A sermon preached at the Judges Service held at Portsmouth Anglican Cathedral on Candlemas Day 1986, in the presence of the Lord Chancellor and attended by judges, magistrates and members of the legal profession.

Says the prophet:

How, though, did the man who first summoned Israel to this vocation understand her mission?

Ironically, he was writing at a time when the very future of Israel’s identity as a people was most in jeopardy. Forty years before she had suffered humiliating defeat by the Babylonians. Her temple was destroyed and her leaders, together with the king, exiled in heathen Babylon. The first prophet of the exile, Ezekiel, had assured his fellow captives that if they remained faithful to their God they would be restored to their land. But nothing had happened and, as the generation which had gone into exile died off, it seemed that God had totally abandoned his people.

Then suddenly a second prophet sounded his triumphant message: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and cry to her

that her warfare is ended,

that her iniquity is pardoned. (Is. 40 : 1—2))

But he was not just content to proclaim Israel’s return to her land: he saw her as the agent by whom the whole world would be brought under God’s rule. Her restoration was not just to vindicate God’s people, to allow them fellowship with him irrespective of what went on elsewhere in his world. Rather it was to be a light to the nations.

The total number of Catholic sociologists in Great Britain could fit comfortably at the back of the Clapham omnibus. Among the many exotic ideological species of sociologists, the feminists, the cat fanciers, and the vegetarians, it is reasonable to assume a believing Catholic could be found somewhere. Those found seem to occupy a peculiar ideological limbo, their religious and sociological gaze doomed to be misunderstood by Church and discipline alike. This tiny band of sociological hopers forms a dispersed breed, invisible in their own Church, and for some, best kept so; within their discipline, they seem as a holy huddle on a tiny rock discernable in a sea of analytical uncertainty, odd, but interesting. Doubtless every occupation carries a burden, a witness to a calling out of improbable circumstances.

Although some sociologists wear their ideological beliefs heavily in public, most carry their burdens privately. Few biographies of sociologists have been written, and even fewer about those who are also Catholic. Sociologists are a reticent breed, and theologically they are unlikely to be able to say much about why they believe in Catholicism. Doubtless coming back to Catholicism was a surprise for some: maybe reading Althusser by candlelight, or an account of the ceremonies of the Dinka in bed, or spotting the moral similarities between the plight of Goffman’s actor and Job in a pub, drove some unsteadily further along the road to Damascus. To be a Catholic and a sociologist is to occupy a place not necessarily of one’s own choosing.

Fifty years ago Sheed and Ward published a book called Peace and the Clergy. It was attributed anonymously to ‘a German priest’ because its author, Fr. Francis Stratmann OP, a Dominican, was the persecuted leader of the German Catholic peace movement, Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken. With about 40,000 members, this was one of the first organisations to suffer the full force of Nazi oppression. It had been dissolved by the Nazis on 1 July, 1933.

Stratmann was born in 1883 and ordained in 1912. After the First World War he had become a university chaplain in Berlin, and it was there that he had begun his struggle against National Socialism and for peace. His book, The Church and War, published in 1924, drew on Scripture, Catholic moral theology and papal pronouncements to challenge the justification of war. When, in 1936, Peace and the Clergy appeared, it was in its English translation. ‘A work of this kind cannot be published in Germany today’, the preface explained. Temporarily arrested by the Gestapo after the Friedensbund was banned, Stratmann survived the war by going into exile, first in Rome, and then to Venlo, in Holland, where he was working as chaplain to Jewish converts in the Sluis refugee camp when the Nazis invaded. Going into hiding, he was sheltered in the Flemish Dominican convent at Lint, in Belgium. In exile he kept a diary, later published, and, in addition to other books, wrote a five-volume work on The Saints and the State.

This article was originally presented (in a modified form) to the continuing seminar on Pastoral Theology of the Catholic Theology Society of America at its 1985 annual meeting. There, and here, it is intended to be the starting point for a discussion and reflection on the nature and significance of a theological process which is playing an increasingly important role in the life of the Catholic Church and other Christian bodies. We refer to it as ‘theology in its natural environment’. It is also variously called indigenous theology, contextual theology, local theology, practical pastoral theology, or theological reflection. The variety of names and of methods all point to an essential quality of theology in its natural environment, its specificity or particularity in terms of a concrete community whose essential unit is the small group.

Our experiential base for theology in its natural environment has centered in seven years of work with the Education for Ministry Program of the Bairnwick Center at the School of Theology of the University of the South, U.S.A. Currently enrolling nearly 6000 students in six countries, this is the largest program of theological education by extension in the English-speaking world. At its heart is a model and various methods for theological reflection that enable people to do theology in their daily lives with the ongoing critical support of a small group of six to ten peers.