bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On Priestly Marriage: A Response To Father Hastings On Celibacy
Authors: Boivin Marcel
Published: July 2007

Scandalous news has a way of getting around the world at a speed which is truly mystifying. The news of what was described to me as Adrian Hastings’ latest eccentricity was no exception. “Fr. Hastings,” I was told some time in May right here in Ngara, “is this time proclaiming disobedience to his bishop as a virtue and trumpeting the announcement of his forthcoming wedding”.

In late September, I finally got hold of the offending piece (“On Celibacy”, New Blackfriars, March 1978. pp. 104-111). I soon felt less sorry for Fr. Hastings than for his detractors. In truth, I know of many priests who feel the way Fr Hastings says he does, with the difference that being better able to articulate the reasons for his feeling he can express it as a legitimate stand. Before I could quite make out the value of Fr Hastings’ arguments, I already felt sure that the most solid support for his position came from the saying of Jesus: “Go learn the meaning of the words: what I want is mercy, not sacrifice” (Mt. 9:13).

The fact, however, that so many members of the Church who cannot lightly be accused of hypocrisy still maintain that all priests must lead a celibate life prevents me from sharing Fr Hastings’ certainty in upholding the opposite view. Perhaps there are reasons beyond my understanding yet within theirs which make it wrong or at least inopportune to repeal the law of celibacy. Yet, one cannot be blamed for voicing an opinion and mine is that Fr Hastings, as a Catholic priest, is indeed free to marry, as are all Catholic priests who did not choose celibacy for its own sake but only agreed to it as to a conditio sine qua non to fulfil their vocation to the priesthood.
Indian Approaches to the Theology of Liberation
Authors: Abeyasingha N.
Published: July 2007

That there are social, political and economic problems in India is a fact that needs no proof. The task of the believer in this situation can be spoken of in line with the general understanding of revelation which encourages the Christian to act like Christ, who gave himself unto death; to act like the apostles who spent themselves for their brethren, because our fellow men are members of Christ and in order that the peace willed by Christ may reign in this world. Yet such a description of the task of the Christian leaves his role as regards the structures of human society relatively undefined.

In India today, there is the effort to analyse the structures themselves and establish Christian positions in dealing with them, so as to re-construct a social order in which sin as a structuring element is less present.

The present article seeks to present the general lines of the approach followed by Indian theologians and then try to offer, for the information and comment of Western theologians, certain approaches by which the theology of liberation as formulated for and in India could have an impact in regard to other approaches to the theology of liberation.

Even the most systematic considerations in the matter of the theology of liberation are formulated as “hypotheses”. The present article seeks to present some of the present approaches to the theology of liberation in India. Admittedly, it is a difficult task to synthesize the perspectives of the analyses of Indian society already made and the “projects” suggested due to the “particularity” of the viewpoint of each author. But it is necessary to make some attempt in order to set our comments in perspective.
4: The Conflict between the English Bishops Vatican I and the Papacy
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The decade that preceded Vatican I saw what was by far the most intensive and exciting theological debate there has ever been in modern English Catholic history. Compared with the pious torpor of the decade that preceded Vatican II, certainly, the zest and odium of theological exchange prepared the clergy and educated laity in England more thoroughly for the proclamation of the doctrine of papal infallibility than was the case anywhere else in the Catholic world. It is true, of course, that nobody elsewhere expected papal infallibility to be so high on the agenda at the Council. The English debate, through Manning’s extraordinary influence at the Council, may even be described (with little exaggeration) as the key factor in ensuring that papal infallibility was moved to the head of the agenda.

The Dublin Review, from 1863 onwards, was the principal organ of the “New Ultramontanism”. In that year the editorship passed to William George Ward, the most brilliant of all the ex-Anglicans from Oxford who dedicated their energies to “Romanizing” the English Catholic community. A fellow of Balliol College by 1834, when he was twenty-two, Ward of course took minor orders but it was in mathematics and logic that his brilliance lay. As the DNB entry delicately puts it, “his union of a severely logical intellect with a craving for more concrete assurance in matters spiritual than reason can afford” led him inexorably to seek communion with Rome. Censured by Convocation on a famous occasion in the Sheldonian Theatre, because of his “Romanism”, Ward at once resigned his fellowship, married, and became a Catholic six months later. Six years later, in 1851, much to the horror of most of the Catholic clergy, Ward had been installed, against strong opposition both within and without the college, as lecturer in moral philosophy in the Westminster archdiocesan seminary.
Vatican I and the Papacy 5: Defining “defining”
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

That ultimate responsibility for true Christian doctrine is included in the universal primacy which the bishop of Rome as successor of St Peter possesses in the universal Church is a claim that should surprise no one who is prepared to entertain the notion of a universal primacy in the first place. This is, at any rate, the burden of the famous chapter 4 of “Pastor Aeternus”, the document in which Vatican I defined the infallible teaching of the bishop of Rome. What, with the approval of the Council, Pope Pius IX defined in the text that was promulgated on 18th July, 1870, as “dogma divinely revealed” runs as follows:

“The bishop of Rome, when he speaks ex cathedra, i.e. when, in discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, is, by God’s, help promised to him in St Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed in defining a doctrine regarding faith or morals; and such definitions of the bishop of Rome are therefore of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, irreformable”.

