Catholic Life Research Articles

Preface to Happiness. Vol. II. A Guidebook to the Summa by E. F. Smith, L. A. Ryan

314 BOOK REVIEWS Preface to Happiness. Vol. II. A Guidebook to the Summa. By E. F. SMITH and L. A. RYAN. New York: Benziger, 1950. Pp. 301 with index. $4.00. Thanks greatly to the verve and the vision of the late Father Walter Farrell, the movement usually called " theology for laymen " has lit up a new fire in American Catholic life. In the wide background from business men to lay professors, from doctors and lawyers to college freshmen, there now glows a whole spectrum of interest in St. Thomas Aquinas not merely as a required seminary subject but as a living theologian with an assuring message for our times. In the foreword to the first volume that appeared in his Companion to the Summa-it stands as Volume II in the completed set-Father Farrell proposed his four works as " guidebooks," related to the Summa as a map to a city and designed to inspire a reading and study of the original. Yet by the gifts of his genius, Father Farrell managed to draw much more than a map and write much more than a guidebook. He wrote a layman's edition of the Summa. He wrote for the beginners of our day in the spirit in which St. Thomas wrote for the beginners of a thirteenth-century study of theology. Father Farrell left us a work that can be read and understood without consulting St. Thomas. Unlike a guidebook or a map, the Companion is a city in itself, modelled with twentieth-century words and images upon the great thirteenth-century capital which was the originaL One of the important extrinsic effects of the Companion was and is to arouse interest in the Summa, and it is to enlarge and orient this interest that confreres of St. Thomas and of Father Farrell are bringing out a new series, A Guidebook to the Summa. Preface to Happiness, Volume II of the whole series but the first to appear in print, is a welcome addition to the instruments for bringing St. Thomas to the laity. The present volume fully qualifies as a guidebook, a map, a direction-finder. The authors are tooling their series to capture the interest which Father Farrell aroused and to focus it boldly on the pages of St. Thomas. Unlike the Companion, the Guidebook can hardly be understood without the control of constant references to St. Thomas, and in this respect, the Guidebook is a mediator between the Companion and the Summa itself. Apart from Father Farrell's Companion, Preface to Happine88 has intrinsic merits that make it a genuine contribution to Catholic learning and Christian culture. The authors are emphatic about their purpose; they want to enkindle in laymen "the habit of thinking theologically," and they insist that such an objective is both desirable and practicaL To the arguments they propound to defend their aims they could even have added the twentieth-century call of the Holy See for " the participation of the laity in the work of the hierarchy." To answer this call, the laity needs a proper theological training. BOOK REVIEWS 315 The authors of the Preface wisely remark that a habit has parts, that the right order of the parts is essential to the habit, and that the best plan for the habit of theology is charted out in the Summa. The nine chapters of the present volume, therefore, parallel the Prima Secundae, like Volume IT of the Companion. The authors have written a useful nine-page general introduction on the nature of theology, the place and order of moral theology, and the distinctive character of Thomist moral science. Through their more than three hundred pages of writing, the authors have never forgotten that their's is a guidebook, and the result is a careful map to take discerning readers to a destiny in the Summa and even to points beyond. Each chapter opens with a pointed introduction to place the given topic in perspective and to weigh its doctrinal and historical importance. Then follows in each chapter a history of the question being treated. Not concerned to drag out dead doctrines with a view to understanding only the predecessors of St...

The Formation of the Catholic Minority in the United States 1820–1860

No minority group in the United States is probably as formless and yet at the same time as rigid as the American membership of the Roman Catholic Church. The rigidity of the Catholic organization arises from the fact that there has never been a real heresy during the three centuries and more of Catholic life within the boundaries of the present United States. Even the so-called heresy of Americanism existed more in the minds of European theologians than in the Catholics of the new world. There have been divergencies among American Catholics on such questions as the application of Gregory XVI's condemnation of the slave trade, the timeliness of die declaration of papal infallibility or the extent of the papal condemnation of secret societies, but there has been no difference on the essential doctrines involved in these disputes.

