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.

In one region of our lives, we have no problem in understanding how a thing can change its substance while apparently remaining itself. The process is known as metaphor. ‘Fire’ can mean anger or amorousness rather than literal flame, but the word ‘fire’ remains unaltered in this exchange, rather as the bread and wine of the eucharist still look and behave like bread and wine. Since the meaning of a word is its being, we can say that the being or ‘substance’ of the word has changed with this metaphorical transaction. Flame has transubstantiated into fury.

Moreover, ‘fire’ can act as a metaphor of passion only because there are real resemblances between the two. The relation between the two signs is not iconic (they don’t look much like each other), but it is not arbitrary either. Maybe Seamus Heaney could get ‘carburetter’ to mean erotic passion, but for most of us ‘fire’ is a less laborious way of doing it. In a similar way, the bread and wine of the eucharist, as signs of our human solidarity which need to be destroyed (consumed) if they are to yield life, have natural affinities with the body of Christ. As Herbert McCabe once remarked, you couldn’t consecrate Coke and burgers because they aren’t food and drink.

The notion of metaphor will only get us so far in understanding the eucharist, since a change of being which leaves a thing apparently intact is more mysterious than a change of meaning which does so. But a semiotics of the eucharist can be pressed further.

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.

Gareth Moore arrived at Corpus to read P. P. E. about two years after I did. We soon became friends, not least because we were always the last two people at the college philosophy society, finishing off the wine. Gareth (who was then known as ‘Gary’ — a fact he later denied) claimed that in his Finals, he — G. E. Moore — was the only candidate for the new optional paper ‘Russell and Wittgenstein’. In 1969, his first year as a graduate student, he moved into 50 Abingdon Road, where I also lived. The landlady was the widow of a man who was said to have taught Edward Heath the organ. Gareth had just returned to the Church. Although we knew that he liked going on retreats to monasteries, he had not, to that point, had any religious belief.

By the time Gareth came to Blackfriars, I had left Oxford to teach in Liverpool. But I kept an Oxford base for the vacations and we met regularly until the mid nineties. We were not in much contact when he was in Belgium and had just resumed normal dining and drinking engagements when he fell ill. We kept in telephone connection until his death.

During our long friendship, we discussed many things, most commonly connected with religion. (My views are those of a rather conservative ‘anglo-catholic’.) But we did not often discuss philosophy. There was one reason for this. Wittgenstein is a philosopher who divides people, and Gareth was a root and branch Wittgensteinian, whereas Wittgenstein has always struck me, from first reading, as being more or less a fraud.

The end of the war left the whole educational system in Germany in chaos and its rebuilding has had to start from scratch. This is obvious as far as external conditions were concerned; buildings were ruined, teaching material destroyed, teachers dispersed and in part forbidden to follow their profession. The children themselves were involved in the maelstrom of evacuation and in the disorderly flight from the bombed west to the east, and from the Eussian invader in the east the return again to the west. All this is clearly appreciated by now. Equally one understands the loss of a sane religious background that followed the breakdown of Germany’s former educational system and the scepticism shown by both teachers and pupils against any alternative system (and even against the re-introduction of pre-war arrangements), whether it was inspired by German teachers themselves, by the Church, the German authorities or the inter-allied military government. These problems are appreciated, in paid at least, everywhere. Their solution is seen to lie only in a very gradual and by no means as yet wholly satisfactory rehabilitation. This is the natural result of the various factors involved in the present situation in Germany, but more recently two new and somewhat unexpected elements have emerged to influence post-war development in a disturbing manner.

The division of Germany into four zones has had an immense bearing on the political and social life of the country, but no less has it had its repercussions in the educational field. This is most marked of course in the division between east and west; but it is true also of the division of government within the west itself.

