I write, first, as one of the ‘young people ‘ to whom the advocates of Catholic Action seem especially to appeal and, secondly, as a provincial.

What exactly is happening in this Catholic Action campaign?

Now and then, at the invitation of devoted men, a lecturer from London or Liverpool descends to harangue us on Catholic Action or to show us some phase of its workings. Who are ‘us’? A group of people representing 1 in 1,000 of the available Catholic population, rising half-a-dozen times a year under the stimulus of a dinner or a dance to 25 in 1,000 and once each year, at a Sunday evening cinema-hall Rally, to 100 in 1,000. And of this weekly or fortnightly band, Apostolic in its diminutiveness at least, who are the regular components? A few married women, a few teachers, a few working-girls; to four of these add one man —a clerk, a plumber, a custom-officer or an out-of-work.

Now, when the lecturer has departed, what in the main is the idea left uppermost in the minds of the hearers of the word? During the lecture they have been galvanized and uplifted by the nobility of the appeal; inspired with generosity, they have been impelled towards the brink. But, as the words which pass betwen them show, when they endeavour to plunge from that brink of noble principles into the complexities of direct action in their own private lives and spheres of existence, they are partly perplexed and partly dispirited.