Theological Problems of Conversion

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PRoviNCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XI OCTOBER, 1948 No.4 THEOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF CONVERSION T HERE exists a rather curious discrepancy between the very lively interest taken nowadays in apologetical, oecumenical, and other works which by their very nature tend to result in conversions to the Catholic Church, and the almost complete lack of reflection among Catholics on the problems connected with these conversions. This lively interest hardly needs demonstration. It can be measured, for example, by the numerous stories of converts which are being published and read and which furnish the principal material for psychological studies of conversion (Starbuck, James, DeSanctis, Th. Mainage, 0. P.) The lack of theological reflection is shown, among other instances, from the fact that the Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique does not even mention the word conversion ; the Dic·tionnaire Apologetique de la Foi Catholique and the Lexicon Fur Theologie und Kirche have only very short articles on the subject and they are more historical than theological . In this study, we intend only to examine some of the theological problems related to conversion and indicate certain solutions; all of these problems could not be studied in one article. 409 410 C. F. PAUWELS It must be noted immediately that the word " conversion " can have several different meanings, all of these meanings having some connection between them. The different uses of the same word have been the cause of much confusion in the psychological study of conversion as we understand it. Conversion can mean (and it is in this sense that we write of it) a change of religious conviction, and notably the acceptance of the Catholic faith. It indicates a motion to something new from something old; therefore it has a counterpart in apostasy, and if we attend to the fact that as an old conviction is given up a new one is acquired we note that every conversion can be called an apostasy. Conversion in this first sense, however, implies something more than a merely intellectual act, for whoever accepts the Catholic faith enters the Catholic Church and intends to live a Catholic life. In another sense, conversion may mean the justificatio impii, the change from a bad life to a good one. In this sense, conversion has been the object of numerous theological studies, and has been considered by St. Thomas 1 and the modem authors. The latin term, conversus, has been used to designate a laybrother in the same sense. It should be noted that a conversion to the Catholic faith always implies some change from a bad to a good life, in this respect at least that the Catholic standards of good and bad must be accepted with the faith; therefore, almost every convert, even if he could be called a good Christian before his conversion, has to make some changes in his manner of life. Still, one can be a bad Catholic and a sinner at the same time, and such a one needs the justificatio impii without needing any change of faith. On the other hand, many non-Catholics are already in a state of grace before they are converted to the Catholic faith. Hence a connection between these two kinds of conversion is not only possible, but necessary. In a third sense, conversion may mean a change in religious life without any change of faith. This kind of conversion is studied by ascetical and mystical theologians.2 We call it a 1 Summa Theol., I-II, q. 113. 'Cf. Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ways of the Spiritual Life, London, 194~. THEOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF CONVERSION 411 conversion when a man changes from a humdrum religious life to a more serious one, from carelessness about venial sin to a systematical endeavor to reach perfection. Although this kind of conversion implies no change in religious conviction and is thus very different from the first kind, it should be noted that the acceptance of the Catholic faith, which is the fullness of revelation and grace, must bring about in the life of good Christians who are in a...

Agriculture, Divinity and Wholeness

In an increasingly pagan world, it is a truism to say that Catholics must become more Catholic or they will have to compromise their faith to an extent which will prove fatal. The truly Catholic life must express wholeness of dedication to Jesus Christ and an integration of all activities. One aspect of the chronic lack of wholeness in living seems to me to stand out above the rest at the present time and to be of great importance. I refer to man’s dependence on the fruits and hence the well-being of the earth, which have largely ceased to interest the modem educated man except from a scientific and mechanical point of view.More than enough has already been written on the disintegration of our times, but right action can only emerge from knowledge and understanding, natural and supernatural. First, then, I am going to try and put the problem, as I see it, in its true context. In the book of Genesis we read that man was born in a garden to dress and keep it. Before he fell, man did not have to work by the sweat of his brow, but he did have to keep a garden in as good a condition as he found it. In practice he would have perhaps to keep the divisions between different kinds of plants and to maintain an orderly arrangement in the garden. For, first of all, the garden of Eden was a perfect creation, and not the finest system of husbandry in the world we know can show a garden to rival this paradise of pleasure.

Hope From France

It needs a long view to assess the uses of adversity. At the time, while the intolerable thing is happening, hope itself seems hopeless. But at the heart of the disaster some new life starts springing: a new life, that is yet the recovery of something old and forgotten. For the Christian, that is only to say that no circumstance is without its providential value. Tout ce qui arrive est adorable.In France in 1941 there seemed little room for hope. The ignominy of defeat reached deeper far than the level of a military surrender and it is easy enough to understand the mood of tortured immolation—“All that is left to France is to suffer”—which came over many Frenchmen at that time. But it is not given, to the members of Christ to despair, and the failure of human hopes, reveals all the more surely the new life we are called to share: “you will be distressed, but your distress shall be turned into joy” (John xvii: 20).It was precisely at this time, 1941, that there came into being a movement, later to be known as the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique, which had for its aim nothing less than the recovery of the parish church as the Christian home, the place where the children of God meet and worship and whose influence extends to all they do. It might seem that there was no need to found a society to affirm what is an integral part of the Church’s function as the Mystical Body of Christ. But the Dominican founders of the C.P.L. had precise objectives in view. The German occupation brought grave difficulties for Catholic life in France.

