bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bartholomew de la Casas, Samuel Purchas and Colonialism
Authors: Maldonado Enrique Ruiz
Published: July 2007

Contradictions in a Controversy

Las Casas has always been surrounded by controversy. Not only clid he play a highly important role in what is known as the ‘Indian Controversy’, but he himself has been the object of violent and protracted dispute. He has been regarded as the glory, and at the same time as the disgrace of Spain; as a fanatic, and a man of enlightenment. He has been used as an example for all kinds of people, for Christians as well as atheists, for Protestants and Catholics, for those on the left as well as those on the right; for people who love Spain, and those who hate the country.

This article does not seek to cast new light on that problem, which is sufficiently vast and complicated to inspire a book and much more. The present task is more modest; it is to look again at one or two important points in the interpretation of Las Casas, and to arrive at a picture which fits better with the man, his thoughts, and his deeply-held desires. I am sure that it is impossible to understand him if his life and work are separated from his basic motives; and this separation has been one of the main sources of the controversy surrounding him. It is also at the bottom of the paradoxical criticism and praise for him that spring out of the turning-point in history known as ‘The Indian Controversy’.

Samuel Purchas (1575-7 to 1626) provides us with a very illuminating example of this contradiction, and his attitude to the Spanish conquest is a case in point. His Relations of the World was first published in 1613, that is 61 years after the first edition of Las Casas’ best-known and most polemical work, the Brevisima Historia de las Destruccion de Las Indias. Now the gap between what Las Casas wrote and the motives of Purchas can be seen clearly expressed in the latter’s writing, for his aims were quite different from those of Las Casas.
Cardinal Newman's Social Philosophy
Authors: Hawkins David G.
Published: July 2007

The most extreme advocates amongst those who favoured ‘sacerdotalism’ if not theocracy, John Henry Newman was ‘deeply introspective, constantly self-concerned, tirelessly self-recording’. Subsequently he possessed a weak social conscience. In later life, Newman acknowledged that ‘he had never considered social questions in their relation to faith, and had always looked upon the poor as objects for compassion and benevolence’. On this indifference, E. B. Burgum comments that ‘there was no writer of the period, who wrote with a more complete unconsciousness of their existence in state or church’.

Parliamentary reform, educational changes, local government development, the Factory Acts, democracy’s progress, industrialism’s and technology’s dubious side-effects left Newman unstirred. Writes H. L. Stewart: ‘The famine in Ireland, the vast selfishness of the Corn Laws, Chartism, the opium war in China—how a Hebrew prophet would have dealt with them! But one would gather from Newman’s sermons that the social passion of an Isaiah or a Jeremiah had no place in Christianity’.’ Newman was as unconscious as Darwin upon the Beagle of great movements outside the Church. C. F. Harrold comments :

This was the epoch—the age of the historical method boldly applied to all fields of experience, the age of full-grown Romanticism, of dazzling and disturbing advances in physical science, of world creating German idealism, of world-shattering Biblical criticism, of political revolution and democracy, of passionate faith in ‘progress’ in economic and social life—this was the epoch in which a little group of Oxford poets, tutors and preachers hoped to bring about a return to primitive, dogmatic, ascetic Christianity/’
Russia's Don Quixote
Authors: Broun Janice A.
Published: July 2007

‘Who are you? Without waiting for a reply people answer for themselves. All Communists and atheists regard me as a militant reactionary. All reactionaries regard me as a Communist and almost an atheist. All churchmen think I am a sectarian; all sectarians regard me as a churchman. Every ignoramus thinks me an intellectual; every intellectual regards me as a social reject and member of the Proletariat. Every Russian thinks me a Jew; every Jew regards me as a Russian’ (1966).

‘One (fellow prison) inmate called me Don Quixote ... I am a Don Quixote because he is the prototype of all revolutionaries and friends of truth. Dostoievsky wrote: “If God in the Last Judgment calls on Humanity to render account of what good it has done, it could hand him with tears Cervantes’ Don Quixote”’ (1970).

‘Only people who do nothing make no mistakes’ (1966).

These are the words of Anatol Levitin, pen-name Krasnov, spoken with typical irony. He has been the Don Quixote of Russian church life, tilting at windmills, putting tactless pen to paper on every burning issue. Bom in Baku in 1915, his father a Jew baptised into Christianity, he became a school teacher. He was ordained deacon in the small ‘Living Church’ which co-operated with the regime, until in 1944 he joined the Patriarchal Church as a layman. Like thousands of others, he spent the years 1949-56 unjustly in a labour camp. After his release he wrote regularly for the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and was co-author of a history of the Living Church, but because of his criticisms he lost his teaching job in 1966 and found work as a church caretaker.
David Hume, The Christian?
Authors: Cregan Michael
Published: July 2007

‘The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author, and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion’.

