Given recent receptivity to the importance of aesthetics and the role of art and the imagination, an examination of an artist who managed to arrive at creative expression not in spite of faith but because of that faith will be both useful and, one hopes, inspiring.’ Georges Bemanos was to the early part of this century what Olivier Messaien has become to the rebirth of Opera today and is the chosen subject of this study for similar reasons. Even a cursory reading of the best known novel of Bemanos, the Diary of a Country Priest, will initiate the reader who is otherwise ill-versed in the central preoccupations of French literature or unlettered in the complexities of Catholic spirituality, into an entirely different perspective on the function of the novel and the drama of human redemption. For in a world of peer-assessment, target-determination, performance-related pay, this story as others from the Bernanos collection can contribute to the unravelling of the activism and success-ethic that lies at the heart of our conception of what it means to achieve fulfilment and self-awareness. Fifty years after the death of Bemanos, it is not too late to set our sights on this most original of French authors for a repristination of the function of the novel and the way that the supernatural can make a contribution to that function. This is a poignant exercise given the complaint of one of this year’s Booker Prize judges, that much contemporary English fiction has lost its creative edge to the tired hymns of suburbia and that much North- Atlantic fiction has been slowed by the relentless march of the grey ideologies of the contemporary academy.

‘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.

The Earl of Shaftesbury and the ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850 is an interesting example of how a man of sense and humanity can be driven by prejudice into taking a posture that contradicts everything he has striven for. What he did was of less importance than why he did it, for even at the time intelligent men were aware that Shaftesbury was obsessively involved in a storm in a tea-cup.

The term ‘Papal Aggression’ indicates how Shaftesbury’s contemporaries saw the Papal Bull of 1850; this Bull abolished the administration of Roman Catholics in Great Britain by Vicars Apostolic, and appointed instead two Archbishops and twelve Bishops with territorial districts clearly marked out. Shaftesbury was in Scotland recovering from illness when he heard about this. It was, he considered, ‘an act of great annoyance and audacity’ but not contrary to law, and he was prepared to simmer awhile.

When Dr Wiseman was appointed the first Archbishop of Westminster and raised to the dignity of a Cardinal, then Shaftesbury felt that he had no other course but to act, and the publication of the pastoral ‘From out of the Flaminian Gate of Rome’ was interpreted by him as a direct threat towards the Church of England. ‘Catholic England’, wrote the Cardinal, ‘has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light had long vanished’.

Early in February, I was privileged to participate in a gathering of forty-five predominantly Catholic philosophers and theologians who met to discuss John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor. Most of the discussion at the conference focused on the second of the encyclical’s three chapters, which deals with “some trends of theological thinking and certain philosophical affirmations [that] are incompatible with revealed truth.”(§29) Conspicuously absent was any attention to either the first or especially the third chapters of the encyclical. The first chapter investigates the nature of Christian discipleship through the lens of St Matthew’s account of Jesus’ meeting with the rich young man. (Matt 19) The third chapter treats the issue of Christian martyrdom and other sources for Christian renewal. In the course of the discussion, the notion of discipleship was mentioned rarely, and the subject of martyrdom never came up. By concentrating almost exclusively on the second chapter, the conference failed to locate the encyclical’s critique of particular “trends of theological thinking and certain philosophical affirmations” within the context provided by Veritatis Splendor itself, namely that of Christian discipleship. In doing so this group mirrored much of the general response to Veritatis Splendor, which has centred almost exclusively on the second chapter. It is my goal to shift this focus, and to highlight the primacy of discipleship for a right understanding of Veritatis Splendor.

Veritatis Splendor has a message about a notion central to our lives: freedom. The Pope argues that the common conception of freedom as merely the absence of constraints is misguided. Christian freedom must be connected with the pursuit of truth.

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.

