To echo Denys Turner, the debate in New Blackfriars has by now ranged over so many different issues and mobilised so many separate arguments that it is impossible to answer every objection that has been raised against my position, nor shall I be able to take all the incidental points not raised directly in relation to my own views but which nonetheless warrant answers from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint. Equally it would be tedious (for anyone can read the debate for themselves) if I were to spend much time simply restating my earlier remarks and taking issue with every instance of their misinterpretation by my opponents.

Therefore, I shall rehearse my argument only in very general form, and then attend to the issue which is central to the debate— the differential characteristics of science and ideology.

My initial strategy was not to offer a substantive contribution to this debate but to carry out a reading of it, as it exists in certain texts, in order to expose the silences, incoherences and contradictions enforced on a writing that engages in what is, for the whole thrust of my argument, a project which has already failed even before its inception. Because, as I contend, Christianity is an ideology (as well, of course, as an ensemble of rituals, practices and institutions) and Marxism a science, and because they suffer a high level of mutual unintelligibility deriving from their very different epistemological statuses (the one, potentially at least, an object of the other), Marxism has no ‘contribution’ to make to this ‘debate’ except to define its character as an irresolvable ideological encounter.

According to the Hebrew cosmology the earth was flat and the sky was like an upturned bowl studded with stars. The earth, and the creatures of the earth, were made to serve man and are under his domination. This view sufficed for many millennia. Careful studies of the regular motions of the stars and the irregular motions of the planets were made by the Babylonians and the Greeks, and Ptolemy devised a complicated system of cycles and epicycles to describe these motions with some accuracy. It was a cosy, man-centred world.

The development of modem science destroyed this picture with a series of shattering blows. Firstly Copernicus showed that it was much simpler to suppose that the sun, and not the earth, is the centre of the world. No longer do we think of the sun serving our needs by circling the earth, night and day. It is we who are ruled by the sun. This view of the sun and the planets was firmly established by the dynamics of Newton, which enabled the orbits of the planets to be calculated from his laws of motion, together with his theory of universal gravitation.

In the following centuries telescopes of increasing power probed further into space, and it became apparent that our resplendent sun is but a rather ordinary star situated in one of the spiral arms of a vast galaxy of some two hundred thousand million stars that we see on clear nights as the Milky Way.

Poverty is not the real problem of the modern world. For we have the knowledge and resources which could enable us to overcome poverty. The real problem—the thing which creates misery, wars and hatred among men—is the division of mankind into rich and poor.

We can see this division at two levels. Within nation states there are a few individuals who have great wealth and whose wealth gives them great power; but the vast majority of people suffer from varying degrees of poverty and deprivation. Even in a country like the United States, this division can be seen. In countries like India, Portugal or Brazil, the contrast between the wealth of a few privileged individuals and the dire poverty of the masses is a crying scandal.

And looking at the world as a collection of nation states, we see the same pattern repeated. There are a few wealthy nations which dominate the whole world economically, and therefore politically; and a mass of smaller and poor nations whose destiny, it appears, is to be dominated.

The significance of this division between the rich and the poor is not simply that one man has more food than he can eat, more clothes than he can wear and more houses than he can live in, while others are hungry, unclad and homeless. The significant thing about the division between rich and poor nations is not simply that one has the resources to provide comfort for all its citizens, and the other cannot provide basic services. The reality and depth of the problem arises because the man who is rich has power over the lives of those who are poor, and the rich nation has power over the policies of those which are not rich. And even more important is that our social and economic system, nationally and internationally, supports these divisions and constantly increases them, so that the rich get ever richer and more powerful, while the poor get relatively poorer and less able to control their own future.

Nothing is more important than that Catholics should continually ask themselves: how bad a state is the Church in? We are all aware of the possibility that the Church may appear to be corrupt, and of the actualization of this possibility at various times in the past. But we tend, I think, to assume that such corruption will always be glaringly obvious, a matter of simony at the papal court, or pluralist bishops, or priests with concubines and children : we therefore conclude that, to the extent that things seem all right, so they must be all right. Whereas in fact, I suspect, corruption is seldom easily recognized at the time. Perhaps even the examples I have just mentioned, which seem to us so scandalous, were not felt at the time as symptoms of deep-seated disease: after all, we know that the Church is composed, not of angels, but of men, and that we have no right to expect perfection from Christians, bishops included; so probably these things were usually put down as instances of the kind of human weakness that we know that we have to reckon with. Thus we must be prepared, at any time, to find that the Church can be deeply corrupted, a corruption for which we shall be sternly judged but to which we have long been blind.

When we have recognized that the Church can be corrupt, we have to enquire what could make it possible for this corruption to take place: and this is the most serious theological enquiry that can be made, for it concerns our understanding of the nature of the Church.

