The household of Faith is manifold but single: its unity demands a variety of race and culture and temporal allegiance, reconciled at the centre in Christ our Lord. In time and space, within the categories that men discern, the individuations that spring from historical change, or merely from human temperament, can seem more compelling than the hidden unity which transcends them. And an insistence on the universality that Catholic faith must bring;—the Church is one, holy, Catholic, apostolic, because in Christ there can be no division, because he is holiness, because he willed all men to be redeemed through himself and that redemption to be made accessible through his apostles—such an insistence can never ignore the integrity of men as endowed with shape and colour, with minds and wills uniquely given and to be employed in the context of the life they find. Nor can it ignore the varieties of society— enslaved or free—which the Church exists to redeem.

‘All things to all men’. It is part at least of the Christian aposto- late: the source is one, but the streams go far. And a parish, mirroring the Church herself, may include at one end a monastery, at the other a prison. And in between, the infinite gradations of holiness or the lack of it: solid families of tradition, isolated converts, the rootless and the dispossessed. Behind walls the holy, behind other walls the publicly condemned; and the mission of the Church is to those and to everyone else besides.

In a stable world, with functions regulated and accepted as such, the redemptive work of the Church may seem easier to achieve.