Reunion, is in the air today; in discussion in Church circles, in the press, on the radio and television, and even in the House of Lords. Among the non-Catholic Churches the last few years have seen schemes of reunion for South India, North India and Ceylon, and all these schemes show a readiness to examine established positions in the light of the present challenge to Christianity from atheism and materialism.

This drawing together of the non-Catholic Churches is comparatively recent, and is very largely the achievement of the Student Christian Movement and other inter-denominational societies that have made many of those who have worked with them impatient of the barriers that divide one denomination from another, particularly on the Mission Field. The result has been a growing awareness of the evils of division and of the damage done to the Christian cause in the eyes of the unbeliever.

I want, for my own satisfaction and perhaps others', to set down as clearly as I can some thoughts about the place of the priest in today's world. It wants some thinking about, I feel.

First of all there is very little written on the subject that comes my way. I remember a deliberately superficial and snap picture in the Observer recently of various clergymen, very sympathetic with the Catholic priest, though one wondered on the evidence just why; a strange novel, The Edge of Sadness, by Edwin O'Connor, which I found evasive and lacking in the decisiveness there must be in a priest, somewhere one hopes even in the vague, tired, washed-out priest that one does see often; and another book I have just got hold of, Priests and People, by Conor Ward: this an excellent sociological study so far as I can judge of a ‘typical’ Liverpool parish, though it leaves out deliberately the personal life of the priest.

Everyone knows by now that the Church is in the midst of a great biblical and liturgical revival. It is certainly a wonderful movement with many wonderful results. But such an accomplishment cannot occur without a certain amount of controversy. The ‘extremists’ among the liturgical enthusiasts would like all devotions to be buried forever in oblivion. The ‘conservatives’ cling to the old order; many of them still want to live nineteenth-century piety with their ‘manuals of devotion’ and rosary beads at mass in a silent church where the mass itself is a private devotion. Of course, this is stating the case rather in the extreme, and a great deal has already been done by the liturgists themselves in recent years to clarify the meaning of liturgy, - which in the past has been associated with the idea of rite and exterior ceremonial.

In this antiphon is to be found what is probably one of the most perfect expressions—being both precise and comprehensive—of the nature and function of the mass or eucharist. It comes from the liturgical office of the feast of Corpus Christi and is also used on other occasions connected with the eucharist. It is of the mass as a whole however that it is descriptive, as its opening words show: O sacrum convivium—the sacred feast in which Christ is preached, made present and then eaten.

To translate it into English is not easy for each original word contains overtones, depth of meaning and openness to further interpretation, the exact equivalent of which cannot all be captured in translation. Thus as well as translating and considering each phrase in turn it will be well to comment almost word by word, bringing out the meaning of each within its overall context.

It's all right for you monks. You live in a monastery, where it's easy to pray. Things are arranged to make it so. But if you live a busy life in the world it's impossible. You're on the go from morning till night. How does anybody think one can pray in those circumstances?’ Such is the complaint and one is tempted, as a monk, to point out its false assumptions. That even in a monastery it is not necessarily easy to pray; that it is possible to be very busy even in a monastery; that even in those monasteries in which the pressure of work is less or the conditions more secluded it appears that there is no guarantee that praying will be easy. Whatever the way of life a person leads there would seem to be a strong likelihood that there will be no effective praying unless he is prepared to take vigorous steps to foster it.

There is a characteristic attitude towards women in the Church which expresses itself in certain customs and regulations. I have tried to find out something about the assumptions behind this attitude and have thought it worth reporting and commenting on what I found, because I suspect that much of it will be as surprising to others as it was to me.

The customs which set apart the sexes in the Church begin to impinge very early in life. The little girl sees her brothers having fun serving on the altar, initiated and ‘in the know’, while she has to stay inner pew, bored, an outsider. The boys usually have precedence at first communion and confirmation, and even on her wedding day, the only day in her life when a woman is allowed in the sanctuary, she comes second throughout the ceremony.

I want to begin by quoting a passage from St Paul which provides a good introduction to what I have to say. He is talking to the Colossians about rising with Christ and living in Christ's life. He goes on to say:

The tenth century was a time of change in the common attitude of Christians towards war; a change in fact so great as to be best understood as a swing from one extreme to another, and we should therefore have in mind from the outset two diametrically opposed points of view.

On the one hand, there is the uncompromising rejection of war and of military service by the early Christians. In the first two centuries after Christ, there was virtually no possibility of Christian participation in worldly conflicts between states. The militia Christi, the soldiers of Christ, were always contrasted with the militia saecularis, the soldiers of the world. The soldiers of Christ were to fight a spiritual battle with spiritual weapons, and the final victory was the victory of the martyr; the soldiers of the world fought with carnal weapons for base material ends, and were subject to the lusts of the flesh; there was nothing m common between the camp of light and the camp of darkness.

