The central commission of the national conference of bishops of Brasil feels obliged to clarify certain issues in public and to explain to the faithful how it conceives the mission of the hierarchy.

It should not be a matter of surprise that many of our brother bishops should have expressed themselves in public in these times, whether individually or together. It is today’s conditions that make it far more necessary than formerly for authority to be exercised in constant communication with members of society. . . .

Our very first reponsibility, we hold, is the furthering of brotherhood among men, as consecrated by sharing in Christ. We are in the service of love, in its fullest meaning, and that not only on behalf of members of the Church, but of all men.

It is our duty to explain our mission better. This mission is ignored by some, misunderstood by others, and deliberately falsified by certain groups who claim to be serving the Church whilst in fact furthering their own interests. Neither misunderstanding nor falsehood will make us desist from the job that is ours by divine commission and that has marked the presence of the Church in our history. . . .

We repudiate the Marxist claim that religion despoils man by consoling him with a future happiness that will compensate for frustrations inevitable on earth. And to affirm that the religious mission of the bishops must be confined to what is called the ‘spiritual life’ is in effect to accept the Marxist conception of religion.

If I understand the French expression of the title correctly, the word ‘clercs’ does not primarily refer to the clergy but to those that in olden days were the philosophers, the writers, the scribblers and the gabblers, and no doubt some clergy came under this heading. Now there are few problems so bluntly omnipresent and so impractically approached by the intellectuals as violence.

I have three books in front of me, one dealing with brotherhood, one with peace, and a symposium on violence. All three are connected since peace can only come from brotherhood and will never come at all as long as our world is dominated by violence. We are all Brothers, by Fr Louis Evely (Burns & Oates, 1967, 15s.), puzzles me. Apparently his books sell on the continent by the 100,000 and are translated into ten languages. Yet, the treatment of the theme of brotherhood is wholly that of a talk given at a retreat in the old style of a nice, comforting, pleasant relationship between a somewhat domestic God and a simple-minded Christian leading himself up the garden path in the private garden of his private soul. One respects the intention but it is difficult to take such spiritual glibness seriously. The next book is Building Peace, by Fr Dominique Pire, O.P. (a Corgi Book, 6s.), which is somewhat clumsily put together by Dr Dricot, but it is honest and faces some facts. I shall return to this later. The third book is called La Violence (Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 1967, 12 Frs). It is a collection of papers read at the Semaine des Intellectuels Catholiques in February last year.

I have just returned from the burial of Herbert Read at Kirkdale Minster, in the same remote churchyard where he himself saw his father buried, by the church of grey stone with slated roof and against the dark wood of firs.

As I try to collect my thoughts about him, I wonder if others will find it easier than myself to say what he stood for most. He had many friends and many audiences, but they were often, I think, isolated from each other. Teachers and children inspirited by his books or presence to find new confidence in their own painting might be dismayed by the bloodless forms of geometrical art which he praised elsewhere; painters and sculptors of the vanguard, who owed him much and who often seemed his predilection, were baffled perhaps by his acceptance of this or that Old Master, by his enjoyment of eighteenth-century porcelain or glass, by his admiration of recent things that were not of the vanguard at all—the early ‘non-abstract’ work of Ben Nicholson, the engravings and paintings of David Jones, the pictures and letters of Stanley Spencer, certain drawings of children by Eric Gill. His continued encouragement of new and experimental writers went side by side with an unquenchable devotion to Shelley and Emily Bronte, to Flaubert and Henry James; and the acute and sensitive interpreter of these classics was perhaps not known also as the masterly and precise and imaginative writer of The Green Child and the autobiographies.

Less than ten years ago the ‘exhaustion of political ideas’ was widely proclaimed. At least in the Western World the differences dividing parties of the left and right seemed to be getting less and changes of government only made for a little more or a little less emphasis on economic planning and welfare. One of the most renowned of American political scientists wrote at the end of the 1950s:

In the space of a few years, however, the atmosphere has changed. The collection of essays edited by Erich Fromm under the title Socialist Humanism well summarizes the change in outlook; here are thirty-six articles, most of them written specially for the book, affirming unequivocally that men can and should create their own world, that elitism is not inevitable and that work can be a creative activity. Of course, a book written by so many hands and claiming, at least on the dustjacket, to cover Marxism, Gandhi, Renaissance humanism, existentialism, Utopia, history, science, dialectic, psychoanalysis, freedom, alienation, justice, labour, welfare, ethics, law, Christianity, technology, and revolution, must at times be exasperating.

