Catholics are so accustomed to be shocked or disillusioned by popular books on social science, that they may well be tempted to give these new Pelicans a wide berth. This would be a mistake, for both are well-written, pleasantly informative, and contain much encouragement for those who do not despair of welding Catholic principles info the British way of life. In Peter Archer’s symposium one will find a keen recognition of the importance of stable family life, a warm acceptance of the need for voluntary effort to supplement state action and a thoroughly wholesome attitude to officials. They should be supported and assisted in the performance of their duties, one gathers, but firmly protected by a wide-awake proletariat from any temptation to dictatorship.

Social Welfare and the Citizen makes no pretext of giving a complete picture of the modem Welfare State. Those topics have been selected for discussion which prove to be ‘the most constant source of practical difficulty to the citizen’. Several of the essays are entirely factual, those for example which deal with Income Tax, National Insurance, Landlord and Tenant, Public Health, Property and Town Planning, Law and the Motorist. No comment is required except a word of praise for their clarity and accuracy. But most of the contributors have made some effort to show the historic background of the service they are describing and to indicate in what ways it needs reform. In an excellent chapter on National Assistance Mr R. E. Prentice reminds us that the old Poor Law of 1601 established a ‘public responsibility for the relief of distress’, impeccable in principle, but discharged over the centuries ‘with a strange mixture of charity and harshness’. A curious feature of the relief of the destitute in this country has been the movement away from local to centralized administration in the interests of humanity. The old Boards of Guardians based on the parishes were notoriously the best-hated institutions

Henri de Lubac's Corpus Mysticum, published during and immediately after the conditions of wartime France, had a profound influence on the theology and actual practice of not only Catholic, but also much Protestant liturgy in the course of the unfolding liturgical movement. The interpretative keys of the text were established primarily by Michel de Certeau and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and have emphasised a historical shift from understanding in the connections between a threefold hermeneutic of Christ's ‘mystical body’. The ‘mystical body’ is variously understood as the Eucharist itself, the extant body of the Church, and the actual body of Christ. The conventional reading of this text is to claim that de Lubac traces a shift, occurring in the High Middle Ages that points away from the body of the Church to an objectification of the eucharistic species, resulting in the highly individualistic piety that manifested itself in the Catholicism of the nineteenth century. This paper challenges that hermeneutic key as an oversimplification of a much more subtle reading suggested by de Lubac himself and intrinsic to the text of Corpus Mysticum, and suggests that de Lubac understood the real shift to be the triumph of a certain kind of rationalism, exemplified by Berengar's thought, emerging to assert itself as the basis and ground of theological thinking, eclipsing the grounding character of the liturgy as the source of meaning in theology. It examines de Lubac's late claim that Corpus Mysticum was ‘a naïve text’ and asks what kinds of naïvety are indicated in this statement.

In May 2021, at Pentecost, a joint Pastoral letter was issued by the Catholic Bishops Conferences of England and Wales and of Scotland. This letter linked the feast day to the urgent need to care better for creation in the months leading to the G20 summit later in the summer and the COP-26 conference in Glasgow in November of that year. This paper looks at the letter, taking some account of reactions to it, and begins to explore ways in which our theology of the Holy Spirit can inform our theology of care for the created order as a developing part of Catholic Social Teaching. Some ‘footprints’ of the Spirit: First, the witness of patristic theologians encourages us to see rationality pointing to order in creation as a fruit of the Spirit. Second, the picture of unity in diversity formed by the Spirit in the New Testament points to the need for cooperation in our response to the current crisis. The last footprint is urgency: in the scriptures the Spirit's activity is constantly seen as urgent, sometimes in an extreme way. This picture suits the urgency of the current crisis in relation to climate change and biodiversity.

In the autumn of 1993, I found myself called upon to give the concluding address to a conference in Stockholm—jointly sponsored by the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, the Royal Institute of Technology, and the Swedish Center for Working Life—entitled: “Skill and Technology: on Diderot, Education and the Third Culture”. One focus of the conference was Diderot’s Dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew, my appreciation of which has, I hope, been properly enhanced as a result of having sat through not only a dramatisation of it in German but also an operatic version, by a Finnish composer, with a Swedish libretto.

