bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Contemplation and The Knowledge of God
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

This is not an exhaustive study of contemplation, and I omit severa important aspects of the subject; most drastically, I omit any discussion of Christ as the ultimate revelation of God. I feel entitled to do so for two reasons: first, that Christ characterized himself as ‘the way’, and it is therefore permissible to make a preliminary enquiry, such as this present one, into what, in general, one is looking for in an approach to God. And secondly, we no longer know Christ himself in the flesh. To see Christ is to see the Father: but how do we see Christ? To some extent we may re-assimilate the problem of knowing Christ to that of knowing God (though since the Incarnation, one cannot leave it at that, obviously; otherwise the Incarnation would have no enduring revelatory significance, which it clearly has).

In English we are unfortunate in having only one word ‘know’ for both savoir and connaître; for the distinction is very important between knowing a fact, and knowing a person, and it is easy to create devastating problems for ourselves by tacitly assimilating contemplation of God to savoir rather than connaître.

The most obvious distinction between knowing a fact and knowing a person is that the former is abstract and general, while the latter is particular. The object of the former type of knowledge, being an abstraction, only exists in my mind. In Buber’s terminology, there is an I-It relationship, an It always being only a part of my world.
From Bonhoeffer to Gandhi: God as Truth
Authors: Douglass James W.
Published: July 2007

The world as suffering and as entering transformation is crucifixion. At the heart of the world is the continuation and working out of Golgotha. The revolution of peace is the world in the critical process of overcoming its self-resistance to unity through the upward convergence of love, a process animated by the union of God and man.

But the world is creation as well as crucifixion, natural growth as well as divine revolution. Man is born in the cathedral of earth and sky, reaches out to the infinite silence of the universe, and begins to form himself in a rhythm of creation and self-recognition. Man is growing and maturing through time, provoking and provoked by a progressive self-understanding. Today the world as creation is man’s cumulative discovery of himself in time, not at his deepest self-identity—for his deepest manhood is found through his suffering union with God, through crucifixion not creation, or through that unique creation which is crucifixion. But the world as evolving creation is man’s growing discovery of himself as distinct and fully responsible, as that one called from childhood to recognize and affirm the possibilities of a world come of age.

In The Secular City Harvey Cox has effectively described the present point of the world as creation in terms of secularization, of ‘man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time’ (The Secular City, 1965, p. 2). The age of the secular city is a liberation of man from religious world-views whose orientation distracted him from the task of building the earth.
Christian Leadership?
Authors: Haughton Rosemary
Published: July 2007

We are constantly being told there is a ‘crisis of authority’. Catholics in particular are always talking about authority and worrying about it, in fact they seem to have a sort of obsession about it—for or against. But they aren’t the only ones who worry, it affects all aspects of public and private life. It affects, naturally, the idea of what kind of leadership—if any—Christians can give at a time like this, in a society like ours. Does the ‘crisis’ mean that the possibility of leadership has gone, at least for the time being? Is there any sense in Christians trying to shore up the crumbling walls of authority?

In order to answer questions of this kind we need to ask two others, which we seldom do ask because we take the answers for granted. These questions are first, What is authority? and secondly, What kind of society do we live in?

It’s important to see exactly what we mean by authority, otherwise we are likely to waste a lot of time talking at cross-purposes.

Authority is primarily to do with community, in fact it is an essential ingredient of community. We tend to think of authority as synonymous with power, or government. Authority may involve the exercise of governing power, but that is not its nature.
Irony Ironised
Authors: Poole Roger
Published: July 2007

‘I sate alone here, by my lamp, nigh to the windows with shutters closed, before me the length of the hall, and read Kierkegaard on Mozart’s Don Juan. Then in a clap I am stricken by a cutting cold, even as though I sat in a winter-warm room and a window had blown open towards the frost. It came not from behind me, where the windows lie; it falls on me from in front. I start up from my boke and look abroad into the hall, belike Sch. is come back, for I am no longer alone. There is some bodye there in the mirk, sitting on the horse-hair sofa that stands almost in the myddes of the room. . . .’

Such is the meeting of Adrian Leverkühn, the demonic composer of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, with the Devil, who has come to make the traditional bargain for a soul.