The dossier mounts and the effort to think all the relevant material through has become daunting. Though it is only two years since the Slant group brought out Catholics and the Left as their ‘manifesto’, the argument about politics and theology, socialism and the gospel, has opened out in so many significant ways and so much new data has come to hand, that one has the sense (obscure enough, it is true) of being on the verge of some major revaluation of meanings and realignment of forces. But the ‘longer and more complicated pieces of writing’ which Raymond Williams mentioned in his review (New Blackfriars, November 1966) as a desideratum, are for the most part still outstanding. On the other hand, the germane topics are surely emerging. Terry Eagleton has listed some of them (in Slant 17), as part of the best outcome of the Birmingham symposium: how to relate cultural to political analysis; the adequacy of Marxism as a perspective for critique and action; the relation of revolution in the Third World to revolution in the western democracies; the relation of Christian eschatology to Marxist theory of history; and how analysis and critique are to issue out into effective social and political action. While there is no urgency to present a complete bibliography, it seems worth calling to mind the more important items in the file on the Catholic New Left debate, before going on to raise some further problems imposed by the recent publication of the May Day Manifesto 1968.

One may disagree with this. But it gives the mind that jolt which is absolutely needed before we can think truthfully about ourselves and our world. Only genius, with its preternatural command of words, can give this jolt, can really make us see.

The study of man has made unprecedented advances in the recent centuries. And all would agree that the major advance has consisted in a new emphasis on the concrete. We are no longer content to define man—as rational animal, say: we seek to know how he ticks, what goes on in him. The emphasis is on experience.

But the very placing of this emphasis makes us forget a very simple fact: that all experience is somebody's experience. In order to keep open to the puzzling nature of this fact, ask: what can be meant by attributing ‘experience’ to ‘somebody’? What sort of ownership is referred to?

‘I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream. I see an American nightmare.’—Malcolm X.

‘And the white Lt.-Colonel from the civilized USA jumped back, snorted and said: “My good man, where I come from we don’t eat people when we kill them. We’re civilized.” And the chief said, “Well baby, why you kill them?” ‘—Stokely Carmichael.

By Summer the American public will be as accustomed to the idea of racial riots as to a well-advertised eclipse of the sun. The actuality of events, sifted through the mass media into print, polls, radio and television, stays comfortably once removed from the affluent. Most Americans watch the auguries of doom on the TV with the numbing disbelief of a rabbit caught in a truck’s headlights; erudite predictions of urban chaos substitute for immediate reform; election charades are played out with unusually large audience participation, and the administration plead for unity and patriotism. It all seems unreal.

In March while President Johnson played golf in Puerto Rico, conspicuously absent from the communal confiteor of churches and liberal establishment, the public glanced at the findings of his commission on civil disorders. The report, a literary genre popularized by the 1966 McCone Commission report on the Los Angeles riots, told them that there was a racial crisis. In New York it was the time of the interregnum; priests were working feverishly on a policy statement while the laity passively awaited a seventh Irish-American Archbishop to ascend the throne of 451 Madison Avenue.

Whatever may have been the case at other epochs of the history of the Church, it is clear that today treatments of confined topics of theology which can afford to take for granted theology and Christianity as a whole are no longer possible. This is true in a special way of the topic which concerns us here, the theology of the priesthood and the ministry, since we have to examine an essential element in the structure or form of Christianity itself, and since we are making this examination not as detached observers but as people who are considering the fundamental sense of our own lives.

Consequently it seems suitable to make explicit two presuppositions of what is to be said later. Firstly, Christianity is real. That is to say, it is real not only with the kind of reality which will allow it to be included among other realities in accordance with a scale of reality already set up apart from Christianity itself. Christianity is real in the sense that its reality modifies the scale of reality itself. Whether we say that Christianity is a new reality in a world considered as being without it (say, as being prior to it, or posterior to it, hostile or neutral to it), or whether we say that Christianity has always been and still is ‘anonymously’ present in the world (as, say, prefigured in a total history of humanity within the eternal design of God), we must, in terms of Christianity itself, claim that Christianity is at the very least a dimension of reality which needs explicitly to be taken into account if the ontological scale which we use to assess it and indeed anything else is to function as a true criterion of the real.