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:

Yves M.-J. Congar (1904-1995) was the foremost French theologian of the twentieth century. The severe trials to which he was subjected by Roman Catholic Church authorities, notwithstanding, Congar loved the Church. As he explained to Jean Puyo in 1975: I am of the Church. I love the Church.’ This love is based on a simple yet profound truth that he recognised the Church as the Mother, the hearth and the homeland of his spiritual being. Congar’s love for the Church, motivated by his love for Christ, is situated in the wider setting of his love for humankind. It is difficult to avoid an admiration for his shrewd insistence on the need to locate the maternal and fraternal dimensions of the Church’s nature, seen as perfectly compatible, in a communion ecclesiology. A communitarian, ecclesial milieu is correctly identified as essential for the formation of Christians:

The Catholic Church's efforts at evangelization must include even its own members in an age of growing secularization wherein religious impulses can be subordinated to culture even unconsciously. Bernard Lonergan observed that religious values should transcend cultural and personal values. But prominent advertising confirms that in contemporary Western societies religious values are subsumed under others, even where spirituality may be held important. The goal before the Church, then, is a transposition of values possible in focus upon a common perception of theology and the culture reflected in advertising—the felt transcendence of the human person. The Second Vatican Council called for the Church to engage with the world; if the message served by the Church is to be heard above the din of the larger culture, it must be delivered in manners persuasive upon the sensibilities of contemporary people. The powerful cultural transmitter that is advertising may assist in this task, for study of the anthropologies of advertising and theology reveals certain surprising commonalities suggesting that methods, if not media, could be equally effective in both realms. Advertising's use of ethnography and narrative, in particular, may provide lessons for the Church in defining audiences and targeting the message to them.

‘Synod’ and ‘synodality’ have become synonymous with Pope Francis. Since Pope Paul VI instituted the Synod of Bishops as a permanent office in 1965, there hasn't been any pontificate that has given these matters as much profile and attention as his has. Why is this the case, and what is Pope Francis’ vision for a synodal Church? More fundamentally, what is synodality, according to tradition of the Church, and Pope Francis? Several years into both local and global synodal-type processes and formation gatherings, it seems many people, even prominent Church leaders, readily admit that they still do not fully understand it. For this reason, this article sets out to provide a general overview and introduction.

This essay purports to discuss some of Pope Francis's ambiguities. It is divided into seven sections. I present his background. I acknowledge the significance of his message of mercy and, based on Bernard Lonergan and Ladislas Örsy, I show how mercy ought to be wisely practised. I discuss Francis's Bergsonian epistemology, which I deem inadequate. I deplore his ambiguities about uncertainty. I then proceed to detail two impasses, which he has not overcome, at least until now: the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood and the possibility of admitting Gays and Lesbians to eucharistic communion. I finally conclude with an appeal to a constructive and critical dialogue.

Even as organized religion becomes less fashionable in many corners, and perhaps especially in the university, a centuries-old scholastic debate about the existence of God has been resurrected to be pursued by the Academy with a new vigour. The so-called Ontological Argument, which St Thomas and Kant each in his turn demolished, is alive and well and alleged to have been more energetically debated in the last decade than ever before in its history, That this phoenix has risen from its ashes is not necessarily best accounted for by seeing it as an event in the war between belief and unbelief. For in large measure, today’s philosophers have occupied themselves with the new modal arguments of men like Malcolm and Hartshorne because of the fascinating logical problems which they entail. Moreover, in the course of the history of the argument, the sides have not been chosen by a strict division between those of the faith and those outside. St Anselm thought he had come upon a worthy insight when he first proposed the argument. But just as surely St Thomas thought the argument inadmissible—without by any means intending to deny God’s existence. There is a lesson here, albeit an embryonic one, for those who are carrying on another current debate—the one about whether theology can or should be done with detachment or commitments

To be academically respectable, some would say, theology must be pursued with scholarly objectivity and freedom from ecclesiastical constraints. Its integrity as a discipline hinges on dispassionate examination of the data and the freedom to draw conclusions wholly in accord with the evidence. One’s faith-commitment as such should not influence his theology.

It was in 1973, in his book God and the Universe of Faiths, that Professor John Hick argued for a Copernican revolution in the Christian theology of religions. His argument met quite a lot of criticism, and it is fairly widely thought that the debate is today a dead one. How true is this?