The lmportance of Christian Aesthetics in Catholic Life

The lmportance of Christian Aesthetics in Catholic Life

The Catholics of France, from the Autumn of 1942 to the Invasion

In a previous article we studied the religious and political position of the French Catholics—both of the clergy and of the laity—from the armistice to the end of the summer of 1942. Here we propose to continue this study following the same plan, considering first the questions cm which the clergy and the laity have taken a stand and indicating the nuances which differentiate their positions, and secondly the present problems in which the faithful take part on their own responsibility. French Catholic life, like all life, is in motion. Yet discovering its inspirations and currents can help us to understand the way it will manifest itself in the period of reconstruction.

Catholics and Protestants in Germany

According to statistics lately published and confirmed through investigations made among prisoners-of-war, ninety-three per cent, of the German people are still members of Christian denominations. Whilst it is hardly necessary to discuss the political aspects of this fact, I should like to make a few points regarding practical religious life in Germany which might contribute to an appreciation of that figure.In justification of my venture, I may say that I am an off-spring of a family which for several generations past has played a prominant part in German Protestant church life and scholarship. I myself, through the study of Protestant theology, have become a Catholic. Educated in a purely Protestant part of Germany, I lived and worked for the last seven years previous to my emigration in one of the Catholic centres of the country. Living as I do at present in, I daresay, fairly close contact with Catholic life in these countries, I feel that perhaps the most important point in appreciating the religious situation in Germany is an understanding of the relations between Protestants and Catholics in that country. I must confine myself to some points which incoherent in themselves are all still up-to-date.Roughly speaking and from a merely statistical view-point, Germany can be subdivided into a Protestant North and a Catholic South and West. However, whole provinces of Southern Germany, such as Wiirttemberg and the Palatinat, are predominantly and most actively Protestant, whilst Miinsterland, Ermland and Silesia have been, especially during the last twenty years, leading centres of Catholic life in Germany.

The Polish Dominican Province To‐Day

The Dominican map of Poland is a queer one. It is true that one can hardly find a town in Poland without a Dominican church and priory (the fathers numbered more than 2,000 and had about 200 houses at the first partition in 1772), but the churches do not belong now to the Order and the priories are being used as schools or prisons. For in the provinces occupied by Russia and Germany in 1772 and 1795, i.c. in 80% of the Polish territory, the religious life was proscribed and the monasteries confiscated. What we see now on the Dominican map is the result of this historical fact, combined with the striving of the new Polish Province to re-occupy its right place in Catholic life of the whole country.So it happens that the bulk of the priories is situated in the south, in the former ‘Galicia.’ There the Dominicans had eleven out of their 16 houses which were nourishing in 1939—among them the venerable Monastery of Cracow, tlie great tormer ‘studium generale’ of Podkamien with about 300 cells, and the actual seat of the Provincial with its fine baroque church at Lwow. The other priories are small and unimportant relics of the time when the Austrian Government allowed the religious orders to exist only on condition that they occupied themselves exclusively in plain parish work.

