A little over a century ago Josephine Butler was beginning to learn, with reluctance and dismay, the extent of organised child prostitution in Britain. When she tried to convey what she had learned she was often reviled as dirty-minded, corrupting and unwomanly. Her work did much to erect legal protection for children, but the possibility and practice of child sexual exploitation continued, as shown in the case notes of bodies such as the NSPCC. In 1987 a tide of hostility was unleashed against another woman, paediatrician Marietta Higgs, who had in the normal course of her work discovered signs of sexual abuse in a small and statistically unsurprising proportion of the children she cared for.

Why is it so often women—supposedly the weaker sex, less tough-minded than men—who seem to be left to face up to the most cruel and sordid social practices, and even vicariously to bear the blame for them? And why, a century after Josephine Butler’s work, is society still so ill-equipped to deal with child sexual abuse?

Josephine Butler’s involvement with girls and women forced into poverty and prostitution began in 1865 in Liverpool, when she visited the city’s vast workhouse and met some of its 5000 inhabitants. Though frightened and horrified at the conditions, and doubtful of her welcome, she sat down on the floor and began to pick oakum with the women and talk to them about their lives. Shortly afterwards she took into her house a girl called Marion who had been seduced at fifteen and abandoned, and was dying of consumption. Others followed and Josephine set up a ‘House of Rest’ for incurably ill women.

Introducing the hermeneutical problem

It is a pity that theological communication so often gets bogged down because a key concept is never satisfactorily and clearly explained. The key idea then degenerates to a kind of magical word, periodically invoked, temporarily perhaps exciting, but ultimately mystifying. A few years ago the word ‘existential’ underwent this process of degeneration. Although the word had a clear meaning in Heidegger’s early philosophy, and indeed, as ‘existential analysis’, signified an enduringly valuable method, the basic insight represented by it failed to shape and illuminate the popular theological discussion. (A fine example of the kind of communication that should have taken place on a much wider scale regarding this word is still Cornelius Ernst’s 1961 Introduction to Karl Rahner’s Theological Investigations.) Instead, the word ‘existential’ became used indiscriminately for anything remotely ‘relevant’ or ‘concrete’. This inflation ended by making the word worthless and unusable—where everything had to be ‘existential’, nothing could be any more. And the mystifying communicators and the befogged hearers concluded about the same time that the word had become meaningless. This need not have been the case: as so often before, a chance had been missed.

Perhaps something similar is happening now with the word ‘hermeneutical’. Wheareas ‘existential’ was used indiscriminately, ‘hermeneutical’ is often used in an almost gnostic fashion, as if allusion is being made to some arcane discipline allowing a privileged few access to philosophical and theological mysteries. And before the general meaning of the word has been assimilated within theological discussion and satisfactorily communicated, particular ‘hermeneutics’ have begun to proliferate, producing a situation at once labyrinthine and mystifying.

‘In one Spirit we were all baptised into one body’ (1 Cor. 12 : 13a). Repentance and faith give a man koinōnia—participation—with the Holy Spirit and by virtue of that partaking he has koinōnia too with all his fellow-Christians who are partakers with him of the same Spirit. He belongs to and within the communion of holy people, of the holy people who share holy things, the sacraments and mysteries of the Church. But the body into which we were all baptised by the one Spirit is itself the body of the Son, the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God made man. The Church, the body of the Messiah, the messianic community, is koinōnia with Jesus Christ as well as koinōnia with the Holy Spirit. True, it is through the koinōnia of the Spirit that the Church becomes the koinōnia of the Son, but nevertheless it does really become that. Paul writes to Corinth:

The Problem of evil, from Epicurus via Philo of Alexandria to today, has usually been presented in more or less the same way. We are generally offered three, sometimes more, propositions:

1. 1 God is omnipotent

2. 2 God is good/loving

3. 3 Evil/suffering exists

This paper argues that being there, actually existing, is a notion that cannot be explicated by formal logicians, cannot be defined in terms of conscious perception, and cannot be satisfactorily explained using the theories of mathematics or natural science. So, must we turn to theology to make up for the deficiencies of the methods so far canvassed? The paper concludes by considering the Thomistic identification of God with existence itself, but argues that it would be a mistake to suppose that the mystery of actual existence is thereby dispelled.

