I The Holy See’s critique of liberation theology

In its document Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’ the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith not only accepts but welcomes the advent of a ‘theology of liberation’, seen as a theological exploration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a ‘message of liberty’ and as ‘liberating power’. The CDF finds fault, therefore, not with the project but with its execution, not with liberation theology as such but with the structure and content of a significant proportion of the liberation theology currently being written. Just how much a significant proportion might be is impossible to determine. On the one hand, some writings of the more extreme members of the school offer the most complete textual confirmation of the portrait by the CDF. Thus in a work put into English in 1977 we read that a theology which accepts the truth of historical materialism (i.e. classical Marxism) will ‘assume his (Marx’s) theory completely in order to see what sort of faith , if any, is possible on that basis’. A moderate liberationist, Gustavo Gutierrez, admits in the preface to a work by a more radicalised colleague thast it would be ‘disingenuous’ to deny the danger of reductionism of just the kind now identified by the CDF. On the other hand, the genre of the document is not textual description so much as logical or conceptual projection. That is, it appears to be concerned with the end-state to which a consistent application of the principles involved in current liberation theology would lead, rather than with a description of a representative mean in the present state of liberation theology.

In the late 1960s, American women and women throughout the world began to awaken to the fact that the victories of women’s rights to work, to vote and to be educated had not solved the problem of women’s inequality. A silent problem was gnawing away at women of the middle classes in industrialized nations, a problem “without a name” as Betty Friedan put it in her pioneering book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1962. In the 1950s all the media of culture and socialization had been directed toward convincing women that their place was in the home, that full-time child-raising and domesticity was their highest vocation. The women who had accepted the “feminine mystique” felt increasingly entrapped and stifled.

At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement were raising American consciousness about the structures of social oppression. Many young women responded enthusiastically to the call to win equality for Black Americans and to end the war in southeast Asia, only to find themselves treated as second-class citizens by their male colleagues, expected to be sexually available, to do the rote labor of the movement, but not to make the real decision. Out of these various forms of discontent, an explosion was gradually building, the explosion of a new movement for women’s liberation.

Betty Friedan had called women to seize their discontent by leaving their exclusive homemaking roles, returning to school for further education and seeking interesting jobs. Entrance into the public world of work was to be the panacea. But many women already suspected that this was not enough; that the world of work was also a place where women were marginalized and exploited.

The first thing that has to be said is that we are not just talking about a single country a long way off. What is sobering and startling in South Africa is the realization that it is a sort of caricature of the whole of our world— ‘like everywhere else, only more so’. The world in focus, perhaps: because here you see the proximity of lavish overconsumption and starvation, freedom and slavery, massive military investment and plain human need. Here you can see the link between our wealth and their poverty. A few of the intermediate stages that usually cushion us from this realization are missing, so that poverty appears in its naked causal connection with the aggressive greed of a minority. It is impossible there not to see poverty as what is created by the violence of the few against the many in a situation of a great natural wealth of resources. In some of the so-called native ‘homelands’ in South Africa, where populations are forcibly shifted from their existing locations, something between one-fifth and one-third of black children die before they are five years old. They do not die by accident, though they die of ‘natural’ causes: they die because decisions have been taken which mean that they are exposed to disease and malnutrition endemic in these areas, far from real medical care. They die because of Dr. Piet Koornhof, the astonishingly titled Minister for Co-operation and Development. That will sound shocking; though the real shock is to grasp that children there and elsewhere in Africa or in Asia or Central America also die because of us, because of the electors of our governments.

The report recently published by a study group for the Church of Scotland on the Motherhood of God for discussion at the Church’s General Assembly caused quite a stir in the popular press, and this reaction, no doubt, had a part to play in setting the atmosphere for the reception of the report at the Assembly itself. However, that there should be such a reaction would seem to reflect the patriarchal nature of the society we live in rather than a resurgence of religious fervour, since I would doubt that the feelings of horror and ridicule expressed came in each case from a devout church-goer.