It is not by accident that Adrian Leverkühn is reading Kierkegaard’s essay on Mozart’s Don Juan in Either/Or. We might even hazard a guess as to which lines Leverkühn was reading when the Devil appeared:

‘When sensuousness appears as that which must be excluded, as that which the spirit can have nothing to do with, yet without passing judgment upon it or condemning it, then the sensuous assumes the form of the demonic in aesthetic indifference. . . . Don Juan consequently is the expression for the demonic determined as the sensuous; Faust its expression determined as the intellectual or spiritual, which the Christian spirit excludes.’
The Transformation of Man
Authors: Holbrook David
Published: July 2007

I find it very difficult to enter into an adequate debate with Mrs Haughton over the whole field of her argument. It is impertinent for me to do so, since I do not recognize the reality which to her is predominant. She says,

All conversion involves repentance, a turning away from all that prevented the self-giving of love, a realization that, as preventing love, much in the past was incongruous and evil (p. 118).

I could go so far with her, though I would need to argue about the exact meaning of ‘repentance’, ‘incongruous’ and ‘evil’. I would argue that the last word tells us more about those that use it than the quality or condition it is supposed to describe. But debate in this dimension would for me be valid. However, Mrs Haughton opens up a whole other dimension when she says

. . . the prophetic calling involves repudiation of much more than unworthy and unloving behaviour. It sees that everything in the life of the flesh—the world as we know it—is futile and useless as a means of accomplishing the will of God. The truth of the world is so distant an approximation to the naked truth of the spirit, as perceived in the moment of revelation, that it can only be discarded (p. 118).

Mrs Haughton is not, I think, characterizing this as a particular view of the prophet: she assumes it as a necessary attitude for her whole argument.
The Real Interests of the Peasant Boy: The Development of Education
Authors: Gaskell Austin
Published: July 2007

(From the evidence of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham and Vaux, before the Parliamentary Committee on the State of Education, 1834.)

‘. . . Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor desirable.’

(Report of the Newcastle Commission, 1861.)

‘. . . Even if it were possible, I doubt whether it would be desirable, with a view to the real interests of the peasant boy, to keep him at school till he was 14 or 15 years of age. But it is not possible. We must make up our minds to see the last of him, as far as the day school is concerned, at 10 or 11. We must frame our system of education upon this hypothesis; and I venture to maintain that it is quite possible to teach a child soundly and thoroughly, in a way that he shall not forget it, all that is necessary for him to possess in the shape of intellectual attainment, by the time he is 10 years old. . . .’

(Evidence of the Rev. James Fraser, later Bishop of Manchester, quoted with approval by the Newcastle Commission, 1861.)
David Jones
Authors: Raine Kathleen
Published: July 2007

The process by which the enduring reputation of one writer emerges among many of (at the time) apparently equal merit is mysterious. We do not so much change our minds as discover them; no dramatic reversal is involved but a gradual enlightenment makes it clear that (as in the present case) David Jones is such a figure. The supreme quality of his art (using the word in its inclusive sense, for it would be impossible, so closely related is the technique of his drawing to that of his use of words, to say that David Jones is an artist who also writes, or the reverse) has long been apparent to an inner circle of his friends, which included T. S. Eliot; but he has never at any time been a widely read, still less a fashionable writer, nor is he ever likely to become so, for his work is too fine and subtle and learned for popular taste. To ‘discover’ David Jones is to enter an elite.

It was for a time possible for my generation to persuade ourselves that ‘the late Yeats’ was a different and incomparably better poet than ‘the early Yeats’ in order to justify what was really a change in ourselves and not in the poet. In the case of David Jones nothing of the kind would be possible. In the current number of Agenda there are several pieces of recent writing (or recently completed, for David Jones has a habit of laying aside pieces of work for years and then getting them out and working over them) but these are not technically different from, or necessarily better or worse than, In Parenthesis, his poetic novel, or epic poem, of the first World War.
What Will Happen Here?
Authors: Dummett Ann
Published: July 2007

Scientists have been the poets of modern society. The myths of our age have been the creation, through popular repetition, of the genuine oracles of scientific discoverers, misunderstood, misinterpreted and misapplied by lesser men. The facts behind Darwin’s theory have been of less importance than the altered view of humanity they came to imply, the higher beast rather than the lesser angel. The clinical work of Freud is a small affair beside the wholesale change in sex-conventions that he fathered. Einstein’s few pages on Relativity revolutionized not only Physics but the concept of Truth itself in other disciplines and in popular understanding.

