bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Radical Gap
Authors: Haughton Rosemary
Published: July 2007

In the April issue of New Blackfriars, Terry Eagleton wrote a fair and interesting review-article on my book On Trying to be Human. This article is a comment on certain questions that arise out of the review. They are quesdons about politics and philosophy and theology, but what it is really about is the irreducible gap in human awareness of life, the edges of which my book was clumsily exploring, and the reality of which gap the reviewer denies. I hope to throw some light on what it is that makes for growth in a society or in an individual.

On Trying to be Human is a mixed book with some extremely turgid passages. Reading it over now, I find much of it unnecessarily complex and lengthy. On the other hand several people, whose scholarship and intelligence is unquestioned, have found it illuminating, and said so. The book was written in an attempt to use Christian ideas as a tool for interpreting the common experience of human life, without calling on support from faith or the idea of revelation. (This was what made some reviewers – Christian and non-Christian — wonder if I were really a Christian at all. As a matter of fact I scarcely was, when I wrote it.) Its starting point was that of many of those who are vaguely called ‘humanist’, and whose prevailing mood is a pessimism which is the only realism they feel is justified by the facts. It was a response to a view of life which can accept nothing but verifiable fact and refuses even to see connections between facts,
The Easter Egg
Authors: Moore Sebastian
Published: July 2007

I love man. He is wild and lost and searching, searching. O God how he searches. He searches for the woman that will understand him. He searches for the more-than-woman that will understand the very thing in man that woman never understands, his passion for the absolute. He desires to be woman as well as man in his search: desires a maturity in his metaphysical passion whereby it will be able to shed that adolescence that seems to be built right into it. The most precious thing in man, the spark, seems fated to intellectualize the world, so that out of the live fire of his mind he peoples the world with immutable essences, so that he loses himself, his fire, transmuting it into dead cool planets of conceptual thought. And the concepts once formed have a terrifyingly long life. They continue to encircle him and constitute his mental universe long after big changes in human living have rendered them useless. He has to project himself all around, because he cannot believe in himself, cannot come to himself. I love him as he circles round and round the agony and promise of himself that he cannot enter; as a woman loves the man whom love has made talkative, parading before her his achievements because he cannot expose himself. And she waits for the moment of tears, of dissolution, of the truth of man. I love this conscious treasure that dare not own the treasure of consciousness.
The Language of Christian Experience
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

‘The proposition that is closest to the very centre of our common faith is that he who loses his life shall save it. It applies not only to the material dispositions of our egoism, but to the spiritual universe we construct to secure ourselves against uncertainty.’ I am an inveterate optimist, and one of my current optimisms is the thought that, just because it is now being forced to embrace the truth of that proposition, English Catholicism may be on the verge of an exhilarating breakthrough. We English catholics are apt to envy more favoured countries than our own, where bishops, priests and people were better prepared for that burgeoning of new life in the Church to which the Vatican Council stands as mid-wife. In many places ecclesiastical structures were already more flexible, liturgical and ecumenical sensitivity was already awakened, pastoral practice was less heavily complacent. And yet—is there not a danger (I am ridiculously overgeneralizing in order to try to focus the point I want to make) that, because of these things, the aggiornamento in such countries might entail little more than an envigorating rearrangement of the ecclesiastical furniture? In our own country, where structures were so rigid, where clergy and devout laity tended to live (with the ‘catholic half’ of their minds) in unruffled isolation from so many of the real issues that rack humanity and the Church of Christ, where theology hardly existed until recently, where ‘pastorale’ is significantly untranslatable, where liturgical immobility made Pius XII’s application of the brakes in 1958 look like dangerous novelty—in this country we are certain to be spared a superficial renewal.
The Roots of Radicalism
Authors: Lefebure Pascal
Published: July 2007

Terry Eagleton’s article, The Limits of Liberalism, in the April number of New Blackfriars is as important as it is absorbing. In it he acknowledges that Mrs Rosemary’s Haughton’s book, On Trying to be Human, represents ‘the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition—the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships’ (p. 353), and he seeks to bring it into contact with another ‘important contemporary Christian tradition’, the radical one, which has been articulating itself in a series of articles in New Blackfriars but which was risking becoming closed in on itself. More significantly still it promises to bring the debate between these two traditions, the liberal and the radical, to issue beyond the rhetoric of mere labelling, so enabling and compelling us to choose between them. The importance of the article to all those engaged in the debate and concerned with the exigencies of contemporary Christian commitment is therefore clear.

