There have always been questions about God, but it was only recently that these took the form of doubt. Our ancestors studied the Scriptures and enquired from their priests and prophets, not because they expected a final and definitive solution but because they encountered a mystery that gave no rest to a questioning mind. Each answer gave rise to new questions, driving people on in their search, awakening in them a desire for a knowledge that could only be satisfied in the beatific vision.

But for the present generation a new and more basic question has emerged, a question that is of a different kind because it asks to be settled before we engage ourselves in the further search for God. First we need to know whether belief is not based upon an illusion. How are we to be certain about God’s existence; how can we dissolve our doubts as to whether the object of our faith is real?

Unfortunately the ‘proofs’ have done little to convince those who are not already convinced; others are left with their doubts. Most philosophers now profess that God, if he exists, is necessarily beyond the limited scope of our knowledge, a mystery on which every purely rational thought is wasted, a dimension too inaccessable to be explored, a matter of faith rather than of demonstration.

And so, in one sense, we seem to have returned to the time before the Enlightenment when true knowledge of God was given with faith and not with rational insight.

But doubt is still with us, and it would be naive to presume that it will be dissolved in a vigorous faith. For how can faith be vigorous when it begins with doubt ? Is it not inevitably somewhat supercilious, conditional because we cannot be certain that it is about anything at all ?It is hard to commit oneself to something which may be an illusion, and it is unrealistic to expect that our doubt will be dispelled by a total faith to which that very doubt is an obstacle.

In this paper I defend a ‘strong compatibility’ thesis. According to this thesis Marxism is not only not inconsistent with Christianity; Christianity is compatible only with Marxism. I further argue that for Marxists to accept this proposition on the grounds that they have no reason to object to the personal combination of Marxism and Christianity is to miss the point both of Christianity and of their own Marxism. This concession is, from the point of view of the Marxist, quite unprincipled. It is to misconstrue both the true nature of the Marxist critique of religion and the true nature of the religion of which Marxism is the critique. But more about this in due course.

First, though, what sort of reasons are invoked against the ‘compatibility’ thesis? They seem to fall, generally, into two categories. First, there are objections to the Christian belief system itself. Secondly, there are objections to the social and historical role of the set of institutions which has espoused that belief-system.

To the belief-system of Christianity on almost any account of what it maintains, defenders of the incompatibility thesis have a form of objection which I shall call ‘ontological’. This objection, taken on its own is, it seems to me, both the most widely canvassed and the weakest. It is roughly this : Christians believe that the universe is peopled with entities and agencies and activities and events—a God, an act of creation, an act of redemption, souls, grace, post-mortem survival and all the rest—all of which the Marxist is, as a Marxist, committed to the denial of. Christians are, thus, ontologically theists, spiritualists and mentalists; Marxists, on the other hand are ontologically materialists. Since ontological immaterialism and ontological materialism cannot both be true, one cannot consistently hold both.

In the concluding paragraphs of his open letter to the Catholic Institute for International Relations, Mr Allen notes that ‘the ultimate objective of the Palestinians is said to be “a non-Zionist, Arab-Jewish state in the whole of what was once Palestine”. This means the ultimate objective of the Palestinians is still the destruction of the state of Israel as it now is’ (my italics). Mr Allen clearly implies that individuals and organisations who subscribe to the objective of destroying the state of Israel as it now is cannot be considered legitimate parties to a Catholic debate on the Middle East conflict and the desired future for the Israel’- Jewish and Palestinian-Arab peoples. Mr Allen is a Catholic and he questions whether the CIIR is voicing a legitimate Catholic position on the question of the Middle East conflict presumably because Comment 19 either states or implies the desirability of destroying the state of Israel as it now is.

Israeli-Jews, as a rule, are not too well informed of Christian history and more often than not betray unforgiveable ignorance of the development of Catholicism. I am no exception, yet, given my limited knowledge, I would be surprised to find a Catholic consensus that state-worship constitutes part of the Catholic spirit or dogma. I would rather have thought that Catholics, like people of any other religion, might have been expected to oppose any insinuation that unconditional acceptance of the existence of any state as it now is, irrespective of its policies and history, should constitute a condition sine qua non for a legitimate ethical-political discussion. I would further like to state at the outset that in terms of my own political ethics, no ethical discussion of the political domain can take place unless it involves a critical scrutiny of any existing state in the light of its history and de facto policies and can thus decide in each case whether one can justify support for its continued existence. This is as true of the state of Israel as it is of the Vatican State.

