bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On What Ideology Is
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

We cannot believe just what we please just when we please; however, there is no doubt that it is sometimes the desires, fears and convenience of persons and groups, rather than the relevant evidence, which determines what they believe about things. I want to say something on this topic, before directly discussing ideology.

Anthony Trollope’ novel The Warden is a story about an elderly and inconspicuous Anglican clergyman named Harding, who has for many years enjoyed a comfortable stipend as warden of a hospice for paupers. During the time when the hospice and the wardenship have existed, the sum allotted to the paupers has remained the same; but the overall income has considerably increased, and this has been entirely for the benefit of the warden. A young reformer named Bold has drawn attention to the anomaly, and intends to go to law about the matter. The archdeacon of the diocese, a domineering and self-opinionated man who is the very antithesis of the warden in character, regards Bold’s interference as an affront to the Church, and an attack on the very fabric of society. In fact legal advice is taken, and a skilful lawyer is hired by the ecclesiastical establishment, who makes it clear that Bold cannot win his case. But Mr. Harding is unable, now the injustice of his position has been pointed out, to retain the wardenship; there now seems to him to be a kind of intrinsic inequity about his station in life, which no assurances about his legal position can allay.
A Philosopher for Today?: Max Stirner's Egoistical Nihilism
Authors: Holbrook David
Published: July 2007

I believe that the underlying philosophy of our culture has become nihilistic. If we pursue the implications of nihilism to their ultimate conclusions, where do we arrive? Very few have dared to do this: Max Stirner, who published a book on this theme in 1845, was one who dared. If we turn back to him we can see that he is the unacknowledged prophet of today’s fashionable culture.

The ultimate problems posed by nihilism are examined in a book on this German philosopher, by Dr. R. K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner, (Hull University Press, 1971). Stirner grew out of the neo-Hegelian movement, and published his one important work in 1945: Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum— ‘The Unique One and His Property’.

Stirner belonged to movements which Marx rejected as ‘intellectual nihilists’. Following the nihilist logic to its ultimate implications, he denied God and Christian values, the State’s authority, and all traditional morality.

But he went still further, and denied all ethical obligations. In the face of nothingness he embraced nothingness, and he sought no commitment or ultimate responsibility, to man or the universe. ‘What is the commonweal to me?’ All that he was left with was— self. The self and the world were ultimately Nothing—but the Unique One ‘makes Nothing his cause’.
Schooling or Education?: The Inner City
Authors: McAleese Mary
Published: July 2007

I come here then, simply as a Parish Sister; yes, I have had a background of teaching. I still consider my basic missionary thrust educational but I can only speak as a Sister in Pastoral work. I will speak from nine years experience in a dockland area of Liverpool, of living and working with people there, of being there from nine in the morning till eleven at night—sometimes till one or two the next morning—for seven days a week, forty-eight weeks of the year. Just being there, living there, working there, trying to be a neighbour, a friend—in the name of Jesus. From that experience I may say things that may not make sense to you—that you may not agree with—that you may not find helpful—but just now at the beginning I want to say that I am trying to explain, as honestly and forthrightly as can, what the phrase The Sister and Education means to me in Inner City Liverpool—what my new ministry there has shown me.

Up there in Liverpool, if you are going north from the Pierhead, along the Dock Road and if about three-quarters of a mile along the docks you turn left and come “up the brew” through three sets of traffic lights, you will find a solid Victorian building-ancient but freshly painted—on the edge of Smith Estate with the name ‘The People’s Centre” in strong white lettering on the black door.
Tillich and Bonhoeffer Exile and Death
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

On 1st February 1933, two days after his election as Reichskanzler, Hitler published a proclamation in the Völkischer Beobachter in which he promised to take Christianity, ‘the basis of our whole morality’, under his ‘Firm protection’. This meant that the state religion would have to conform with and support National Socialist ideology. For some who rebelled against this it meant exile and for others death.

The universities were among the earliest of state institutions to be purged after the confirmation of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany and as early as April 1933 Bernhard Rust, the Prussian Minister for Cultural Affairs, had suspended the theologians Emil Fuchs, Professor at Kiel, Karl Ludwig Schmidt at Bonn and Paul Tillich at Frankfurt where he was Professor of Philosophy and Sociology, together with teachers of other subjects in other universities.