Despite the trivialisation of the report by the popular press and its subsequent dismissal by the General Assembly, this reaction as a whole should be welcomed by theologians and believers alike, and those who produced the report should not be upset by it, because confrontation and controversy are at the heart of the Christian gospel and the tradition of the Church. From the beginning the preaching of the gospel encountered intransigence and resistance to change. St. Paul himself expressed anguish at the seemingly impossible task of preaching the concept of a crucified God, ‘the scandal of the cross’, which he describes as, ‘a stumbling block to Jews and folly to gentiles’ (I Cor. 1:23). But without that leap into new territory the Christian message would have died with the first apostles. This does not mean that the Church must change for change’s sake, but only that it is through confrontation with new concepts that we are forced to study and reflect on our present position.

The model of the bourgeois or Victorian family that received its idealized expression in the 19th century has its roots in complex processes of socioeconomic and cultural changes going back to the late medieval period. It was a long time before this type of family really became standard or normative for most people in Western societies, and it has remained more an ideal than an actuality for many people. For well into the 18th century, and even later in rural and frontier areas, other types of family patterns still predominated. For peasant and farming families in Europe and America, the home continued to be a workshop where a variety of goods used by the family were produced. The family members had little private space, for most of the house was taken up by the workshop where goods were created. Farm animals might live in sheds under the rooms where the family lived, a practice that still continues in peasant families today. Grandparents, unmarried aunts and uncles, apprentices and other dependents quite often swelled the ranks of persons living in a household.

Aristocratic families also did not correspond to the modern nuclear family type. In 18th century palaces a large court of retainers dwelt in attendance. Still sometimes legitimate and illigitimate children of a great noble, as well as the children of servants, lived together. Servants often slept in the same rooms as their masters or outside in the halls. Functions that we think of as intimate and private, such as a great magnate’s eating or going to bed, were public events.

During the past twenty years a massive literature has grown up on the implications for the life of the Roman Catholic Church of modern social changes and shifts in theological emphasis legitimated by the Second Vatican Council. Nevertheless, it would be useful to try to summarize from a sociological standpoint the overall effect of those changes and shifts in the role of the parochial clergy of England and Wales and on their relationship with the laity.

The Roman Catholic community in these countries broadly can be said to comprise six distinct strands in terms of social origins and cultural heritage. First of all there is the largely aristocratic and upper middle class strand, derived from the recusant gentry, in decline since the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850. The second strand consists of a significant infusion of converts. The third, by far the most important numerically, is the mass of Irish immigrants over the past century and a half. About the size and significance of the last three strands we know remarkably little in any detail: Catholic refugees arriving in the 1930s and 1940s from Eastern Europe (especially Poland), and Catholic migrant workers and their families from the Mediterranean countries and from the Caribbean.

Of these various strands, the most significant from the point of view of the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales as a significant religious and political force is undoubtedly the Irish strand.

English theology is notoriously ‘lop-sided’. In the historical disciplines, it has an excellent record of intelligent and discriminating scholarship. But, when attention shifts from what was once said and done in the name of Christianity to what might be said or done today, matters are either handed over to the philosopher (whose admirable and indispensable preoccupation with formal and linguistic considerations is no guarantee of competence to perform this task) or else are tackled at a level which, according to the standards operative in cognate ‘secular’ disciplines—from aesthetics and literary criticism to social and political theory—is so strikingly amateurish as to render it hardly surprising that theology plays little part in the conversation of the culture. In this naughty world, Professor Sykes has performed an excellent deed. The Identity of Christianity is a learned, vigorous and original reconstruction of some perennial problems: problems which found particular focus, in the nineteenth century, in discussion of the ‘essence’ of Christianity.

