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Vatican II on the Church and Ecumenism: An Anglican Comment
Authors: Mascall E. L.
Published: July 2007

The promulgation at the third session of the Second Vatican Council of the three Constitutions De Ecclesia, De Oecumenismo and De Ecclesiis Orientalibus Catholicis is clearly an event of outstanding ecumenical importance, though its full significance will clearly appear only in the light of future thought and acitivity. Anything like a detailed consideration of the contents of the Constitutions would be quite impossible in the space at my disposal, but I hope that the comments which I shall make from an Anglican standpoint on some of the more striking characteristics of the first two may be of some interest and even perhaps of some usefulness to the readers of New Blackfriars.

To begin with De Ecclesia. In spite of the vicissitudes through which the Constitution has passed since the introduction of the original schema on November 30th, 1962 (and for information about this I am indebted to the extremely illuminating article by Père G. Dejaifve, S.J., in the Nouve/le Revue Théologique of January 1965), the overall impression which one receives is that of a remarkably systematic, comprehensive and unified document; only one section, which I shall refer to in more detail later, bears some visible marks of a clash of views which reached something less than full reconciliation. Most impressive of all is the way in which the presentation of the doctrine of the Church in primarily juridical and governmental terms which has characterized most Roman Catholic documents and treatises in the past has been completely superseded by an approach which is in the fullest sense biblical and theological.
Heidegger among the Theologians
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Catholic theologian could still happily regard himself as the exponent of the most polished set of clear and distinct ideas on earth. This is no longer possible. Catholic theology seems at present in chaos: glorious chaos in the opinion of some, dire catastrophe in that of others. But, however it is to be evaluated, there is no disputing the fact of the present great upheaval in the practice of Catholic theology. Ideas that have been fixed for centuries are in process of revision, positions that have been taken for granted for as long are now under scrutiny for reconstruction. The purpose of this article is to indicate how the situation is shaping inside the German theological arena, and it should be stressed from the outset that this is simply a report, not a hallelujah or a jeremiad.

Perhaps the only surprising feature of the present situation is that it has been staved off for so long. Every form of research undergoes periods of growth-crisis. The very mass of his data forces the investigator to reconsider the presuppositions of his study and the adequacy of the interpretation of his results. There has to be periodical revision of the basic categories with which any science operates. This is how a science ‘advances', not so much by piling up more and more information (erudition) as by revaluing its fundamental interpretative concepts (genius). The maturity of a science is not measured by its immunity from such internal upheavals but by its capacity to produce them.
The Dialogue with Hinduism
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

The establishment of the new Secretariat for other religions in Rome is a sign of a new approach within the Catholic Church. For the first time in history the Church has begun to adopt a positive attitude towards other religions. In the past the belief has been that it is the mission of the Church to ‘teach all nations’ and to convert them from ‘error’ to the knowledge of the ‘truth'. It is true that there has always been a recognition of the fact that there is truth to be found in other religions and that men can be saved in them, and this goes back to the earliest tradition of the Bible, but never before has there been an open recognition of other religions as entities with which the Church can enter into a dialogue. Just as the Secretariat for Unity has taught us to recognize Christian values in the separated Christian Churches and to enter into ecumencial relations with them, so the new Secretariat for Religions is a recognition of the fact that there are religious values in other religions and opens the way to an ecumenical dialogue with them as corporate bodies or institutions.

This new attitude is due, no doubt, primarily to the changed condition of the world. For the first time in history the great religions of the world have come into global contact with one another and have begun to confront one another with mutual understanding.
The Quality of ‘Mercy’
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

This article is not about mercy, but about ‘mercy', the English word. This word is the stock translation in religious texts of the Latin word misericordia. My contention is going to be that the quality of ‘mercy’ is far too strained to stand for misericordia; that not only is it an inadequate word to translate the Latin word, it is – more seriously – an insufficient word to convey the full Christian, religious thing. And as this thing, as this value is practically at the heart of the Christian gospel, the good news of God to man, the use of an insufficient and hence misleading word to represent it can have very unfortunate consequences indeed. But with these I am not here concerned. My interest is in finding the best English word or words for translating misericordia in liturgical texts. And my way of doing this is going to be by putting ‘mercy’ on trial.

