It is embarrassing to utter a screaming banality in public: yet love, in all candour, is what the Catholic Church, to say nothing of the world in general, does desperately need. Think of a Christian. Then of Christians as a group. Busy. Long-suffering. Self-effacing. Can you think of them making little sacrifices for one another? Of course. Or perhaps laying down their lives for their brethren? Yes, again. Some of them at least. But do you think of them unzipped and uninhibited, actually loving each other? Ah, well now. . . . Auch unter ihnen sind Helden; viele von ihnen litten zuviel-: so wollen sie andre leiden machen. Amen, Zarathustra.

A French magazine carried out a survey among its readers (Catholics, nearly all of them) on birth control: What the readers thought or did about it, what they thought the Church in general should do about it. What is to the point here is not that the views expressed showed wide divergence, nor even that they revealed such a mass of human suffering:

Such is the meeting of Adrian Leverkühn, the demonic composer of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, with the Devil, who has come to make the traditional bargain for a soul.

It is not by accident that Adrian Leverkühn is reading Kierkegaard’s essay on Mozart’s Don Juan in Either/Or. We might even hazard a guess as to which lines Leverkühn was reading when the Devil appeared:

It must be obvious that no theme of traditional theology requires a new airing in the atmosphere of aggiornamento more than that of the papacy and its place in the Church. Ultimately this is a task for the professional theologian but one who could, in Karl Barth’s words ‘… take history seriously as a force outside himself and which spoke to him with authority’. For this to be so, the historian, through whom history speaks if it speaks at all, must do some spade work. It is natural for theologians to suppose that since the data of their study are eternal verities or eternal falsehoods, then the theses they present are absolutely, once and for all, true or false. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that however absolute the central concerns of theologians are, there are very important areas of their study in which a radical relativism is called for.

Let us take for example the theology of the eucharist. In an important sense, it is the study of the relationship between bread and wine, disposed within a certain ritual, and the flesh and blood of Christ. What could be more direct and simple, more suitable for questions answerable with a flat yes or no than this study? But these questions must be asked in terms of human language, that is they must be made intelligible in a human activity peculiarly prone to changes of meaning and peculiarly liable to quite remarkable expansion. For centuries it seemed that questions about the eucharist could only be asked in the language of Aristotle’s metaphysics.

Not long ago different branches of the Church seemed to be univocally associated with certain translations of the Biblical text: Protestantism with the King James Version, Roman Catholicism with the Vulgate and, less centrally, with the Douai Version. Doctrine could be immediately referred to a single standard and official translation. This older situation has in recent years quite suddenly dissolved, and no one quite knows what will take its place. It is far from clear that new translations can or should come to occupy the position which the older ones had. For one thing, there are too many of them, with still more to come, and the search for finality would seem to be an infinite regress. One hears that modern scholarship is solving age-old problems, and this is partly true; but it is also increasing the complexity of factors which have to be taken into account and thus (I suspect) making more remote the possibility that a single translation, fully correct from the scholarly point of view, can be produced. It is not long ago that one heard in discussions of theological education that new and accurate translations might make less necessary the training of ordinands in the biblical languages; but on the contrary, the variety of translations may in course of time make the original languages more indispensable as a means to discrimination (thereby incidentally re-creating something of the situation in which St Jerome himself was led to learn Hebrew!).

It was often said of good Pope John that in summoning the Council he unleashed stronger forces than he had bargained for; there were suggestions that at the end he felt these forces to be beyond his control and overpowering him. There is sometimes a naive enthusiasm in those who are most eager for renewal which blinds them to the problems raised by this renewal. One sphere in which the problems are acute and puzzling is that of the biblical renewal. The problems centre round the paradox which is overstated by the often-heard cry: ‘How is it that we are encouraged to read the Bible more and more, while at the same time we are told that less and less of it is true?’ The paradox is overstated in this form, for what we are told is not that less and less of the Bible is true, but that less and less of it is to be taken at its face value, that less and less of it can be understood without considerable training, that not all of it is of equal importance, some passages or even whole books being of very peripheral value for the Christian life, while others teach some idea which is crucial amid a waste of folklore or rabbinic legalism. The dilemma is at its most puzzling at two moments, readings in the Mass and private reading of the scriptures.

It is commonplace that the world of the Old Testament was very different from ours, that their forms of expression are very different from the ones we use today.

A number of modern historians have reminded us that the history of the West has been the history of revolution. And these revolutions have occurred not merely as the result of an objective crisis in society, but because a crisis was precipitated by the emergence and action of a new dynamic proletariat. In each case, this proletariat had been captured by a new vision of a new social order. Its members found themselves excluded from the benefits of the status quo, or repelled by its injustices. Eventually they reached a point where their consuming passion was to bring the old order down and build a new and they were willing to sacrifice their lives so that this could happen.

These movements became disruptive forces in their societies; in some instances, they overthrow the old order and, eventually, organized society on a new foundation, with new structures of economic, social and political life. They often failed to achieve their goals, yet when we look back on our history today, we can see that many of the most significant breakthroughs toward a more human society have occurred as a result of these revolutions.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the emergence of such revolutionary forces is once again the order of the day. In the United States, this new proletariat has made its appearance among the black militants and the radicals of a new student generation. But it is in the Third World, and especially in Latin America, that this phenomenon is most widespread.

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

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

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

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

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