Unfinished Journey

The Church 40 Years after Vatican II

Essays for John Wilkins

Edited by
Austen Ivereigh

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 Contents

About the Contributors v

Introduction
Austen Ivereigh 1

Part I Taking Stock

1 Vatican II: Of Happy Memory - and Hope?

Nicholas Lash 13
2 The 'Open Church' 40 Years Later: A Reckoning
Michael Novak 32
3 Tradition and Reaction: Historical Resources for
a Contemporary Renewal
Eamon Duffy 49

Part II The Unfinished Journey

4 On Having the Courage of One's Convictions

Hans Kung 69
5 Images of the Church: From 'Perfect Society' to
'God's People on Pilgrimage'
Rembert Weakland 78
6 Wanted: The Other Half of the Church
Joan Chittister 91
7 Augustine, Aquinas or the Gospel sine glossal
Divisions over Gaudium et spes
Joseph Komonchak 102
8 Power and Powerlessness in the Church:
The Chance for Renewal
Timothy Radcliffe 119
CONTENTS

9 Religious Freedom: The Limits of Progress

Michael Walsh 134
10 Where Does Catholic Social Teaching Go
from Here?
Clifford Longley 149
11 The Scientific Search for the Soul
John Cornwell 170
12 The Place of Philosophy in the Life of the Church:
A Time for Renewal
JohnHaldane 183
13 Captivated Ambivalence: How the Church Copes
with the Media
Lavinia Byrne 196
14 The Church and the Media: Beyond Inter mirifica
Alain Woodrow 208

Part III Signposts from Afar

15 A Lead from Asia
Thomas C. Fox 227
16 How Base Communities Started: Paraguay's
Christian Agrarian Leagues
Margaret Hebblethwaite 240
17 Truth beyond Division: Eastern Meditation and
Western Christianity
Shirley du Boulay 257
18 Oscar Romero, Bishop-Martyr and Model
of Church
Julian Filochowski 272

Part IV Postscript
19 John Wilkins: A Tribute
Hugo Young 287

IV
 About the Contributors

LAVINIA BYRNE is a regular broadcaster with the BBC on

domestic radio and with the World Service. She used to teach
communications in the Cambridge Theological Federation,
where she was a tutor at Westcott House. A former editor of the
Ignatian spirituality journal The Way, she is author of Woman
at the Altar (Continuum, 1999), and 20 other titles. She writes
The Tablet's internet reviews and edits its Catholic internet
portal, www.cathport.com.

JOAN CHITTISTER OSB is a Benedictine sister of Erie, Penn-

sylvania, and a popular speaker and writer. A theologian, social
psychologist and communication theorist, she is an active mem-
ber of the International Peace Council and a regular columnist
for the National Catholic Reporter. Her recent books include
Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Wm. B. Eerdmans,
2003), New Designs: An Anthology of Spiritual Vision (3enet-
vision, 2002) and The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every
Woman's Life (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000).

JOHN CORNWELL is Director of the Science and Human

Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge, and an Affili-
ated Research Scholar in the Department of History and Phil-
osophy of Science in the University of Cambridge. His books
include Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Penguin
Books, 2000) and Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People and the
Fate of Catholicism (Penguin Books, 2002).

v
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

SHIRLEY DU BOULAY worked for several years covering

religion for the BBC. Among her many books are biographies
of Teresa of Avila, Dame Cicely Saunders, Desmond Tutu and
Bede Griffiths. She is currently working on a biography of
Swami Abhishiktananda. She was married to the late John
Harriott, for many years a much-loved Tablet columnist.

EAMON DUFFY is Reader in Church History in the Univer-

sity of Cambridge, and President of Magdalene College, Cam-
bridge, where he has been Fellow since 1979. He has recently
been appointed Professor of the History of Christianity. He is
a member of the Pontifical Historical Commission and of the
Theology Committee of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of
England and Wales. Among his books are The Stripping of
the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1570 (Yale
University Press, 1992) and a history of the popes, Saints and
Sinners (Yale University Press, 1997, with a revised and ex-
panded edition in 2000). His most recent book, The Voices of
Morebath, Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village
(Yale University Press, 2001), was awarded the Hawthornden
Prize for Literature in 2002. He is a frequent broadcaster on
radio and television, and a longstanding Tablet contributor.

JULIAN FILOCHOWSKI was director of CAFOD, the Catho-

lic Agency for Overseas Development in England and Wales,
from 1982 until 2003. He was also a member of the Com-
mittee for International Justice and Peace of the English and
Welsh Bishops' Conference from 1981, and co-chair of the
Caritas International AIDS Task Force from 1988. In 1999 he
was elected a member of Caritas International's Executive
Board and a member of the Board of Caritas Europe. In 1998 he
received an OBE for services to International Development.

VI
 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

THOMAS C. FOX is the publisher and former editor of the

National Catholic Reporter. His books include Sexuality and
Catholicism (George Braziller, 1995) and most recently Pente-
cost in Asia (Orbis, 2002).
JOHN HALDANE is Professor of Philosophy and Director
of the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs in the
University of St Andrews. He is author (with J. J. C. Smart) of
Atheism and Theism (Blackwell, 2nd edn, 2003) and of An
Intelligent Person's Guide to Religion (Duckworth, 2003). His
next book is a collection of essays, Faithful Reason (Rout-
ledge). He has been a frequent contributor to The Tablet for the
last decade.
MARGARET HEBBLETHWAITE is a theologian, spiritual
director and journalist living in Santa Maria, Misiones, Para-
guay, where she teaches a Bible class at a tertiary institute for
the poor. She married the Vaticanologist Peter Hebblethwaite
in 1974 and was widowed in 1994. From 1991 to 2000 she
was assistant editor at The Tablet. Her books include Mother-
hood and God (Geoffrey Chapman, 1984), Basic Is Beautiful:
Basic Ecclesial Communities from Third World to First World
(HarperCollins, 1993) and The Next Pope (with Peter Hebble-
thwaite: HarperCollins and HarperSanFrancisco, 2000). She
has edited an anthology of texts which appeared in The Tablet's
'Living Spirit' column: Living Spirit: Prayers and Readings for
the Christian Year (Canterbury Press, 2000).

AUSTEN IVEREIGH is The Tablets deputy editor. A former

lecturer in Spanish and Jesuit novice, he is the author of Catholi-
cism and Politics in Argentina (Macmillan, 1995) and editor
of The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Essays in
Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (University of
London, 2000).

vn
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

JOSEPH KOMONCHAK holds the John C. and Gertrude P.

Hubbard Chair in Religious Studies in the School of Theology
and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America
in Washington, D.C. An expert in the ecclesiology and theol-
ogy leading up to the Second Vatican Council, he is editor
of the English-language edition of the five-volume History of
Vatican II, the fourth volume of which is about to appear.

NICHOLAS LASH is the Norris-Hulse Professor Emeritus of

Divinity and Fellow Emeritus of Clare Hall at the University
of Cambridge. His books include Easter in Ordinary: Reflec-
tions on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (SCM
Press, 1988), Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading
of the Apostles9 Creed (SCM Press, 1992 and 2003) and The
Beginning and the End of 'Religion' (Cambridge University
Press, 1996).

CLIFFORD LONGLEY is The Tablet's editorial consultant,

fortnightly columnist and leader writer, and was for six months
in 1996 its acting editor. For 20 years he was religious affairs
editor of The Times, and for a time its chief leader writer. He
wrote a weekly column in The Times throughout that period,
and continued it in the Daily Telegraph, from 1992 to 2000.
Books include The Times Book of Clifford Longley (Harper-
Collins, 1991), The Worlock Archive (Geoffrey Chapman,
2000) and Chosen People (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002). He is a
regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day.

MICHAEL NOVAK covered the second session of Vatican II

in 1964 for the National Catholic Reporter. The winner of the
Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (1994), he currently
holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Pub-
lic Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington,

vin
 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

D.C. His books include The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

(Madison Books, 1991), The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (Free Press, 1993), Belief and Unbelief: A Philos-
ophy of Self-Knowledge (Transaction Publishers, 1994), The
Experience of Nothingness (Transaction Publishers, 1998) and
Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions: Freedom
with Justice (Transaction Publishers, 1989). His latest book
is On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the
American Founding (Encounter Books, 2001).

TIMOTHY RADCLIFFE OP is a Dominican of the English

Province. He joined the Order in 1965, studying in Oxford
and Paris. He taught Scripture at Blackfriars, Oxford, for
many years and was its Prior from 1982 to 1988. As Provincial
he was President of the Conference of Religious. He was Mas-
ter of the Order of Preachers from 1992 to 2001, and is now
an itinerant preacher and lecturer. He is the author of Sing a
New Song (Dominican Publications, 1999) and I Call You
Friends (Continuum, 2000).

MICHAEL WALSH wrote the commemorative history of The

Tablet, and was for many years its television critic. He retired as
Librarian of Heythrop College, University of London, in 2001,
and is now editor of the Heythrop Journal. He is also the editor
of the Dictionary of Christian Biography (Continuum, 2001).
Among his recent books are Warriors of the Lord (John Hunt
Publishing, 2003), an account of the military religious orders,
and The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally
Bloody History of Papal Election (Canterbury Press, 2003).

REMBERT G. WEAKLAND OSB is the Archbishop Emeritus

of Milwaukee and an international expert in liturgy and sacred
music. A Benedictine monk of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he was

IX
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

elected Abbot Primate of the International Benedictine Fed-

eration in 1967, and ten years later named Archbishop of
Milwaukee by Pope Paul VI. In 1999 he received his thirty-
seventh doctorate from Columbia University for his thesis on
the Office Antiphons of the Ambrosian Chant. He remains
active in the dialogue between the Catholic Church and the
Orthodox Church in the United States.

ALAIN WOODROW, The Tablet's Paris correspondent, was

for 20 years religious affairs and then media correspondent for
Le Monde. His nine books include a novel, Le pape a perdu la
foi, and a study of the Society of Jesus published in English
as The Jesuits, A Story of Power (Geoffrey Chapman, 1995).
He divides his time between Paris and the Auvergne.

HUGO YOUNG has been a political columnist with the Guard-

ian for 15 years and a Tablet director since 1985. He was a
columnist and editor on the Sunday Times until it was taken
over by News International. His books include a biography of
Margaret Thatcher, One of Us (Macmillan, 1991), This Blessed
Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Macmillan,
1998) and a recent collection of his Guardian columns, Supping
with the Devils: Political Journalism from Thatcher to Blair
(Atlantic Books, 2003).

x
 Introduction1
Austen Ivereigh

As a unit of time, 40 is a number rich in biblical resonances.

Jesus was tested in the desert for 40 days, which was also the
period the apostles waited in the Upper Room for the fire of
Pentecost. The Flood lasted for 40 years - the same period the
Israelites wandered in the wilderness. And it was 40 years ago
that the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was getting under-
way in Rome, unleashing a revolutionary return to the Church's
sources, and setting Catholic Christianity on its still-unfinished
journey of renewal and reform.
The metaphor of the journey is the right one. The Council
jettisoned the historically isolated idea that the Church was
outside time and history; the Church would henceforth be seen
as the People of God on pilgrimage.
Every pilgrimage must at some point pause and take some
bearings. The retirement this year of John Wilkins after 22 years
as editor of The Tablet seemed too good an opportunity to pass
up. Some of the leading Catholic writers of the 'Vatican II gen-
eration' were therefore invited to find positions overlooking the
postconciliar route and ask: How far have the pilgrims come?
What roads have they travelled? Which turnings did they miss?
Which routes remain inadequately trodden?

