Today we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King. It’s the last Sunday in the liturgical year: next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, when we begin to relive liturgically the whole mystery of the meaning of life as we apprehend it, once again from the beginning, with the birth of Mary’s child at Bethlehem.

The liturgical year now ends with the feast of Christ the King, This is a feast introduced by Pope Pius XI in 1925. What he was doing then was simply to sanction and ratify a movement which started about 1870 in the town of Paray-le-Monial in France, a movement called La Société du Règne Social de Jésus-Christ, the founders of which seem mostly to have been aristocrats and merchants. The idea behind it seems to have been to suggest that the power of Christ, the sovereignty of God, was not just in our hearts, purely inward and spiritual, but that it made some visible difference to society. After all, 1870 was not a very happy time for the Church; the pope had finally lost control of the city of Rome and withdrawn into the Vatican. The new secular state had just offered him a pension and declared his basilicas and palaces extra-territorial and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the government. Pius IX refused to accept these terms and it was not until 1929 that Pius XI signed a treaty with Mussolini’s government which ran on these lines. In the climate of 1870 it must have seemed natural enough to compensate for the pope’s loss of temporal power by propagating the idea that Christ’s sovereignty is more than merely spiritual and interior— that it is also social and political.

Analogies are a little like the toeholds one grasps on a steep slope; they enable one to take the next step in a dangerous geography. The next step is the point in question: is it possible ? The question, for a climber, cannot be an abstract one; he must create as he goes. And he draws breath, when the air is very thin indeed, from the example of those who went far, who died in the breach, or who made it further.

Danger is within and around. Whatever the quality of the air (it is not high, by all reports) this is of its substance. It is not merely that one is hunted in a perpetual open season; this is taken for granted, part of the game today. Much nearer the point is the possession of one’s own life, one’s own soul: not to belong to the hunters, not to inhabit their dreams, not to be hung as a trophy on their walls. Resistance is one way of putting it; the pressures one can olfer against a foul project, unworthy of man, undertaken in that decrepit chain of command which forges one man to another, a chain gang of slaves, blind in authority, blind in obedience.

Such thoughts arise on the occasion of the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s death. His faults, which were indeed large ones, died with him, extinguished in blood. The questions raised by his life and dramatized in his murder remain to haunt those who were his friends, who, two years later, have tears to shed for a young life, so brutally extinguished. In a sense which is both true and difficult of understanding, his death was irrelevant to his failure; one could still consider him as having won his prize, gone on to the highest political honour—and changed nothing.

‘No one has ever seen God’; this is the text which was read to us from the first Epistle of St John, and which also occurs at the end of the Prologue to St John’s Gospel. ‘No one has ever seen God’: an appropriate text, perhaps, for the Sunday after the Ascension and before Pentecost, in that pause which the liturgy has contrived for our meditation between the departure of the Son as risen Lord and the coming of the Spirit, an experience of absence through which we may more profoundly recover an experience of presence—absence, presence, of what, of whom? Of God, whom no one has ever seen.

Let us recall what must be a familiar experience to all of us at some time in our lives: the sleeping city, the lights shining in the empty streets, oneself, the solitary watcher withdrawn from the human community of sleep, to which one is all the more deeply drawn. This is the before and after of all the active business of the day, the multifarious contradiction of human project, plan and purpose, the coming and going: all rises from and returns to sleep, movement back to stillness, the rising and falling of a single biological rhythm of breathing, unconscious, at rest. Are these sleepers dreaming their personal dreams, or are they united in the single impersonal dream of the worl? Even those who do not sleep in this sleeping stillness, the sufferers awake in their white nights alone, the lovers involved in their private intimacy, aren’t they too enacting in this universal dream a typical human destiny of pain and sex, death and procreation, sounding a ground bass of human existence? The sleeping city: a human community realized in a unity before and after, below if not above, the community of active function and conscious purpose: this underlying community finding itself in a deeper unity of typical man. And who or what sustains this deeper unity—is the dream of the world really impersonal, or does the dream unfold in some deeper dreamer?

This document was composed by the Dominican friars who have been imprisoned in Sao Paolo since 1969. It is the outcome of their joint reflections and those of other Christian prisoners with them. It falls into three parts: a meditation on the role of the Church in the world (extensively summarized here), an account of conditions in Brazil, and a consequent justification of the revolutionary position they have adopted.