Claudel and the Catholic Revival

CLAUDEL AND THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL By L. S. BoNDY, C. S. B. T HOUGH there is a wide range of opinion in estimating the quality and the value of the Catholic Revival in contemporary French Literature, its existence is no longer questioned even by the most unsympathetic critics and historians. It is an acknowledged fact that during the last eighty or ninety years, a very notable part of French Literature, I mean literature properly so called, literature as one of the fine arts, shows evidence of a profound and increasing influence of Catholic doctrine, Catholic morality, Catholic life. It is an influence that is not content with the role of a surface accessory but is reaching down to essentials, to the very well-springs of literary production. A detailed study of the movement would carry us far beyond the scope of this article. However we can hardly hope to reach an intelligent appreciation of Paul Claudel without first situating him in the movement to which he owes so much and which in turn he has enriched more, perhaps, than any other writer. We shall limit ourselves to those parts of the Catholic Revival which seem to have exercised a definite influence on our poet. In the Middle Ages, Europe had witnessed a similar flowering of Catholic letters. This is not surprising when we realize to what extent the whole civilization of the period was Catholic. To find a rose growing on a rose-bush is not astonishing. But when we find a particularly luxuriant rose apparently emerging from a stock of poison-ivy, the event should at least arouse our curiosity. And indeed, one needs to be very charitable and even highly imaginative to discern in the society of the Second Empire and the Third Republic a particularly Catholic form of civilization. It would not be very difficult, a priori, to marshal an imposing array of reasons to prove that, at that time, a Catholic revival of letters simply could not happen. Yet happen it did; and there seems to be no good reason to think that it 171 17~ L. S. BONDY has spent itself. It is even quite possible that it has not reached its peak. What will happen when the present cataclysm is over, no one can prophecy. But this, I think, we know: the forces at work in this movement are so strong and vital that they are least likely to be destroyed and may even emerge with added strength from the horrible bath of blood and destruction. The sources of any literary movement, if we push our inquiry far enough will generally lead us as far back as our patience will endure. For literature bears a close resemblance to life, and life is as mysterious a word as can be found in any language. I need not say how arbitrary are the dates we professors assign to such things as classicism, romanticism and symbolism. How can we speak of Boileau without conjuring up Horace and Aristotle? And did not Sainte-Beuve go to the sixteenth century to find ancestors for his contemporary romantic friends? If then we place Charles Baudelaire at the beginning of the Catholic Revival, it is because we must begin somewhere and the author of Les Fleurs du Mal and especially of Mon Cceur mis anu does mark a well characterized if embryonic stage in the development of the movement. This assumption is by no means universally accepted. The life of Baudelaire with all its wild eccentricities, his taste for mystification, his insufferable arrogance, his pornographic reputation, his categorical denials of Christian faith, are all poor recommendations for the role of father of a Catholic movement. Such an excellent critic as Abbe Calvet firmly believes that nothing soundly Catholic can ever come from such a questionable source. A good deal of misunderstanding will be avoided if we note at the outset that there is no question here of canonizing Baudelaire. Whether or not Baudelaire saved his soul, is a matter of rather serious importance for Baudelaire. It has however , very little bearing on the question we are now discussing. We must not forget that our problem is primarily a literary problem and...

Some Aspects of Catholic Education

We hold as Catholics that the truths of our faith should be the basis and life-giving principle of our ideas and judgements and actions in every department of our lives, and that nothing should be excluded from the all-inclusive influence of that principle. I had not been teaching very long before I began to be conscious that, as in the life of ordinary Catholics in the world, so in school life, there were often two distinct areas. One area was an explicitly Catholic area, in which Christian standards were fully realized and fully applied; but there was another area, and in school this was chiefly covered by what are termed the secular studies, where Christian standards were not indeed denied, but either not applied at all or only applied occasionally at certain isolated points where their non-application would have been glaringly apparent. At other less prominent points our standards of judgment were not really Christian at all, but those of the world around us. In other words, we were not living the Christian life integrally; the principles of the faith were not penetrating into and informing every idea and judgement in every department of our lives; and in consequence we were producing characters, forming personalities, that were all-unconsciously divided in allegiance, in the service of two masters, ruled in part by Christian principles, but in part either without definite standards of any kind or ruled by standards that were not Christ’s and that in the last analysis were quite irreconciliable with Christ’s law.

The Cardinal

All English Catholics will be rejoiced that His Grace the Archbishop of Westminster is to be raised to the Cardinalate in the forthcoming Consistory; for it is something greater than a personal honour, since he is the representative of English Catholicism in the Universal Church.The unity of the Church has never implied a barren uniformity among nations. It is one of the miracles of Catholic life that the acceptance of a common rule and of a single Faith has only emphasized national traits and diversity of cultures; grace has strengthened nature, not destroyed it. It is something some than a coincidence that in our own time Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalism have all found leaders in the only vitally international society upon earth. While looking back through the past of which we are ourselves the heirs we come to realise it as a unity. Ullathorne, Milner, Challoner, St. Thomas More, all are linked not merely by a common purpose but by the means through which that purpose was achieved. Their lifeworks were only phases in a continuous tradition marked by an indomitable loyalty to the Holy See and an ineradicable Englishry. It would be naive to assert that our own tradition is necessarily better than others. It would be disloyal to forget that it is our own. It is right that we should rejoice when it is to be once more represented, and so fitly represented, in the Sacred College.

Groups

Recent years have seen the birth and astonishing growth of a movement whose title, marking the place of its first organization, is the somewhat valuable one of the “Oxford Groups.” Although the movement has almost ceased to be a factor in undergraduate life, the name remains: an annual meeting at Oxford—a distinction enjoyed by many other bodies—fosters the connection.Catholics are not likely to be encouraged to take part in a religious movement outside the visible Church, “undenominational,” and exhibiting many of the features of revivalism; that much may be said at the start. Often in the past treated by Catholics as a joke, the Groups at least merit attention; moreover, at certain points, they touch upon Catholic life. Part of their main programme of “winning the world for Christ” is, avowedly, the “awakening of the historic churches,” with consequent overtures to Catholics: individuals, perhaps unwittingly, have found their way into its ranks. All the more reason then for Catholics to examine the nature of the movement, and form an estimate of its true worth: further, we ought all, priests and laity alike, to be on the look-out for any lesson that may prove of value when translated into Catholic Action.