Nobody knows for sure whether or not Denis Diderot had a conversation with Jean-Francois Rameau, nephew of the composer, in the Café de la Régence in Paris, in April 1761. Nor does it matter. Diderot certainly wrote the first draft of the Dialogue in that year, reworking it in 1773, 1778 and 1782, the year before he died. The history of this short text (less than seventy pages in the Flammarion edition) is so extraordinary that one almost suspects Diderot himself of having somehow arranged it.

Although it has been described as “the very centre of his writing” and has provoked a still burgeoning library of commentary and interpretation, the Dialogue was never published or referred to by Diderot in his lifetime, and it first saw the light of day in a German translation, done by an admiring Goethe from a French manuscript which he had been lent by Schiller, who seems to have obtained it from a German officer in St Petersburg. Goethe’s translation appeared in 1805.

It might seem that to be a Christian and at the same time a feminist involves few conflicts for the individual. In John 10:10 Christ said: “I came that they may have life and have it more abundantly”. Surely this is what feminism is about too — enabling women to live their lives “more abundantly”, by utilising all the potential which lies within them. One of the major achievements of the women’s movement has been to give women a growing consciousness of how great that potential is and the realisation that the peculiar gifts of women are not necessarily worthless because a male-orientated world sees little value in them. Women have discovered in themselves a capacity for assessing their own value and utilising their various potentialities as fully as possible. Christians, too, male and female, have a duty to be fully human and to realise their own worth. Offering ourselves unreservedly to God involves of necessity a developing awareness of what it is we are offering. It would seem, then, that the feminist Christian should see her feminism as enriching her Christianity and her Christianity as reinforcing her feminism.

Nevertheless, in practice, areas of conflict do arise. One such is the issue of abortion. Feminists have consistently campaigned for abortion on demand and the slogan “a woman’s right to choose” has become one of the most familiar of the women’s movement. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that one cannot be a true feminist while not supporting the notion that abortions should be freely available to all women who ask for them.

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.

This article will discuss the emergence of an increasingly cogent argument made by Pope John XXIII for a redefined role of episcopal pastoral governance in the (ante) preparatory phase of the Second Vatican Council and during early conciliar debate. Pope John will be presented as encouraging a renewed role for bishops in his public orations preceding the Council. This continued in his support of the conciliar process and encouragement given to senior bishops at critical moments during its first session. As contemporary understandings of episcopal governance were questioned before and at the Council, increasing numbers of bishops saw the possibilities of revitalising their governance role in a pastoral mode. Its contemporary relevance lies in Pope Francis’ call to build a synodal church in which episcopal governance is exercised at the local and universal levels. Today, this requires individual bishops ‘to assume their responsibilities to govern their own diocese, always in consultation with the faithful.’1

In a pace-setting paper recently published in New Blackfriars, Fergus Kerr argues that Cartesian assumptions and presuppositions have entered so deeply into the thinking of the West that even those who profess to follow other traditions of thought can often be found to be working within the Cartesian paradigm. Here I hope to develop just one of the many lines of inquiry to which Father Kerr has pointed, arguing that there is a convergence between Cartesian anthropology on the one hand and the productive relations of capitalism on the other. Beyond this, I shall try to suggest that this convergence can tentatively be documented so as to form a real part of the “history of ideas” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than left as no more than an abstract, analytical congruence or aptness of fit.

The theoretical argument is straightforward and can be concisely stated. Thomist anthropology and psychology propose a unitary conception of man and of the relationship between soul and body. Kerr pertinently reminds us (p. 255) of Aquinas’s commentary on I Corinthians 15, and quotes his memorable reference to the soul as pars corporis humani. This unity is found in all living things, in vegetables, for example, and in “brutes”; the rational soul in man, moreover, is no exception to this unitary principle. A corollary of this is that, as Kenny puts it, “a human being is not something that has a body; it is a body, a living body of a particular kind”.

