When I settled down to prepare this lecture, I looked at the title I had offered to the Regent of Studies and began to have doubts: was it really appropriate, on so prestigious an occasion, to discuss what seemed, the more I looked at it, a rather naive or childish question?

Not that I have anything against childish questions. Small children are neither experts nor are they wise. They are not experts, because they lack the opportunity to amass specialist stocks of information and skill. And they have neither experienced enough nor suffered enough to be wise.

Nevertheless, small children do often ask fundamental questions as a matter of personal concern.

Theologians are usually elderly, or at least middle-aged. The theologian’s audience therefore have a right to expect of him a measure of scholarly expertise: they are entitled to assume that he knows a number of things that other people either do not know or have forgotten. Moreover, the theologian’s audience also have a right to expect of him a measure of that wisdom which is the fruit of experience and suffering. (The fact that, on both counts, the audience will often be disappointed does not render their expectations the less legitimate.)

There is no question of my declining your kind invitation; rather, the talk I would give is not the talk you would want. I think that the Papal Visit is lamentable. I could do nothing but deplore it. And I ask you to hear my reasons.

It is not the sensationalism and vulgarity against which I complain — the souvenirs, the “logo”, the Popemobile, the hiring of a publicity-agent, the whole unlovely apparatus of a whistle-stop tour. After all, if the thing is going to take place at all, it will have to be financed from somewhere, and the cost seems crippling enough to call for every money-making scheme that ingenuity can devise or gullibility fall for. There is, I suppose, something vaguely comic about it all, but then there always is something vaguely comic in the travels of the very great. No, if there were no more to it all than a chance for crowds to see the Pope, my reaction would be very much what it is to cup-ties, or Butlin’s, or pilgrimages to Lourdes: carry on, God bless you, don’t expect me to join in, have a good time. Unfortunately, much more is involved, and if I had to state in a phrase what that something more is, I would say that the Visit is profoundly and damagingly misleading. Let me say why.

You will know that recent events and changes in our own Church - the concept of Oecumenism, the recovery of the Bible, the Second Vatican Council — are examples of how Christians of all denominations are trying to come to terms with their past and to understand it.

What is the significance of singing the psalms? It is the one form of prayer shared by every major Christian denomination. Whatever the disagreements about the Eucharist, charismatic prayer, the rosary or whatever, the singing of psalms has gone unchallenged as the typical form of Christian prayer. And yet it is not immediately obvious in what sense the psalms are either Christian or, for that matter, prayer. How can it be an act of Christian prayer to long to dash out your neighbour’s children’s brains on a rock, to celebrate a law by which we are no longer bound, and to proclaim God’s mysterious intention to use Moab as his washbowl? The question is not what this or that psalm, might have meant originally in the Temple. It is not even of what Christian theological sense we might discover or construct for any or all of the psalms. That is an important question but its answer will not make sense of our practice of singing the psalms, in which there is no time to carry out complex theological hermeneutics and during which our minds are often enough dull, vacant or distracted. The question is not of the meaning of the psalms but of the meaning of singing them, though, as we shall see, the relationship between the two is complex.

The first thing to note is that we are not just singing the psalms, we are singing the psalter, and it is the canon of the psalter that gives us a preliminary definition of the significance of psalm singing. It is true that we do not sing all the psalms in the psalter, and even the psalms that we sing are sometimes bowdlerised of the nastier verses. But even if we only ever sung just a few of the psalms it would still be true that the canonical form of the psalter makes a claim about what sort of an activity psalm singing is.

Peru has a Left-wing daily paper called El Diario de Marka. On the day after Pope John Paul issued his encyclical Laborem Exercens the paper carried a cartoon covering most of its front page which summed up its view of the significance of the encyclical for the Peruvian situation. It showed a determined looking Pope John Paul carrying a banner which read: “Free Trade Unions, Right to Strike, Co-Ownership of the Means of Production and Just Remuneration, Social Justice”. He was bearing down on a rather smug President Belaunde who stood with a banner behind his back saying “Anti-Strike Decree” and thinking “Terrorist”.

The fact that such a cartoon would even appear in a Left-wing paper, let alone cover most of its front page, indicates the importance of the popular church for the Peruvian Left. This was further underlined by the amount of space and the sympathetic coverage the paper gave the encyclical in marked contrast to that given by the bourgeois press. Nor is this simply a recognition of the large number of Christians who are trade union and political militants. Perhaps more important is the new image this has given the church and the consequent expectation that a papal statement on social justice would be a broadly Left-wing document.

Occasions such as this serve to show just how significant is the popular church, both politically and ecclesiologically. Not only is it new to find large sectors of the church being the natural allies of political progressives but it is even more novel to find that this alliance has caused secular progressives to re-evaluate the meaning of Christianity itself and to come to expect that even some of its more conservative leaders must themselves be progressive if they choose to criticise society from a Christian standpoint.

Parents are desperate bores about the cute things their children have said but the Aquinas family preserved a story about young Thomas of a rather different kind. They complained that he was always bothering people with the question: What is God? I expect the story is quite true and totally trivial; it only becomes interesting if we see it as a sort of premonition of his whole life, of what his life was to be like and of what his sanctity was like. The first interesting thing is that it was not a statement, an affirmation, but a question.

Some people are saints through their heroic work for the poor, some through their courage in dying for the faith, some through their indefatigable preaching of the gospel; sanctity takes all sorts of forms: the sanctity of St Thomas lay in asking questions.

We (and I mean especially his Dominican brethren) regularly get him wrong by thinking of him as someone who provides the answers. He does, I think, provide more and better answers than most, but what makes him central and vital to our tradition (which is quite an important one for the whole Church) is his conviction, which he hands down to us, that there is always a question to be asked to which an answer is either true or false.