Assuming, then, that the bishop of Rome as successor of St Peter must in some sense be “the mouth of the Church and of the episcopate”, and must thus be able on some occasions at least to give voice to the faith that all alike hold, what are the problems of interpretation that this text contains? The fact that these problems have often been raised before, and that, in trying to resolve them, we have little new to say, will not deter us from covering the ground once again.
Faith And Experience VIII Beyond Reason And Language?
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

“We feel that, even if all possible scientific questions have been answered, our existential problems (Lebensprobleme) have not been touched at all”. suppose many people would agree that we feel that there must be more to life than just getting sensible answers to sensible questions, there must be more to life than “sweet reasonableness”. “He who does not dance, does not know what is going on”. In a short story by the Russian writer, Olga Larionova, a rebellious young lady who has fallen in love against instructions laughs at the “poverty-stricken wisdom” of her thoroughly rationalist commander from Logitania. In the words of e. e. cummings:

since feeling is firstwho pays any attentionto the syntax of thingswill never wholly kiss you;wholly to be a foolwhile Spring is in the worldmy blood approves,and kisses are a better fatethan wisdom
Watercress Theology or What the Abbess said to the Bishop on the Road to Samarkand
Authors: Pinnington Judith
Published: July 2007

The semi-official working party of members of the General Synod’s ecumenical council made its initial visit to Zamind only a matter of months after the area became accessible for Western visitors following the Soviet relaxation of the restrictions which had applied to foreign travel in the Taghiz Republic. The ‘Beeson Report’ of the B.C.C. working party on religious conditions in the U.S.S.R had suggested the existence of hitherto unknown autonomous Christian Churches in remote forest and mountain regions, and it was one such report which led us to Taghiz. But what we found there exceeded our wildest expectations and poses a serious challenge to all our ecumenical thinking.

Let me first sketch in the physical context. We descended from the plateau of Qudukh at 9,400 feet through an area of bleak marshes and lava fields which one of the group imaginatively likened to a petrified sea in storm. In due course we reached a vast basalt plain bisected by a large fast-flowing river. This river was flanked by a large expanse of rich black alluvial soil dotted with many small trees and berried shrubs. Before us was a lake of the deepest blue edged by sands of an orange colour, and beyond, rising up mysteriously in the midst of the plain, a stark massif scored with many small tumultuous mountain streams. In the upper reaches of one of these we could see a vast triangular platform of rock standing out from the mountain-side surrounded on all sides by branches of the stream; and on that platform stood the Monastery of Zamind existing in happy symbiosis with a sizeable and prosperous-looking village. We began to ascend, and as we approached more closely we saw a wealth of luxuriant vegetation -terebinth, tamarisk and yew predominating with a sprinkling of willows at the edge of the stream. Daisies and poppies abounded.
Eucharist, Baptism, Church Oneness And Unity
Authors: Tillard J. M. R.
Published: July 2007

The theology and practice of the Eucharist is undoubtedly at the heart of the ecumenical task. The discussions on intercommunion and eucharistic hospitality have become the focus of nearly every ecumenical dialogue and of many ecumenical gatherings. Nevertheless I do not want to discuss this issue again here. For I am convinced that there will be no serious answer to the problem as long as we do not agree on some basic ecclesiological principles.

I want to deal with one of these basic principles. It is very strange indeed that so few theologians or churchmen have written on the link between Eucharist, Baptism and Church taken all together. Usually one studies the relation of Baptism with Church, of Eucharist with Church, of Baptism with Eucharist, but without putting together the result of these three analyses. I shall try to do it here. It will lead us to the very basic question of the distinction between the oneness (unicitas) and the Unity (Unitas) of the visible Church.
Crises of Confidence and Rules of Faith
Authors: White Alan
Published: July 2007