The Council made John Wilkins a Catholic. In the first of a

2002 series of Tablet articles commemorating the opening of

1
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Vatican II, he recalled how, as the son of an Anglican mother

and an agnostic father, and knowing little of the Catholic
Church, he could barely believe his eyes when Pope John XXIII
summoned the world's bishops to Rome.
Here was a Pope like the fisherman Peter. You could
almost see him casting out his nets, you could almost feel
his love for the whole world. And then this Council - the
bravery of it, the confidence of it. Where did that come
from? Reflecting, I could see it came from a Christian
community that felt itself to be connected in a special
way with the Upper Room in Jerusalem where the
Church began. The Catholic Church, I suddenly saw,
was attached to that Upper Room experience as by an
umbilical cord that ran through the centuries up till now.
And therefore it had a unique hold on the apostolic
tradition, leading to a willingness to return to the sources
in a transforming way.
As the Council got underway, his eyes grew still wider. First,
the document on the liturgy, now to be in English as well as
Latin; then the constitution on the Church, replacing the pyra-
midal structure with a circular conception ('a people's Church,
hierarchically structured'); then the document on the Church in
the modern world, which overturned the image of the Church
as a lighted castle in favour of that of a people on pilgrimage.
These astonishing documents were followed by still others: one
on ecumenism, which recognised the baptism in the name of the
Trinity for every Christian; another on religious liberty, which
performed a U-turn on the question of the rights of error; and
still another on non-Christian religions, which laid the ground-
work for a positive view of all the world's religions. 'Before the
Council ended', he recalled, 'I had become a Catholic.'2

2
 INTRODUCTION

But if Vatican II undoubtedly changed the Church, why, he

asked in a following article, was there now 'a sense of short-
fall, of unfinished business?'3
There was never one view of the Council, then or now,
even within the progressive majority at Vatican II. Indeed, as
Joseph Komonchak in these pages illustrates in his account of
the redaction of Gaudium et spes, there were substantial differ-
ences among theologians otherwise united in their deter-
mination to forge a new pastoral plan for the Church. Those
differences - expressed in part by the two theological journals,
Concilium and Communio - would become more marked
after the Council ended. Some deplored the lack of courage in
implementing the Council; others regretted that it was imple-
mented 'in the wrong spirit'; still others that the rejection of
the preconciliar culture was too drastic for the health of a
community founded on tradition. If it is not easy to mark the
distance travelled since Vatican II, it is in part a reflection of
different understandings of what the Council was for.
These differences are apparent in the three magisterial over-
views which make up the first part ('Taking Stock') of Unfin-
ished Journey. Speaking for his generation, and especially for
'those who have personal experience, as adults, of preconciliar
Catholicism', the Cambridge theologian Nicholas Lash takes
a characteristically clearsighted view of the directions which
the Church was set to follow after the Council. He measures
the extraordinary distance travelled, notably in three areas: the
celebration of the liturgy, the relations of the Catholic with
other Churches, and the preferential option for the poor. Lash
has a correspondingly clear view of where the Church has got
bogged down - birth control and priestly celibacy - or, in
some cases, notably on the question of collegiality and the place
of women, has actually backtracked.

3
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

The American writer and theologian Michael Novak also

has a clear line of vision of the Church's pilgrim path, but what
he sees is rather different from Lash. Novak, who as a young
reporter filed with enthusiasm from Rome on the Council's
second session, later came to regret 'the spirit of Vatican IF
which, he says, 'sometimes soared far beyond the actual, hard-
won documents and decisions of Vatican IF. His view is not
that the Church backtracked; rather that it set off in great
haste, then got sidetracked, hastening towards false horizons.
He credits John Paul IFs pontificate with 'rescuing' the Coun-
cil, restoring it to its true path, purpose and spirit. In the end,
because of Pope John Paul, he suggests, the Council has worked
out for good, and the Church as a consequence of Vatican II is a
holier, more significant presence in the world.
The historian Eamon Duffy takes up a position between the
hills, with a view of both the preconciliar and postconciliar
cultures. His essay is concerned with the way the Church can
articulate itself to the wider culture, something he believes
contemporary Catholics find it harder to do than their fore-
bears. In a carefully argued discernment of why, even as things
got better, they have often appeared to worsen, he nonetheless
perceives the major drawback of the postconciliar era, which
is a debunking of tradition, a 'psychic evacuation' which is
'a feature of any cultural revolution'. He calls for a recovery of
tradition, arguing that if Catholics are to survive as a com-
munity they need to learn to explain 'to the culture at large,
and to ourselves, just who we are and what we stand for'.

The main body of Unfinished Journey consists of 11 essays

by Catholic writers who focus their sights on particular paths.
The Swiss theologian Hans Kiing offers a characteristic-
ally provocative invitation to Catholics to have 'civil courage'
in speaking truth to power, to be willing to challenge the

4
 INTRODUCTION

hierarchy when conscience demands it. Such a willingness is

implicit in a pilgrim Church rather than a 'perfect society' -
a fundamental revisioning of the way Catholics see the Church
which is charted by the emeritus Archbishop of Milwaukee,
Rembert Weakland. But the equality implicit in this vision -
St Paul's image of the body made up of equal parts with dif-
fering functions - remains remote. The American Benedictine
writer Joan Chittister shows dramatically how doors opened for
women after the Council, then firmly shut again in their faces.
The former Master of the Dominicans, Timothy Radcliffe,
sees in the recent clerical sex abuse crisis a historic opportunity
for the Church to embrace a truer, more gospel-based notion
of its power, so freeing up its capacity for 'spaces of undis-
torted communication'. Vatican II was, above all, intended to
enable this. But the Church's ambiguous record in dealing with
the media is patchy, as two contributors argue. Lavinia Byrne
describes the Church's view of the media as 'captivated
ambivalence': captivated because it is seduced by reaching
millions; ambivalent because it resists transparency. Alain
Woodrow finds at least part of the problem in the Council's
declaration on social communications, which is widely acknow-
ledged to be one of its poorer documents. After offering some
suggestions as to how the Church can now improve on its
communications document, Woodrow, who has worked for
both the secular and the religious media, offers solace for the
Catholic journalist trapped between a Church distrusted by
the media and a media distrusted by the Church. The high
ideals preached by the Church need to be translated, he argues,
into a clear and simple professional code of ethics for the
media; to kickstart the process, he ends with his own, though-
tful decalogue.
Michael Walsh and Clifford Longley respectively treat two
'political' themes rich in philosophical conundra: religious

5
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

freedom and social rights. Walsh charts one of the most re-
markable developments since the Council: how the Church
has moved to embracing religious freedom as a key universal
human right rather than an undesirable concession. But he
warns that, in privileging truth over freedom, and in his notion
that freedom exists in order that people seek religious truth,
Pope John Paul has eroded, rather than reinforced, the Coun-
cil's view of religious freedom. As Walsh notes, and Clifford
Longley illustrates with a vivid excerpt from the diary of an
English bishop who was present at the debate over religious
liberty, the issue was one of the most intensely argued over at
Vatican II. Longley places that debate within the broader
context of the developing view in Catholic thinking of the role
of the state, and the relation of human rights to the modern
state. He points out that the Catholic doctrine of human rights
goes much deeper than the idea of citizen rights, for they are
not concessions of the state but are intrinsic to people by virtue
of their God-given dignity, which is why 'a refugee seeking
entry to a state has the same human rights as one born into it'.
Since the Council, the Church's voice in favour of the refugee
and the poor has, as a result, considerably strengthened.
With a philosopher's clarity, John Haldane observes that
every gain has a cost and, therefore,
whether, overall, the post-Vatican II Church is better or
worse than that which preceded it is a question that
should be felt to be difficult to answer, and even prob-
lematic to contemplate, for it is, after all, one and the
same Church as was founded by Christ and as will persist
until his return.
But that does not stop him trying, with an overview of the
place of philosophy in the Church since the Council. The
aggiornamento of that place, he concludes, is incomplete,

6
 INTRODUCTION

and is likely to remain so; but he praises above all the greater
accessibility - and therefore attractiveness - of Aquinas's
Catholic/Aristotelian synthesis to rigorous non-Catholic think-
ers of the day.
John Cornwell's essay might equally be called 'After
Dualism', for it reminds us of how far the Church has travelled
since the Council's pastoral constitution of the modern world
dismissed the old demarcations of body and soul, restoring
unity. Emboldened by this, he believes the Church now needs
to beware of 'a vociferous group of thinkers, highly popular
within the genre of public understanding of science, to reduce
and distort the nature of consciousness, selfhood, freedom, in
order to make a fit with closed, reductionist, computational
explanations'.

The final part of Unfinished Journey is entitled 'Signposts from

Afar'. In terms of vitality and sheer numbers, the centre of the
Church's gravity since the Council has shifted to the devel-
oping world. Asia, for Thomas C. Fox, offers an exciting vision
of the Church which 'has been taking shape now quietly for
some 30 years, largely off-stage and out of sight'. As he lays out
that vision, it becomes clear that the conciliar priorities - the
option for the poor, inculturation, interfaith dialogue, respect
for theologians and collegiality - are all far more characteristic
of the Church in Asia than in Europe and North America.
Where Asia goes, will the rest of the Church now follow?
Prayer has already opened up many paths. Shirley du Bou-
lay's essay on the popularity of Eastern meditation shows that
one of the fruits of the Council - which invited religious orders
to return to their sources - was the way in which the East
helped Western monks rediscover their own desert contempla-
tive traditions, a process which has continued in spite of the
Vatican's anxiety about syncretism.

7
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Latin America, home to 40 per cent of the world's Catho-

lics, also points to the future, although here the example is less
ecclesiological than one of witness and prophecy. Both Filo-
chowski and Hebblethwaite document examples of suffering
by the Church for the sake of the poor, the first in the famous
case of the saint, martyr and model of the Vatican II bishop,
Oscar Romero of San Salvador, the second in the hitherto
unknown case of the Agrarian Leagues of Paraguay, an early
example of base communities which were snuffed out by brutal
repression. Those who criticise the Council for accommodating
the Church to the world - the danger which Duffy discusses
in relation to Europe and America - too easily forget how, in
Latin America, precisely the reverse occurred. The interpreta-
tion of the Council at the great meeting of bishops at Medellin
in 1968 paved the way for the martyr Church, whose place was
no longer in a privileged bunker under the shadow of wealth
and power but alongside the poor, directly in the line of fire.