Not least important of the myths we have grown up with has been the notion of Race. Already in the nineteenth century, some evolutionists applied the idea of competing and differing species to the apparently different groups of mankind, defined by general differences of physical appearance. The survival of the fittest came to be seen, in terms of Race, as the story of Nordic man’s superiority. The science of anthropology dealt in terms of ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ peoples, with the assumption of European man’s advancement implicit. Now, modern biology and anthropology no longer deal in these terms. Race, as the term is popularly used, is not a biologically valid or respectable concept. The anthropologist has discovered and learnt to respect the sophisticated culture and technology of the rest of the world’s history. But the myth of Race remains solidly embedded in the intellectual apparatus of all educated people in Europe and North America.
Papalism Ancient and Modern (I)
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

It must be obvious that no theme of traditional theology requires a new airing in the atmosphere of aggiornamento more than that of the papacy and its place in the Church. Ultimately this is a task for the professional theologian but one who could, in Karl Barth’s words ‘… take history seriously as a force outside himself and which spoke to him with authority’. For this to be so, the historian, through whom history speaks if it speaks at all, must do some spade work. It is natural for theologians to suppose that since the data of their study are eternal verities or eternal falsehoods, then the theses they present are absolutely, once and for all, true or false. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that however absolute the central concerns of theologians are, there are very important areas of their study in which a radical relativism is called for.

Let us take for example the theology of the eucharist. In an important sense, it is the study of the relationship between bread and wine, disposed within a certain ritual, and the flesh and blood of Christ. What could be more direct and simple, more suitable for questions answerable with a flat yes or no than this study? But these questions must be asked in terms of human language, that is they must be made intelligible in a human activity peculiarly prone to changes of meaning and peculiarly liable to quite remarkable expansion. For centuries it seemed that questions about the eucharist could only be asked in the language of Aristotle’s metaphysics.
Homeless Plus: A Study in Social Integration
Authors: Pearce Richard
Published: July 2007

It is no exaggeration to say that there is a revolution afoot in the field of social welfare. In recent decades there has been much radical re-thinking; principles which previously had been tacitly accepted, in some cases for a century or more, have become the subject of an increasingly severe and telling criticism. Experimental ventures are breaking new ground almost daily, and, though at present few have been running for a length of time or on a scale sufficient to yield more than marginal results, they are nonetheless proving that an urgent need exists for still further research and new endeavours.

Among the few which can claim a significant and definitive breakthrough, both in terms of success and in relation to other existing techniques and structures, is the Ladyeholme Association. This has been working in London for the past seventeen years and has achieved a 75 per cent success rate in re-integrating with society families and the remants of families which, for one reason or another, have dropped out of general society and into a twilight region of (semi-) destitution; for example, the unmarried mother and her children, the ex-prisoner and his family, the mentally ‘recovered’ in search of a home, the prostitute escaping the trade but needing shelter and moral support, the socially unstable of almost every sort. It is a mistake to believe, as so many of us do, that existing social services are doing enough in this deceptively simple field; for the most part, the problem has either been ignored or aggravated by inadequate ‘answers’.
Original Sin (I)
Authors: McDermott Timothy
Published: July 2007

The story of original sin is a story told us by God through Christian tradition. As in all stories which make a point, some elements in this story are absolutely essential to its point, others belong rather to the particular style in which the story is told (and possibly another style might be equally effective), while other elements again are essential neither to point nor to style but included simply because that was the way an incident happened. But how do we decide which elements are which?

In this article I shall suggest that the essential elements in the doctrine of original sin make a point about Calvary; that the references to Adam and the origins of mankind are part only of the style in which this point about Calvary is communicated; and that it is the gospels rather than Genesis which describe the way original sin actually happened. But how does one test such suggestions?

By examining the only vehicle of the doctrine that we have: namely, the traditional interpretation; and trying to discover within that interpretation the story-teller’s point, the structure of his story and the importance of its various elements. So in what follows I shall first consider what the Council of Trent and Thomas Aquinas have to say about original sin, without questioning their presuppositions, in the hope that the purpose, structure and relative importance of the various elements of this interpretation will emerge. Only then will I try to explore the possibility of re-telling the story in a different form.
The New Dutch Catechism
Authors: Hastings Peter , Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

When theologians grumble and growl and commissions sit, a mere schoolmaster might have the sense to leave a book like this alone. It is true that the same theologians who bare their teeth at the little eccentricities of the Dutch Catechism have not, through the long years of damage, waved our own aloft shrieking for the faggot, an omission which anyone really interested in education must find it hard to forgive. Even without such unchristian, carping thoughts, an educator not hooked on the ancient catalogues of angelic powers might well go in to bat for the Dutch simply on the grounds that they have produced the right educational approach.

It is not only its approach that I welcome, the content is often of immediate interest and importance to the schoolmaster, e.g. the section on ‘The faith to which one is bred’ in which are discussed the problems of child education and eventual personal acceptance and conversion that are built in to the practice of infant baptism. The views expressed endear the authors to me, but more yet the manner in which the problem is discussed in the light of the experience of the reader and the attempt to initiate trains of thought—and so it is not the content so much as the catechism’s significance in education that I intend to discuss.