On Thursday, 4th October, 1979 James Mackey, formerly Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies in the University of San Francisco, delivered his inaugural lecture as Thomas Chalmers Professor of Theology in the University of Edinburgh. The lecture hall in New College, the Divinity Faculty of the University, was filled to overflowing. Undoubtedly it was Professor Mackey's reputation which had drawn many members of his audience to hear him. Strange to say, that reputation was established not by any of his written works, nor by any extensive familiarity with his personal biography. What had attracted some, at least, of his hearers was his appointment having been the subject of an unprecedented debate in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in May of this year.
Meaning and Metaphor in Theology
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

The title of this paper would appear to suggest that it belongs to a fairly familiar area of discussion in the philosophy of religion – the discussion of ‘religious language’ – to which the late Bishop of Durham, Dr Ramsey, made many notable contributions. The appearance is somewhat misleading. Of come the present paper must clearly be concerned with religious language; but the centre of its concern is not religious language in general but in particular the language which it is the business of the Christian theologian to interpret, in the first place Biblical language, and in the second place the language of interpretation itself, theological language. Even this formulation – religious language in general, bibliqal and theological language in particular – might be misleading if it were taken to imply simple inclusion. It may turn out that the apparently broader, more fundamental discussion of religious language relies in fact on assumptions which are open to criticism deriving from the apparently narrower and secondary discussion of biblical and theological language.
Rahner's Grundkurs revisited
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Can it really be the case, as Hugo Meynell makes out in his meditation on Karl Rahner’s Grundkurs des Glaubens (New Blackfriars February 1980), that “the best living Catholic theologian” (p. 77) neither believes the doctrine of the resurrection in a recognisably traditional sense (p. 87) nor distinguishes the doctrine of purgatory from the belief in reincarnation which characterizes some Eastern religions (p. 88) — to cite but two charges in Dr Meynell’s arraignment? Can it really be the case that, in his ripe old age (for he is 76 this year), as he delivers what is plainly conceived as his theological testament, and prepares to die in the serenity of that faith which has never wavered since his proudly old-fashioned Swabian Catholic upbringing, and throughout his life-long grounding in the Spiritual Exercises (“I think that the spirituality of Ignatius himself, which one learned through the practice of prayer and religious formation, was more significant for me than all learned philosophy and theology inside and outside the order”), Karl Rahner’s Christology is not significantly different from that of a Nestorian or a Liberal Protestant (p. 87), and his idea of eternal life little different from that of (horrendous to relate) Professor D. Z. Phillips?

Well, in the epidemic of reactionary intransigence that is affecting so many of the best educated and the most formidably intelligent Catholics at the present time, no doubt such suspicions of Rahner’s orthodoxy may occasion little surprise and may even pass without notice. But Dr Meynell’s published work, for fifteen years and more, bears witness to his great knowledge of, and imaginative sympathy with, modem theological movements, as well as to his unremitting fidelity to Catholic doctrine in its most classical formulations.
The Vatican and Communism from ‘Divini Redemptoris’ to Pope Paul VI
Authors: Higginson Paul
Published: July 2007

The period between the publication of the encyclical ‘Divini Red-emptoris’ (On Atheistic Communism) in 1937 and the election of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, was marked by a definite and fundamental change in Vatican/Communist relations. This study attempts to chart this development, explaining exactly how and why this transformation has occurred. The few other studies of this subject have all lacked a historical perspective, and have therefore tended to encourage the false notion that the views and action of the successive popes have remained the same. Part I of this essay examines the hostile intransigence of Pius XI and Pius XII during the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, and centres upon the startling change of attitude promoted by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. The more cautious but perhaps more significant promotion and extension of this Joh-anine ideal by Paul VI over a longer period of time will be analysed (along with a brief look at the state of Vatican/Communist relations in the present day). In Part II this study is essentially Vatican centred; the Church is large and often ambiguous, and local hierarchies, groups of militant lay Catholics, Christian Marxists, prominent theologians, and individual clergy, have only been analysed when they influence or have helped to change the Holy See. Papal speeches and letters, promulgations and edicts from the Holy Office and the other Vatican Congregations, and particularly Papal encyclicals, have been used extensively, and other primary material such as journals, reviews, newspapers and other contemporary writings have been consulted where necessary. The change in the nature of communism and the policies of the communist world (primarily the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, but also China, Indo-China, Latin America and the European Communist parties) I have treated as a secondary development due to limitations of time, space and sources.
On the Fringe
Authors: Quinn Edward
Published: July 2007

‘I wouldn’t belong to this bunch of macaroni merchants for another second if it wasn’t the way of laying hold on Christ’. My own feelings about the Church are not exactly the same as those of Stanley Morison when he made this statement many years ago to Tom Burns, but something like this principle has enabled me to remain in the Church as the body of Christ, without feeling obliged to belong to the Catholic club, throughout my three score years and ten. Unlike Morison, I am not a convert, but Catholicism intervened effectively in my life only after childhood. And my first contacts were not with an Italian but with what appeared to be a very Irish and clerical institution.