As Archbishop Weakland notes, the bishops at the Second

Vatican Council retained the idea that the means of holiness,
through the Holy Spirit, were present to the Church and its
members, but that the full perfection would only come with
the eschaton. For that reason the Church was always in need
of reform - semper reformanda - but full of hope because of
Christ's promise to remain with his Church till the end of time.
There can be little doubt that the Holy Spirit presided over
Vatican II and through it has brought the world great fruits.
The adventure of spiritual and pastoral renewal to which the
Council called the Church has not always been accepted and
has sometimes been resisted. But it remains an invitation
whose depth and power continue to be revealed over time and
which may only now, 40 years on, at the beginning of the new
millennium, begin to be genuinely embraced by the ordinary

8
 INTRODUCTION

faithful, as they awaken to their vocation, and take their place

in the ranks of the priesthood of all believers.
The Council is to the Church as a marriage vow is to a
couple, or a vocation to a priest or religious - assented to in
faith, but whose meaning and impact are revealed gradually,
over time. Unfinished Journey is, in this sense, like those life
inventories which pilgrims make periodically in the course
of their lives: a catalogue of achievements and failures, of
openness to grace and resistance to it. The purpose of such
inventories may be a resolve to do better, but their effect is
inevitably to bring home to pilgrims how little they have
gained on their own merits and by their own strengths.
Therein the real virtue of taking stock: Unfinished Journey is
an urgent reminder that it is still Pentecost, and there is much
more for the Spirit still to do, and much more openness to that
Spirit required of the Church.
Unfinished Journey is also a tribute - paid expressly by
Hugo Young on behalf of Tablet readers at the end of this
book - to John Wilkins in thanks for the many years he has
spent patiently and gently reminding the Church of the prom-
ises it made at the Council. Nowhere are those promises more
powerfully expressed than in the opening words of the Pastoral
Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, that trumpet
call to the Church to immerse itself in human history. The
words are great favourites of John's, and implicitly a charter
for The Tablet under his editorship. They remain as vivid today
as 40 years ago.

The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of
the men [and women] of this age, especially those who
are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys
and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of
Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an

9
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

echo in their hearts ... United in Christ, they are led by

the Holy Spirit in their journey to the kingdom of their
Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation
which is meant for every man [and woman]. That is why
this community realises that it is truly and intimately
linked with humankind and its history?4

Notes
1 The editor would like to thank the directors and staff of The
Tablet for their help and support of this project, and for keeping it
under wraps. He would especially like to thank Michael Phelan
and Robin Baird-Smith from the Board, and his colleagues Sue
Chisholm, Mian Ridge and Robert Carey.
2 John Wilkins, 'Earthquake in Rome', The Tablet (12 October
2002), pp. 10-11.
3 John Wilkins, 'Unfinished Business', The Tablet (19 October
2002), pp. 10-12.
4 Gaudium et spes, 1.

10
 Parti
Taking Stock
 1
Vatican II: Of Happy Memory - and Hope?
Nicholas Lash

My generation - those who have personal experience, as

adults, of preconciliar Catholicism - have a unique responsi-
bility. We who were brought up in the Church of Pope Pius
XII know that it was a world neither of tranquil certainties
and quiet obedience disrupted by dissent, nor a dark place of
clerical oppression from which the Council set us free. But like
others of this generation, for most of my adult life the
constitutions and decrees of the Council, and the spirit which
animated them, have been the benchmark by which to judge
the reform of Catholic pastoral practice. And those of us who
had personal experience of the context in which the Council
came to birth, and of its dynamics as a historical event, still
have a unique contribution to make to the assessment and
evaluation of its outcome - not least because, in a few years'
time, the Council will be nobody's living memory.
To what extent are we suceeding in implementing the
programme of reform initiated by the Council? To answer that
question, it is not primarily the period between 1962 and 1965
we should look at, but that from 1965 to the present day. Our
concern, in other words, is with what biblical scholars would
call the Wirkungsgeschichte of the Council - the history of its
effects. How far have we realised, or failed to realise, the
programme of reform which it initiated?

13
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

The Achievements
The identity of the vast majority of Catholic Christians is
formed and finds expression principally at Mass on Sunday.
It is here, in the way we celebrate the Eucharist together, and
relate what we are doing there to what we do and undergo
elsewhere, that the doctrine of the Church expounded in the
Council's Constitution Lumen gentium, the doctrine of God's
word in Dei verbum and the account of Christianity's relation-
ship to secular society in Gaudium et spes do or do not take
shape, find flesh. In this sense, the state of the liturgy is the first
and fundamental test of the extent to which the programme,
not merely of the decree Sacrosanctum concilium but of all the
Council's constitutions and decrees, is being achieved.
In 1968, the Catholic Truth Society in London invited me to
produce a replacement for its standard catechetical pamphlet
on the celebration of the Eucharist, What Is He Doing at the
Altar? I entitled the new text, What Are We Doing at Mass?
The pastoral, missionary and political implications of that
shift in the identity of Christian agency are incalculable. It is
the structured community that is the Church - God's gathered
people - which celebrates the Eucharist, not merely the person
presiding over the celebration. There are many weaknesses in
liturgy today: the banality of so much that we sing, the uneven
quality of translations, the poverty of so much preaching and
our failure to make the liturgy what Paul VI called a 'school of
prayer', among others. But to dwell on these would risk dis-
tracting our attention from what is the Council's single most
profound and significant achievement.
Notwithstanding the continued nervous isolation of Russian
Orthodoxy, the transformation in our relations with other
Christian traditions has been hardly less comprehensive.
Although full communion and common ministries with the

14
 VATICAN II

Churches of the Reformation remain a distant dream, the depth

of mutual understanding and respect, and the extent of pastoral
collaboration that we have already achieved, would have
seemed unthinkable a few years before the Council opened.
(As recently as 1950 one of the English Catholic bishops refer-
red, in the pages of The Times, to the Archbishop of Canter-
bury as 'a doubtfully baptised layman'.)
The third great achievement of the Council is a shift to-
wards the preferential option for the poor. Some years ago,
I was present at a lecture that the father of liberation theology
Gustavo Gutierrez gave to an enormous crowd of students at
Boston College. The Peruvian spoke of the assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Romero on 24 March 1980, and of his fun-
eral a week later. 'I was at that funeral', he said, 'during which
40 other people were killed. Can you name any of them?'
The students, of course, could not. 'Those', said Gustavo, 'are
the poor.'
One reason why it is difficult to generalise about the extent
to which the Church is becoming converted to the preferential
option is that those who work with and for the poor are often
as invisible as the poor themselves. But even if we cannot easily
measure it, without doubt the Council's impulse in this direc-
tion has borne impressive fruit.
The phrase 'preferential option for the poor' was coined at
the 1968 conference at Medellin in Colombia, where the bish-
ops of Latin America gathered to apply conciliar teaching to
that continent. Reflecting on Medellin some 20 years later,
Archbishop Michael McGrath of Panama said that the Latin-
American Church was committed 'not only' to 'a preferential
option for the poor in economic and political terms', but that
'this option' was to be applied 'first of all to the evangelisation
of the poor, so that with them and from their point of view we
can carry out the evangelisation of the entire community'.

15
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Notwithstanding the reverses in Latin America during the

present pontificate, and the Vatican's attempts to curb what it
regards as the 'political' errors of liberation theology, I suspect
that future historians will judge John Paul II to have been
committed to the notion of evangelisation 'with and from [the]
point of view of the poor.
The Council put things in the right order in other ways, too.
In 1985, one of the English bishops, shortly before leaving for
Rome to take part in the Synod convened to celebrate the
twentieth anniversary of the end of the Council, asked me what
I thought were important clues to the quality of our remem-
bering of what the Council sought to do. I suggested that one
such clue lay in the importance which people attached to the
sequence of chapters in the Council's two dogmatic constitu-
tions, Dei verbum and Lumen gentium.
In the case of Dei verbum, the Council treats first, in Chap-
ter 1, of God's being and act, God's utterance, the Verbum Dei,
and only then, in Chapter 2, does it go on to consider what we
are to do about the Word that has been spoken to us, and about
the responsibility of those who teach us to 'listen' to that Word,
to 'guard' and to 'expound' it. (The Catechism, deplorably,
begins, not with God, but with our 'search' for God.)
In the case of Lumen gentium, Chapter I insists on the irre-
ducible diversity of biblical and patristic images of the mystery
of God's gathering of humankind, the mystery of the Church.
Chapter 2 nevertheless privileges one such image: that of God's
'people' on the move through history. Only in Chapter 3 does
the Council consider the structures and offices that this pilgrim
people need.

The Failures
In his 1966 Sarum Lectures, Bishop Christopher Butler gave a
lengthy and careful analysis of Chapter 3 of Lumen gentium.

16
 VATICAN II

It is in this chapter that the Council had struggled to incor-

porate the narrowly juridical teaching of Vatican I on papal
primacy into its own larger view of episcopacy. 'What matters
in the end', said Bishop Butler, 'is the successful achievement
of the Council's intentions.'1
In the distance between the theory and practice of col-
legiality, those intentions have, thus far, been dramatically
frustrated. I do not believe that anybody, as the Council ended,
foresaw the possibility that, only 37 years after the promul-
gation of Lumen gentium, the Church would be far more
rigorously and monolithically controlled by Pope and Curia
than at any time in its history. The Church has paid a heavy
price for John Paul IPs lack of interest in administration. And
with hindsight, it was naive of the bishops to suppose that the
Roman Curia - many of whose most senior members had been
key players in that handful of bishops who had resisted the
reform programme, line by line - would suddenly and easily
surrender power.
To have an idea of just how new is the twentieth-century
centralisation of ecclesial power, we need only go back to the
early nineteenth century. In 1829 there were 646 diocesan
bishops in the Latin Church. Of these, 555 owed their appoint-
ment to the State, about 67 had been elected by diocesan
chapters or their equivalent, while only 24 had been appointed
by the Pope. Not until 1917 (in the new Code of Canon Law)
was it claimed that inherent in the papal primacy was the right
to appoint bishops throughout the Catholic Church. Power
swiftly taken is not as swiftly abandoned.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, such centralisation was
logistically impossible to achieve even if it had been desired.
It took a very long time for messages to get from Rome to Paris
or Vienna - to say nothing of Cape Town or Bombay. With
the coming of the railways, the world became much smaller,

17
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

a process which accelerated dramatically in the century that

followed with the coming of air travel, television and the Inter-
net. Centralisation and micromanagement have grown along
with technology, unimpeded by a countervailing principle.
'The most striking accomplishment of the Council', noted
that shrewd commentator 'Xavier Rynne', writing in 1966,
'has unquestionably been the proclamation of episcopal col-
legiality, the principle that the bishops form a college and
govern the Church together with the Pope who is their head.'
Moreover, he went on, 'the new doctrine is bound to influence
the exercise of [papal] authority in practice, particularly if
Pope Paul's plans for the reform of the Roman Curia and the
establishment of the Synod of Bishops are fully carried out'.2
Which, of course, they were not. The Curia remains un-
accountable to the episcopate, and the Synods, in their present
form, have become little more than further instruments of
papal power.
There are areas today in which the Church is dangerously
polarised, and the Council is often blamed for this. Is such
blame justified? That a body of human beings comprising, at
least nominally, one-sixth of the human race, should display a
vast diversity of temperament and attitude and opinion is both
inevitable and desirable. A Church in which there were no
serious disagreements would be dead. Disagreement about
things that matter deeply to the disputants may create tensions
but does not, of itself, do damage to the bonds of charity or
threaten sacramental unity. Polarisation, in contrast - the
dramatised simplification of disagreement to the point where
there appear to be, for all practical purposes, two and only
two approaches or opinions possible (and these two locked in
mutual incomprehension and distaste) - threatens truth and
charity alike.