Terry Eagleton’s contention is that Mrs Haughton’s affirmation and exploration of ‘the meaning of being human for a Christian’ is gravely deficient in that it systematically excludes ‘wider (and arguably deeper) connections of this immediate focus’ (p. 353). He devotes the bulk of his article to criticizing Mrs Haughton for attributing a distorted primacy to the spirit, the inward, the personal, with a consequential devaluation of the flesh, the external, the social and the political, and this on account of a misconception of the relationship between the two.
Sex and Nonsense
Authors: Marshall Patricia
Published: July 2007

The present generation of parents and other educators faces a particular problem: having been brought up for the most part with little or no sex instruction, having been protected to some extent by the pressures of social convention, they find themselves faced by a generation of young men and women who talk freely about sex, who say openly that they are not prepared to accept the traditional teaching of the Churches with regard to sexual behaviour and for whom the fear of an illegitimate pregnancy is no longer the deterrent to fornication that it may have been in the past. To make matters even more perplexing, the young men have long hair which used to be thought a symbol of homosexuality and the young women wear mini-skirts which is confusing for a generation of men accustomed to thinking of the exposed female thigh as a non-verbal communication of a specific kind. What are they to do ? Judging by the number of books currently flooding the market, at least part of the answer seems to be ‘read a book about sex’ for, with no statistical evidence, I’d be prepared to guess that it is this generation rather than the one at risk that is doing most of the reading—perhaps the others are too busy with the field work.

The first of these three paperbacks, Sense and Nonsense about Sex, purports to be written for teenagers, and more specifically appears to be directed to Protestant teenagers in youth clubs, but I find it hard to imagine any young man or woman actually reading it.
Church, State and The Vietnam War
Authors: Linden Ian
Published: July 2007

‘Our bishops have warned us: “There is a grave danger that the circumstances of the present war may, in time, diminish our moral sensitivity to its evils”. We fear that this very danger has become actualized. We face a severe crisis of conscience within our Catholic community that arises from the incongruity between the moral principles enunciated by the Church and the uncritical support of this war by so many Catholics’: from the Catholic Committee on Vietnam—Open letter to the clergy and laity of the United States.

Since the beginning of 1965, the Committee of Clergy and Laymen concerned about Vietnam, comprising distinguished figures such as Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, John C. Bennett, President of the Union Theological Seminary, Martin Luther King, Reinhold Niebuhr, together with Protestant bishops and many prominent rabbis, has maintained constant moderate pressure on the administration to bring about a non-military solution to the Vietnam conflict. Although it was reported in Herder Correspondence for September/October 1966 that Cardinal Cushing was on the committee, this report proved to be a misunderstanding caused by a priest from the Boston Diocese who did support the concern. None of the Catholic Hierarchy has supported the committee, though two of the bishops have found themselves able to give private help and encouragement. There has been a number of reports of attempts at dissuading clergy from associating themselves with public protests organized by the group.
The Rule of Saint Freud
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

The monk pointed his pistol. ‘As far as I am concerned, the community no longer exists. The land is mine. I suggest you get out— and quick!’ The two hired thugs made it clear the threat was a real one. Reluctantly, the little group of Benedictine postulants, and their superior, packed up their few things and trudged off into the heat and dust of a Mexican afternoon. So ended the first period of one of the most interesting experiments in the monastic life in this century.

The superior was, it turned out, a man of rare courage. Born in Lille in 1912, and educated ih Louvain, Dom Grégoire Lemercier spent seven years at the abbey of Mont-César before accepting the invitation of a Mexican colleague to accompany him and another monk, a Belgian, to found a monastery in Mexico. The project was delayed by the outbreak of war, during which Lemercier served as a chaplain and was taken prisoner. When he was released he left for the United States, and joined his two companions at their abbey of Monte Cassino in the north of Mexico in 1944. The foundation was a double failure: the Belgian threw up his vocation and got married, and the Mexican apostatized and at the end of 1949 took over the monastery by armed force. Two years later, little daunted by this experience, Dom Grégoire founded another monastery, Santa Maria de la Resurrección, a few miles from Cuernavaca, following the strict Benedictine observance.
A West Indian Looks at Race Relations
Authors: Pitt David
Published: July 2007

There is a great deal of discrimination in Britain against immigrants, and it is essentially discrimination based on colour. Discrimination must not be confused with prejudice. Prejudice is an attitude of mind. Discrimination consists in giving expression to our prejudices by positive action; in this case by excluding one person from some benefit or opportunity, and not taking the same action against another person with the same qualifications.

