bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Poet, Mystic, Reformer
Authors: Hibbert Giles
Published: July 2007

A strict ascetic mystic belonging to a religious reform movement in the heady atmosphere of counter-reformation Spain; a writer of treatises on the techniques of contemplative and mystical prayer; esoteric, strict, demanding, even dry and humourless—strange for a close intimate of the great Teresa, so human, witty and compassionate—but undoubtedly at the same time a man consumed by the love of God. This is most probably the image conjured up by the name of John of the Cross.

And yet he is also well known, even famous, for his poems—you will find them tucked in at the back of Professor Allison Peers’ magisterial presentation and translation of the Complete Works, though you will also find them published in the Penguin Classics series. What sort of poet is he? A real poet, or one of those religious versifiers who present their ideas on the life of prayer in this superficial, yet attractive, form for the sake of their simpler listeners? There were many of these to be found in 16th Century Spain.

A real poet many will claim; but those who take this side of him seriously and acclaim him as one of the peninsula’s greatest poets are more likely to be found amongst the unreligious, the secular, students of Spanish literature than amongst those who follow his doctrine.

John of the Cross was indeed a poet of stature, together with being most of the other things mentioned; but not many people have attempted to present this so that it can be seen as a whole, so that we can get what he has left to posterity in perspective.
The Work of Mother Teresa in Belfast
Authors: Wilson Desmond
Published: July 2007

The Belfast experiment by Mother Teresa’s sisters is over. Suddenly, and to most people unexpectedly, they departed in September, 1973 leaving behind some work completed, some incomplete or merely projected and many friendships bruised by their sudden departure.

The Missionary Sisters of Charity, to give them their proper name, came to Belfast with almost equal suddeness and unexpected by most people. About two years ago Mother Teresa expressed a desire to visit Belfast to see for herself what was happening and to try to help. It was by no means clear what she could do but she had in mind to create some ecumenical project by which she believed that the love of God might soften the antagonism there. She was advised by a number of people that what she had in mind was not possible. This was not simply a counsel of despair; it was advice based upon bitter experience. Already a dedicated community worker who had patiently and courageously worked in Cyprus for the Reconciliation of Greek and Turkish Cypriots had declared that Belfast was not right even for that kind of experiment.

Mother Teresa, however, was told that she should come to Belfast because her coming would give some encouragement to people who badly needed it. She came on a flying visit on a Saturday afternoon and on Sunday morning attended Mass in the church of Corpus Christi in Ballymurphy. The people at once took her to their hearts and into their homes.
Ecology and the Angels
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

‘Nature is never spent’ (Gerald Manley Hopkins).‘One day soon, maybe . . . there will be no more Nature’ (Prince Bernhard, at a Wildlife Fund dinner).‘There is no more Nature’ (Samuel Beckett, Endgame).‘Nature fights back’ (Rachel Carson).

The disappearance of Nature is a central theme of modem fiction,. Among those novelists who tend to see it as an accomplished fact already, two responses seem to prevail. The first is typified by Robbe-Grillet’s verdict that modern man feels no deprivation at the loss of Nature, for Nature was never more than an illusion, comforting perhaps in a meaningless world but no less illusory for all that. To be rid of Nature is to be at last free. The second response is typified by Beckett’s verdict: there is no more Nature, and the loss is tragic and the deprivation catastrophic. To be rid of Nature is to be in the realm of the lost ones, in a world of sheer ‘lessness’. A third response, however, has to be considered. This is latent in Mailer’s identification of the source of our troubles about Nature in the triumph of what he calls corporation-land: that combination of technology, materialism and exploitative brutality towards the environment which is most evident in the cities of America. However, in Mailer’s case there is also a certain fascination for, as well as hatred of, this massive agglomeration of brutalities : there is pride, energy, vitality in it, as well as regimentation, pollution and despair. Mailer’s ambivalence is characteristic of a general uncertainty about ‘the big plot being hatched out by Nature’.

This uncertainty is evident enough elsewhere, in the utterances of people speaking from many different viewpoints.
Theology and Equality
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

Until very recently Christian theology has never been much concerned with social equality. It would be true to say that, on the contrary, a well-developed theology of inequality has been characteristic of Christianity for most of its history. Before I develop this theme it could be well to define what kind of equality I am talking about. I am concerned with social equality of the kind that is demanded by many contemporary civil-rights movements. It may be called ‘equality of consideration’ by which I mean the presumption against treating human beings differently in any respect until grounds for the distinction have been shown which are relevent to the distinction we propose to make. According to such a principle we consider that to judge an individual not on his merits relevant to the case but on the supposed merits of some class to which he belongs is a fundamental injustice. The onus of proof that membership of some class of human beings disqualifies an individual from equality of consideration in some respect always lies with one who wishes to make or to perpetuate the disqualification.