18
 VATICAN II

On almost every issue considered at the Council, there was,

it is true, a fairly clear division between majority and minor-
ity opinion. But for all the influence it wielded, in numerical
terms the minority was very small indeed. Consider the figures:
Lumen gentium was approved by 2151 votes to 5, Dei verbum
by 2350 to 6, and Gaudium et spes by 2309 to 75. These are
not the acts of a polarised episcopate, nor of a Church seri-
ously divided.
Pope John XXIII had called the programme of reform for
which the Council was convened aggiornamento, a bringing-
up-to-date. Paul VI, in contrast, preferred to speak of rinno-
vamento^ or renewal.3 The scholars meanwhile used a French
word, ressour'cement, meaning the refreshing of Catholic
thought, liberating it from the arid juridicism of late neoscho-
lasticism, drawing once again upon the richness of its biblical
and patristic sources. The journalists, for their part, unsurpris-
ingly but unhelpfully preferring political terminology (which
increasingly, in the English-speaking world, meant the language
of American politics), spoke of the majority at the Council as
progressive or liberal, and the minority as conservative.
The confusion resulting from all this is succinctly illustrated
by the following remark from a recent biography of Cardinal
Ratzinger: 'To put all this into political terms, aggiornamento
was a liberal impulse, ressourcement more conservative.'4 Yet
ressourcement is not an alternative to aggiornamento, but the
means of its achievement. As Yves Congar said in 1966: 'True
reform implies an appeal from a less perfect to a more perfect
tradition, a going back to the sources.'5 In the second place, it
was misleading to describe as conservative a group of people
whose principal ambitions were to sustain the thought-patterns
of nineteenth-century scholasticism and the neo-ultramontane
institutional innovations of the twentieth century.

19
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

The Problem with Open Windows

On the larger issue, those who seek to hold the Council
responsible for polarisation in the Church today underestimate
the extent to which the attitudes of Catholics - bishops in-
cluded - are shaped behind the gospel's back, as it were, by the
seismic shifts that there have been, in recent decades, in social
and economic structures, attitudes and expectations.
Does this mean that the Council came too late? If what was
needed in the 1960s was aggiornamento, when did the Church
begin to fall behind the times? Bernard Lonergan's answer
was: in the late seventeenth century: 'When modern science
began, when the Enlightenment began, then the theologians
began to reassure one another about their certainties.'6
Confronted by a Western culture increasingly hostile, both
institutionally and intellectually, Catholic Christianity tried to
pull up the drawbridge, seeking security in disengagement
from the world of which it formed a part. This stance could
not last indefinitely. The pressures which began building up in
the nineteenth century came to a head during the beginning
of the twentieth. The Modernist crisis marked the painful
and often tragic beginning of a rich and fruitful renaissance
of Catholic life, thought and spirituality, which came near to
fruition in the 1960s.7
But in many ways it came too late, sowing the seeds of its
own dissolution. The condemnations of 'Modernism' danger-
ously delayed all programmes of renewal. For decades the
Church remained in a state of siege, fully alerted to the danger
of attacks as much from within as without. With the forces of
renewal marginalised and suspect for half a century, the offi-
cial expression of the reform movement, when it came in the
form of the promulgation of conciliar documents, was greeted
by many Catholics with bewilderment and incomprehension.

20
 VATICAN II

Pointing the way, albeit hesitantly, towards an eventual trans-

formation of structures, the documents presupposed for their
understanding a transformation of consciousness which was
too often lacking. Moreover, fundamental shifts of culture did
not wait upon the re-engagement of Catholicism with those
secular worlds which it had for so long viewed with baleful
suspicion. As a result, even when the conciliar message did
begin to get through to the Catholic community as a whole, it
seemed not to speak to the felt concerns and expectations of
increasing numbers of people.
This account goes some way, I believe, to help explain the
sadness, even the bitterness, of some of those (such as Louis
Bouyer and Cardinal de Lubac) who had worked tirelessly to
bring about the renewal which the Council sought, only to find
themselves in a situation far more anarchic and confused than
anybody had expected. Culturally, ethically and politically,
we live in most bewildering times; but it is not Catholicism
that is, as Cardinal Ratzinger complains, collapsing, but the
citadel that we erected to protect us from the tempests of a
changing world.
Did the Council come too late? No, it came just in time. But
it came too late for renewal to be achieved without consider-
able confusion, misunderstanding and distress.

The Crisis of Authority

To conclude these reflections on the failure of the Council, it is
necessary to say something on two topics which were kept off
the conciliar agenda: birth control and priestly celibacy.
Pope Paul VI will surely go down in history as one of the
truly great popes of modern times. It is all the more painfully
paradoxical that, if there is one event which triggered the con-
temporary crisis of authority in the Church, it is his rejection of

21
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

the official report (not, as it is sometimes erroneously des-

cribed, the 'majority report') of the Commission which he
had convened to consider the question of birth regulation
and his promulgation, on 25 July 1968, of the Encyclical
Humanae vitae.
As with birth control, so with priestly celibacy. Many of the
bishops wished the Council to consider the matter, but Paul VI
insisted on reserving it to himself and, in 1967, issued the
Encyclical Sacerdotalis coelibatus.
Whether or not Paul VI was well advised, in the circum-
stances of the time, and in view of the pressures to which he
was subjected, to reserve these two questions to himself is for
the historians to decide. The really striking thing to notice,
however, is the disturbing frequency with which questions
of sexual behaviour are decided, in the Church, not on the
basis of doctrinal or ethical considerations, of what human
beings should or should not do, but on account of problems
of authority.
The point of crisis was probably reached for many, said
Professor John Marshall, a member of the Commission, around
23 April 1965. It was now that 'the four theologians of the
minority group acknowledged they could not demonstrate
the intrinsic evil of contraception on the basis of natural law
and so rested their case on authority'.8
In recent decades, the failure to tackle questions of sexual
behaviour on their own terms - and in terms which honestly
confront the damage done to men and women by the sexual
misbehaviour of the clergy - has led, in many parts of the
Church, to the scandal of widespread clerical concubinage
and, most recently, to damaging revelations of the extent to
which ecclesiastical authorities have covered up and condoned
the sexual abuse of minors.

22
 VATICAN II

If ever there were a time when the Church needed to treat

questions of sex and gender honestly, it is surely now - not
simply for its own sake, but for the sake of the society in which
the gospel of God's friendship is to be proclaimed. In a culture
increasingly corroded by destructively egocentric individual-
ism, a culture which finds lifelong commitment not simply
unsustainable but well-nigh unintelligible, the Catholic tradi-
tion of the primacy of relations, of the centrality and pos-
sibility and fruitfulness of the gift of lifelong friendship - both
in the form of love given and exchanged in marriage and in the
form of celibacy freely undertaken in witness to the king-
dom - has so much to offer that we surely dare not squander it
by preoccupation with the fear of change.

Unfinished Business
Questions concerning how the gospel of the crucified and risen
one is effectively to be proclaimed, in solidarity with and from
the standpoint of the poor, the weak and the disadvantaged,
are vastly more important than questions of Church structure.
Nevertheless, inappropriate structures frustrate appropriate
evangelisation. There are, at present, few more urgent tasks
facing the Church than that of realising the as yet unrealised
programme of Vatican II by throwing into reverse the centrali-
sation of power which accrued during the twentieth century,
and restoring episcopal authority to the episcopate.
The need for collegiality is crucial to the vision of the Coun-
cil. When we speak of the 'universal' Church, the 'Catholic'
Church, we refer, in the first place, to that gathering, by God's
redeeming grace, of all the just 'from Abel, the just one, to
the last of the elect'.9 What we usually call 'the Church' sub-
sists as a kind of sacrament or symbolic enactment of this

23
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

eschatological gathering, this assembly, congregatio or eccle-

sia. More concretely, as Lumen gentium puts it: 'This Church
of Christ is truly present in all legitimate local [gatherings] of
the faithful ... united with their pastors.' Each celebration
of the Eucharist, each parish or diocese, are not, therefore,
merely fragments or small parts of some vast multinational
corporation. They are the universal Church in its particular
existence - in this time and at this place. Thus it is that, where
episcopal office is concerned, Lumen gentium insists that every
bishop is 'the vicar of Christ', and that bishops are not 'to be
regarded as vicars of the Roman Pontiff, as branch managers
of 'Church International PLC'.10
But, of course, the universal Church in each particular place
will be a community of limited experience and resources. It
can only draw on so much holiness, scholarship and wisdom.
It will necessarily be a fragile group of sinful men and women
in continual need of strengthening and enrichment, of educa-
tion and correction, from all those - of every age and race and
culture - with whom it exists in communion. In other words,
the strengthening of bonds of solidarity, of koinonia, at every
level - local and regional, national and international - is indis-
pensable for the health and liberty of each particular instance
and expression of the Catholic Church.
It is worth bearing in mind that the initial impulse behind
the Ultramontane movement in early modern Europe was to
strengthen the bonds of union between German and French
dioceses and the See of Peter in order to ensure the freedom of
the Church from state control. To the extent that, in our own
day, the bishops of the Church succeed in taking back their own
episcopal authority (within, and not 'above', their Churches,
I need hardly add) through the development, at every level, of
appropriately collegial instruments, the indispensable vocation

24
 VATICAN II

of the Holy See will become clearer: as 'sheet-anchor', 'rock'

or 'court of last appeal'. This vocation of the See of Peter is
(as Luke's Gospel says) to 'strengthen [his] brethren' (Luke
21:32). It is to facilitate and enable, not to control and domin-
ate through power over all appointments and the issuing of
endless streams of 'orders' and 'instructions'.
One of the most striking developments in Catholic life since
the Council ended has been the flourishing of 'movements'
such as Opus Dei, the Neo-Catechumenate, Communion and
Liberation, and so on.11 According to one commentator, Car-
dinal Ratzinger has said that these movements 'cannot be
reduced to the episcopal principle, [but] represent a new justifi-
cation for the Petrine ministry'.12 In view of the enthusiasm
with which Roman support for the movements, thus rational-
ised, is being prosecuted in the closing years of the present
pontificate, it is impossible not to fear that they are being used
as instruments subversive of that recovery of episcopal
authority for the importance of which I have been pleading.
The ministry of women remains, quite evidently, seriously
underdeveloped. If one sets aside the question of women's
candidacy for the sacrament of order,13 it is sometimes unclear
whether the underdevelopment in question is specifically of
women's ministry or, more generally, of the ministry of the
laity. Suppose, for example, someone were to argue that there
should be women nuncios or women in charge of Roman
congregations. If such suggestions were resisted on the grounds
that the nature of these offices is such as to require their
exclusive occupancy by priests or bishops, then it would be
clear that the opposition was to these offices being held by
laypeople, rather than specifically by women.
For most of the Church's history, it has been maintained
that women cannot hold high office in the Church because

25
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

(to put it at its simplest) running things is what men do. It is

instructive, in this regard, that when the Declaration Inter
insigniores of October 1976 stated that 'the Church desires that
Christian women should become fully aware of the greatness of
their mission: today their role is of capital importance both for
the renewal and humanisation of society and for the redis-
covery by believers of the true face of the Church', the only
vocations through which this mission might be exercised were
specified as martyrdom, virginity and motherhood. Moreover,
the evidence of the patristic and medieval authorities appealed
to by recent pronouncements asserting the impossibility of
ordaining women suggests that almost the only arguments
adduced against their ordination in the past were variants on
two themes: we cannot do it because Our Lord did not do it,
and we cannot do it because running things is what men do.
Church history tells another story. Consider Fontevraud, in
whose great abbey church lie Eleanor of Aquitaine, her hus-
band Henry II of Anjou and England, and their son Richard
Coeur de Lion. Fontevraud, for centuries the largest monastic
complex in the world - containing priests, lay brothers, lay
sisters, contemplative nuns, invalids and social outcasts - was,
from its foundation in 1101 until its dissolution at the French
Revolution, uninterruptedly governed by the abbess of the
community of contemplative nuns.
The question of the ordination of women - as the Pontifical
Biblical Commission advised Pope Paul VI when he sought
their advice on the matter - cannot be decided on the basis of
New Testament exegesis. The historical evidence is if anything
even more fragile. The question has never previously been
raised on the assumption (now agreed on all sides) of the social
equality of men and women. It is a new question, and new
questions need time, attentiveness, sensitivity and careful
scholarship; they cannot be foreclosed by fiat.