I have always held that discrimination, from which the native- born coloured suffers as much as any coloured immigrant, was based on colour, and this has been confirmed by the P.E.P. report. In carrying out their survey P.E.P. used an English person, a West Indian, an Indian, a Pakistani, a Hungarian and a Cypriot. If you accept the reaction to the English person as the norm, the findings were quite clear. For example, on one occasion forty places were tested for jobs. The Englishman was offered thirty jobs, the Hungarian twenty-seven, and the West Indian three. This shows the extent to which discrimination is based on colour. It is a fallacy to think that, as most coloured people are newcomers, discrimination will cease, since after a generation or two they will be absorbed. It is much more likely that discrimination will have become greater and segregation will have begun to be confirmed. The P.E.P. report has disclosed that people who have skills which they obtained in this country suffer greater discrimination than others; in fact 70 per cent of the coloured people who have British qualifications suffer from discrimination.
The Fire This Time
Authors: Power Jonathan
Published: July 2007

In 1960 one person in ten in the United States was non-white. Today it is one in nine. By the end of the decade it will be one in eight. Of persons under fourteen today it is one in seven. Of persons under the age of one it is one in six.

The American race problem is too large to be swept under the carpet. In fact it is of such a size as to influence the whole course of world politics: for if one thing is clear in this turbulent world it is that the major source of conflict of the latter half of this century will be the race/poverty problem and that America will, in one way or another, be at the hub of it.

Already in America the situation is being polarized to the extent where it is becoming more and more rare for white and black people to do anything together. This was my conclusion after two years in the U.S.: first in the liberal, nearly all white, peaceful university town of Madison, Wisconsin, and secondly in the West Side ghetto of Chicago where no other white people lived and where the crime rate was one of the highest in the country. And since leaving America twelve months ago I have seen the process of polarization accelerate at an astonishing rate. All my white and Negro friends agree that they see no alternative in sight to an escalating number of major explosions that will make Newark and Detroit look like tea-parties.
Pigmentation and Christian Morals
Authors: Cameron J. M.
Published: July 2007

Every man of sense who has had to fill up a form in which there is a space labelled ‘race’ must have been tempted to write down ‘human’. That ‘Caucasian’ (an echo of a long obsolete ethnological theory) or ‘Negro’ should be required answers has profound moral and political significance in our time. It represents the enchantment of the intellect by a myth comparable in its power and in its forbidding consequences to the myth of antisemitism. The follies and cruelties that go with this enchantment are well known and need not be listed. We may well suspect that the spell that binds so many cannot be broken by argument, that time spent in examining the sophistries of racialist theory (resting for the most part on a radical confusion of phenotype with genotype) is time wasted. But Christians at least have a duty to examine their consciences and their presuppositions, both in order to correct their attitudes and in order to know how to witness to the truth in the world of our day.

What we do in unavoidable ignorance of how things are may be excusable or perhaps meritorious, even in those cases where a knowledge of how things are would have prompted us to quite other courses.
Language and Community
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The intention of this paper is to test the hunch that there must be some correlation between theory of language and theory of community. Why this seems worth doing should come out in the course of the paper. It should be said that it was meant to fit between a paper by Raymond Williams and one by David Cooper, in a symposium on the theoretical basis of a ‘common culture’.

Raymond Williams writes: ‘We live in almost overwhelming danger, at a peak of our apparent control. We react to the danger by attempting to take control, yet still we have to unlearn, as the price of survival, the inherent dominative mode’ (Culture and Society 1780-1950, Penguin edition, p. 322).

We have to unlearn the dominative mode in social relationship. That programme is part of a complex argument, the whole of which I have no intention of spelling out here, in my crude orthography. But the point of the case is that the line of writers and thinkers studied in Williams’ book, the tradition he presents there, from Burke and Cobbett down to George Orwell, is a tradition of criticism of, and protest against, the official ideology and the prevalent consciousness of our society: ‘The development of the idea of culture has, throughout, been a criticism of what has been called the bourgeois idea of society. The contributors to its meaning have started from widely different positions, and have reached widely various attachments and loyalties.
Priesthood and Ministry
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

Whatever may have been the case at other epochs of the history of the Church, it is clear that today treatments of confined topics of theology which can afford to take for granted theology and Christianity as a whole are no longer possible. This is true in a special way of the topic which concerns us here, the theology of the priesthood and the ministry, since we have to examine an essential element in the structure or form of Christianity itself, and since we are making this examination not as detached observers but as people who are considering the fundamental sense of our own lives.