Christianity is nothing if it is not eschatology: a hope in a promise for the future. This is what Jurgen Moltmann is inviting us to take seriously, in his very important book. It is, however, a difficult book, at least for the non-theologian; and perhaps the best way of giving a fair account of its value is to present, in some detail, the argument of the concluding chapter (the appendix on Ernst Bloch has been omitted from the English edition). The problem is to show how Christianity as eschatology actually happens. What visible form and observable shape does this hope in a promised future, which believers share, actually take in the complicated business which is modern life in an industrial society such as ours? What in fact is the relationship between the Church and the world?

We have to decide whether, as believers in modern society, we form what Moltmann calls an accommodating group, a group capable of being absorbed and assimilated by society, or a group which is inassimilable and non-conformist. We have to ask if this hope in the future which we have, compels us to resist being assimilated and adjusted to modern society. Moltmann is, of course, going to argue that if believers really conduct their lives and their thinking in the context of their hope in God’s promised future, then there will always be tension between the believing community and modern society … whatever modern society may happen to be (Moltmann clearly works in terms of the society to which he belongs: western industrial capitalism).

I find it very difficult to enter into an adequate debate with Mrs Haughton over the whole field of her argument. It is impertinent for me to do so, since I do not recognize the reality which to her is predominant. She says,

I could go so far with her, though I would need to argue about the exact meaning of ‘repentance’, ‘incongruous’ and ‘evil’. I would argue that the last word tells us more about those that use it than the quality or condition it is supposed to describe. But debate in this dimension would for me be valid. However, Mrs Haughton opens up a whole other dimension when she says

. . . the prophetic calling involves repudiation of much more than unworthy and unloving behaviour. It sees that everything in the life of the flesh—the world as we know it—is futile and useless as a means of accomplishing the will of God. The truth of the world is so distant an approximation to the naked truth of the spirit, as perceived in the moment of revelation, that it can only be discarded (p. 118).

Mrs Haughton is not, I think, characterizing this as a particular view of the prophet: she assumes it as a necessary attitude for her whole argument.

Scientists have been the poets of modern society. The myths of our age have been the creation, through popular repetition, of the genuine oracles of scientific discoverers, misunderstood, misinterpreted and misapplied by lesser men. The facts behind Darwin’s theory have been of less importance than the altered view of humanity they came to imply, the higher beast rather than the lesser angel. The clinical work of Freud is a small affair beside the wholesale change in sex-conventions that he fathered. Einstein’s few pages on Relativity revolutionized not only Physics but the concept of Truth itself in other disciplines and in popular understanding.

Not least important of the myths we have grown up with has been the notion of Race. Already in the nineteenth century, some evolutionists applied the idea of competing and differing species to the apparently different groups of mankind, defined by general differences of physical appearance. The survival of the fittest came to be seen, in terms of Race, as the story of Nordic man’s superiority. The science of anthropology dealt in terms of ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ peoples, with the assumption of European man’s advancement implicit. Now, modern biology and anthropology no longer deal in these terms. Race, as the term is popularly used, is not a biologically valid or respectable concept. The anthropologist has discovered and learnt to respect the sophisticated culture and technology of the rest of the world’s history. But the myth of Race remains solidly embedded in the intellectual apparatus of all educated people in Europe and North America.

The story of original sin is a story told us by God through Christian tradition. As in all stories which make a point, some elements in this story are absolutely essential to its point, others belong rather to the particular style in which the story is told (and possibly another style might be equally effective), while other elements again are essential neither to point nor to style but included simply because that was the way an incident happened. But how do we decide which elements are which?

In this article I shall suggest that the essential elements in the doctrine of original sin make a point about Calvary; that the references to Adam and the origins of mankind are part only of the style in which this point about Calvary is communicated; and that it is the gospels rather than Genesis which describe the way original sin actually happened. But how does one test such suggestions?

By examining the only vehicle of the doctrine that we have: namely, the traditional interpretation; and trying to discover within that interpretation the story-teller’s point, the structure of his story and the importance of its various elements. So in what follows I shall first consider what the Council of Trent and Thomas Aquinas have to say about original sin, without questioning their presuppositions, in the hope that the purpose, structure and relative importance of the various elements of this interpretation will emerge. Only then will I try to explore the possibility of re-telling the story in a different form.

