Before 1914, the mass of the people in this country took little real interest in international affairs, which were commonly regarded as reserved to statesmen and their expert advisers. In Parliament, foreign affairs were looked on as a nonparty matter, about which, save on rare occasions, basic agreement on policy was reached behind the scenes between the Government of the day and opposition leaders. This attitude was by no means confined to England. Since the end of the first World War, public interest in international affairs has grown steadily in all countries, though it may unfortunately be claimed that growth of the knowledge required to consider and weigh dispassionately the many complicated facts involved has not kept pace with the interest displayed.

This applies to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, but it is distressing to find that even among Catholics—and well-educated persons too—there is little realization that the proper conduct of international relations by Christians should be governed by as definite a code of Christian ethics and morality as that which should guide the private life of the individual Christian, and one which is indeed directly deduced from the same laws of personal morality as have been revealed by God in the Scriptures and are interpreted by his Church. A little thought will show that this must be so. All Catholics recognize the moral principles of the Natural Law, of the ten commandments given to Moses and of the supernatural extension of these laws declared by our Lord, upon which the Church bases her teaching of man’s moral duties and obligations towards God, the family and himself, and towards others who are not of his immediate family.

‘After the Steppe-cat—What?’ It is with the feeling of baffled uncertainty posed by Mr Thurber’s wistfully evocative question of long ago that the English filmgoer may look at the Italian cinema today, or at least so much of it as he is able to see for himself or learn about from the writing of those who have seen more, or other, films than he. For after Umberto D —what? This great film is not only the climax of the neo-realist school in Italy, it is also its full-stop, for after this there is really nothing more to be said in this line without repetition or recession. The Italian cineasts must either drive roads across new country or they must fall back on old ones which have for some time been abandoned.

This is not the first time that Italian films have had great importance; in the very early days of the cinema the Italians had an influence quite disproportionate either to their output or to their distribution. That taste for the grandiose and the magniloquent which had so far had to express itself in opera (should we prefer not to go back quite so far as the Imperial Games), seized upon the cinema as the perfect vehicle for the spectacle, seeing here no limit to the scale of decor or caste except the financial; and it produced in Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis (1912) and Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), two films which set the pattern for a picture which the Italians seem to have been making, on and off, for some forty years—each one bigger and more lush than its predecessor.

The section of the creed introduced by the words ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary’ consists of a relatively long Christological statement. This statement is an essential part of the original proclamation of the Gospel, and indeed, is found both in the Epistles of St Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. The reason for its inclusion in the creed is both because the Gospel cannot be expressed without it, and because it serves to refute any view of our Lord’s life and suffering as only apparent and not real. The whole section is a witness to the historic reality of his words and actions. By the emphasis it lays on this section, the Church refutes the most pervasive of all heresies, Docetism. The term ‘Docetism’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘suppose’ or ‘seem’ and the heresy suggests that Christ only apparently possessed a human body or that only some of the events recorded in the Gospels are salvific. All Docetism pre supposes an idea of what salvation should be like, of what divine action cannot involve. From this ready-made standpoint it proceeds to select the elements in the Christian Gospel that it finds congenial and to reject the rest. The Christological section of the creed serves to remind Christians that it is the Gospel that judges the man and not man the Gospel. The article ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary’ is introductory to this Christological section.