A principle of equality of this kind is not a natural Christian growth. It can be developed without any reference to Christianity but it is likely to be more vigorous if it comes about by the cross-fertilisation of Christian inspiration and humanist ideas. If Christianity has contributed anything to the development of the equality principle in society it is not so much by way of formal Christian ideas as by way of a certain humanitarian impulse at work in a suitable ideological environment.
The Common Man Confirmed
Authors: Moiser Jeremy
Published: July 2007

One often hears it said, and it is even more often accepted, that it is right to despise the masses. The majority of mankind, it is argued, are subject to a basic shortness of vision and a fundamental inertia which make it necessary for someone else—a dictator, a power elite, a superior—to administer their affairs. On this view the passivity of the mass of people has to be offset, if man is to advance, by being manipulated by the competent, talented few. Progress in history and the growth of civilisation are the work of an oligarchy, while the people constitute merely the raw material out of which history is made.

On the other side a number of thinkers have espoused the cause of the polloi. History is the vicissitudes of common folk, and nothing nobler can be contemplated than the numberless multitudes who shape the world’s destiny.

It would seem difficult for a Christian to adopt either of these views for his understanding of the Church. If, on the one hand, the Church is thought to consist primarily in the clerical elite, it is hard to see why Christ took such pains to identify himself with the unspectacular masses. If, on the other hand, the Church’s history is seen as the development of the sensus omnium fidelium, it is not easy to explain the cult of exceptional members who are thought to have advanced the spread of Christianity more significantly than any others, and it is even less easy to explain the emphasis placed on the role of the hierarchy in the preservation of God’s truth.
The Italian Devils of Anglo‐Saxon Literature
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

Every culture has its images of evil and its personifications of wickedness. The English-speaking world possesses a literature and dramatic tradition rich in devils. There are deceivers, troublemakers, outlaws, corrupters, traitors, chiselers, killers, monsters, parasites, criminal masterminds, and endless other variations of human wickedness and malice.

The Anglo-Saxon world’s literature and drama is also rich in foreign devils. Among the foreign devils the Italian villain is the perennial favourite. From the Age of Elizabeth to the present, the Italians have supplied the drama and literature of the English-speaking world with more foreign devils than any other people. Other nations have supplied foreign devils; however, no nation has supplied them as consistently as Italy.

The Italian devils possess that mixture of qualities which enable us to recognize them as both descendants of Lucifer and precursors of The Godfather. Sinning against God and society, they are in conflict with their origins. They display an awesome satanic grandeur in their fiendish attempts to control or to destroy the lives of others.

The Italian devils are an essential part of the English-speaking world’s centuries-old image-making of Italy. The literary and dramatic tradition of the Italian devil has undoubtedly preconditioned the English-speaking world’s relations with Italians, clerics and laymen. The Italian devil of the criminal monk tradition, affirmed from the Age of Elizabeth to the Age of Victoria and the present, continues to cast his sinister shadow over the Vatican.
St. Thomas and Dante
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

The legend of Dante’s ‘Thomism’ arose from the fact that a main component of his culture is obviously ‘scholastic’, and that until not so very long ago the authentic thought of St Thomas had not been clearly differentiated from its general scholastic background. A poet writing within a few decades of St Thomas’s death, and showing a great respect for him, and delighting to reason, even in verse, about form and matter, act and potency and so on, seemed plainly a ‘Thomist’; and when this designation began to be questioned there were not wanting those who went on insisting on it for the greater glory of the Dominican Order or of Catholic culture, which was thought to have reached its apex in the work of Aquinas. But now all that has changed. Since the pioneering labours of Bruno Nardi and Gilson’s brilliant book it has become increasingly evident that Dante cannot be called a Thomist in any strict sense of the term as denoting a body of doctrine characteristic of St Thomas.

However there is, I think, a qualified sense in which one may speak of the poet’s Thomism, and which it is one purpose of these notes to indicate. But first a little more should be said about the question in general; and here I may be allowed to bring myself briefly into the picture. When, some years ago, I undertook to write the article ‘Tommaso d’Aquino’ for the Enciclopedia Dantesca, I naturally set about reading or re-reading all the relevant texts, beginning with Dante. My task, as I saw it, was twofold. First, on the abstract doctrinal plane—comparing ideas with ideas—I had to try to decide how far Bruno Nardi had been right in his lifelong effort to detach Dante from Aquinas by expounding the poet’s philosophy as a variant on the Neoplatonist tradition, with traces (especially in the Monarchia) of Averroism.
Ivan Denisovich: Towards the Repossession of History
Authors: Barker Francis
Published: July 2007

The view of Alexander Solzhenitsyn projected in the press, both popular and literary, in the bourgeois countries is of some kind of embattled Western liberal, who, amid the severities of ‘totalitarianism’, continues resolutely to articulate the values that underpin the Free World. We do not see him treated as a Russian socialist who after decades of official dogma is conducting a genuine struggle to come to terms, artistically, with recent Soviet history, to deal with real problems of common life and its valuation in a transitional society. Nor is he even shown to be the author of a certain kind of typically Russian social novel discernibly in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky—but always as the Scourge of Communism.