Consequently it seems suitable to make explicit two presuppositions of what is to be said later. Firstly, Christianity is real. That is to say, it is real not only with the kind of reality which will allow it to be included among other realities in accordance with a scale of reality already set up apart from Christianity itself. Christianity is real in the sense that its reality modifies the scale of reality itself. Whether we say that Christianity is a new reality in a world considered as being without it (say, as being prior to it, or posterior to it, hostile or neutral to it), or whether we say that Christianity has always been and still is ‘anonymously’ present in the world (as, say, prefigured in a total history of humanity within the eternal design of God), we must, in terms of Christianity itself, claim that Christianity is at the very least a dimension of reality which needs explicitly to be taken into account if the ontological scale which we use to assess it and indeed anything else is to function as a true criterion of the real.
Marxism and Christianity
Authors: Hamer Colin
Published: July 2007

As a result of an educational system no longer the prerogative of the clergy, a multiplication of fields of study, a great diffusion of culture, improved communications, and more rapid social transformations, we live in an age in which man is more ready to criticize and to challenge standards hitherto accepted. Individual persons, political institutions, schools of artistic style, humanist ethical movements, racial and national groups, women’s and youth organizations, economic blocs—all are more conscious of their differentiations within a highly complex society and demand that their freedom and autonomy be recognized, refusing to be dictated to by religious leaders or state authority. The accelerated pace of change in modern life, the movement of populations to the towns, their lack of social roots or stability, overt and subconscious advertising, heavy work, group pressure, mechanical and psychological noise, the shock to routine thinking consequent upon emigration deprive man of the solitude and peace needed for constructive thinking, while technological advance makes man seem less in need of God’s help for his daily bread, and so more ready to pick holes in traditional religion, amidst the heightened fascination and lure of the world.

The present religious choice is not simply between Catholicism and Protestantism, nor between Christianity and Natural Religion. It is a choice for or against God. Open, popular, organized and widespread, atheism is no longer hidden and exceptional, but, buttressed by polity and culture, constitutes the world’s most urgent problem.
Gospel and Revolution
Authors:   16 Bishops of the 3rd World
Published: July 2007

As bishops of some of the peoples who are striving to develop, we endorse the anxious appeal of Pope Paul VI in his letter ‘Populorum progressio’, so as to define their duties for our priests and faithful, and to send words of encouragement to all our brothers in the Third World.

As they are in this Third World, our Churches are caught up in a confrontation no longer simply of East and West, but of three great groups: the western powers which grew rich in the last century, the two Communist countries that have also become great powers, and finally the Third World, still seeking an escape from the domination of the great powers, and the freedom to develop in their own way. Within even the developed countries there are still classes, races and peoples that have not yet received their rights to a full human life. An irresistible urge is working these poorer elements towards their betterment by liberating them from all oppressive forces. Although most countries may have gained their political freedom, economic freedom is still a rarity. Few also are countries where social equality prevails, an essential condition of true brotherhood, for peace cannot exist without justice. The peoples of the Third World are the proletariat of existing humanity, exploited by the great, their very survival threatened by ones who, because they are stronger, arrogate to themselves the sole right to judge and police peoples less rich in material terms. In fact our peoples are no less wise or just than the great powers.
Change and Revaluation in The Bible
Authors: Wansbrough Henry
Published: July 2007

It was often said of good Pope John that in summoning the Council he unleashed stronger forces than he had bargained for; there were suggestions that at the end he felt these forces to be beyond his control and overpowering him. There is sometimes a naive enthusiasm in those who are most eager for renewal which blinds them to the problems raised by this renewal. One sphere in which the problems are acute and puzzling is that of the biblical renewal. The problems centre round the paradox which is overstated by the often-heard cry: ‘How is it that we are encouraged to read the Bible more and more, while at the same time we are told that less and less of it is true?’ The paradox is overstated in this form, for what we are told is not that less and less of the Bible is true, but that less and less of it is to be taken at its face value, that less and less of it can be understood without considerable training, that not all of it is of equal importance, some passages or even whole books being of very peripheral value for the Christian life, while others teach some idea which is crucial amid a waste of folklore or rabbinic legalism. The dilemma is at its most puzzling at two moments, readings in the Mass and private reading of the scriptures.

It is commonplace that the world of the Old Testament was very different from ours, that their forms of expression are very different from the ones we use today.
Persons and Metaphysic
Authors: Moore Sebastian
Published: July 2007

‘The thinking, presenting subject—there is no such thing. ... In an important sense there is no subject. . . . There is (therefore) really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk non-psychologically of the I. The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the “world is my world”. The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body, or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world.’ Wittgenstein, Tractus 5.631-5.641.

One may disagree with this. But it gives the mind that jolt which is absolutely needed before we can think truthfully about ourselves and our world. Only genius, with its preternatural command of words, can give this jolt, can really make us see.

The study of man has made unprecedented advances in the recent centuries. And all would agree that the major advance has consisted in a new emphasis on the concrete. We are no longer content to define man—as rational animal, say: we seek to know how he ticks, what goes on in him. The emphasis is on experience.

