According to classical Christian doctrine, the human body is not a container for the soul but its “form”. In defending a form of this view, I suggest that the resurrected body of Christ represents the truth of human flesh. In the light of the resurrected and glorified body of Christ, who still bears his wounds, death can be understood as the loss of something irreplaceable and therefore mourned as a horrific deprivation of life; that is, because eternal life consists in the vision of God by our whole selves, and not just a separated soul, a proper Christian anthropology that began in some sense with the glorified body of Christ as the “truth of the physical” might suggest a very different biomedical practice than that with which we are familiar, which often proceeds from a methodological materialism underwritten by a dualistic metaphysics.

Several times since I left the Communist Party nearly four years ago to become a Catholic, young priests have told me that they proposed engaging in argument or debate with members of the Communist Party. In every case they have been convinced that they had not only been given all the answers to the Marxists when they were in the seminary but, in addition, that those arguments were so devastating, so unanswerable, that any audience, any Communist even (if he were honest), would at once be obliged to accept them and to admit the intellectual defeat of Marxism. But it is not as easy as that, as a brief discussion of the lines they proposed to follow and an indication on my part of the answers which the Communists were likely to produce has usually soon demonstrated.

It is absolutely right that the young priest should be sent out with a knowledge of Marxism—for it is now, apart from anything else, the basis of all education from the elementary school to the university in nearly a quarter of the world today—and it is obviously necessary that he should be given entirely convincing answers at the time, or the consequence might well be that our seminaries would begin to produce members of the Communist Party instead of Catholic priests. But, when visiting seminaries, or talking to their younger products, I have sometimes felt that this outlining of the Marxist case followed by instruction in the pat answers to it is all a little too easy. First you put up a simplified, truncated version of Marxism and then provide the unanswerable answer. The result is a foregone conclusion. It is rather in the same category as those very popular but, I always feel, rather phoney ‘two pulpit’ performances where one priest puts up Marxism as an Aunt Sally and the other proceeds to knock it down.

As bishops of some of the peoples who are striving to develop, we endorse the anxious appeal of Pope Paul VI in his letter ‘Populorum progressio’, so as to define their duties for our priests and faithful, and to send words of encouragement to all our brothers in the Third World.

As they are in this Third World, our Churches are caught up in a confrontation no longer simply of East and West, but of three great groups: the western powers which grew rich in the last century, the two Communist countries that have also become great powers, and finally the Third World, still seeking an escape from the domination of the great powers, and the freedom to develop in their own way. Within even the developed countries there are still classes, races and peoples that have not yet received their rights to a full human life. An irresistible urge is working these poorer elements towards their betterment by liberating them from all oppressive forces. Although most countries may have gained their political freedom, economic freedom is still a rarity. Few also are countries where social equality prevails, an essential condition of true brotherhood, for peace cannot exist without justice. The peoples of the Third World are the proletariat of existing humanity, exploited by the great, their very survival threatened by ones who, because they are stronger, arrogate to themselves the sole right to judge and police peoples less rich in material terms. In fact our peoples are no less wise or just than the great powers.

What the late Stephen J Gould baptized ultra-Darwinism is anti-evolutionary. In so being, it leads to the undermining of science, rationality, and, lastly, to ethical nihilism, wherein any notion of humanism is impossible, and this for one simple reason – there is now no such thing as a human. In addition, we argue that ultra-Darwinism is a progeny of crass philosophical dualism, and this leads it to despise matter and the material world, even though, paradoxically, it espouses materialism. We conclude that the theory of evolution invalidates ultra-Darwinism.

Newman was formed in the Church of England and all his major theological concerns were developed in an Anglican context. The rebuttal of utilitarian scepticism in the University Sermons; the ecclesial context of Christian faith and life in The Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church; the strong sense of mystery in Newman's epistemology and apologetic; the sacramental character of Christian truth are all significantly part of the Anglican inheritance that he took to the Roman Catholic Church. Furthermore Newman's early formation was ‘pre-Victorian’– he was engaged when writing his Essay on Scriptural Miracles with earlier debates with the Deists, as well as sharing in the rediscovery of the imagination that characterised Coleridge and the Romantic Movement. This paper explores these and other issues to show an important part of Newman's enduring Anglican inheritance.

Can God change his mind? If not, what is the sense in praying to him? If he is really immutable, does that not imply that he is inexorable, ruthless and uncaring like a blind cosmic force? And in that case, can we plausibly be expected to love him or to believe in his love for us? This is a perennial problem, expressed for instance in Morris West’s impressive novel, The Clowns of God, by the abdicated pope Gregory XVII: ‘Our Jesus who was of the seed of Abraham said that whatever we ask will be given us. We should knock at the door and clamour to be heard. But there’s no point in that if there’s no one inside—or if the one inside is a mad spirit whirling heedless with the galaxies!’

