WHITEFRIARS CHRONICLE

Successful magazine * Prayerful walks * Jews and ourselves * Willingham call NE of the biggest success stories in publishing surrounds The Word, a profusely illustrated Catholic monthly magazine produced by the Divine Word Missionaries.
When the magazine was taken over by Bro. Paul, of St. Patrick's, Donamon, Roscommon, Ireland, in 1952, it was a pamphlet site production and had a circulation of 6,000—chiefly in England.
Today its pages are twice the old size, and the circulation is rapidly approaching the quarter million mark.
Over 50.000 copies Itre Sold in Britain every month. The U.S.A. also takes 50,000. In Ireland the circulation has topped 100,000.
Bro. Paul told me: "Overall sales shot up another 10,000 when we started printing in colour five months ago. And now, apart from our own missionaries, we have readers and promoters in 18 European countries. We even have a subscriber in Moscow."
The magazine can be ordered through any newsagent. ninepence a month, or by post. Ils. a year, from St. Richard's College, Hadrm. Droitwich, Worcs. I cannot imagine anyone being disappointed by its content matter. There has never been a family magazine quite like The Word.
Profile expert ANDREW BOYLE, once a member of the CATHOLIC HERALD'S editorial staff, has compiled a half-hour programme on Lord Beaverbrook for a BBC Home Service broadcast on Monday, the Beaver's 85th birthday.
It should be well worth listening to. Mr. Boyle has gone from strength to strength on this type of profile feature since he left the C srsioric HERALD.
His book on Cheshire V.C. (No riming Glory) became a Book Club choice and a paperback bestseller. His biography of Lord Trenchard was bought up for serialising prior to book publication.
Push for a bus
RREADERS of this column have sent me a total of £213 2s. 6d. for the little Cornish parish which is buying a bus to take local Catholic children to a Catholic school in Bodmin. A magnificent gesture!
Among the donations was a cheque for £150 from a gentleman who wishes to remain anonymous. What a relief this is for the chilren's parents who, until the bus offer came along. were struggling to meet taxi fares.
Fr. Albert Wyatt, of Bodmin, was flabbergasted when our readers' donations were forwarded
to him. Now, he is having a photograph taken of the bus. with the children included, and prints will he sent to each donor—with a signed "thank you" from the children.
Fr. Wyatt writes: "Now that we have got the bus there is an incentive for the parents here to make greater fund-raising efforts, and we may eventually be able to help others in small isolated parishes. Furthermore, the fact that we are running our own bus to take children to school has made a terrific impression on nonCatholics. Driving through Wadebridge, now, is just one series of waves and smiles."
Jews and ourselves Iis a consoling thought that God can bring good out of the greatest evils. Even the terrible holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany has had good results—the new outlook by Christians towards the Chosen Race with whom the Covenant was first sealed.
I am glad, therefore, to see that a little quarterly devoted to furthering Jewish-Christian understanding is doing so well that it can afford to shed its previous mimeographed appearance and come out as a smart primed magazine.
This is The Jews and Ourselves, edited from Paris but written, of course. in English. To mark the change-over, Archbishop Beck of Liverpool has written a welcoming foreword.
This little magazine is not solely devoted to give Catholics, especially teachers, up-to-date information concerning modern Judaism and Christianity. It also aims to meet the contemporary need for wider knowledge among Catholics of the rousts of their faith and liturgy, the Jewish back ground of the Old Testament, and the Holy Land.
To my mind, one of its greatest effects will be in fighting every form of religious, social and racial prejudice in the place where this can best he done — in the schools.
Singing in Rome VERE LAURIE, well-known member of the Catholic Stage Guild, is off to Rome soon with the Imperial Opera Cornpany. They will give a short season of "The Beggar's Opera" at the lovely Teatro Goldoni, Another CSG member of the cast is Norah del Monte, who sings the part of Mrs. Peachum.
Castle chapel ONE of the proud boasts of Wardour Castle chapel in Dorset is that it has an unbroken continuity in the celebration of Mass since the days of Charles I and probably since those of Elizabeth I.
I have never seen the chapel but the photographs in the brochure sent me by the Appeal Fund Committee show it to qualify for what it describes as "one of the architectural glories of England".