For those inside and outside the Church in 1908 Catholicism in the West Riding town of Keighley was personified by the parish priest, Joseph Russell, a fine figure of a man who until his death in 1945 was always seen outside wearing a top hat (except on one occasion when he realised halfway up Highfield Lane that biretta and frock coat did not go together). After studies at Waterford and Maynooth, he soon made his mark in the Leeds diocese as preacher and administrator, a successful money-raiser who established four parishes from St Anne’s in Keighley and largely paid for their churches before they were cut off. He was very concerned tor the rights of the Church, reluctant to accept English curates, but on excellent terms with the Anglican rector and active on the local board of guardians.
Rahner Retrospective: I‐Rupturing Der Pianische Monolithismus
Authors: Fergus Kerr
Published: July 2007

In the preface to the thirteenth volume of his Schriften zur Theologie, which appeared in 1978, Karl Rahner speaks of a fourteenth volume as nearing readiness for the press and to be published in late 1979 (to the best of my knowledge it has not yet appeared), and, although he does not say so in so many words, his tone suggests that the fourteenth will be the last of the series which began in 1954. Since the appearance in 1961 of Cornelius Ernst’s translation of the first volume, and the inauguration of Rahner’s Theological Investigations (with an allusion to Wittgenstein in the title), the English version has kept pace very creditably, despite inexorably rising costs and perceptible decline in concern with systematic theology, not to mention the difficulty of finding competent translators. The publication of Theological Investigations XVI, admirably translated by David Morland of Ampleforth, giving us the first half of Schriften XII (1975), the volume which Rahner dedicated to his mother on her hundredth birthday, offers an opportunity to review the series so far, and perhaps to underline the author’s most characteristic perspectives and concerns, or at any rate to outline pathways in this forbiddingly massive corpus of some 7000 pages of text.

It should be noted at the outset that the first six volumes of the English translation correspond exactly to the first six volumes of the original. As Rahner’s productivity was released in the wake of the Vatican Council his collected essays became increasingly substantial. The densely printed German volumes proved too unwieldy for us, with the result that the next four volumes to appear were split in two and thus yielded eight volumes in the English edition. The eleventh volume of the Schriften is the only exception to the rule that the series is devoted to miscellanies of articles, lecture texts and so on, by being confined entirely to Rahner’s work on the history of the sacrament of penance.
Rahner's Grundkurs Revisited Again
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

I do not think that ‘arraignment’, the term used by Fr Fergus Ken, quite hits off my comments on Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith. I said as clearly as I knew how that I thought the book was in most respects of very high quality indeed. It is true that I devoted most of my comments, partly for reasons of space, partly because panegyric is uninstructive and tiresome, to what I felt were its limitations.

I agree that it is often necessary to qualify the meaning of one’s statements carefully, if misunderstanding is to be avoided. But there is a difference between the kind of qualification which makes one’s meaning more precise than it would otherwise be, and the kind which seems rather to destroy it. Thus I can say, I love that lady, but I don’t intend to marry her’, and my qualification serves to clarify my feelings and motives. But if I say, I love that lady, but I don’t mind in the least if I never see her again, or if she falls under a bus tomorrow’, then I may cause a certain amount of confusion, and may reasonably be asked what I do imply in saying that I love her.A propos of Christian expectations of a future life, Rahner says that we must resist the temptation to think of them as ‘anticipatory, eyewitness accounts of a future which is still outstanding’ (p 431). Perhaps it is stupid of me not to be able to see what is being denied here, unless it is that Christians have some kind of expectation for the future, after the end of the present life. If Rahner’s point had been merely that the expectation was not arbitrary, or that the afterlife to be expected was not unconnected with the moral dispositions and the relation to God which a person was building up in the present life, it would surely have been expressed in some other way.

Certainly I have a use for qualifications, believing as I do that to contrast Christian faith with myth in the way that Rahner does (p 291) is an important strategic error in apologetics, unless one mitigates the contrast with a great many qualifications.
Magisterium Vel Ministerium?
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

There is a number of substantive issues that divide Catholic opinion today, and which have been brought to the fore by the forthright statements of Pope John Paul II – clerical celibacy, for example, and the ordination of women. But the all-important, primary, basic issue that has to be discussed and fought about in the Church today is not a substantive one but, in a sense, a procedural one: how, where and by whom should such substantive issues be decided? The all-important question, in other words, is the question of authority: what is the nature of authority in the Church of God, and where does it reside? At a profounder level you could say it is a question of ecclesiology: what is the nature of the Church? Here I shall only touch on that question by implication.