Tillich had lived a curious life in Germany up to that time. Having been an Army Chaplain in the 1914-18 war and having endured the battle at Verdun, he became firmly identified with the political fate of Germany after the war. He became a Religious Socialist and had a very reserved and equivocal association with the institutional church. Yet he managed to combine his socialism with an enthusiastic participation in the parties of upper class society, and he combined his Lutheran Christianity with a still more enthusiastic participation in a wide variety of sexual adventures. Despite his detestation of the thuggery of Nazi university students he was loath to leave Germany even after the accession of Hitler and his desire to return from New York in 1934 and be given a university job led him to produce a most compromising letter to Rust in which he appealed for employment in Germany.
New Books on Spirituality
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

First, two reprints, one of an undoubted classic, Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God, in Donald Attwater’s excellent translation, with a relatively new introduction by Dorothy Day. This must be the most attractive English edition available now. It may be doubted whether Cardinal Suenens’ A New Pentecost? will survive the test of time, but it is likely to endure long enough to justify its new paperback edition. (For a review of the original edition, see New Blackfriars, November 1975).

There is also an anthology of the Cardinal’s dicta compiled by his devoted biographer, Elizabeth Hamilton, Ways of the Spirit, and this makes a pleasant book to dip into, and could be used as an aid to meditation.

The SPCK offers us a new edition of Bishop Appleton’s One Man's Prayers, revealing a generous and trusting spirituality, expressed in simple prayers which many might find helpful on occasion.

John Gunstone, The Beginnings at Whatcombe is a lucid and readable account of the growth of one of the more convincing communities to emerge from the “charismatic movement” in this country, and offers wise advice about the difficulties of living together in community without simply fleeing to naive supematuralism.
Trial Marriage: An Alternative View
Authors: Boivin Marcel
Published: July 2007

A good friend of mine from Montreal, by profession a notary, told me two years ago that, judging from his experience since 1970, of the couples who come to register their marriages before proceeding to the Church, at least one in five gives the same address; meaning to say that, in the proportion of 20%, couples now seeking a Church-Marriage have been cohabiting for probably no less than a year. That figure, while not providing statistical evidence, is indicative of a trend which is gaining popularity among young people in my country—making sure their union has a chance to last before committing it to the punctilious care of the Church and Law—a trend not infrequently lamented by a sizable section of the clergy as a sad result of those young people’s loss of faith and lax morals.

Since then, I have crossed the ocean and settled in the country parish of Ngote, Tanzania, ministering to a Christian community hardly three generations old and, by God’s grace, still little touched by the mixed blessings of industrialisation. Yet of the 18 marriages celebrated in the parish in 1975, only five were between couples for whom Church-Marriage would mark the beginning of conjugal life. In 1970, such marriages had numbered 19 out of 37, while last year they were down to three out of 22. Those figures suggest that ‘trial-marriages, a troubling new fashion at home, are here becoming the norm.

Clearly linked to the issue of trial-marriage (in the sense, for this part of the world, of a matrimonial alliance locally acknowledged as legitimate even though still lacking the Church’s sanction and thus officially regarded as void by the Church) considered in this article is the problem of the decreasing ratio of Church-Marriages in relation to the overall number of conjugal unions entered upon by Church members.
Women and the Priesthood
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

One of the factors that has constantly bedevilled the debate about the admission of women to the priesthood is the uncertainty about what a priest is in Christianity. It must be obvious that we can’t come to any sound conclusions in this matter until we have a theological understanding of the meaning of priesthood and how it relates to the other ministries in the church. The relationship with other ministries is one of the important things to establish if we are going to arrive at a clear idea of what priesthood is. Is it a universal category that in some way comprehends all the other ministries in the church? Or is it just one among many, the central one perhaps, yet not including the others? (One of the questions we have to face after all is why many women who seek to take their rightful place in the ministry feel that they will have got nowhere until the priesthood itself is open to them. What idea of the priesthood lies behind this ambition? Is it the right one? Or is it a historical distortion?)

It is a fact that many theologians in modern times have deplored, that in the Roman Catholic Church there has for many centuries been a gradual absorption by the ordained, sacrificial priesthood of nearly all the other ministries in the church. This is well illustrated by the way in which the sacrament of Orders has been administered since the early middle ages. Ordination meant essentially giving to a man the power of celebrating the Eucharist. The climax of a long series of preparatory rites was the anointing of the hands of the candidate and the bishop’s handing over to him the sacred vessels.
Science and Ideology
Authors: Barker Francis
Published: July 2007

To echo Denys Turner, the debate in New Blackfriars has by now ranged over so many different issues and mobilised so many separate arguments that it is impossible to answer every objection that has been raised against my position, nor shall I be able to take all the incidental points not raised directly in relation to my own views but which nonetheless warrant answers from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint. Equally it would be tedious (for anyone can read the debate for themselves) if I were to spend much time simply restating my earlier remarks and taking issue with every instance of their misinterpretation by my opponents.

Therefore, I shall rehearse my argument only in very general form, and then attend to the issue which is central to the debate— the differential characteristics of science and ideology.

