For most Catholics, a prayer meeting is a new and perhaps disturbing experience. However, in recent years an increasing number of Catholics have been meeting to pray together, in silence or in spoken prayer as they feel led by the Spirit; so it may be useful, for both enthusiasts and critics, to consider in general terms the advantages, objectives and principles of prayer meetings, and to face frankly the dangers and possible errors to which they are liable.

The basic principle of group prayer is the teaching of our Lord, that ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in their midst’ (Matt. 18, 20), and that ‘if two of you agree about anything on earth in prayer, it shall be granted’ (18, 19). For we are together the Body of Christ, and as such ‘members of one another’ (Eph. 4, 25). As Christians, we belong together; it is therefore natural and proper that we should exercise our most specifically Christian privilege of prayer together. This is what much of the recent liturgical renewal has been about.

Group prayer obviously falls into two kinds: formal, liturgical prayer, and spontaneous, free prayer. Originally, of course, these two were not separate. Even the Eucharistic Prayer, the Canon of the Mass, was originally extemporized by the celebrant. And it is clear that in the worship of the early Church the whole assembly would take part in various ways (except perhaps the women—and there St Paul may have been dealing with the particular situation!). Whether we shall ever return to this, or even whether it would be a good thing to return to this, I do not know. In any case, our situation is different, and we do have to distinguish between set prayer and spontaneous prayer.

The question of Anglican orders is often thought to be a mere side issue in the dialogue between Canterbury and Rome. In one sense this is true: even were Rome to recognize the validity of Anglican orders, it would not bring about reunion, as the example of the Orthodox clearly shows. Yet in another sense the question is important; for it involves nothing less than the recognition by Catholics of the true ecclesial character of the Anglican Communion. It was recognition of this fact which led the editor of this journal to commission a full-length review article of the writer’s Stewards of the Lord and to select Fr John Coventry, S.J., one of England’s leading Catholic ecumenists, for this important task. The present writer is honoured by this selection and is happy to respond to the editor’s offer of space for a reply. The review article unhappily contains serious misunderstandings as well as misrepresentations of the book’s argument. These make a reply essential—not in any spirit of personal self-defence, but in the interest of the issue itself.

Last year the largest aid budget in the world was steered through the American Congress—yet it was the smallest budget since America began giving aid twenty-three years ago. But perhaps this is no cause for alarm. Consider the following vignettes.

• Washington. December 18th, 1969 (U.P.I.). ‘Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield said that the foreign aid programme had lost its original purpose and he would oppose it. “Foreign Aid is no longer an aid programme. It’s a programme for the benefit of American business”, Senator Mansfield said at a news conference. He added, it was no longer being used for the humanitarian precepts (sic) for which it was established.’

• Washington. June 7th, 1970 (A.P.). ‘U.S. Foreign Aid Chief John Hannah acknowledged today that the U.S. aid programme is being used as a cover for C.I.A. operations in Laos.’

The lady in Muriel Spark’s latest novel, eagerly looking out for her murderer, was surely an anthropologist manquée. For one element in the anthropologist’s complex fate is the dialectical compulsion to achieve the synthesis of contraries. The anthropologist’s charter— the cohesiveness and interpretability of all the works of social man— is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment surely; yet this volume suggests that it is in the very area where the hidden and the hateful come nearest to receiving the guilty approval of social man that anthropologists can do their finest work, marked by that passionate rationality and clear-eyed empathy which do at times reward painstaking research and patient reading. It is true that the best essays are by historians, or by anthropologists using history to gain a wider range; but the historians, Professor Norman Cohn, Mr Peter Brown, Dr Alan Macfarlane, and Mr Keith Thomas, have adopted the anthropological approach, which examines the interplay of ideology and institution, rather than work in the historian’s tradition of the placing of men in their milieu.

This collection, then, dedicated to exploring the dark margin of society’s self-consciousness, is intended as a commemoration of Professor Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the A'zande. Now this is one of the classics of anthropology in more than one sense. The ease of style depends on the extreme clarity of the underlying thought, and this in turn is the fruit of the prolonged, patient absorbing of an enormous mass of material.

Christians are accused of discounting human suffering. Catholics are charged with increasing people’s sufferings in order to keep the rules of the Church, sometimes with regarding suffering as a just punishment, and even with considering it as something good and desirable in itself. In addition, your profession and mine are closely and continually connected with suffering in a variety of forms, and while on occasion we may be forgiven for seeing life in terms of little else, the possibility of this one-sided view at least prevents us from evading the fact that there is a great deal of suffering in ordinary life and that as both Christians and professionals we are compelled to think seriously of it.

Suppose we begin with this idea of suffering as a punishment, or a judgment, or a visitation of divine wrath. It is not uncommon to meet people who regard their sufferings as a judgment, and who gloomily go further and say that not only is God punishing them, but he is quite right to do so.

The only way to find out about the experience of a prayer meeting is obviously to take part; all I can do in these pages is to drop a few hints, in the hope that they will stir a chord or two, so that something will get across.