26
 VATICAN II

In 1979, Karl Rahner argued that the fundamental

theological significance of the Council lay in the fact that it
marked 'the beginning of a tentative approach by the Church
to the discovery and realisation of itself as world-Church'.14
He saw three great epochs in Church history, the third of which
has only just begun. There was a short period when Christi-
anity was still a form of Judaism; another period, lasting
nearly two thousand years, when it was (with few exceptions)
the Church of what became European culture and civilisation.
The third period was now beginning, 'in which the Church's
living space is from the very outset the whole world'.15
Rahner's argument was not about geography, but about
culture. At Vatican I, there were bishops from Asia and
from Africa, but these were missionary bishops of European
or American origin. Vatican II, in contrast, really was a first
assembly of the world-episcopate.
In order for the Church truly to be a world-Church, on this
account, it has to become a Church which - while never ceas-
ing to keep alive the memory that it grew from Jewish roots
and flourished, for many centuries, in European soil - will be
genuinely at home in all the diverse cultures of the world.
Such genuinely pluralist inculturation of the gospel will,
of course, profoundly influence not only liturgical styles and
forms of theological argument but also patterns and structures
of Church order and of ministry. There will, as Rahner sees it,
be no future Christendoms: he saw the Church of the future as
a Diaspora-Church, a little flock, pusillus grex. This situation,
he insisted, must not be interpreted - either in practice or in
theory - in sectarian terms, in attempted insulation from the
contexts in which the gospel is to be proclaimed.16
At least in its broad outline, Rahner's argument seems to me
persuasive, and it raises two issues of immense importance for
the future of the Church. In the first place, there is the question

27
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

of the relations between Christians and (for example) Jews,

Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus. In Western culture, since the
seventeenth century, it has been customary to see these peoples
as specific variants of the genus called religion. There are many
reasons for believing this interpretative framework to be
misleading,17 but the question raised by Rahner's argument is
this: do these other peoples now also find themselves required,
on their own terms, to understand themselves as, and to live as,
world-peoples? I simply raise the question, the answers to
which would, I suspect, be very different in each case, with very
different implications for the pattern of our quest, as Chris-
tians, for deeper mutual understanding and collaboration.
In the second place, it is clear that a Church becoming a
world-Church, increasingly diverse in structure, in thought-
forms, in liturgical expression, would need to sustain, with
even more attentiveness and energy than has been the case thus
far, the bonds of common faith, and hope, and charity. But,
if the Church is truly to be a world-Church, a Church that is
equally at home in every corner of the world, then the principal
instrument for sustaining koinonia, for deepening the global
bonds of faith, and hope, and charity, will be the collegiality of
the worldwide episcopate (sub et cum Petro, by all means).
Such communion of the world-Church can certainly not be sus-
tained by structures of control from a single Roman centre,
aided and abetted by movements of (for the most part) parochi-
ally Mediterranean origin and character.
In 1995, John Paul II, through the encyclical Ut unum sint,
asked bishops to engage with him in dialogue about the reform
of the papacy. One of those who responded was John Quinn,
the former Archbishop of San Francisco. In the Conclusion to
his study on The Reform of the Papacy', the archbishop said
there were two great problems above others: centralisation
and the need for reform of the Roman Curia.18

28
 VATICAN II

My own view is that these two problems in fact boil down

to one. There is not the slightest possibility that the Roman
Curia will reform itself to the extent of surrendering its control
and rendering itself accountable to the episcopate. Only the
world-episcopate, with the pope, can effectively instigate and
supervise the necessary reforms. It would be premature to con-
vene a general council for this purpose. A renewal of regional
councils, as a regular feature of Church life, would be a great
step forward. But the history of synods in Rome since Vati-
can II and the sustained campaign to rein in the authority of
episcopal conferences demonstrate that the curial stranglehold
is at present so complete that there is no serious possibility,
without curial reform, for effective worldwide recovery of the
ancient tradition of regional councils.
What we need, and what (in my judgement) it is not un-
realistic to hope for, is the election of a pope who, broadly
sharing Archbishop Quinn's diagnosis of the problem, estab-
lishes a commission, which the pope would chair, whose mem-
bers would be perhaps 40 or 50 diocesan bishops, drawn from
every corner of the world, and which would be advised by
officials of the Roman Curia, and by historians, theologians and
canon lawyers from outside Rome (many of whom, of course,
might be laypeople, women as well as men). The task of this
commission would be to draw up proposals for the transfer of
governance in the Church from pope and Curia to pope and
bishops, through the establishment of a standing synod whose
members would be diocesan bishops and whose work would be
assisted by the offices of a curia so reformed as to function, not
as an instrument of governance, but as a service of adminstra-
tion. The work of this commission, when completed, would
then be submitted to the worldwide episcopate for comment
and, presumably, revision, before receiving from the pope its
final ratification. The centralised control from which we suffer,

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

and which has contributed so greatly to the present crisis of

authority, was built up in less than 100 years. It could be put
into reverse in less than 10.

Notes
1 Christopher Butler, The Theology of Vatican II (London:
Darton, Longman & Todd, 1967), p. 113.
2 Xavier Rynne, The Fourth Session (London: Faber & Faber,
1966), p. 257. Xavier Rynne was later identified as F. X.
Murphy.
3 Rynne, Fourth Session, p. 258.
4 John L. Allen, Cardinal Ratzinger (New York: Continuum,
2000), p. 57.
5 See Informations Catholiques Internationales (1 January 1966),
p. 55.
6 Bernard Lonergan, Theology in its new context', in William
Ryan and Bernard Tyrrell (eds), A Second Collection (London:
Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974), pp. 55-67 (55).
7 Nicholas Lash, 'Modernism, aggiornamento and the night battle',
in Adrian Hastings (ed.), Bishops and Writers (Wheathampstead:
Anthony Clarke, 1977), pp. 51-79 (52).
8 From a 1968 article in The Times by John Morgan, 'The history
of the debate', in Peter Harris et al., On Human Life (London:
Burns & Gates, 1968), pp. 7-26.
9 See Lumen gentium, art. 2, quoting from a homily by Gregory
the Great.
10 See the debate between Cardinals Kasper and Ratzinger, especi-
ally Kasper's article in Stimmen der Zeit (December 2000), trans-
lated as 'On the Church', The Tablet (23 June 2001), pp. 927-30.
11 See series of reports on the movements in The Tablet (March-
April 1997 and January 2001).
12 Gordon Urquhart, 'A dead man's tale', The Tablet (22 March
1997), p. 367.
13 See Nicholas Lash, 'On not inventing doctrine', The Tablet
(2 December 1995), p. 1544.
14 Karl Rahner, 'Basic theological interpretation of the Second
Vatican Council', Theological Investigations, vol. XX (London:
Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981), pp. 77-89.
15 Ibid., pp. 82-3.

30
 VATICAN II

16 Rahner, 'Structural change in the Church of the future', Theo-

logical Investigations, vol. XX, pp. 115-32 (128-9).
17 See Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and End of Religion (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 3-25.
18 John R. Quinn, The Reform of the Papacy (New York: Herder,
1999), p. 178. See also Lash, 'A papacy for the future', The
Tablet (11 December 1999), pp. 1678-9.

31
 2
The 'Open Church9 40 Years Later:
A Reckoning1
Michael Novak

My account of Vatican II, The Open Church, had a model in

the long journalistic account written by Lord Acton at the First
Vatican Council in 1870. Acton recreates what it felt like in
Rome during those days, the sentiments as well as the ideas,
the rumours and suspicions and the hopes; and, while clearly
partisan in his own leanings, he made a mighty effort to see
things truthfully. Despite all this, Acton misread the events of
Vatican I quite dramatically. He could not foresee how, in the
cataclysmic world of the twentieth century, the Church would
badly need a strengthened papal leadership, and even suffer
for papal weaknesses. Notwithstanding this failure, Acton
awakened in his readers an eros of honesty and truth; and that
saved Acton, too.
How history will come out is not known to those living
through the heat of the present, and much that they may have
missed may turn out to have been crucial, while events that
seemed to them decisive would be smothered by later twists
and turns. As a historian of vast erudition, Acton opposed the
declaration of the infallibility of the pope - at least at that
time, when the Vatican's struggle to keep papal states on the
one hand and rampant positivistic rationalism on the other
lent the occasion exactly the wrong connotations. But he

32
 THE 'OPEN CHURCH' 40 YEARS LATER

eventually came to see (after the papal states were definitively

lost) that the conditions placed upon the exercise of infalli-
bility by the Council might actually restrain later popes and
chasten them, and thus narrow the channels of papal power,
not broaden them.
In my account, too, I tried to be aware of irony and trag-
edy - themes which the antiquity and tangled passions of the
history of Rome impose upon the mind with every mocking
jester of every fountain. How they laugh at the passing gener-
ations, those fountains! How they laughed at ours. I meant
most seriously such passages as these in my Introduction of
1963, in which I wrestled with the problem of foresight and
interpretation. I felt keenly the irony inherent in our hubris in
those days, our pride of life, our sense of being special:

As the Council Fathers gathered in Rome in the last

week of September, 1963, it was difficult to understand
the exact meaning and direction of the work that had
been begun in the first session the year before. As the
weeks of October passed and then of November, it
became even more difficult to understand. It will take a
century perhaps, or two centuries, before the event is put
in sufficient focus for men to grasp it simply. From our
position, while the Council is still going on, we grope
more in darkness than in light. It is not that we lack for
theories about what is going on; it is rather that our
theories are inevitably partial, and probably partisan.
The facts which seem important to observers caught up
in the events may prove in the perspective of time to
have been insignificant; small things which occur unob-
served may one day prove to have had a great effect
upon subsequent history.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Despite the manifest faults, sins and weak minds of many of

us during and after Vatican II, the Holy Spirit did preside over
it, and brought the world immense fruits through it. Without
the Council, we could never have had the enormously impor-
tant pontificate of Pope John Paul II, and perhaps not the long
hidden but energetic stirrings of Eastern Europe that erupted
so magnificently in 1989, that year that will reverberate
throughout history, the year that showed international Com-
munism to be tinkling brass, whistlingly empty. The year 1989
was the year in which Joshua blew the horn, and the Wall
again came down.
And yet the very pope who presided (brilliantly, by the way)
over the final three sessions of the Council, Paul VI, said
publicly some few years afterwards that 'the smoke of Satan'
had filtered into the work of the Council, and blown up a
mirage of 'the spirit of Vatican IF that had subverted the letter
of what the Holy Spirit had wrought, and blown the barque of
Peter far off course and tossed her about on stormy seas. Many
inhaled a spirit of self-intoxication from the air they breathed
from 'the spirit of Vatican IF. A spirit of radical individualism
and hatred for the way things had been swept through reli-
gious community after religious community, through colleges
and universities, through the ranks of priests (and even some
bishops, although the latter were more constrained by their
close ties to Rome), and eventually through the educated laity.
Thus, 'Vatican II Catholicism' was born. It was much cel-
ebrated by its proponents.
It has not yet been dispassionately evaluated, and its colos-
sal failures have not been weighed against its much-praised
successes. This is not the place for such an accounting. But it is
worth indicating at least where the events I began to record in
1963 had led by the beginning of the following century.

