I recently received the following comments on the latest issue of StAR from Fr. Peter Milward, SJ.

a) It is truly admirable the way the editors of StAR come up with a new topic for each issue that is relevant at once to Catholic tradition and to the Modern age, and this issue on Nazism and Secularism is no exception. The design of the cover, too, is no less admirable, apt and appropriate.

b) The Editorial by Joe Pearce is, as usual, brilliant, prompting me to hope that this and all his previous editorials are included in the book reviewed by Portia Hopkins on p.39, “Beauteous Truth”. Truly Joe succeeds in showing how beautiful is Catholic Truth. Only, I have one animadversion concerning the way he traces the triumph of secularism back to the French Revolution, whereas I would trace it all the way back to Henry VIII with his Erastian domination of the Church by the State, thereby effecting a subtle alteration, not only for England but also for Europe, from “Christendom” to mere “Christianity”.

c) No less than three times Prof Aeschliman refers to TS Eliot’s notion of a “dissociation of sensibility”, without seeming to realize the context in which Eliot uses this term. According to Eliot, it set in sometime during the seventeenth century, between Shakespeare and Donne, on the one hand, and Milton and Dryden, on the other. It may be traced, though Eliot leaves it vague, to the influence of the “new philosophy” heralded by Sir Francis Bacon and espoused by the Royal Society from 1660 onwards.

d) It was already in my boyhood that I read Franz Werfel’s “Song of Bernadette”, and I was so impressed by both the book and the author. I was so convinced that the author must have been a devout Catholic, but I was so disillusioned on learning that he was a Jew. So Jews can appear as Catholics, as Catholics were originally Jews. And the same is true of Simone Weil.

e) “Behold the Woman!” What a splendid title for an article on an exhibition on “Mary in Sacred Art”! Also in the content of the article, the exhibition aptly demonstrates “the profound impact of one woman upon art and culture”. And that calls to mind the contemporary impact of the same Woman on the drama of William Shakespeare, as he conceives of all his ideal heroines, from the Elizabethan comedies through the Jacobean tragedies to the final tragi-comedies, as “full of grace”.

f) What a great man was Dietrich von Hildebrand! His greatness appears not only in his conversion to the Catholic Church but also in his humble acceptance of Catholic teaching, especially as expounded by Pope Paul VI in his encyclical “Humanae Vitae”, in spite of its betrayal by many American moral theologians led by Charles Curran.

g) I strongly disagree with Portia Hopkins’ review of Joe Pearce’s “Beauteous Truth”, when she criticizes his “evident hostility to the Protestant branch of the church”. In these words she both betrays her own allegiance to the modern “branch theory” and her ignorance of Church history, according to which Luther was at once a schismatic and a declared heretic – or as her namesake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, calls him, “beast of the waste wood”. In the interests of ecumenism, there is no point in whitewashing the past, which inevitably remains what it has always been, though in the present we may well cultivate friendly relations with “our separated brethren”, as also with those of other religions. Incidentally, it is a pity that she makes no mention of her namesake among the “important figures in the Catholic revival”, including Newman, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene and O’Connor – maybe because he isn’t sufficiently ecumenical for her taste.