The Afrikaans daily Die Burger for Saturday, 26th August, 1967, reports the Prime Minister, Mr Vorster, as saying the following to a Nationalist Party gathering in the Transvaal: ‘We have developed a way of life in South Africa. We have learned from experience, so that we have been able to find a solution (to the problem of race relations) which the world can learn from. South Africa has never expected the world to subscribe to its policy or accept it; our standpoint has always been that we should be given credit for being honest. I think more and more people are giving us credit for our honesty. They are asking whether we haven’t perhaps got something. South Africa is being looked at with new eyes.’ Mr Vorster asked the United States and Britain whether they had found the solution to the colour question. ‘We have reached the stage when we can tell the world that we have the solution. We have reached the stage when we can invite the world, and say: “Come and see what it looks like where people can live in a country according to the policy of separate development.” In South Africa there is peace and calm, and this is not because of pressure from the government. South Africa has no need to call out an army, in order to let people live together like this. Everywhere in the world there are problems and strife. This is not the case in South Africa, because we have been dealing with the question for generations. We can discuss these matters, because the evidence is there for any unprejudiced person to see.’

Although the oikumene is the whole inhabited world, the term Ecumenism has been appropriated to relations between Christians. Therefore Fr Eugene Hillman, treating of non-Christian relations with the Church, had to qualify it as The Wider Ecumenism in the title of his new book, which develops previous writings of his.

The relaxation of obstacles, largely legal, to relations of Catholics with other Christians has resulted in a short time in widespread changes of attitudes. These, in their turn, are exerting pressures on theology to review old positions, for ecumenical charity finds certain apparently established views incompatible with its experiences. Of such a nature seem to be the calls to revise the theology of the validity of orders, and of intercommunion.

In the case of the wider ecumenism with non-Christians, the obstacles have been more theological, and, indeed, due largely to a lack of any theology of other religions. The elements of such a theology are to be found in tradition, and in recent years it has been developing in academic circles, especially in Germany. But so far these developments have had little impact on those who live and work in non-Christian places, where the old views and the consequent attitudes persist, with increasing tension being felt by Catholics and all Christians between them and the signs of the times.

If we were to take a look at human society of some four and a half centuries ago, say, about the year 1500, we should see there a world that was still largely sacral. The whole of life was bound up with religion, the Church, the Sacerdotium, penetrating into every department of human life, and in the civil order the Imperium itself was regarded as sacred. The Sacerdotium may have been corrupt and the Imperium tottering but men still thought of the whole of society as sacred. Even the very processes of nature by which millions of men and women gained a painful livelihood were nearer to magic in their minds than we usually like to think they were. Nature was largely unpredictable, afflicted with mysterious calamities and marred from time to time by what were called ‘Acts of God’.

On the other hand, there was an immense surge of new life throughout Europe. Men had rediscovered the ancient literature of Greece and Rome and were luxuriating in it. For more than a hundred years Italy had flowered with a new art in paint and stone, whose products we still admire. Great new buildings were going up, but above all, men felt that they were new beings. They were throwing off’ the restrictions of the old sacral order and were finding themselves, discovering new powers to which they could see no limit. Nature itself was being freed from the bondage of magic and within a hundred years Galileo would demolish the old picture of the cosmos and take the music out of the spheres.

After the third international Newman-Conference of Luxembourg, it had been felt that it was time ‘to bring Newman home’. This led to the first Oxford Newman Symposium at Oriel College (1966). The meeting at Newman’s own college was something of an experience, most moving and inspiring, not only by reason of its significance as an ecumenical event in such an historic place, but also, and mainly, because of the things that were said and discussed. Carefully designed by the editors, and reconsidered after the discussion by the contributors, the whole collection of essays, although written by scholars of so different denominations and habits of mind, shows a remarkable convergence in the appreciation of Newman’s place and importance in contemporary theology. It may be said, indeed, that it constitutes a milestone in the history of Newman scholarships and will for ever remain one of the most outstanding publications on the general subject of Newman’s thought and influence.

Four capital points were made: 1, Newman is not only a great historic figure, a saint, a master of English prose, but one of the foremost theologians of his age and perhaps of all times. He did not enrich us with a new system, but he created a new spirit, a new way of putting theological questions. He opened new paths and brought theology back to its proper tasks and methods. 2, Newman’s theology is a result and a most personal synthesis of various theological traditions.

