It is embarrassing to utter a screaming banality in public: yet love, in all candour, is what the Catholic Church, to say nothing of the world in general, does desperately need. Think of a Christian. Then of Christians as a group. Busy. Long-suffering. Self-effacing. Can you think of them making little sacrifices for one another? Of course. Or perhaps laying down their lives for their brethren? Yes, again. Some of them at least. But do you think of them unzipped and uninhibited, actually loving each other? Ah, well now. . . . Auch unter ihnen sind Helden; viele von ihnen litten zuviel-: so wollen sie andre leiden machen. Amen, Zarathustra.

A French magazine carried out a survey among its readers (Catholics, nearly all of them) on birth control: What the readers thought or did about it, what they thought the Church in general should do about it. What is to the point here is not that the views expressed showed wide divergence, nor even that they revealed such a mass of human suffering:

The dossier mounts and the effort to think all the relevant material through has become daunting. Though it is only two years since the Slant group brought out Catholics and the Left as their ‘manifesto’, the argument about politics and theology, socialism and the gospel, has opened out in so many significant ways and so much new data has come to hand, that one has the sense (obscure enough, it is true) of being on the verge of some major revaluation of meanings and realignment of forces. But the ‘longer and more complicated pieces of writing’ which Raymond Williams mentioned in his review (New Blackfriars, November 1966) as a desideratum, are for the most part still outstanding. On the other hand, the germane topics are surely emerging. Terry Eagleton has listed some of them (in Slant 17), as part of the best outcome of the Birmingham symposium: how to relate cultural to political analysis; the adequacy of Marxism as a perspective for critique and action; the relation of revolution in the Third World to revolution in the western democracies; the relation of Christian eschatology to Marxist theory of history; and how analysis and critique are to issue out into effective social and political action. While there is no urgency to present a complete bibliography, it seems worth calling to mind the more important items in the file on the Catholic New Left debate, before going on to raise some further problems imposed by the recent publication of the May Day Manifesto 1968.

The tradition that the third gospel was written by Luke the doctor dies hard. We may realize that the ‘Luke the doctor’ of Colossians 4, 14 is not necessarily the same Luke as the one to whom the gospel is attributed (just as there is no shadow of an indication that the Mark of the second gospel is any of the Marks mentioned in the Acts and the Epistles). We may know that all attempts to show that the author of the third gospel used medical language collapse, simply because there was no such thing as technical medical language in those days. Yet there remains a sympathy with human suffering and appreciation of the many-sidedness of men’s characters, a power to make a penetrating yet kindly assessment which is often —rightly or wrongly—associated with the medical man, the Dr Camerons or even the Dr Findlays of this world. But Luke is no country doctor from the highlands or the valleys, and it is because of this that his special preoccupation with rich and poor is especially significant to Christians of an affluent society brought face to face with poverty.

Luke stands out among the other New Testament writers by a certain grace and dignity. The gospel of Mark, on which a large part of both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels is based, is undisguisedly Kleinliteratur, stories told uncomplicatedly in simple, popular form, without literary pretension; he writes the sort of Greek which was probably spoken by the lower classes in the cities of the Roman empire.

1. Introduction—the present malaise

One of the effects of the Council has been a clearing of the intellectual atmosphere to the point where honesty is tolerated even when it runs counter to deeply rooted taboos. Dr Victor J. Pospishil, priest of the Byzantine Rite Catholic diocese of Philadelphia, has published an appeal for a profound reform in the marriage discipline of the Roman Communion: Divorce and Remarriage. Towards a New Catholic Teaching (Burns & Oates, London, 1967). A canonist with experience in tribunal work, Dr Pospishil presents a convincing case for a reform in present discipline which would allow for the extension of the power of the Church to dissolve those marriages which are ratum et consummatum, sacramental marriages consummated by the sexual union of the parties. As he points out, these are the only marriages excluded from this power in the Church at present.

There is no doubt that a profound malaise with respect to the ecclesiastical discipline on Christian marriage exists in the Western Church today, a malaise which expresses itself in many ways. There is an ever-increasing number of petitions for nullity or dissolution, and in many cases diocesan tribunals are ill-equipped to handle formal (nullity) cases. The escape provided in the Western Church for people in non-viable situations for the past few centuries is, under present circumstances, clearly inadequate.

People are beginning to realize that some of the ideas put forward since the Council have roots which go back to the Modernist movement at the turn of the century. Since Modernism was condemned by Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Gregis in 1907, with unexampled severity, this raises some interesting questions. The history of Modernism is in for reappraisal and already the field is bristling with budding experts, mostly French and American. I am no expert and the views I express here are open to revision.

Modernism once seemed to me an interruption, almost an irrelevance, in the development of ideas in the Church. The link between the liberal Catholics of the nineteenth century and the general attitude which emerged at the recent Council is clear enough. The Council has reversed the views implicit in the famous Syllabus of Errors (1864); it has decided that ‘Christendom’ has gone for ever, that the Church must stop trying to govern the world and learn how to serve it. ‘A free Church in a free State’ has been enlarged into ‘a free Church in a free World’—an updated version, surely, of views first promoted by the unfortunate Lamennais and pursued with more caution by Montalembert and Lacordaire in France, the editors of the Rambler (Acton, Simpson, Newman) in England, and others elsewhere.

This element in the Second Vatican Council is the one most apparent to the world, which welcomes it, and perhaps it may be called Pope John’s line, for his view was pastoral: how to make the Gospel available to the modern world was his deepest concern and a favourite word was convivenza, which he preferred to ‘co-existence’.