In this paper I speculate about the idea of personal moral discovery. These speculations occur, however, only at the end, for my object is to present genuine, not rhetorical, questions. The substance of this paper concerns moral weakness and self-deception. These topics are relevant because the analyses of moral weakness and of self-deception throw light, in different ways, on what is meant by and also on what obstacles there are to the discovery for oneself of a moral point of view.

Briefly the light they throw is this: self-deception is one sort of obstacle to self-knowledge. Insofar, then, as discovering a personal morality is the process of discovering something about oneself—and I merely assert for the moment that it is in part this—self-deception is one kind of obstacle to personal moral discovery. It may follow from this that the contrary process of detecting one’s own self-deceptions is one form of self-discovery which is relevant to moral discovery. If so, it will be important to be clear about how we do discover that we have been deceiving ourselves. I try to solve some of the difficulties there are about how this self-detection occurs in the second part of this paper.

The relevance of moral weakness to the topic of self-discovery is more complex. Again briefly, there are two main assertions which I make. The first is that any self-ascription of moral weakness is problematic. This is to say that the subjective evidence immediately available to the moral agent himself on any putative occasion of moral weakness is never sufficient evidence that he was, genuinely, morally weak on that occasion. We do not know, in other words, just from what is going on in our minds at the time, that our failure to act as we think we ought to be acting is moral weakness rather than something else.

‘He this evening again recommended to me to perambulate Spain. I said it would amuse him to get a letter from me dated at Salamancha. Johnson. “I love the University of Salamancha; for when the Spaniards were in doubt as to the lawfulness of their conquering America, the University of Salamancha gave it as their opinion that it was not lawful”. He spoke with great emotion, and with the generous warmth which dictated the lines in his “London”, against Spanish encroachment’.

Boswell never got round to explaining precisely why it would have been so amusing for the Doctor to receive the letter from Salamanca, and Johnson never explained exactly what he meant by the University of Salamanca. Still, I suppose, not many Spaniards are very bothered about Boswell and Johnson, but they can still get mighty hot and bothered about the discovery and conquest of America; and they are not particularly happy about Wasps telling them where they went wrong. With all the logic of passionate indignation—which, of course, tends to brush aside the mere facts of history and geography—many is the irate Spaniard who has triumphantly produced in the form of a supposedly unanswerable question, what he thinks is to be the coup de grâce of any discussion on the relative merits of different brands of European imperialism, viz.: Where are the Indians in Protestant North America and why are they so numerous in Ibero-America? (And, by the way, that’s another thing you’ve got to be very careful about; none of your Latin America; our prickly, patriotic Spaniard, when aroused, admits of no contribution from the Italians and French in the Southern Hemisphere!)

Let us begin with dissolving inflated statements on the indissolubility of marriage which do nothing but distort the issue: statements such as marriage is indissoluble, or marriage between Christians is indissoluble, or marriage is indissoluble because it is a sacrament. In point of fact, the Church considers marriage to be generally dissoluble: she claims the power to dissolve marriages between unbaptised spouses and does avail herself of that power when she sees fit to do so. Since by far the majority of spouses that live on our planet are not baptised, the initial proposition must be reworded as follows: in the Church’s view, marriage is dissoluble, with the proviso that in some cases it is not.

What are those cases which are exceptions to the rule? Marriages between baptised spouses—or, to use the short-cut formula, marriages between Christians? The trouble is that the Church also claims the power to dissolve such marriages and actually goes on to break some, as when she grants a dissolution of the bond to validly married Christian spouses who have failed to ‘consummate’ their marriage.

What, then, about relating indissolubility to the reception of the Sacrament of Matrimony? Doesn’t everybody know that if you are baptised and validly married in the Church, your marriage is ipso facto a sacrament and indissoluble by divine law. . . ? Beware, however, of bringing God into the picture before the Church is out of it: for your marriage is a sacrament even though you may have chosen not to consummate it, yet the Church would have no qualms of conscience in regarding you a free man (or a free woman) if you wished, say, to join a religious order and actually made your solemn profession.