Naturally, it is easy for the champions of the Western bourgeoisie to appropriate Solzhenitsyn to their own ideological purposes (along with many other ‘dissident intellectuals’): do not, after all, the demands most often raised by the ‘cultural opposition’ such as those for freedom of speech and of publication—the civil rights most cherished by the intelligentsia—have the very appearance of ‘liberal’ demands? This mystification is easy to dispel. Noticeably, the Western press only reports the activities of the intellectuals: widespread factory occupations, food riots, work stoppages, street demonstrations, and the storming of the party headquarters in Novocherkask by local factory workers (all of which took place when Kruschev announced rises in meat and dairy prices in 1962, the year of Solzhenitsyn’s first publication) are not reported in the West with such alacrity. And in any case, as Harding remarks, freedom of speech is by no means a liberal call in the Russian context: by raising demands which the state bureaucracy dare not satisfy, the intellectuals must eventually consider the abolition of the bureaucracy itself and a means of achieving this, and thus their dissent falls within the dynamic of permanent revolution.
Seeing, Healing, Reasoning: The Mandari Way of Thought
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

Knowledge that the author of a book between one’s hands died before its publication inevitably affects one’s judgement of it. At first reading, the late Dr Jean Buxton’s Religion and Healing in Mandari seemed to me to lack complete integration as a book, to be rather a collection of extremely interesting and thoughtful chapters loosely strung together. Further reading, however, has suggested to me that this impression is a superficial reaction to a remarkable quality in the book, its capacity to give attention to several different themes in succession, or rather, to give each theme its own value in the overall pattern of Mandari thinking and doing, without either isolating it from the whole, or giving the totality an imposed, schematic unity in the service of some favourite formula. Dr Buxton refused to see Mandari reality as a collection of bits and pieces or as a shapeless mass or as a geometrical pattern.

The Mandari are a people of the southern Sudan, numbering, when in the nineteen-fifties Dr Buxton did her fieldwork among them, some 15,000. They are linguistically and culturally different from the Dinka and Nuer, even though in the present century they have undergone considerable influence from the latter. Dr Buxton had already described their social institutions in her earlier Chiefs and Strangers; her theme here is in fact wider than the title suggests, since, in so far as a central theme gradually emerges from the rich and fascinating material here presented, it is how the Mandari order and arrange in a rational way what they see and experience. Nothing is in the mind which is not first in the senses, said the old scholastics; or, as an excited disciple of Chomsky exclaimed: ‘The human mind exists’. Dr Buxton would have accepted both these statements; but it is her merit that she has shown how they apply to an obscure, poor and non-literate people in the circumstances of the culture they have formed and the environment which dominates them.
Dancing with David
Authors: Newman Pamela
Published: July 2007

Those whose reservations kept them away from the ‘Dance’ Mass at the French Church, Leicester Place, last summer will be relieved to know that the congregation neither indulged in ‘one more time’ of Lord of the Dance, nor flung off garments to give way to unbridled holy rolling. A few jackets and ties were removed (it was a warm evening) but the only sensational happenings were the sincerely vigorous protestations of a few ladies of strong Tridentine loyalties. What, then, was done? And was it worth doing? Above all, was it proper to be done in the context ?

‘The theatre is the place for this, not the House of God’ intoned one of the ladies in a recurring and joyless antiphon, received for the most part by the packed congregation in compassionate silence and heroically overlooked by the readers thus interrupted. Well, is it? Were we insulting God by a mock marriage of actress and bishop? ‘But what about David ?’ a young Anglican said to me as we queued to get in. Ah, yes, David . . . but he was one of your ancient royals. And very Old Testament and Jewish. But so—inconveniently?—is the foundation of belief in, and credibility of, the Person who said ‘Before Abraham was, I am’.

By this time the moths of misconception have no doubt gathered in large numbers. It will be useful to begin, therefore, with an account of what actually took place. Before the Mass, the celebrant, Father Kevin Donovan, S.J., explained clearly and with infectious enthusiasm what was intended. The Liturgy of the Word would include a number of readings from the Gospels and the psalms which would then be interpreted in dance and movement.
A View of the Resurrection
Authors: Sharkey Michael
Published: July 2007

It was in the future days—I know time tells strange tales—that the idea first came to me. We had discovered long before how to transmit objects by dematerialising them in one place, translating them into the basic energy of their matter, and directing this energy to another place for rematerialisation. You will appreciate that this in itself had given rise to some pretty wild theories about the Resurrection of Christ. However, in working out how to apply this principle across galactic distances, we accidently discovered a way of tracking the light of past events. As you know, you see a thing when light is reflected from it to your eye. That light never dies but hurtles away, out through space, at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. Somehow, one of our team was able to draw up the formula for finding and reconvening the light of past events, and for showing us these events on the face of our computer.

