bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Vatican ll's Model of the Church
Authors: Loftus John 
Published: July 2007

“Thou speak’st wiser than thou art ware of’(As You Like It: Act II, scene 4, 1. 55)So many hands have sown the ideas in this article, and over such a long period of time, that I have forgotten many of them. I can recall Richard McBrien declaiming from his book, Do We Need the Church? as he strides across the field, so sure and so impatient. I can hear Christopher Butler, in his black habit with the hood up, quietly chanting The Theology of Vatican II. But I cannot remember who it was that planted the most fruitful seed of all: “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was the first document of the Second Vatican Council. It would have been very different, if it had been the last”.The ripening, I know, took place in the warmth and light of Avery Dulles’ Models of the Church. But his was the kind of sunshine that forced me to seek the shade of second thoughts; and once there, I wondered if I dared to disagree with him.In this article, I present an argument which is made up of three suggestions about how we are to understand Vatican II’s ideas concerning the Church. To illustrate the point I am trying to make, I raise some questions about how this affects our view of the sacraments. And I ask whether this is not a case of the famous sensus plenior, the ‘fuller sense’ which appears to have been discussed only by scripture scholars up to now, but is surely relevant to the interpretation of council documents.
Celibacy: A Final Word
Authors: Hastings Adrian 
Published: July 2007

The article on Celibacy which appeared in the March issue of New Blackfriars was written last October and followed up by the rest of my book In Filial Disobedience, published by Mayhew-McCrimmon in June. Since March I have received a good deal of comment, both favourable and unfavourable, and in the light of this it has seemed worth while to add a final piece responding in particular to the major objections raised very seriously and kindly by some people. Could a priest really be morally justified in rejecting the Church’s law of celibacy with all the canonical consequences this entails? I have given my reply to that question the form of an article in the Summa Theologica. It is, hopefully, my last public contribution to the debate. This is not the most important subject for the Church today by any means, and yet it is a very important one both for its own sake and because it affects so many others. It is the key to a more flexible restructuring of the ministry. Yet if there is one thing which has grown in my mind in the last months it is the conviction that a law of so massive a nature, so tenaciously maintained by Rome with such powerful sanctions, cannot be defended or criticised primarily in terms of pragmatic pastoral advantage and disadvantage, whether in Europe or in Africa. It must be regarded primarily as a semi-doctrinal statement and one profoundly significant for the understanding and the misunderstanding of holiness.Videtur quod. It seems that a secular priest may not marry.Jesus was celibate. A priest should imitate Jesus as closely as possible because of his calling to be another Christ. In the words of Cardinal Hume, ‘Our Lord was celibate. Whatever reasons were important to him, I want to make mine’. (Searching for God, p. 52).
Theology and Culture
Authors: Swanston Hamish 
Published: July 2007

There is a moment in Twelfth Night when Feste, the Fool, calls upon Malvolio, who has been shut up in a dark cell as a dangerous madman. Feste, to render himself the more credible as a prison visitor, puts on a parson’s gown and a parson’s voice and, announcing that he is Sif Topas the curate who comes to visit Malvolio the lunatic, counsels him with words of learned but wholly irrelevant comfort. Malvolio, in frustration at this pastoral nonsense, most violently asserts that he is in no way mad, so the pretence clergyman agrees to test the prisoner’s wits by posing some deep question. ‘What’, he asks, ‘is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?’ From that encyclopaedic knowledge of the classical world we expect in a renascence man, Malvolio answers that the philosopher held ‘that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’. Ruthless as if he were conducting a seminar, the Fool then asks him: ‘What think’st thou of his opinion?’ Malvolio rather carefully replies: T think nobly of the soul and no way approve his opinion’. But at this the clergyman seems quite convinced that Malvolio is indeed mad, declaring as he hurries away, ‘thou shalt hold th’opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits’.This absurd interlude seems to many, I suspect, a paradigm of theological talk. A madman and a fool disputing about the soul, and as if this were not itself at sufficient remove from reality, disputing about whether the human soul might animate a bird. I should like to suggest to you, however, that while this dialogue may very well present an unkind parody of the manners both of the student of religion and of the believer, its satire does not, even glancingly, touch the theologian’s enterprise.
Misery and Christianity
Authors: Binns Winifred 
Published: July 2007