My initial strategy was not to offer a substantive contribution to this debate but to carry out a reading of it, as it exists in certain texts, in order to expose the silences, incoherences and contradictions enforced on a writing that engages in what is, for the whole thrust of my argument, a project which has already failed even before its inception. Because, as I contend, Christianity is an ideology (as well, of course, as an ensemble of rituals, practices and institutions) and Marxism a science, and because they suffer a high level of mutual unintelligibility deriving from their very different epistemological statuses (the one, potentially at least, an object of the other), Marxism has no ‘contribution’ to make to this ‘debate’ except to define its character as an irresolvable ideological encounter.
Religion, Truth and Language Games
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

When people become religious believers, when they talk about their religion or engage in verbal activity in practising it, what are they doing? Although he does not believe that a simple, unqualified answer can be given to this question, Patrick Sherry thinks that it is important, that certain ideas of Wittgenstein are a help in trying to answer it and that a proper answer raises problems of truth and justification which are often ignored: “Let us then ask ourselves what pictures and concepts are used in religion and theology: we want to know how doctrines are related to the world— what is their subject matter and what kind of description are they trying to provide? Now it is unlikely that we will be able to reach a simple answer to such questions, because so-called ‘religious language’ is of many different kinds ... even putatively ‘descriptive’ or ‘fact-stating’ uses of religious language are of many types (p. 18)... We need to ask how and why the religious ‘universe of discourse’, which supposedly structures the believer’s experience, ever arose in the first place (p. 45) ... There are three tasks which need to be tackled if we are to produce a viable Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. These are to characterise the language-games and forms of life of religion by explaining their place in our lives and experience, to relate them to other language-games, and to deal candidly with the problems of truth and justification.
The Ideology of the French Catholic Revival
Authors: Birkett Jennifer
Published: July 2007

This is a period tormented by its sins. Before it, the triumph of science and the Republic; after it, the revival of materialism, and then preparation for war makes it much less easy to see the forms in which individual and collective despair find expression. Yet this despair is of long standing: its cause even more so, and is not specifically French. To anyone seeking a radical cure the idea must present itself forcibly that . .. the decline of Christianity in Europe has a great deal to do with it.

Robert Bessède’s account of late nineteenth-century Catholic culture in France, in his recent study La Crise de la conscience catholique (Paris, 1975), is typical of traditional commentaries on this period. A particular stance—an attitude of despair in the face of history—with its origins in a minority group caught in very specific historical circumstances is transformed by special pleading into a universal phenomenon, to become eventually one more symbolic embodiment of the eternal crucifixion of man. If we look, for instance, into Bessède’s work, which claims to consider objectively the whole movement of ideas at this period, but has its real centre of interest in traditionalism and in the writers of the Catholic Revival, we find that he wholeheartedly adopts the Revival’s own blinkered perspective, refusing even to try to decipher the historical particularity inscribed in their ideology. Ostentatiously dismissing the contribution which the “historian of ideas” can make in such a domain, he prefers to speak of “mysterious” impulses, “feelings”, always and universally the same, which are “the basis and motive force of history”:

The crisis under discussion in this book —more clearly than any other—springs from a nexus of feelings, every one of which is a feeling of lack; it provokes questions whose scope goes beyond the political and social domain.
Recent Catholic Writing on the Resurrection (II) The Appearance Stories
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Having described the new approach to the empty tomb narratives (NEW BLACKFRIARS, July 1977), we must next investigate what some Catholic theologians now believe about the gospel narratives about appearances to the disciples of the resurrected Jesus. As before, we limit our enquiry to The Common Catechism, and to the recent books by Walter Kasper and Hans Kung.

Hans Küng in fact says almost nothing about the appearance narratives themselves. He behaves here like the most traditional scholastic theologian. He develops his view in opposition to that of the distinguished young Catholic exegete Rudolf Pesch, and indulges in a good deal of speculation about the metaphysics of the risen body. He leaves aside all detailed reference to the gospel texts.

As far as the speculation goes, Kung starts from the assumption that the Resurrection is “essentially a work of God on Jesus” (p. 349): that is to say, he is in no doubt that the Resurrection is something that happened to the crucified Jesus—it was not something that happened in the minds and hearts of the disciples. Kung cannot be accused of subjectivising Easter or of reducing it to any kind of human discovery or projection. Since the Resurrection is “an act of God within God’s dimensions”, Küng believes that it cannot be described as a historical event, as he says, “in the strict sense”:

“For the raising of Jesus is not a miracle violating the laws of nature, verifiable within the present world, nor a supernatural intervention which can be located in space and time. There was nothing to photograph or to record. What can be historically verified are the death of Jesus and after this the Easter faith and the Easter message of the disciples. But neither the raising itself nor the person raised can be apprehended, by historical methods” (p. 349).
Angliores Anglis Ipsis
Authors: Gray‐Stack Charles
Published: July 2007

I start with a quotation from the “Point of View” of the Church of Ireland Gazette for August 19th.