34
 THE 'OPEN CHURCH' 40 YEARS LATER

The Growth of Collegiality

In a chapter fittingly called 'October 30', I wrote as follows in
1963: 'On the evening of October 30, a nearly full moon
bathed St Peter's Square in such brilliance, such serenity, as
was worthy of the greatest day in Roman Catholic history
since 1870.' On that day the central vote of Vatican II was
taken, indicating a powerful consensus of the assembled 2,100
bishops in favour of a renewed emphasis on the supreme
authority of the entire college of bishops, united around the
world with the pope, and thus stressing the 'collegiality' of all
bishops, including their centre, their servant, and their leader,
the Bishop of Rome, rather than (as Vatican I had seemed to
many to have done) the authority of the pope in solitude. How
has that final sentence in that crucial chapter held up over
these last four decades?
Very well, I think. Without that emphasis on the collegiality
of the bishops around the world, there would scarcely have
been the effort to select a non-Italian bishop - a Pole, from the
Eastern bloc - in those dangerous years of the late 1970s, when
the Soviet Empire still seemed to be expanding (in Angola,
Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Yemen and elsewhere)
and the world feared 'nuclear winter'. The internationalisation
of the Roman Curia, and the regular participation of bishops
from around the world in international synods, commissions
and committees would not as likely - or at least so quickly -
have occurred. Again, even as Pope John Paul II has dramatised
the international pastoral role of the Bishop of Rome by a
steady, relentless round of visits to his brother bishops in
country after country, each of his public Eucharists in every
country he visits is celebrated in a highly visible collegiality with
all the bishops of that country, and of many other countries

35
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

besides. There the pope and bishops are visibly united as the
grains of wheat in the one bread, the grapes in one wine. This
ecclesial body of bishops is visible for all the world to see, in the
dramatic moments of the internationally televised Eucharists.
The theology of collegiality first signalled by the consensus of
the Fathers of the Council in five dramatic votes on 30 October
1963 has been witnessed in highly dramatic visual symbols by
billions around the world.
Thus, in public perception the Catholic Church at the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century is in many ways more vital,
more dynamic and more important than it ever was at the
beginning of 1700, 1800 or 1900. One sees this in the number
of stories about the Catholic Church appearing on the front
pages of major newspapers and the covers of popular maga-
zines. The US Ambassador to Italy wrote to Washington circa
1864, and with morose delectation, that he was most assuredly
witnessing the last days of the Roman papacy. By the end of the
twentieth century, US Presidents, the most consequential of
world leaders, were eager to be televised with the Pope, and as
frequently as possible in order to bask in his moral authority
and the aura of dynamism that surrounds him. None of this is
likely to have happened apart from Vatican II.

Why an Open Church Needs Borders

On still other fronts, what has happened to the grand project of
the 'open Church'? Pope John Paul IPs work with and in frank
dialogue with Jews is one good evidence of solid accomplish-
ment, and even more sweeping is his boldness regarding human
rights around the world. His visits to the Synagogue in Rome
and to Israel, his words at Auschwitz and at Yad Vashem, his
conversations with Jewish survivors from his boyhood home,
Wadowice - all these touched many Jewish friends of mine and

36
 THE 'OPEN CHURCH' 40 YEARS LATER

writers in the public press quite deeply. So did his appeals for
human rights to Pinochet in Chile and Marcos in the Philip-
pines. John Paul II has not hesitated to upbraid the powerful,
including the United States and its presidents. In Cairo, Beijing
and elsewhere he has opposed the cultural elite of a communi-
cations age - journalists, commentators, feminists, secularists
and anti-Christians of all stripes and formidable powers - in
calling abortion and euthanasia moral evils of a horrifying sort,
and in refusing to budge on his duty to uphold the considered
practice of Jesus, namely, that only males, weak and unworthy
as they are, may be ordained as priests. Most of all, the Pope has
urged truth within the Church, and repentance for many hereto-
fore unadmitted sins of its members, including bishops and
popes. His appeals for repentance have sometimes drummed
down like rain, they have come so often - for Galileo, the Inqui-
sition, the Czech martyrs, the massacre of Huguenots, and many
more. The Church is a very human institution, whose vocation is
to incarnate Christ in history, and it has not been afraid to dirty
its hands in that task, as it must. If it is always to be calling the
world to repentance, it must lead in that path every day.
Moreover, there is lively, not to say furious, argument
within the Church (and between the Church and the surround-
ing culture) on almost everything. The Church in America is
not dying of terminal indifference; passions run very high, and
arguments cut even deeper. If there has been a failure of
openness, it lies in the paucity of fora in which intelligent
representatives of otherwise hostile points of view can engage
one another in the same room. Richard John Neuhaus, a con-
vert from Lutheranism, has attempted to make the scholarly
seminars around the journal First Things one such forum.
On a less intellectually rigorous level the Common Ground
Initiative, launched by Cardinal Bernardin before his death, is
another. More are needed, variously conceived.

37
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Most Catholics, left and right, really do love the Church.

They have, alas, learned to be fearful of one another from
abuses by one side and the other during the past 40 years. The
reformers were far from generous toward the conservatives,
whom they roundly defeated when they took over virtually all
the institutions within the American Church. In addition, they
are sometimes the last to recognise their own intolerance, since
in their own self-image they are by definition tolerant. From
Vatican II onwards, most liberal Catholics abandoned the
practice of tolerance, towards conservatives at least, having
learned to refer to 'conservatives' in tones of mockery. By con-
trast, the besetting sin of conservatives, now that after genera-
tions of dominance they find themselves a defeated minority,
is a peculiar sort of resentment born of a feeling of powerless-
ness. These besetting sins feed each other's worst tendencies.
The very conception of the open Church, like that of the
open society according to Karl Popper, requires a falsification
procedure, a test for being found out to be wrong, and being
rejected on that account. Not everyone who claims to be speak-
ing for the Catholic faith is actually doing so. It is quite impor-
tant for the community to have methods for ascertaining the
falsification of the witness. (Is racial segregation compatible
with Catholic faith? Is it Catholic to encourage the practice of
abortion, or to have one? Do Catholics still believe in purga-
tory?) Down the ages, in matters of faith and morals the method
protected by the Holy Spirit has been to defer to the judgement
of the Bishop of Rome, when the latter is in conformity with the
faith as it has been taught 'always and everywhere' (in other
words, not solely because it is his private opinion). To be
Catholic means to be in communion with Rome.
In cases of irresolvable dispute, the noble Christian's course
is, in the end, having made his case to the best of his ability, to
defer to the Bishop of Rome, and in silence and peace to await

38
 THE 'OPEN CHURCH' 40 YEARS LATER

the decision of history. It is not unusual for an intellectual to

be in a greater hurry than the Holy Spirit. If his position turns
out, actually, to be correct and that of the Bishop of Rome
wrong, his willingness to have deferred for the good of the
whole community will be all the more honoured, and his
original opinion given the priceless sanction of a position held
firm at great personal cost. Meanwhile, it sometimes happens
that public understanding moves more slowly than that of the
learned, so that even a delay in the public presentation of an
advance position may work to the good and the equanimity of
the whole body of the faithful. It will sometimes secure, as
well, the rounding out and deepening of the initial advance
position. 'For those who love God, all things work together
unto good.'
In no other period in my life have so many theological
disputes been conducted so broadly and openly in the secular
press, in the religious press, and in public debates as in the
years from 1961 until now. In such an era, theologians need to
develop their own mechanisms for guarding the data entrusted
to them. They themselves should mark out of bounds opinions
that falsify the data. If theologians watch over their own
ranks, bishops and Rome will not have to intrude. An open
Church cannot be built if those with the crown jewels - the
data of revelation - do not hold these life-giving data pre-
cious. The truths of the faith are essential for a true humanism.
To treasure them, many in our blood-soaked time have given
up their lives.

Three Scarlet Threads

Vatican II was a call to holiness sent out to hundreds of
millions of hearts. It will be a success only if that call is heeded
many times over, in critical mass. God sheds abundant graces

39
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

among us. The task is hard, but not impossible. That is what
John Paul II has been calling us to, in his own vision of
opening up the Church to the world, so as to open the world to
God's gracious mercies.
Many who do not understand the language of theology - who
are flummoxed by theological terms (much like the spell checker
in my computer) - may find it easier to grasp a philosophical
model of the same. That model is not entirely adequate, but it
does accustom the mind to making some fruitful moves, like a
child learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels.
If you try to become conscious of the driving urgency within
you to pursue questions to their conclusion - sometimes, for
instance, to get to the point of a j oke, or to hear the end of a story,
or to solve a nettlesome puzzle - you have some clue about the
yawning hunger of a woman or man to come to an under-
standing of all things. To see it all whole. To grasp every detail.
And it might seem to you that such an understanding would be
so far beyond any of your limits of time and ability that it would
require an insight that is infinite, as infinite as are the questions
to be raised. To pursue such an insight is what it means to love
the truth, to be in the grip of the eros of understanding, restless
until you rest in the full light of a limitless understanding.
To pursue that light day by day you need to be free, free to
test out putative theories and hypotheses - first approxima-
tions, as it were - and to drive on to better-grounded ones; free
to acquire your own insights and make your own judgements.
You need, as well, a certain degree of self-command, a sobriety
of purpose and equanimity of judgement, a fearlessness in the
face of uncomfortable findings. You need a certain detachment
from other passions, in deference to the passion for seeing
things straight. In all those senses, you would come to see the
meaning of the line: 'Ye shall seek the truth, and the truth
shall make ye free.' Our love for truth nourishes in us the

40
 THE 'OPEN CHURCH' 40 YEARS LATER

self-command of free men. By contrast, other loves can deflect

us from following the light. They can twist our judgement and
undermine our courage, as in the case of the scientist who
falsified data for the sake of advancement. Oddly enough, the
profoundest characteristic of free women and men is their love
for truth. That is the love that makes them free.
If you are reflecting along with me about your own love of
truth and willingness to bear the burden of asking questions,
you have available in your own consciousness much of the
classic evidence for assertions about the nature of the human
person, human community and God, according to the tradi-
tions of the Catholic Church. The infinitely restless drive of
inquiry, the appetite for truth, the discomfort with anything
less than truth - all these are best nourished in community,
with friends with equal (or even superior) love for truth, who
keep you honest and inspire you through times of great
difficulty, because they have also known dry and painful times.
If you follow me so far, then you can understand why
Bishop Wojtyla wrote even before the Second Vatican Council
assembled that the most important word for the Council to
tell the world concerns Everyman's answer to the question:
Who am I? Who are we? What is the meaning and sense of
the human project? In formulating this answer, three terms
seemed to him crucial: freedom, the person and community.
These three are tied together by the active energy that drives
through all of them: love of the truth about man. Freedom is for
truth, and is built up, constituted, by fidelity to truth. The
search for truth is communal, not only personal, and it requires
for its exercise the open society - open in its polity, its econ-
omy and its culture. It is the vocation of the Church to keep
this vision before the human race, in part by living out this
vision in advance of the human race, through its own constant
repentance, reform and starting again.