Other catechisms in use have not shown much interest in thought, only in answers—sometimes accompanied by dogmatically phrased ‘reasons’ in lieu of thoughtful discussion, but, with some less convincing answers, the bald statement alone without discussion or context.
Papalism Ancient and Modern (II)
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

I should like now to turn to a particular example and a particular pontificate, that of Gregory VIII. Gregory is, of course, the triumphalist’s hero: what history text-book is there that hasn’t its section on the Gregorian reforms? It seems to be scarcely noticed that these ‘reforms’—the division of the Church into two castes, a clerical caste with a duty to rule the laity, whose function it was to fight in causes the clergy considered worthy—are very largely what has come under attack at Vatican II and since. Nothing is more striking, I think, than the present Pope’s repudiation of one of the more notorious of Gregory’s friends, Cardinal Humbert, and his Constantinople ex-communications in 1054. Now the fact that certain policies could be reforms in the late eleventh century, yet be abuses nine hundred years later, is not in itself surprising. But in the case of Gregory there are important lessons to be learnt and important questions to be asked.

But there is the question of means too, and there is a limit to the degree to which valuable consequences can excuse bad thinking and evil actions. Gregory, it seems to me, was guilty of both. The sickening frequency with which in his correspondence the quotation ‘cursed be the hand that abstains from blood’ is found cannot be excused with a reference to troubled times. Plenty of men of goodwill were just as shocked at the time. Again Gregory’s attempts to make the Sardinians and Corsicans acknowledge that they belonged to the patrimony of Peter and must pay the pope a tax are not in themselves very important.
Renewal
Authors: George A. Raymond
Published: July 2007

Three dissimilar books illustrate three aspects of that search for renewal which now characterizes so much of the life of the Church.

The Church in Transition (Geoffrey Chapman, 16s.) by Desmond Fisher, a Roman Catholic journalist, is a popular account of that great upheaval which would probably have come in any case but which was largely set in motion by Pope John. There are in most churches good simple believers who ask not in any obstinate spirit of opposition to all change, but in all innocence, ‘Why can't we just go on as we are?’ There are many books which we might put into their hands, but this is one of the clearest and best. It describes in lucid terms the preparations for the second Vatican Council and the subsequent events. Mr Fisher recognizes the importance of the Council, but sees clearly that it is only a beginning. ‘Vatican II proved the truth of the old tag—Ecclesia semper reformanda.’ ‘The aggorniamento is for all time and it must go on.’ But this work will not go on unless not only ecclesiastics but lay people are involved in it, and its ideas penetrate the thinking of Roman Catholics everywhere.
Violence and Brotherhood: a case of ‘trahison des clercs’
Authors: Westow Theo
Published: July 2007

If I understand the French expression of the title correctly, the word ‘clercs’ does not primarily refer to the clergy but to those that in olden days were the philosophers, the writers, the scribblers and the gabblers, and no doubt some clergy came under this heading. Now there are few problems so bluntly omnipresent and so impractically approached by the intellectuals as violence.

I have three books in front of me, one dealing with brotherhood, one with peace, and a symposium on violence. All three are connected since peace can only come from brotherhood and will never come at all as long as our world is dominated by violence. We are all Brothers, by Fr Louis Evely (Burns & Oates, 1967, 15s.), puzzles me. Apparently his books sell on the continent by the 100,000 and are translated into ten languages. Yet, the treatment of the theme of brotherhood is wholly that of a talk given at a retreat in the old style of a nice, comforting, pleasant relationship between a somewhat domestic God and a simple-minded Christian leading himself up the garden path in the private garden of his private soul. One respects the intention but it is difficult to take such spiritual glibness seriously. The next book is Building Peace, by Fr Dominique Pire, O.P. (a Corgi Book, 6s.), which is somewhat clumsily put together by Dr Dricot, but it is honest and faces some facts. I shall return to this later. The third book is called La Violence (Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 1967, 12 Frs). It is a collection of papers read at the Semaine des Intellectuels Catholiques in February last year.
Original Sin (II)
Authors: McDermott Timothy
Published: July 2007

In the traditional interpretation mankind is a unity because it is, so to speak, a genealogical tree of which each man’s personal life is a branch. I suggest rather that the unity of mankind must be thought of as a unity in history, a unity in a play with one plot in which each man has a rôle. Just as Aquinas conceived of a biological intention of nature presupposed to all personal intentions, and of the propagation of mankind as presupposed to all personal lives (and therefore in a position to taint them); so we must conceive of an intention of history, which I call its plot, underlying every man’s personal life in so far as that life is a rôle in the total play. Just as a man, on Aquinas’ picture, is to some extent determined by an intention of nature even before he begins to take personal charge of his life, so too man’s life must receive sense from the part it plays in the whole play, even before one judges of the success or non-success of the way he personally played that part.