But the very placing of this emphasis makes us forget a very simple fact: that all experience is somebody's experience. In order to keep open to the puzzling nature of this fact, ask: what can be meant by attributing ‘experience’ to ‘somebody’? What sort of ownership is referred to?
Chairman Mao and the Parish Revolution
Authors: Hunter Deirdre
Published: July 2007

‘Eat up your dinner’, my mother used to say. ‘Think of the starving millions in China.’

That was before 1949. When 1949 came round, no one bothered to tell me what had happened. The ploy simply changed to ‘Think of the starving millions in India’.

Even at that age I knew there was something funny about this argument. Whether I ate my dinner or not, the starving millions weren’t going to get a whiff of it.

It is interesting, especially after nearly two years in China, to look back and laugh at my mother’s trick. More interesting, though, to realize that the new generation in the West has still not grown out of thinking in my mother’s terms.

‘What is to be done about Vietnam?’ people say, in intervals between working at their meaningless jobs, or keeping up with the Joneses. ‘And what about India?’ And now that the Cultural Revolution is in full swing in China, such people might add ‘And poor China. . .’.

There is no end to the ‘problems’ that confront Western suburban man. He revels in solving (in his head) the population explosion, the bomb, famine and flood, war. It seems to be little more than a game, an entertainment to take his mind off himself, off the apparently insoluble problems of his own society.
South African Impressions: (II) The Ecclesiastical and Religious Scene
Authors: Hill Russell
Published: July 2007

At the end of my previous article I proposed to examine, in this one, whether religion might not be able to offer a therapy for South Africa’s manifold neuroses, which it is beyond the power of politics to provide. The only symptom of neurotic condition which I discussed in that article was colour prejudice. There is another, related, symptom which is if anything more prejudicial to a healthy society, and that is a general devaluation of ‘the liberties of the subject’; at least it is something more disturbing even to a conservative Englishman with a long tradition of civil liberties, free association and freedom of speech in his blood. These excellent microbes seem to have been almost totally extracted from the blood stream of white South Africa; and the fault does not seem to lie simply with the governing Nationalist Party. This Party has simply been much more ruthlessly effective in giving its actual and potential rivals a treatment of repression which it experienced itself from its opponents before it came into power. It has profited by, rather than induced, an endemic lack of concern for individual liberty. It is an ironical situation, and to underline the irony, I would like to quote from the political reminiscences of Dr D. F. Malan, the first Nationalist Prime Minister after the last war.
Catholics and Racial Crisis
Authors: Linden Ian
Published: July 2007

‘I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream. I see an American nightmare.’—Malcolm X.

‘And the white Lt.-Colonel from the civilized USA jumped back, snorted and said: “My good man, where I come from we don’t eat people when we kill them. We’re civilized.” And the chief said, “Well baby, why you kill them?” ‘—Stokely Carmichael.

By Summer the American public will be as accustomed to the idea of racial riots as to a well-advertised eclipse of the sun. The actuality of events, sifted through the mass media into print, polls, radio and television, stays comfortably once removed from the affluent. Most Americans watch the auguries of doom on the TV with the numbing disbelief of a rabbit caught in a truck’s headlights; erudite predictions of urban chaos substitute for immediate reform; election charades are played out with unusually large audience participation, and the administration plead for unity and patriotism. It all seems unreal.

In March while President Johnson played golf in Puerto Rico, conspicuously absent from the communal confiteor of churches and liberal establishment, the public glanced at the findings of his commission on civil disorders. The report, a literary genre popularized by the 1966 McCone Commission report on the Los Angeles riots, told them that there was a racial crisis. In New York it was the time of the interregnum; priests were working feverishly on a policy statement while the laity passively awaited a seventh Irish-American Archbishop to ascend the throne of 451 Madison Avenue.
The Contempt of Ritual. II
Authors: Douglas Mary
Published: July 2007

Ritual is pre-eminently a form of communication. Let us turn therefore to a modern sociologist who conducts research among ourselves into different patterns of communication. Professor Basil Bernstein says that

different speech systems or codes create for their speakers different orders of relevance and relation. The experience of the speakers may then be transformed by what is made significant or relevant by different speech systems. As the child learns his speech, or, in the terms I shall use here, learns specific codes which regulate his verbal acts, he learns the requirements of his social structure. The experience of the child is transformed by the learning generated by his own, apparently voluntary acts of speech. The social structure becomes in this way the sub-stratum of the child’s experience essentially through the manifold consequence of the linguistic process. From this point of view, every time the child speaks or listens, the social structure is reinforced in him and his social identity shaped.

