Holy Year Reflections
The article on another page on the Holy Year and what it means to Roman Catholics will be read with keen interest, and possibly, in parts, with some concern. The Holy Year itself is a great con- ception, and Protestants may fitly not only wish it well, but learn something from it. Emphasis on times and seasons can easily be overdone, but periods of special concentration on the spiritual rather than the material are always wholly good. But the insistence with which many Roman Catholics—notably several of the con- tributors to the recent correspondence in The Times—dwell on the gulf which separates them from other Christians is the more to be regretted in that it is possible to detect in it a claim that they are not only different from, but.better than, other Christians. That claim, if it is made, can be noted with composure, but the declara- tion of inability to join with other Christians in the simplest act of worship is on many grounds depressing. There, however, that must be left. But the tendency of Catholics to take political action specifically as Catholics—as, for example, in the declared intention to make the inadmissible claim of full public financial support for Catholic schools an election issue—will be viewed with some anxiety. Mr. Christopher Hollis refers a little cryptically to the demand of the Catholic to play his full part in the developments of the next fifty years. But is anyone denying him that now ? What does the Catholic ask for that he has not already got ?
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