Thus might conclude almost any exposition of the traditional Argument from Design. In fact, this testimonial to teleology comes from the philosopher David Hume (1711 to 1776), usually thought of —correctly—as a foe of religion, and whose painstaking criticisms of natural theology still form the sine qua non of all rejections of that enterprise.

‘A purpose, an intention, a design is evident in every thing’, he declares, and ‘we must adopt with the strongest conviction, the idea of some intelligent cause or author’ since monotheism may justly boast of ‘these invincible reasons on which it is undoubtedly founded’.
Metaphysics after Heidegger: for his eighty‐fifth birthday
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

’ Without this theological provenance I should never have come upon the path of thinking. But provenance decides destination’ (Unterwegs zur Sprache, page 96).

Heidegger’s reputation in English philosophical circles has suffered badly from his association with Nazism. It would be easy to accumulate quotations to show how the connection suffices to discredit him philosophically. Yet we have no reason for expecting philosophers to be politically informed or enlightened or even sensible. They have in fact often proved very authoritarian and elitist in their views. Furthermore, Wittgenstein visited Russia in the 1930s and seriously considered emigrating there as late as 1939, when it was surely plain enough what Stalinism was like (cf. John Moran: “Wittgenstein and Russia’, New Left Review No. 73), but this fact has not affected any one’s estimate of his philosophical work. On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s philosophy may not be so independent of his social, political and religious opinions and experience as his most devoted exponents have led us to believe. But in the context of his life Heidegger’s connection with Nazism is not unintelligible.
Women and the American Churches
Authors: MacEoin Gary
Published: July 2007

I have talked to many women around the United States who are establishing themselves in church positions hitherto exclusively male. They represent the principal Christian denominations and Judaism. Ages range from grandmothers to college students. Some reject the revolutionary label. But what they are doing adds up to a radical revolution. They are reformulating mankind’s most basic assumptions : not just the relationships between the sexes, but the notion of human nature itself, the notion of sin, the very notion of God.

Age is a factor in attitude. The younger women tend to more belligerency. But also important is the level of resistance of their churches to opening up the three male preserves: ruling, sanctification (ministration of the sacraments) and teaching. Women in Protestant denominations which give them some openings as rulers, ministers and theologians, are irked by tokenism but believe they can surmount it if they keep their cool. The higher resistance of Episcopalianism and Roman Catholicism is producing a strident, angry response.
Sociology: Friend or Foe?
Authors: Pickering W.S.F.
Published: July 2007

Sociology is not a universally beloved human science. It may have gained prestige in some quarters in recent years but it has enemies and opponents, who believe that in the long run sociology does more harm than good. During the past year the Chilean generals removed it with good reason from the universities and have declared null and void all degrees heretofore awarded in the subject. In some of the ways in which it has developed during the past half century, it can rightly be called a science of debunking. The movement in part started with Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) who made it his task to explain the non-rational, non-scientific nature of ideologies, and similarly much in thought and action that is said to be based on the obvious, the rational, and the true. In a different direction, sociological surveys have pricked other kinds of bubbles, and by the use of statistics, interviews, and other ‘factual’ devices, they have been able to mirror the gap between the ideal and the real, between the image and what actually occurs, between social intention and social achievement. One contemporary example can be seen in the analysis of local government. The procedures and decisions that are made by the authorities are very far from being democratic, very far from taking into account the wishes of those for whom measures are enacted. An examination of the activities of the local town hall along with the experiences of those who are governed by it allow one to assume that Pareto was right—even in the heart of a country priding itself as being democratic, government is indeed carried out by an élite, professional or elected.
Christians for Socialism
Authors: Arroyo Gonzalo
Published: July 2007

A Chilean Jesuit priest who is also an expert on agricultural economics, Gonzalo Arroyo was a technical adviser on problems relating to agricultural reform for the ten years previous to the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973, and is one of the founders of the world-wide movement called Christians for Socialism. Now living in exile, he gave this interview last June. Here, utilising in his argument methods proper to the Theology of Liberation, he gives his reasons for believing this world-wide movement is going to be of rapidly growing importance in the uncertain years ahead.

Q. In your opinion, what are the principal problems facing mankind?

A. I shall restrict myself to the five which seem to me the most crucial.

1. The ecological problem, that is the problem of conservation and renewal of natural resources like water, soil, air and forests which capitalist industrialisation does not manage to take seriously, subject as it is to the dictates of the frantic race for production and consumption.
Paul's Reluctance to Baptise
Authors: Ford Josephine Massyngberde
Published: July 2007

It has often caused the present writer some admitatio that in 1 Cor 1 : 14-17 Paul appears to show such reluctance to baptise but upon reading Kildahl’s The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues an insight into the situation was suggested to her.

In 1 Cor 1 : 14-15 Paul declares:

I am thankful (or I thank God) that I baptised none of you except Crispus and Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptised in my name.