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I am here sticking, as I said above, to merely philosophical

language. But the Bible also speaks richly of these three
realities, as does the liturgy and the whole of the theological
tradition. The excruciating experience of our own bloody
century and the exhaustion of so many competing ideologies
has, perhaps, fashioned for us a more precise language for
articulating this tradition than was available to earlier ages.
We have acquired a sharper historical consciousness, and
perhaps an even fuller sense of collision with all the different
cultures of earth, such as individual bishops felt in St Peter's.
In greeting those who sat near them during the Council,
they struck up friendships with men from entirely different
continents and cultures. (In his letters to his diocese, Bishop
Wojtyla described his amazingly diverse seat mates, as did
Bishop Tracy of Baton Rouge in his, not failing to note the at
times incommensurable cultural distances they encountered.
One could find unity in faith and love, they learned, even when
in the eyes of the other one saw a totally different world of
experience.)
Perhaps, too, these searing times have taught us a richer lan-
guage of interiority and consciousness than the tradition had
felt need of before. Thus, Wojtyla found in phenomenology
richer terms for expressing interior dimensions of the per-
son and community than are to be found in Aquinas. He had
needed to draw on such terms to understand his own inner life
during the Nazi, then the Communist, occupation of Poland.
All these points Vatican II wrestled with, for instance in its
debates about the meaning of the liturgy (public worship) of
the Church, its most vital, inmost source of connection with
God's action in the world, for this connection is at once
communal, personal and free. And then wrestled with them
again in its discussion of the meaning of the Church. Person,
community and freedom were important red threads coursing

42
 THE 'OPEN CHURCH' 40 YEARS LATER

through all its debates. They were woven into worldly con-
texts in the later debates in later sessions, first raised in this
Second Session, in such documents as those on Religious Lib-
erty and, as it was at first called, 'The Church in the Modern
World'. In both these documents, Wojtyla played leadership
roles in committee, not always in the very front rank, but by
making intellectual contributions at crucial intersections.
Although he was only 42 when the Council opened, Wojtyla
made 8 oral interventions in the Council hall, a rather high
number, and often spoke in the name of large groups of bish-
ops from the East. (Altogether he made 22 interventions, oral
and written.) He was an unusually active member of various
official drafting groups for Gaudium et spes, and even a chief
author of what was called the 'Polish draft'. His voice was
crucial to the passage of the document on religious liberty and
to the deepening of its philosophical and theological dimen-
sion, in line with the necessities of the non-free nations behind
the Iron Curtain. No one, perhaps, was more influential in
persuading the Americans and Europeans that their own views
on liberty needed to be deepened, in order to account for
questions arising from other cultures. In later memoirs about
the Council, such world-class theologians as Yves Congar and
Henri de Lubac praised Wojtyla's acumen in committee work
as well as his magnetic presence.
All in all, the Council met for four sessions across four
consecutive autumns from 1962 through 1965. It reached
agreement on 16 major documents. All these were published in
official form in the languages of the nations and have been
subjected to a stupendous amount of commentary. Still, it is
surprising how few Catholics, even well-educated ones, have
actually spent time reading the documents themselves. (Those
most fond of the 'spirit' of Vatican II seldom sent students
to study the 'letter'.) These 'Declarations', 'Decrees' and

43
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

'Constitutions' are for the most part splendidly poised and

balanced, and quite nourishing to the inquiring soul. They
were written as if with devotional purposes in mind, to move
the heart as well as intellect.

Rescuing Vatican II
I can remember the smells of burning chestnuts in the streets of
Rome; the taste of Sambuca after dinner with my wife Karen;
the excitement of the press conferences every early afternoon;
the perfect October air in St Peter's Square with the great
dome glinting in the sunlight. It was a wonderful time to be
alive. Since an Ecumenical Council happens only once in a
century, I am glad to have been present at this one, a great and
history-changing outpouring of the Spirit, and just plain fun.
But it was much easier to portray the sheer novelty of
the Council than to portray its continuities with the past. The
news business is in the business of news - novelty - and the
public does not go to the press for solid scholarship. In a deli-
cious irony the media bring us the opposite of 'non-historical
orthodoxy' - non-orthodox novelty.2 Important realities are
often distorted, and history itself is significantly falsified. For
instance, the era before the Council was more like a Golden
Age in Catholic history than like the Dark Age described to
an eager press by the post-conciliar 'progressives'. There were
many glaring deficiencies in it and yet it was in many respects
healthier and more faithful to the Gospels than much that
came later in the name of 'progress' and 'openness'.
Once the passions of those participating in the Council rose,
the victorious majority (the 'progressives') acquired a vested
interest both in stressing new beginnings and in discrediting
the leadership and the ways of the past. That emphasis shifted
the balance of power in the Church into their hands. To them

44
 THE 'OPEN CHURCH' 40 YEARS LATER

accrued the glory of all things promising, new, and not-yet-

tried; to their foes accrued the blame for everything wrong.
The more power wrested from the 'old guard', the more mas-
sive the power acquired by the reformers. The more the past
was discredited, the greater the slack cut for new initiatives and
new directions. The politics of the post-conciliar Church in the
United States and some parts of Northern Europe became an
unfair fight.
Within a decade of the end of the Council, every major
institution in the American Church and in many others was
dominated by the progressives, under the sway of 'the spirit of
Vatican IF. That spirit sometimes soared far beyond the
actual, hard-won documents and decisions of Vatican II. Some
seized the right to go far beyond those. It was as though
some took the Church to be dis-incarnate, detached from flesh
and history - detached, that is, from Rome and the Vatican,
and so far as possible from any concrete local authority.
Detached, too, from past tradition and the painful lessons of
the past. It was as though the world (or at least the history
of the Church) were now to be divided into only two periods,
pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II. Everything 'pre' was then
pretty much dismissed, so far as its authority mattered. For the
most extreme, to be a Catholic now meant to believe more or
less anything one wished to believe, or at least in the sense in
which one personally interpreted it. One could be a Catho-
lic 'in spirit'. One could take Catholic to mean the 'culture' in
which one was born, rather than to mean a creed making
objective and rigorous demands. One could imagine Rome as
a distant and irrelevant anachronism, embarrassment, even
adversary. Rome as 'them.'
One way of putting this is that 'non-historical orthodoxy'
was driven out from the centre of the Church, only to be
replaced in not a few hearts by 'neodoxy', the love of the latest

45
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

thing, the cult of the new. Thus, those we used to call at

Vatican II 'the prophets of doom', 'the School of Fear', turned
out to have had in some respects prudent foresight. As world-
weary Romans say, 'To bet on pessimism is always safer.'
It is not that way in America, and not in the breast of Karol
Wojtyla, activist young bishop at Vatican II and, in due course,
13 years after the Council's conclusion, the pope who took as
his papal name the names of the two popes of Vatican II, John
XXIII and Paul VI. Wojtyla's key word is not pessimism but
hope. He bears not only vision but also conviction, will and
total trust in the grace of God.
It is not too much to say that John Paul II rescued Vatican II
from disaster. His total awareness of the presence of the Holy
Spirit at the Council, the new Pentecost, suffused his every
action as Archbishop, then Cardinal, of Krakow and later as
Universal Pastor of the Church. He brought back a sense of in-
carnation, concreteness, discipline and practicality, and he has
been an indefatigable theoretician. No sooner did the world's
Catholic universities gear up for a year of conferences on one
of his important encyclicals (formal letters intended for the
whole Church) than he issued another (by June 2003, 14 in
all). He has given a thorough and authoritative interpretation
of Vatican II. More than that, by his actions he has dramatised
its key emphases worldwide and in many ways shown hesitant
bishops, and bishops intimidated by the immensity of the task,
how to do it.
In a nutshell, Wojtyla proposed the following principles for
the development of the Council (and continues to do so as
Pope): that the chief ideologies and intellectual currents of
modernity are exhausted; that the world needs and seeks a new
and authentic universal humanism; and that it is just this
humanism that the Church was called into existence to offer.

46
 THE 'OPEN CHURCH' 40 YEARS LATER

The creator of the universe, who created human beings, created

them free at the same time. He calls them to be his friends, in
freedom and not in slavery. He made them so that by nature
they seek and inquire - restlessly, urgently. He infused an eros
of understanding into their hearts, so that they might turn away
from all that falls short of or falsifies truth. This faithful pursuit
of nothing but the truth guarantees their freedom. It is their
shield against self-deception, illusion and slavery. Such a
pursuit is a communal, not merely solitary, adventure. For we
correct and inspire one another, and not only in one country
but as a worldwide community.
In this way, further, the Christian mysteries of the Trinity
and the Incarnation - the community of God in three Persons,
and the taking on of historical flesh by One of the Three -
unveil the community, freedom and eros of inquiry embodied
in the human person. Our creator and Father wills a universal
humanism, a civilization of friendship. The Church must open
itself to the world, shouting the good news of this highest
calling. The Church is the forerunner of human destiny. God
has called humans toward his own infinite beauty (hinted at in
sunsets and mountain streams, peonies, Alpine peaks, rolling
white-capped waves, the eyes of a beautiful woman, the music
of Mozart, and the breathtaking lines of the great national
poets of all nations). He unites them in solidarity with one
another and with him. Communion is the inner tendency of
creation. L'Amor, Dante writes, che muov' II Sol' ed altre
stelle. The Love that moves the sun and all the stars.
So also I am glad to have come to know Karol Wojtyla, if
not in 1963, then in his time as pope - John Paul the Great, as
I think he will be known, the pope who rescued Vatican II and
gave it urgent focus; and who taught us relentlessly to focus
where he focuses: on Christ. I cannot think of the Council

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

without thinking of the pope named for the two popes of the
Council, John and Paul - and without thinking of the One to
Whom he points: 'Sia lodato Gesu Cristo!' Were these not his
first words as pope?

Notes
1 This is a revised and abridged version of the Introduction to
Michael Novak's The Open Church (New Brunswick, NJ, and
London: Transaction Books, 2nd edn, 2001); original version, The
Open Church: Vatican II (New York: Macmillan, 1964).
2 'Non-historical orthodoxy', the theology of the Roman Curia
prior to Vatican II, imagined theology as a set of eternal prin-
ciples, outside of time, 'a building absolute and perfect, in whose
possession the faithful may stand safely and securely', as one
among them put it. Its practitioners did not worry overmuch about
that system's historical justification, or about making it relevant to
the historical present.