‘. . . Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor desirable.’

(Report of the Newcastle Commission, 1861.)

‘. . . Even if it were possible, I doubt whether it would be desirable, with a view to the real interests of the peasant boy, to keep him at school till he was 14 or 15 years of age. But it is not possible. We must make up our minds to see the last of him, as far as the day school is concerned, at 10 or 11. We must frame our system of education upon this hypothesis; and I venture to maintain that it is quite possible to teach a child soundly and thoroughly, in a way that he shall not forget it, all that is necessary for him to possess in the shape of intellectual attainment, by the time he is 10 years old. . . .’

Having recent experience of the activities of several missions in part of ex-British Africa, I read with great interest Elizabeth Power’s article ‘Black Nuns in Africa’ (New Blackfriars, December, 1966, and the subsequent exchange between her and Sr Anne Gregson, February, 1967) and, more recently, the correspondence about mission strategy in East Africa (August, 1967).

My work demanded that I should liv e with rural Africans in their huts and learn to speak their language. I spent most time in the diocese of one particular society of Roman Catholic missionaries, but I also saw a little of the work of three other Roman Catholic missionary societies and four Protestant ones. There were marked differences between these different missions, in their resources of finance and personnel, in their organization and the amount of responsibility they gave to Africans, in what they thought it proper for missionaries or Europeans to do, and in what they thought Christianity is concerned with.

I had for a long time thought it would be interesting to know about the way of life and attitudes of African nuns, but the first African nuns I saw on the central mission station could only observe from a distance. Even those who were teachers had been trained to keep their distance from visitors so I could not speak to them. The missionaries took pains to point out to me that the African nuns had clothes in greater quantity and quality, better housing and bedding, and a more adequate and better balanced diet than nearly all rural African women.

I have been invited not only to comment on the essays published in this collection, but also to try to ‘place’ Bernard Lonergan and his work. The first task is not easy, the second is virtually impossible. In saying this, I am not denying that it is reasonable to ask questions such as: cWhat is Lonergan up to?’, ‘Where does he stand in contemporary debates?’. The list of contents alone would invite such questions. What is the common factor, beyond the mere fact of common authorship, in sixteen essays, originally published between 1943 and 1965, on such disparate topics as: ‘Finality, Love, Marriage’, ‘A Note on Geometrical Possibility’, ‘The Assumption and Theology’, and ‘Cognitional Structure’? Another reason for wanting to have Lonergan ‘placed’ is that, while the sheer difficulty of most of his work renders him inaccessible to many people, he has profoundly influenced such very different spirits as David Burrell, Bishop Butler, Charles Davis, Sebastian Moore, John Courtney Murray and Michael Novak. Yet, while I believe that Lonergan is one of the most profoundly original and creative Catholic thinkers of our time, it is his very originality that makes it almost impossible to place him. It may seem paradoxical to describe as ‘original’ a man much of whose writing bears the terminological hallmark of neo-scholastic theology and metaphysics. But then, the originality of Beethoven did not consist in the notes of the scale which he employed, but in the conception and structure with which they were ordered.

Frederick Crowe’s editorial introduction to the collection is an excellent biographical and interpretative summary of Lonergan’s work.

At the end of my previous article I proposed to examine, in this one, whether religion might not be able to offer a therapy for South Africa’s manifold neuroses, which it is beyond the power of politics to provide. The only symptom of neurotic condition which I discussed in that article was colour prejudice. There is another, related, symptom which is if anything more prejudicial to a healthy society, and that is a general devaluation of ‘the liberties of the subject’; at least it is something more disturbing even to a conservative Englishman with a long tradition of civil liberties, free association and freedom of speech in his blood. These excellent microbes seem to have been almost totally extracted from the blood stream of white South Africa; and the fault does not seem to lie simply with the governing Nationalist Party. This Party has simply been much more ruthlessly effective in giving its actual and potential rivals a treatment of repression which it experienced itself from its opponents before it came into power. It has profited by, rather than induced, an endemic lack of concern for individual liberty. It is an ironical situation, and to underline the irony, I would like to quote from the political reminiscences of Dr D. F. Malan, the first Nationalist Prime Minister after the last war.