In our issue of February 1964 we published an article by Leslie Dewart, the underlying implication of which (also worked out explicitly in his book ‘Christianity and Revolution: the lesson of Cuba’) was that the Cuban Church had made a too simple identification of the Christian cause with anti-Communism and of anti-Communism with pro-Americanism. In the course of the article (p. 56) Mr Dewart referred to the voluntary exodus of more than four hundred priests after the failure of the Pig’s Bay expedition. In this connection we have received the following document from Mgr Eduardo Boza Masvidal. Mgr Boza was appointed auxiliary bishop and vicar-general of Havana in February 1960 and was forced into exile by the Cuban Government in September 1961, as a result of the worsening in relations between the Cuban Church and the Government following the Pig’s Bay invasion. His expulsion and that of the 132 priests who were expelled at the same time is clearly to be distinguished from the earlier withdrawals of mainly non-Cuban priests, and his enforced exile and that of other Cuban priests is plainly an act of grave injustice on the part of the Cuban Government in which he deserves our deepest sympathy. The document sent us by Mgr Boza is a copy of his reply to the Cuban Ambassador to the Holy See. The Ambassador had protested against the inclusion of Cuba in an Exhibition of the Persecuted Church. The Bishop’s reply is given under three main headings.

1. The Ambassador points out that diplomatic relations still exist between Cuba and the Vatican.

This in no way signifies there is no persecution of the Church in Cuba. As is well known, the Holy See has no other object in view, in maintaining such relations, than the good of souls; it is not concerned to withdraw from any country so long as it is not obliged to do so, notwithstanding all the injustices to which the Church may be subjected.

In recent times there has grown up a strong feeling that our tradition of sanctity is inadequate, and that this inadequacy is connected with its isolation from the secular world. In Fr Rabut’s words, ‘La saintete traditionelle s’est coupé non seulement du peche mais souvent des espoirs et des travaux du monde’.

This period of comparative isolation from ‘the hopes and labours’ of the world has coincided with a period of strong establishment; so that the isolation has expressed itself in practice not in indifference but in active obstruction to most of the advances made in the post-reformation period. Is there a necessary connection between the obstruction and what we may call, for lack of a better phrase, the period of establishment of Christianity in Western society?

Certainly, one of the most curious aspects of the Church in its social dimension has been its almost total opposition to change: not to this or that particular change, but to change as such. This has taken the form of an implacable opposition to a succession of radical or revolutionary philosophies which have fomented change over the past five hundred years. Nineteenth-century liberals met with the same treatment as their twentieth-century counterparts, those theorists and reformers who, at various positions left of centre, have learned not to count the Church as among their allies. They are tinged with ‘secularism’ and ‘utopianism’, are irreverent of precedent and tradition, and easily fit into that elastic ecclesiastical category of ‘dangerous’.

Since history is, almost by definition, change, it will be seen that this puts a great strain on the relationship between the church and a section of the world which has particular claims on the church’s sympathy.

Equilibrium means maturity, a harmony and balance of tensions that comes from intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual maturity. Clearly the first essential is professional competence, the possession of those varied techniques and skills which can give a sense of adequacy. The social worker is often in a certain sense a lay spiritual adviser whose role, at its own level, is comparable to that of the confessor and spiritual director. For that reason a deepening knowledge of techniques and skills must be accompanied by a corresponding desire to appreciate the importance of moral and supernatural means. In this connection we may adapt the words of the famous physician and say that the social worker tends the wounds of the psyche but it is God who heals them. One can never leave out of account the working of God’s grace, and must remind oneself again and again that one’s role is secondary and subordinate. To do otherwise is to fall into the heresy of good works.

Intellectual maturity also implies a true humility. By this I mean a serene acceptance of one’s limitations with the corollary that one is not ashamed through vanity or human respect to seek from others the knowledge that one lacks. But at the same time humility also means a sense of security in one’s strengths. Humility in the face of the mystery of this person, my client, who confronts me here and now, is essential if I am not to be overbearing and patronising, and consequently insecure because I seek security in my attitude of superiority.

Jean-Paul Sartre as a critic has been harshly judged in Western Europe, indeed he is one of the more notable victims of cold war mental attitudes. This is well illustrated by the quarrel with Albert Camus brought into the open by Jeanson’s harsh review of ‘L’Homme Revoke’ in ‘Les Temps Modernes’, a quarrel in which a very large number of western readers have taken Camus’ side. Camus is seen as the upholder of human dignity and values, over against Sartre, the system builder, infatuated with the marxist myth of history. This attitude very much undervalues Sartre’s contribution—he points out clearly the essential weakness in Camus’ position. Moreover the whole debate is an excellent illustration of the difficulty involved in building any coherent, materialist system of ethics.