He distinguishes two different types of linguistic codes. One, he calls the elaborated code, in which, as he says, the speaker selects from a wide range of syntactic alternatives, and these are flexibly organized; this speech requires complex planning. In the other, which he calls the restricted code, the speaker draws a much narrower range of syntactic alternatives, and these alternatives are more rigidly organized. The elaborated code is adapted to enable a speaker to make his own intentions explicit. It is adapted to the elucidation of general principles.
Has the Church Opted for Revolution?
Authors: de Broucker José
Published: July 2007

Has the Roman Catholic Church now come round in favour of revolution? It is in South America that the question arises above all. The multiplication of facts and declarations which provoke the question often incline one to give an affirmative answer. In order to see what’s what, it might be useful to review certain recent events that have been particularly noteworthy.

Most recent declarations rest on paragraphs 30 and 31 of Pope Paul Vi’s encyclical Populorum Progressio: ‘3o. There are certainly situations in which injustice cries to heaven. When entire populations, deprived of the necessities of life, live in a dependence that prevents them from exercising any initiative or responsibility, or from making any cultural advance or taking any part in social or political life, the temptation to remove such insults to human dignity by violence is great. 31. We know, however, that revolutionary insurrection—except in the case of manifest and prolonged tyranny that attacks fundamental rights of the person and endangers the common good of the country—engenders new injustices, brings in new imbalances, and involves new ruins. A real evil is not to be combated by a greater misery.’

These two paragraphs have in general been received as a faithful expression of the traditional thought of the Church. The new factor here is therefore not at the level of thought or of expression; it lies in the welcome it has received and in the way in which it has been interpreted at the hands of a Christian public that is as inclined to justify ‘revolutionary insurrection’ now as it was formerly to discourage or condemn it.
All You Need is Love?
Authors: Moonan Lawrence
Published: July 2007

It is embarrassing to utter a screaming banality in public: yet love, in all candour, is what the Catholic Church, to say nothing of the world in general, does desperately need. Think of a Christian. Then of Christians as a group. Busy. Long-suffering. Self-effacing. Can you think of them making little sacrifices for one another? Of course. Or perhaps laying down their lives for their brethren? Yes, again. Some of them at least. But do you think of them unzipped and uninhibited, actually loving each other? Ah, well now. . . . Auch unter ihnen sind Helden; viele von ihnen litten zuviel-: so wollen sie andre leiden machen. Amen, Zarathustra.

A French magazine carried out a survey among its readers (Catholics, nearly all of them) on birth control: What the readers thought or did about it, what they thought the Church in general should do about it. What is to the point here is not that the views expressed showed wide divergence, nor even that they revealed such a mass of human suffering:

‘. . . I would have been completely blind if my husband hadn’t shown great love for me by abstaining from pleasure, when he felt the approach of his sexual emission. That’s what love is, otherwise it’s self-love for the sake of pleasure.’

‘Our young couple have been reading a book, The Joys of Loving, which is far too concerned with sex, then Better Love, which is sheer filth, since they ended up knowing more than their parents did after twenty-seven years of marriage.’
Politics and Theology: Retrospect and Agenda
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The dossier mounts and the effort to think all the relevant material through has become daunting. Though it is only two years since the Slant group brought out Catholics and the Left as their ‘manifesto’, the argument about politics and theology, socialism and the gospel, has opened out in so many significant ways and so much new data has come to hand, that one has the sense (obscure enough, it is true) of being on the verge of some major revaluation of meanings and realignment of forces. But the ‘longer and more complicated pieces of writing’ which Raymond Williams mentioned in his review (New Blackfriars, November 1966) as a desideratum, are for the most part still outstanding. On the other hand, the germane topics are surely emerging. Terry Eagleton has listed some of them (in Slant 17), as part of the best outcome of the Birmingham symposium: how to relate cultural to political analysis; the adequacy of Marxism as a perspective for critique and action; the relation of revolution in the Third World to revolution in the western democracies; the relation of Christian eschatology to Marxist theory of history; and how analysis and critique are to issue out into effective social and political action. While there is no urgency to present a complete bibliography, it seems worth calling to mind the more important items in the file on the Catholic New Left debate, before going on to raise some further problems imposed by the recent publication of the May Day Manifesto 1968.
St Luke and Christian Ideals in an Affluent Society
Authors: Wansbrough Henry
Published: July 2007

The tradition that the third gospel was written by Luke the doctor dies hard. We may realize that the ‘Luke the doctor’ of Colossians 4, 14 is not necessarily the same Luke as the one to whom the gospel is attributed (just as there is no shadow of an indication that the Mark of the second gospel is any of the Marks mentioned in the Acts and the Epistles). We may know that all attempts to show that the author of the third gospel used medical language collapse, simply because there was no such thing as technical medical language in those days. Yet there remains a sympathy with human suffering and appreciation of the many-sidedness of men’s characters, a power to make a penetrating yet kindly assessment which is often —rightly or wrongly—associated with the medical man, the Dr Camerons or even the Dr Findlays of this world. But Luke is no country doctor from the highlands or the valleys, and it is because of this that his special preoccupation with rich and poor is especially significant to Christians of an affluent society brought face to face with poverty.