On the subject of authority there are, as there have been for centuries, two rival points of view, two conflicting parties in the Catholic Church. In the middle ages there were the papalists against the conciliarists; in the 19th century the names, and to a slight extent the precise issues at stake had changed, and there were the Roman ultramontanes (direct heirs of the medieval papalists) against the cisalpines and the gallicans.
On Losing The Catholic Faith…
Authors: Tatham Michael
Published: July 2007

Acquiring the faith in 1946 was a process that lasted a year and a half and was predated by two circumstances that probably had an influence which outlasted the years of belief one was that I happened to have an uncle who – despite never going near a church even at Christmas – was a quite remarkably good man, and the other was that apart from the conventional influences of my Anglican school I was brought up in a fundamentally pagan and easygoing home.

No doubt because of this nominally religious background, when the faith did impinge on my adolescence it was all the more virulent – there had been no saving inoculation. Certainly it was quite unlike anything I had previously come across.
God:I — Creation
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need asking, that the world poses these questions for us.

To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the validity of science — I don’t mean science as a body of established facts set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual activity, the activity of research currently going on; and not just routine research which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the growing point of science, the venture into the unknown.

It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It is perfectly possible to say we now have science; (we didn’t have it in the eighth century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of course all the really great advances in science have come by questioning just that; by questioning, let us say, whether the Newtonian world is really the last word, by digging down and asking questions of what everybody has come to take for granted. But you could imagine quite easily a society which discouraged such radical questioning.
In Tears With His People: Reflections on the Role of the Roman Catholic Clergy in Four English Parishes
Authors: Hornsby‐Smith Michael P
Published: July 2007

In this article, a number of findings of a series of focussed interviews with fifteen Roman Catholic clergy associated with four English parishes will be discussed in the light of a recent survey of clergy from three denominations. It will be shown that in a number of important respects the findings of this mail questionnaire survey were not supported by the evidence derived from taped interviews in the present research.

All the priests interviewed were or had been recently associated with one of the four parishes selected for the study of change in the Roman Catholic community in England. The parishes had been selected to reflect as far as possible with the resources available, both regional and social class variations. Two parishes were in the London area. One was a middle class commuter parish covering an area of some fifteen square miles, about 20 miles outside the city and with a Catholic density of around 8% of the population. The second was an inner-city parish occupying under one square mile in area with a large proportion of both Irish and New Commonwealth immigrants. In this parish Catholics comprised some 18% of the population. The remaining two parishes, both covering under one square mile in. area were in Preston where Catholics comprised between one quarter and one third of the population. Relatively few Catholics in Preston admitted to having any Irish ancestry. One parish was an inner-city, traditional working class parish in a state of population decline and aging associated with massive but arrested urban redevelopment programmes and the second, on the outskirts of Preston consisted mainly of new housing estates occupied by upwardly mobile people in professional, managerial and technical occupations.
Sexual Minorites as a Challenge to Christian Fellowship
Authors: Pinnington Judith
Published: July 2007

It may be that the following comments will appear to some readers applicable to all ‘sexual minorities’. I myself do not so apply them. I have trans+exuak, entirely in mind as I write, and not merely because they tend to be the most seriously discriminated against. However, it is not for me to dictate to others how they should or should not make use of these ideas. If readers wish to see the trans-sexual’s dilemma as a paradigm of some larger or even quite different dilemma, then so be it.

The Open Church Group in Great Britain has been campaigning to persuade homosexuals who “feel separated from their churches because of their nature to reconsider their position and return to the practice of their faith”. The problem which the group envisages is a real, though variable one. Attitudes among theologians may be slowly changing (though not all of us would agree that in this field all change is for the good); but, as two American writers on female homosexuality have put it, “Inroads into religious thought and re-evaluation are a slow and cumbersome process. [Lesbians] live in the now.” It is scarcely sufficient to shrug the shoulders and say “In time, it will all work out”. This is not enough for Christian fellowship, because Christian fellowship belongs to the now, not to the contingent future.

