The Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, two Carmelite friars living on the top of Mount Carmel in the Holy Land, a few Dominican friars, and some 200,000 other Christians, clerical and lay, share something special with me which marks us out, in some respects, from our other brothers and sisters in Christ. We are all bom and bred Jewish, and we share this characteristic with all the apostles, with the Mother of our Lord, and with our Lord himself. Some of us are more aware of our Jewish background than others, and some of us are more deeply steeped in the traditions of Rabbinical Judaism than others of our group. Are we ex- Jews, people who have abandoned their Jewish identity by accepting Jesus as our Messiah, or do we remain Jewish in Christ? I believe that we remain Jewish in Christ, and that Christ calls us to strengthen, to nurture and to cherish our Jewish identity within his body, the Church. There are many people who disagree with this proposition. There have long been Christians who believe that Jews are called to abandon their Jewish identity when they are baptised into Christ, and who see the persistence of Jewish identity among baptised Christians as an affront to our Lord. For such people, my belief in the persistence of my Jewishness and in the importance of the Jewish identity of people like me is folly at best and apostasy at worst. Many Jews concur with this view, albeit from a different angle, viewing all Jews who become Christians as apostates who have abandoned any identification with the Jewish people and have joined hands with those who have persecuted them and murdered them. The baptism of Jews, on their account, is a bar to fellowship, a stumbling-block. I would like to essay a discussion of Jewish-Christian identity and its dilemmas within the Church.

Muriel Spark’s concept of faith is an essential feature of her work.lt supplies perspective and balance. Without an appreciation of it, her novels may only be valued for their wit, their irony, their unpredictability. These are indeed attractive aspects of her writing. However, they do not function merely to tease, surprise and entertain. They exist to illustrate a life which is essentially fragmented.

In a world where nothing can be fully grasped, there are dangers; the most threatening is a misplaced confidence in a single selfish viewpoint. Such an error constitutes an essential sin in Christian terms: it is philautia, love of self. St Augustine described sin as a turning away from God towards the self. Sin in Christian terms is negative: it is the opposite of all that comes from God. And so we find certain characters in Spark’s work mistakenly asserting themselves as the source of power and their own viewpoint as a criterion of truth. On the other hand we find characters who have a profound need to acknowledge a truth beyond themselves and who strive to come to terms with the essential inadequacy of a human perspective. These characters have a determination to identify what is true and honest in their existence; they have a sense of irony and sometimes a great sense of joy. All these characters describe themselves as Catholics. Although they are not portrayed as dependent on church ritual or practice, the dimension of faith is of the utmost importance to them.

Caroline in The Comforters is most explicitly bound up in her faith. She is a convert and finds herself patronized by cradle Catholics such as Mrs Hogg. She is irritated by this for she has a sense of her faith which lies beyond the smug platitudes of this woman. Although Caroline goes into retreat, she does not encounter her faith by turning her back on her life. On the contrary, the challenges, the irritations and the mysteries which nurture her faith are in her experience.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Europe is the scene of what would appear to be two diametrically opposed processes of political development. We are witnessing the development of a European superstate in the West, while in the East we see the fragmentation of a major political and military alliance. Some six centuries ago, in a very different Europe, Thomas Aquinas argued that, because human beings live and act in society, there must exist some means whereby the group or society may be governed for the common good, so that it does not degenerate into a collection of people each concerned only with his own interests1. My purpose is to examine what contribution the thought of Aquinas may have to make towards an understanding of what is happening in Europe at the present time.

A number of preliminary questions may be formulated:

1. a Do both of the political processes described above reflect a search for a better way of achieving the common good and attaining the common end of man?

2. b Are these apparently opposing trends in fact in opposition, or are they simply different stages of the same development?

3. c Can they both be interpreted as positive in terms of their likely contribution to the common good?

Matthew’s gospel contains passages difficult for Jewish Christian relations for the final text, as we have it, seems to contain passages hostile to Jews which irritate Jewish Christian dialogue. History, however, may show these so called ‘anti Semitic’ passages of this gospel in a new, and quite different light.

The key text which today causes perhaps the greatest agony for those involved in Jewish Christian dialogue is the verse in the passion narrative of Matthew’s gospel: Mt. 27: 25 ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’. For these commentators, the idiom ‘his blood be upon’ means ‘the responsibility of the death of Jesus is on our heads’. The action of Pilate washing his hands, seems to be drawing a contrast between Pilate and the people: Pilate seems to be declaring his innocence of the death of Jesus and says ‘My hands are clean of this man’s blood . . .’ By contrast the people seem to be accepting responsibility for the death of Jesus. Pilate is not guilty, but the ‘people’ are guilty. By this saying, they also incriminate their heirs in this guilt Some try to get round these ‘anti-semitisms’ (Matt. 23: 32-36, 7: 21-23, 8:11-12, 23: 33-46, 27: 25) by saying that ‘anti-semitic montages’ are only a secondary element introduced to the text added at a later, Greek, stage of the development of the gospels.

There is, of course, at present a fairly strong lobby, even among some Christians, who want to find ‘antisemitisms’ within the new Testament, for reasons which are sometimes distant from the academic interests of biblical criticism. It is necessary I think to examine these texts anew, both in the interest of the historical evidence available and in the interests of integrity within Jewish Christian relations.