Robert Lowell was born in Boston in 1917. He was descended from early New England colonists, and after a childhood on Beacon Hll, he went to St. Mark’s School and then on to Harvard, where he matriculated, but transferred after a year to Kenyon College. There he majored in classics and became a pupil of John Crowe Ransom. In 1940 he became a Catholic convert. Although Lowell attempted to enlist in the navy after the beginning of World War II he later protested against the Allied bombing of the civilian population of European cities and as a result of his failure to obey the Selective Service Act he was sentenced to a year and a day in a Federal prison. He was released after five months and in the following year, 1944, there appeared his first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness.

Since that time Lowell’s status as a poet and a public spokesman (the two became undistinguishable) has never ceased to grow. Lowell has acquired an extraordinary power as the private man made public, the tormented citizen whose personal struggles and griefs seem fatally enmeshed with the course of twentieth century history. When the poet turned down L. B. Johnson’s White House invitation as a protest against American policy in S.E. Asia it was not only the President who expressed concern. Lowell has made himself into an archetype, living through the contradictions inherent in his society, tom between the need for a domestic and artistic privacy, and the forces that impel him to a public commitment.

In what must have been one of the most dynamic decades in the history of theology the name of Harvey Cox has constantly appeared. It would be enough for a theologian to have made a substantial contribution to one development within the period, but Cox has been at the centre of several different movements, not all of them mutually compatible. The history of his own progress during the eight years from 1965 is an interesting commentary also on what has been happening to theology in the period, more particularly the status of religion in Europe and North America.

Cox suddenly emerged on the theological scene in 1965 with his bestseller The Secular City. It may be seen as an appropriation of the work of the later Bonhoeffer. He spent 1962 in Berlin, participated in the Marxist-Christian dialogue of the time and was much influenced by Bonhoeffer’s idea of ‘religionless Christianity’. Perhaps Marx had been right and religion should be superceded. On his return to America he wrote The Secular City. ‘Much of that book represents my attempt to do for the American scene what Bonhoeffer had done for his’. Whether or not Bonhoeffer knew what he meant in writing of religionless Christianity we may doubt if he would have recognised Cox’s book as a continuation of the same theme. The link is rather with Bonhoeffer’s theme of ‘world come of age’. Bonhoeffer was the first Protestant theologian of standing for a generation who dared to put in a good word for the secular world. Under the influence of Barth the secular world was constantly condemned for Promethean tendencies. The enemy of the Nazis, the prisoner of the Gestapo was under no illusions of the reality of evil in the world, but he could see also the strength and achievement of that world.

I once wondered how it would feel to arrive back in Anomabu (home of Aggrey and Robert Gardiner) and be referred to simply as Kodwo’s wife, rather than as the American, wife of ... For I am black, 12 years married, dress in the traditional Ghanaian ‘cloth’, speak a bit of the Fanto language, as a type, have features indistinguishable from my in-laws, have lived and worked for eight years in West and East Africa. Politically, I am firmly aligned with those working towards a genuine economic and political liberation of Black Africa. Nevertheless, for the likes of me in Africa, ‘Black’ does not yet fully mean ‘belonging’.

I’m not sure I understand all the implications of this for the Black or for Africa. During a recent, five-week home-leave in Ghana from Switzerland I thought about it a little in between talking with others of my kind in my kind of dilemma : a being poised between two worlds. Observing trends in Ghana and reflecting on life as I experienced it, I have come to some tentative statements which may interest persons for whom the question of Blacks living in Africa is of any import. The following three conclusions are tentative, as neither Blacks nor Africans claim to have found final answers. They are that: (a) black tourism is a development worthy of consideration for its potential impact on shaping Black/African relationships of the future; (b) for the ‘non-transient’, to discover that the much heralded concept of the African extended family does not yet extend to him is to really begin to make progress in living in Africa; (c) but more positive: because the Black approaches the African not as an inferior, a rival, a subject for exploitation, but as a brother (with all the psychological connotations this presupposes) and he approaches Africa with a sense of belonging, there is the potentiality for working together toward a common good, irrespective of the past.

As the spirit of the age proclaims a new freedom from the traditional sexual ethic, discussion about marriage in the church today runs the risk of becoming bogged down in what are in one sense peripheral issues. Marriage is seen as an institutionalisation of eros, as the expression of a sexual ethic, and the question of any specifically Christian meaning of marriage is lost in ethical discussion.

This is not to imply that the ethical dimension is unimportant; but it is not the only dimension to be considered. The revolt against the late medieval and modern tradition, with its attendant rigidity, should not be allowed to obscure the search for a theology of marriage as a sign of the Kingdom, as a sacrament.

