At the same time, left-wing radicals were active in disseminating their ideas and recruiting members to their cause. Indeed, James Puthucheary, who became an important figure in Malayan left-wing politics boasted, with perhaps some amount of exaggeration: “we took over almost all the societies except the Christian Students Movement – Raffles College was run by my friends.”⁶

Puthucheary’s admission was revealing. Like their co-religionists in the United States, many Catholic university students in Singapore, though a minority on campus, believed they had something very important to contribute to Malaya and the university milieu. They were deeply influenced by what Dulles termed the “apologetics of restoration”⁷, which maintained that the modern West “in rejecting the divine authority of the Church was ineluctably plunging toward the abyss of nihilism and despair”⁸ and proposed instead “a theocentric humanism that acknowledged both man's dignity in relation to God and man’s sinfulness in relation to the Fall and the Crucifixion.” The only way of regeneration for the human community was “a rediscovery of the true image of man”⁹ and a definite attempt towards building a civilisation where “there is [not] too much love of science, and too little science of love”¹⁰.

Concern for society

The support of particular political parties was neither the main concern of the Aquinas nor of Catholic university students. They were interested, rather, in enunciating basic principles of thinking about the human person and to draw out their implications for wider social questions.

Yet it would seem that at least in the initial years, the society seemed particularly favoured by the British administration and conservative elements in Malayan politics who had agreed with the British timetable for Malayan independence. At their first annual dinner, its guest list included C.C. Tan of the Singapore Progressive Party¹¹.

During 1951-1957, endorsement and praise for the Aquinas was given by no less than the university Vice-Chancellors, Sydney Caine and A. Oppenheim, who considered the Aquinas “an outlet for serious writing, which guides thought and writing on the ultimate values which inspire human life”¹² and that readers would also “gain much from the sincerity, intensity of feeling and depth of thought which its contributors both past and present illuminate in its pages”¹³.