In his book he characterised as “Ptolemaic” the view which has been allegedly held for at least the last “fifteen centuries” which proclaims that “all men, of whatever race or culture, must become Christians if they are to be saved”. He cites the Decree of the Council of Florence (1438—1445) which upheld the traditional Catholic position, summed up in the axiom, extra eeclesiam nulla salus—there is no salvation outside the Church. He maintains that Vatican II and modem theologians such as Karl Rahner propound further epicycles of the same Ptolemaic view, as they still assume “without question that salvation is only in Christ and through incorporation into his mystical body, the Church”. He feels that there is little difference between Roman Catholics and Protestant positions on this issue.

The Ptolemaic system held that the earth was at the centre of the universe and explained the movement of the planets (which did not conform to the theory) through “epicycles”. The increasing number of epicycles rendered the Ptolemaic view less and less plausible until finally the Copernican view, in its simple explanation of the facts by the theory that the sun rather than the earth was the centre of the universe, replaced it.

Taking part in secular discussion is difficult for a Christian philosopher. An approach that has often been favoured by Catholic philosophers is to attempt to engage at a level of pure reason using natural law concepts. This paper argues that such an approach sells us short and represents a failure to engage in secular discussion on equal terms and a failure to give adequate witness to the teachings of Christ. The paper seeks to argue that while it is not true that reason has a wax nose, as former Cardial Ratzinger argued, there is a role for faith-derived concepts in secular discussion and for encouraging others to share their view whether faith based or not, and for subjecting those concepts to the scrutiny afforded by rational analysis in an effort to achieve an identified common ground of human goodness that both transcends individual culture and belief but has its individual origins within the disparate cultures and traditions.

Robert Keable’s death requires a remembrance in Blackfriars, where almost first of anywhere, the writings of the new Keable found place. It was at the time of the founding of Blackfriars that he came in contact with those who were busy with its beginnings. He welcomed it, and was always its friend.

The friendship began in this way. His book, Standing-by, had been given me, and had captivated me, being, so I thought at the time, so I still think, the most admirable study of the War from the standpoint of religion, with its insistence on the two types of Christianity, Catholic and the Y.M.C.A., that is, the priestly religion, authoritative and sacramental, and the religion of clubs, libraries, gramophones, and cups of tea. Under the spell of the book, I wrote to thank the author in a letter of gratitude, addressed to him care of his publishers. For a couple of months I heard nothing. When I had forgotten all about my letter, written, it must be confessed, under the first emotion of the book’s beautiful style and exquisite language and delicate austerity of idea, I was pleasantly reminded of it by a very long answer, full of personal explanation and dated from Basutoland, whither Robert Keable had returned with his labour battalion when the War was done. In that letter one phrase of it may bear quotation: ‘Please pray, that I who have had the light to see the Vision may have the courage to follow it.’

Hans Urs von Balthasar was very clear that he owed his most distinctive theological insights to Adrienne von Speyr. ‘On the whole I received far more from her, theologically, than she from me, though, of course, the exact proportion can never be calculated’; she often gave him suggestions for sermons ‘but only rarely ... did she read my books’; ‘following her advice’ he took the extremely painful decision to leave the Society of Jesus; he ‘strove to bring [his] way of looking at Christian revelation into conformity with hers’; and although she has no part in the writing, without her ‘the basic perspective of Herrlichkeit would never have existed’ (First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, 1981, page 13). ‘Today, after her death, her work appears far more important to me than mine, and the publication of her still-unpublished writings takes precedence over all personal work of my own’. He predicted, scornfully, that theologians would try to disentangle his insights from hers. Those who read the volumes of Herrlichkeit as they came out in 1961-67 (I was impelled towards them by the enthusiasm of Cornelius Ernst and Donald MacKinnon), of course, knew little or nothing about his indebtedness to von Speyr. Indisputably, some of his most characteristic themes draw heavily on her mystical experiences; other motifs, however, that are central and of great interest, seem independent of his meeting her.

There is as yet no proper biography. Born in 1902, in the Swiss Jura, in a comfortably-off family of doctors, clergymen and merchants, settled in Basel for centuries, Adrienne von Speyr was brought up as a Protestant.