Such a statement is not found elsewhere either in the Pauline Corpus or the rest of the New Testament, or to my knowledge in Christian writings: this would suggest that a special situation in Corinth warranted such reluctance. One main peculiarity of the Corinthian Church was its overenthusiasm and its stress on the gift of tongues. The Acts of the Apostles demonstrates that on extraordinary occasions the baptism of candidates was either preceded or followed by glossolalia. That ‘tongues’ might have accompanied baptism in Corinth also is suggested by the fact that Paul, after listing the spiritual gifts (1 Cor 12 : 4ff), emphasises the unity of the Body, which is the Church, by using a phrase occurring only once outside the Gospels and Acts ‘in one Spirit were we all baptised into one body’ (1 Cor 12:13).
Why Can't God Do Everything?
Authors: Moonan Lawrence
Published: July 2007

It is the contention of Professor Geach in ‘Omnipotence’, Philosophy 48 (1973) 7-20, called GP in what follows, that ‘no graspable sense has ever been given to this sentence [‘God can do everything’] that did not lead to self-contradiction or at least to conclusions manifestly untenable from a Christian point of view’ (GP 7-8). In the still more recent ‘An irrelevance of omnipotence’, Philosophy 48 (1973) 327-33, called GIOP in what follows, he continues to maintain a thesis of that kind: ‘any thesis that gives a plausible interpretation of the sentence ‘God can do everything’ is a thesis involving both inherent logical difficulties and conclusions hard to reconcile with traditional Christian belief’ (GIOP 327), and ‘sense is not to be made of “God can do everything” ‘ (GIOP 332). His contention, as the present paper will show, will not in fact survive straightforwardly logical criticism owing nothing essential to any arcane points of detail peculiar to philosophical theology.

Reasonably dismissing some other possible ways of understanding ‘God can do everything’—which should rather be put as ‘There is nothing that God cannot do’—Professor Geach brings his main batteries against a position held by many catholic theologians, St Thomas Aquinas among them. According to that position ‘ “God can do so- and-so” is true just if “God does so-and-so” is logically consistent— there may be consistently describable feats which it would involve contradiction to suppose done by God’ (G P 9’s italics). In view of that restriction which G P rightly emphasises, Aquinas advanced the thesis
Wholeness in Wittgenstein and Aquinas: A Contrast in Styles
Authors: Lefébure Marcus
Published: July 2007

The title of my paper is intended to represent a glimpse and a project rather than the profession of an achievement. I must, therefore, make explicit at least a certain disclaimer and mark a certain delimitation. I write primarily as a simple pupil of Aquinas, as one, however, who, perhaps precisely as such, has learned a sympathy with certain later and apparently dissimilar thinkers, and in particular with Wittgenstein. Further, the Wittgenstein whom I want to consider here is the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations.

My intention, therefore, is to suggest certain analogies between the thought of one whom I consider to be my principal tutor and that of another with whom, I think, Aquinas would have recognised an elective affinity. And since my argument will at least at times be somewhat intricate, I want to begin by providing an Ariadne-thread to facilitate the passage through the possible labyrinth. My contention will be that the conceptions of language held by both Wittgenstein and Aquinas can best be understood as expressions of their conception of what it is to be a man, that their respective conceptions of man turn out to be fascinatingly convergent, but that nevertheless their conceptions of language present a striking, albeit complementary, contrast. Or, put in slightly different form, the idea I want to suggest is that whereas the conceptions of language held by both thinkers should be seen as aspects and consequences of a markedly similar conception of man, these conceptions of language nevertheless present contrasting characteristics.

I shall begin, then, by trying to state my understanding of the main features of Wittgenstein’s conception of language as expressed in the Philosophical Investigations.
A Redeeming Occasion
Authors: Swanston Hamish F.G.
Published: July 2007

Going to a performance of any opera anywhere—well, almost any opera and almost anywhere, not Lucia di Lammermoor, not Glyndebourne—is for me an entrance upon an occasion. An entrance I may make at each performance. An occasion not to be experienced by those who sit amidst contraptions which without a by-your-leave or a letter of introduction thrust the entire chorus and orchestra of La Scala into one’s withdrawing room, and which are yet quite unable to bring Parsifal’s heavenly voices descending from the ceiling.

This sense of occasion belongs not nearly so much as is popularly believed—by those, for example, who covered the great concrete staircase of the Metropolitan at Lincoln Center with rich red cloth—with chandeliers and plush of a vanishing past, but rather is to be discerned in a common expectation of audience and players and singers. ‘It does me good to come here’, said my mother during the interval of a recent Covent Garden performance, T don’t often see so many people looking cheerful. It is not what television suggests to me that the world is like these days’.