Misericordia, it scarcely needs saying, appears so often in liturgical texts because it appears so often in the Bible. Two other Latin words appear frequently in its company, the related noun miseratio, usually in the plural miserationes, and the related verb misereor. The first weakness of the English ‘mercy’ is shown by the fact that it does duty, either by itself or in a phrase like ‘have mercy', for all three of these Latin words.
Must one always Obey the Laws?
Authors: McDermott Timothy
Published: July 2007

The question I have been asked is: Must one always obey the laws? The first thing to say is that clearly this is not a legal question. By that I mean that you cannot answer the question by saying: but the law says you must. For then your questioner comes back with: and why must I obey that law ? The situation is rather like that of the pilot of a plane or the captain of a ship. The crew and passengers do not obey the pilot or the captain merely because he tells them to. Nor do they do it simply because he is a powerful man and would make them sorry if they didn't. Rather they obey him because they think he has a right to tell them what to do. He has the right because he holds a position of authority. Obeying a government is so like the situation of obeying a pilot, that in fact the word government derives from the Latin word for steering a ship. One obeys a government not simply because of its power, but because of its authority; and it does not get this authority simply by saying that it has it. You do not obey laws simply because the laws say that you must. Why then do you ?

We might ask what gives the captain of a ship his position of authority. There are two answers to this, because there are two questions hidden in it. If we mean, how did it come about that this particular man is filling this position of authority, then the answer would be that he was chosen by the legally approved methods.
Dante, Poet of the Intellect
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

The death of T. S. Eliot in the first month of the seventh centenary of Dante's birth could be an occasion for examining a particular poetic influence; or, more generally, for reflecting on Dante's contemporary ‘image'. The subject, however, of the present note is an aspect of Dante's poetry in itself-though considered, as befits the occasion, with an eye to its general relevance to us today. That it has some such relevance is no doubt already implied in allowing this of Eliot's work – in particular of the Four Quartets; for no one, I suppose, would deny that these poems have a contemporary importance, and certainly they, like AshWednesday and Animula and even The Waste Land, are inconceivable without the influence and example of Dante. Yet one may doubt whether Eliot's own example has been much followed, in this respect, by more recent poets. Eliot did his best, certainly, and to re-read now the famous essay of 1927 is to be struck once more by its admirable concentration on Dante as artist and a master in his art. The essay was not addressed to scholars, nor even primarily, I think, to the common reader, but to the writer's fellow-poets. The emphasis was all on Dante ‘the master', ‘the greatest master of the simple style', from whom ‘more can be learned about how to write poetry’ than from any English poet. How many of our contemporaries, I wonder, look to Dante in this way? For the modern educated public the Comedy- that epitome of Western pre-Renaissance thought and feeling – remains an important historical document; it is hardly felt as a stimulus to fresh creative writing.
Theology and History
Authors: Richards Michael
Published: July 2007

The interpretation of the historical process is now a major academic industry. Just as we have bibliographies of bibliographies, we have histories of historical writing. Indeed, the day is not far distant when, in history as in metaphysics, the third degree of abstraction will triumphantly be reached: a history of histories of history. The historians, those who of all men should be urging most strongly a return to the sources, are also those who lead us to the most rarefied heights of speculation about our nature and destiny. The field of history should be for ever unenclosed, and be a free breathing-space for a pallid population well nigh stifled with the fumes of philosophy.’ In the forty years since Augustine Birrell wrote The Muse of History, the Green Belt has become a built-up area; the pallid population now suffocates in libraries beneath the weight of reviews and journals whose learned footnotes tantalize with hints and glimpses of pastures long submerged.

When the theologian ventures on to this scene, the historian may well despair. Understandably, he hesitates before subscribing to Professor Toynbee's declaration that history passes over into theology. ‘It is a bad habit in historians to take at their face value the hysterical exaggerations of the pulpit'; it is also a bad habit to turn to first causes when secondary ones will do. That may be why ecclesiastical history is reckoned a soft option by those academics who rate hard-headedness as highly as any man of business.
Liberty of Speech in the Church
Authors: Smith Jerome
Published: July 2007

The Church has always demanded free speech for herself. Faith is obedience given to God through hearing and obeying the preached Word of God; and for that preaching no human authorization is necessary or even possible, but only a mission from God. ‘How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed ? Or how shall they believe him of whom they have not heard ? And how shall they hear without a preacher ? And how shall they preach unless they be sent?’ (Rom. 10.14). If freedom to preach is not granted by the secular authorities, then they are to be ignored, and the necessary freedom to speak is to be exercized, whatever the cost. Peter's defence still stands: ‘We ought to obey God rather than man’ (Acts 5.28).