Besides this claim to our interest, the chapel is also interesting as a sort of shrine. For it is a still living memorial to an age when English Catholics lived in an ever-diminishing backwater, doomed, it looked certain, to extinction.
To the prayers of the people who knelt here for two centuries the more happy state of our religion today. must in some part. be due. During the past year. the Catholic community has given over £12.000 to the fund for saving it. A further sum of
£10,000 is required. I will gladly undertake the forwarding of any donation to the right quarter, Walsingham call T HAVE had a very nice note in kindly rebuke of our failing to mention a visit by 38 Anglican pilgrims from many parts of Cornwall to Wakingham recently. Seemingly they made ecumenical history by going as a group to the Slipper Chapel there,
They got a very gracious welcome from Fr. Gerard Hulme, guardian of the national shrine of Our Lady, and they wish, through me, to place on record their very great appreciation.
Fr. Hulme gave them a talk on the history of the building and then their leader, the Rev. Eric Hall, Vicar of St. Day, led them in prayers for Christian Unity before the Shrine.
I wonder if we all realise strongly enough that with three Christian rites represented there -Roman, Anglican and Ortho
dox Walsingham is a true shrine to Christian unity.
Nuns' boarding house THREE nuns will shortly set 1themselves up as "landladies" when they move into a house they have bought at Fair Oak, a Hampshire village, eight miles from Southampton.
They plan to take in boarders studying at Southampton University and Teacher Training College. The boarders will commute every day.
The nuns, members of the Congregation of the Saviour and the Blessed Virgin, have only one house in England, at Shepton Mallet in Shropshire. But the "landlady nuns" have been living in a private house at Eastleigh. three miles from Fair Oak, and teaching at the local school.
Property agents in Southampton say that the last few building plots in the town will be auctioned off in the next month or two. Then Fair Oak is expected to come in for pretty rapid development. The nuns seem to have got in at the right time.
Prayerful walks T THINK Hilaire Belloc would -1heartily approve of two pilgrimages which have come to my notice. Both combine prayers and discussion with the discipline of walking.
The first, organised by a group of French Catholics, the Companions of St. Francis, is a walk from Montelimar to Lyons from July 25 to August 2. Separate parties for men and women will be made up of equal numbers of different denominations. The pilgrims will try to live simply in the Franciscan spirit of poverty. Translators will make things easy for monolingual English participants, who should contact Georgette Montrcdon, 16 Cours Vitton, Lyons 6, Rhone, France.
The second pilgrimage is the Pax Christi series of "routes" which this year will take fifteen groups to the shrine of Our Lady of Oropa in Piedmont. This last from August 16 to August 26, following which there will be a coach tour to Pope John's birthplace at Sotto it Monte.
Last year, 18 British participants walked: this year the number is expected to increase considerably. Cost of the "routes", exclusive of fares to and from Italy, will be £8. The doctrinal theme during the march will be Pacem In Terris and the mediation theme, the Our Father 1 gather these routes are social and full of good, clean fun. English organiser is John Geary, 22 Gilbert Road, Romford, Essex.
200,000 expected
HE Katholikentag (Catholic Day) rallies in Germany are world famous and I hear from a correspondent in Stuttgart that 200,000 people are expected to attend the final assembly there on the first Sunday in September. Cardinal Bea and several foreign Bishops are likely to attend and a message will be read from the Pope.
The motto or the Katholikentag is "Change yourselves by thinking anew'' and the whole idea is to stress that the world is changing and that the Church while rigidly adhering to her eternal teaching, must adopt new methods of spreading it.
Stuttgart is one of the most ecumenically minded cities in Germany and at the Evangelical Bible Institute there Catholic and Evangelical theologians and scholars are working together on a new translation of the Vulgate to be published next year. 1 hear, too, that Catholics in the Soviet zone are not being left out of the Katholikentag celebrations. They will be holding setvices in their churches at the same London's hit musical WEST END impresarios were talking this week about The Sound of Music.
This Rodgers and Hammerstein musical based on a true story about a Catholic family of singers, the Trapp family of Austria, has become a runaway success, On Whit Monday it entered its fourth year at the Palace Theatre.
The secret of its success? That is what theatre managements were discussi ng. fol kiwi i ng disappointments with frothier, more glamorous, shows.