On 24 March Catholics committed to the cause of social justice keep the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Here is the sermon which Herbert McCabe OP preached at Blackfriars, Oxford, at the Mass marking the anniversary last year. The gospel reading was Luke 24:1—10 (Luke’s account of the first Easter morning).

When the Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto was in prison one of his interrogators asked him: ‘How can a Christian collaborate with a communist?’. He answered: ‘For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists but into oppressors and victims’. I think this was a witty reply—it certainly wasn’t saying anything so tedious as ‘Truth doesn’t matter; let’s do something practical’. I think it was witty because it turned the interrogator’s question round in a new and surprising way, and because it challenged and disturbed his interrogator: ‘Is it worse to collaborate with atheists as I do or to collaborate with injustice as you do? When I work with atheists I do not become an atheist; but when you work for the unjust you do become unjust’.

Frei Betto was saying that it is just because he passionately thinks that truth matters and just because he is not an atheist, that his first concern is not whether people agree with him but whether they are suffering and in particular suffering at the hands of sinful men, from the lovelessness and injustice of others. His atheist comrades may have their own reasons for struggling against injustice, but for him his reason is his belief.

It must have been early in 1919, the time when Father Bede Jarrett resumed his weekly walk with me, that he spoke of his desire for a monthly review; of the need for a new Catholic review in England; a periodical, fearless, outspoken, zealous for truth; not primarily theological; a review that would present, in intelligible fashion, Catholic teaching on social justice, comment on passing events, give adequate space to literature, strike the human note. A Dominican review—acceptable to the unlearned—and, perhaps this was harder, a review the learned would not disdain. The articles must not be heavy, nor yet be too obstruse for the plain man. Scientific technicalities were to be avoided, humour not discouraged. A Dominican review that would appeal to the laity and, no doubt, might be read by the clergy. In all its criticism of books and political activities, and in the inevitable controversies that would be provoked, the review, while not allowing truth to be obscured by feelings of charity, must not let the plea of truth excuse want of charity. All cocksureness, arrogance, identification of personal opinions with eternal verities—in short, all pontificating by lay- writers on matters by no means de fide was to be deprecated, as far as possible excluded.

Let us never believe that the way in which the people in power tell us to look at the world is the only way we can look, because if we do that, then that’s a kind of appalling selfcensorship. (Salman Rushdie).

In Britain we believe in live and let live ... Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists and Rastafarians are all welcome to our tolerant society. But there is only one law for all of us ... Those who say their deep religious convictions prevent them from obeying the law of this land should quit Britain immediately and go and live in a country where the conflict does not exist. (Sunday Sport, 19 February, 1989 — editorial on Rushdie).

So the battle over The Satanic Verses is a clash of faiths, in a way. Or, more precisely, it’s a clash of languages. (Salman Rushdie, The Observer, 22 January, 1989).

Britain’s prized tolerant and pluralist society began to exhibit the power of its master code from the beginning of 1989, following the highly publicised second attempt at book burning by Bradford Muslims in January, 1989. (The first protest in Bolton, in December 1988, failed to get any media coverage—so it was repeated after advice that the national media be duly invited!). Text burning was encoded and enmeshed into two curiously related histories: that of Nazism and that of the history of religious bigotry and intolerance. Hence, from a major national quality paper: ‘following the example of the Inquisition and Hitler’s National Socialists, a large crowd of Muslims burnt some copies of the book’ (The Independent, 16 January, 1989).

John Henry Cardinal Newman died on 11 August, 1890. In the summer of the centenary of his death the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian. It is a topic by which Newman was much exercised. In this article I would like to look at the Instruction in the light of two ideas adumbrated by Newman, each of which involves a distinction between positive and negative models of the role of the Magisterium.

The Vatican Council of 1870 was a major landslip in the history of Catholic theology, and for much of the following decade Newman was riding the after-shocks generated by its definition of papal infallibility. His central concern was to assimilate what he understood to be the true teaching of the decree Pastor Aeternus into a structure which would still allow scope for theological responsibility. In November 1874 an intemperate pamphlet by William Gladstone gave Newman an opening for a formal and public statement of his reaction to the definition. A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation was dated 27 December 1874 and was published in January 1875. In the Letter Newman was of course particularly concerned with infallibility, ecclesial and papal, rather than with magisterial teaching in general, but his reflections are of wider application.