This difficulty is rooted in their common ground; both start from the atheism of Nietzsche and its consequence the absolute freedom of man. Yet both belong to the long line of French moralists and are passionately concerned with what a man ought to do, granted this double premiss. However they begin to differ even in the ways they accept this atheism. Sartre is very matter of fact, for him the death of God is so self-evident that there is no point in talking about it. Towards the end of ‘Le Sursis’ Mathieu receives a letter from Daniel in which the latter very interestingly explains his half-conversion to Catholicism. Mathieu reads part of the letter, loses patience with its to him utter irrelevance, and throws it into the waste paper basket. This contrasts sharply with Camus’ interest in the way the individual accepts atheism.

Ever since the dawn of cinema there have been magicians. When Lumière resolutely took the path of realism in those first five-minute films, showing us undeniable trains, veritable fire-engines and disasters and humiliations only too recognisably from daily life, Melies had already chosen, quite as resolutely, to send a man to the moon, to present fairy coaches travelling through sleeping woods, to give us in short marvels instead of documentaries.

Two of the greatest magicians the cinema has ever known have been much in the news of late. Cocteau because in October he astonished us once again, as all those years ago he had done in obedience to Diaghilev’s command, dying this time in fact instead of with that hallucinatory backwards fall in Testament d’Orphee, when he commented gravely that since poets on occasion gave the impression of dying then their friends might permit themselves the appearance of weeping. And Orson Welles—so long a film-maker and still only middle- aged—because he has attempted perhaps the most impossible task of his never cautious career in bringing Kafka’s Trial to the screen, which reached London a good six months after it opened in Paris.

Cocteau always insisted that all the work he did, in any medium, was the work of a poet. Certainly none but a poet could have made his films, the first of which he even called Sang d’un Poete. Even in films which he did not actually direct himself, such as J.-P. Melville’s version of his play, Les Enjants Terribles, his influence was as immediately visible as those stars so invariably a part of his signature. Of those he did direct, there are some which more brilliantly exemplify bis power to bind an audience in a potent visual spell than others. First, L’Eternel Retour, his version of the Tristan story in modem idiom, which reached us after VE day; one will never forget the extraordinary richness—an almost overpowering richness—of the experience after all our years of cinematic austerity.

In a previous article it was assumed that the English segregated school school system based on selection at eleven years and the intellectual theories sustaining it were passing away and were being succeeded by various forms of comprehensive secondary education. If this be so, and the events of last summer on the political, social and academic scenes would seem to add confirmation, can the Church sit idly by without examining the meaning that this educational revolution may hold for Catholics and the general community? Understandably the Catholic administrator is concerned, at parish and diocesan level, with providing adequate places for the increasing numbers of children committed to his care; nevertheless the Church has a primary concern for the education of youth whether inside or outside the Church and he will surely wish to ascertain whether any assets of permanent value to Christian life may be obtained from a re-organization of our own sector paralleling the changeover to comprehensive systems in state schools.

Catholic authorities may be reassured that, from the known achievements of comprehensive schools, the adoption by them of the new pattern could have an extremely favourable outcome, if cast within the mould of Christian ideals, on the development and character of the English Catholic community. Initially it may be noted that at such schools a far greater proportion than normal remain on beyond the usual leaving age: for example, in some London comprehensive schools between 40% and 60% is quite common, compared to a national average of 20 % in Local authorities which operate a separate school system.

Now that four years have passed since Le Corbusier’s Dominican church and priory at La Tourette burst on an astonished world with the impact of what was described as ‘the greatest ruin of the twentieth century’, it is possible to have later thoughts and to consider the building not as a major tourist attraction but as a place of prayer and study. It is possible, in fact, to ask whether Le Corbusier’s frequent claims for La Tourette as un lieu de silence, un lieu de repos, are justified. It is good to be there in the empty weeks of early spring, before the tourist hordes descend, and if the endless rains of a wet March have left the concrete mass a leaden grey and the waterspouts are for ever dripping—and the many leaks reveal themselves in new places—then at least one is spared the coloured illusions of the picture postcards.

One’s earlier impressions are on the whole confirmed. The building is a triumphant statement, in terms that match the needs of our time, of what an architect of genius can do to give spatial reality to the sacred. The jeu de volumes—that untranslatable phrase that expresses Le Corbusier’s primary concern with the use of space—is even more effective now that even a brief period of time has given the patina of use to what has too often been a sort of cerebration. These buildings, after all, church and refectory and lecture room and cells, arc to be used, not to be written about or even to be admired. And the marvellous counterpoint of solid mass and floating horizontal surface, of the honest concrete and the progressions of the glass, takes on an altogether different meaning when a bell rings and the cloister fills with friars on their way to church or refectory.