Attitudes in the Churches which go so far as to deny Christian fellowship to ‘sexual minorities’ may be reduced to one simple, if generally unrecognized factor: dread. Mystery misconceived is dread: it is distracting, zwiespältig — dividing the mind against itself, making neutrality impossible. It is the negative side of holy fear: it is what St Paul presumably meant when he warned against the destructive consequences of unworthy communion. Whatever the aetiological reasons which might be adduced in hard clinical fashion to ‘explain’ what has been called ‘sexual deviance’, it remains at the end of the day for a great many ‘normal’ people, and therefore for a great many Christians, an object of dread, something which unsettles their security.
The Theology of Ernst Käsemann ‐ I
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Ernst Käsemann was born in Westphalia in 1906. His graduate studies, in the leisurely and protracted German manner, were coming to a close in 1933, the year in which Hitler was voted into power and his dissertation on the concepts of the body and the body of Christ in St Paul was published. From the outset, as a young pfarrer in Westphalia, he belonged to the Confessing Church: the organized opposition to the influence of National Socialism among German Protestants. At the age of forty, in 1946, he returned to academic life as professor of New Testament studies, first at Mainz, then at Gottingen, and since 1959 until his retirement at Tubingen. On the third day of his first semester as a student at Bonn in 1925 he started going to the class on the Epistle to the Romans which was being given by Erik Peterson: “the course of my study and in some sense, as befits a theologian, my life was decided” (p vii). In 1973 he published the commentary on Romans which had occupied him for many years. A third revised edition was required a year later. This is the text, very carefully and literally translated (almost pedantically, although that is a laudable fault in the present current of wretchedly inadequate translations), by Geoffrey W, Bromiley, which is now under review.
Visual Metaphors, Theatres and Courts
Authors: Swanston Hamish F. G.
Published: July 2007

There was, earlier this winter, a great deal of ribald talk about a scene in the National Theatre’s production of Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain. There is likely to be more talk of the same sort now that the Secretary of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association is proceeding with her suit against Mr Michael Bogdanov for procuring the commission of an act of gross indecency between Mr Peter Sproule and Mr Greg Hills on 19th December last. And all this talk will doubtless be excited by public interest in Mr Timothy Sainsbury’s Indecency Displays Bill and the Government’s promise to assist the progress of that Bill through Parliament. We are, it seems, again about to debate the meaning of ‘indecency’.

Though Sir Peter Hall has not followed the distasteful example of another theatre director, I would yet like to suggest that The Romans and indecency should be considered with the Old Vic production of Macbeth in mind.

I had secured my ticket for that Macbeth some weeks before the production opened, so I was not required to join the line of those who had been excited by the critical notices which quickly made Mr Brian Forbes’ production and Mr Peter O’Toole’s performance notorious. The opportunities for happiness, or even a little pleasure, are not so common in my life that I would easily forego a performance of any of Shakespeare’s plays, and among them, Macbeth has especial claims. Once, when quite a small boy, I surprised the greatest Macbeth of my time rehearsing to himself across the lawn: ‘Learning me lines, dear laddie’, Godfrey Tearle admitted with a flourish.
An Ethics for Behaviour Modification
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

To assure ourselves of the benefits of the theory and practice of behaviour modification, and to avoid the dangers, which are obviously immense, we urgently need a comprehensively critical ethical theory, on the basis of which what is good for individuals and for society may be reasonably determined on the evidence, and not depend simply on arbitrary flat or the whim of the majority or arty powerful group. Once such a theory is outlined, it will, I am afraid, be found to be incompatible at first sight with the theoretical basis usually taken to underlie the most sophisticated techniques of behaviour modification. However, I shall argue that an appropriately restricted and modified behaviourism will be quite consistent with the required ethical theory.

In reading the literature on this and related topics, one is made most painfully aware of the yawning gap which there is in the place where a rational ethics ought to be. (If anyone is to be blamed for this, it is the moral philosophers rather than the psychologists.) One can hardly wonder at the fear expressed by some members of the public that, the more efficient our techniques of behaviour modification become, the less notion we have of what ends we ought to aim at, what states of affairs we ought to avoid, in our employment of such techniques.
Making Peace at Spode
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

The world being what it is, a ‘peace movement’ is bound to be a haven for odd-balls, eccentrics, the awkward squad: people who go against the direction of the current and resist the conventional wisdom. On the other hand, a movement composed solely of such people will always lack effective organisation, and its protests will peter out into mere idiosyncrasy. I think that these two facts go far to explain why the English Dominicans have been somewhere near the centre of the Catholic peace movement in Britain ever since it began (if one can talk of a beginning) with the founding of PAX in the mid-thirties of this century. For the English Dominicans — at least as far as my experience goes — are themselves an awkward squad: a regiment of misfits and individualists. I don’t know much about the Dominican Order elsewhere in the world: I suspect that outside Britain they may be very different. Neither do I know much about their history in this country. So I speak ‘existentially’, as the jargon goes, from my own personal observation only.