From the times of the apostles onwards the Church has never hesitated over this basic freedom of speech which she must claim for herself. There has been greater unsureness over whether others should enjoy a like freedom. The weight of history has left the Church with an apparently negative approach to toleration in matters of religion or morals. But the publication of Pacem in Terris brought a new note, with the customary openness and optimism of ail Pope John's utterances. ‘By the natural law every human being has the right... to freedom in searching for truth and in expressing and communicating his opinions . . . within the limits laid down by the moral order and the common good; and he has the right to be informed truthfully about public events. . . Every human being has the right to honour God according to the dictates of an upright conscience, and therefore to worship God both in private and in public’.
Maritain Through the Years
Authors: Speaight Robert
Published: July 2007

The other day, as I was signing the register in a West Country hotel, the proprietress observed to me: ‘Didn't there use to be an actor called Robert Speaight?’ The remark had no importance except to flavour an autobiography or enliven a dinner table; but it had, I think, a certain significance. It signified that a day comes when we must all brace ourselves to realize that other people regard us as fuddyduddies. Jacques Maritain is the antonym of a fuddyduddy, but he is 82 years old. Since the death of his wife, Raissa, he has lived with the Petits Frères de Charles de Foucauld at their headquarters just outside Toulouse. The fine new Dominican church and scholasticate are close at hand, and here the Petits Frères follow certain courses and receive a solid theological formation before dispersing, in their groups of two or three, to the uttermost ends of the earth. They live in huts – purposely provisional, one supposes – and take their meals in ‘messes’ of six or eight. Maritain has his own little hut, partitioned to form a bedroom and a tiny study. Fie is not a canonical member of the community, but he shares its life in so far as he is able to; gives an occasional conference or seminar; and is at hand for advice. Twice a year he leaves Toulouse to visit the house which still belongs to him at Princeton – at present occupied by Arthur Lourié and his wife – or to stay with friends at Kolbsheim in Alsace.
How Corrupt is the Church?
Authors: Dummett Michael
Published: July 2007

Nothing is more important than that Catholics should continually ask themselves: how bad a state is the Church in? We are all aware of the possibility that the Church may appear to be corrupt, and of the actualization of this possibility at various times in the past. But we tend, I think, to assume that such corruption will always be glaringly obvious, a matter of simony at the papal court, or pluralist bishops, or priests with concubines and children : we therefore conclude that, to the extent that things seem all right, so they must be all right. Whereas in fact, I suspect, corruption is seldom easily recognized at the time. Perhaps even the examples I have just mentioned, which seem to us so scandalous, were not felt at the time as symptoms of deep-seated disease: after all, we know that the Church is composed, not of angels, but of men, and that we have no right to expect perfection from Christians, bishops included; so probably these things were usually put down as instances of the kind of human weakness that we know that we have to reckon with. Thus we must be prepared, at any time, to find that the Church can be deeply corrupted, a corruption for which we shall be sternly judged but to which we have long been blind.

When we have recognized that the Church can be corrupt, we have to enquire what could make it possible for this corruption to take place: and this is the most serious theological enquiry that can be made, for it concerns our understanding of the nature of the Church.
Education and the Growth of Conscience
Authors: Tidmarsh Mannes
Published: July 2007

Consciences are neither born nor made, they develop. Development in living beings is the outcome of interaction between the individual and the environment; specifically, in the case of moral development, between the individual person and the culture. The child is born with the potential ability to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in terms other than those of immediate personal satisfaction to which the infant is limited, but the growing child can make assessments only in terms of the values which he is taught. He has. as part of his human make-up, the tendency to pursue the perceived good and to shun the perceived bad. What he actually perceives as good and bad depends largely on what the society into which he is born teaches him so to perceive. This is not to say that the individual's capacity for moral judgment is wholly dependent on the influence of external agents; the ultimate structure of conscience is unique because no two environments are entirely alike and no two individuals are entirely alike.

Though it has been said that moral development is the result of interaction between the individual and the culture one must be yet more precise. The child receives his values not from ‘the culture’ or from ‘ ‘society’ in a large and undefined sense but from a fairly circumscribed group of persons: parents and siblings, other adults in the family circle, school teachers and companions. This means that values are never transmitted to the child in a ‘pure’ state, they are always, in some way. modified by the person who mediates them.
A Theology of Death
Authors: Barrett Paul
Published: July 2007

All theology springs from the fact that man, faced with a revelation that makes certain demands upon him, finds that at the same time he must accept the demands of his own humanity and of his life in the world. The reason is that man cannot accept revealed truth without submitting it to interpretation by his reason, in terms of truths he knows as a rational thinker. A man finds that he cannot be true to revelation unless he is true to himself as a man in the world.