If religion means anything at all it has to be relevant to our situation. It has to be a source of hope for desperate people. I specify desperate people because those who are contented and happy rarely search for solutions until disaster forces them.In my sixties, I try to come to some conclusions. There is not much time left and the need for solutions is more urgent. I have made a long search by attending Anglican, Methodist, Pentecostal, Quaker and other Christian churches and by reading their writers. All have made some impact but left me unsatisfied. It may be my fault that I am not satisfied, but, since my search has been genuine, I have taken some drastic measures. I have sold my house and home and come to London, with only my clothes, to work as Warden in a hostel for thirty-six homeless women. These are raw material. They come from every kind of society and collectively they have suffered everything. Very often I admire individuals; altogether, they are generally hell to live with. They do not read and their vocabulary is limited. Some are on drink, on drugs; on smoking, on bingo, on jumble-sales or on sleep. I reflect again that religion in England has been mainly the product of the middle classes expecting a high degree of articulation and academic study. Words come to mind—‘eucharist’, ‘litany’, ‘transubstantiation’, ‘atonement’. Even worse, ‘logical positivism’, ‘language-games’, ‘semantics’, ‘linguistics’. Can these help my guinea pigs? Not much.So many of our theologians and philosophers seem to live in ivory towers. Do they starve, live on social security, feel they are socially worthless, sink into apathy, drown their pain in gin or whisky? To these troubles add physical illness and emotional instability. I repeat, religion must be relevant to the situation and provide a source of hope for desperate people.
Women's Ordination: Can the Debate be Revived?
Authors: DiNoia Joseph A. 
Published: July 2007

After the initial furore provoked by the Vatican Declaration nearly two years ago the discussion of women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church has come to a virtual standstill. The debate has stalled largely because both defence and criticism of the Declaration have not always been on target.For one thing insufficient attention has been paid to the significant developments which this document embodied. For the first time the Catholic Church officially abandoned many of the standard theological arguments which had been used in the past to legitimate the traditional policy barring women from ordination. The Declaration conceded that the patristic and scholastic arguments, previously accorded such weight, were in large measure conditioned by prejudicial attitudes and beliefs about women’s alleged innate deficiencies as compared with men or their inborn aptitudes for domestic and nurturing roles. The traditional policy thus came to be defended for wrong or inadequate reasons.In the Declaration’s central argument traditional claims about women’s inferiority and subordination to men, or their alleged incapacity for pastoral responsibility played no part. Moreover claims about the direct bearing of gender-specific traits on female/male role differentiation in society and the church were used to highlight rather than to demonstrate the propriety of the traditional policy. Such claims were combined with ecclesiological doctrines to yield an argument for the complementary distribution of male and female roles in the church, and with christological doctrines to yield an argument for the necessity of maleness for the priesthood’s representational function. But the Declaration carefully qualified the persuasive force to be accorded these arguments in its overall case by designating them as illustrative rather than demonstrative.
On Celibacy
Authors: Hastings Adrian 
Published: July 2007

After much thought and prayer I have come to the decision that I am free as a Catholic priest to marry. I have come to this after long years of wrestling with myself and of pondering both the pastoral and missionary needs of the Church and the basic nature of the Christian priesthood, marriage and freedom. I have for years argued persistently for a major change in the Church’s position in this regard, a change which I see as absolutely crucial for the wider effectiveness and coherence of the aggiornamento set in motion by Pope John. It is only recently that I have come to the conclusion that in this matter as in others one cannot go on indefinitely simply affirming in print and in speech a point of view completely at odds with the structured ordering of one’s own life. There comes a moment when it is morally necessary to pin oneself to the truth and importance of what one has affirmed to be true and important.I have been a priest for twenty-two years. I accepted the obligation of celibacy at ordination without questioning because I wished to be a priest and this was the law of the Church, and I have kept it. In the cheerful, zealous, withdrawn atmosphere of a seminary it did not seem much of a problem. I was even convinced for a time that I did not want to marry, but for many years now I have wanted to very much. So this decision is first of all a response to an honest sense of my own need. Yet at present I am living happily with my mother; I have many dear friends, and I am extremely busy as a university lecturer and writer. I have certainly not come to this decision out of loneliness or depression or because I have lost interest in the Church or the Catholic priesthood. Quite the contrary.
Pasolini: The Last Days
Authors: Williams Michael E. 
Published: July 2007

So the British public is not going to be able to see Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom. Perhaps some mature reflections by one who saw the film as long ago as July 1976 at the quaint Pagoda cinema in Paris, might be of interest to the readers of New Blackfriars.At the outset it appears that Pasolini is using a device we find in his film Pigsty where he tries to tell two related stories at the same time and keeps cutting from one to the other. There is first the story from de Sade of the four, rich, degenerate men who, looking for some new stimulus for their jaded appetites plan a monumental orgy. They seek out beautiful and innocent boys and girls, take them to a remote castle and there indulge in all manner of depravities for 120 days at the end of which they torture and kill their victims. Then there is the story of the short lived fascist republic that was established at Salo in North Italy in 1943-4 and the enforced recruitment of young peasant boys to serve the Nazis in the war against the allies and their own countrymen. But it soon becomes apparent that the fascism that Pasolini is interested in is not so much Salo as the ‘nonfascist’ fascism of present day Italy under the capitalist system. The historic Salo is soon forgotten and the four men are shown as pillars of Italian society : Il Duca, Monsignore, Excellenza and Presidente. It is these contemporary figures who become the protagonists of the de Sade story. The orgies take place in three stages or gironi. A word chosen perhaps to remind us of the Dantean circles in hell. Each of them is introduced by a female character who recites the scene that is enacted before us.
Christianity and the Revolution
Authors: Castro Fidel 
Published: July 2007