Not that opera is to be thought escapist. Contrariwise. The 19th Century convention, for example, of a plot moving along by quick melodramatic incident, like falling in love or shooting a man down, with, before and after the incident, extended arias of comment and interpretation, seems to me not a whit artificial but exactly like the processes of my ordinary living.
English Bards and a Scottish Previewer: David Hume
Authors: Hakin Dayton
Published: July 2007

‘It is a tide which has turned only once in human history. . . . There is presumably a calendar date —a moment—when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it’.

Thus George Moore, Tom Stoppard’s brilliant, bespectacled version of the modem moral philosopher. In Jumpers, Stoppard has managed to do with contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy what he did earlier in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Bead with modem literary criticism—to make of an academic discipline a playing field for his sport, and of its preoccupations so much grist for the artist’s mill. Stoppard’s wit draws the finest of lines between the serious and the outlandish; and his irreverence makes for good fun—at the expense of his earnest protagonist. But George wins us, albeit the way a warm puppy wins us; and we can summon a measure of sympathy for his plight. George moves in a world where all his colleagues benignly presume that intelligent people outgrow belief in God; and so, he feels defensive about his commitment to a deity fashioned of old by the philosophers.

It really does not matter to most believers today, I suppose, that the onus for proving the existence of God has passed to them. Believers are not so interested as they used to be in cornering the adversaries in the labyrinth of the Five Ways. What the believer may feel, however, is a certain social onus, as he rubs shoulders with that large company, now in the ascendancy, who look upon him as they might look upon a curious fossil unearthed in a Palestinian excavation.

That the tide has turned and the believer has ridden out with it to an exile in a foreign land characterizes the current Christian Sitz im Leben. Our poets sensed, three and four generations ago, that this would be the climate of the twentieth century.
Thinking about God ‐ A response to Patrick McGrath
Authors: Davies Brian A.
Published: July 2007

In his article ‘Professor Geach and the Future’ (New Blackfriars, Vol. 54, No. 642, Nov. 1973), Patrick McGrath depicts what any non-academically inclined Christian must read as a bleak situation. He says that ‘if God knows everything that will happen, there is no room for free will. If he does not, he cannot be infinite and unchanging’. The upshot of this is that ‘a great deal of hard thinking on the character of the divine attributes is required from theologians, philosophers and scripture scholars’. What are the implications of this, and ought they to be accepted?

Clearly McGrath has his finger on some problems. To say that God is omniscient, and to maintain at the same time that he is changeless, looks on the face of it like a contradiction. It may, at least, appear to be something approaching one. To affirm that God comes to know things and to add that he is changeless seems likewise open to objection. Furthermore, it goes against the grain for thinking people, and, because of special reasons, for Catholics in particular, to deny the need for research, discussion and debate in religion. Unless we are prepared to refuse tolerantly to consider the fruits of experience and scholarship, or unless we are prepared to abandon the notion of an historical, teaching Church, so much seems a sine qua non. McGrath’s article is, however, disturbing. For, assuming (as seems natural) that most Christians are committed to the belief that, on certain occasions at least, human actions can be free and that God is immutable and omniscient, it reflects a regrettable tendency which many must now recognize as perennial. The tendency in question leans towards the view that the average theist or Christian needs to wait on the findings of certain academics for the right to give his complete assent to certain beliefs about God.
Women and the Priesthood
Authors: Wilis Eirene
Published: July 2007

The subject of the ordination of women to the representative priesthood of the Church is often discussed in terms of objections and meeting objections. The quick exchange and the tension involved in differing considerations can often be helpful and constructive; but I have chosen simply to consider the idea of women priests in itself, in a positive way. One may very well agree with the Anglican bishop, Trevor Huddlestone, that the theological arguments against the ordination of women ‘simply don’t hold water’; and one may also take the view of the novice master of an anglican monastery, that the argument of the twelve apostles all having been men is New Testament a similar view, and yet prefer simply to think about a priesthood of men and women in and for itself.

One other point of introduction is this, that any open discussion on the matter, and any public consideration of it, should, to be safe, have the support and purification of private self-examination. For the issues involved touch us at levels deeper than our reason; and if discussion becomes highly charged emotionally, as it sometimes does, then it is fairly certain that the people concerned have not privately come to terms with their feelings; we need to discover by ourselves what we feel about the subject, not only what we think, and not only what we think we ought to feel. In this way we can both discover our motives and work out our reasons. Doubtless the two should converge, but they do so to some extent in a divided, not yet perfectly integrated, human nature. A person can have a case for or against the ordination of women which in itself is flawlessly reasoned but which covers a subconscious motive or feeling of very dubious quality.
Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Spirit of Ecumenism
Authors: Congar Yves
Published: July 2007

I have chosen a strange subject to celebrate the centenary of Thomas Aquinas here, at Oxford. Is it not paradoxical, if not a little provocative, to speak of ‘St Thomas and the Spirit of Ecumenism’? For several reasons great caution is to be recommended.