I would suggest, indeed, that this notion of a plot in history more truly expresses the nature of man than any genealogical or biological concept. For if, in some unimaginable future, intelligent animals were discovered on some other planet who belonged to some quite different branch of the biological tree, nevertheless, because they were intelligent animals, it would in principle be possible for us to communicate with them, for us to affect each other’s culture, and for us to grow into having one history with them.
Papalism Ancient and Modern (III)
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

I should like now to sum up the discussion so far, trying to show that what I have been saying does not depend only on what to many will seem a queer and barbarous jargon. To put it in other words: the triumphalist, because he lacks the insight social studies give, does not realize that not only do other minds exist but other kinds of authority, other patterns of government and social living which he does not know. Every one of them has a right to participate in the Church. No one has the right to say that what exists now is the only pattern and must be accepted as a condition of entry. What is the triumphalist pattern? Their pope is a Lord Chief Justice dispensing authoritative justice in a court of law. A man who must be guarded by strict rules of laesae majestatis lest the law be brought into disrepute. The sort of man who reproached Peter Damian when he criticized the late pope, St Leo IX, for recruiting a gang of ruffians to fight the Normans for him under all the trappings of a Holy War. He received the unanswerable reply, We don’t call David a saint for his relations with Bathsheba. But it takes more than commonsense to silence a triumphalist. In the case of a secular judge, one can see that rules of laesae majestatis are essential.
Prophets and Parishes
Authors: Drinkwater F. H.
Published: July 2007

Here is another of those radical-theology desacralizing books from the continent, this time translated from the French (Structures of Christian Priesthood by Jean Paul-Audet, Sheed & Ward, London 1967, pp. 200, 14s.). The author is a French-Canadian Dominican, a distinguished biblical scholar still at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. The general theme is broadly similar to that of Fr Robert Adolfs’ The Grave of God, but less challengingly expressed: namely, that the pastoral ‘structures’ (blessed word!) of the Church unfortunately took a wrong turning in Constantine’s time or even earlier and now need de-institutionalizing back to something more like the apostolic age. Interwoven is an argument against obligatory celibacy for the priesthood, which it will be easier to leave to the end of this article for separate consideration.

The first two-thirds of the book take the form of historical evidence about Christian ecclesial organization in the first century or so. The evidence is marshalled from the New Testament and the early Fathers. What it shows (according to the author) is that our Lord’s own ministry’ was that of a travelling prophet, heralding a message (a kerygma) to the general public and imparting instruction (a didache) to his close followers. The twelve apostles were chosen and trained to imitate this mobile ministry of the word. Thus was set the pattern for the early Church, which at first was quite flexible; small local communities of a few dozen people meeting in somebody’s private house. Thus the ‘base-community’ (local Christians) was identical with the ‘liturgical assembly,’ and our author reckons that there were no ‘sacral persons’, nothing like the Jewish priesthood, at first.
Biblical Translation and the Church
Authors: Barr James
Published: July 2007

Not long ago different branches of the Church seemed to be univocally associated with certain translations of the Biblical text: Protestantism with the King James Version, Roman Catholicism with the Vulgate and, less centrally, with the Douai Version. Doctrine could be immediately referred to a single standard and official translation. This older situation has in recent years quite suddenly dissolved, and no one quite knows what will take its place. It is far from clear that new translations can or should come to occupy the position which the older ones had. For one thing, there are too many of them, with still more to come, and the search for finality would seem to be an infinite regress. One hears that modern scholarship is solving age-old problems, and this is partly true; but it is also increasing the complexity of factors which have to be taken into account and thus (I suspect) making more remote the possibility that a single translation, fully correct from the scholarly point of view, can be produced. It is not long ago that one heard in discussions of theological education that new and accurate translations might make less necessary the training of ordinands in the biblical languages; but on the contrary, the variety of translations may in course of time make the original languages more indispensable as a means to discrimination (thereby incidentally re-creating something of the situation in which St Jerome himself was led to learn Hebrew!).
Insight into Lonergan
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