This has been tied to a hard line on the question of divorce and remarriage, to a doctrine of indissolubility that has been seriously questioned in recent years. Even more common perhaps is a pastoral praxis that, while freeing people from the more oppressive features of the old ideology, may also reduce the discussion of marriage as a sacrament to the status of a non-question. In justice it should be pointed out that the defence of an absolute indissolubility has been driven back to the question of sacramentality. In the practice of the modem church, as expressed in the Roman Curia, non-sacramental marriages are not indissoluble. Nor in fact are all sacramental ones; the maze of technicalities involved in this practice often defies the comprehension of the layman.

Consideration of marriage as a sacrament often appears indissolubly linked to this world of the canonists, to a legal structure that is more easily bypassed than challenged. At the same time, questions of sexual ethics retain their relevance against the background of the new praxis as they did against that of the old.

The literary career of Wodehouse almost exactly covered the first three quarters of the present century. Eighty of his titles are in print in these islands today in hard covers published by Barrie & Jenkins, and Penguins usually have about twenty of them in paperback at any given time. ‘It is a striking example of the patience and loyalty of the British public’, as his great master, Conan Doyle, observed of the unflagging popularity of Sherlock Holmes.

It is also a striking example of the power and endurance of Wodehouse’s rapport with his readers. The achievement is in its way more remarkable than that of his master. When Conan Doyle wrote those words at the end of the 1920s, over half of his own literary output had vanished from the bookshops, and Holmes has carried on his lean shoulders anything to have survived in addition to his own cycle. Wodehouse, on the other hand, has never had to depend on Jeeves to sell his other titles. Jeeves and Bertie have been the favourites, but Lord Emsworth, Mr Mulliner, the Oldest Member, Ukridge, the Drones Club, and Psmith—and the vast range of characters limited to one or two novels—have consistently retained their public. There is a story that Evelyn Waugh once asked Graham Greene what he proposed to write next, The End of the Affair having recently appeared. ‘Something about God, I suppose, Greene’?

Evidence abounds of the continuing disenchantment of very many young people with institutional Christianity, while they retain an interest in religion and spirituality. Beyond the Vatican’s Secretariat for non-believers recently announced study, there is little evidence of the Church grasping this fact and examining it in any depth.

Two events in the space of one week recently caused me to dig out of my files material that I prepared some time ago on the religious psychology of mid and late adolescence. The first was a visit to a Christian contemplative community, only loosely connected to an established religious Order, in Sussex. There is nothing fixed or final about the numbers residing there, as they are free to come or go at will, but there are generally between nine and twelve in community. On the day of my visit and participation in their life together, there were ten young men in residence, all between 19 and 30 years of age. This community is under the direction of and revolves around the elderly Anglican priest who set it up some years ago.

The community atmosphere, very noticeable to a visitor, was impressive and seemed to be an ‘overflow’ from the morning and evening hour of movement and meditation together. Later conversation revealed that the majority of these young men, caught up in this contemplative way of life, had no interest in institutional Christianity and no desire to take part in a normal church service.

Two or three days later, as a stimulus for class-room discussion, I conducted a simple survey among the forty-nine fifth formers of the very ordinary County Secondary School in which I teach.

Both the technological and the organic in Solzhenitsyn’s organising imagery seem to propose structures and processes independent of human agency or control; and for Solzhenitsyn’s idea of history, control is a crucial question. The role of the individual within history, the extent to which he can be held responsible or can change his situation, is left unexplained. The imagery of the Great Machine perhaps presupposes a Great Mechanic who originally constructed the device, and indeed when Solzhenitsyn’s technocratic ideology issues into prescriptive injunctions its very substance is a belief in an individual or collective elite who should run society and its institutions; but the technological and structural images are not used in this way. Although one of the intentions of The Gulag Archipelago is to demonstrate a continuity between Lenin and Stalin, to prove the former an architect of later repression, the emphasis in the technological images of history is upon mechanical operations which take place over against the activity of individuals, including that of those people who apparently administer them. Yet the individual is for Solzhenitsyn the absolute subject of history:

The Universe has as many different centres as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a centre of the Universe . . . (G.A., p. 3).