And revelation is a very wide concept. Some revealed truths are not immediately concerned with matters of ordinary human experience. Of such a kind is the revelation of the Trinity. There is no particular rational factor that would automatically make us tend to interpret this truth in one way rather than in another. Other revealed truths however are concerned with matters of ordinary experience, and so experience itself provides a framework for a rational interpretation of the revealed truth, enabling us to accept the revealed truth as running parallel, so to speak, with the truth we have learned for ourselves. Where revelation concerns death, for instance, we have an example of this kind of ‘ready-made’ interpretation being used. Because death in our human experience means that particular event which is the termination of life in the world, we are inclined to think of death, where the word occurs in statements of revealed truth, as that event.
Language Structure and Moral Education
Authors: Nichols K. F.
Published: July 2007

My theme is really the Socratic proposition that knowledge is virtue. This is an idea which is never far from the minds of those concerned either with literature or with education. Yet when we look into our own lives, the proposition seems obviously false. We know from our own experience the truth of video meliora proboque. deteriora sequor. Most Catholics moreover, have been brought up to venerate (rightly but perhaps for the wrong reasons), sancta simp/icitas. the faith of a Breton peasant; to feel that a lot of learning is a dangerous thing, and that nothing good ever came out of Cambridge – at least not since the time of St John Fisher.

Nevertheless we can see that there is something in the proposition, at any rate negatively. If it is not true that virtue necessarily accompanies knowledge, it is commonly true that crime accompanies ignorance. Robert Raikes, the founder of the Sunday School movement, wrote of the prisoners in Gloucester gaol for whom he was working in the 1770's; ‘extreme ignorance was the principal cause of those enormities which brought them into this deplorable situation, precluding all hope of any lasting or real amendment from their punishment'. The uneducated classes a hundred years ago were still referred to as the ‘criminal classes', and it remains true today that those social areas where education is least successful are also those where delinquency is most common. Ignorance is, in modern Western society anyway, at least a contributory cause of crime, and education, if not a cure for crime, would at any rate create, as Jeanne Hirsch said of politics, a vacuum within which something is possible.
American Jews and Vatican II
Authors: McCabe Bernard
Published: July 2007

When Pope Paul came to New York last October and said Mass in Yankee Stadium, before a congregation of 40,000 and a hidden audience of untold million television-viewers, he made a special point, no doubt because he was in the world’s most Jewish city, of extending his blessing to ‘the sons of Abraham’. The Mass he said was the Votive Mass for Peace, which has a Gospel beginning: ‘Late in the evening that same day, the first day of the week, although the doors of the place where the disciples had gathered were bolted for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood before them and said: “Peace be to you!” (John 20.19-20). For days afterwards one could meet Jews saying: ‘So that’s what we mean, that’s exactly what we mean’. Quite a few Catholics were bothered about it too (e.g. an angry Jesuit letter to The National Catholic Reporter: ‘unthinking acceptance of scriptural readings chosen long ago by unskilled hands’). The incident with all its sensitiveness and misunderstandings on both sides, was typical enough of the atmosphere in which the ‘Schema on the Jews’ was received in the U.S.A.

Ever since the close of the second session the American Jewish press had given prominent space to articles and news reports echoing widely current rumours about the strength of the forces in or near the Vatican opposing a definitive statement on anti-Semitism.
Conscience Emergent
Authors: Drinkwater F. H.
Published: July 2007

It is not often in this country that the official or semi-official Catholic line on controversial questions receives the close attention devoted to it in Mr Walter Stein’s formidable article in the November Blackfriars. Its subject (the reader will recall) was nuclear weapons and the morality of their possession and use. There-may-well-exist-possible-lawful-targets; We-should-leave-it-to-our-governments-and-experts: H-bombs-are-just-the-counters-of-diplomacy; Possessing-them – is – only – an – occasion – of – sin – which – a – good – intention – could – render-remote; Do-not-we-need-an-up-to-date-ethics-of-bluffing ?

Any-how-was-Hiroshima-so-very-different-from-Dresden ? All these recent instances of casuistry (when the need was for witness) inside and outside of the Council, on the part of prelates, theologians and editors, were patiently examined by Mr Stein; and he had no difficulty in showing their ‘appalling irrelevance’ in face of the ‘massively murderous commitments here and now’, the existence of which all the Catholic nuclear apologists admit though boggling at the idea that Christians should do anything practical about the situation beyond favouring disarmament by general consent. It is all very criminal and crazy (say our official Catholic representatives in effect) but there is nothing that a Christian can do about it beyond what any atheist or communist can do and is indeed doing already.

