It is no secret that the Church finds herself in crisis, and the awareness of such a fact is ‘pessimism’ only in the eyes of those for whom all change is necessarily a tragedy. It would seem more realistic to follow the example of Pope John (and of Pope Paul after him) and to envisage courageously the challenges of an unknown future in which the Christian can find security not, perhaps, in the lasting strength of familiar human structures but certainly in the promises of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. After all, Christian hope itself would be meaningless if there were no risks to face and if the future were definitively mortgaged to an unchanging present. Christian hope is confident not in metaphysical immobility but in the dynamism of unfailing love. ‘Crisis’ means ‘judgment’, and the present is always being judged as it gives way to what was, yesterday, the future. Only when we try to drag yesterday bodily with us into the future does ‘crisis’ become ‘cataclysm’. An ‘optimism’ that insists on denying evident realities is hardly inspired by Christian truth, and true hope is that which finds motives for confidence precisely in the ‘crisis’ which seems to threaten that which is dearest to us: for it is here above all that the power of God will break through the meaningless impasse of prejudices and cruelties in which we always tend to become entrapped. It is in the crises of history most of all that the Church knows, from experience, that the truth shall make her free.

In Spring 1963 the British Council of Churches appointed a Working Group ‘to study, as a matter of urgency, the question of Britain’s continued possession of an independent nuclear deterrent’. The group (which included a Catholic observer, Father Corbishley, s.j.) reported back to the Council that ‘there is no case for independent nuclear action—that is, without prior consultation with our allies—in any part of the world’, and the Council of Churches endorsed the report in a resolution of October 16th, 1963. The Resolution, together with the Working Group’s Report, forms a document of considerable importance.

Although it must be said that, like previous similar documents, such as The Valley of Decision (1961), The British Nuclear Deterrent fails to maintain its grip at the most decisive levels, it is a serious expression of concern, and its well-informed respect for the strategic and political realities of our situation is particularly striking after the endless hypothetical abstractions that still disable so much Catholic thinking in this field. One can only heave a sigh of gratitude when one reads that ‘the Churches are bound to bear witness’ where one’s nation ‘is prepared to annihilate vast populations in another country’ and that ‘our concern is to find God’s will in this given situation—the will of a God of whom it may not be said that He does certain things in general but nothing in particular’.

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.

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.

The programme for the sixteen days of this year’s Cannes Festival, the seventeenth of the series, was considerably more uneven than it has been for several years past and this, it seemed to me, made it more than usually interesting for the serious student of cinema. With three or four exceptions the great names were absent, and the number of predictable smash hits was surprisingly limited when one first looked at the complete list of entries. But as the brilliantly sunny days passed, it became increasingly evident how stimulating was the great proportion of work by very young or inexperienced directors, and one became used to seeing nervous young men sitting behind the microphone at the post-performance press conferences, waiting to be thrown to the wolves. So nervous were some of them, in fact, that even the journalistic wolves relented sufficiently to temper their bite to the shorn lambs.

Apart from one or two quite outstanding pictures like Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, which in the event won the Grand Prix outright and shared the Catholic prize, or Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned—not at all what you might expect from its title—you could almost divide the entries into films with very interesting ideas made by directors with insufficient experience to make the most of their material; and films made by experienced directors trying to put over insufficient material by means of accomplished technique.

For once, I found myself wholly on the side of the first category, many of which provided extremely rewarding viewing. One that I liked almost the best, though I was in a minority here, was a Swedish film made by a young man called Bo Widerberg; Kvarteret Korpen was translated as Raven’s End, the name of an industrial quarter outside Stockholm.