It is a fair question for the enquirer who encounters theological talk to ask at what point, and in what way, such talk is rooted in common human experiences that can be discussed. His difficulty is that, while not wanting to deny to theological talk some empirical foundation, he is at a loss to know what this foundation is. The problem is especially acute when there appears to be a claim by believers that only ‘insiders’ can really understand the language that is being used: that is, when credo ut intelligam is interpreted as ‘unless you are prepared to believe what we believe you won't be able to understand what we are talking about’. The enquirer feels that he is being invited to take a blind plunge, on the grounds that only real swimmers can know what swimming is, when he has no idea what it is he is being invited to plunge into, or how to do it.

I want, for my own satisfaction and perhaps others', to set down as clearly as I can some thoughts about the place of the priest in today's world. It wants some thinking about, I feel.

First of all there is very little written on the subject that comes my way. I remember a deliberately superficial and snap picture in the Observer recently of various clergymen, very sympathetic with the Catholic priest, though one wondered on the evidence just why; a strange novel, The Edge of Sadness, by Edwin O'Connor, which I found evasive and lacking in the decisiveness there must be in a priest, somewhere one hopes even in the vague, tired, washed-out priest that one does see often; and another book I have just got hold of, Priests and People, by Conor Ward: this an excellent sociological study so far as I can judge of a ‘typical’ Liverpool parish, though it leaves out deliberately the personal life of the priest.

I want to begin by quoting a passage from St Paul which provides a good introduction to what I have to say. He is talking to the Colossians about rising with Christ and living in Christ's life. He goes on to say:

In my recent book, Each His Own Tyrant, I introduced a Catholic Home of Rest where a young postulant was helped to understand her own neurosis, and to work free from it. My postulant (Alice) was fictitious, but not so the Home. And I have been asked to write a little more about it here, chiefly in connection with its work for nuns.

First, a brief description of the background. The Home is in a beautiful part of England. It consists of a number of houses and cottages, each in charge of a housemother—the Principal being in close touch with these groups, which are like small families within a larger one. (There is also a house for men, with its own farm, but as this works separately, I shall not describe it here.)