“The General Synod of the Church of England ... will consider ‘The Irish Problem and Ourselves’ published on behalf of the Board of Social Responsibility. Since one of its two authors, Canon Eric Elliott, is a prominent member of the (Irish) Committee on the Role of the Church, and since the document itself draws freely from the reports of that Committee, it might be said that the English Synod is being presented with a Church of Ireland viewpoint”.

In this article I shall take the Gazette’s language and speak of the English “document” and the Irish “report” to avoid confusion. The Document appears to agree with Dr. Palley former Professor of Public Law in Queen’s University, Belfast. She contrasts the “majority of Protestants” who are “descendants of as the settlers” with “the majority of Irishmen, for the most part Roman Catholics”. Possibly Professor Beckett, who has recently retired from a history chair in the same university may be rather more reliable. I quote from the Appendix he supplied to the Irish Report of 1975.

“It is often asserted or assumed that Protestants represent a colonial population while the Roman Catholics are the native Irish. This is at best a dangerous half-truth. It is probably the case that most Protestants are descended in the direct line from English or Scottish ancestors, who entered the country at various times from the later sixteenth century onwards. But such families have commonly inter-married with the earlier layers of population. And besides this there is a very substantial number of Protestants whose direct Irish ancestry goes back to Medieval times and earlier. As for the Roman Catholic population, it contains such a very large inter-mixture of English and Scottish, that it cannot possibly be regarded as representing any single strain”.
Do We Need Any More Saints ?
Authors: Gomme A.H.
Published: July 2007

In the true sense of the word of course there can never be enough saints. Luther, I have heard, said that the only thing that matters is to be a saint. Simone Weil is even more uncompromising: “it seems to me that saintliness is. if I dare say so, the minimum for a Christian” (Seventy Letters, ed. Rees, 1965, p. 175). It is simply a linguistic oddity that English and German among others have tended to separate the word ‘saint’ or its equivalent from ‘holy’, whereas the Romance languages keep one word to describe the holy person and to mark out those whose saintliness the Church has formally recognised. In England the word may even take on a dismissive air: one hears from time to time the quite unashamed remark. “I don't pretend to be a saint”, as if unsaintliness were a perfectly reasonable and acceptable state of mind, which we can in any case do nothing about, a condition perhaps that one has been born with, as who should say, “I don't pretend to be very clever’’. A booklet published by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul innocently answers the question whether its members are “near-saints’’: “Certainly not. God knows, they are ordinary Catholics, real men who (let it be said with the utmost humility) are trying to do God’s will”. Saints as are of course extraordinary—that is why we feel we need a special word for them; and I suggest that part of their difference is in their greater human reality, or rather that they are more fully human (whole) by being holy.
One is One and All Alone and Evermore Shall Be So
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

For English speaking readers of my generation Simone Weil was one of a galaxy of French writers who came to the fore just after the last war. I am thinking particularly of Congar, de Lubac, Daniélou, arid Marcel. Time has dealt with their reputations very differently. Who remembers Marcel now? If Cardinal Daniélou is known to more people than Father Daniélou ever was, it is for rather special reasons. But in total these writers were a major cause of that aggiormamento in the Church we are still learning to cope with. They put out ways of thinking about theology both radically new and very traditional and in the process they devalued utterly the bankrupt pseudo-scholasticism that then ruled the roost. The most important of these writers were unquestionably de Lubac and Congar: but Daniélou too, is not to be forgotten with his work on typology. These theologians were among the first to have what is now commonplace—genuine argument and discussion with non-papist theologians of similar status. Some of them took part in an ecumenical seminar in Paris out of which came Oscar Cullmann’s magisterial book on Peter. Less well-known than these is the Anglican Father Hebert, whose books on The Authority of the Old Testament and the Throne of David had considerable influence on Daniélou (to put it mildly). It is symptomatic of the time that I myself first heard of Hebert’s books through Daniélou’s review in Dieu Vivant. This periodical was the New Blackfriars of the day; although it was no more all-embracing of the Catholic intellectual milieu than is New Blackfriars, it was equally representative of an important current of opinion.
Traditions of Unbelief in England
Authors: Hebblethwaite Peter
Published: July 2007