First of all, there can only be ecumenism if one accepts the other as other, that he also has insights, that he has something to give. Now St Thomas lived in an epoch of a Christianity very sure of itself, and even, one can say, of a latin Catholicism loyal to the Pope as its head, absolutely assured of its legitimacy and its truth. England was certainly no exception. In these circumstances, what could possibly have been an ecumenical dialogue? Heretics were to be ‘exterminated’: that does not mean killed, but driven far away, chased from the land; though the process of ‘exclusion’ could culminate in physical destruction. One thinks of the cathars of Montségur. Listen to this account of an indicative incident. It happened at Cluny, at the beginning of the reign of St Louis, who recounted the episode to Joinville: ‘There was a great conference of clerics and Jews at the monastery of Cluny. There was a knight there . . . , who stood up and leaning on his crutch, asked that the greatest cleric and the greatest master of the Jews he brought to him. And so they were. . . . “Master”, said the knight, “I ask you if you believe that the Virgin Mary, who carried God in her womb and in her arms, gave birth while remaining a virgin and that she is the mother of God”. And the Jew replied that he did not believe a word of it. . . . “Truly”, said the knight, “You will pay for it”. And then he lifted up his crutch and struck the Jew near the ear and knocked him to the ground. And the Jews fled, carrying away their master, badly wounded, and thus ended the conference’.
Priorities in Religious Life—An Alternative View
Authors: Keating Denis
Published: July 2007

Once the primacy of the existential witness provided by the quality of community life is firmly established, the community can undertake, either corporately or individually, any of the works of mercy. Material services have their place, but this is very definitely a secondary one. What people DO by way of work, projects, etc., is irrelevant to the apostolic dimension of religious life. This apostolate, as I have tried to stress in various ways, is exercised in and through the quality of common life. Any specific works of social benefit that members undertake, either individually or collectively, are entirely secondary.

‘Any of the works of mercy’, ‘material services’, ‘works of social benefit’; how many Dominicans, how many other religious, will recognise their work in those descriptions? Is this the kind of choice between community life and work that they are offered? How does it come about that such a false choice is both approved and supported? How is it that the break-down situation, which is what the ‘choice’ between community life and work is, can be seen as offering relevance and a future to Dominican, and other, communities? (In what follows I shall write mainly from what I believe to be a Dominican point of view. I doubt if any one writer can cope with a topic as broad as ‘religious life’; I am even less convinced that a male is going to provide the solutions for either female congregations or joint ‘communes’).
The Uses of Analogy
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

An important theme of David Burrell’s thoughtful and thought- provoking book is that it is a mistake to elevate the discussion of analogous usage in language to a systematic theory. The difference between Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and even more Cajetan lies just here : Scotus turns analogy into a metaphysical theory, Cajetan turns it into formula for constructing the logical arguments. Aquinas, on the other hand, despite occasional gestures in that direction, is mainly concerned to avoid systematisation. If Burrell is right, then for Aquinas there is no such thing as a ‘theory of analogy’, only a need to examine and where necessary try to justify the way we actually use words analogically. Indeed, in a sense the burden of Aquinas’ treatment is that there cannot be a theory. And of course if there cannot be a theory of analogy, a fortiori there cannot be such a thing as a theory of analogy for theologians in particular.

I say all this because it is the presumption of Humphrey Palmer’s book that there is such a theory, that it is designed for specifically theological purposes, and that it is no good. It is also his presumption that Aquinas had such a theory and that therefore what he says is no good. So if Burrell is right, then Palmer’s critique, however valid against theorists and metaphysicians like Scotus or Cajetan, does not really touch Aquinas at all. Which is a pity, since there seems little point in attacking straw arguments when there are arguments of tougher metal to be dealt with.
Certainly about God
Authors: van der Hart Robert
Published: July 2007

There have always been questions about God, but it was only recently that these took the form of doubt. Our ancestors studied the Scriptures and enquired from their priests and prophets, not because they expected a final and definitive solution but because they encountered a mystery that gave no rest to a questioning mind. Each answer gave rise to new questions, driving people on in their search, awakening in them a desire for a knowledge that could only be satisfied in the beatific vision.

But for the present generation a new and more basic question has emerged, a question that is of a different kind because it asks to be settled before we engage ourselves in the further search for God. First we need to know whether belief is not based upon an illusion. How are we to be certain about God’s existence; how can we dissolve our doubts as to whether the object of our faith is real?

Unfortunately the ‘proofs’ have done little to convince those who are not already convinced; others are left with their doubts. Most philosophers now profess that God, if he exists, is necessarily beyond the limited scope of our knowledge, a mystery on which every purely rational thought is wasted, a dimension too inaccessable to be explored, a matter of faith rather than of demonstration.