The little story that follows has something in common with Guareschi’s Don Camillo tales, but it has the advantage of being true; and truth is more interesting than fiction even when the latter is written by a humorist of genius. My true story is not funny, but most Italian priests who know communism at close quarters do not—sometimes for different reasons—find the situation at all funny, and are even inclined to blame Guareschi for having, as one of them said to me, ‘joked about things that are tragic’. That may not be quite fair to Guareschi, but it is a point of view which his non-Italian admirers should not overlook.

As for my story, its setting is the Tuscan countryside today, where three-quarters of the population are communist and therefore officially excommunicated by the Church. That is the first point to grasp. Try to imagine the more obvious difficulties confronting a priest in this situation. Is he to refuse the Sacraments to everyone who has the party membership card and will not throw it away? If so, he knows that he is shutting the church door in the face of most of the men in his parish and more than half the women. Over large zones of central Italy the peasants just assume, as a thing too obvious to need discussion, that the communist party is their party. E il nostro partito: the phrase comes out pat as a matter of course. Moreover it is widely assumed in Italy (at least verbally) that communism is simply Christianity in practice, and that the priests at the bottom of their hearts know this. In other words it is assumed that the barrier between Church and communism is no more than a legal device erected by the priests because their self-interest ties them to the other political faction.

This article examines the retrieval of patristic exegesis in two major figure in Catholic Ressourcement theology: Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar. Henri de Lubac's driving concern in his biblical writings is not so much to chronicle the history of interpretation as it is to explicate the great theological synthesis, which underlies the doctrine of the fourfold sense of Scripture. For de Lubac, this synthesis, wherein the totality of Christian doctrine and practice is centered in Christ and grounded in the reading of Scripture, is an essential component of Christianity. De Lubac encourages the integration of this theological vision with modern biblical studies, but he does not offer much as to what such an integration might look like in practice. Congar, building upon de Lubac's work, goes beyond de Lubac in making concrete efforts to integrate some of the theory and practice of patristic interpretation with modern exegesis. Important here is Congar's notion of “typological tradition” whereby the divine mystery concealed and revealed in the realities presented by the biblical text, unfold in the tradition, doctrine, and practice of the Church.

Hester (Tottie) and Clara Pater gave me their brother’s Rituate. The white and violet volume is now in the library of Blackfriars, Oxford. He would have been pleased, no doubt, had he been told that his house in St. Giles (’ with a plastered front of some antiquity, with a pleasant row of trees in front of it; at the left .... a little passage leading to the back of the house, the inner arch .... surmounted with a quaint carved face’ ) was fated to be occupied by Dominicans and that learning and sanctity would dwell where his learning and his aspirations had stretched imploringly towards holiness.

His aspirations: hear him (how unlike the Mr. Rose of Mallock’s New Republic) as he meditates on the Discobolus at rest: ‘With the heavy discus still in his left hand, he is preparing for his venture, taking stand carefully on the right foot. Eye and mind concentre, loyally, entirely, upon the business in hand. The very finger is reckoning while he watches, intent upon the cast of another, as the metal glides to the goal. Take him, to lead you forth quite out of the narrow limits of the Greek world. You have pure humanity there, with a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, but without vanity; and it is pure. There is nothing certainly supersensual in that fair, round head, any more than in the long, agile limbs; but also no impediment, natural or acquired. To have achieved just that, was the Greek’s truest claim for furtherance in the main line of human development.

In an article on French literature during 1921, which was published in this review last April, emphasis was laid on what was named the ‘stationary’ character of present-day French literature. The principal cause of this, it was suggested, was to be found in the abnormal loss of her young writers and intellectuals which France suffered in the war. In the course of the past year a change seems to have come about. Without giving any comprehensive account of French literature for the last twelve months it would be impossible to state all the reasons for this impression, but close students of France’s literary production would probably agree that, although it would be idle to generalise too confidently, more idle still to talk with any definiteness of new ‘tendencies,’ yet there has been a greater spontaneity, a greater virility, less aimlessness or wanton experiment in the past year than during any year since the Armistice.