Luke stands out among the other New Testament writers by a certain grace and dignity. The gospel of Mark, on which a large part of both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels is based, is undisguisedly Kleinliteratur, stories told uncomplicatedly in simple, popular form, without literary pretension; he writes the sort of Greek which was probably spoken by the lower classes in the cities of the Roman empire.
Who Were the Modernists?
Authors: Trevor Meriol
Published: July 2007

People are beginning to realize that some of the ideas put forward since the Council have roots which go back to the Modernist movement at the turn of the century. Since Modernism was condemned by Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Gregis in 1907, with unexampled severity, this raises some interesting questions. The history of Modernism is in for reappraisal and already the field is bristling with budding experts, mostly French and American. I am no expert and the views I express here are open to revision.

Modernism once seemed to me an interruption, almost an irrelevance, in the development of ideas in the Church. The link between the liberal Catholics of the nineteenth century and the general attitude which emerged at the recent Council is clear enough. The Council has reversed the views implicit in the famous Syllabus of Errors (1864); it has decided that ‘Christendom’ has gone for ever, that the Church must stop trying to govern the world and learn how to serve it. ‘A free Church in a free State’ has been enlarged into ‘a free Church in a free World’—an updated version, surely, of views first promoted by the unfortunate Lamennais and pursued with more caution by Montalembert and Lacordaire in France, the editors of the Rambler (Acton, Simpson, Newman) in England, and others elsewhere.

This element in the Second Vatican Council is the one most apparent to the world, which welcomes it, and perhaps it may be called Pope John’s line, for his view was pastoral: how to make the Gospel available to the modern world was his deepest concern and a favourite word was convivenza, which he preferred to ‘co-existence’.
The Wider Ecumenism
Authors: Magrath Oswin
Published: July 2007

Although the oikumene is the whole inhabited world, the term Ecumenism has been appropriated to relations between Christians. Therefore Fr Eugene Hillman, treating of non-Christian relations with the Church, had to qualify it as The Wider Ecumenism in the title of his new book, which develops previous writings of his.

The relaxation of obstacles, largely legal, to relations of Catholics with other Christians has resulted in a short time in widespread changes of attitudes. These, in their turn, are exerting pressures on theology to review old positions, for ecumenical charity finds certain apparently established views incompatible with its experiences. Of such a nature seem to be the calls to revise the theology of the validity of orders, and of intercommunion.

In the case of the wider ecumenism with non-Christians, the obstacles have been more theological, and, indeed, due largely to a lack of any theology of other religions. The elements of such a theology are to be found in tradition, and in recent years it has been developing in academic circles, especially in Germany. But so far these developments have had little impact on those who live and work in non-Christian places, where the old views and the consequent attitudes persist, with increasing tension being felt by Catholics and all Christians between them and the signs of the times.
A Penance Service
Authors: Swanston Hamish
Published: July 2007

There is a trade of manners in the Church. The way one sacrament is celebrated influences, in time, the liturgy of others. This has been most evident in the recent history of the Eucharist and Penance.

Penance, in the days immediately before Pius X, had pretensions to be a private business between priest and penitent in a box. It was individual and it was frequent. When Pius X made Communion frequent a great many people set about making it individual. Often enough communion was taken from the community context, and men went daily to communion before or after Mass. Even when communion was received within the Mass, efforts were made to maintain privacy for the communicant. Everyone came up quietly (my seminary Rector made a huge fuss when some of us looked up open-eyed as he passed down the line) and, having been quietly given a host from yesterday’s ciborium, they went quietly back to make a little cave with their hands, opening them a little perhaps when the Leonine prayers warned them that a demon was wandering through the world for the ruin of souls, and quickly shutting them again.

All this is done with. The Eucharist has come out into the open again, and now in turn Penance is venturing forth.

