THE TA BLET, May 30th, 1953

THE TABLET I

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

VOL. 201, No. 5897

LONDON, MAY 30th, 1953

NINEPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1840

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

ENGLISH CATHOLICS IN THE NATIONAL TRADITION

Their Unique Character Among Minority Groups “ THE DEPUTY ANOINTED BY THE LORD ”

The Royal Anointing and Coronation REGALIA OF TWO KINGDOMS England and Scotland. By Alastair Guinan SAINT BERNARD : MONK AND APOSTLE Reflections in his Eighth Centenary Year. By Thomas Merton

ELECTION FERMENT IN ITALY Some Issues in the Closing Stages of the Campaign

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

T HE ceremony o f Coronation is a ceremony o f dedication, profoundly Christian in every detail, expressing a view o f human duty and destiny which those Bishops who drew it up for this country almost a thousand years ago knew as the air they breathed.

cannot help, especially when it is the Crown in the person o f a young Queen, the new generation o f a family which has, for a long time now, symbolized so much in private life to which the nation is profoundly attached.

Gone are the days when vast issues depended on the character o f the sovereign thus formally and publicly consecrated to his high duties. But the office remains a great one, an exacting one, and one whose importance gathers weight with time. The wearer o f the multiple crowns o f the British Commonwealth can never begin to measure where her influence will spread and permeate ; but she will have the constant knowledge that, whenever she speaks to those she meets, they will go away treasuring and remembering what the Queen has said to them.

Here she inherits a great tradition o f royal encouragement for all good works, especially for those good works which depend upon voluntary and self-sacrificing individuals who, under today’s conditions, may easily be tempted to think they can leave what they are doing to be done by some public authority.

The Crown, which is specially charged to keep in mind, as statesmen cannot always do, the long-term interests o f the community, can do a particularly im portant thing in showing how impoverished we should be as a nation if the magnificent voluntary tradition was allowed to dwindle and decline. The Crown is the apex o f the Constitution, but it is symbolic, as the other parts o f the Constitution cannot be, o f something more, it is at the head o f the State, but it represents the nation, and the nation is a wider reality.

The State is the nation organized for special high purposes, with great duties and great rights. But it does not cover the whole field o f national life, whereas there is nothing good o f any kind in which Ihe Crown

No act or ceremony, no symbolic object, no prayer in the ceremony, but points in the same direction to the dedicated life as the Christian religion holds it up before all men, whatever the state o f life to which they find themselves called.

At a time when it is so easy for the human imagination to be overwhelmed by the magnitude in which modern thinking has to be done, by the range o f science in all its applied functions, it is not surprising that there have been a crop o f philosophies, all tending to the same conclusion, seeking to minimize the role o f human personality and the human will. Interpretations are popularized in terms o f economics and productive relations, in terms o f psychology and the unconscious, in terms o f mass movements and collective emotions, and memories. They all make it particularly necessary that the world should see reaffirmed, in the most solemn fashion possible, the great opposite affirmation, on which the Christian religion rests, o f the power o f human volition and human minds and hearts to determine the nature o f human existence.

That this cannot be well done w ithout prayer and the constant invocation o f help from outside the human race, that the grace which men need comes to them all the time through the Incarnation ; all this, which it is as necessary to affirm as it is to affirm human responsibility and the freedom o f the will, is present in Tuesday’s ceremonial, the great heritage which our Christian ancestors have handed down, something that is present in the idea behind the great evocation, and prayer, “ God Save the Queen.”