The Church is the universal sacrament of salvation, continuing in time the presence, mission and work of Christ in the world. Jesus Christ came to make salvation a reality, and his whole life, including his death and resurrection, was a witness of love. The mission of the Church is to continue this living witness of love, and the Church is essentially missionary, sent to the world to witness to Jesus Christ among men.

The Church cannot exist on the fringe of the world; it is in the world and has to be constantly present to the world, since it is there that its mission lies, as light to the world, salt of the earth, the leaven in the dough. This is why the Council produced a Constitution on the Church in the World of Today.

For the next three weeks, as Lent builds up more intensively towards Easter, the gospel readings at Sunday Mass abandon the ordinary course of readings for the year (Luke this year) and go over to John. And that for a very good reason, which is internal to the gospel according to John. What Lent is all about, as we have been seeing this last couple of weeks, is a longish preparation for Easter—a preparation that once was the final spurt of adults preparing to be baptized during Easter night, and then also of already baptized Christians who had fallen away in some pretty serious regard and were now getting ready to come back to the heart of the Christian community on Maundy Thursday, and then finally a sort of extended retreat for the whole Christian people. Because everybody realized that they all needed to come back closer to the heart of things—every Christian had fallen away to some degree, every Christian was in some way an internal emigré—they realized that they all had to come back closer to the heart of things, and that meant recovering something of their first flush of enthusiasm and their first entry into the Church, their baptism. And baptism from the beginning was an Easter affair, an Easter affair even before there was an Easter kept as an annual feast; already in the New Testament letters, baptism was seen as a sharing in Christ’s death and in his being raised again.

The Pope’s encyclical on Development, Populorum Progressio, has drawn attention to a man, Père Lebret, who is better known in many parts of the Third World than in Europe and particularly in the English-speaking world, but whose life is, nevertheless, expressive of one of the main trends that have marked the development of humanity and of the Church during the last decades.

In marking him out as one of the principal instigators of this encyclical, Paul VI knew better than anyone that he had not intervened in its detailed preparation simply as an expert, but that it was his experience and his life which had given him the essential inspiration for it. And those who knew him realize that his work and thought are one with his life; so much so, that if his writings were to pass away, in the way writings do, there would still remain the mark he has left on the history of his time and the direction which, largely thanks to him, some men and some commissions have given to their life and work.

In our present preoccupation with the problem of our relations with the Third World, it would, therefore, seem to be useful to recount the main stages of his life, in order to understand better some of the forces which determine the direction of history in the sense of an ever closer interdependence of nations.

The tide has gone out, and the great constructions of Christian thought seem to lie in their harbours like capital ships no longer in commission for active service, some destined for the breaker’s yard, others to be reprieved and to lie at their buoys, moth-balled and landlocked. Is St Thomas’s Summa among them ?

This is where the comparison between theological architecture and naval construction begins to limp. Or rather, where we should be careful about committing our idea of a capital ship to one image. For it has a constant meaning under shapes as diverse as a three-decker, a super-dreadnought, an aircraft-carrier, and a nuclear submarine, and the force of its meaning has to be brought to bear so long as sea-power is required for the life of a nation. Likewise, so long as a grasp on the reasons for things is required in the life of the Church, for in this world it must know what it means and be able to show what it means, the need will remain for the systematic and coherent articulation of the implications of divine Revelation in terms of human experience.

On the 22nd September, 1967, the German bishops published a pastoral letter concerning the Church’s doctrinal authority and mission to teach. In view of a certain incident that has occurred since, a few remarks need to be made about one passage in the document. The passage runs as follows:

Johann Baptist Metz has broken with this Rahnerian programme for a transcendental theology because of what he calls its ‘tendency to privatization’ (Privatkiemngstendenz). He denies thereby the universality of this transcendental experience from which Rahner builds up his system. This experience can be seen rather as the product of a particular philosophy (which is itself determined by theology) that the individual is always determined by a basic attitude towards ‘Being’, ‘death’, etc., always exists in an enduring relationship to God as ‘horizon’, etc. But these are religious presuppositions and products of a society which assumed man to be ultimately ‘religious’, the only question being whether he would explicitly accept this or deny it. In a non-religious, secular and pluralistic society, these assumptions can no longer be made.