One of the tasks of the Secretariat for Non-believers is to study the diverse forms of atheism. It has not been easy to do this in Britain for lack of studies which map out the field. Now with Varieties of Unbelief Dr. Susan Budd has filled the gap. A literate sociologist, she has put us all in her debt by examining the minute-books and records of the various secularist societies. Her work is another contribution to the ‘sociology of the past’ which is indispensable if we are to understand the present. It occupies, as she puts it, the wasteland ‘between the tilled and fertile plantations of the sociology of collective behaviour and the history of ideas’ (p. 1). Such is her almost superhuman objectivity that it is quite impossible to determine from the book where she stands: her story takes her down some fascinating by-ways of English eccentricity (thus Annie Besant managed to remain a secularist and a theoso-phist to the bafflement of everyone except herself), but she stays resolutely cool and tries to resist the temptations of irony. Though she is prepared gently to chide her secularists for their repeated attacks on citadels long abandoned by the religious, she clearly admires them for their independence of mind and rejection of compromise, and can speak of them as ‘heirs to a great tradition, to the continued vitality of a radical culture which exists outside established methods of thought’ (p.80). But her tone is so very different from the propagandists of secularism whose account of the ‘great tradition’ tends to enrol Erasmus (a Catholic) and Voltaire (a deist) and indeed anyone who has in any way contributed to human progress. To the secularist, the world is full of ‘anonymous secularists’ who would reveal themselves if only they knew better.
Between Prophet and Philosopher
Authors: Clark Douglas Kent
Published: July 2007

Heu vatum ignare mentes . . .

—Vergil, Aenid, 11.63

The God of the Psalmists and the prophets was not in nature, He transcended nature—and transcended, likewise, the realm of mythopoetic thought. It would seem that the Hebrews, no less than the Greeks, broke with the mode of speculation which had prevailed up to their time.

—H.and H. A. Frankfort “The Emancipation of Thought from Myth”

At least until the advent of counter-cultural occultism, we of the post-medieval West, whether we regard ourselves as heirs of the secular Greeks or of the pious Hebrews, have liked to think that our own speculation has broken completely with mythopoetic thought. As successors to the rationalists and empiricists, many of today’s philosophers have attempted to find ultimate knowledge through “scientific” investigation, and, failing, have settled for an understanding, not of the Ultimate but of mere phenomena. Nor have we lacked our “prophets” who, in the footsteps of Luther, have eschewed human reason, seeking ultimate knowledge directly from God’s mouth. Yet both our prophets and our philosophers have tended, at least until very recently, to shun the whole ambiguous realm of mythopoetic thought and expression. To the philosopher, mythopoetry is imprecise, an unscientific and indirect way of dealing with reality. To the prophet, it is unworthy of the transcendent God who has taken the trouble of bypassing myth by revealing himself directly. So the philosopher looks below, to man’s own wits, to find, if not clear and distinct Cartesian ideas then clear and distinct descriptions of phenomena, and the prophet looks above, to God, for his clear and distinct word.
Christian Priesthood and Secularised Mentality
Authors: Conaty Sean
Published: July 2007

Statement of the Problem . . . Latin America In Latin America and specifically in Chile the most dynamic (socially concerned) clergy have experienced the phenomenon of secularisation in a way that is perhaps different from the clergy in Europe or the United States. In these countries the strongest impact has probably been made by the scientific and technical discoveries of recent years. On the other hand, in Latin America the impact is felt especially through the experience of the power of mass movements to produce cultural transformations which pastoral action has never been able to bring about. These mass movements have become a reality, thanks to leaders, generally non-Christian, who understood and could make use of socio-economic and sociopolitical laws which allowed radical changes in structures of exploitation. Seeing the effectiveness of these mass movements and technical expertise of their leaders, some of the clergy became increasingly conscious of the contrast with the more or less total failure of large scale ecclesiastical pastoral action such as Catholic Action, Y.C.W, Y.C.S, the Christian Family Movement... etc. I believe that this feeling of frustration built up within the clergy a sense of inferiority and ineffectiveness which today appears as their major problem. What social changes had the Church been able to achieve in Latin America, bearing in mind that 99% of the people are baptized, that is to say are people who might be expected to respond to the directives of the ecclesiastical leaders? It is this uncomfortable feeling that has pushed the progressive clergy to look for new forms of theological understanding that will promote really effective Christian thinking on the radical transformation of the structures of exploitation. This is where we find the psychological roots of action and indeed the theological roots too, for the breath of the Spirit can surely be felt there.
Unity and Difference in Christianity
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The difference between Catholics that comes out very plainly in recent writing on the Resurrection (New Blackfriars, October and November 1977, pp 453-461 and 506-515) prompts questions and reflections about the nature and extent of the diversity of belief that exists within the Catholic communion. This is particularly urgent and apposite at the present time, in England, as Catholics seem to be moving, slowly but inexorably, towards some degree of communion with the Anglican Church—long mocked as the home of incompatible beliefs. As Cardinal Hume said, in his address at Church House, Westminster, on 1st February 1978:

“We do not yet know what diversity of doctrinal emphasis or differences of practice will not only be permissible but also desirable”. ‘

