This is an essay that I have wanted to write for a long time. Perhaps not exactly this essay but one like it. In fact, I once did so, about twenty years ago. That essay was all about the rights of conscience: how our consciences are formed; and how to be Catholic means to be free. But the article was turned down by the editor of the journal in question because my remarks on conscience were ‘meat being offered to babes who can only take milk’. If the Catholic ‘babes’ had been given such meat twenty years ago perhaps they would not have suffered such pains from the diet which recent events have provided for them. Yet what saddened me most about the episode was the editor’s assumption that anything written by a Catholic must in some sense be ‘definitive’.

This notion that an article has to be definitive leads to articles being mass-produced, all of the same form and, above all, identical in tone, very solemn, rather omniscient, final in their judgments, givng an air of finality even to their non-judgments, donning the judge’s black cap even when pronouncing the accused not guilty. This means to say that writers are encouraged to pretend that one of their half-thoughts is a thesis, and two of their half-thoughts a whole book (a publisher once asked me to turn an article of twelve pages that I had published into a book of 140 pages, saying ‘You needn’t add anything of substance to it’; he produced a series of such books).