In the introduction to his admirable translation of Karl Rahner's Schriften zur Theologie, I, Fr Cornelius Ernst begins by pointing out that Rahner is a theologian totally competent in the study of the past. Editor of Denzinger's Enchiridion Symbolorum, and co-editor of the Lexicon fur Theologie und Kirche, Rahner has obvious qualifications in the presentation of what has so far been achieved in theology. But he is more than an historian. He works in the present, the studies collected here are concerned with matters of moment, not with past disputes. He works in the present for the future when we shall know all that has already been revealed.

We were sitting on a hill in the South of France under the blazing sun and quietly listening to these words of St Thérèse: ‘I have recognized my vocation … my vocation is Love … In the heart of the Church I am Love, c'est l'amour seul qui compte'.

At just that time - so I gathered from letters from home - people listening to the wireless were shattered to hear desperate appeals coming through: ‘Help, they are burning everything down… Perhaps we can hold out another hour, send us help … People of the West, don't let us down … our last lines are falling … where are you?’ And then quite suddenly the appeals stopped; there was a terrifying silence.

Liturgy is still widely regarded in England as something connected either with archeology, rubrics, or monasteries. In Belgium, France and Germany, for several decades, the liturgy has been seen and used for what it is: the man-in-the-street's closest and most active contact with God. Historical research, used before the war often just to resuscitate defunct liturgical practices for the archaicist's delight, has shown why the liturgy is not, at present, as good a means of contact as it could be - that is, not pastoral enough. Theological consideration of it has not only brought before us the extraordinary depth, range and immediacy of this contact, but has also thrown into still clearer light the essentially pastoral function of the liturgy and indicated the general lines on which it must be made to fulfil this function more effectively.

For many of us, as for the Mari tains, the impact of Chartres is a cumulative experience that reaches its climax at suitable altitude, perhaps halfway up the clocher neuf, or circling at some point those ‘outer balconies, high above ground, through an unbelievable entanglement of arches and buttresses'. From that scaffolding that suspends one between roofs and towers, there is nothing left but the final admiration … ‘the unity and harmony of so much lofty beauty could have as its foundation only the unity of truth'. Having left beneath one the particular beauties of stained glass, of proportions, of sumptuous effects, here, it is the anatomy of the Church, spread out beneath one as it might be for the blessed Damosel, that impresses the memory with something absolute.

It is hard to imagine why Karl Hörmann's Introduction to Moral Theology has been translated into English. The author states that the book was written for lay people. In fact, it is the kind of book which is most at home in the pocket of the seminarist at examination time. The publishers claim that it is ‘a guide to principles and practice in modern life’. In fact, many of the infrequent practical examples are hot from Aristotle or the thirteenth century. Every page is leprous with jargon. We read of ‘the positive method’, of ‘substantial union’, of ‘ontological goodness’, of ‘the sense-appetite’; words such as ‘convenience’, ‘determine’, ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘elevated’ are used in senses quite alien to their English usage. Frequently the examples take us back to that quaint and vivid world where men set fire to their neighbours’ houses and kill their friends while hunting, where captains throw overboard their merchandise to lighten the ship, and where maidens miss mass to avoid being put to the blush by their banns.

Very few women can claim to have converted their husbands by being late with dinner but Biagia Ceretani, the wife of John Columbini, is one of them. John Columbini was born in Siena about 1304, and at the time of his marriage was a successful merchant. He was, it seems, intent only on increasing his worldly goods, ambitious, close-fisted and choleric. His biographers say that he gave way to bad temper without scruple though there is no evidence that he did anything more violent than ‘turn the air blue'.

One day he came home after a busy morning, tired and hungry, to an unlaid table and a meal half-prepared. Very naturally he ‘blew his top’ as the saying goes. Biagia, hoping to distract him, thrust a volume of saints’ lives upon him and more naturally still, her husband flung it on the floor.

For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

That is how St Paul speaks of the plan of redemption to his converts at Corinth. And now here is Shakespeare showing man as instrumental in ‘declaring the glory of the Lord'. It is a passage from King Lear where the king, cast out into the storm by his unnatural daughters, sees, for the first time it may be, the close kinship of us all.

Dear Lord, I turn to you after hearing many arguments about war, peace, nuclear weapons, non-violence, pacifism, and the duty of Christian persons to take an active interest in governmental policy, or drift, or incapacity to resist events.

Of course it concerns me deeply whether your creation, human and non-human, is destroyed or not; and though to die might be swift as the rending of a curtain that hangs between here and hereafter, I don't want to die with most of the world, my world at any rate, making a funeral pyre.

I can accept it if it is part of your plan, something you mean to allow because out of it you can bring greater good. Must I accept also the ghastly possibility of living while others die, m a barren world, the Material expression of spiritual bankruptcy? Yes. I am sure your answer is ‘Yes'.

In my recent book, Each His Own Tyrant, I introduced a Catholic Home of Rest where a young postulant was helped to understand her own neurosis, and to work free from it. My postulant (Alice) was fictitious, but not so the Home. And I have been asked to write a little more about it here, chiefly in connection with its work for nuns.

First, a brief description of the background. The Home is in a beautiful part of England. It consists of a number of houses and cottages, each in charge of a housemother—the Principal being in close touch with these groups, which are like small families within a larger one. (There is also a house for men, with its own farm, but as this works separately, I shall not describe it here.)