1. Telling the time

By current standards, St Thomas Aquinas did not have very much to say about time, and even less to say about Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. When discussing the commandments, however, he did say something rather interesting about the Sabbath. Human beings, he tells us, owe a threefold duty to the head of their community: a duty of faithfulness or single-hearted loyalty, of reverence, and of service. This threefold duty is, according to St Thomas, the subject-matter of the commands to worship only God, to refrain from taking his name in vain, and to keep the sabbath holy. It is, he says, the servant’s duty to repay through service the good things received from his lord. But what we have received from this Lord, the Creator, is—everything. Hence the command to sanctify the sabbath in grateful remembrance of the creation of the world: ‘sanctifica(re) sabbat(um) in memoriam creationis rerum’. In due course, I shall return to this suggestion that it is in keeping our very createdness in mind that we keep the Sabbath holy. But, first, I want to reflect on what is entailed in learning how to pray.

But surely, you may say, we know how to pray? Jesus taught us how to pray: he taught us to say ‘Our Father ...’.

But do we really know how to say ‘Our Father’ here and now, in this place, at this time?

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that due to the so-called “accusation of Christomonism” made especially by the Orthodox observers during the Vatican II sessions, the pneumatology of French theologian Yves Congar proceeded to develop in a way that would have never happened without such a reproach. We will go through the accusation itself, its theological consequences, and then we will study the direct and indirect responses of Congar. Was Congar even aware of the effects that this accusation had on his theology?

Ritual is pre-eminently a form of communication. Let us turn therefore to a modern sociologist who conducts research among ourselves into different patterns of communication. Professor Basil Bernstein says that

He distinguishes two different types of linguistic codes. One, he calls the elaborated code, in which, as he says, the speaker selects from a wide range of syntactic alternatives, and these are flexibly organized; this speech requires complex planning. In the other, which he calls the restricted code, the speaker draws a much narrower range of syntactic alternatives, and these alternatives are more rigidly organized. The elaborated code is adapted to enable a speaker to make his own intentions explicit. It is adapted to the elucidation of general principles.

Even in war-time men cannot think only of what they are doing here and now. Their desire goes beyond the immediate job; and when their outer world falls to bits they turn to God, if they believe in Him and seek Him, or to the Future that is always going to be so much better than the past, or to their own souls. Belief that the human soul is somehow, vaguely, ‘divine’ is intensified by the horrors that surround it and to which it seems a stranger even while it directs them. The sense of the strangeness of man’s soul in this world, of its unconformity to the outer madness, causes wonder; and wonder has traditionally found expression, in England, in the individual voice of poets. Yet as a citizen and in public the poet is expected not merely to draw poetry from the situation, but to relate it back to the situation. He must be practical, he must provide propaganda or, in the -widest sense of the word, amusement. If Shakespeare is ever played nowadays, he is expected, officially at least, either to help people to forget the War completely or to make them remember it all the more intensely. Teach us to forget ourselves for a night. Teach us to remember ourselves to-night so that to-morrow we may fight like Englishmen.

The admirable work edited by Fr Alberic Stacpoole OSB, Mary’s Place in Christian Dialogue (St Paul Publications, 1982), makes no mention of Fatima. Even Archbishop Eugenio Cardinale’s paper on ‘The Mariology of Pope Pius XIF does not allude to it, which is strange because in Portugal he is known as ‘the pope of Fatima’. Clearly, Fatima has no place on the agenda of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose papers are collected in this volume. The reason for the omission is evident: Fatima represents the kind of mariology that most alarms and scandalises our Christian brothers and sisters. With its banal ‘messages’, its improbable miracles and its resolute anti-communism, it makes the faith ‘risible’, and St Thomas says we should not do that.

The history of the ecclesiastical breach between East and West, and of the attempt to heal it, is very long and obscure. There was the Photian schism of the middle of the ninth century, but that was over within a few years. Two centuries later the Patriarch Cerularius was excommunicated by an over-zealous papal legate and retaliated in kind; but that quarrel was not final. The Fourth Crusade captured Christian Constantinople and never went any further, but set up a Latin kingdom there which lasted less than sixty years and did as much to antagonize the Greeks as anything else. Yet, a little more than ten years after he regained his throne, the restored Greek Emperor—but not the Greek Church—had accepted the Latin faith and union in the Second Council of Lyons (1274). His purpose, however, was political, to win the Pope’s help to prevent any attempt to re-establish the Latin kingdom of Constantinople.

From then on over the next century, whenever Constantinople was more in danger than usual by reason of the rapid advance of the Turks, the Byzantine emperors approached the pope of the time, as head of western Christendom. They asked for military aid, and they offered the possibility of union of the Churches through the medium of a general council. The offer was, of course, a sort of bribe, but not entirely so. Both East and West sincerely deplored the schism that divided them and would have wholeheartedly welcomed a genuine union.