I have been invited not only to comment on the essays published in this collection, but also to try to ‘place’ Bernard Lonergan and his work. The first task is not easy, the second is virtually impossible. In saying this, I am not denying that it is reasonable to ask questions such as: cWhat is Lonergan up to?’, ‘Where does he stand in contemporary debates?’. The list of contents alone would invite such questions. What is the common factor, beyond the mere fact of common authorship, in sixteen essays, originally published between 1943 and 1965, on such disparate topics as: ‘Finality, Love, Marriage’, ‘A Note on Geometrical Possibility’, ‘The Assumption and Theology’, and ‘Cognitional Structure’? Another reason for wanting to have Lonergan ‘placed’ is that, while the sheer difficulty of most of his work renders him inaccessible to many people, he has profoundly influenced such very different spirits as David Burrell, Bishop Butler, Charles Davis, Sebastian Moore, John Courtney Murray and Michael Novak. Yet, while I believe that Lonergan is one of the most profoundly original and creative Catholic thinkers of our time, it is his very originality that makes it almost impossible to place him. It may seem paradoxical to describe as ‘original’ a man much of whose writing bears the terminological hallmark of neo-scholastic theology and metaphysics. But then, the originality of Beethoven did not consist in the notes of the scale which he employed, but in the conception and structure with which they were ordered.

Frederick Crowe’s editorial introduction to the collection is an excellent biographical and interpretative summary of Lonergan’s work.
Galbraith on the New Capitalism
Authors: Bliss Christopher
Published: July 2007

One of the fundamental problems that any critique of Capitalism must face is that such a critique should, if successful, isolate features of a capitalist society that are specifically ‘capitalist’ from, for example, general features of industrial societies. This problem is most acute in the case of the human implications of the system. After all, the quality of life of an industrial worker does not differ as greatly between the United States and the Soviet Union as ideology, official and unofficial, would have one imagine. Indeed an examination of numerous features of American and Soviet society reveals strong similarities in social organization, and the distribution of power and income. The existence of such similarities has sometimes led observers to conclude that a process of ‘convergence’ is taking place; that as the Soviet Union becomes increasingly industrialized and wealthy, and as technical change takes place in both countries, the systems continually produce similar solutions to similar problems.

In an extreme form such a view can become a kind of technological determinism. The vast and complex technology of our time determines for us power and social relationships and there is little we can do to change them. In such an extreme form this is akin to a rather crude Marxism, but one that logically applies the idea that the social structure is largely determined by the structure of production even to societies in which, officially, the means of production are in the hands of the people. However, even if one admits a larger role than this for political and social choice, there are clearly bounds on the social reforms and reorganizations that would be consistent with the continued working of the industrial system.
The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin
Authors: Mathew Gervase
Published: July 2007

La Pensée religieuse du Père Teilhard de Chardin was first published at Paris in 1962. It has been admirably translated by René Hague and forms an authoritative commentary. It is authoritative because Père Lubac had been a close friend of Père Teilhard de Chardin for over thirty years and had discussed his thought with him and because it is by Père Lubac with his clarity and his gift for understanding other viewpoints than his own.

In his first chapter ‘The Essential Core’, Père Lubac distinguishes between two groups of Père Teilhard’s writings ‘the first in which the line of thought is still scientific or, one might prefer to say philosophical, is developed from the data of experimental science; the second, more strictly mystical and religious, is often explicitly based on the data of Christian revelation. Central to the first is The Phenomenon of Man, to the second Le Milieu Divin.’ Inevitably Père Lubac places his emphasis on the group that centres on Le Milieu Divin and attempts to penetrate ‘to the heart of Teilhard’s mystical teaching’. In what sense was Père Teilhard a mystic?

Père Lubac’s eighth chapter is entitled ‘Scientist, Prophet and Mystic’. In it he describes Père Teilhard as a scientist of the first order. This is perhaps a simplification. From the time of his scholasticate and his first unfortunate association with Mr Dawson and the Piltdown Skull, Père Teilhard’s primary subject of study was prehistoric archaeology and it was this that finally made his name in China.
Brotherhood: The Responsibility of Bishops Today
Authors:   The Bishops of Brasil
Published: July 2007

The central commission of the national conference of bishops of Brasil feels obliged to clarify certain issues in public and to explain to the faithful how it conceives the mission of the hierarchy.

It should not be a matter of surprise that many of our brother bishops should have expressed themselves in public in these times, whether individually or together. It is today’s conditions that make it far more necessary than formerly for authority to be exercised in constant communication with members of society. . . .

Our very first reponsibility, we hold, is the furthering of brotherhood among men, as consecrated by sharing in Christ. We are in the service of love, in its fullest meaning, and that not only on behalf of members of the Church, but of all men.