People sometimes talk as if prayer were a purely human act; but this is not Christian doctrine. Prayer is the act of the believer, the one who says T live now not I but Christ’ (Gal. 2, 20). It is only in Spirit and Truth that we can offer prayer to the Father (John 4, 23). It is because Christ prays, that we, in the same Spirit, can pray. Prayer is a divine activity in which we, by grace, participate. (On all this, see Herbert McCabe’s very lucid account in Doctrine and Life, August 1970.) It is always ‘the Spirit and the Bride’ who prays (cf. Apoc. 22, 17); we can only pray because God himself gives us prayer (as the Lord taught St Catherine expressly). All prayer, in so far as it is true prayer, is ‘infused’; the contemplative is the one who knows it by experience. In our prayer groups, therefore, we aim to pray with the prayer that God himself gives us.

Now as we become more and more sanctified, our prayer too becomes more and more attuned to the prayer of Christ. That is what we aspire to. But we must avoid two antithetical traps. On the one hand, we must not assume forthwith that anything we utter at a prayer meeting is automatically underwritten by God; we may on occasion get a ‘witness’ of some kind to assure us that our prayer is truly willed by him, but that is a different matter. The other trap is to sit and wait until God actually forces something out of us. Dom John Chapman used to reiterate: ‘Pray as you can, not as you can’t.’ We must start where we are. There may be a great gulf set between our ‘own’ prayer and that of the Spirit, but both are important.

In a letter dated 15th July of this year and released to the public one week later, Pope Paul, writing to Cardinal Jean Villot, head of the Vatican Secretariat of State, announced the foundation of a new pontifical body, of which the cardinal would be the first president. To give it its official title, the new agency is the Pontifical Council ‘Cor Unum’ for Promoting Human and Christian Development. Its purpose is to ‘co-ordinate the energies and undertakings of all Catholic organizations’ engaged in emergency relief and development funding.

The project had first been made known beyond the confines of upper-level Secretariat of State circles some seven weeks earlier. From various sources the following sketch of background moves can can be made out. The story seems worth telling in view of one of the major objections that was to be voiced later against the whole project: the unilateral action of the Vatican in a matter that affects the whole Catholic Church, most especially all those persons directly involved in the collection and distribution of relief and development funds.

On 26th May, Cardinal Villot put his signature to approximately 100 copies of a 3-page document. The same day, Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, Under-Secretary of State, summoned a number of persons to see him; among them was Mons. Jean Rodhain, president of Caritas Internationalis. He spoke to them not in a group but one after the other, informing them of the content of Cardinal Villot’s letter.

With all the trappings of cloak-and-dagger international intrigue, Cardinal Villot’s letter was not to be sent to its addressees by mail: a team of envoys fanned out to deliver it in person. They travelled to Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, the United States, and elsewhere. They laid special stress on the confidential nature of the proceedings and the document.

The current spate of writings on the Christian attitude to divorce is remarkable for its almost complete unanimity in allowing for the possibility of dissolving the marriage bond. Moreover, there seems to be widespread belief that it is not only possible but highly desirable, if not desperately necessary, for the Catholic Church to change her discipline in this matter. Such a change would indeed be a drastic reversal of belief and practice, yet biblical and historical research indicates that the New Testament doctrine is not without its difficulties and that there was in fact toleration of divorce in the early Church both in the writings of certain Fathers and in the practical discipline of particular Churches. Many have concluded that these facts make it evident that the Church has more power in dissolving marriages than it exercises at present.

Whilst there is this frequent conclusion, authors nevertheless arrive at it by different routes. Some argue that our Lord’s teaching was meant as an ideal rather than a law; some hold that the Church, in exercising the power of the keys in this matter, is not a mere human authority, but that she is using divine power, hence it is not man who ‘puts asunder’ the marriage bond, but God acting through his Church; others, again, seem to base their case on the spirit of compassion for human imperfection which was such a marked aspect of Christ’s dealings with sinful man. These opinions may or may not assist the authorities concerned in their task of reviewing marriage legislation in Canon Law. They will wish to adhere with the utmost loyalty to the evangelical value proposed by Christ in his teaching on marriage and they will look for a clear biblical precedent before departing from the present position. For whatever else may be said about the Church’s marriage laws, they have enabled her to bear witness to the world that marriage is a union forged between man and woman by God himself, and man may not sunder it.

‘Speak that I may see thee’—a line from one of Ben Jonson’s plays serves to remind us that in language we reveal ourselves in a quite distinctive way. And perhaps nowhere is language more sharply revelatory than in those phrases which fall almost automatically from our lips, routine verbal gestures scarcely attended to.

I suppose, for the average layman, the most sustained theological discourse that he hears exists in the weekly sermon. Even with that general kind of context in mind, there would seem to have grown up in the last few years two kinds of vocabularies which stand in an interesting relationship to each other. As we look at the lists vertically we can see two quite distinct theological profiles—some features of more consequence than others, but taken together, an interesting whole.