The individual is consequently expected to have moral responsibility and, in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase, ‘civil valour’ (G.A., p. 462), a concept upon which he puts much emphasis although it is ill-defined. He assigns to each of the Russian people some share in blame for allowing the Stalinist crimes to take place.

Melveena McKendrick, in a work recently published on Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age, makes the point that there was during this period of the 16th and 17th centuries no change in the social position of the vast majority of women, that is, those of the rural peasantry, and she then adds:

Initially, I found the throw-away line about the prostitute and the nun quietly amusing, or rather, amusingly sardonic in a low pitch way. The juxtaposition seemed to be sufficiently slightly outrageous to underscore the delicate irony of the order of presentation—prostitute first, nun second, capping it all with the application of the term calling to both. Donnish humour at its best? But, on second thoughts, its clever, quiet and telling effectiveness seemed to me to betray a very bourgeois understanding or misunderstanding of the nature of professional sex, politics and religion. I don’t think Buñuel, Genet or Pasolini would have tried to be so neatly clever about such vital things as prostitution and the religious life. You see, deep down, what is wrong is not the question of coupling the two and regarding them both as vocations, the real trouble is to think for one moment that the lives of these practitioners of the most ancient of female professions run along fixed and prescribed lines. But let’s try and put the question into some sort of perspective.

Any study of any aspect of the life of the historical Jesus is complicated because of the fact that the gospel accounts of his ministry are interpretations and applications of what he did and said rather than straightforward accounts of his life and activity. Add to this the fact that many Christians today seriously question the possibility of miracles and either dismiss them as fables or explain them as the result of Jesus’ extraordinary psychic gifts, and one becomes aware of the difficulty and delicacy of the task of drawing any conclusions about the miracles, about their historicity, and about their place in modern Christianity. Yet the complexity and sensitivity of the topic has not daunted the exegetes, and recent years have given us a constant flow of books and articles on the miracles. The aim of the present essay is not to attempt the impossible task of reviewing this immense body of literature, but to draw attention to some approaches and trends in modem miracle studies and to examine at some length a few of the more recent books. We will pay special attention to the historical questions raised by the miracle stories, and we treat only of the synoptic miracles, omitting those of John which give rise to somewhat different problems.

One of the striking things about the works of recent writers on the miracles is the lessening of emphasis on the apologetic value of the mighty deeds of Jesus. Not that these writers would deny the teaching of Vatican I that the miracles are most sure signs of divine revelation (cf DS 3009). Nor would they despise the assertion of Vatican II that ‘the miracles of Jesus also confirm that the kingdom has arrived on earth’ (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church no. 5). But they do not look upon the miracles as events praeter, extra, or contra naturam which prove the divinity of Jesus and the validity of his claim.

In his recent article ‘Where are the Simple Faithful’? Fr Anthony Archer wrote recently (May 1975) for New Blackfriars : ‘Opening the Church has allowed all sorts of groups to find their inspiration within the Church, for the gospel is a very potent source of new ideas’ (p. 203).

Anyone sufficiently in touch with the actual range of such post- Vatican II Catholic pluralism is aware of the fact that a growing Catholic gay movement is finding its place too on the scene. Impulses of the past few years have been particularly strong in Holland but perhaps even more so in America and Australia, where dignity and acceptance movements have recently joined hands to form an international fellowship of self-accepting gay women and men who profess openly their homosexuality and their Catholicism.

These groups are not so much interested in debate with what they refer to as straight-society. Primarily they are interested in reaching other Catholic homosexuals with their message of self-acceptance and their positive evaluation of responsible sexual relations between gay persons. The very label ‘gay’ is preferred to ‘homosexual’ since it implies explicit awareness of and positive willingness to accept oneself thankfully for what one is, rather than to go on bemoaning one’s fate as second-class citizens in a world of straight values and oppression.

In the early days of anthropology, it was not quite clear whether the new arrival was an infant prodigy, or simply a know-all adolescent. If the claims of the first generations of anthropologists were correct, marvellous keys had been discovered for tracing the prehistory of the family and the origins of religion; but the development of the subject brought about their rejection, though Morgan’s scheme of the evolution of the family was absorbed into the ossified dogmas of Soviet Communism (from which it has by now been quietly dislodged), while Sir James Frazer’s mythology of corn spirits and dying gods not only impressed Freud but gave English-speaking intellectuals their abiding image of traditional religion.