And so, in one sense, we seem to have returned to the time before the Enlightenment when true knowledge of God was given with faith and not with rational insight.

But doubt is still with us, and it would be naive to presume that it will be dissolved in a vigorous faith. For how can faith be vigorous when it begins with doubt ? Is it not inevitably somewhat supercilious, conditional because we cannot be certain that it is about anything at all ? It is hard to commit oneself to something which may be an illusion, and it is unrealistic to expect that our doubt will be dispelled by a total faith to which that very doubt is an obstacle.
C.I.I.R. and The Middle East
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

Before examining Mr Allen’s particular criticisms of the CIIR Comment 19 on the Middle East, it is necessary first to dispel some of his misconceptions about the Catholic Institute. Through its regular newsbrief Comment CIIR gives the background to particular situations, usually international in character and examines them in the light of Catholic social teaching and values. In this way CIIR attempts to bring to the attention of the Catholic community in this country international issues of justice and peace which are quite properly their concern. Where the role of the Catholic Church is integral to the discussion, this is examined —for example, recent Comments on Portuguese Africa, Brazil and Chile. It is true that in Comment we do not quote extensively from official Church sources; rather we make references to these as necessary. As a Catholic body, we give a Catholic view, but it is only a Catholic view. Perhaps Mr Allen would care to specify where he feels the Comment is uncatholic or unchristian?

Quoting from an article in the Tablet of 15th June 1974, Mr Allen criticises our ‘selective approach to complex problems’. The article went on to say :

‘But the CIIR never deals in trivialities or at a superficial level, and one must expect and respect some biassed passion where big issues are at stake. Indeed we would like to see CIIR’s crusading zeal extended to all that vast area of the globe under the domination of Soviet Russia where all values that it stands for are more blatantly and brutally disregarded than anywhere else’.

It seems that CIIR is being criticised not for what it does say but rather for what it has not. Whilst some may consider it a valid criticism of the CIIR that in recent years it has not produced anything on the persecution of Christians in communist countries, such criticism in no way invalidates what it has already said on Northern Ireland, Portugal or the Middle East.
The Ethics of Living and Dying Today
Authors: Nuttgens Bridget
Published: July 2007

Two summers ago, some friends of ours lost their 14-year-old son. He slipped while clambering around on a family picnic at the seaside—so innocuous in the sunshine!—and three days later they were told that he would never recover consciousness. It was explained to them that he could of course be kept ‘alive’ indefinitely if that was their wish ? Had our friends been Catholics, would they have found it any easier to make the decision to turn off the machine? I doubt it.

Yet I feel it should have been. Recent work on bereavement records the regularity with which the bereaved are prey to feelings of guilt over negligences to the dying person or the inevitable feeling where an illness is long-drawn out, that the sooner death comes, the better. What is likely then to be the psychological effect on those bereaved by their own decision, and how badly do they need the moral support and comfort of a caring but clear-headed church in this predicament? Outsiders accuse the autocratic Catholic Church of still issuing rule-of-thumb directives on all moral questions, and since, alone of the Christian churches, she still maintains an absolute stand on the taking of life (as those with experience in the abortion field well know), it would amaze them to learn that in such an agonising decision as this, the Church appears to have so little positive help to offer. Why ? One can of course suggest reasons : positive ones, such as the one of which my father constantly reminded us in our days of youthful revolt, that a Church which claims to speak to all peoples and for all ages must exercise a wise conservatism and not rush into rash statements; and the corollary : that the Church prefers to avoid rigid statements where the situation is uncertain and still in the process of developing—as is clearly the case with topical medical techniques.
Council and Pope: The Modern Relevance of Conciliarism
Authors: Black Antony
Published: July 2007

Late-medieval conciliarism provides one theoretical model for the structure of the church, and in particular for its decision-making processes. The development of councils as a means of settling disputes which could not be settled at the local, episcopal level, and of making decisions binding on the church as a whole, in particular of defining the true faith, remains, so far as I am aware, still clouded in our fragmentary knowledge of the early church. But we may guess that the use of councils developed steadily and ‘organically’, as did the priesthood and episcopate, as the church developed its own (in many ways) unique structure in response to the needs of the time. The same appears to be true of the development of the Roman primacy. The notion that the Roman church was the final court of appeal in theological and ecclesiastical disputes, and the corresponding notion that it was incapable of error, were first developed (though I do not know how widely they were accepted in the East) in the late 4th and 5th centuries. Some, such as St Athanasius, regarded the consent of Rome as the touchstone of a true council. ‘Infallibility’ as applied to the Roman see in this sense was thus a very ancient doctrine, and some have found it as early as I Clement (96 AD.). But it was quite a different matter to say that the Roman see (or even the pope in person) could pronounce a final, binding decision on a matter of faith without an oecumenical council. As Professor Tierney has recently shown, papal ‘infallibility’ in this ‘strong’ sense was a product of disputes between the friars and the French episcopate in the late 13th Century, and it was accepted by very few prior to the Council of Florence (1439), and not all that widely thereafter. The normal view of medieval canon-lawyers was that the pope was supreme in jurisdiction, i.e. his word was law in settling disputes, but that as regards defining faith a council was required; indeed, in matters of faith, he was both fallible and impeachable.
The CIIR and Louis Allen
Authors: Davis Uri
Published: July 2007