The term ‘solidarity’ is in danger of developing into a clich?. It has been employed so often as a kind of ‘compassion football’ between a guilt-ridden (for some) oppressor ‘First’ World and an indignant (for some) oppressed ‘Third’ that its significance has become opaque. That lack of precision undermines its value for clarifying the relevant Christian response to the divisions between North and South, powerful and powerless, in our world. Solidarity shows us a way which eschews both a patronising attitude and a sense of guilt on the part of the North, and a feeling of being alone in the struggle on the part of the South. Solidarity empowers both and leads to a deeper understanding of what Jon Sobrino, recalling St Paul’s injunction, calls ‘bearing with one another in faith’.

In this article I wish to explore the theological roots of solidarity in an attempt to recapture the flavour of its deeper meaning in a belief that solidarity is a key concept for those who ‘hunger and thirst for what is right’ (Mt 5:6). I follow Albert Nolan’s argument that its roots are found in the Old Testament, but that it broadens its scope when Jesus begins his mission. The new theology of neighbour then becomes the model of solidarity for later thinkers, theologians and activists (‘militantes’ to the Latin Americans) in both the Third World and the West, in their struggle to live an authentically human, and therefore authentically Christian life. Lying at the core of solidarity is co-responsibility for the planet, and the humanisation of life for every being on it, by ridding the world of the structures of widespread injustice and deep-seated division which disfigure the created oneness of humanity.

So many hands have sown the ideas in this article, and over such a long period of time, that I have forgotten many of them. I can recall Richard McBrien declaiming from his book, Do We Need the Church? as he strides across the field, so sure and so impatient. I can hear Christopher Butler, in his black habit with the hood up, quietly chanting The Theology of Vatican II. But I cannot remember who it was that planted the most fruitful seed of all: “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was the first document of the Second Vatican Council. It would have been very different, if it had been the last”.

The ripening, I know, took place in the warmth and light of Avery Dulles’ Models of the Church. But his was the kind of sunshine that forced me to seek the shade of second thoughts; and once there, I wondered if I dared to disagree with him.

In this article, I present an argument which is made up of three suggestions about how we are to understand Vatican II’s ideas concerning the Church. To illustrate the point I am trying to make, I raise some questions about how this affects our view of the sacraments. And I ask whether this is not a case of the famous sensus plenior, the ‘fuller sense’ which appears to have been discussed only by scripture scholars up to now, but is surely relevant to the interpretation of council documents.

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama is about the good. Its conception of Christian moral life is set ‘after Christendom’ and directed to a ‘post-Christian’ culture. If the Theo-Drama becomes central to the way that Christians live in the post-modern world, what will their ethos be like?

‘Christendom’ is Christianity as an achieved political strategy: at the end of the game, the board should look like Aquinas’ On Princely Government. Aquinas’s natural law theory is embedded in Aristotle’s idea of the city as directed to a common good by its ruler. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics are authoritative for him. Von Balthasar has very little to say about Christendom. The ethics of the Theo-Drama does not hinge on an idea of natural law.

According to von Balthasar, pre-Christian cultures found the sacred in the cosmos. With the Incarnation, he says, the sacred is relocated to the person of Christ. Mediaeval Christendom assimilated cosmic religiosity into a Biblical framework. But the footprints of God in the cosmos did not lead all the way to Golgotha. Luther was not in error when he brought this “crisis to consciousness”. Von Balthasar claims that post-Christian culture is desacralised: Great Pan is dead, and the Piper at the gates of dawn cannot now be invoked even by Van Morrison. Post-Christian man has to make a choice: either the physicist’s universe and a technocratic state or the person of Christ. This is not a matter of cultural progression or regression: after the Incarnation, God makes himself less clearly present in nature.