Professional social anthropology meanwhile followed the path of academic respectability, the elaboration of its own methodology and, more particularly, its own academic language, which admirably fulfilled the related functions of revealing its mysteries by successive degrees to the initiated while concealing them from outsiders. Respectability once attained, however, has a way of losing its charm, and we now seem to be on the verge of a new wave of anthropologists as prophets. Dr Roy Willis presents himself as one of the first of the band, with his revelations contained in Man and Beast, the first of a new series, entitled Approaches to Anthropology, under the general editorship of Professor Mary Douglas.

Let it be said at once that Dr Willis is a singularly urbane prophet and his kerygma contains little that menaces doom, though much that stirs up thought.

There is a suggestion in the fourth gospel that the saving lordship of Christ is finally manifest at his lifting up on the cross (cf. John 3.14, 8.28 and 13.32). Paul, in a letter to the Corinthian Church (cf. I Cor. 15.12 ff), proposed the anticipation of the general resurrection in the resurrection of Christ as the climactic moment of Christian belief. The church at Ephesus sang a hymn which celebrated the ascension as the triumphant manifestation of the Christian mystery (cf. I Timothy 3.16). The Apostles’ Creed, following the pattern of the old Roman Creed states that Christ’s glory is most tellingly declared at his return to judge the living and the dead. The credal affirmation here has set a number of theologians considering just how the eschatological judgement is related to the immediate judgement of human beings at their deaths. A deal of attention has been given to relating the future coming of the Son of Man ‘on clouds of glory’ to the promise ‘this day you shall be with me in Paradise’ (Lk. 23.43).

There has, however, been rather less modern discussion of how the belief, expressed in the Constantinopolitan-Nicene Creed, of Christ coming into a kingdom (or a reign) ‘without end’, is to be reconciled with Paul’s eschatological scenario of the Son being at the end subject ‘to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all’ (I Cor. 15.28). Is there, then, one kingdom for the Father and another for the Son? ‘By no means’.

At the time of the Reformation the catechism began to assume a new importance. The rapid diffusion of printed works coincided with the spread of new reforming ideas. Luther had a catechism printed in 1529. This was followed by a Catholic catechism published at Augsburg in 1530. Most of the leading reformers produced similar manuals and Peter Canisius and John of Avila were in the field before the Catechism of the Council of Trent. But catechisms can tell us more than the way in which Protestant differed from Catholic. Not all correligionists agreed about the relative importance of doctrines nor indeed about method. We are reminded of this by the appearance of a new edition of the ‘Commentaries on the Christian Catechism’ by Archbishop Carranza. This work was first published in Antwerp in 1558, put on the Spanish Index of Prohibited Books in 1559 and officially condemned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1576. Four hundred years later in 1972, a new critical edition, with the Imprimatur of the Bishop of Salamanca, was published to commemorate the International Year of the Book.

Bartholomé Carranza, born 1503, was a Dominican of the Province of Castille. He was a consultor to the Inquisition at Valladolid and also censor of books, he attended the first two stages of Trent as one of Charles V’s theologians. At Trent he was a powerful advocate of episcopal residence and his experience at the council gave him first hand contact with religious controversy and the political situation outside Spain.

Before examining Mr Allen’s particular criticisms of the CIIR Comment 19 on the Middle East, it is necessary first to dispel some of his misconceptions about the Catholic Institute. Through its regular newsbrief Comment CIIR gives the background to particular situations, usually international in character and examines them in the light of Catholic social teaching and values. In this way CIIR attempts to bring to the attention of the Catholic community in this country international issues of justice and peace which are quite properly their concern. Where the role of the Catholic Church is integral to the discussion, this is examined —for example, recent Comments on Portuguese Africa, Brazil and Chile. It is true that in Comment we do not quote extensively from official Church sources; rather we make references to these as necessary. As a Catholic body, we give a Catholic view, but it is only a Catholic view. Perhaps Mr Allen would care to specify where he feels the Comment is uncatholic or unchristian?

Quoting from an article in the Tablet of 15th June 1974, Mr Allen criticises our ‘selective approach to complex problems’. The article went on to say :

It seems that CIIR is being criticised not for what it does say but rather for what it has not. Whilst some may consider it a valid criticism of the CIIR that in recent years it has not produced anything on the persecution of Christians in communist countries, such criticism in no way invalidates what it has already said on Northern Ireland, Portugal or the Middle East.