Here, on the face of it, there is a stark and hopeless conflict between devotional expectations and the postulates of classical theology. How can the eager Christian heart, yearning for a personal friendship with God, inspired by the biblical imagery of God’s love-affair with his people, cope with a God who is changeless, unresponsive, atemporal, impassible?

Problems like this can be felt very deeply, and indeed it seems that this particular problem has been so deeply and generally felt that it is now widely assumed that it is religiously impossible to believe in the kind of God proposed to us by classical theology. It may therefore seem rather indelicate and perhaps impertinent to suggest that, after all, it is a false problem.

In the false Spring of our times, everything is painted green: it is the appointed liturgical colour for our post-historical sabbath. It’s to everyone’s taste, the guarantee of minimum respectability. There’s a Green party, but that doesn’t get very far, because it appears to appropriate for a particular cause the symbol that belongs to all. The colour has a utopian hint, or rather that of a puritan arcadia, but at the same time it soothes the passages of capitalist economic exchange. More than that: the guarantee of a ‘good’, ‘healthy’ relation to nature, as to one’s own body, increases surplus value. Capitalism has already incorporated, in the interests of profit, the new religiosity of our times, which takes the form of transcending one’s humanity in order to celebrate nature or animality as the ‘other’ with which one nonetheless seeks to become united.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. The planetary structures which support life have been dangerously interfered with; much natural beauty, along with the delicate and long-developed harmonies of people’s everyday environments has been ruined or destroyed. Technology is employed indiscriminately and for the mere sake of size and complexity. However, ‘Green consciousness’ is not the complete answer to all this: in too many ways it may collude with precisely what it purports to oppose.

This paper begins by exploring how Joseph Ratzinger's post-doctoral work on the Theology of History in St Bonaventure is shaped by his interest in how theology can be grounded in salvation history. Through this lens, he examines Bonaventure's multi-form theories of scripture and the place of St Francis in salvation history to show how prophetic interpretations of scripture are consistent with Christ as the apex of history. The paper goes on to demonstrate that these insights also influence Ratzinger's later work, particularly his reading of Dei Verbum, his recognition of the Mariological dimensions of hermeneutics, as well as his consideration of various prophetical manifestations of the life of the Church such as the monastic movement and the new ecclesial movements.

It is not my intention to attempt a systematic examination of what Catholic historians have had to say about the Reformation in England. Such an examination, beginning, perhaps, with the work of Dr Nicholas Sander and Fr Edward Rishton in the sixteenth century - De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani - and working through to Fr Philip Hughes’ three volumes on The Reformation in England would indeed bring the enquirer into contact with a large number of fascinating personalities and would incidentally, provide him with a number of examples of prejudice and propaganda, as well as with models of painstaking and disinterested scholarship. Nor am I concerned only, or even mainly, with Catholics who have written historical works, but with all Catholics who have in one way or another to deal with history and with historical problems, particularly with historical problems which still arouse religious prejudices and which may be the occasion of religious propaganda.

Whether they like it or not, Catholics have to concern themselves with history. They belong to a church which claims to have been founded by an historical person at a particular point of time in history. They claim that there is continuity between the Church founded by Christ and the Church today. They claim that the line of supreme pontiffs is not eventually lost in the twilight of fable but can be traced back to St Peter. The Catholic explaining or defending the claims of his Church must continually have recourse to history, not only because his Church makes particular historical claims but because in a great many of the attacks made on that church, the arguments employed are arguments from history.

Thomas Aquinas is celebrated for many things in the history of Christian theology, but one is the revolutionary place he gives to the thesis that Christ acquired knowledge by way of empirical experience. That his claim should be so revolutionary strikes us today as odd. Any reflection on Christ's knowledge ordinarily begins today by stressing how the Word of God assumed our ordinary human limited ways of knowing. In medieval times, however, theologians found it extremely difficult to accept that Christ acquired knowledge by the normal empirical, experiential route. A crucial role in Aquinas's theological advance beyond this position was played by his philosophical commitments, within the wider context of the soteriological character of his Christology. However, there are problems involved in Aquinas's particular theological position on Christ's acquired knowledge and his wider picture of Christ's knowledge. The same philosophical means that enabled Aquinas to recognise the reality of Christ's acquiring knowledge also led him into an overall picture of the perfection of Christ's knowledge that was not so satisfactory. Part of the solution to the difficulties into which Aquinas gets himself can be found in a philosophical position already employed by him in his mature account of Christ's knowledge.