Penance has become popular. And this in two senses of the phrase. More people are taking part in the ecclesial forgiveness of God, and they are more often doing so as members one of another rather than as single men.
The Erosion of the Mystery
Authors: Marinoff Irene
Published: July 2007

The process of secularization which began towards the end of the Middle Ages seems to have reached its peak. Not only has a way of life developed which no longer even pays lip-service to religion, so that large sections of the population live completely outside any direct religious influence, secular values have invaded the City of God itself. They have all but succeeded in eliminating an entire dimension of experience which, by the grace of God, is open to man. In other words, man is slowly and systematically robbed of his ideals. His vision is narrowed down to the here and now. If it is true, as George Herbert wrote: ‘Who aimeth at the sky shoots higher much than he that means a tree’, we are in danger of missing even the tree, unless we stop and take our bearings afresh. It is one thing to say that monogamous marriage, celibacy and the non-use of contraceptives are far beyond the powers of the average man. It is quite another to demand their abolition on these grounds—not only because there have been people—they still exist—who are actually able to live on this level, but chiefly because this would mean ignoring one human possibility. No one would dream of abrogating the law of charity, because most of us sin against charity regularly, often grievously. But the lives of the saints are there to show us that the ideal is patient of realization, even if we ourselves are too weak to approach it more closely.
Catholics and Jews after 1967—a New Situation
Authors: Rijk C. A.
Published: July 2007

Since the Vatican Declaration Nostra Aetate, concerning the relations between the Catholic Church and non-Christian religions, was promulgated on 28th October, 1965, a slow, but sound and effective change has been taking place in the Church. Obviously, the painful misunderstandings of centuries cannot be removed in a single year, but there is no doubt that the Church, during the Vatican Council, sincerely sought a new and better understanding of itself. Praying, discussing, listening, struggling, it discovered many new insights into its very being. One of the points most discussed was the relation between the Church and the Jewish people. Israel is either a stumbling block for the Church or else points out a deep mystery of divine revelation, in which both the Church and Judaism participate. It is not necessary to digress here on the history of relations between the Church and Judaism for the past twenty centuries, because there have been many dark patches. Nor do I need to speak about the difficult and painful struggle of the Vatican Council to reach a positive statement. The final result was neither very good, nor very bad: it was a compromise addressed to Catholics; a pastoral document in a positive spirit, and as such a revolutionary declaration compared with statements of former Councils.
Waiting for 1984
Authors: Berridge Dorothy
Published: July 2007

Psychologists working in the field of human development are understandably reluctant to make predictions. They prefer to work backwards, attempting to explain later behaviour in the light of earlier experience, but always aware of the multiple factors involved in the human situation and of the unreliability and inaccuracy of what has been recorded, often in retrospect. Reliable studies on a large enough scale are few and far between, especially in this country, while the increasing social and geographical mobility of the general population makes any longitudinal study over the years increasingly difficult to carry through.

Meanwhile, theories of child-rearing abound, varying not only from generation to generation but also according to the school of thought involved; more important, large sections of the population remain more or less untouched by such professional advice, even at the level of the popular women’s journals, so that the mores of regional subcultures persist, despite the attempts of teachers and social workers with what are now recognized as essentially middle-class professional goals and expectations.

Nevertheless, one factor on which there is increasing agreement is the importance of the earliest years, of the pre-school period spent largely within the family setting. What evidence there is suggests real differences at work within the range of social class, which will facilitate or hamper the work of formal education during the next ten or more years the children will spend in school. What these differences really are, and how they can be met without distorting or destroying what is valuable at each level, still remains a matter of conjecture.
Towards the Recovery of Wisdom
Authors: Ling Trevor
Published: July 2007

The most important task facing the West today is the recovery of that spiritual tradition which, by the fourteenth century, had found widespread expression and had its representatives throughout Catholic Europe, but which was then lost in the convulsions which shook the Latin Church in the sixteenth century, as attention was directed predominantly to questions of institutional authority, dogmatic orthodoxy and political advantage. Such, at least, is the view which in varying ways has recently been expressed by men of learning and perception whose viewpoint is that of non-European and non-Christian cultures, notably Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. There have been suggestions of a similar kind from Christians who have opened their minds to the testimony of these other religions and cultures. Five recently published books which bear upon this subject are Edward Conze’s Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies, Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Encounter of Man and Nature, Frithjof Schuon’s In the Tracks of Buddhism, William Johnston’s The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Sisirkumar Ghose’s Mystics and Society.

The malaise of modern Western society, whose symptoms are high rates of alcoholism and other forms of drug addiction, suicide, violence, the increase of mental illness, the steady but lethal pollution of the atmosphere and the earth’s waters, and the prodigal squandering of natural resources with little thought for the future, are seen by more than one of these writers as being connected with the fact that from about the end of the fifteenth century European religion became divorced from the perennial philosophy (with its spiritual understanding of nature) of which until then it had formed a branch.