My first experience goes back to the Oxford of the early nineteen-fifties: and to feel the difference then between, say, the atmosphere of Jesuit Campion Hall and the atmosphere of Dominican Blackfriars was to experience an almost tangible shock. As I remember it now, Campion Hall was like something out of Henry James: a rich tapestry of dark browns and reds, complex and subtle in its visual as well as its intellectual organisation. Its inhabitants wore their black suits and soutanes as a uniform: one had to dig quite deep to discover the person within. Dominican Blackfriars, by contrast, was light and airy; a set of variations upon the theme of whiteness and transparency.
A Theology For Britain In The 80s ?
Authors: West Angela , Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

Has Liberation Theology taken root in Britain? The Times (28 August) detected it as an alien influence when the Archbishop of Liverpool and other local churchmen supported the BCC grant of £500 to the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee. The complaint was that although it might be appropriate in its countries of origin, with their acute poverty, cruelty, exploitation and political corruption, in Britain it can do nothing but play into the hands of political extremists. But £500 won’t go very far towards a revolution these days. It will soon be eaten up in fares and lawyers’ fees. It is clearly the sign of the churches taking sides — that is, changing sides — in a political struggle, that the Times doesn’t like. Whatever we may think of the Liverpool events, the 80s is clearly going to be a dangerous decade. There have been warnings of deepening social division, more urban conflict and a police force changing its main concern from crime-prevention to national security. If this is the way things are going, there will certainly be serious attempts by British Christians to learn lessons from the Liberation Theologians and apply them on their own ground.

It was concerns of this kind that caused a group of politically- minded Christians to organise a conference entitled “A Theology for Britain in the 80s” at Easter time this year in Digby Stuart College, Roehampton and to get funds from — the BCC. The event had been planned for two years and the participants were personally invited months beforehand and asked to prepare themselves through discussions with their “base groups”. However, judging by the lateness of some invitations, the organisers had difficulty in attracting many of the people they had first asked to this theological banquet. Some of the guests, it seems, had pressing reasons of their own for not turning up; and the organisers had been obliged, to go out and compel others to come in and fill the empty places.
Christianity and Politics: The Case of Gerrard Winstanley
Authors: Turner Denys
Published: July 2007

“For I tell you and your preachers, that Scripture which saith The poor shall inherit the earth, is really and materially to be fulfilled. For the earth is to be restored from the bondage of sword property, and it is to become a common treasury in reality to whole mankind; for this is the work of the true saviour to do, who is the true and faithful Leveller, even the spirit and power of universal love...

Thus wrote Gerrard Winstanley in 1650, about one year after the execution of Charles I. Sketching in the economic and political conditions of an earlier revolutionary period, Engels wrote in The Peasant War in Germany:

“Even the so-called religious wars of the sixteenth century involved primarily positive material class interests. Although the class struggles of the day were carried out under religious shibboleths, and though the interests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were concealed behind a religious screen, this changed nothing in the matter and is easily explained by the conditions of the time.”
Pointers Towards A Popular Church In Britain
Authors: Kirby Peadar
Published: July 2007

Peru has a Left-wing daily paper called El Diario de Marka. On the day after Pope John Paul issued his encyclical Laborem Exercens the paper carried a cartoon covering most of its front page which summed up its view of the significance of the encyclical for the Peruvian situation. It showed a determined looking Pope John Paul carrying a banner which read: “Free Trade Unions, Right to Strike, Co-Ownership of the Means of Production and Just Remuneration, Social Justice”. He was bearing down on a rather smug President Belaunde who stood with a banner behind his back saying “Anti-Strike Decree” and thinking “Terrorist”.

The fact that such a cartoon would even appear in a Left-wing paper, let alone cover most of its front page, indicates the importance of the popular church for the Peruvian Left. This was further underlined by the amount of space and the sympathetic coverage the paper gave the encyclical in marked contrast to that given by the bourgeois press. Nor is this simply a recognition of the large number of Christians who are trade union and political militants. Perhaps more important is the new image this has given the church and the consequent expectation that a papal statement on social justice would be a broadly Left-wing document.

Occasions such as this serve to show just how significant is the popular church, both politically and ecclesiologically. Not only is it new to find large sectors of the church being the natural allies of political progressives but it is even more novel to find that this alliance has caused secular progressives to re-evaluate the meaning of Christianity itself and to come to expect that even some of its more conservative leaders must themselves be progressive if they choose to criticise society from a Christian standpoint.
New Ministries: From Dream to Reality
Authors: Boivin Marcel
Published: July 2007

Somehow, the subject of new ministries always calls up to my mind the picture of those hundreds of young people who, in the course of an ecumenical session held in Manchester in 1970, had filled a vast auditorium to hear Canon John V Taylor give an address on possible new forms of ministry. Expectations were running high. On the Protestant side, there was the widespread feeling that the pastorate was welded to the establishment rather than in live contact with people. On the Catholic side, there was the vexing combination of decreasing numbers of vocations to the priesthood and growing numbers of resignations from it. The Canon’s address was challenging and one could feel that the crowd was of one mind with him: indeed there was a vital need to re-assess the Church’s ministerial structures and to re-distribute ecclesial functions. The trouble began when he went on to propose his list of reformed ministries. These turned out to be a selection from the wide choice offered by the New Testament, and they rallied no one; to some they appeared to be no match for the priesthood, to others they seemed to be too ancient to again deserve a place under the sun. The question-period soon degenerated into a high-pitched barrage of objections and confusion was the net result of the day.