If that is the situation at least for us in Britain and U.S.A., the question arises urgently: why the boggling? Why have Catholics become so helplessly habituated to what our critic calls a falsely-prudent ‘legalist lifemanship’, a ‘diet of casuistic pusillanimities’ ? One tempting explanation might be a kind of irresponsibility; a serious layman might imagine he saw in the clergy (high or low) an inability to face realities, an almost charming immaturity as of schoolboys who do not grow up, for whom loyalties mean more than truth or justice.
Fear in South Africa
Authors: Hindmarsh Roland
Published: July 2007

It is disturbing to realize how little the educated reading public knows about Africa, in spite of the fact that this continent has rarely been out of the news for the past decade. Reporters in the daily press, as well as columnists in the weeklies, may perhaps be excused for paying attention principally to rapid change or abnormality, since they take this to be their function. Perhaps too the reading public, however educated it may be, has been conditioned to expect the spectacular and the violent; the main features of living, largely constant, shifting only gradually in character and emphasis, do not make news.

There was something very distasteful about the way Ghana’s preparations for independence were watched by the daily press; it was clear that reporters expected a disaster when Africans took over the government of a state after so much shorter a period of tutelage than had been given to India and Pakistan. ‘Barely a lifetime of British rule.’ people found themselves thinking, ‘it’s bound to lead to civil strife, and the collapse of order. Then I suppose we’ll have to go in again to clear up the mess’. But the Ashanti people didn’t revolt; Ghana has remained internally at peace, though the methods she has used have caused dismay in Britain. This dismay need in many cases not have arisen. If some newspapers had tried more conscientiously to give an account of the social and cultural forces that made two-party democracy an unsuitable, in fact an unstable, form of government in Africa at the present time, readers would have been less alarmed or less despondent about the collapse of parliamentary opposition in one country after another.
What is Politics About?
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: July 2007

This note is provoked by some recent discussions in New Blackfriars and elsewhere, which have been about making the presence of Christ effective in the world in terms of social justice. It is not enough, we are rightly told, to preach in a vacuum; a pointless activity if no-one is listening. Social action means, if it is to go beyond isolated individual benevolence, political action: the point is made both in the Editorial and in Mr Eagleton’s article in the December 1965 number. In a general way, I agree with this position, but there seem to me several implications in it that need to be examined.

In the first place, should we not be careful to avoid the kind of implicitly totalitarian attitude that gives supreme importance to the political order at the expense of every other kind of human activity? One recalls Nkrumah’s amiable motto: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom . . .’ On the whole, one would have thought Christians would avoid this particular trap, but I can imagine some eager Christian radicals, so intoxicated with the discovery that in battling in the political arena they are doing Christ’s work, that they exaggerate the importance of that particular way of doing it. On a basis of respect for persons, one needs to recognise that there are many admirable people in this world, who contribute a great deal to society, but to whom politics means nothing at all: many, but by no means all, of them are women.
No Fear, But Some Reproach
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

‘The king kisses the hands of my lady Abbess’, rang the cry across the convent walls. The year, 1602, and the occasion, a hunting trip made by Henri IV in the neighbourhood of the Cistercian foundation of Port-Royal. The abbess in question was just eleven years old, and pattens had to be found for her to stand on to receive the king properly. It was not the abbess he came to see, though, but her father, Antoine Amauld, who to all intents and purposes controlled the abbey of Port Royal. His daughter, Jacqueline, was only nine when she took her vows in October, 1600, though the request addressed to Rome for her to be made at once coadjutrix of the abbess described her as seventeen. Under these inauspicious circumstances of flagrant royal patronage and deception of the papal authority began the startling career of Angélique Arnauld and the two institutions of Port-Royal which were the most significant phenomena in the religious history of the ‘great century’ in France.

It is useful to be reminded how this purest of all the religious movements of the seventeenth century began in an atmosphere of simony and corruption, because it goes some way to explain the lazy monastic ideal against which Mère Angélique, a very vigorous, shrewd and forthright French version of St Teresa of Avila, later rebelled, and it also gives us some inkling of the family strength of the Arnaulds and their connections, which enabled Port-Royal to stand up to the Archbishop of Paris and the royal incursions under Louis XIV as long as it did.
Liturgy and Politics
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

