The past two years in Northern Ireland have been a time of intense political activity among its one-and-a-half million people. The frequency and intensity of street violence has ensured international publicity and attention. Yet the causes underlying the disturbances remain much misunderstood at home and abroad.

It is a trite but necessary beginning to emphasize that the Irish problem is not one of religion. It is true that religious denomination neatly divides the political positions. Unionists are Protestant, non-Unionists Catholics. But however compelling it is to see the intermittent guerrilla warfare in Belfast or Derry in terms of Catholics and Protestants it must be resisted. These confrontations may have little formal political character, but in a real sense they represent a clash of different political forces; the resistance of a complex postcolonial social structure to new economic and social influences from within and without.

Put another way, the Civil Rights campaign and the British Government’s involvement in that campaign and its aftermath represent attempts to dismantle, what had, under strain, become a semi-fascist state, and to replace it with something approaching social democracy. Just why the ‘Irish Question’ should once again irrupt into British politics, and at this particular time, is problematical. But an important factor which enabled a Labour administration to begin on the unfinished business of Ireland is the impact of economic change on the relationships between the parties involved, the Republic of Ireland, Ulster, and Britain. Economic change alone cannot account for all developments, but an analysis of recent events in Ireland which leaves them out altogether could only help to mystify further the reputedly already amazed Britisher.

It was not until a fairly recent visit to the United States that I came across and wondered at the emphasis put on counselling by the clergy over there. It struck me at first hearing that this must be something for which specially selected clergy were specially trained, put through courses, taught techniques—something for which I had never been qualified. A closer appraisal made it clear that though some may indeed have been on courses, most were more likely to be doing not much more than what I have always summed up as ‘being available’—available for what? Well, almost anything—meal, bed, tea, sympathy, cash, a ready ear, a shoulder to be wept on, a sponge to absorb, a tap to turn on, a man to pray with, a person who can be silent, a pillar of strength, a place of peace, a warm area of concern, a vehicle of love, a man of God, a secular human being who will be interested.

What I am trying to say is that a counsellor is one who is available to God and to his or her fellow men and women to put at the service of both all that he or she is—and has to give. How much there is depends initially on God, secondarily on heredity, background, education, etc., and thirdly and continually upon the individual’s openness to the Spirit, as the Spirit moves in the world and in him.

The Spirit scatters his gifts: none of us possess all. God is God—too great for us—how wonderful that we can and should go on growing in wisdom and grace before God and man, till we meet each other and Him—face to face—and know what we are now ‘seeing in a glass darkly’.

Last year the largest aid budget in the world was steered through the American Congress—yet it was the smallest budget since America began giving aid twenty-three years ago. But perhaps this is no cause for alarm. Consider the following vignettes.

• Washington. December 18th, 1969 (U.P.I.). ‘Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield said that the foreign aid programme had lost its original purpose and he would oppose it. “Foreign Aid is no longer an aid programme. It’s a programme for the benefit of American business”, Senator Mansfield said at a news conference. He added, it was no longer being used for the humanitarian precepts (sic) for which it was established.’

• Washington. June 7th, 1970 (A.P.). ‘U.S. Foreign Aid Chief John Hannah acknowledged today that the U.S. aid programme is being used as a cover for C.I.A. operations in Laos.’

After doing much to discredit in Absolutely Null and Utterly Void the historical build-up to Apostolicae Curae, Fr Hughes has now tackled the theological questions involved in Anglican Orders. In doing so he pursues his attack on Dr Francis Clark’s two books. This does not make entirely happy theological reading. One is left with the impression that both authors were first quite convinced a priori of the truth of their thesis, and then set out to prove it.

The basic argument of Clark’s Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation was surely not, as Hughes writes (p. 41), ‘that it was not abuses or errors that caused the Reformers to reject eucharistic sacrifice, but their own new conception of grace, justification . . .’; rather was the basic argument that the Reformers did not merely reject current late medieval superstitions about the Mass, but the Catholic doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice itself. In so far as Clark has maintained that a perfectly clear and orthodox doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice was currently taught (and as clearly rejected by the Reformers), and that the prevailing superstitions have been greatly exaggerated, Hughes makes many inroads on his position: Biel’s theology was extremely unsound, even if orthodox by the skin of its teeth; how threadbare Catholic thought was on the point came out in post Reformation apologetic, when it was clear from their twisting and turning that Catholic theologians, though insistent that the Eucharist is a sacrifice, were quite unable to give either a coherent or an acceptable account of why or how it is (and remained so till yesterday or even today); what theological thought there was, lay buried under a mass of devotional and allegorical comment on rubrics; the elevation was wrongly thought of as the moment of offering, Cajetan’s lone voice, that the whole of the Mass was a sacrifice in a sacramental sort of way, going unheeded; above all, theological thought does not exist in isolation, and in this period was embedded in a shocking system of buying the effects of Calvary piecemeal for personal use.