This paper aims at delivering a definition of modernity as offered by modern Jewish theology: a theological capturing of the modern era as an epoch possessing its own unique and positive religious characteristics. This positive theological evaluation of modernity seems to derive uniquely from the Jewish perspective which sees in modernitas a hopeful repetition of the narrative of Exodus: the story of liberation and autonomous self-constitution of man helped by God who wished his subjects to stop being just subjects, but also wanted to offer them freedom. This emphatically affirmative definition of religious modernity has only one equivalent in Christian theology: the millenarist notion of a “new age” – die Neuzeit, or modernitas – as the third age of the spirit, which greatly influenced the most ambitious strain of modern philosophy: German Idealism and Hegel in particular. In referring to the writings of Jacob Taubes (most of all his Occidental Eschatology) I will attempt to show that the twentieth-century Jewish messianism tends to perceive modernity, also in its Christian version, as an epoch of the reawakening of the original spirit of the Hebrew revelation, conceived most of all as the emancipatory event of Exodus.

On the acknowledgements page of Theology and Social Theory John Milbank thanks, rather abruptly, ‘Rowan Williams, who taught me theology’. No other teacher is recognised. The formal teaching was at Westcott House, Cambridge, in the mid-70s; but there is evidence enough that the current Archbishop of Canterbury has been an abiding influence on the whole of John Milbank’s theological career. In the crowded Metro of Milbank’s footnotes, it is rare to see a face more than once; but Williams appears five times in The Word Made Strange, speaking variously of Barth, Arius, Lossky and Gregory of Nyssa. And often, Milbank’s ideas seem closely related to those of his teacher. The concept of poesis in Milbank’s ‘A Critique of the Theology of Right’ (1989) - ‘the ceaseless re-narrating and ‘explaining’ of human history’, a self-exceeding act — is clearly the twin of Williams’ ‘generative revelation’ — ‘events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life’ — in his essay ‘Trinity and Revelation’ (1986). But this example serves not just as a demonstration of Williams’ influence on Milbank; it also shows how Milbank overtakes his teacher, tackling on a grand scale ideas that are in Williams rather tentative. For Milbank, the idea that somehow Christian experience generates its own momentum of truth contributes to the overthrow of Kantian transcendentalism; for Williams, the same sort of idea provides ‘a way of thinking’ about the Spirit’s work in the church. Milbank’s theological ambition seems much greater than Williams’.

The article argues that philosophers of religion and theologians should pay less attention to the so-called ‘classical attributes’ of God and more attention to the neglected, but venerable, tradition of the divine names. Grounded in Scripture, these reflections are predicated on the doctrine of Creation, and what it is for human beings as creatures to speak of their Creator. The article demonstrates that, even the so-called ‘classical attributes’, when placed in the divine names tradition, are far from being mere ‘natural theology’ but Christological to the core and lead us, through intellect, into the mysteries of awe and prayer.

Cardinal Ratzinger has brought out an essay collection whose third and most substantial part is devoted to what can be called the theological foundation of political ethics. These essays are worth examining, not only for their own conceptual merits, but also for the light they throw on the criticism of liberation theology which has come from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under his leadership, as indeed on the interventions in favour of human rights made by Rome during the time of John Paul II.

What emerges from the analytic summary which is offered in this article is, I believe, a twofold conclusion. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is headed by a powerful and original theological mind. That mind is, however, alien to the philosophical and theological tradition which has provided the customary idiom for the magisterial interventions of the popes in both dogmatic and ethical issues for the last hundred years. Almost no trace of Christian Scholasticism in its Thomist-Aristotelian form can be found in these writings. Rather do they draw for their inspiration on a variety of sources rarely tapped by figures in the Cardinal’s position: Christian Platonism in its various historic manifestations; the Catholic Tubingen school of the early nineteenth century, which worked out an account of the relation between revelation and reason in the light of Kant’s critique of human understanding; and, not least, the voices of European literature.

In response to accusations leveled against the integrity of confirmation as a distinct sacrament, the author searches magisterial documents for a theology of confirmation. Two main theological explanations of the sacrament are explored: the ecclesial significance of the bishop's office as the original minister of confirmation; and the grace of the sacrament – that is, the gifts and Gift of the Holy Spirit. This grace is characterized as both defensive and offensive, from the perspective of defending the faith of the individual and the Church, and sharing in Christ's mission to evangelize the world. In a final section, the author addresses several popular but mistaken or one-sided approaches to explaining confirmation that have had negative pastoral consequences in recent decades.