We are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of the outstanding young preacher Geoffrey Preston by publishing this trilogy. It was written not very long before he died and has not appeared in print before. Its other two parts, ‘The Church of the Son’ and ‘The Church of the Father’, we will be publishing in our July/August and September numbers.

The Church is a communion, a fellowship, a togetherness in life and liturgy. And this togetherness, this sobornost, is rooted and grounded in the togetherness, the koinōnia, of the three-personed God. To this communion we have all been given access through the incarnation of the Word of God, by his own entering into koinōnia and sobornost with us. Those who share in this togetherness of koinōnia are in the Greek termed koinonoi, a name that cannot be rendered in English with a word which preserves the same linguistic form as ‘fellowship’ or ‘communion’, and so will have to be translated ‘partakers’. Christians partake with one another of goods both material and spiritual, and this is based on their common partaking in the life of the Godhead itself.

In Luke 7: 36—50 there is a story, found with variations in all four gospels, of an expression of extravagant love for Christ by a woman, a woman with a certain reputation in town, who came to dinner uninvited and anointed his head or his feet with tears or myrrh, and in Luke and John wiped his feet with her hair.

The story is presented as a lesson Our Lord taught about the Jubilee legislation in Deut. 15, in which every seventh year all debts would be forgiven, all slaves released and all property revert to its original owners (probably a greater challenge to the excesses of capitalism than anything Karl Marx ever said or wrote). Deuteronomy stresses that this should not be an excuse to fail to help the poor in the land when the Jubilee year approaches. Deuteronomy claims that there would be no poor in the land if all Israel obeyed God and all his commandments; but the truth is, Deuteronomy goes on, you will always have the poor with you in the land; therefore, open wide your hand to the poor and needy. Those in the gospel story who apparently knew the law in Deuteronomy quite well were the indignant disciples in Mark and Matthew, Simon the Pharisee in Luke, and Judas in John’s gospel. They were offended by the woman’s apparent extravagance, and especially this woman’s extravagance, seeing who she was.

Though much of what I have to say will reflect a perspective based on my own experiences and, to that extent, will take its colouration and emphasis from Catholicism in the U.S. setting and situation, I think the underlying essentials will apply as well to the British and European situations. After all, Catholic opponents of war, wherever they are, must come to terms with the tragic truth that the ‘universality’ of our Church has usually found expression in too ready a willingness to endorse and support participation in wars and (for the last 1500 years at least) a reluctance to challenge its faithful to give active witness instead to its Founder’s teachings of peace and nonviolence.

Something of a re-awakening began in the interval between the two World Wars. In great part due to the writings of the Dominican, Fr. Franziskus Stratmann, there developed what might be described as a ‘Thomist’ or ‘neo-Scholastic’ pacifism. While not yet accepting the ‘absolutism’ of the so-called ‘peace churches’ with their total rejection of all violence and war, this new theological interpretation recognized the impossibility of fitting the weapons and strategies of modern warfare into the traditional concept of the ‘just war’ and its conditions.

Cornelius Ernst once sought a pattern to English Dominican recruitment and found none. We often come to the Order of Friars Preachers by the strength of chance encounters or even reading; the force of example of one or many witnesses may play its part in leading us there and certainly it is individual witness that plays a part in keeping us there.

Names such as Bede Jarrett, Vincent McNabb and Hugh Pope were on the Catholic Truth Society pamphlets which an eleven-year old convert read in self-education, before and after his entry into the Church.