That avowal of ignorance—which is also clearly a word of hope— must seem to many Catholics even now very like an admission of defeat. Surely, they will say, the one thing that Roman Catholics can be clear about is what diversity of doctrinal emphasis and difference of practice are permissible. How is it possible that, on any but trivial and peripheral matters, there can be a serious question about this? Do we not already know, have we not always known, what doctrinal differences we cannot permit—far less desire—within the communion of the catholica? How can a cardinal archbishop ask such a question?
Wedding in Solentiname
Authors: Lyons John
Published: July 2007

After a quick breakfast, the long wooden table is cleared and wiped clean, ready to receive the corpse of the victim, a poor ignorant innocent. Little light enters the musty kitchen where all the meals are taken together. Through the side door near the orange tree, heavy with fruit (like a Christmas tree with the bulbs switched off) dark, agitated shadows can be seen. The early morning sun is just beginning to draw out a thin sweat. A band of young campesinos, brandishing various tools of destruction, like conspirators planning their attack on a hated dictator. Suddenly with a cheer they break up and head off in search of the appointed offering. There is a pagan gleam in their eyes, a wild joy as the pig with its front trotters tied together, is dragged by its hind legs through the grass to the execution spot. The string is then removed as a jeering circle is formed around the creature, a large meat knife catching the morning light, an axe, someone with a small revolver. Meanwhile the wood collected earlier has been piled up to make a fire, the flames of which are now licking upwards, crackling; and a huge bowl containing oil is placed over the fire in preparation for the chicharron to be fried. The pig watches these pro ceedings with unease and while the boys are lost in their own excitement it spies a gap and makes a bolt for freedom, heading downhill and through a hole in the fence. The fence, however, is no guarantee of political immunity; the boys chase after it, one grabbing its tail and a fierce struggle ensues (amid panic stricken squeals) to get the pig back through the hole in the fence. The revolver is placed by its head, fired and echoes in a shout of glee from the boys which dies almost as rapidly as the pig’s legs give way: it is all over.
Mary Crawford and the Christian Heroine
Authors: Tatham Michael
Published: July 2007

It is a matter of commonplace that Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s most controversial novel—perhaps even, in some ways a failure. Fanny Price who occupies the central position in mediating what is widely thought to be Jane Austen’s point of view, is, in fact, almost completely antipathetic to the attitude to life revealed by Jane’s correspondence with her sister, Cassandra; while Mary Crawford—having won our approval by her good natured intelligence and vivacity—is cast aside, not merely as a threat to Fanny’s romance—what Angus Wilson has called ‘the dusty union’, but as a comprehensive danger to the very foundations of the Mansfield estate, and by extension, to the stability of the whole fabric of society at a critical period of revolutionary ferment. It is also largely agreed that Jane Austen’s supposed intention of writing a novel on the theme of ordination—with all that this implies of a conservative political philosophy—led her to abandon the ironic mode and even compelled her to impose an arbitrary didactic conclusion upon the plot so that virtue might be almost as glibly and sentimentally rewarded as in Pamela.

Ironically, much of the misunderstanding and confusion seems to have arisen because it has been believed that Jane Austen wrote her novel under the influence of Evangelical Christianity with all that this implies of regeneration and enthusiasm and disapproval of the smartly decadent values of fashionable London society. This critical response sees Mansfield Park as Jane Austen’s response to the issues of her time—a response in which the religious affirmations of the debate in the chapel at Sotherton and Edmund’s impending commitment to the duties of Thornton Lacey are balanced by secular responsibilities to the management of the estate. In this thematic reading Jane Austen assumes the mantle of Edmund Burke; and clearly, the coherence of such a reading has much to recommend it.
Prophets, Spouses and Story‐tellers in Africa
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

In trying to understand the world, or, at least that part of it with which we are involved, we can look for a prophet, or even turn prophets ourselves, or we can tell stories about the world. The excellence of the prophet is that he parts the wheat from the chaff; the excellence of the story-teller is that he makes chaff look like wheat, perhaps even transmutes it into wheat. The poet, if he is lucky, is something of both prophet and story-teller: the theologian, if he is, as many theologians appear to be, unlucky, will falter when he should speak in prophetic judgement, and fail too in the task of imaginative transmutation. In apocalyptic, the two modes of understanding are fused, as we see in Daniel or Revelations, much to the bafflement of most of us. But for the purposes of this review, it seems possible to see prophecy and story-telling as complementary and inter-acting opposites. Perhaps I should say that I am myself more in sympathy with the story-teller than the prophet; but I shall try to be fair as I mpve between the polar interests of my fellow-Adrians, the prophet-watching of Adrian Hastings and the story-hearing of Adrian Roscoe, taking a look in between at that prophetic institution in which so many stories end, namely marriage.
Unity and Diversity in Christianity II
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The restoration of churchly unity among all Christians is the agreed aim of ecumenical work. It is the programme announced in the opening phrase—Unitas redintegratio— of the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism (which is thus also the title). Such phraseology suggests that the unity to be restored did at some stage actually exist—that there was once, historically and empirically, an “undivided Church”, prior to the conflicts among Christians that gave rise to schisms and heresies. Reflective study of church history seems, however, to keep pushing further and further back to the point at which the Church was visibly and organically one. The Decree of Ecumenism dates the first of the divisions at the refusal of what was to become the Nestorian Church to accept the dogmatic pronouncement of the Council of Ephesus in the year 431. The convoking of that council had itself been an attempt to restore Christian unity. The further one goes back into history the more evident it becomes that it has always been necessary to restore unity. The “undivided Church” begins to look more like an endless task rather then any historically dateable empirical reality. The variety and complexity of divisions among Christians become increasingly obvious. It is not at all clear that anybody, either in the World Council of Churches or in the Catholic Church, not to mention the many other participants, has yet succeeded in working out a doctrine of the Church which does justice to the tangled anomalies of the situation.
Close Encounters of Another Kind
Authors: Hibbert Giles
Published: July 2007