Early in December 1986, I was siting in Charlottesville, Virginia, minding my own business (which is to say that I was on sabbatical leave) when a letter arrived from John Coventry, asking me to address this year’s conference of the Association on the topic of ‘ministry of the word’.

I agreed, and almost at once began to regret having done so. The topic seemed so vast, so comprehensive, so obviously central to every aspect of Christian speech and action, that I did not know where to begin. So I turned to the dictionaries, and got a bit of a shock. The Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique has only one entry under ‘ministry’, and that is ‘ministre des sacrements’. Ah well, that was back in 1929, in the dark ages before Vatican II. Things would be better in the bright new postconciliar world, a world which had witnessed the proclamation of a dogmatic constitution entitled ‘Dei Verbum’. Well, perhaps, but not much better. Sacramentum Mundi (1969) has no entries under ‘ministry’, and the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, published in 1967, has one, which reads ‘ministry, Protestant’.

Perhaps we should not make too much of this. It is, after all, perfectly possible that, gathered under other heads and quite compatible descriptions, our Catholic self-understanding has still been permeated by a sense of all our discipleship, all our prayer and compassion, all our disciplined distinctiveness, being set at the service of the word, the diaconia tou logou. Possible, but I somehow doubt it, because it was not simply the ministry of the word which had largely ceased to figure in our Catholic vocabulary.

Whatever he did was quickly done, but neither hastily nor in a hurry. This is particularly true of his reading and writing, both of which in sum mounted up imperceptibly to a great deal. His published books and pamphlets, of which even his most intimate companions rarely knew anything until they suddenly appeared ready for printing, are but a small part of the writing he left behind him. This consists of official documents, letters and postcards, plans of sermons and lectures, quotations from books read, and the student’s notes to which he was forever adding something. Considering the busy life he led and the little leisure he was allowed, the extent of his reading and his accurate memory of what he read are very remarkable. Much of it was done in trains and on long voyages. At one time he devoted the time spent in the noisy Underground trains in London to the study of Russian, and made some progress with it. He read history seriously all through life. He returned constantly to his early theological and ecclesiastical studies, refreshing them and keeping them up to date by reading new work as it appeared, preferably such as had a practical bearing on his own special duties. For the nourishment of his own soul and those others whom he had helped in their spiritual life he persevered with his study of the mystics.

Apart from a certain number of discreet and limited meetings between Christians and Marxists, it was not until comparatively recently that these discussions came to the public notice. There was a Catholic participation at the Semaines de la Pensee Marxiste in early 1964 and then a reciprocal Marxist presence at the Semaines des Intellectuels Calholiques at the beginning of the following year. From France, the lead in this field has now passed to Germany, and more precisely to Austria, where in the spring of 1965, the Paulusgesellschaft, an association of German-speaking Catholic university teachers, organized a meeting specifically devoted to a dialogue between Christians and Marxists from both West and East Europe. There have since been two more meetings of this nature; the most recent, in 1967, was held at Marienbad in Czechoslovakia.

Of course, the idea of a meeting between Catholics and atheist movements (of which Marxism is presently the most important) was mentioned quite clearly in 1963 by Pope John XXIII in his encyclical Pacem in Terris. He there made a distinction, since become familiar, between static theories condemned by the Church and the movements inspired by these theories, but which evolve in time. He said: ‘In as far as these movements are in accord with sound principles of reason and are a response to the just aspirations of the human person, who would refuse to recognize in them elements that are positive and merit our approval? It could happen that certain meetings with a view to practical co-operation that had up till now appeared inopportune or sterile, could now produce real advantages or at least contain the promise of such for the future.’

An article under this heading, as part of a series on how God speaks to us, is presumably meant to presuppose that revelation and contemplation are two ways or contexts in which God does so. I want to suggest that the two are inseparable, and that they have much more to do with mundane realities than is commonly thought. To illustrate both points here is an extract from John M. Hull’s account of what it is like to be blind:

This seems to me to be at once a revelatory and a contemplative experience. It is also about something so ordinary that sighted people take it for granted, namely rain. Hull’s account of this moment provides an extraordinarily vivid example of de Caussade’s doctrine of the sacrament of the present moment:

As the book of Exodus tells it, when the People of God was formed out of liberated slaves from Egypt (a kind of early Liberia), Aaron and his sons were made the first priests of the new community. Like all the peoples around them the Hebrews took it for granted that a real established society needed a priesthood, just as we take it for granted that a society needs some kind of civil service or some kind of school system. Aaron was the first high priest of the children of Israel, he had a job, an important job, within that community. The priest’s job was to arrange the transactions with the gods of the community, to ensure that the gods did not become hostile, for this could be disastrous for the people. The priest had to find out what the gods wanted and arrange for the people to give it to them. So he stood as mediator, on the frontier, looking both ways, to the gods and to the people; communicating to the people the messages of the gods, communicating to the gods the offerings of the people.