To put it crudely, this involved a leap ahead of the light, by a short-cut method, encountering the light and bringing its information back, by short-cut, almost instantaneously to our computer which translated it into vision on its face. A few seconds was all the computer needed to intercept and interpret events of thousands of light-years’ distance.

Even though we could do this with light only, and not with sound, an extraordinary amount of excitement was generated, and many people used the machine to witness once more the happy events of their childhood, etc. On the whole, though, this shattered too many illusions, and it hurt and embarrassed some very nice people indeed. More caution was used.
Religious Life: A Dialogue
Authors: Boulding Cecily
Published: July 2007

I should like to question strongly the assertion made in Fergus Kerr’s article Priorities in Religious Life (October 1973), and repeated from the essay by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, that: ‘What is distinctive about religious life is that religious consent to live according to the evangelical counsels, but in community. That is the difference’.

I would maintain that what is distinctive about religious life is that religious undertake to live in consecrated celibacy, and I think that the writer of the article referred to implies this when he says, in his third section: ‘It is time, too, that there were religious communities to demonstrate that men and women can live together in consecrated celibacy,’ alluding to the fact that the cradle of the Dominican Order, Prouille, was by St Dominic’s legislation a double community (but there was a good deal more to that story!)’

If community, if living together, why celibacy? Surely this is contrary to the idea of community taken in its most radical and absolute form, which is the ideal the writer seems to be advocating. If celibacy is still to be maintained and consecrated even in the most ‘communitarian’ situation, this must surely be because it is prior to the ideal of community, and of the essence of religious life?

I freely admit that, historically, this has not always been considered so. There have been cases, such as that of the Order of Knights Templar, where the Church accepted as an authentic religious vocation a way of life combined with the married state, and I would not wish to suggest that the life of married clergy is not a religious vocation; I submit, however, that consecrated celibacy has come to be the defining characteristic of ‘religious life’ as we understand it in our era, and that participation in a formal ‘religious community’ is secondary to this.
From Secular City to People's Religion
Authors: Kee Alistair
Published: July 2007

In what must have been one of the most dynamic decades in the history of theology the name of Harvey Cox has constantly appeared. It would be enough for a theologian to have made a substantial contribution to one development within the period, but Cox has been at the centre of several different movements, not all of them mutually compatible. The history of his own progress during the eight years from 1965 is an interesting commentary also on what has been happening to theology in the period, more particularly the status of religion in Europe and North America.

Cox suddenly emerged on the theological scene in 1965 with his bestseller The Secular City. It may be seen as an appropriation of the work of the later Bonhoeffer. He spent 1962 in Berlin, participated in the Marxist-Christian dialogue of the time and was much influenced by Bonhoeffer’s idea of ‘religionless Christianity’. Perhaps Marx had been right and religion should be superceded. On his return to America he wrote The Secular City. ‘Much of that book represents my attempt to do for the American scene what Bonhoeffer had done for his’. Whether or not Bonhoeffer knew what he meant in writing of religionless Christianity we may doubt if he would have recognised Cox’s book as a continuation of the same theme. The link is rather with Bonhoeffer’s theme of ‘world come of age’. Bonhoeffer was the first Protestant theologian of standing for a generation who dared to put in a good word for the secular world. Under the influence of Barth the secular world was constantly condemned for Promethean tendencies. The enemy of the Nazis, the prisoner of the Gestapo was under no illusions of the reality of evil in the world, but he could see also the strength and achievement of that world.
Law and Liberty, Church and Gospel
Authors: Moiser Jeremy
Published: July 2007

The Problem

It is not difficult to show from the New Testament that dialogue is built into the structures of the Christian community. Ep. 4:11-16, for example, ‘proves that in the New Testament there is no opposition between ministerial authority and an emancipated laity. Rather the relation between the two is the fact that the first gives rise to the second.’ Other texts (for example, Rm. 1 :12; 2 Co. 1 :24; 1 Pt. 5 :3) show that the apostles’ authority over the local communities was not all one way: the latter had something to give the apostles. The same conclusion follows, too, from the fact that the Word of God has been committed to the whole community. As Augustine once said, God speaks to every member of the Church ‘from the bishops right down to the last of the faithful’. There is thus a pooling of experience, a fruitful interchange of opinion.

