Beginning of Lent

THERE IS ROOM FOR THINKING-OUT NEW PENANCES
By Michael de la Bedoyere
IAENT, which begins next Wednesday. is traditionally a time for penance.. But penance can be of many different kinds. It is clear that the stress Once laid on corporal austerities has been gradually modified so that today we are advised to seek our main penance. not only in a special effort of self-reformation, but in accepting with a better grace the trials which life is nowadays very apt to offer.
It may be that in earlier days the course of a normal life, though doubtless in many ways physically harder than ours, was more placid and conventional. It may be, too, that within a traditional Christian culture it was almost automatically more Catholic. Hence the stress on additional corporal mortification.
However that may be, it can hardly be doubted that the contemporary Christian life, lived within a pagan atmosphere and, probably, with a heightened nervous sensibility, offers almost endless possibilities of mortification and penance in merely consciously trying to bring it a little nearer to that spiritual serenity which may well have come easier to our Catholic forefathers.
Prejudice
AMONG possibilities of morti
fication there is one that is rarely stressed. We all like to have our own wayand our own way is usually the product of the prejudices, tastes and habits which we have formed in the course of our fives. It is much easier, and to many much more satisfying, to indulge ourselves in doing and thinking what we have always done and thought.
Indeed it hardly ever occurs to us that there may be any serious reason for questioning those views and habits which we have come to take for granted.
And this applies, not only to our views about personal, social, political, national matters (which we rarely make the effort seriously to question just in case they may not he the best of which we are capable), but also to our spiritual views and habits.
Yet if we are to judge by the spiritual quality of our own lives or by our effectiveness as Catholics generally to impress the world with the \ alue of our Christian faith, it would indeed be surprising were our spiritual outlook something good enough to be taken for granted.
We know of course that in practice we are always falling short of our ideal, and it is part of our spiritual routine to try to do better. But it is not of this that one is talking. The suggestion is that the ideal which we propose to ourselves may have become just a habit—that it may even have actually degenerated into a prejudice.
Might there not be a .considerable mortification involved in our readiness to question ourselves about the real quality of the ideal which by now has grown into a habit? For this means that it has grown into something of ourselves, whereas spiritual progress, as all the masters testify, depends on trying to get out of ourselves and allowing God to get into us.
Sevenoaks
SUCH considerations seem rele
vant, not only to ourselves individually, but also socially. How far do we form part of a silent conspiracy never to change anything in our corporate Catholic habits?
The question suggests itself on reading an article in the current Christian Democrat by Captain S. F. Norfolk called " The Parish as Unit." The special value of this article lies in the fact that its plea, apart altogether from the intrinsic strength of the arguments adduced, is based on something that has been tried and that has in large measure succeeded.
Three years ago in the parish of Sevenoaks—a parish fairly typical of very many on the ring of London and other large towns—a local Catholic Association, comprising the whole parish in its aspect of a living Catholic community set within a non-Catholic environment, was founded. The President is the Parish Priest who controls policy, and the Association is governed by an Executive Committee with an appointed Lay Chairman, five elected lay members, four ex-officio members (including the two assistant priests) and three co-opted lay members.
Required Action
THE writer of the article, basing
himself on the experience gained in the work of this Association, argues very convincingly the merits of this type of regional and local Catholic Action, as cornpared with the sectional type of which we have much greater experience in the numerous national and diocesan associations founded for some special type of Catholic and some special end.
Among other things he points out that the pattern of this country's political structure is a regional one. "Any organisation which wishes to exert an influence in public affairs must obviously conform to this pattern." This may be an exaggeration, but it seems eminently true that any hope of modifying the outlook of our countrymen, not so much about one special question or reform, hut in general, as is done, for example, by political parties, must depend on regional work. Only in this way can people everywhere he influenced according to the principles of the movement operating in as many places as possible.
If this is generally true, how closely it suits Catholicism with its traditional stress on the Family as the key cell and the Parish which is of its very nature locally situated and bounded.
Outward-Looking Parish
TO read of the work of this
Sevenoaks Association is enough to see how admirably and, it seems, almost necessarily such an Association meets a vital Catholic need at the present time.
In earlier days the ecclesiastical parish was set in a country whose law, customs, habits, way of life was Catholic. There was then no desperate need for the parish to have, so to say, an outward face towards a non-Christian or postChristian world around it. Even so, it then possessed many nonecclesiastical functions which have been lost.
Today, the parish's ecclesiastical life is almost entirely turned inwards and set upon the " Sunday" life of its parishioners. For the most part, the rest of the parishioners' lives have no inherent connection with the parish, and consequently there is no relation whatsoever, however tentative, between the Catholics as a local community and the world without.
This, surely, is an immense loss both to Catholics themselves and still more to those outside whom Catholics are called upon to leaven and bring to the full truth about life and its supernatural purpose.
The experiment in Sevenoaks, begun quite humbly and experimentally by a small group of imaginative Catholics and, meeting from the first with the favour of
the parish priest, has shown how easily the deficiency can be remedied.
Within three years a Youth Club, a Discussion Group, a Welfare organisation, social activities, a Library and a Magasine -all with an " outward" look, have sprung up. And this, we repeat, is not in a district where Catholic numbers are relatively high and Catholic traditions stable, but in a mixed and population changing area where traditions have come to be weak and fluid.
Conservatism
NO striking reversal of past
habits was required in order to build up so valuable an asset. It was no more than a question of filling a gap whose size, not in Severroaks only, but almost everywhere, was so great that it is astonishing that the experiment comes so late. It was no more than a question of being allowed to carry on and try and see what came of it.
If we throw an eye over the present state of Catholicity in this country or in any other, we shall surely be forced to the conclusion that there is much room for adaptation to chaqing circumstances if the Church is to carry its due effect in a world that needs it so much.
Year in acid year out, our correspondence columns carry the evidence of this sense of the need for trying things out and they offer concrete suggestions, whose wisdom and merits naturally differ considerably. We know that abroad, notably in France, Italy itself and Germany, the last few years have witnessed changes some of which still shock our own countrymen. Conservaiism is necessarily a mark of the sound and true Catholic, but it can be motivated either by a free and objective weighing of the merits and demerits of initiative, or by the unconscious growing into the set habits which suit us best because we have become used to them aincl they suit us.
To make the effort to look anew into our habits and prejudices, whether in regard to our temporal or spiritual views, may well be one of the possible mortifications which Lent in our times calls for.