The crucial role of the French Jesuit theologate in exile at Ore Place, Hastings (1906–26) in the development of la nouvelle théologie has been greatly overlooked in favour of Lyons and Fourvière. In fact, Ore Place played a key early role in the ressourcement of twentieth century French Catholic theology through constituting a unified and sympathetic scholarly community during an era of theological and political turmoil. One of the theologate's best-known students was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1908–12), while other teachers and students included Pierre Charles, Joseph Huby, Henri de Lubac, Ferdinand Prat, Pierre Rousselot, and Auguste Valensin. Within this congenial scholarly community, Teilhard developed some key theological foundations of his thought on topics including grace and nature (miracles, anthropology, and evolution) and christology, and was ordained. The full importance of theological formation at Ore Place for the thought of Teilhard and other French Jesuits of his generation has rarely been recognized.

On January 6th, 2021 following a ‘Save America’ rally held by President Donald Trump, supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol with the aim to stop Congress’ verification of election results certifying President elect Joe Biden. The subsequent press coverage on this tragedy provided a variety of labels for the violence: insurrection, rebellion, riot, protest, etc. To understand what type of act this was, I utilize Thomas Aquinas distinction of ‘sedition’ and ‘rebellion’ as a conceptual model. I argue that the attack on the Capitol was a form of political sedition, which Aquinas held to be an immoral and unjustified attack on proper political authority. In connection with this claim, I discuss Aquinas’ political theory and his criteria of a justified armed rebellion against political tyranny as a way to understand the events at the U.S. Capitol and to help us think clearer about legitimate and illegitimate civilian political violence in the future.

The whole question of the moral aspect of psychotherapy is, it seems to me, a vast and intricate one, and one which has as yet been given little serious and thoroughgoing consideration. This is due in part to the fact that contemporary psychotherapeutic theory and practice is in so variegated, amorphous and contradictory a state that few generalisations about it are possible, let alone any critical examination of it as a whole in the light of any body of ethical principles. It is possible, indeed, to take the written works of a given writer on psychological theory and methods and to subject them to ethical scrutiny, and a certain amount of work of varying merit has been done in this direction; work which is itself, perhaps, by no means impervious to serious criticism. But even such work as this, within its own inevitable limitations, is not always very practically helpful. The theoretical expositions of psychologists and the accounts which they give of their methods are not infrequently both better and worse than their actual practice; and in any case do not afford very adequate material for judgment and discussion on the part of those who themselves lack either active or passive psychotherapeutic experience.

But the practical urgency of the problem is too acute to allow us to wait indefinitely for some decisive and all-inclusive ethico-psychotherapeutical synthesis. The problem is brought home to most of us in its most challenging and concrete form when the question arises of committing ourselves or others to psychological treatment. Do we not, in doing so, risk the undermining of our moral principles, perhaps of our religion and our faith? Rumours have reached us, perhaps, of alleged psychotherapists who, after long and costly weeks of treatment, prescribe some such homely old palliatives as a dose of fornication, divorce, cutting loose from hearth and home, or some other form of uncleanness, injustice or impiety.

The Scottish Composer James MacMillan has drawn on his Roman Catholic faith in much of his musical output, and this has been a significant influence not least on the six operatic works which he has produced to date. These operas, a number of which set libretti by the poet Michael Symmons Roberts, are richly diverse in their scale and in the stories which they present; yet they share a number of themes in common. All of them juxtapose sacred and secular topics, and all are concerned with stories that are both timeless and contemporary. Particularly striking is the fact that all of them draw on liturgy or scripture to give depth and resonance to the stories they tell. These resonances apply both to the characters in the operas and to the audience watching the works in performance. These operatic works therefore have the capacity to prompt theological as well as musical and dramatic reflections in those who experience them.

Mythology is replete with stories of the childlike wisdom which dares and does where the wise and prudent of this world quail and fail. Fr. Witcutt knows the value of mythology and has learned its lesson. His Catholic Thought and Modern Psychology is no profound and learned academic treatise. It is, on the contrary, a naive book; indeed a spritely book. Neither the depths of the unconscious nor the heights of theological and philosophical speculation hold any terrors for him. From one to the other he passes—we might almost say he gambols—with enviable ease and assurance, unintimidated by any excessive concern for the’ complexities of the problem he has set himself, or any inhibiting regard for pettifogging accuracy.

It would be a great mistake to neglect his book on that account. ‘Some,’ said Aristotle, ‘require exactness in everything, while others are annoyed by it. . . for there is something about exactness which seems to some people to be mean. . . .; hence one must be trained how to take each kind of argument.’ The job Fr. Witcutt has undertaken desperately needed doing. For it is a job which the pundits neither of ‘Catholic Thought ‘nor of ‘Modern Psychology ‘have hitherto attempted to do; a job which they still seem far from being ready to do. From among the Catholics, Dalbiez, it is true, after a magnificent restatement of Freud, and a less satisfying endeavour to free Freud’s psychology from Freud’s philosophy, has attempted a dubious mutual non-intervention pact between psychoanalysis and religion. Alters has modified Adler in a direction more acceptable to Catholics; at the expense, however, of abandoning depth-psychology altogether. There has been a good deal of unprincipled eclecticism. But at co-ordination and synthesis there has hitherto been little or no attempt.