Sykes has shifted the theme from ‘essence’ to ‘identity’ partly to counter the widespread but unwarranted suspicion that an ‘enquiry into what makes Christianity Christianity’ (p.3) is likely to be reductionist in character, and partly because his discovery of the importance of Newman’s work for the ‘elucidation of what was at stake’ helped him to see how mistaken was the equally widespread view that the issues under consideration are of central moment only to Protestant Christians.

In my work as a hospital chaplain I listen to many people whose daily life has been drastically interrupted by some kind of unexpected event—not always an illness— so that they have been obliged to stand back and try to take stock of all the things that have happened to them over the years. These people often say things which reveal the important part played by ritual in their lives, things like “I was married at St. So-and-So’s”, or “I remember being confirmed at St. Somewhere-else’s”. They may never have been to these churches again—most probably they have not in fact, or at least only rarely—but they remember what took place on these occasions, what it meant to them and how they felt about it. Now, when they look back, these things at least make sense. Sometimes, perhaps they are the only things that do make sense. All the meaning and purpose of a life has become attached to a particular occasion associated with a church service that they probably have not thought about for years. You could say that for them at this juncture in their lives the possibility of meaning only really exists at all because of that morning at St. So-and- So’s. You could also say that nowadays with some of our strong-minded theologically rigorous clergy they probably wouldn’t even have had that!

Christian ritual has suffered attack from several directions, notably theology, psychopathology and anthropology. Protestant theologians in particular have regarded ritual as an idolatrous attempt on the part of men and women to reach God by means of human techniques and on human initiative.

I do not sing

Of angel fair or damosel That leans athwart a painted sky;

My little verses only tell

How human beings live and die And labour as the years go by.

I do not sing

Of plaster saints or jealous gods,

But of little ones I know,

Who paint their cheeks or bear their hods Because they live in doing so Their hapless life on earth below.

Patrick Macgill Songs of the Dead End

Patrick Macgill (1889—1962), the Donegal poet and novelist, was an articulate spokesman for a suppressed, inarticulate migrant workforce. He is also effectively an important voice of the sensitive layman in a clericalised church around the turn of the century. To give rather than to acquire is his message; to give freely and to become truly liberated is his ideal of the Church which he loved to hate: ‘If a man is born to the ould ancient faith he’ll never lose it’, it will always be there, (1918 : 200). That tension between the authoritarian clergy and the layman runs through his work. The preoccupation with sexual morality and the only moral issue runs through his scorn for that lace-curtain respectability of his time. His class-consciousness is remarkable in early twentieth-century Catholic writing, when many churches seemed to have lost their sense of personal involvement with the poor as people rather than objects of charity. That, for Macgill was the ultimate pornography. Himself a navvy in Scotland, he knew the bitter experience of the emigrant Irish far removed from the organisational church, from the main stream of secular life and effective personal relationships, and so from God.

Life stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending. Our sense of the ending depends on our basic faith concerning the ultimate meaning and value of our life story. The entire life story of Jesus Christ and its particular ending in the resurrection equips Christian faith with its sense of the ending of both our individual life stories and of the universal story that is history. The resurrection expresses the belief that the Storyteller’s Creator Spiritus of life-giving love, which enabled Jesus Christ to find his true story, also enables us to find our true stories with the same love that survives death in the resurrection of the just.

The story of the Last Judgment, which also expresses faith’s sense of an ending, implies that the love which survives death is a responsible love. We are responsible for the incipient life stories that we have gratuitously received; and we are responsible for finding our true stories in virtue of the life-giving love that we have received. Our freedom is such that we are not necessarily predetermined by the gift of the life-giving love to the finding of our true story. What has been freely received may be freely rejected.

A paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984

In his Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, John Wesley spoke of faith as follows:

In Wesley’s mind faith is a ‘spiritual sense’ which enables the believer to perceive a reality beyond the scope of the non-believer restricted to the ‘natural’ senses. Faith, Wesley emphasises, is not a human choice but a gift of God. Those lacking this gift may no more understand what it means to have faith, than those lacking the gift of sight may understand what it means to see. (Note, incidentally, that in this article I am using ‘faith in’ God and ‘belief in’ God as interchangeable terms, and talk of ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’ as if there was no such thing as ‘half-belief’.)