But, of course, the Children of Israel were no ordinary society, they were something unique in human history; they made a gradual but huge revolution from which all subsequent humankind has benefited and (as with all revolutions) suffered too. For by the time the Book of Exodus was put together it was becoming clear that their God was not one (or more) of the gods, and this was going to make a difference to what such things as priesthood meant.

The four Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus might be compared to four portraits of him. Rembrandt or Velazquez would present a rather traditional and historical likeness. El Greco presents almost translucent features and elongated limbs, a more mystical likeness. Roualt, who gives perhaps no more than a torso in bold striking colors, brings out the human suffering. Dali presents a cosmic view, the cross hovering over the world. Each presents the same story but with differing emphases; the crucifixion is, at the same time, historical, traditional, mystical, full of human suffering and cosmic.

Similarly, each Evangelist has created a portrait of the death of Jesus. We must ask why. The Evangelists were not just writing biography, nor were they concerned with the purely historical. They were writing from the resurrection faith, from which stems all the theology of the New Testament. They narrate the death of Jesus from this perspective; consequently, the meaning of his death, rather than physical detail, is their central concern.

When I set out to prepare this paper I was mildly disconcerted to discover that what I had in mind had already been done, and done brilliantly, by an American nun, Sister Kathleen Hughes R.S.C.J. You will find it in Reconciliation, a collection of lectures given by American theologians at Notre Dame in 1986, and I must express my warm appreciation of its excellence and my debt to its contents for stimulating much that I now wish to say.

Sister Hughes’s argument was that any theological discussion of reconciliation should start from human experience, which she illustrates very broadly from both fiction and real life. It may be worth adding that the point applies not just to this one sacrament but to all. Every sacrament meets something lodged deeply in human instincts and widely expressed in human behaviour. It was not the sacrament that invented marriage. It was not the Eucharist that invented ritual meals celebrating the intimate bond between creator and creature, the gifts of creation, and human ties of affection. And so with the other key human experiences—entrance into life, entrance into adulthood, serious illness and death. The sacraments are not stuck into ordinary life like candles on a cake. They are the God-given, church-moulded, Christian ways of speaking to deep-seated human needs and instincts as familiar as the lines on our hand.

What must I believe to be a Catholic? Catholicism is a highly variegated phenomenon, with an extraordinary diversity of beliefs, practices and traditions. Is this Tradition an inheritance to be cherished, or a stifling burden?

This question becomes especially acute when the Church tries to discover its identity in a new culture or society, as when Paul brought Christianity to the world of the Greek city, or, in our own day, when we ask what it might mean to be a Catholic in monetarist Britain. One way to answer this question would be to scrutinise the Tradition, to see if one can discern an essence that must be preserved, while leaving one some freedom to be creative. Clifford Longley recently described a liberal conservative theologian, such as Karl Rahner, as one who ‘sits under obedience to Tradition, and applies his intellectual ingenuity to the negotiation of as much freedom as can be justified within those limits.’ Many Catholics can identify with that picture. But I would suggest that if one looks at the genesis of the New Testament one can discover a different paradigm of the relationship between tradition and creativity, fidelity and freedom.

There were several moments between the time of Jesus and the canonisation of the New Testament when the Church was faced sharply with the question: What must we believe? What in the inherited tradition must be preserved? This was so with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles, with the gradual separation of Christianity and Judaism towards the end of the first century, and with the emergence of the Great Church in the second to fourth centuries.

Christian unity is the concern of all these three books, and they are all of some importance; the first two for an understanding of the place of the Catholic Church in the ecumenical scene, and the third for the explanatory light it throws, from the Anglican side, upon the complex and debatable question of the Church of South India.

Mr J. M. Todd sets out to explain the relationship of Catholicism to the Ecumenical Movement. His book, the first of its kind in English and one which supplies a great need, includes a synopsis of the history and scope of this almost universal emergence, in the non-Catholic world during the past fifty years, of thought and action for Christian unity. It is written with a wide knowledge of the whole subject and with a deep conviction of the urgent importance of the ecumenical spirit as an essential element in the apostolate of the Catholic Church in the modern world. The essence of ecumenism is understanding; to seek out what is true in the beliefs, practices and values of those who differ from us and to make that the starting point of work for unity. We do not attempt, nowadays at least, whatever we may have done in the past, to convert the Chinese or the Hindu without the closest and most sympathetic study of what they already believe, and of the ethics and culture from which their beliefs issue and in which they are held and practised. We proclaim the Christian gospel as the true fulfilment of the aspirations which arise from these beliefs, and we take care to present it, as far as possible, in the atmosphere, idiom of thought and the clothing characteristic of the existing culture of those to whom we preach.