It is our duty to explain our mission better. This mission is ignored by some, misunderstood by others, and deliberately falsified by certain groups who claim to be serving the Church whilst in fact furthering their own interests. Neither misunderstanding nor falsehood will make us desist from the job that is ours by divine commission and that has marked the presence of the Church in our history. . . .

We repudiate the Marxist claim that religion despoils man by consoling him with a future happiness that will compensate for frustrations inevitable on earth. And to affirm that the religious mission of the bishops must be confined to what is called the ‘spiritual life’ is in effect to accept the Marxist conception of religion.
Eschatology as Politics
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Christianity is nothing if it is not eschatology: a hope in a promise for the future. This is what Jurgen Moltmann is inviting us to take seriously, in his very important book. It is, however, a difficult book, at least for the non-theologian; and perhaps the best way of giving a fair account of its value is to present, in some detail, the argument of the concluding chapter (the appendix on Ernst Bloch has been omitted from the English edition). The problem is to show how Christianity as eschatology actually happens. What visible form and observable shape does this hope in a promised future, which believers share, actually take in the complicated business which is modern life in an industrial society such as ours? What in fact is the relationship between the Church and the world?

We have to decide whether, as believers in modern society, we form what Moltmann calls an accommodating group, a group capable of being absorbed and assimilated by society, or a group which is inassimilable and non-conformist. We have to ask if this hope in the future which we have, compels us to resist being assimilated and adjusted to modern society. Moltmann is, of course, going to argue that if believers really conduct their lives and their thinking in the context of their hope in God’s promised future, then there will always be tension between the believing community and modern society … whatever modern society may happen to be (Moltmann clearly works in terms of the society to which he belongs: western industrial capitalism).
The International Protection of Human Rights
Authors: Johnson David
Published: July 2007

On 16 December 1966 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted three important instruments concerning human rights. These were the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both adopted unanimously; and also an Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was adopted by majority vote. The adoption of these texts represents one more step in the slow, but on the whole steady, progress towards an International Bill of Rights. When this project was first mooted after the Second World War, it was realized that at least three distinct stages would be necessary. First, there would have to be broad international agreement on the rights to be enjoyed by every human being. Secondly, States would have to accept a definite legal obligation to afford these rights to all persons within their jurisdiction. Thirdly, there would have to be provisions for enforcement.

These proposals sound simple enough, but it is as well to realize how revolutionary they were at the time and how many and serious are the obstacles that still have to be overcome before they can be implemented.

Traditional international law was a legal system applying essentially between States, although it made provision also for what the International Court of Justice has called ‘instances of action upon the international plane by certain entities which are not States’. Such instances have been performed by a miscellaneous collection of entities including the Holy See, the Sovereign Order of Malta, international institutions such as the United Nations and the Specialized Agencies, and even rebels granted belligerent status without yet having been recognized as States.
Socialist Humanism
Authors: McLellan David
Published: July 2007

Less than ten years ago the ‘exhaustion of political ideas’ was widely proclaimed. At least in the Western World the differences dividing parties of the left and right seemed to be getting less and changes of government only made for a little more or a little less emphasis on economic planning and welfare. One of the most renowned of American political scientists wrote at the end of the 1950s:

. . . the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved: the workers have achieved industrial and political citizenship, the Conservatives have accepted the Welfare State, and the democratic Left has recognized that an increase in overall state power carries with it more dangers to freedom than solutions for economic problems. This very triumph of the democratic social revolution in the West ends domestic politics for those intellectuals who must have ideologies or utopias to motivate them to political action.

In the space of a few years, however, the atmosphere has changed. The collection of essays edited by Erich Fromm under the title Socialist Humanism well summarizes the change in outlook; here are thirty-six articles, most of them written specially for the book, affirming unequivocally that men can and should create their own world, that elitism is not inevitable and that work can be a creative activity. Of course, a book written by so many hands and claiming, at least on the dustjacket, to cover Marxism, Gandhi, Renaissance humanism, existentialism, Utopia, history, science, dialectic, psychoanalysis, freedom, alienation, justice, labour, welfare, ethics, law, Christianity, technology, and revolution, must at times be exasperating.
African Nuns
Authors: Lee Annabelle
Published: July 2007

Having recent experience of the activities of several missions in part of ex-British Africa, I read with great interest Elizabeth Power’s article ‘Black Nuns in Africa’ (New Blackfriars, December, 1966, and the subsequent exchange between her and Sr Anne Gregson, February, 1967) and, more recently, the correspondence about mission strategy in East Africa (August, 1967).

