Only a few years ago, an article with a title such as this would have seemed of merely historical interest—akin, perhaps, to a paper on the Second International or Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism. But fascism is no longer of merely antiquarian interest, if indeed it ever was. As the crisis of world monopoly capitalism intensifies, fascism is once more a real political issue in the advanced capitalist societies; and some historical analysis of its constitutive structures is absolutely indispensable to the political task of rooting it out. This isn’t easy, for a number of reasons. For one thing, fascism is a phenomenon of considerable complexity, and for that reason among others lends itself temptingly to vulgarly reductive explanations whose theoretical bankruptcy leads straight to political impotence. For another thing, there isn’t always enough time to plough one’s way through the history and theory of fascism when the National Front are gathering at the local town hall. And so Front-hunting can become a seductive displacement of the real task of examining what fascism actually signifies. There is, too, the problem of knowing how seriously at the moment to take fascism in our society—of steering a line between that bland dismissal of it on which it historically thrives, and diverting one’s political energies from the major tasks which confront us—the destruction of the bourgeois state through the building of revolutionary proletarian leadership—to a more immediate but (at present) structurally less determinant issue. In this, the issue of fascism is rather like that of sexuality: it’s never easy to draw the line between pathological obsession and ascetic underplaying.

To risk a reductive formulation: fascism is essentially the attempt to ensure the rule of monopoly capitalism in its purest, most untrammelled, most invulnerable form. But of course monopoly capitalism is extremely reluctant to do any such thing.

The content of any notion of Catholicity must ultimately be referable to, and not incompatible with at the very least, Scripture. But the idea that it can be read out of Scripture as though such notions could be settled in scholarly footnotes to the text is quite mistaken. It is experiences of the development of the Church; discriminations about what went right and what went wrong, that illuminate what we read in Scripture. Now that experience and that development are continuous, so that Scriptural notions of Catholicity need to be scrutinised and refined, if not every generation, at least from time to time, but experience, both of the private and personal, and of the institutional is no more to be got easily than the truth of Scripture by a mere reading of the words on the page. The tendency is to be conservative, to interpret our experience as we have been taught to interpret it, and to accept the institutions of Christianity as we have known them. It is only occasionally, when things break down, when the fallacies we were brought up on, both in our personal experience and the nature of the institutions we have belonged to, are too manifest to be denied, that we are in a position to revalue the nature of Christian experience and particularly that experience of Catholicity that underlies our acceptance of some institutions and rejection of others. It seems to me that the age of the Fathers was very much not this kind of age.

Patristic authors have been scrutinised almost as meticulously as the text of Scripture itself for justifications or condemnations of the papal version of the Petrine succession. Many such scholars have found their papalism confirmed—or their anti-papalism or even their indifference—because what you get out of the Fathers on this topic is very much what you took in in the first place. Of course, the Fathers as the interpreters of Scripture in the first instance, as the setters of the style of such interpretations, have and deserve special authority.

Catholics with some biblical knowledge will clearly be familiar with the expression ‘speaking in tongues’. Those who have encountered what is known as ‘Catholic Pentecostalism’ or the ‘Charismatic renewal’ will be even more familiar with it. For within this, though not always considered essential, it certainly is regarded by many as a topic of considerable importance. Up to the present, however, there has been little of a philosophical nature said on the subject and the purpose of what follows is to go some way towards remedying the deficiency. My comments will be necessarily curtailed for the sake of space, but, hopefully, something of interest will emerge.

Advocates of speaking in tongues undoubtedly have a biblical basis for introducing the topic. According to Acts, on the Day of Pentecost the apostles were ‘filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues’ (Acts 2.3, R.S.V. Cf. Acts 19.6-7; 10.66). In 1 Corinthians 14, although he has some harsh things to say on the subject, St Paul declares: ‘I thank God that I speak in tongues more than you all’, and he makes it clear that speaking in tongues is a gift from God. The New Testament witness is not, however, a great deal of help in deciding what exactly speaking in tongues amounts to. It is not even clear whether the biblical authors regard the phenomenon as speaking in unknown but genuine languages. St Paul’s contribution is meagre enough and could hardly be called a fully worked-out analysis. He alludes to speaking in tongues only to make the negative point that this should not detract from Christian edification. Only when stating what he considers to be edifying does he begin to expand.

Our editor has learned much about torture in recent years. Had he not done so, I doubt whether he would have had the ingenuity to think of inviting me to reply to Bill Mathews’s defence of Bernard Lonergan in the light of Fergus Kerr’s review of thirteen other people’s reflections on Lonergan’s Method!

When we mounted that symposium at Maynooth from which Looking at Lonergan’s Method emerged we had a quite specific purpose in view. On the one hand, we believed that Method in Theology was far too important to be ignored. On the other hand, we knew that it would receive plenty of adulatory attention from those who have been so profoundly influenced by Lonergan’s work that they seem incapable of doing more than uncritically restating Lonergan’s position in Lonergan’s categories. We felt that there was room for a collection of essays which did Lonergan the honour of taking him sufficiently seriously to attempt critically to come to grips with some of the fundamental issues raised by Method (a similar attempt, by a group of Texan theologians, can be found in the Spring 1975 number of the Perkins Journal). It is, I think, a measure both of the importance of the issues, and of the perceived power of Lonergan’s contribution, that scholars as internationally distinguished, and from such varied cultural, philosophical and confessional backgrounds, as Hesse, Jossua, Pannen-berg and Torrance, should have agreed to take part in this enterprise. One shows respect neither for the issues, nor for Lonergan’s contribution to their clarification, if one simply leaps to his defence, as Bill Mathews tends to do, without—apparently—attempting first to understand the standpoints from which other scholars offer a critical response to his achievement.

It is well-known that Jeeves’s first appearance was in a story called ‘Extricating Young Gussie’ in which he had two modest lines. Bertie is firmly, if crudely, established in it, although his name is fairly definitely Mannering-Phipps. Aunt Agatha makes her first appearance there. A little earlier in this, the second decade of the century, Wodehouse produced a scattered series of short stories for the Strand featuring an I/r-Bertic, Reggie Pepper. Some, though not all, of these were reprinted in the collection My Man Jeeves: the Pepper stories were still Pepper, although four Wooster stories set in America were added. These latter were reprinted in Carry On, Jeeves six years later and, as noted above, one Pepper story was Woosterised. Decades later more of the Pepper stories were reworked: ‘Doing Clarence a Bit of Good’ became ‘Jeeves Makes an Omelette’, one of the only two Jeeves short stories to appear after 1930, and ‘Rallying Round Old George’ was refashioned, to its disadvantage, as a very late Mulliner, ‘George and Alfred’. One point of interest in the latter reworking is that a Prince was changed to a movie mogul. What is not known is that an uncollected Reggie Pepper, ‘Disentangling Old Percy’, appeared in the Strand for August 1912 (Vol. XLIV, 219-29), bringing Florence Craye into the world. ‘Percy’ was not her father, but her brother.