In October last year in Kingston, Jamaica, at a meeting presided over by the Prime Minister, Mr. Michael Manley,Dr. Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, addressed representatives of the Jamaican churches and answered questions about religion and the Cuban revolution. The following is a slightly abbreviated transcript of what was said.It was stated here that I’d give a general outline of relations between the Church and the state in Cuba. It seems to me it would be convenient if I were brief in my opening remarks. I’d like to start by saying the following: in our country a very profound revolution took place which brought about a radical change in the relations of production and in social relations.History shows that whenever such revolutionary events have taken place all sorts of conflicts have arisen, including conflicts between the Church and the state. This happened during the French Revolution, as you know; it happened during the Mexican Revolution, many problems of that nature arose; and it also happened during the Russian Revolution.Well, also in our case, in Cuba, some conflicts arose in the beginning. Actually, in my opinion, this was due on many occasions to the leadership body of a given religious congregation or to the social group most closely connected with such a religious congregation.
Che, the New Man and the New Woman
Authors: McDonagh Francis 
Published: July 2007

The ‘Catholic Left’ in Britain, during its short life, showed little interest either in spirituality or in political activity outside journalism. There are quite good reasons for these omissions, but it is interesting to find that they are not repeated in the practice of leftwing Catholics in Latin America. Action and spirituality, and the tension between them, are important themes of Sheila Cassidy’s account of her experiences in Chile, and her story is all the more interesting because she is so patently not a Catholic left groupie.The personality which comes through this book is very much that described by Michael Hollings in his introduction: ‘enthusiastic . . . efficient, impetuous, starry-eyed, down-to-earth, practical, emotionally uninhibited, politically a child’. The rambling and occasionally gushing narrative almost makes one forget at times that its author was obscenely tortured with electric shocks by the Chilean secret police.These qualities also give the story an appealing freshness. It is almost a classical adventure story, in which the author became involved largely by accident. No political or religious motives took Dr Cassidy to Chile. She had got to know a Chilean medical student during her own studies, and one of Chile’s attractions was the chance to gain surgical experience with less night work than in Britain. Dr Cassidy spent two years in Chile before returning to England to see her dying father, and a further two from the beginning of 1974. The military coup against the Allende government took place towards the end of the first period and Dr Cassidy’s imprisonment occupied the last two months of the second.
Sociology and Exegesis
Authors: Freer Fercus 
Published: July 2007

Theology is a deeply conservative discipline, which is why the panic that breaks out immediately at the threat of new questions must always seem so exaggerated to people trained in other fields of study. Any new approach is usually rejected at first on the grounds that there is no evidence for it. As soon as the exponent of the new approach has shown that there is indeed evidence for his interpretation he is at once accused of reducing all the evidence to fit his thesis, and of wanting to reinterpret the whole of Christianity in function of his new insight. Finally, when he shows that he has no such intention, he is told that what he has found out has been well known all along. The new approach is first rejected because it is impossible, then because it is illegitimate, and finally because it is old hat.Gerd Theissen has undertaken a sociological analysis of the earliest phase of Christianity, which he defines as “the renewal movement within Judaism brought into being through Jesus and existing in the area of Syria and Palestine between about AD 30 and AD 70” (p. 1). Far from enjoying august and exalted status as Professor of New Testament in the University of Bonn, as the blurb proclaims him to be, he is (at the time of writing) still fully employed as a school-teacher. He gives lectures as a Privatdozent, for which of course he receives no salary. He thus has neither the leisure nor the technical apparatus to armour his research with the impenetrable shield of erudition and argument behind which most theological work is conducted. In fact, as he writes in the Preface, “the work came into being while I was involved in teaching religion and German, and is addressed to readers who are also involved in practical work of this kind”.
Mary Crawford and the Comic Heroine
Authors: Tatham Michael 
Published: July 2007

