With the appearance of its eighteenth and nineteenth volumes, the English translation of Karl Rahner’s Schriften zur Theologie now stands complete in a score of volumes (I reviewed the twentieth, which appeared in 1981, in February last year). Completion was timed for Rahner’s eightieth birthday, which was on 5 March.

Some of the essays refer in footnotes to subsequent papers, so a supplementary collection will eventually (even soon) be necessary. The publishers are to be congratulated on staying the course. The translators have sometimes nodded, and some have occasionally been defeated by Rahner’s tortuous sentences and idiosyncratic jargon (it has never been kept uniform). It is pleasant to record that the last three in the series (two volumes of the German edition) have been undertaken by Edward Quinn: needless to say, they reach the standard set by Cornelius Ernst in his pioneering version of the first volume (1961).

During the past twenty years a massive literature has grown up on the implications for the life of the Roman Catholic Church of modern social changes and shifts in theological emphasis legitimated by the Second Vatican Council. Nevertheless, it would be useful to try to summarize from a sociological standpoint the overall effect of those changes and shifts in the role of the parochial clergy of England and Wales and on their relationship with the laity.

The Roman Catholic community in these countries broadly can be said to comprise six distinct strands in terms of social origins and cultural heritage. First of all there is the largely aristocratic and upper middle class strand, derived from the recusant gentry, in decline since the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850. The second strand consists of a significant infusion of converts. The third, by far the most important numerically, is the mass of Irish immigrants over the past century and a half. About the size and significance of the last three strands we know remarkably little in any detail: Catholic refugees arriving in the 1930s and 1940s from Eastern Europe (especially Poland), and Catholic migrant workers and their families from the Mediterranean countries and from the Caribbean.

Of these various strands, the most significant from the point of view of the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales as a significant religious and political force is undoubtedly the Irish strand.

In the United States it was the year 1921 that marked the culmination of the era of Victorian feminism. Women finally won the right to vote that gave them the official status of public citizens in the American Republic, after an eighty-eight year struggle that began in the 1840s with the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. But this culmination of Victorian feminism also marked its rapid demise as well. The Victorian domestic culture of female moral superiority and sisterly bonding gave way to the more eroticized world of the 1920s. The daughters of the suffragettes became the flappers of the “Roaring Twenties”, who were embarrassed by the moralistic culture of their mothers, with their large hats and long white dresses. Women, it seemed, had won access to the male promised land of education, politics and business, and even the male world of sexual pleasure, and now it was only a question of entering into and taking possession of it.

This year the English Dominicans are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Father Bede Jarrett (1881—1934). As we noted in last month’s editorial, he was—and still is—revered as administrator, author, preacher, friend; above all, as a man who gave a distinct stamp to the English Dominican Province. During his sixteen years as Provincial (1916—32) he founded this magazine, but probably his most important single achievement was to bring the Dominicans back to Oxford after an absence of nearly 400 years. He initiated the building of the new Oxford house of studies, Blackfriars, in 1921—the 700th anniversary of its original founding on the instructions of St. Dominic. On 17 March (exactly fifty years after Father Bede’s death) Dominicans from many parts of the English Province met there for a commemorative Mass. Father Conrad Pepler spoke at this, and we print his text here. Born in 1908, from boyhood Father Conrad knew Bede Jarrett; he came to the Order in 1927, when Father Bede was Provincial, and was a student at Blackfriars, Oxford, when he was its Prior (1932—4). Later he was Editor of both “Blackfriars” and “The Life of the Spirit” (now merged in “New Blackfriars”), and then, from 1952 to 1981, Warden of the Dominican conference centre in Staffordshire, Spode House.

“Wisdom has built her house, she has set up her seven pillars.”

(Prov. 9: v.1)