The problem of politics is essentially the problem of reconciling personal relationships to public or impersonal human relationships. For we all feel a tension between the two. We begin life almost wholly within a context of personal relationships – with parents or parental substitutes who present themselves to us as individuals. It is only gradually that we discover a wider world or relationships with people who are not members of the family – that is to say, people not familiar to us. Slowly, as childhood proceeds our original personal relationships are surrounded by a rarefied and less know-able but ever-expanding ‘atmosphere’ of unfamiliar humanity. This ‘atmosphere’ of impersonal humanity can only be partially explored, and has for the most part to be taken for granted. Of course, no sharp dividing line can be drawn between those whom we know in a real, personal way and the surrounding mass of humanity which we can know only in a notional, impersonal way, but just as the familiar air of Birmingham or Bermuda gradually thins out as we go upwards, until we come to a point where we quite obviously need some artificial means for continuing to breathe there at all, so we gradually come to a point, in the exploration of our human surroundings, where we need to set up some artificial, institutional framework if we are to carry on living in that rarefied atmosphere. That is to say we need to set up a political order and to develop a political consciousness.
Abortion and the Psychiatrist
Authors: Spencer Seymour
Published: July 2007

The Catholic psychiatrist can justly feel that the Ramsey Committee’s findings are likely to make harder rather than easier his present work in the moral setting in which he conceives it: because mainly of the indeterminate, even muddled, attitude taken up by the Committee towards the status of the foetus and the psychiatric possibilities in the mother; because secondarily no understanding is shown of the present difficulties of the Catholic psychiatrist confronted with the demand for termination.

In speaking thus frankly, there is no intention to impugn the Committee’s breadth of vision, constructive desire or sincerity. The writer has the Committee’s chairman, Professor Ramsey, as a personal friend and wise and far-seeing administrative colleague. Acquainted also with the other two Oxford dons on the Committee, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, and with the Committee’s psychiatrist, Portia Holman, he knows all three of them for their humane concern. These characteristics pervade the Report. The first two chapters sum up admirably the reasons for the present importance of abortion; the history of British legislative concern for the question abutting in the two currently relevant statutes and their successful assailment by Alec Bourne, the gynaecologist; and that of Christian canonical concern from Tertullian onwards, including the period of distinction (never, it seems, one of essential nature but only of ground for varying the penalty for infanticide), between foetus animatus and foetus inanimatus. The Committee concludes Chapter II with the affirmation that the subject is a proper concern for the law on the primary ground, which any Catholic will endorse, that every human being has the right to life unless his unlawful act forfeits it.
On Misleading the Clergy in Matters of Marriage
Authors: Hoskin Michael
Published: July 2007

So much has been written in recent months on the problem of family limitation that one must hesitate before adding to the mountain of literature. Yet the situation is desperate: as Catholics try to observe the recent teaching, marriages are wrecked and the toll steadily mounts of those who formally leave the Church, or lapse, or give up the sacraments, or live with a constant sense of bad conscience. Meanwhile we find ourselves isolated on this issue not only from the rest of the secular world – this in itself would not disturb us – but from other Christian bodies; and on a matter on which the New Testament has little to say.

The anguish of individual souls is matched by the physical suffering of whole nations that live in continual hunger. The problem is recognised at last but its vast scale is not always appreciated: on February 6 the Population Reference Bureau in Washington reported that if present trends continue the world population will more than double – that is, there will be over 3,500,000,000 extra mouths to feed – by the end of the century. None of us can grasp a number of such magnitude, so let us put the issue another way. In more and more countries the infant who survives his first few weeks is nearly certain to reach maturity; since the great majority of mankind marry and have children, it follows that if the average family contains only four children the population will almost double with each generation; and it is then only a matter of simple arithmetic to work out how long it will be before there is insufficient standing room on our planet and we shall literally have filled the earth.
Love and Heresy
Authors: Webb Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

‘Time was’, wrote William, ‘when the corrupt love of the flesh had its masters, who were so skilled in their subject that the most famous of them was constrained, even by the lovers and companions of his depravity, to recant by praising the opposite of what he had originally taught’. The reference to Ovid is clear enough. The Ars Amatoria, to a monastic mind of the twelfth century, is the testament of a pastmaster in corruption and perversity, of a persistent follower of the bent of fallen nature, which is away from God, back to the flesh, and downward to the earth.

The due order of nature, for William, is the upward direction that fire takes, for the soul is created to look heavenward, to rise in pure spirituality and be identified with God whose image it is. And it is meant to spiritualise the body, and carry it in that same upward direction – as far as that is possible on earth – aiming at least toward some position between earth and heaven. If heaven is unattainable before death, at least one can strive to be lifted up from the earth. But fallen man, with such as Ovid for his guide, is only too prone to cleave downward, to the flesh, to the earth, and to corruption. And this is the opposition that William traces in the first chapter of his Nature and Dignity of Love, the work which was called Anti-Masonem in the middle ages, on account of its avowed attack on the Ars Amatoria.
Mother Mary of the Cross: O.D.C.
Authors: Speaight Robert
Published: July 2007

