Far away & long ago
McCarthy, Abigail
boredom sets in), no front-page headline is ever less than about be taken over by the BBC (which is its obvious equivalent in two inches high. Nobody brought up solely on these...
...Similarly, the rectly are the,people who run Britain, not the people who just teaching profession must be very badly hit by the loss of the live in it...
...It reads: As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and is misbegotten, for the active power in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness according to the masculine sex...
...That is why the strike has caused such a fuss...
...Librarians probably buy more books on the Times strike, into perspective...
...It could be argued seriously then-and was-whether a Catholic in government could remain true to his oath of office and uphold laws not approved by the church...
...It is not that the Times has more, or better reporting than tising jobs throughout the country...
...The Literary Supplement is the most anything "intellectual" are the hallmarks of the British prestigious book-reviewing paper in the country, and both people...
...UL recall will . forgive my lapses as I reminisce...
...Quite possibly it will be out again long it lasts, will not kill the Times...
...which the church was the established church, that the church might well flourish under the separation of church and state...
...Those were the days of the rediscovery of Thomas Aquinas...
...L-5t CNcato 10...
...For the past few read, which were documents of the prebeen full of speculation about days I have been living in the past, and Vatican II struggle of the laity to be alPope John Paul II and the Catholic from that perspective it seems startling to lowed to be mature members of the marxists-how will they deal with each me, although hardly news...
...Actually, on closer inspection, it is just possible occasionally There is one more thing to say on a possibly more serious to detect a slight whiff of political interest in the Mirror (which note...
...But, above all Britain can do without the Times...
...Neo-Thomism was to be scorned, if not actually forbidden...
...Who is apt to believe, for example, that when I started collecting many of these books one of the hotly debated questions on Catholic college campuses was whether lay persons could study philosophy at all, let alone confront the dominant philosophies of our time...
...a school, college, university, or allied field, looks first of all in It is not that the editorials are any more influential than edito- those publications...
...I look at Liturgy and Personality, to mention only one such book, and remember the long effort to participate in worship, when even to suggest the vernacular was thought, subversive...
...1971 "Special Catholic Nostalgia Issue" rescue of truths wherever they were held captive, that commerce with the real (italics mine) and with experience, which quickened it in its original source-and above all, the intuitivity which is the life of its life...
...What a flurry when we began to teach the works of Claudel, Bernanos, Mauriac...
...He had defined the old problem once again: ". . . when modern philosophy and modern science began (and continued) to make a noise in the world, most of St...
...Even the rich and powerful in class, the military and the mighty generally...
...What these people are doing now, I don't rials in other papers, though marginally that may be so...
...pblld IInl.h.d to h.a..el, bin...
...The passionate concern with sin and grace and the wretched of the earth in that literature and in'the early works of others, like Graham Greene, was a revelation...
...For these publicapapers is that gossip, envy, titillation, armchair sport, astrol- tions to go out of existence would be very serious indeed for ogy, dislike of foreigners, and a profound lack of interest in certain groups of people...
...It is good on some things, less good on others...
...Even had I not been emotionally disposed to do so, it took only the discovery of the 92nd question, Part I, to convince me that Maritain was right...
...What matters first of all is that the because although the Times is the paper read by the people who Times is the paper which is read by the people who run run Britain, the Times (contrary to its own opinion) does not Britain-the MPs and politicians, the top civil servants and actually run Britain itself...
...I have been church...
...The latter two remind me of yet another struggle-that of the Catholic writer to be allowed to transmit reality...
...Pleased, however, as the powers that be might have been with the rediscovery of Thomas in such prestigious places, they soon fostered a Thomist school of thought which insisted that all the answers were in Thomas per se and that there was no need for an extension of Thomistic thought and method aided by the insights of more recent thinkers or from newer branches of knowledge like anthropology, sociology and psychology...
...nr.t namV vragra..d In Gz[dl IE[tPNoMOnCYI $.d.hoe, p~ , d bay...
...I recall a rather giddy pleasure when readable translations became available-high school Latin was not adequate-in finding out for myself...
...The battles are half-forgotten other, they ask...
...authors and publishers must be feeling the pinch over its It was necessary to say all this in order to put the current closure already...
...To judge from the way the paper businessmen, the administrators and bankers and insurance- reacted to its own demise, one would have not have thought brokers, a large proportion of the academic and professional this-yet is is undoubtedly true...
...including perhaps Commonweal readers, will see to that...
...Nobody brought up solely on these papers electronic terms) but that is very unlikely...
...Bernanos's`attacks on the bourgeois mentality and the dehumanization of the French workers sear today again as I went through his Plea for Liberty once more...
...They were struggles being bravely engaged in-at least in the places where I lived and taught-but it depends on the point of view as to whether they were skirmishes on a frontier, harbingers of a fruition to come, or abortive starts which, if they had had full encouragement in their time, would have grown into full-fledged, solidly lay-supported reforms in faith and fidelity to the Gospel which would have forestalled the desperate alternatives of today...
...It is not know...
...2 Inspiring MADORNAand CHILD BABY SHOE SHRINE -from The Critic...