Ten years have passed. In the Catholic Church at least, the question of priesthood and ministry has been studied from all angles and there is a growing consensus on the need to disentangle the two. Some concrete steps have been taken in that direction, as witnessed by a recent issue of Pro Mundi Vita Dossiers (June 1980).
Lonergan and Hume II: Epistemology (2)
Authors: Fitzpatrick J
Published: July 2007

What binds together the three steps or stages in Lonergan’s theory of knowledge — experience, understanding, judging - and makes them into one dynamic activity, is the pressure in the inquirer to discover the truth, what Lonergan has called ‘the eros of the mind’, the free, unrestricted desire to know. Knowing is a conscious, intending activity and what is intended is the truth. It is this intention to know, this psychic drive or thrust and not sensory extroversion to what is presumed (as in Hume) to be ‘already out there now’ that is the overarching criterion of truth. What is known is related immediately to this self-transcending nisus; understanding and judgment are simply answers to the questions generated by the desire to know. Put another way, the questions leading to understanding and judgment are an unfolding of this basic intentionality. The desire to know is something that arises spontaneously and irresistibly in human beings and is present in the reader who is attending to what is being said in this article, striving to understand it and asking if this understanding is true. But while this striving for the truth is the overarching criterion of objectivity, each level of cognition has its own peculiar function to perform and so its own criterion of objectivity; or we might say that the quest for objective knowledge is manifested in different ways at the different stages of knowing.

What is peculiar to the data of experience is their givenness — they are there — and hence the criterion of objectivity at the level of seeing, hearing etc, is to see or hear what is there and not to see or hear what is not there. At the level of sensation the subject must be submissive to the givenness of the data (and not, for example, fabricate his own evidence or grounds).
Consecrated Virginity
Authors: Rees Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

During the last ten years, a new form of Christian lifestyle has begun to be lived out — that of the consecrated virgin living in the world. At a time when many people are searching for ways of ministry in the Church that allow for real depth of commitment combined with real freedom of expression, it has escaped many people’s notice that the Church now gives her blessing to the ancient lifestyle of consecrated virginity. The consecrated virgin is a deeply committed woman who publicly vows to remain celibate for life, in order to give all her loving energies to Christ and his Church. But she keeps a real freedom of lifestyle, always choosing where, how and with whom she will live; she is thus free to follow the creative leading of the Holy Spirit in a way unprecedented among women religious in recent centuries.

The life of virginity has existed from earliest times. Christ claimed this lifestyle, according to Matthew, with his rather stark statement: “There are eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can”. (Mat 19:12). He too apparently valued the lifestyle for the freedom it gave him — freedom to spend whole nights in prayer without depriving a loving wife of his attentions, and freedom to live how, where and with whom he liked, in order to best do his Father’s work.

St Paul, as “one who, by the Lord’s mercy has stayed faithful” to his Master’s celibate lifestyle (I Cor 7:25), several times describes virginity with tenderness and simplicity.
Two Years After: Reflections on ‘Liverpool 1980′
Authors: Hornsby‐Smith Michael P
Published: July 2007

Two years ago over 2000 delegates from all the dioceses and Catholic national organisations, including 42 bishops, 255 clergy and 150 religious men and women and 36 ecumenical observers attended the National Pastoral Congress in Liverpool. For those of us who were there it was a remarkable experience of an open, sharing, participating, listening, celebrating Church, a veritable conversion experience. Back in our local patches it is difficult to retain the sense of exhilaration and commitment with which we left Liverpool two years ago. Was it, then, all a load of froth, an irrelevant, euphoric interlude to cheer us up? Was it, as I asked before the Congress ‘a damp squib or pentecostal fire’? (New Life, Winter 1980). Did it represent a new Spring or was it a false dawn? The official report of the Congress provides us with the opportunity to recall the expectations aroused by the Congress and reflect on some of its outcomes. In this article I propose to attempt three tasks: firstly, to review Liverpool 1980; secondly, to consider the place of the National Pastoral Congress in the long process of renewal in the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales since the Second Vatican Council; and thirdly, to reflect on the contemporary situation in the light of the Congress, the message from the bishops to the local Church in the light of the Congress (The Easter People), and developments which have been stimulated by it since.