Newman observes that authoritative statements may be either positive or negative:

1. The man himself.

An incapacity to read French led me to the discovery of the significance of J.-K. Huysmans. In his book A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor used Huysmans’ term ‘les paratonnerres de la société’ to refer to the monastic calling, the time spent in ‘silent factories’ reducing ‘the moral overdraft of mankind’. One would expect monks to act as tuning forks for the holy, but hardly in this dramatic fashion, which seemed more the preserve of liberal theologians with advanced views. The phrase resonated in this sociological imagination. It seemed to be an answer to a long-standing effort to link sociology to an understanding of liturgical performance, where the actors endeavour to attune those present to signals of transcendence emerging from the absent. Huysmans appeared to be awarding monks a striking success in their social activities in attracting Divine attention. Apart from needing to find out the context of the phrase, a puzzle arose as to who was J.-K. Huysmans.

Initial inquiries were perplexing. Huysmans was infamous for his work A Rebours, the classical pioneering study of the art of decadence. This was the book that so influenced Wilde in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and which elicited the lofty mot at his trial that he never spoke of the morality of an author. Further inquiry indicated that Huysmans had become bored with decadence and had returned to Catholicism. An account of his return was given in his book, En Route. The paths of both authors crossed oddly in the present day, for the only copy of this work that could be located by the interlibrary loan service at Bristol University was at Reading. His dalliance with vice in A Rebours was well known; his return to virtue in En Route seems to have been overlooked.

Hans was twenty-two. Except for a rather shabby greyish sheet, he lay naked on a double bed. His body was covered with large ugly black sores. I wondered if it was catching.

Earlier that evening I had been in my room, reading. I had been ordained about a year, it was 1984, and I had never even heard the word AIDS, though in fact three years had already gone by since, in Los Angeles, the first signs of a new viral infection had come to light. The telephone had rung, and a man called Carl, with a young voice, had asked if he were speaking to a priest. I had said I was. He had told me that his friend was dying. He himself was not a Catholic but his friend was. He had asked me to visit them.

At that time I was a curate in West London, at the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Victories, Kensington. The Parish takes in the Earls Court area. Earls Court has a large homosexual population, and Hans and Carl were part of that community. I call it ‘a community’ because, in many ways, that is just what it is. Earls Court has many pubs and places where homosexual men can go, and there is a feeling of support and acceptance among them. In fact, there is something rather ‘cliquey’ about the place.

Carl, Hans and I did not begin a heated discussion about the rights and wrongs of homosexuality. There were far too many more urgent problems. Carl had given up his job so as to be at home to look after Hans. They had no money, little hope, and Carl was coming to the end of his tether.

The promulgation of the Bull In agro dominico in March 1329, which condemned twenty-eight propositions taken from the work of Meister Eckhart, is an event which has attracted the attention of many scholars in recent years. This interest is the result not only of the ‘rehabilitation’ of Eckhart by the theological fraternity (the greater part of which is now convinced of his fundamental orthodoxy) but also of the extraordinary character of the condemnation itself. In the present article I do not intend to repeat the work of Bernard McGinn, Edmund Colledge and others, who have shown the extent to which Eckhart was misunderstood by the commission which examined his work, but rather to enquire why it was that such misgivings were ultimately translated into a formal condemnation of Eckhart’s work by the Holy See itself.

In agro dominico stands out from other such condemnatory Bulls in a number of ways. Firstly, it was the first and only occasion when the full machinery of the Inquisition was used against a member of the Dominican Order, and it was similarly the first and only time in which a theologian of the first rank was charged with the inquisitio haereticae pravitatis: the most serious accusation which the Inquisition had at its disposal and the one which carried the heaviest penalties. Despite its extraordinary character, however, Eckhart’s trial remained fundamentally within the bounds of legality, as Winfried Trusen’s recent study has shown. Trusen also reveals, however, the malevolence of his detractors and their determination to inflict maximum damage upon Eckhart within the strict letter of the law.

1. Telling the time

By current standards, St Thomas Aquinas did not have very much to say about time, and even less to say about Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. When discussing the commandments, however, he did say something rather interesting about the Sabbath. Human beings, he tells us, owe a threefold duty to the head of their community: a duty of faithfulness or single-hearted loyalty, of reverence, and of service. This threefold duty is, according to St Thomas, the subject-matter of the commands to worship only God, to refrain from taking his name in vain, and to keep the sabbath holy. It is, he says, the servant’s duty to repay through service the good things received from his lord. But what we have received from this Lord, the Creator, is—everything. Hence the command to sanctify the sabbath in grateful remembrance of the creation of the world: ‘sanctifica(re) sabbat(um) in memoriam creationis rerum’. In due course, I shall return to this suggestion that it is in keeping our very createdness in mind that we keep the Sabbath holy. But, first, I want to reflect on what is entailed in learning how to pray.

But surely, you may say, we know how to pray? Jesus taught us how to pray: he taught us to say ‘Our Father ...’.