In the concluding paragraphs of his open letter to the Catholic Institute for International Relations, Mr Allen notes that ‘the ultimate objective of the Palestinians is said to be “a non-Zionist, Arab-Jewish state in the whole of what was once Palestine”. This means the ultimate objective of the Palestinians is still the destruction of the state of Israel as it now is’ (my italics). Mr Allen clearly implies that individuals and organisations who subscribe to the objective of destroying the state of Israel as it now is cannot be considered legitimate parties to a Catholic debate on the Middle East conflict and the desired future for the Israel’- Jewish and Palestinian-Arab peoples. Mr Allen is a Catholic and he questions whether the CIIR is voicing a legitimate Catholic position on the question of the Middle East conflict presumably because Comment 19 either states or implies the desirability of destroying the state of Israel as it now is.

Israeli-Jews, as a rule, are not too well informed of Christian history and more often than not betray unforgiveable ignorance of the development of Catholicism. I am no exception, yet, given my limited knowledge, I would be surprised to find a Catholic consensus that state-worship constitutes part of the Catholic spirit or dogma. I would rather have thought that Catholics, like people of any other religion, might have been expected to oppose any insinuation that unconditional acceptance of the existence of any state as it now is, irrespective of its policies and history, should constitute a condition sine qua non for a legitimate ethical-political discussion. I would further like to state at the outset that in terms of my own political ethics, no ethical discussion of the political domain can take place unless it involves a critical scrutiny of any existing state in the light of its history and de facto policies and can thus decide in each case whether one can justify support for its continued existence. This is as true of the state of Israel as it is of the Vatican State.
Was Paul a Male Chauvinist?
Authors: Butler Christine
Published: July 2007

Poor St Paul: with, ‘Wives be subject to your husbands’, he has a pretty bad reputation as a misogynist. I will try to show, however, that examination of his writings proves that this reputation is undeserved and to indicate how it has grown. So that it has become what Dr Caird describes as: ‘one of the most firmly held of the prejudices and half truths which together comprise the biblical semiliteracy of the man in the street’.

I cannot here go into a detailed exegesis of all the extracts from St Paul’s letters in which women are mentioned, but one central point must be made clearly from the start. St Paul had one main concern. That was, to preach the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus. His mission was not concerned with women as women, or with their place in society or even in the local churches. It was not as a sociologist that Paul wrote but as an apostle. He was concerned above all to preach what Christ had done for all mankind. He was concerned to show people how a new relationship with God could be found through being in Christ. The new relationship with God came through the new covenant established by Christ’s death and resurrection. Through baptism into Christ, people were given the new seal; just as circumcision had been the old seal of God’s relationship with his old people, and the law had been their relationship with God. There would of course be repercussions in social relationships which would follow from the realisation of the new relationship with God through Christ. But if we look at Paul from a particular standpoint: what has he to say about women only?, we are asking a question which he did not ask.
A is for Africa, B is for Belonging
Authors: Ankrah Maxine E , Heaney Seamus
Published: July 2007

I once wondered how it would feel to arrive back in Anomabu (home of Aggrey and Robert Gardiner) and be referred to simply as Kodwo’s wife, rather than as the American, wife of ... For I am black, 12 years married, dress in the traditional Ghanaian ‘cloth’, speak a bit of the Fanto language, as a type, have features indistinguishable from my in-laws, have lived and worked for eight years in West and East Africa. Politically, I am firmly aligned with those working towards a genuine economic and political liberation of Black Africa. Nevertheless, for the likes of me in Africa, ‘Black’ does not yet fully mean ‘belonging’.

I’m not sure I understand all the implications of this for the Black or for Africa. During a recent, five-week home-leave in Ghana from Switzerland I thought about it a little in between talking with others of my kind in my kind of dilemma : a being poised between two worlds. Observing trends in Ghana and reflecting on life as I experienced it, I have come to some tentative statements which may interest persons for whom the question of Blacks living in Africa is of any import. The following three conclusions are tentative, as neither Blacks nor Africans claim to have found final answers. They are that: (a) black tourism is a development worthy of consideration for its potential impact on shaping Black/African relationships of the future; (b) for the ‘non-transient’, to discover that the much heralded concept of the African extended family does not yet extend to him is to really begin to make progress in living in Africa; (c) but more positive: because the Black approaches the African not as an inferior, a rival, a subject for exploitation, but as a brother (with all the psychological connotations this presupposes) and he approaches Africa with a sense of belonging, there is the potentiality for working together toward a common good, irrespective of the past.
A Note on Grace
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

