I have called this paper ‘The involvement of God’ because I want to take part in a discussion about such questions as whether God suffers with the sufferings of his creatures, in order to ask how far God is involved in his world. I shall first try to defend what I take to be the classical doctrine of God derived from Augustine and Aquinas: that it is not in the nature of God to be involved in the suffering of the world as spectator, sympathiser or victim, but that it is in God’s nature nonetheless to be involved with his creatures more intimately than any creature could be involved with any other. Secondly I shall argue that the Christology of Chalcedon does make sense of the notion that God suffers and indeed was tortured to death; indeed, in large part it just is this notion. Thirdly, and a bit more tentatively, I shall suggest that a sacramental interpretation of Chalcedonian christology yields the whole of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The subject of God’s suffering is so popular amongst theologians today that I am quite incapable of even beginning to give a survey of recent literature—this is partly because I haven’t read enough and partly because I don’t want to misrepresent authors by isolated quotation. I shall quote very little; I am concerned with certain ideas, how they hang together and how they fall apart.

A contemporary of Dante’s, opening the Divine Comedy for the first time, would probably have expected to find St. Francis among le beate genti, or at least to hear his praises sung by them, and that independently of any particular interest in the Franciscan Order, such was the esteem in which ‘il santo d‘Assisi’ was held. St. Dominic, on the other hand, an incomparably less popular figure, is unlikely even to have crossed the mind of such a reader except, perhaps, in connection with the well-known confraternity he founded. For the average Catholic of those times, Dominic had already become what he has remained, one of those holy ‘founders’ about whom one knows or cares little, well-nigh obscured as they are by the universally accepted and venerated institutes which they founded. Even the Dominicans themselves seem, on the whole, not to have fully appreciated the extraordinary character of the man to whom they owed so much. Apart from the biographical sketch in the Libellus of Jordan of Saxony (d. 1237), Dominic’s immediate successor in the government of the Order—a sketch which was historical rather than hagiographical, written that is to describe ‘the origin of the Order of Preachers’—and from the depositions by the witnesses at the two Processes, at Bologna and Toulouse, prior to his canonization in 1234, biographical material concerning Dominic is sparse, or, rather, scattered piecemeal among conventional legendary accretions.

Recently the distinguished Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar accused the almost equally distinguished Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff of not believing in Jesus’s divinity, and dismissed the liberation theology of Latin America as an export from Europe. What do Church leaders who know Boff well and have an intimate understanding of the pastoral situation in Latin America think of that?

Pedro Casaldaliga is not a familiar name even to those in the English speaking world who take an interest in the Latin American Church. Yet within Latin America he is one of the most highly regarded figures in the ‘radical’ wing of the Church. A spry, fifty-seven year old Spaniard, he is one of those figures that move the Latin American heart more than any other type of hero—a Catholic bishop committed to the poor. His diocese of Sao Felix in the Matto Grosso in Brazil has been the constant scene of struggles between the multinational corporations and estate-owning landlords on the one hand, and the indians and landless poor on the other. Bishop Pedro’s stance in favour of the latter has caused him to be the target of many assassination attempts. He arrived in Managua, Nicaragua, in late July to show public support for the fast being carried out by the foreign minister, Father Miguel “Escoto, long a friend of his. As a European, though one who has lived in Brazil since 1967, he was particularly keen to draw more European attention to that struggle of which Nicaragua is the focal point.