But do we really know how to say ‘Our Father’ here and now, in this place, at this time?

It is a quarter of a century, this year, since the death of Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian who has been called ‘perhaps the principal moulder of modern Christian thought’. To mark this we are publishing here a transcript of the dialogue between him and Carl Rogers, the pioneer of person-centred psychotherapy, which took place at San Diego State College, California, on 7 March 1965 and was his last public appearance. The transcript, which was circulated (in a somewhat edited form) as a pamphlet by the College in 1966, is appearing in Carl Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson and published by Constable of London, price £12.95 hardback, £7.95 paper.

Carl Rogers: The importance of self-affirmation: I think that would be one area where we agree. Then I have been much impressed with your thinking about the courage to be, because I see that in psychotherapy; the courage of being something, the risk that is involved in knowing. ... I’ve also liked your phrase about the antimoral act being one that contradicts the self-realisation of the individual, and it seems to me both of us are trying to push beyond some of the trends that are very prominent in the modern world; the logical positivistic, the ultrascientific approach, the stress of the mechanistic and highly deterministic point of view which, as I see it, makes man just an object trying to find some alternative stance in relation to life. I wonder if you feel that we’re in some agreement on issues of that sort?

In his attempt to defend the Declaration of Human Rights against criticism from both the second and the third world, the Belgian philosopher Guy Haarscher admits in his book Philosophie des Droits de l’homme (Brussels, 1987) that this would be easier if modern men could still believe in God. Why? Because God is the embodiment of what is common to all people. He represents the universal truth of human values on which human rights are based.

Ever since Durkheim we have been strongly aware of the fact that there is a close relationship between society and faith in God. But Guy Haarscher states that God is dead. We cannot go back to a faith in God, he says, for it would entail accepting a hierarchically structured cosmos and thus a hierarchical society. Society before the French Revolution was such a society, one in which all individuals had their place, their definable rights and obligations. It was a society in which the value system was clear and persons enjoyed quite a lot of security, but in which they were not allowed to leave their places lest they endanger the society’s unity. In the third century Plotinus had argued for the inner goodness of such a social order, and his impact on Christian theology can hardly be overestimated; many Vatican declarations cannot be understood fully without some knowledge of Plotinus’ philosophy.

For modern human beings this hierarchical society is repressive. The French Revolution marked the death of of hierarchical society and the dawn of an age in which (in theory) all individuals were allowed to find the places in society which suited them most.

An old friar once remarked to me that, whilst he was glad to live in the midst of a community of young and high-spirited Dominicans, he often missed the companionship of a brother of his own generation with whom he could share his memories. At various stages in our lives we cast backward glances over our shoulders but there comes a time when we look to our beginnings, uncovering the summer in the seed. Father Anthony Ross’s book is an exercise not only in the uncovering of memory but in the sharing of memories, and in the sharing there is a healing too; the work is dedicated to his parents and step-mother in the belief that ‘love covers all offences.’ In this book he offers us a lyrical account of his boyhood in the north of Scotland, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Tomas O’Crohan’s The Islandman and Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A ‘Growing, his subsequent university career, his entry into the Roman Catholic Church and admission to the Dominican Order. Father Anthony is a historian by training and it is his particular gift to disclose ‘the past quivering in what is’. His own life has coincided with major developments in the political and cultural life of the Scottish people with related implications for the Catholic Church in Scotland in general and the Dominican Order in particular. His book is part of his own story but is also a chapter in the history of his country and his Church.

To be a Muslim today—or any day—is to live in accordance with the will and pleasure of Allah. Muslims often say, with joy and pride, that it is easy to be a Muslim since Islam is ‘the straight path’ leading to paradise. What this means, in other words, is that the principles of Islam are simple and straightforward, free of ambiguities, confusions, inconsistencies or mysteries, and that comprehending them or living in accordance with them is not difficult. The assumption here is that if one somehow comes to ‘the straight path’ by accepting Islam, which is Allah’s last and final revelation to humanity, one will fairly effortlessly arrive at the destination which is a state of eternal blessedness in the presence of Allah. I must confess that I am totally amazed, and overwhelmed, by this assumption. To me, being a Muslim today—or any day—seems to be exceedingly hard, for to be a Muslim one has constantly to face the challenge, first of knowing what Allah wills or desires not only for humanity in general but also for oneself in particular, and then of doing what one believes to be Allah’s will and pleasure each moment of one’s life.

In view of the stereotyping of Islam and Muslims which has gone on in the West for many centuries, and especially since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979, it is necessary to state at the outset of this article that ‘the world of Islam’ is not a monolith and that Muslims differ as sharply within their “ummah” of one billion persons as do adherents of other major religious traditions within their own respective communities.