You may perhaps like the heroine as she is almost too good for me.Letter 1815The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic.. . . Letter 1815If there is anything to be said for my suggestion (New Black-friars June 1978) that Jane Austen was unlikely to have been in sympathy with Fanny Price’s religious attitude, and in fact probably shared Mary Crawford’s cynical view of the Established Church and such overtly Christian institutions as matrimony, it may be wondered why she nevertheless gave Fanny Price and her clerical cousin, Edmund, such central roles in the novel. Obviously, there can be no definitive answer, but the problem becomes less intractable if we give sufficient weight to Jane Austen’s extremely lively sense of humour. There was nothing she enjoyed so much—especially of course in the affectionate intimacy of her correspondence with Cassandra—as laughing at her neighbours and the world, and it was above all this spirit of comedy that informed virtually all her writing prior to Persuasion. If Mansfield Park wears its humour with a difference then no doubt it was the more amusing to tease and confuse her admirers even when these also happened to be a favourite brother.Henry is going on with Mansfield Park. He admires H. Crawford: mean properly, as a clever pleasant man. I tell you all the good I can, as I know how much you will enjoy it.Letter 1814
No Good at Grunwick
Authors: Hawthorn Jeremy 
Published: July 2007

‘This book is a critical introduction to political theology, not an enthusiastic initiation into it’ (p 37). Such was the intention of Alfredo Fierro in making his own sizeable contribution to the subject. Drawing together a great variety of sources he tries to sketch the development of ‘political theology’, and suggests some directions for the future. This not without a sense of his own relative position: from the outset he states that ‘this book was written in Madrid, Spain, and finished in the summer of 1974 (xii). (The Militant Gospel, SCM Press 1977 xv + pp. 453 £4.50).The book divides into three parts, Situation, Programme and Theory, eight chapters in all. In the first part, changes in the climate of thinking are described which have brought political theology into being; the second goes through the formulation of the new theology; while the third reflects on the significance of it and challenges the presuppositions of several authors.First, though, some general comments about method. The term ‘political theology’ is used rather too frequently—I’ve already used it twice—and moreover as if one was always clear what is meant by it. Then, related to this, is Fierro’s tendency to put together several ideas about a concept without contrasting them very accurately or stating a clear view of his own. Often this makes no difference, and one appreciates the breadth of reference; but there are times when some distinctions have to be made (notably the discussion of ideology, pp 243-7), and a failure to do so is unhelpful.
The Coherence of Theism
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

Richard Swinburne’s new book “is concerned solely with the central core of theistic belief, that God exists, that there is a God. It is not concerned primarily with whether this belief is true or with whether \ye can know it to be true, but with the prior question of what it means and whether it is coherent.” (p. 1) The discussion begins with a general analysis (Chapters 4-6) of the way in which talk of God is to be understood, whether it is analogical, propositional and so forth. There then follows (Chapters 7-15) a consideration of what Swinburne takes to be involved in the claim that there is a God. Swinburne concludes that theism may be coherent, but that a certain understanding of divine attributes is necessary to sustain this conclusion. In particular, God’s eternity cannot be equated with timelessness, and both ‘omnipotent’ and ‘omniscient’ need to be understood in more narrow a fashion than is sometimes the case. Swinburne also maintains that the coherence of theism may only be properly affirmed where there is good, inductive evidence for the truth of theism. There is no direct proof of coherence. Consequently, “those theists who claim to believe that there is a God ‘by faith’, in a sense of the latter expression which entails that they do not have good inductive grounds for this belief, will, if I am right, have to face the consequence that they do not have good grounds for believing that the claim which they make is a coherent or logicallly possible one.” (p. 296)So much for the overall argument of the book. What about the cogency of its details? It seems to me that Swinburne’s whole discussion is spoiled by a fundamental error of approach, a pervasive wrong move. On this I shall comment presently.
The Rich Young Man
Authors: Mackrell G. F. 
Published: July 2007

The Trojans heeded too late the warning to beware of Greeks bearing gifts and admitted into their city a wooden horse full of Greek commandos. One had to be even more circumspect about Greek gods bearing gifts and the legendary Midas should have known better when he asked them for the gift of the “Golden Touch”. Yet when he touched his leaden goblet and saw the dull grey change to bright yellow he thought that his cup was overflowing. As indeed it was, until the wine touched his lips. Then the purple liquid congealed into solid gold. He stretched out a fatherly hand to pat his daughter’s head and withdrew it a fraction of a second too late; she froze there — a golden statue. For some people money is everything; for Midas everything was money.The Synoptics recount the story of another gentleman with similar values:
“And behold, one came to him, saying, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ And he said to him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good?-One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.’ He said to him, ‘Which?’ And Jesus said, ‘Honour your father and mother, and, you shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ The young man said to him, ‘All these things I have observed. What do I still lack?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions” (Matthew 19: 16-22).