Code Religion

If there is one section of the community which seems to remain impervious to Catholic influence, it is that body of educated Englishmen whose religion is little more than an ethical code. There have been, of late years, numbers of conversions from among the Anglo-Catholics, Congregationalists, and others of more or less definite belief; very few from among those supporters of institutional religion whose creed—if it can so be called—is limited to a certain standard of external conduct. Leaders of men, imbued with the best public school traditions, the section is a large and important one; we will typify it by the representatives we should find in a regimental Mess, or in the Ward Room of one of His Majesty’s ships.Such men have little opportunity of meeting with Catholic life: a mixed marriage here and there: a few Catholic friends in their own profession: a visit to a Catholic country, where they will continue to live very much their own life—a race apart; these are the sum total of their contacts. These separated brethren are worthy of more consideration and attention than they are accustomed to receive. Moreover, there is a defensive standpoint, and those Catholics who are drawn into the same state of life, and often, by force of circumstances, deprived of many of the helps of their religion, have to be on their guard lest they too become “code-religionists.”

Catholic Action and Catholic Life

The zeal which has come over some of us to develop Catholic Action in obedience to the Holy Father’s command is altogether admirable and it is unfortunate that there are still so many yet untouched by it. But there is a danger, which has already appeared in a mild degree, of this zeal developing into a mere passion for external works. The inner spirit which gives rise to Catholic Action gradually disappears and those who have not yet acquired the zeal are still less inclined to take part in the new apostolate. The excesses of the fervent and the criticism of the lukewarm are alike due to the error which consists in thinking that unless we are obviously doing something we are not participating in Catholic Action. To many of us Catholic Action still means principally public demonstrations, protests to members of Parliament, anti-Birth-Control agitation, accompanied by the painful futility of numerous committee meetings. Some of these external effects are indeed produced by Catholic Action, but they are quite secondary to the real movement, which is simply the overflowing of the inner life of the Catholic.For Catholic Action is essentially Catholic Life, we are told by the Pope, who has done most to inaugurate this movement of modem times. “Catholic Action is justly identified with the Christian life,” said Pope Pius XI to the students of the Mexican Institute on May 29, 1934. It is the characteristic of life to give rise to external works, to common social activity, but these are not the essence of life, nor are they the essence of Catholic Action.

Editorial

Father Bede Jarrett and America would probably appear to most of those who knew him as a natural juxtaposition. Yet it ought perhaps to be rather surprising, for he was so completely and even so typically English. The truth is, of course, that though he was English he was not insular, and he escaped the narrowness of insularity because he was also so typically Dominican. (We call him typical not in the sense that he was like many others cast in the same mould, but in the sense that he was himself a model from which a true mould might well be fashioned.) He was thus tvpically Dominican not merely in his apostolic spirit, but also in his discernment and appreciation of truth and true values. It is this, more than anything else, that explains his interest, and perhaps his success, in the United States. He, who loved youth for its fineness, its enthusiasms, its unaffected (even if sometimes quixotic or unformed) idealism, and all its possibilities of greatness as yet unspoiled nor disillusioned, saw and appreciated these qualities of youth in the American nation. He was big enough, too, not to expect perfection but to overlook the failings which were the outcome of unbounded energy and activity, and not of malice. And if he found there a more eager response than in England, it was because we have perchance grown old and sluggish. He did not cease to love what was old and set, but he saw greater hope for the future in what was young and still plastic. He found this in America; but he found, too, the signs of a fruitful maturity, evidences of a true scholarship, of new-born literature and art, and above all a vigorous and sincere Catholic life. It is still the purblind fashion of many of us to think of Americans in terms of gangsters, racketeers, and go-getters, or of superficiality, hustle, and graft. Perhaps we are not helped in this matter by the American movies or tourists that do not always show us the true American. In any case, it is high time we should remove the beam out of our own eye and stand prepared, as Father Bede was, to find in the United States a new Saul amongst the prophets, a source of rejuvenation for the hardening arteries of Western life and culture, a ‘New Deal’ for civilization at large.

Catholic Law and General Life Assurance Company

Catholic Law and General Life Assurance Company