DOUGLAS HYDE'S COLUMN

w. Priest Workers or Lay Missioners?AwA
I FOUND myself some time ago
waiting in the company of a roomful of Anglican clergymen for a meeting to begin. "Did you go over to the Mission de Paris this summer?" asked one of another. "No," was the reply, " I went down to Marseilles to see the priest workmen there."
For the next fifteen minutes the conversation drifted backwards and forwards between the " Red belt " of the French capital and the docks of its Mediterranean part. as one after another joined in, describing what they had seen of the new methods being used by Catholic priests in France to reach the paganised poor. It does not surprise me, therefore, that an anonymous Anglican clergyman has now written a book called Priest Workman in England (S.P.C.K.. soft cover, Penguin type book, 10s. 6t1.). The author, however. did not go to the factory in the first place as a missionary but because he found himself out of a job, due to some odd gap in the Anglican organisation.
Despite this, he has clearly tried to model his book oh the lines of Abbe Michonneau's Revolution in a City Paris, a fourth edition of which has recently been published (Blaekfriars, 12s. 6d.); Mission to the Poorest (which tells the challenging story of the Marseilles priest workmen); France Pagan? and other (superficially) similar works by Catholic am hors).
But, whereas theirs are vital contributions to the Christian thought of our das, which could come only from the experience and pens of Catholic priests, his, sincere though it is, might in the parts which deal specifically with his own experience, have been written by any Anglican layman trying to modestly influence an unfamiliar factory atmosphere.
is it necessary P
THE average Catholic reading it would, I imagine, feel saddened by the revealing admissions this Anglo-Catholic has to make. " When we teach catholic truth,"
he writes, " we have to explain with great care that we are not Roman Catholics, and yet that we share with them nearly all the faith we teach. This is a subtle business . . ."
And again : " The general difference between England and France seems to he that in France the structure of Church life—and the skeleton, so to speak, is there; there is no dispute about it; the task is to make the dry hones live. But in England there is no general agreement as to what the framework is." That should at least make us grateful for the Church which is ours.
The existence of the French priest workmen may be said to be a measure of the desperation of the situation there. But one feels. so far as the Church here is concerned. that we have sufficient laymen capable. once they have seen the need, of becoming worker-missionaries, to make it unnecessary for us to expend our priests in this way.
But it does mean that we have to activise those we have. The fact is that at this moment we have a growing number of keen, apostolic laymen taking their Catholicism with them wherever they go and capable of exerting a decisive influence on our times.
Gloves off
FOR those non-Catholics who read this column (and this, I know, includes not only sympathetic Anglicans but a number of as-yet hostile Communists too) and who believe that Catholics are unable or unwilling to submit their beliefs to the sort of attack in which no holds are barred, try reading Difficulties (Eyre and Spottiswoode, I8s.).
This is a second edition, published after an interval of twenty years, of the famous "debate by post " between Arnold Lunn and Mgr. Ronald Knox, conducted when Lunn was still not a Catholic.
In fact, he had reached that
stage, known I imagine to every convert, when the Faith was " worrying" him and when his hostility to it was therefore all the more hitter, compelling him to put into words his every prejudice and intellectual objection to the Church.
There is nothing phoney about it, although Catholic readers will he fascinated by the way in which, as the correspondence progressed. his prejudices tended to come to the fore as his intellectual objections were weakened—or effectively disposed of —by his Catholic opponent.
No. it ends with Lunn still fighting, not with a " happy ending" conversion. That came two years later— and was just a beginning.
In harness
I HEAR from Glasgow that the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and the University College Society there have worked out a scheme for contacting Catholic Commonwealth and other students —particularly the coloured ones — and putting them in touch with the chaplaincy and their fellow Catholics.
The scheme was launched after Glasgow S.V.P. headquarters had heard from Mgr. F. K. McClement, who has an over-all responsibility for Catholic Colonial students in England and Wales.
Schemes such as these help to stop the steady draining away from the Church of some of the most promising products of our mission schools, and bring the layman in this country into harness with the missionary overseas. The Catholic People's Week on Africa, to he held at St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill, Middlesex, from April 18 to 24, and about which I first wrote last December, looks like making a major contribution to this work.
The organisers now have an impressive list of lecturers, African and English, and are busily engaged in writing to coloured students and others likely to be interested, in all parts of the country.