Few topics, to my mind, have been so obscured by inter-confessional debates as that of grace. Particularly, perhaps, among Catholics really everything written or said since the sixteenth century has been conditioned by reaction against, or attack upon, positions asserted to be those of the Reformers. Yet when we trundle out these statements and the arguments on which they rest, it comes as a surprise to be told that we have got the Reformers quite wrong; even their contemporaries, the theologians of the Council of Trent, seem to have been grappling with adversaries of their own making. When we go on to look, far too superficially in my case, at what seems to be the Reformed view about what we hold, the results are even more surprising.

Perhaps the Reformed take theologians more seriously than we do, but even given this, they seem, from our point of view, to be remarkably unlucky in the ones they read (but I except Professor Torrance from this).

It may well be—because Catholics have been guilty of practically every absurdity—that there are theologians who hold, or have held, that grace is a separate thing, something we can possess; or a reservoir on which we can draw. Some, not of very great repute, have certainly held that a right use of natural powers deserved or brought about a giving of grace. On a hasty reading it might appear that even the great medieval theologians regarded grace as the embellishment of an aristotelian universe. But when it is suggested that even Roman theologians regard grace as an impersonal something, a something detachable from the presence of the living God, I do not recognise anything more than the selection of one set of statements interpreted in the worst possible sense and used out of context.
Christian Journalism
Authors: Bright Laurence
Published: July 2007

In itself this collection of articles, letters, jokes, editorials and poems from New Christian (1965-1970) has nothing particularly to recommend it to readers five years later. Everything here was written for its own time and place rather than for export. But seen as a reminder of what New Christian stood for, as evidence to draw on should there be any other serious Christian reviews in being or possibility, it seems to me of very great value.

However we regard New Christian, praise or blame for it belongs mostly to Trevor Beeson, its permanent editor. I think he achieved remarkable success. He aimed high, and hit a lot of marks, missing only the crucial one—circulation. His short account in the Reader of what he tried for and where he failed is a model for any editor of a Christian journal. I propose to summarise it under eight heads, following each with my own comment, and drawing where necessary on the evidence of the collection.
Jesus the Martyr
Authors: O'Collins Gerald
Published: July 2007

Men and women martyred for their faith form a coherent and distinctive group—from Socrates and Stephen, through Joan of Arc, Savonarola and Thomas More, down to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in our own day. Violent death came to each in such a way that we can classify them all with Jesus.

Particular circumstances may allow us to match their martyrdoms with his passion and crucifixion. At times betrayal by former friends or similar forms of treachery led to arrest and imprisonment. The trials which preceded the death penalty frequently centred on some fatal question. Did Thomas More wish to deprive Henry VIII of the title which Parliament had granted him? How would Jesus answer when the high priest asked him : ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ (Mark 14:61). Finally, many martyrs shared the same geography of death with Jesus—public execution. Some were, of course, butchered in their prison cells, or like Bonhoeffer led away to the sinister secrecy of a Nazi hanging. But Joan of Arc died in the Rouen market-place, Savonarola outside the old Palace in Florence, and Thomas More on Tower Hill.

Granted these and other similarities, we need, nevertheless, to be sensitive to much that gives Jesus’ passion and death its own particular profile. The differences go beyond the obvious and massive fact that no one even alleges that the other martyrs have reconciled the entire human race with God. We must not let other notable contrasts slip out of sight. Let me examine one of these.
Lonergan's Theory of Knowledge and the Social Sciences
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

Bernard Lonergan’s theory of knowledge is not yet very well-known among social scientists. But it seems to me that it has implications of fundamental importance for the central problems with which they are concerned. In what follows, I shall try to explain why.

What is the nature of the explanation of human behaviour sought by the social scientist, and what relation does it have to the explanations which agents give of their own actions? It is characteristic of the sociological view which one might call ‘positivist’ that it eliminates as quite irrelevant to the scientific explanation of human behaviour the accounts given by the agents themselves. This is justified by the claim that the agent’s point of view is by its very nature individual and subjective; whereas science aspires to a form of explanation which is objective and publicly verifiable. Completely opposed to the positivist view is that which takes the agent’s explanation of his own behaviour as uniquely privileged. On this account, social science is pursuing a chimaera if it looks for any explanation of an action other than that which the agent gives or at least is capable of giving himself. This is a central contention, I think, of the ethnomethodologists; it has also been defended by Peter Winch.

A third view is the Marxist one, which differs from that just alluded to in that it insists that what human beings are up to on the one hand, and the justifications which they give of what they are doing, are two very different things ; but does not aspire to the kind of ‘reductionism’ which is practised by the positivist.