The model of perception, when used in this way to explain the nature of religious belief, tends to make of believers a privileged group who may have only a limited dialogue with the ‘blind’. Indeed, it is difficult to see what sort of discussion would be possible between believer and unbeliever as to why one should believe.

What makes a holy place holy? This is the question that soon presents itself to the Christian visiting the ‘Holy Land’. Wherever one goes, whether it be among the many sites in and around Jerusalem itself, or whether one travels through the countryside that Jesus must have looked on and walked over, one soon realises that some sites are more ‘authentic’ than others, and piety assumes many different forms. There is the old lady who caresses the stone on which, ostensibly, Jesus’ body was prepared for burial, then transferring whatever power she considers it has by going through the motions of anointing her own body. At the other extreme is the pilgrim, scandalised by the superstition and credulousness of such simple faith and by the unscrupulous behaviour of the clerical custodians in encouraging such behaviour, who seeks refuge in a less earthly spirituality which effectively holds itself aloof from the holy places he visits. If one feels a stranger in both camps then one has to either make excuses for the situation or make sense of it.

One can adopt the theological snobbery of the ‘well-informed Christian’ who accepts that that sort of demonstrative behaviour is fine and perhaps even a good thing for simple (not to say gullible) people whose only contact with the post-Vatican II Church is that brand of piety. Yet these same critics of the ‘simple faithful’ can offer their own equally unquestioning and questionable explanation of why they visit the holy places by bringing into play some theological formula.

It was easy to anticipate that there would be some criticisms of Margaret Hebblethwaite’s widely praised book “Motherhood and God” from conservative quarters, and what the criticism would be. And our publishing, in our last issue, of Deborah F. Middleton’s article “God as Mother—a necessary debate” has brought us letters from readers arguing that all who discern “motherhood” in God must be mistaken. But questions about Margaret Hebblethwaite’s book have not come solely from the right. Here Mary Pepper, one of the organizers of Christian Women’s Information and Resources (CWIRES), criticizes the book from a feminist perspective and the author replies. We shall be publishing a review which looks at the book from yet another perspective later.

Editor.

The publication of Motherhood and God by Margaret Hebblethwaite happened just as the Church of Scotland Study Group presented its controversial report on The Motherhood of God. So the book was launched amid the turbulence of dispute within the Scottish Church, evidence that the questions around gender and theology can no longer be ignored. The report, cautiously and reasonably, gives scriptural justification for describing God as Mother, but a minority of the group felt unable to agree that God might be properly addressed as Mother. (It was the outcry over a woman praying ‘Dear Mother God’ that caused the setting up of the Study Group.)

But in her very readable book, ‘about finding God in motherhood and motherhood in God’, Margaret Hebblethwaite has no difficulty at all.

“Fido is wagging his tail in heaven to-night”. According to Evelyn Waugh, this was the greeting sent out from Forest Lawn to the owners on the anniversaries of their pets buried in the cemetrey. No one, of course, asked if the owners would also deserve a place in heaven if they had killed their dogs by overfeeding or whether the latter would have the joy of interrupting the heavenly choirs by their barking. But the false assumption behind this attitude was perhaps less the hope of reunion with animal friends than the idea of a heaven where we shall all congregate cosily with our pets and former neighbours. If some of us do not relish the prospect of an eternal menagerie, can we nevertheless in all charity welcome the company of human beings who never hurt us but often threaten to bore us to death?