Now there is a sense in which this dialogue in the Church between ministers and laity takes the form of preaching on one side and obedience on the other. The official proclamation of the Gospel in the community provokes a response which Paul calls ‘the obedience of faith’ (Rm. 1 :5; 16:26) and Peter ‘the obedience of truth’ (1 Pt. 1 :22), so that to genuine exposition of the Gospel message the people respond by accepting the Word in faith. However, no human dialogue can be totally active on one side and totally passive on the other. Every form of communication involves a giving and a receiving on both sides if it is not to degenerate into monologue and silence.
Marriage: A Sign of the Kingdom
Authors: Bishop Jordan
Published: July 2007

As the spirit of the age proclaims a new freedom from the traditional sexual ethic, discussion about marriage in the church today runs the risk of becoming bogged down in what are in one sense peripheral issues. Marriage is seen as an institutionalisation of eros, as the expression of a sexual ethic, and the question of any specifically Christian meaning of marriage is lost in ethical discussion.

This is not to imply that the ethical dimension is unimportant; but it is not the only dimension to be considered. The revolt against the late medieval and modern tradition, with its attendant rigidity, should not be allowed to obscure the search for a theology of marriage as a sign of the Kingdom, as a sacrament.

This has been tied to a hard line on the question of divorce and remarriage, to a doctrine of indissolubility that has been seriously questioned in recent years. Even more common perhaps is a pastoral praxis that, while freeing people from the more oppressive features of the old ideology, may also reduce the discussion of marriage as a sacrament to the status of a non-question. In justice it should be pointed out that the defence of an absolute indissolubility has been driven back to the question of sacramentality. In the practice of the modem church, as expressed in the Roman Curia, non-sacramental marriages are not indissoluble. Nor in fact are all sacramental ones; the maze of technicalities involved in this practice often defies the comprehension of the layman.

Consideration of marriage as a sacrament often appears indissolubly linked to this world of the canonists, to a legal structure that is more easily bypassed than challenged. At the same time, questions of sexual ethics retain their relevance against the background of the new praxis as they did against that of the old.
The Black Friar and the Catechism: A question of words and meaning
Authors: Williams Michael E.
Published: July 2007

At the time of the Reformation the catechism began to assume a new importance. The rapid diffusion of printed works coincided with the spread of new reforming ideas. Luther had a catechism printed in 1529. This was followed by a Catholic catechism published at Augsburg in 1530. Most of the leading reformers produced similar manuals and Peter Canisius and John of Avila were in the field before the Catechism of the Council of Trent. But catechisms can tell us more than the way in which Protestant differed from Catholic. Not all correligionists agreed about the relative importance of doctrines nor indeed about method. We are reminded of this by the appearance of a new edition of the ‘Commentaries on the Christian Catechism’ by Archbishop Carranza. This work was first published in Antwerp in 1558, put on the Spanish Index of Prohibited Books in 1559 and officially condemned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1576. Four hundred years later in 1972, a new critical edition, with the Imprimatur of the Bishop of Salamanca, was published to commemorate the International Year of the Book.

Bartholomé Carranza, born 1503, was a Dominican of the Province of Castille. He was a consultor to the Inquisition at Valladolid and also censor of books, he attended the first two stages of Trent as one of Charles V’s theologians. At Trent he was a powerful advocate of episcopal residence and his experience at the council gave him first hand contact with religious controversy and the political situation outside Spain.
The Gulag Archipelago: History Betrayed I
Authors: Barker Francis
Published: July 2007

In plotting the artistic course of Alexander Solzhenitsyn the two texts which may be taken as datum points of particular importance are the first short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. Writing previously on Ivan Denisovich I proposed an interpretative model which saw the book’s empirical and ‘valueless’ character as having twofold importance: it represented a clean break with previous official ‘illustrating literature’ and simultaneously reflected central characteristics of Soviet society atomised and depoliticised by the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This duality I saw as a threshold which could pave the way for a new and radical, analytic, Soviet literature and yet could also remain tied to an empirical and static reportage of phenomena subsumed under a structure of concepts constituted of abstract, superhistorical, and in the end desperately reactionary values. It is this latter possibility, the rehearsal of the terrible facts of Soviet history organised in the service of a retrogressive ideology, that is realised in The Gulag Archipelago.