It is not so long ago that mysticism was a dirty word, the Reformation was regarded as a ‘good thing’, and a scientific education was seen as having more value than one in the ‘humanities’. But fashions change, and even genuine perspectives alter. The current fortunes of St John of the Cross are an example of what can happen and will repay examination, for this mystic, poet, and outstanding representative of Counter-Reformation Spain is again becoming popular and arousing interest. Lectures about him are attended eagerly and received with enthusiasm; books once again are being published about him.

But there is danger in this if what is happening is simply a reversion to earlier perspectives. One suspects this, for example, with regard to the reappearance from the early 1950s of Thomas Merton’s introduction to and presentation of the Maxims, Cautions and Counsels of St John of the Cross (Counsels of Light and Love, Burns & Oates, 95 pages, £1.50). Perhaps this book represents the most attractive of old-style presentations of John and his teaching, based as it is on a liberal humanism tailored to the inadequacies of modern urbanised man; but whether it really represents what John stood for is another matter. Apart from anything else, as with so much that has been written about him, it suffers from an almost total failure to take account of the appropriate context. The lesser writings of St John of the Cross presented in this book, as also his letters, arose from a very particular cultural and social situation which must be appreciated if the nature and significance of his ‘advice’ is to be understood. Even more perhaps than with his major works it is necessary to realise that these writings were addressed to particular people, or groups of people, in very special circumstances, and are dependent upon a very close relationship between him and them.
Vatican ll's Model of the Church
Authors: Loftus John
Published: July 2007

“Thou speak’st wiser than thou art ware of’

(As You Like It: Act II, scene 4, 1. 55)

So many hands have sown the ideas in this article, and over such a long period of time, that I have forgotten many of them. I can recall Richard McBrien declaiming from his book, Do We Need the Church? as he strides across the field, so sure and so impatient. I can hear Christopher Butler, in his black habit with the hood up, quietly chanting The Theology of Vatican II. But I cannot remember who it was that planted the most fruitful seed of all: “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was the first document of the Second Vatican Council. It would have been very different, if it had been the last”.

The ripening, I know, took place in the warmth and light of Avery Dulles’ Models of the Church. But his was the kind of sunshine that forced me to seek the shade of second thoughts; and once there, I wondered if I dared to disagree with him.

In this article, I present an argument which is made up of three suggestions about how we are to understand Vatican II’s ideas concerning the Church. To illustrate the point I am trying to make, I raise some questions about how this affects our view of the sacraments. And I ask whether this is not a case of the famous sensus plenior, the ‘fuller sense’ which appears to have been discussed only by scripture scholars up to now, but is surely relevant to the interpretation of council documents.
Celibacy: A Final Word
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

The article on Celibacy which appeared in the March issue of New Blackfriars was written last October and followed up by the rest of my book In Filial Disobedience, published by Mayhew-McCrimmon in June. Since March I have received a good deal of comment, both favourable and unfavourable, and in the light of this it has seemed worth while to add a final piece responding in particular to the major objections raised very seriously and kindly by some people. Could a priest really be morally justified in rejecting the Church’s law of celibacy with all the canonical consequences this entails? I have given my reply to that question the form of an article in the Summa Theologica. It is, hopefully, my last public contribution to the debate. This is not the most important subject for the Church today by any means, and yet it is a very important one both for its own sake and because it affects so many others. It is the key to a more flexible restructuring of the ministry. Yet if there is one thing which has grown in my mind in the last months it is the conviction that a law of so massive a nature, so tenaciously maintained by Rome with such powerful sanctions, cannot be defended or criticised primarily in terms of pragmatic pastoral advantage and disadvantage, whether in Europe or in Africa. It must be regarded primarily as a semi-doctrinal statement and one profoundly significant for the understanding and the misunderstanding of holiness.

