In February of 1982 Cardinal Hume addressed a press conference on his hopes for the forthcoming papal visit to Britain. At that time the full horrors of the Falklands war were still lodged in the dim recesses of the Argentine military mind and the seemingly endless resources of British colonial nostalgia were still untapped. The Cardinal was able to speak of the renewal that the pope’s presence and message would bring as well as the challenge he would present to pastors and people calling them to “a fundamental change of ourselves”. In the euphoria that accompanied and immediately followed the Pope in Britain many people spoke of “things never being the same again”. In a few short days of glorious summer weather he was said to have given the Church here a sense of renewed confidence, hope and pride in its own history and traditions. He proved sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the various national communities that form the United Kingdom. He was openly committed to ecumenical dialogue and the tone of his speeches was so eirenic and positive that Peter Nichols in The Times wondered “if we cannot start thinking about the weekend that produced John Paul III”. Paradoxically this seems to point not so much to a renewal of the Church in Britain as to the personal conversion of the Pope to a new interpretation of the Petrine office. This interpretation has particular implications for the development of the theology of the Church as well as revealing not only the virtues of the Pope but the weaknesses of the Church in Britain. Until these implications are examined the renewal hoped for by the Archbishop of Westminster and his brother bishops in England, Wales and Scotland will be delayed if not altogether blighted.

In the first part of this article, I described how a small group of Christian feminists, concerned with issues of sexual justice and the role of women in the creation of a just society, found themselves involved in the establishment of a new eucharistic community, where women had the opportunity to preach the good news of our calling — as we were beginning to understand it. I looked at some of the resistance that we encountered in ourselves as we moved into this new sphere, and at the nature of the ideology, which at psychological level, preserves the sexual status quo, and hinders women from taking their full part in Christian ministry, and their full responsibility for proclaiming the Christian gospel. Here I hope to continue reflection on the experience of our community, and show how it has contributed to my understanding of the sacramental body of Christ and its true ministry.

At the time that our community was in the thick of its problems with the organisation of itself and the Mass, I happened to read Schillebeeckx’ essay on Ministry in the book Minister? Pastor? Prophet? and felt that it threw a great deal of light on the problems that we were undergoing. The questions he was asking about the role and nature of priesthood were importantly related to questions which were on our own practical and theological agenda. In taking the Mass into the context of the women’s community, it was rather as if we had removed the string from a set of rosary beads.

I should like to begin this paper on a personal note. I suppose it was in my late teens that God began to make a really personal claim on me and over the next four years or so I found that more and more of what I experienced and read spoke to me of God — not only the Mass and spiritual books but all my experience and reading: travelling in the London underground in the rush hour as well as visits to the country; my first experience of girls as well as my discovery of contemplation; films, novels, articles in the secular as well as Catholic journals. It was as if my experience of the present enabled me to begin to understand what I received from my culture and Christian past, but also as if what I thus, so variously and fragmentarily, received from the past put in question, corrected and filled out what I experienced in the present. Present and past thus interacted, sometimes challengingly, sometimes consolingly, sometimes shockingly, but vitally. Everything tended to become a medium and an occasion of the experience of God.

Then I entered the Order and was gradually initiated into traditional Church studies, and little by little I had it impressed on me that the right and proper way to become a theologically-minded persdn was to start from the beginning in the person of Jesus Christ and the Scriptures and then to move through the various reformulations of this fontal inspiration in the various forms of the Tradition (to be spelled now, I discovered, with a capital T).

I am very grateful indeed to Fr Brian Davies for treating my work with such sympathy and thoroughness. He has put forward objections to some of my arguments and conclusions which richly deserve some attempt on my part at an answer.

Fr Davies approves of a recent suggestion by Anthony Flew, derived from Kant, that one should distinguish sharply between those types of argument for God’s existence which try to establish it from the mere fact of the world, and those which do so on the basis of some particular characteristic of the world. They propose that the term ‘cosmological argument’ should be kept for arguments of the former class. With great respect and suitable trepidation, I would wish to dissent from this formidable team of authorities, preferring as I do a threefold division. For I believe it is very important in this context to distinguish between two sorts of properties which things or the world may have; one sort, by virtue of the fact that they can be objects of our knowledge at all; the other which they just happen to have as a matter of fact, independently of their knowability by us. Let us distinguish these as respectively A properties and B properties. Now the effect of the proposal of Kant, Flew and Davies is to reduce theistic arguments which are not versions of the ontological arguments to two types — those from the mere existence of things or the world, and those from the B properties of things and the world.