My work demanded that I should liv e with rural Africans in their huts and learn to speak their language. I spent most time in the diocese of one particular society of Roman Catholic missionaries, but I also saw a little of the work of three other Roman Catholic missionary societies and four Protestant ones. There were marked differences between these different missions, in their resources of finance and personnel, in their organization and the amount of responsibility they gave to Africans, in what they thought it proper for missionaries or Europeans to do, and in what they thought Christianity is concerned with.

I had for a long time thought it would be interesting to know about the way of life and attitudes of African nuns, but the first African nuns I saw on the central mission station could only observe from a distance. Even those who were teachers had been trained to keep their distance from visitors so I could not speak to them. The missionaries took pains to point out to me that the African nuns had clothes in greater quantity and quality, better housing and bedding, and a more adequate and better balanced diet than nearly all rural African women.
Karl Rahner—a spiritual portent
Authors: Squire Aelred
Published: July 2007

The way reputations get off the ground is nearly always something of a mystery, and the reputation of Fr Karl Rahner is a more than usually interesting case. It must by now be so internationally complex that some aspects of it deserve consideration in their own right. The appearance of an English translation of volume III of the Theological Investigations may perhaps be taken as an appropriate occasion to look at this reputation in the light of some of the diverse activities on which it is based. For the pieces collected in this volume on the Theology of the Spiritual Life, which range in interest and difficulty from a sort of exalted pamphlet on the ‘Apostolate of Prayer’ to an absorbing and exacting introduction for a book of verse by a fellow Jesuit, are a reminder of the many claims upon a theologian who has never been allowed, or at least taken, time to write a single sustained work of theology. The very fragmentary character of his written achievement, the limitations within which it moves, and the yawning gaps it leaves behind it are, granted Rahner’s undoubted intellectual calibre, a singular testimony to the situation for the theology of the spiritual life today. It is a testimony all the more eloquent for being that of a man who, whatever his professional qualifications, establishes himself in the mind as first and foremost the dedicated priest. When, in an essay on the priestly existence reprinted in this volume, he says (p. 258) ‘even leaving aside for the moment the general question whether it is not the case that every existentially significant truth cannot be genuinely transmitted from one person to another unless it is possessed by the teacher not merely intellectually as a proposition but as something existentially realized by him’, we feel confident that this is the one question he is never really able to leave aside.
Metaphilosophy
Authors: Potts Timothy
Published: July 2007

The basic reason why it is so difficult in practice to give an account of philosophy’s aims and method is undoubtedly that there is no agreement among philosophers themselves about what they are trying to do and how; and this means that they often find it as difficult to explain themselves to each other as to those whose home is in other disciplines. This is especially so when the philosophers in question belong to different traditions. It is well known that philosophers today fall broadly into two camps, those who belong to the Englishspeaking tradition of analytic philosophy which was born of a reaction against Hegel at the beginning of this century, and those who remain if not in the Hegelian, then at least in the Cartesian tradition and who are now represented primarily in France and Germany. I suppose that we may add as a third group the neoScholastic philosophers of the seminaries and Catholic universities, who at least until recently represented a revival of the medieval tradition, but are now being more or less absorbed by the first two groups (and especially the second) according to their physical location and that of the universities in which their staff are trained.

To each of these traditions there corresponds an attitude towards philosophical aims and methodology which may be associated with a turning-point in the history of philosophy.
New Thinking in Catechetics
Authors: Berridge Dorothy
Published: July 2007

The new approaches in religious education which are still a controversial issue in this country, certainly did not have to wait for Vatican II, even though the Council and its teaching has been one of the major factors at work. The pioneers of the movement, as of so many others in the contemporary scene, can be traced to the beginning of the present century, and to continental biblical scholars who were not content to let the fruits of their studies remain in academic isolation. Rather they quickly saw the need to communicate their new theological thinking to the youngest members of the Church, so that gradually the content of traditional syllabuses of religious instruction was transformed. At the same time began the introduction of more child-centred methods of presentation of the Christian message under the influence of contemporary educational changes in the teaching of secular subjects.

These two factors, content and methodology, are often confused, not only (and understandably) by parents and priests necessarily remote from the professional field of education, but also, and more regrettably, by the teachers themselves. It is these who arc rapidly losing confidence in their own abilities to cope, and it is this predicament that brings them in such numbers to the wide range of courses being held up and down the country.

In so far as the main aim of such teachers is to find a ready-made syllabus, complete with well-tested answers to their particular problems, this is, I feel, regrettable. Good teaching of religion, as of any subject in the curriculum, is of necessity ‘do-it-yourself’; only the teacher on the spot, knowing the children, their backgrounds, their particular abilities and interests, can effectively adapt the content of any syllabus to their needs.