In the May local council elections in the borough of Congleton, Cheshire, I stood as a Labour Party candidate in one of the wards. It consisted of rich Cheshire farmland and the result was quite predictable. I received 106 votes to the Tory 432. If Labour had won in the ward of Brereton, it would have signalled “the end of civilization as we know it”, and, to employ the phrase of Caspar Weinburger, U.S. defence spokesman, when interviewed on BBC World Service, the capitulation of the west to “Soviet hordes”. That, however, is not the point of this article. I am a “practising Catholic”, by which is meant a Catholic holding to the teaching of the Church and attending the sacraments. Now, a little down the road on which I live there happen to be a number of Catholic families, also “practising”, indeed pillars of the local Church. But in contrast to me two of these families supplied the bulk of the ten signatures the local Tory candidate required for his nomination. That is quite a public commitment because their names went up in print on the town hall and local parish notice boards, where I spotted them. As a political commitment it is second only to standing as a candidate. It was this which set me thinking if in fact we can talk about a Catholic social ethic.

English theology is notoriously ‘lop-sided’. In the historical disciplines, it has an excellent record of intelligent and discriminating scholarship. But, when attention shifts from what was once said and done in the name of Christianity to what might be said or done today, matters are either handed over to the philosopher (whose admirable and indispensable preoccupation with formal and linguistic considerations is no guarantee of competence to perform this task) or else are tackled at a level which, according to the standards operative in cognate ‘secular’ disciplines—from aesthetics and literary criticism to social and political theory—is so strikingly amateurish as to render it hardly surprising that theology plays little part in the conversation of the culture. In this naughty world, Professor Sykes has performed an excellent deed. The Identity of Christianity is a learned, vigorous and original reconstruction of some perennial problems: problems which found particular focus, in the nineteenth century, in discussion of the ‘essence’ of Christianity.

Sykes has shifted the theme from ‘essence’ to ‘identity’ partly to counter the widespread but unwarranted suspicion that an ‘enquiry into what makes Christianity Christianity’ (p.3) is likely to be reductionist in character, and partly because his discovery of the importance of Newman’s work for the ‘elucidation of what was at stake’ helped him to see how mistaken was the equally widespread view that the issues under consideration are of central moment only to Protestant Christians.

Never reluctant to provoke their readers, the Hanson brothers declare roundly that,

This vapid dismissal of an ancient doctrine is discordant with current Roman Catholic tradition represented by the Vatican Council’s document Dei Verbum, which maintains that ‘the books of Holy Scripture were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’. So what has led the Hansons, in the name of intelligent people of the present day, to abandon the inspiration of scripture as an untenable belief? One reason is that the Hansons equate inspiration with inerrancy, for they allege that inerrancy has been the only practical outcome of the tradition of biblical inspiration, and certainly it is the case that inerrancy was made to bear much weight in Roman Catholic tradition in the late nineteenth century and, during the early part of this century, in the anti-modernist campaign.

In late 1969 and early 1970 the Brazilian press carried a story which it called the “Dominican Affair”. It told of how an important urban guerilla had been shot dead by the police owing to his betrayal by two student-brothers of the Dominican Order. The story had the widest implications for Church-State relations at a national and international level, and it got world coverage. Recently more information has come to light, which makes possible an hypothesis (but not yet a definitive statement) of what really happened. It is fascinating, whether or not one is a Brazilian or a Dominican. It reveals very dramatically the complexity of the ways in which the apparatus of government and the media may distort—and continue to distort—even the most localized of events. And it shows how, in spite of these distortions, a seemingly modest man, Frei Tito de Alencar, whose sufferings and ideals have been written about several times in New Blackfriars, can emerge eventually with the stature of a martyr.