The book appears to be a history of the repressive apparatus and of ‘that amazing country of Gulag’, but most editions of it (although not the English language version) are subtitled ‘An experiment in artistic investigation’ which has, as I shall show, a quite different and less authoritative epistemological status. It extensively and repetitively catalogues the entire repertoire of the Stalinist atrocities from the moment of arbitrary arrest, through the process of interrogation, mental and physical torture, to trial or extra-judicial sentencing; it recounts the intermediate stays in the transit prisons, the MVD internal prisons and the ‘boxes’ in which prisoners en route were kept at railway stations.
Recent writings on the Miracles
Authors: Maher Michael
Published: July 2007

Any study of any aspect of the life of the historical Jesus is complicated because of the fact that the gospel accounts of his ministry are interpretations and applications of what he did and said rather than straightforward accounts of his life and activity. Add to this the fact that many Christians today seriously question the possibility of miracles and either dismiss them as fables or explain them as the result of Jesus’ extraordinary psychic gifts, and one becomes aware of the difficulty and delicacy of the task of drawing any conclusions about the miracles, about their historicity, and about their place in modern Christianity. Yet the complexity and sensitivity of the topic has not daunted the exegetes, and recent years have given us a constant flow of books and articles on the miracles. The aim of the present essay is not to attempt the impossible task of reviewing this immense body of literature, but to draw attention to some approaches and trends in modem miracle studies and to examine at some length a few of the more recent books. We will pay special attention to the historical questions raised by the miracle stories, and we treat only of the synoptic miracles, omitting those of John which give rise to somewhat different problems.

One of the striking things about the works of recent writers on the miracles is the lessening of emphasis on the apologetic value of the mighty deeds of Jesus. Not that these writers would deny the teaching of Vatican I that the miracles are most sure signs of divine revelation (cf DS 3009). Nor would they despise the assertion of Vatican II that ‘the miracles of Jesus also confirm that the kingdom has arrived on earth’ (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church no. 5). But they do not look upon the miracles as events praeter, extra, or contra naturam which prove the divinity of Jesus and the validity of his claim.
The Passing of the ‘Simple Faithful’
Authors: Archer Antony
Published: July 2007

The Catholic Church is the only Church in England to have had in recent times any substantial following among working class people. Now, as the Church loses this following, it is worth asking what exactly the attraction was. Evidently at one time working class people found something in the Church, and now they do not.

For all practical purposes the Catholicism we have now dates from the later half of the nineteenth century. The situation at the time is well known. There were a few, mostly well off ‘old’ Catholics, some pockets of the country where Catholicism had never entirely disappeared, a trickle of converts and the vast number of Irish immigrants working in the new industrial centres. A kind of Catholicism prevailed that found its inspiration in the Counter-Reformation. In Ireland it had been imposed by the Irish hierarchy in the power vacuum which followed the loosing of the English hold on what had not been destroyed of Irish Catholicism. In England it had been adopted after the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850.

Certainly there were objections to this kind of Catholicism. The ‘old’ Catholics grumbled at the rococo devotions introduced by Italianate converts and joined their bishops in resisting the ultramontane extravagances of Manning and his friends. To the Irish immigrants, however, ‘Counter-Reformation’ Catholicism had from the beginning a great deal to offer.

It is not just that Catholicism was ‘their’ religion, something the English had tried, but failed, to crush. Counter-Reformation Catholicism had the added attraction of its essentially alien nature.
The Gulag Archipelago: History Betrayed II
Authors: Barker Francis
Published: July 2007

Both the technological and the organic in Solzhenitsyn’s organising imagery seem to propose structures and processes independent of human agency or control; and for Solzhenitsyn’s idea of history, control is a crucial question. The role of the individual within history, the extent to which he can be held responsible or can change his situation, is left unexplained. The imagery of the Great Machine perhaps presupposes a Great Mechanic who originally constructed the device, and indeed when Solzhenitsyn’s technocratic ideology issues into prescriptive injunctions its very substance is a belief in an individual or collective elite who should run society and its institutions; but the technological and structural images are not used in this way. Although one of the intentions of The Gulag Archipelago is to demonstrate a continuity between Lenin and Stalin, to prove the former an architect of later repression, the emphasis in the technological images of history is upon mechanical operations which take place over against the activity of individuals, including that of those people who apparently administer them. Yet the individual is for Solzhenitsyn the absolute subject of history:

The Universe has as many different centres as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a centre of the Universe . . . (G.A., p. 3).

The individual is consequently expected to have moral responsibility and, in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase, ‘civil valour’ (G.A., p. 462), a concept upon which he puts much emphasis although it is ill-defined. He assigns to each of the Russian people some share in blame for allowing the Stalinist crimes to take place.
For want of Women's Lib: Sex, Religion and Politics under the Catholic Monarchy
Authors: Cueto Ronald
Published: July 2007

Melveena McKendrick, in a work recently published on Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age, makes the point that there was during this period of the 16th and 17th centuries no change in the social position of the vast majority of women, that is, those of the rural peasantry, and she then adds:

‘To the remainder of Spanish women, four main courses were open. They could join the ranks of the mujeres de mala vida somewhere in the hierarchy from courtesan to common prostitute. They could enter a convent. They could enter into service as a dueña or a lady-in-waiting. Or they could remain with their families, marrying or not as inclination or opportunity decided. Those who embarked on this last course concern us most, for the life of the prostitute and the nun, by the nature of their calling, ran along fixed and predictable lines . .