There are two ways of reinstituting the diaconate: having full-time deacons without any other occupation and having part-time ones whose main job is something else. Gradations between the two are also possible. The full-time deacon may, if necessary, do a certain amount of other work, whereas the part-time one may fulfil his duties say just in the mornings, or only in his spare time (evenings or weekends). Neither type, however, would be satisfactory by itself. There is a danger that the part-time deacon would lack the necessary firmness of purpose without the example of a full-time one, and that his attitude to the work could degenerate into a take-it-or-leave-it casualness. On the other hand, the church would be unable to manage with full-time deacons only, for economic reasons. It would be impossible to supply them to small mission stations, to the many churches in Latin America which lack a priest, or to the small diaspora areas on the continent. In these cases the only feasible thing is to have a local man as part-time deacon. A full-time one has to be guaranteed an income, while someone working part-time in an honorary capacity would compensate for this outlay, as in his case there would simply be the cost of his training. As part-time deacons men would be considered whose occupations were readily compatible with this work: teachers, social workers, lay preachers who give religious instruction at schools, etc. But the choice of part-time deacons should not be limited to men of these professions. There are men in every walk of life who are suitable for this work. Now that the worker-priests have been suppressed, could not the church make use of the worker-deacon, as a representative of the hierarchy in the world of labour

Robert Rauschenberg, whose show has just ended at the Whitechapel Gallery, is a traditional artist, binding into one vision all the major streams of experiment and achievement of twentieth-century art which interest him. The paintings, combine paintings, and objects on view are a digest of influences which in fact we all know; if we do not, then there is no excuse, because books on the art leading up to Rauschenberg are a commonplace in bookshops, let alone the pictures themselves which are on view at the Tate and other galleries. Rauschenberg’s is probably the best example of a kind of art in the mid twentieth century which starts off by making you think it is art autre, and then it becomes art engagè, only, on final analysis to turn into a kind of art pour I’art. At first glance nothing could be more art autre than the first combine paintings with their wilful inclusion of everything that is not art. The point of art autre as I see it, is to cut to the root any kind of making or appreciating that involves the aesthetic faculty; it is done expressly to destroy the academic and conventional idea of what constitutes Art and substitute a gratuitous gesture in its place, a gesture that is in the end only made valid by the vision of the maker, the true artist. It is a simultaneous alienation of the art-object from the spectator and from arty, or aesthetic, art; but this situation is never a complete success unless the art-object is thumpingly bad—then of course you do get a complete alienation. Rauschenberg’s art is very good however and so the feeling of alienation is quickly replaced by a feeling of magnetism.

Screen psychiatry inherited much of the cinema’s older mythos of medicine. Young Dr Kildare, old Dr Gillespie, and their myriad colleagues easily switched from homey simplifications of the medically arcane to palatable psychoanalysis, the old soap-opera science keeping up with progress, prescribing Freud’s protean penicillin.

Of course, the new language had to be learned. And sometimes, the screen refracted the careful terminologies with disconcerting imprecision. The language of the couches and clinics, often beclouded enough, seemed to have been imperfectly absorbed by the popularizers themselves, emerging like the spirited garblings of matrons describing their illnesses and operations over tea—or Thurber’s triumphantly inexact maid, Della, whose sister, she confided, ‘got tuberculosis from her teeth, and it went all through her symptom’.

Much of the difficulty had to do with the importunate imperialism of the new depth psychology, whose revelations, formulated in the special language of its own province, could usurp so easily the imaginative essences of works of imagination. Dostoievsky had written psychological novels, and Goethe and Coleridge had projected the turmoil of personality upon creations of action and symbolic meaning. But their terms were always those of the novelist and poet; their characters were not case-studies masquerading as fiction; their claims to universality were persuasively inspired, not dogmatically pre-supposed.

As presented to us in Europe at the moment, the American film is in a rum state of disproportion. Hurtling around in circuit like so many giant satellites go the blockbusters—El Cid and Ben Hur and West Side Story—and not yet generally released are the near three hours of The Cardinal, the three hours plus of Cleopatra, looming like Easter Island figures in the West End or on the boulevards of Paris.

And yet, in contrast to films of such enormous magnification, spatial and temporal, financial and technical, we have now been able to see a handful of American films which would almost appear to have been made by directors looking through the wrong end of the telescope, so deliberately small-scale are they.

The first of these was, I suppose, the memorable Shadows, made by John Cassavetes to please himself in a kind of sophisticated near-improvisation, which ran for months at the Academy Cinema, with the longest queues of the most enthusiastic young audiences that London had seen since foreign films reached us again after the war. This study of race relations in New York, made in a minor key but with major intelligence, was most absorbing, apart from its sheer cinematic interest, for the insight it gave one into the lives of real people, as distinct from film stereotypes, as prolific in the American cinema as in the British, but less easily detectible by the stranger. And now that one has read James Baldwin’s Another Country, Shadows seems even more impressive in retrospect. Then came Shirley Clarke’s The Connection—I do not think one can include The Savage Eye in this category, for it was essentially a documentary—which was a wonderfully entertaining piece of work. It dealt, you will recall, with the existence of junkies whilst they await the appearance of Cowboy—sinister black boy in white dungarees—who will bring them their dope, without which they cannot survive.