...The people it has affected di- strength of it than any other single magazine...
...Jan.-Feb...
...So many volumes turned up, dusty and long unTHE SUNDAY supplements have probably startling news...
...And what of the efforts to secure the autonomy of the lay person in the sphete of politics...
...Thomas's disciples remained almost deaf to these wretched murmurs, except to refute them . . . Gradually the Thomists of the schools lost that openness, that feeling for research and progress, that zeal to go to the GREAT CATHOLIC ADS NO...
...Moth r er Psrl, baby...
...But this is a Literary Supplement, the Times Educational Supplement and very small concession: the overwhelming impression of both the Times Higher Educational Supplement...
...This is that it is not just the Times, and theSunday Times, claims to be a Labor supporter): and this makes it just a shade that are off the streets just now...
...ABIGAIL McCARTHY Commonweal: 72...
...A little commerce with the real in the guise of biology seemed in order...
...strike would never make the international head- because these journals are easily the most important for adverlines...
...Not only lay students but seminarians as well were advised that, although St...
...I discovered that that old conflict was still very much on the mind of the aging Maritain when I leafed through his last book, The Peasant of the Garonne, before putting it into a packer's box...
...That debate goes on...
...What will happen to it is far before you read these lines in Commonweal...
...Poor John Courtney Murray was having to defend himself because he held that the ideal state was not necessarily a state in...
...while the production of woman comes from the defect in the active power, or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence, such as that of a south wind, which is moist...
...from clear...
...On some campuses a teacher was suspect if he or she cited Jacques Maritain on Thomas Aquinas, or Heinrich Rommen on the natural law...
...te:d 14§7 C1ybaarn, Gpt...
...His relevance and that of scholastic philosophy had really been rediscovered for Catholics by "outsiders" like Hutchins and Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago, and Maritain at the Sorbonne...
...That is why it will carry on-somehow, And this is why,.I am quite sure, the current strike, however somewhere, sometime...
...more instructive one than those of the Guardian or Telegraph, But, despite all this, Britain carries on without the Times, though that is certainly true...
...Wedgwood Benn suggested recently it might BRIAN WICKER Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy over one's shoulder...
...Also affected are the Times more "serious"than its almost totally trivial rival...
...And could a lay person initiate social action...
...But whoever owns it, I mary organs: two of the latter being visible, every day of the will bet that it won't be allowed to go under...
...And Catholics were excited and pleased...
...Books have a way of disappearing on their shelves, and in the packing, and unpacking for a move, turning up again FAR AWAY & LONG AGO to remind one of past discoveries, enthusiasms and once dearly-held beliefs...
...Times Educational Supplement, and the College and Univer(Intellectuals and artists don't run Britain: and this is why a sity world by that of the Times Higher Education Supplement, Guardian...
...U- P., w.r n.n 1 G m ~ DI1RAM n. IC PsOnUCys...
...Thomas himself...
...In their absence, you can't be sure that you've surveyed even that the correspondence page is a more entertaining, or everything going in the field...
...But I doubt if those in the rest perhaps, it is read by foreigners who belong to those classes...
...They had to do with the world I lived in then...
...I have never really read it because I was assured that, as a one-time adherent of Maritain, I would find it disappointingly reactionary but I gleaned enough to find its style the old lucid delight and may well get back to it one day...
...And still does...
...of the world can...
...Apparently a recould be anything other than a political, artistic, or scientific cently deceased heiress, who acquired twenty-three million moron...
...To many of their readers made once more aware of how rapid now-indeed, often quite incredible-so the fact that there are Catholic marxists is change is when viewed looking back I hope that readers with more precise 16 February 1979: 71 Never before much a perfect setting far baby ahoyI Shoes permaniaed in metallic bronze -Iike Bnimhand movntedon h-.old t Imm.d be...s terelh.r >,lsh disIo..& g loch .Lava a[ Yadenv a...
...There are books and memoirs of all the other fresh starts-in labor, the rural life movement, ecumenism...
...Dorothy Day's House of Hospitalitywhich I remember as being much more immediate in impact than her later books-with its call to serve the poor where they were had had its effect on the campuses, but neither she nor Catherine de Hueck of Friendship House were welcome at every Catholic school...
...MEMORIES OF HALF-FORGOTTEN BATTLES It was so in my recent move...
...Thomas indeed had all the answers, it was better and safer to read commentaries than St...
...Neither could any such reader fail to know everything pounds at the age of ten through being born into the Shell Oil there is to know, visually at any rate, about the human mam- empire, wanted to buy it at one time...
...boredom sets in), no front-page headline is ever less than about be taken over by the BBC (which is its obvious equivalent in two inches high...
...There are some of Maritain's books among others lined up once again on the shelf-An Introduction to Philosophy, Prayer and Intelligence, Christianity and Democracy, Art and Scholasticism, Art and Poetry...
...These authorities were lay, after all, and apt to make worldly applications of their teachings...
...The authorities were not at all sure...
...The foreigners, week, either on page three (the Sun) or page five (the Mirror...
...Anyone who wants a job in any other paper...
Vol. 106 • February 1979 • No. 3