To move away from a dogmatic allegiance, from a commitment to a worked-out system of beliefs, is not unusual today; nor is it unusual, having done this, to retain a profound conviction about the power and richness of the tradition underlying the theology. Many people can no longer assent to Christian theology—not only to the theology they have known, but to any theological system—and yet they may still want to read the Bible and other Christian literature, and, perhaps, to participate in the liturgy. From an older and more established viewpoint their position is curious, even dishonest, for it seems an evasion of the responsibilities of belief and commitment that the Bible and the liturgy are all about. To say this often enough, however, is to provoke an answering attitude which remarks, in tones of pragmatic commonsense, that there is nothing wrong in this at all, for surely the Bible is to be read and the liturgy attended; if the Bible is being read and the liturgy is being attended, then all is well; for the fact of the continuing response not being tied automatically to a dogmatic allegiance does not in itself invalidate the response—whether it does or not is a question which directs attention to the kinds of response which the Bible and the liturgy themselves seem to demand. And to put it like that is to pose not a theological, but a critical, question.

To recognize the question thus is to move much nearer to the non-dogmatic person who isn’t starting out with a set of preconceptions called beliefs. That this person continues to attend to the Bible and the liturgy should suggest areas of meaning which the predominant orthodoxies have not taken into account, but of course the very perplexity of established dogmatism at the sight of this new type of reader or participant comes from an inability to entertain this possibility: what the Bible and the liturgy mean is what theology says they mean—surely there is nothing else! To this point of view the newer type of response is necessarily meaningless.

It is an interesting exercise to trace the development in the character of Satan that takes place in the Old Testament. In the earlier strands himself, while in the later strands, when the problem of evil had become more acute in the experience of the nation and of the writers concerned, the evil and suffering inflicted upon them is attributed to supernatural beings other than Yahweh. By the time of Jesus this ‘failure of nerve’ had resulted in a complex demonology and satanology as men were borne down by this ‘cosmic totalitarianism’. In the Old Testament itself there are comparatively few allusions, let alone direct references, to hostile evil powers; a fact that is made more surprising when considered against the background provided by the demon-riddled world of Mesopotamia. Nevertheless we see this development beginning and growing. In this respect the figure of Satan is of great interest because in the role ascribed to him we have the clearest example of a development which begins with his work as ‘adversary’ and member of the heavenly council and builds up through clearly discernible stages to a supernatural enemy of God and man who organizes a kingdom of evil in opposition to God.

The conception of Satan as an individual and superhuman power occupies but a small space in the literature of the Old Testament. From the relevant references we gather that he in no sense fulfilled the role of the evil and subversive power ascribed to him in later Jewish literature.

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’.

In a previous article, we were considering the Pentecostal doctrine of the ‘baptism in the Spirit’, and concluded that it all really belongs to the full New Testament understanding of baptism, of what it is to be a Christian at all. Baptism should be—indeed (so far as the evidence shows) clearly was—a real spiritual turning point, leading a person into a whole new world of experience, with its own canons of understanding and behaviour, its own distinctive principles of action, moral and charismatic. We saw that there was an indissoluble complex of faith in the exalted Christ, metanoia (conversion, new heart), renunciation of Satan the Prince of this world (dropping out, apotaxis), the experience of the Spirit of God ‘who explores even the hidden things of God’, who ‘convicts the world’, who ‘leads us into all truth’.

We then had to admit the fact that this is not, generally, our experience of being baptized, and saw that the Pentecostal theory is one way of coping with this situation, though one that we cannot follow, as such. I shall now mention various other ways, and, with the theological basis thus broadened, shall attempt some theological and practical synthesis, showing how I think we can learn much from the Pentecostals, without betraying anything that the Church has always held dear.

Already in the New Testament we find some important guidelines. For instance, there is a very significant shift between Matthew and Mark. For Matthew, faith is a key concept, closely tied to his concluding scene, the exaltation of Jesus. The question Jesus asks is, ‘Do you believe that I can do this?’ (9, 28). The answer must be, simply and totally, ‘Yes, Lord’, an answer that entails a radical abandonment of care, a total upheaval of the normal procedures of social life.

Until the publication last year of the Motu Proprio and the Directory by the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales mixed marriages looked very different to different people. It depended where you stood. In fact there can be few states of life which appeared so different according to viewpoint.

If you were an average Roman Catholic priest or bishop brought up in the One True Church with a firm Catholic tradition, they were a major problem. More than half your marriages were mixed and the majority of the non-Catholic partners were merely nominal Christians. One of your primary concerns must have been that the Catholic partner continued to practise his or her faith and the children were brought up as Catholics. The Catholic Church in this country has been the only major Church which has increased in numbers in recent years, and, apart from the Irish immigration, the children of mixed marriages have probably accounted for the largest part of this increase.

If you were an average Anglican priest or bishop brought up in a firm Anglican tradition, mixed marriages with Roman Catholics were a minor, but very sharp, problem. You came across few of them where the Roman Catholic practised his religion, but the ones you did meet showed that ‘One True Church of Christ’ at its most intransigent, intolerant of the conscience of the Anglican partner. You were tempted to be as intolerant in return, leaving the couple as bewildered and unhappy pawns of a different colour trying to make love in the middle of an ecclesiastical game of chess.