Initially, I found the throw-away line about the prostitute and the nun quietly amusing, or rather, amusingly sardonic in a low pitch way. The juxtaposition seemed to be sufficiently slightly outrageous to underscore the delicate irony of the order of presentation—prostitute first, nun second, capping it all with the application of the term calling to both. Donnish humour at its best? But, on second thoughts, its clever, quiet and telling effectiveness seemed to me to betray a very bourgeois understanding or misunderstanding of the nature of professional sex, politics and religion. I don’t think Buñuel, Genet or Pasolini would have tried to be so neatly clever about such vital things as prostitution and the religious life. You see, deep down, what is wrong is not the question of coupling the two and regarding them both as vocations, the real trouble is to think for one moment that the lives of these practitioners of the most ancient of female professions run along fixed and prescribed lines. But let’s try and put the question into some sort of perspective.
Can a Christian be a Marxist
Authors: Turner Denys
Published: July 2007

In this paper I defend a ‘strong compatibility’ thesis. According to this thesis Marxism is not only not inconsistent with Christianity; Christianity is compatible only with Marxism. I further argue that for Marxists to accept this proposition on the grounds that they have no reason to object to the personal combination of Marxism and Christianity is to miss the point both of Christianity and of their own Marxism. This concession is, from the point of view of the Marxist, quite unprincipled. It is to misconstrue both the true nature of the Marxist critique of religion and the true nature of the religion of which Marxism is the critique. But more about this in due course.

First, though, what sort of reasons are invoked against the ‘compatibility’ thesis? They seem to fall, generally, into two categories. First, there are objections to the Christian belief system itself. Secondly, there are objections to the social and historical role of the set of institutions which has espoused that belief-system.

To the belief-system of Christianity on almost any account of what it maintains, defenders of the incompatibility thesis have a form of objection which I shall call ‘ontological’. This objection, taken on its own is, it seems to me, both the most widely canvassed and the weakest. It is roughly this : Christians believe that the universe is peopled with entities and agencies and activities and events—a God, an act of creation, an act of redemption, souls, grace, post-mortem survival and all the rest—all of which the Marxist is, as a Marxist, committed to the denial of. Christians are, thus, ontologically theists, spiritualists and mentalists; Marxists, on the other hand are ontologically materialists. Since ontological immaterialism and ontological materialism cannot both be true, one cannot consistently hold both.
Kingdom Without End: A Note on Marcellus of Ancyra
Authors: Swanston Hamish F G
Published: July 2007

There is a suggestion in the fourth gospel that the saving lordship of Christ is finally manifest at his lifting up on the cross (cf. John 3.14, 8.28 and 13.32). Paul, in a letter to the Corinthian Church (cf. I Cor. 15.12 ff), proposed the anticipation of the general resurrection in the resurrection of Christ as the climactic moment of Christian belief. The church at Ephesus sang a hymn which celebrated the ascension as the triumphant manifestation of the Christian mystery (cf. I Timothy 3.16). The Apostles’ Creed, following the pattern of the old Roman Creed states that Christ’s glory is most tellingly declared at his return to judge the living and the dead. The credal affirmation here has set a number of theologians considering just how the eschatological judgement is related to the immediate judgement of human beings at their deaths. A deal of attention has been given to relating the future coming of the Son of Man ‘on clouds of glory’ to the promise ‘this day you shall be with me in Paradise’ (Lk. 23.43).

There has, however, been rather less modern discussion of how the belief, expressed in the Constantinopolitan-Nicene Creed, of Christ coming into a kingdom (or a reign) ‘without end’, is to be reconciled with Paul’s eschatological scenario of the Son being at the end subject ‘to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all’ (I Cor. 15.28). Is there, then, one kingdom for the Father and another for the Son? ‘By no means’.
Moral Weakness, Self‐Deception and Self‐Knowledge
Authors: Turner Denys
Published: July 2007

In this paper I speculate about the idea of personal moral discovery. These speculations occur, however, only at the end, for my object is to present genuine, not rhetorical, questions. The substance of this paper concerns moral weakness and self-deception. These topics are relevant because the analyses of moral weakness and of self-deception throw light, in different ways, on what is meant by and also on what obstacles there are to the discovery for oneself of a moral point of view.

Briefly the light they throw is this: self-deception is one sort of obstacle to self-knowledge. Insofar, then, as discovering a personal morality is the process of discovering something about oneself—and I merely assert for the moment that it is in part this—self-deception is one kind of obstacle to personal moral discovery. It may follow from this that the contrary process of detecting one’s own self-deceptions is one form of self-discovery which is relevant to moral discovery. If so, it will be important to be clear about how we do discover that we have been deceiving ourselves. I try to solve some of the difficulties there are about how this self-detection occurs in the second part of this paper.