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Third Marquis of Salisbury and three times Prime Minister of Great Britain, was a man of many principles. One of these was that the more public houses you had in a place the fewer people were likely to get drunk; another was that in the town of Bishops Hatfield, over which he ruled with a benevolent and unquestioned authority, the Roman Catholics must be kept on the other side of the railway. The ‘other side’ is all that most people now see of Hatfield, as they rush northwards along the double lanes of the A. i; but in the days when I lived there the Great North Road passed through the middle of the town, and I can remember at least three public houses – one of them the Eight Bells where Bill Sykes ordered his pint after the murder of Nancy – which the eye of an alert traveller might have caught within the space of sixty seconds. To catch sight of the Roman Catholics you would have had to go a mile or two up the St Albans Road where the Oblates of St Charles maintained their unobtrusive Oratory. The old part of the town was dominated by the spire of St Ethelreda’s church, with the Old Palace of the Bishops of Ely, and the great house and park beyond, and the statue of the third Marquis meeting you as you came out of the station. If ‘Establishment’ means anything, it meant everything at Bishops Hatfield.
Are We Reforming the Liturgy?
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

The period since the promulgation of the Constitution on the Liturgy has seen, in this country as in every other, a considerable number of alterations in the ceremonies of the mass, the most obvious of which has been the introduction of English. These changes have been received with a mixture of enthusiastic approval, quiet acceptance and strongly expressed antipathy. But the time is overdue when we should have stopped asking: ‘Are the changes going well?’ and should have begun to ask: ‘Are we reforming the liturgy?’.

It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that, whereas the nature of liturgical reform and the radical principles that must be kept in mind in working towards the goal have been clearly stated in various documents promulgated by the Vatican Council, they have not yet been sufficiently received into the general consciousness, with the result that there is still a danger that we shall fail to achieve the task set us by the Council. This failure would not consist simply in nonachievement. Now that the whole question of reforming the liturgy has been explicitly raised in the minds of all church-going catholics, misconceptions concerning the goal and the radical principles of reform will, in turn, give rise to false ideas about the nature of the liturgy and, indeed, of the church herself. Once fundamental mistakes are made, it is too late to say: ‘Let’s start again; we will forget the past two years’. History moves one way, and takes an inexorable toll of wrong decisions.
The Place of the Priesthood
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

In a paper published in New Blackfriars a few months ago, Mr Eagleton applied a number of political insights to our understanding of relationships within the Church, in an attempt to prevent the formulation and implementation of theological ideas that would be at variance with a correct understanding of our society. He is convinced that ‘our changing ideas about the priesthood aren’t only theological but are part of a general pattern of change in our whole society which for over a century has been redefining relationships, values, functions, attitudes’. He is concerned lest we block this process of development by merely changing our tone of voice, or our terminology, leaving intact and unquestioned a pattern of ecclesial relationships that is inappropriate to our contemporary understanding of political reality. Much that he says in criticism of what he describes as the ‘liberal paternalism’ of English Catholicism is both penetrating and important. But it seems to me that his analysis is defective because he has failed adequately to ask the question: what is a priest? It is certainly true to say that ‘we have in fact to make a clear division between what theology tells us about the priesthood, and the whole historical accretion which this has gathered in society’, but, if insufficient attention is paid to the data of revelation, we shall extricate the idea of the priesthood from one particular historical entanglement only to drown it in another: that of the dominant perspectives of contemporary politics.
The Post‐conciliar Papacy
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

My prevision of the papacy’s more or less immediate future differs from that of R. H. Benson, the Roman Catholic H. G. Wells, in his two novels Lord of the World and Dawn of All, by being neither eschatological nor ultramontane. To save prognostications about an institution’s future from being mere fiction one should try to control them by some consideration of its past. So I will begin my essay in fortunetelling by a glance at an earlier post-conciliar papacy, and thus try to set up a contrast between the papacy after the two councils of the Vatican and the papacy after the two councils of Constance and Bâsle/Florence in the fifteenth century. It is generally recognised that this episode of Church history is of special relevance to us today. It is discussed by Hans Kung in Structures of the Church), by Paul de Vooght in Les Pouvoirs du Concile et L’Autorité du Pape au Concile de Constance), and by Olivier de la Brosse in Le Pape et le Concile ... àla Veille de la Reforme). Without of course wasting our time by reviving the old papalist-conciliarist controversies of that epoch, we can profitably enquire why in the event they were so sterile, and whether in fact they have ever been satisfactorily resolved, and if not, whether we are today on the threshold of such a resolution.
The Flight to Woman
Authors: Stewart J. E.
Published: July 2007

Karl Stern writes in The Flight from Woman of a male-female polarity which runs through life, and suggests that it is a kind of ultimate, ‘anchored in the absolute’. One is reminded of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘two principles’, a male and female polarity at the heart of things. To Lawrence the work of the male is to actualise, to bring into being, the turbulent potentiality of the Flesh, a disturbing darkness which is prior to rationality, morality and value, and which is ambivalently savage and tender.