Even from traditional theology we get the impression that we shall not be troubled with bores, but equally that our joy in the beatific vision will be solitary and even then frustrated by the delay in the restoration of the body or by a reunion with the soul to which it will be no more than a glorified appendage. We look for the restoration of the whole personality, redeemed in Christ and therefore in Christ’s company and in the company of those we have loved on earth. The lonely person in particular asks if the affection of his or her pet, expressed in an outstretched paw, in a purring response, is not somehow transfigured also and not forever extinguished.

In the United States it was the year 1921 that marked the culmination of the era of Victorian feminism. Women finally won the right to vote that gave them the official status of public citizens in the American Republic, after an eighty-eight year struggle that began in the 1840s with the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. But this culmination of Victorian feminism also marked its rapid demise as well. The Victorian domestic culture of female moral superiority and sisterly bonding gave way to the more eroticized world of the 1920s. The daughters of the suffragettes became the flappers of the “Roaring Twenties”, who were embarrassed by the moralistic culture of their mothers, with their large hats and long white dresses. Women, it seemed, had won access to the male promised land of education, politics and business, and even the male world of sexual pleasure, and now it was only a question of entering into and taking possession of it.

I: Defender of the Indians or Satan’s tool?

In his De procuranda indorum salute (1589) the Spanish Jesuit, José de Acosta, a former provincial of his order in Peru, lamented that nowadays the gospel and war were all too closely associated. He was at pains to reject proposals mooted by a fellow Jesuit that Spain should invade China so as to bring that great empire into the fold of the Catholic Church. Not that Acosta was a pacifist, since he defended the right of a Christian Prince to establish forts in heathen territory for the protection of trade and the preaching of the gospel. Moreover, in regions like Amazonia, inhabited by mere savages without any law, king or fixed abode, there was a positive duty to introduce some form of political order so that the natives could be taught the elements of civility and Christianity. Any resistance to this imposition of a protectorate could be justly quelled by force of arms, albeit applied with paternal firmness. As for the justice of the previous conquest of the relatively advanced kingdoms of the Incas and Aztecs, Acosta simply counselled a closure of debate, arguing that with no chance of restitution or restoration, any further discussion of the question merely served to provoke dissension between the spiritual and temporal authorities.

Recently there has been considerable discussion in Christian circles about the relationship between Christianity and the world religions. Traditionally Christians have insisted that anyone outside the Church cannot be saved. To quote a classic instance of this view, the Council of Florence in 1483-45 declared that: ‘no one remaining outside the Catholic Church, not just pagans but also Jews or heretics or schismatics, can become partakers of eternal life: but they will go to everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. Unless before the end of life they are joined to the Church’.

Increasingly, however, for many this view has seemed highly improbable in the light of contact with other faiths. An important document issued by the Catholic Church in 1965 (Nostra Aetate) for example declared that the truth which enlightens every man is reflected also in non-Christian religions. Nevertheless while recognising the value of other religions, this declaration maintains that the Christian is at the same time under the obligation to preach that Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

The tool of social analysis

Power has become a central concept in the analysis of political and social institutions. Its newly-found utility in part stems from the growth of Marxist analysis, which so many academics in the social sciences who are not necessarily Marxists have accepted to various degrees.

Until recently, the more common concept was authority—an idea that was once popular particularly amongst political theorists. Authority as an analytical tool has ceased to have pride of place because of its abstract nature and ideological overtones. The tendency today is to speak of power structures, not authority structures. Authority exists but it can be overthrown by another authority. The question is not so much the nature of the authorities but the fact that one is able to vanquish the other. How is the triumph achieved? The answer is simply that one authority has more power than the other and thus overcomes it. The concept of authority is still referred to and continues to be valuable, but the model of power is more useful, since it is that of a conflict in which sheer strength wins the day. Power implies opposition and final triumph. That is what politics is about. Some would see the whole of history as a power struggle. As Lenin has written: ‘Great questions in the life of nations are settled only by force.’

The extensive use now made of the concept of power has brought with it the problems of definition, and within the social sciences the issue virtually constitutes a subject in itself.