The relevance of moral weakness to the topic of self-discovery is more complex. Again briefly, there are two main assertions which I make. The first is that any self-ascription of moral weakness is problematic. This is to say that the subjective evidence immediately available to the moral agent himself on any putative occasion of moral weakness is never sufficient evidence that he was, genuinely, morally weak on that occasion. We do not know, in other words, just from what is going on in our minds at the time, that our failure to act as we think we ought to be acting is moral weakness rather than something else.
Objections to Lonergan's Method
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Looking at Lonergan’s Method is a collection of thirteen papers issuing from a conference held at Maynooth in the spring of 1973 at which scholars from differing traditions and disciplines gathered to assess the significance of the recent work of Bernard Lonergan.

These are not the papers written for the meeting; they represent the authors’ reflections after it, in the light of the discussions that took place. Perhaps the momentum for the book was the convergence of fundamental doubts about the viability of Lonergan’s method. At any rate, for all the respect and gratitude that some of the Catholic contributors voice for what Lonergan has done over the years to loosen the hold of a certain way of doing theology, it is very striking that all but one or two of these papers make what seem such irreparably damaging criticisms of his recent work that it becomes very difficut to regard it any longer as a promising trail in the reconstruction of Catholic theology which is now so urgent a task. The book thus marks a watershed in the history of Lonergan congresses.

That Bernard Lonergan is the only figure in the English-speaking world whose achievement in Catholic theology ranks, in influence and reputation, with that of the leading theologians of our time, cannot be disputed. The years he spent lecturing at the Gregorian University in Rome (1953-1965) afforded him a unique opportunity to reach the minds of a whole generation of candidates for the priesthood—either directly or through the countless future seminary professors whom he must have taught (he sometimes had classes of 650 students!).
Theology and Class
Authors: Macpherson Duncan
Published: July 2007

‘In a higher world it may be otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to perfect is to change often’.

‘The history of all existing society is the history of class struggles’.

The first of these quotations was written by Newman in 1845 in his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The second was written by Marx and Engels three years later in The Communist Manifesto.

Newman’s essay can be seen as the beginning of a genuine sense of history in the world of Catholic Theology. The Communist Manifesto can be seen as having a similar role for the history of ideas. Catholic Theology could never be the same again after Newman’s essay and secular history could never be the same again after the Communist Manifesto.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore more than a few of the implications of the Marxist view of history as class struggle for Newman’s view of doctrinal development. I am not aware that anyone has ever given a Marxist analysis of Newman’s famous essay. There are, however, a number of Marxist treatments of the history of the Church and of Christian doctrine—notably by Engels and Karl Kautsky. These treatments are all written from the point of view of a rejection of belief, both in God and in any meaningful degree of historical certainty about the existence of Jesus Christ.

The reasons for Marxist atheism are well known and can be found in the philosophical background of the young Marx. The reasons for the extreme scepticism over New Testament origins can be traced to early nineteenth century biblical criticism and to the work of the bosom friend of the young Marx at Berlin in the 1830s, Bruno Bauer.
The Contribution of Sociology to the Catholic Church
Authors: Hornsby‐Smith Michael , Dann Graham
Published: July 2007

Attitudes towards sociology displayed by some leading authorities in the Catholic church today are, to put it mildly, ambivalent. They vary from suspicion and sometimes overt hostility to feelings of relative pleasure depending on whether or not the findings of sociological research can be used to support their pastoral intuitions. Pope Paul, for instance, has been reported as claiming that the turbulence and dissent in the Roman Catholic church today ‘tends to be produced with a new method, that of the sociological survey’. At the same time that he made this remark he was sponsoring one of the largest socio-religious surveys to date within his own diocese of Rome. In England, in his address to the Church Leaders’ Conference in 1972, Cardinal Heenan viewed with alarm the number of university students now opting for courses in sociology and what he saw as the almost certain consequence of requests for fresh surveys. He continued by doubting the value in planning future pastoral strategy of such surveys as that recently completed for the Church in West Germany. In the same year he was accepting one of the ‘findings’ of an extremely unrepresentative survey carried out by the Laity Commission on behalf of the hierarchy, that priests working in parishes should make themselves more available to their parishioners. Yet he was not reported as welcoming another ‘finding’ in the same survey that the laity accepted the principle of optional celibacy for priests. Thus it would appear that some church leaders are selective in their acceptance of sociological findings.

We would now like to suggest there are at least four reasons for the suspicion of sociology. In the first place it is quite possible that sociology is connected in the minds of many with revolutionary social change. The student unrest of the late 1960s which was thought to be seeking such change occurred in universities such as Berkeley, Nanterre and tlw London School of Economics, all with strong faculties of sociology.