The ‘question of Being’ is in a sense deeply against the spirit of the age since the rise of hermeneutics has substantially led to the eclipse of a traditional metaphysics of the self and the world. The central role of ontology in the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar therefore makes him appear as a figure who is deeply against the grain of much current thinking, and who stands as a bulwark in defence of traditional, or classical, perspectives.

We can trace two primary sources for the role of Being in von Balthasar’s theology. The first is Martin Heidegger, whose vocabulary of Seinsvergessenheit (‘forgetfulness of Being’) sounds throughout von Balthasar’s discussions of Being. The very centrality of Being and of the Ontological Difference (which von Balthasar reads as a thomistic real distinction), is a sign of von Balthasar’s debt to the German philosopher, even if he proves highly critical of many aspects of the heideggerian project in its particularity.’ By far the more important influence is that of Thomas Aquinas, who is discussed in a section from the fourth volume of the English translation (The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity) and again in the fifth (The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modem Age). According to von Balthasar, ‘what Thomas does is to use beauty to define being’. This is a resonant statement indeed, since, to a not inconsiderable extent, it holds also for von Balthasar himself and the whole of his Herrlichkeit project. Time and again during these central volumes, von Balthasar will return to the theme of Being as that which governs the most fundamental aspects of aesthetics, philosophy and theology, as well as the understanding of the human and the grounding of human experience.

‘The Catholic liturgy is the supreme example of an objectively established rule of spiritual life.’ ‘The liturgy is the lex orandi'. These were the principles of Romano Guardini’s liturgical writings, both theological and pastoral. He sought to bring the liturgy into the centre of the Christian’s life, at the heart of the many other, more private, expressions of prayer and reverence. He offers an overview of Christian public prayer:

According to Aidan Nichols, if the principles of Romano Guardini on liturgy had been consistently applied to contemporary sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, his influence might have stopped the post-conciliar liturgical reform from backing modernity as a winning ticket, just at the point when it became converted into postmodernism. This short sketch points to some of Guardini’s insights in the liturgical area, especially on questions which have recently been taken up anew by liturgical thinkers.

If I dare to imagine that these letters may have some significance for both of us, it is because I believe that Christianity is concerned with human crises, since Christians are called to manifest the mercy and truth of God in history.

Christianity is the victory of Christ in the world, that is to say in history. It is the salvation of man in and through history, through temporal decisions made for love of Christ the Redeemer and Lord of History. The mystery of Christ is at work in all human events, and our comprehension of secular events works itself out and expresses itself in that sacred history, the history of salvation, which the Holy Spirit teaches us to read between the lines. We have to admit that this meaning is often provisional and sometimes beyond our grasp. Yet as Christians we are committed to the attempt to see some meaning in temporal events that flow from human choices. To be specific, we are bound to search ‘history’, that is to say the intelligible actions of men, for some indications of their significance, and some relevance to our present choice as Christians.

‘History’, then, is for us that complex of meanings which we read into the interplay of civilization. And we are also (this is more urgent still) at a turning point in the history of that European and American society which has been shaped and dominated by Christian concepts, even where it has at times been unfaithful to its basically Christian vocation. We live in a culture which seems to have reached the point of extreme hazard at which it may plunge to its own ruin, unless there is some renewal of life, some new direction, some providential reorganization of its forces for survival.

One has often been asked by incredulous, though well-meaning, people—and almost apologetically—‘Why did you become a Catholic?’ The suggestion being that there must be some explanation to account for such a strange, even a remarkable, lapse from rational behaviour on the part of one supposed to be some sort of scientist. The question is not well put. I suppose that none of us can say truthfully and certainly why we do anything. It would be better to ask not why, but how, did a man become a Catholic; and this is the question I shall attempt to answer, so that next time I am asked why I became a Catholic I can just hand over this number of New Blackfriars. Perhaps even more alarming and difficult to give a direct answer to is the question: ‘When were you converted?’ Perhaps I had better deal with that one first.

Some people, it would seem, have peculiar notions about what is called ‘conversion’, as though it were some sudden and dazzling experience (it may be with some people; I do not know). So, we are led to suppose, this is what happened on the road to Damascus, but if that dramatic incidence, that traumatic vision, occurred as described, we might recollect that Paul was a highly religious Jew, and so was Jesus, a Jew preaching unto Jews in the tradition of Jewish thought and expression. And we might also bear in mind that when we read that Augustine was converted by Ambrose that Augustine was a Neo-Platonist and was already, so to speak, half-way there. So, if we may compare little things with big things, we come to me, which is embarrassing, but obviously I cannot talk about myself without some ‘I’s and ‘me’s.

The role of combat as a religious stimulant was widely observed and debated during both World Wars. Through a consideration of American opinion in World War II, especially in the light of British opinion a generation earlier, this paper illustrates that, however similar expressions of combatants’ faith may have been across time and space, their perceived value was very much dictated by their wider religious context, and particularly by the existing assumptions and priorities of religious observers and pundits. This meant that, in the American context of World War II, appraisals tended to be much more positive than in the British context of World War I, adding considerable substance and longevity to the claim that ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’.