This conviction that there is an area of dionysiac darkness and force within men, to be tapped, to be entered, a further resource of power beyond the polite liberal enclosures of conscious awareness, may go back to the nineteenth century to Schopenhauer (who believed in and feared it) and Nietzsche (who affirmed it) but it is a twentieth-century creed, confirmed by Freud and by the shock with which men have recognised their own violent depths. What are we to do? The familiar answer is that we are to accept the dark, this female pre-rational source, as the really ultimate thing which defines us as what we really or intrinsically are. So – obviously – this is what we ought to be. The hunger for extreme situations, for shock, for the perverse, which one meets for example in Antonin Artaud or in Genet, is a sign of this almost metaphysical belief in a deeper passional ground to which we must break through by violence, abandoning the tight restrictive world of morality and conduct.
The Renovation of the Old Jerusalem
Authors: Haughton Rosemary
Published: July 2007

It was time, evidently, that someone should make a thorough study of marriage as an institution in the twentieth century, and do so from a Christian point of view. It was time to look at the way people actually think and live their marriages and consider those of others. It was time to be unsatisfied with the Christian or Catholic label as sufficient indication of what the labelled ones think and feel. It was time to do all this in a way that would make clear to priests (priests both at work and in the process of education) the real nature of the problems they have to cope with in their parishes, and help them to do so with compassion but also with understanding. It is important that this should be done because the state of the institution of marriage in a particular community, and the attitudes and situations that attend it, dictate the structure and growth of that society, form its behaviour in other departments of life, and decide its future for good or ill.

Father Haring is nothing if not thorough. His 488 pages examine every conceivable aspect of marriage and family life from the sociological, theological and practical points of view, and every point he makes is supported by statistics of public-opinion polls (mostly from Germany, Holland and Belgium). And since my final, depressing conclusion at the end of all this hard work is that the book is a monumental disaster I had better begin by saying all the nice things I can find to say, and there are plenty.
Two Meanings of Violence
Authors: Windass Stanley
Published: July 2007

It has been generally accepted in recent years by strategists that the possession by each of the two Great Powers of nuclear weapons, of sufficient destructive power to cause unacceptable destruction to the opposing side, has constituted a deterrent to either side against the use of these weapons – and a deterrent also against aggression generally, whenever there was a fear that this might lead to the use of nuclear weapons. As long as the cold war seemed to be forming the world into two blocs of opposing nations grouped round the major nuclear powers, some calculation of the risk of nuclear war entered into the strategic calculations in most areas of conflict, thus restraining the use of violence and the spread of war.
For a time, there seemed to be some hope of stability in this situation. Of course there was always the risk of war by accident, and the danger of a technical breakthrough in the arms race which would destroy the symmetry of the balance; but if only these dangers could be overcome, there seemed to be some prospect of a stable bi-polar world. Consequently, all the attention of the politically involved peacemakers focussed on means of slowing down or stabilising the arms race between the major powers, and of improving safeguards against the risk of war by accident.
The Devil and his Angels
Authors: McDermott Timothy
Published: July 2007

There is a parlour-game in which a whispered message is passed down a line from player to player and comes out unrecognisably distorted at the end. Sometimes the result is whimsical, sometimes hilarious, sometimes it is merely flat. Invariably it is ridiculous. Now this is not merely a game for parlours. It is a game which the succeeding generations of mankind have been playing with one another throughout history; and there we call it tradition (which is after all only a Latin word for handing on). Men of one generation after another have handed on their thoughts, their customs, their institutions to succeeding generations who have often made extraordinary and unrecognisable use of them. Sometimes the results are whimsical, more often they are tiresomely childish.

We in the Christian church have on our hands a great number of conceptions that started their life as adult, but, because they have been let slip from generation to generation by mere tradition without understanding, are now thoroughly and tiresomely childish. This article is an attempt to rescue one such conception from the childishness in which it is wrapped: namely, our conception of the Devil and his angels. It is an attempt to unroll tradition, so to speak, and catch our present conception in the making; to watch generation pass on its message to generation, and ask what message we would have received if each generation had made sure it understood what the previous generation was saying. Perhaps such an article can serve to start the original message on its way again.