Liberation theologians, from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even from North America and Europe, are actively engaged in responding to massive human rights violations in countries where revolution has either been a success or a tragic failure. The inspiration for this commitment is the Church's ‘Option for the poor’, originating in the historic Conferences of the Latin American Bishops at Medellin and Pueblo. But twenty years on, in a changed global context, there is a need for Liberation Theology to develop more than a praxis-oriented focus: there needs to be a further development of that epistemic shift on which Liberation Theology was originally constructed, as well as a new sensitivity as to how knowledge itself is attained. This new sensibility must extend to those who have withstood and suffered the violation of human rights, and include reflection on who has the right to know, and the de-humanisation process on both individual and communal levels. I will briefly explain what I mean by this epistemic shift before exploring the whole notion of ‘dangerous memory* and its bearers.

I consider this to be a theo-political task: theology has always been concerned perhaps over possessively with the location of truth and its formulations. But since the work of Michel Foucault, philosopher and social historian, and his call for the ‘insurrection of the subjugated knowledges’, it is no longer possible to ignore the power factor in theological expressions. The call to listen to oppressed peoples as the ‘bearers of theological truth’ must be woven into the struggle against the dominant ideology.

Kenelm Foster’s new book is a collection of essays written between 1959 and 1977. With one exception, all these studies have aspects of Dante’s work as their subject. The book falls readily into three parts. Chapters 1-5 deal with general topics: “An Introduction to the Inferno”, “Courtly Love and Christianity” (the only non-Dantean topic, but, obviously, very relevant to the main subject), “Dante and Eros”, “St Thomas and Dante”, and “Dante’s Vision of God”. Chapters 6-9 are readings of various cantos of the Comedy (and one of the pleasing features of the book is the successful retention in these and other essays of the semi-informality of the lecture style): Inferno XIX, Purgatorio XVII, Paradiso X and XIX. Chapters 10-12 consist of one long essay (over a third of the work) from which the book gets its title, on the presence of morally good pagans in Limbo, and on the philosophical and theological assumptions which lie behind this unusual idea.

I cannot summarise here the main themes of this rich and varied book. But since I want to recommend it warmly to specialists and non-specialists alike, let me try to specify some features which lead me to do so. Specialists particularly will gain from Father Fsoter’s interpretation of certain passages which run counter to commonly received opinion: lucid expositions combined with detailed accounts of where and why he finds other critics’ views unsatisfactory, as for instance on Par. XIX 64-66 (“Lume non è ...” pp. 149-152). Of particular value to the non-specialist are the apparently casual but in fact careful and judicious outlines of political, literary and theological developments (e.g. pp. 34-36, 87-88, 152-54).

John Henry Newman believed that all Christian doctrines must be accessible to all Christian believers, both the intellectually sophisticated and the uneducated. This implied that the intellectually simple must be able to apprehend and assent to mysteries, such as that of the Trinity. This paper discussion what Newman understood by the idea of mystery. Mystery for Newman was primarily a hermeneutical problem. Mystery was a result of the human incapacity and inability to grasp the fullness of truth. In Newman, the hermeutical problematic is one of limitations of language thus leading to submission of intellect to a sublime truth.

Many questions have been raised concerning the logical validity of Aquinas's Fourth Way. Some commentators judge the Fourth Way to be problematic while others find it delightful. In this paper, the Fourth Way is understood as a reflection on what it is to attribute to things around us scalar predicates. Does the Fourth Way not resemble what Wittgenstein observes when speaking about ‘the standard meter’? If so, is the Fourth Way significantly different from what might be called a ‘mystical’ line of thinking? If not, it would be this mystical meaning that is used in the Way with respect to ‘God exists’. How should we understand this mystical meaning? By noting that beauty appears as a response-dependent property and by stressing that in order to attribute it to something we must possess certain virtues. Beauty would then be relative to virtues which are linked to the mystical meaning of ‘God’. Why could such a use, concerning the predicate ‘beautiful’ (even if that is not mentioned in the Fourth Way) not constitute an explanation of ‘what we call God’? This is a question to which the reading of the Fourth Way might lead.