Videtur quod. It seems that a secular priest may not marry.

Jesus was celibate. A priest should imitate Jesus as closely as possible because of his calling to be another Christ. In the words of Cardinal Hume, ‘Our Lord was celibate. Whatever reasons were important to him, I want to make mine’. (Searching for God, p. 52).
Dr. William Maxwell, 1760‐1834 The Catholic Radical
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard
Published: July 2007

Conservatism and Catholicism have been synonymous in Britain during the past two hundred years. How that identification came about is debatable. Catholics for tactical reasons may have wished to conciliate opponents of Catholic Emancipation by emphasising their essential social and political conservatism. That image allowed the Church to capitalise on the public sympathy for the French emigre clergy who were pouring into Britain during the French Revolution: Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution, (1790) was unwittingly the finest modern Catholic apologist. That expedient became, in the wake of the Oxford Movement a permanent feature of a Church still dependent to a degree on wealthy patrons and increasingly conscious of its social status; its hallmark dreamy spires rather than social democracy. If the Church had joined the Tory Party— or the Tory Party at prayer seemed about to return to Rome—then that was grist to the Liberal mill. If anti-Catholicism was the anti-semitism of the intellectuals, then militant liberalism could mobilise those nonconformist sentiments, temperance, disestablishment and evangelical schooling into a crusade against the whore of Babylon. It was in their political interest to portray Roman Catholicism as the bastion of conservatism. With the excesses of European Catholicism during this period the Church was indelibly identified with the most conservative forces in society. But that is to ignore another tradition, that of radical Catholicism whose most outstanding figure is Dr. William Maxwell.
Theology and Culture
Authors: Swanston Hamish
Published: July 2007

There is a moment in Twelfth Night when Feste, the Fool, calls upon Malvolio, who has been shut up in a dark cell as a dangerous madman. Feste, to render himself the more credible as a prison visitor, puts on a parson’s gown and a parson’s voice and, announcing that he is Sif Topas the curate who comes to visit Malvolio the lunatic, counsels him with words of learned but wholly irrelevant comfort. Malvolio, in frustration at this pastoral nonsense, most violently asserts that he is in no way mad, so the pretence clergyman agrees to test the prisoner’s wits by posing some deep question. ‘What’, he asks, ‘is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?’ From that encyclopaedic knowledge of the classical world we expect in a renascence man, Malvolio answers that the philosopher held ‘that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’. Ruthless as if he were conducting a seminar, the Fool then asks him: ‘What think’st thou of his opinion?’ Malvolio rather carefully replies: T think nobly of the soul and no way approve his opinion’. But at this the clergyman seems quite convinced that Malvolio is indeed mad, declaring as he hurries away, ‘thou shalt hold th’opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits’.

This absurd interlude seems to many, I suspect, a paradigm of theological talk. A madman and a fool disputing about the soul, and as if this were not itself at sufficient remove from reality, disputing about whether the human soul might animate a bird. I should like to suggest to you, however, that while this dialogue may very well present an unkind parody of the manners both of the student of religion and of the believer, its satire does not, even glancingly, touch the theologian’s enterprise.
Misery and Christianity
Authors: Binns Winifred
Published: July 2007

If religion means anything at all it has to be relevant to our situation. It has to be a source of hope for desperate people. I specify desperate people because those who are contented and happy rarely search for solutions until disaster forces them.

In my sixties, I try to come to some conclusions. There is not much time left and the need for solutions is more urgent. I have made a long search by attending Anglican, Methodist, Pentecostal, Quaker and other Christian churches and by reading their writers. All have made some impact but left me unsatisfied. It may be my fault that I am not satisfied, but, since my search has been genuine, I have taken some drastic measures. I have sold my house and home and come to London, with only my clothes, to work as Warden in a hostel for thirty-six homeless women. These are raw material. They come from every kind of society and collectively they have suffered everything. Very often I admire individuals; altogether, they are generally hell to live with. They do not read and their vocabulary is limited. Some are on drink, on drugs; on smoking, on bingo, on jumble-sales or on sleep. I reflect again that religion in England has been mainly the product of the middle classes expecting a high degree of articulation and academic study. Words come to mind—‘eucharist’, ‘litany’, ‘transubstantiation’, ‘atonement’. Even worse, ‘logical positivism’, ‘language-games’, ‘semantics’, ‘linguistics’. Can these help my guinea pigs? Not much.

So many of our theologians and philosophers seem to live in ivory towers. Do they starve, live on social security, feel they are socially worthless, sink into apathy, drown their pain in gin or whisky? To these troubles add physical illness and emotional instability. I repeat, religion must be relevant to the situation and provide a source of hope for desperate people.