In our previous article we discussed the ninth chapter of Fr. Joyce’s book. Another chapter, which in our opinion spoils an otherwise most excellent work, is chapter xvi on ‘Conservation and Concurrence.’ In this chapter Fr. Joyce again abandons the teaching of the Angelic Doctor for a modern theory which is wholly inconsistent with the teaching of Augustine and Thomas and indeed of the Holy Scripture. The problem here concerned has to do with the Divine Causality and the freewill. If God is the cause of all being and all modes of being, how comes it that the will is free in its choices? St. Thomas has a very definite doctrine on this point: God premoves the will to its choice, yet so supereminent and so transcendent is the Divine motion that the will is not necessitated in its act, for the Divine motion, so efficacious, premoves the will to determine itself (by deliberation) to this rather than to that. Hence the determination of the will comes not only from God but also from the will.

Both Molina and Suarez refuse to subscribe to this doctrine : for them predetermination is wholly destructive of freewill. Briefly, their doctrine comes to this : ‘The Divine motion is not prior to the action of the freewill; the motion therefore is not received into the will; on the contrary it is received into the will’s effect or action in order to effect what is proper to God alone, namely the being of the action; hence, it is said, God simultaneously concurs with the will as a partial cause to produce the will’s action: this partial causality is to be understood on the part of the cause (ex farte causæ) and not on the part of the effect (ex parte effectus), because the effect is wholly produced by God as the First Cause and wholly by the will as secondary cause.

There has been a resurgence of interest in a particular kind of contemporary music in recent years. This has been a surprise to many, especially the composers involved, because we live at the end of a century that has seen a retreat by the composing community from the larger music loving public. If one looks back to the early days of the century we see figures like Schonberg, establishing private societies for the performance of Contemporary music. A perception is beginning to emerge within the composing community that the priorities of composeIs have in some way separated from the priorities of the larger music-loving public. At the very time when a museum culture was beginning to be the main priority of classical music listeners, composers were going into a very exploratory mode. In the century of the holocaust and the loss of meaning generally, composers have gone into a kind of laboratory phase when the very nature of music was the stuff of their investigations. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and the young Turks of the post-war generation took music into a very abstract phase indeed by making explorations into the purely abstract nature of music but with an ideological and idealistic desire to turn their backs on the past. They wanted to start afresh from year zero, as it were, to write a music that was untainted by tradition, a music that would not have any resonance of a failed bourgeois culture.

It is a quarter of a century, this year, since the death of Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian who has been called ‘perhaps the principal moulder of modern Christian thought’. To mark this we are publishing here a transcript of the dialogue between him and Carl Rogers, the pioneer of person-centred psychotherapy, which took place at San Diego State College, California, on 7 March 1965 and was his last public appearance. The transcript, which was circulated (in a somewhat edited form) as a pamphlet by the College in 1966, is appearing in Carl Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson and published by Constable of London, price £12.95 hardback, £7.95 paper.

Carl Rogers: The importance of self-affirmation: I think that would be one area where we agree. Then I have been much impressed with your thinking about the courage to be, because I see that in psychotherapy; the courage of being something, the risk that is involved in knowing. ... I’ve also liked your phrase about the antimoral act being one that contradicts the self-realisation of the individual, and it seems to me both of us are trying to push beyond some of the trends that are very prominent in the modern world; the logical positivistic, the ultrascientific approach, the stress of the mechanistic and highly deterministic point of view which, as I see it, makes man just an object trying to find some alternative stance in relation to life. I wonder if you feel that we’re in some agreement on issues of that sort?

The purpose of this work is to explicate Thomas Aquinas' teaching regarding the nature of satisfaction, punishment, and the relation between the two in the Passion of Christ. This task is undertaken as a response to recent treatments of Aquinas' soteriology that misinterpret his understanding of the penal nature of Christ's work of satisfaction. I argue that Aquinas' explication of Christ's ‘satisfactory punishment’ on the cross does not reduce the salvific significance of the Passion to the mere endurance of a penalty in order to fulfill an arbitrary legal requirement, nor does it reflect a notion of God as wrathful and delighting in human suffering. Rather, the punishment that constitutes the Passion is a complex reality that is willed by God and chosen by Christ as a fitting means of attaining the end of his saving mission, namely, the healing and elevation of sinners.