48
 3
Tradition and Reaction: Historical Resources
for a Contemporary Renewal
Eamon Duffy

In a tribute to John Wilkins it seems appropriate to reflect on

Catholic identity. Catholic tradition, and the relation between
them for the future. And I begin with two novels.
The first, published in the USA in 1959, Walter Miller's
A Canticle for Leibowitz^ is a science-fiction novel about the
rebuilding of world civilisation after a new dark ages brought
on by nuclear war. In the aftermath of that war the world had
turned its back on technology and science, and most of the
scientists had been lynched. The novel focuses on a new reli-
gious order, the Order of St Leibowitz, dedicated to the preser-
vation and copying of the remnants of the world's learning:
monks in the great desert fortress monastery (somewhere in
Arizona I would guess) copy and illuminate elaborate symbolic
diagrams which, we realise but they do not, are in fact electrical
circuit charts and machine blueprints. As the world had col-
lapsed in nuclear ruins, the Church survived, though Rome was
liquidated and the papacy is now established somewhere in
America. The monks preserve Christian civilisation in a world
populated by cannibalistic desert mutants and ruled by robber
barons. In due course there is a new Renaissance, and a new
scientific revolution, in which the monastery's precious archive
plays its part. But once more pride and sin precipitate war: as
the novel closes, the monks of St Leibowitz set off for the stars

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

in a spaceship aboard which are a group of cardinals, among

them the next pope: behind them, nuclear winter descends.
Miller's book is a witty meditation on the difference
between knowledge and wisdom, and on the relation of the
Church to human culture, in an essentially Augustinian frame-
work. Everything in the novel changes, except the desperate
sinfulness of the human heart, and the ancient abiding cer-
tainties of the Church and her liturgy: at the end of the fictional
fourth millennium the liturgy is still in Latin and the forms of
the Christian life are exactly as they had been in 1959, down to
the bishops' buskins. Miller's grand vision of the collapse and
flux of human society through millennia betrays not the slight-
est premonition of the revolution which, in 1959, the year of
the novel's publication, was about to transform the Church
which for Miller, was the one constant in a world perpetually
falling apart.
By contrast, David Lodge's How Far Can You Go?, pub-
lished in 1980, is a painfully funny evocation of what it was
like to be a young university-educated Catholic in Britain in
the 1960s and 1970s. It opens with an early morning Mass set
in the gaunt London church of our Lady and St Jude (hopeless
causes, a nice touch!) on St Valentine's Day 1952, attended by
the group of students who will form the dramatis personae of
the book. Most are the products of intensely Catholic back-
grounds, soaked in and acquiescent to the minutiae of Catholic
teaching and sub-cultural peculiarity, and the opening pages of
the novel offer a crash course in some of the more exotic
features of Catholicism as then understood: transubstantiation,
holidays of obligation, works of supererogation, the difference
between mortal and venial sin, the rosary, plenary indulgences,
purgatory, and the almost permanently tormented state of a
pubescent young Catholic male's conscience.

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 TRADITION AND REACTION

The novel culminates a generation later with the televising of

an experimental 'seventies' Easter Vigil, organised by a group
called COC (Catholics for an Open Church) in which white-
robed charismatic nuns dance on a college playing field as
the sun rises, a Latin-American theologian in a combat jacket
preaches revolution, and a voice-over by a well-meaning but
slightly bewildered young priest, soon to leave the priesthood
for a Ph.D. in sociology and marriage to a secretary, expresses
doubts about the Resurrection. An anonymous commentator
sums up the changes which the book has chronicled.

Many things have changed - attitudes to authority, sex,

worship, other Christians, other religions. But perhaps
the most fundamental change is one that the majority of
Catholics themselves are scarcely conscious of. It's the
fading away of the traditional Catholic metaphysic -
that marvellously complex and ingenious synthesis of
theology and cosmology and casuistry, which situated
individual souls on a kind of spiritual Snakes and Lad-
ders board, motivated them with equal doses of hope and
fear, and promised them, if they persevered in the game,
an eternal reward. The board was marked out very
clearly, decorated with all kinds of picturesque motifs,
and governed by intricate rules and provisos. Heaven,
Hell, Purgatory, Limbo. Mortal, venial and original sin.
Angels, devils, saints, and Our Lady Queen of Heaven.
Grace, penance, relics, indulgences and all the rest of it.
Millions of Catholics no doubt still believe in all that
literally. But belief is gradually fading. That metaphysic
is no longer taught in schools and seminaries in the more
advanced countries, and Catholic children are growing
up knowing little or nothing about it. Within another

51
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

generation or two it will have disappeared, superseded

by something less vivid but more tolerant.

Lodge's fictional analysis of the psychological, social and

intellectual upheavals which underlie the comic dilemmas of
characters caught in the flux of modernity and the dissolution
of inherited Catholic certainties is very shrewd, and still
touches a nerve. His point is that the Catholic metaphysic was
inseparable from the tight web of Catholic practice. Appar-
ently timeless certainties had actually turned out to be part of
a package, wound into and in part dependent for credibility on
a set of cultural practices and attitudes which have now gone or
are going as irrevocably as the demise of the dinosaurs. This
Catholic culture was vivid, and often endearing - it is evoked in
the football scores of the Catholic youth clubs in South London
in the 1950s in another of Lodge's novels, Therapy: 'Immacu-
late Conception 2, Precious Blood 1 ... Perpetual Succour 3,
Forty Martyrs, nil', but it was part of the life of a community
whose history of disadvantage and discrimination, and whose
dominant first-, second- or third-generation Irish compo-
nent gave it a distinctive and strongly defined sense of identity.
In Lodge's admittedly highly coloured portrayal, Catholicism
on the eve of the Council was not a set of opinions; it was a
community and a way of life one signed up for.
But it was a way of life which, though it seemed immemo-
rial, was actually a cultural construct, the product of a network
of specific circumstances. In the 1950s, it was a community on
the crest of a wave. The Catholic Church throughout Britain
was one of the principal beneficiaries of the Butler Education
Act of 1944. In the 25 years after the Second World War
a swelling wave of pupils from Catholic schools would flood
into the universities. The community itself was growing, the
estimated Catholic population of England and Wales moving

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 TRADITION AND REACTION

rapidly towards 4,000,000, baptisms topping 100,000 a year,

adult conversions (many of them by people 'marrying in')
touching an annual 15,000. The seminaries and religious orders
were packed, and ambitious new building programmes were
adopted to accommodate the boom.
Yet despite all that, the Church in Britain was intellectually
ill-prepared for the Council. Its leaders were practical men, for
whom theology was a bore. The Cardinal Archbishop of West-
minster, John Carmel Heenan, was a gifted and charismatic
pastor, but on his own admission 'had never had a serious
doubt in his life'. He was temperamentally and intellectually
ill-equipped to steer the community through the theological
white water of the seventies.

The Council: The Decisive Break

The Council profoundly changed the orientation of Catholic
theology, ecclesiology and spirituality. The whole tone of its
documents, and the fundamental decision to produce no new
definitions or anathemas, marked in themselves a decisive
break with what one may call the tradition of the Vatican
Jeremiad. This was the spirit of confrontation, the repudiation
of non-ecclesial culture, which had characterised the official
utterances of the Church for more than a century. The shift to
the vernacular in worship reintroduced into Catholic liturgical
and devotional experience a decisive element of regional vari-
ety which was bound to have theological as well as pastoral
implications, however carefully policed it might be. It also
introduced in an acute way the question of the meaning and
value of tradition - an issue I shall return to presently. Finally,
the conciliar process itself, the sense of the shared labour of the
whole Church and not simply the central organs of the papacy
to discern and proclaim the Catholic faith which comes to us

53
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

from the apostles - all this decisively and permanently shifted

Catholic perception of the nature of the Church, and the role of
the magisterium within it.
The Council left us with a very different sort of Church,
more responsive to lay expectation, more theologically alert
and diverse. Yet there were and are those who believed that this
amazing and Spirit-led experience should have produced a far
greater conversion of hearts, minds and structures. Lay expec-
tation was growing. When, not very surprisingly, a heavily
clerical and authoritarian institution failed to transform itself
at once into a place of dialogue and partnership between laity
and priesthood, sharp disillusion set in. That sense of failure -
'Whatever Happened to Vatican II?' - has persisted among
Catholics of a certain age, old enough to have shared in the
initial euphoria of reform in the white heat of the conciliar
years themselves.
One prominent and persistent theme of the liberal critique
of the present state of the Church has been its failure ad-
equately to absorb the characteristic values and institutions of
democracy - dialogue, consultation, accountability. The pres-
sure for greater involvement of women - and maybe their
eventual ordination - derives some of its force from 'demo-
cratic' rather than strictly theological arguments. Yet for many,
this process of accommodation has gone disastrously too far.
The Catholic Church in Britain is now far more at ease in the
culture than it was on the eve of the Council: Catholics are to
be found at every level of English life, and the once pervasive
cultural anti-Catholicism has receded. In popular perception,
the Reformation no longer seems the key stage in the crea-
tion of a British identity, but a far-off battle long ago, and,
outside Scotland and Northern Ireland, the Reformers, as often
as not, are perceived as Paisley-like men who broke a lot of
lovely statues.

54
 TRADITION AND REACTION

Yet there are some who view this rapprochement with the
establishment with dismay. In The Two Catholic Churches:
A Study in Oppression, a powerful and controversial book
published in 1986, the (then) Dominican Antony Archer
suggested that the transformations of the Church in England
after Vatican II were a betrayal of the working class to whom
on the eve of the Council the Catholic Church had unique and
privileged access. The advent of a vernacular liturgy and forms
of Christian involvement, which placed a premium on discus-
sion and activism, had, he thought, merely taken control of the
Church away from the clergy and handed it to the articulate
middle classes, who had every interest in making the Catho-
lic Church as much like the Church of England as possible -
and that, with the cooperation of a newly professionalised
clergy, was what Archer thought had happened. The Church
had opted for power, acceptability and talk, and in the process
had abandoned its proper constituency among the powerless
and inarticulate.
Archer's attack on the actual outcome of the conciliar
reforms in England was launched from the Left: he was not
opposed to change, but disliked the form change had taken.
On the Right, there were those who, quite simply, thought the
faith had been betrayed, that ecumenism and doctrinal devia-
tion were the poisoned fruits of liturgical change, and that the
Council, if not the cause, was at least the occasion for a dis-
astrous collapse of Catholic values, which had to be reversed.
This point of view was less fiercely and divisively expressed in
England than elsewhere, but the case drew strength from the
fact that in the years since the Council the English Church's
post-war boom has been steadily evaporating. The indicators
of Catholic practice began a downward spiral in the early
1970s, which has continued and grown steeper, bringing
the Church in this country into line with the rest of Europe.

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In the immediate aftermath of the Council there was an exo-

dus from the priesthood and (especially) the religious orders,
and recruitment to the seminaries dipped. In 1968 there were
almost 5,000 secular priests in England and Wales, and 2,762
ordained male religious. In 1998 statistics indicated just over
4,000 secular priests and 1,682 religious, their age-profile
steadily worsening: cobwebs gather in the corridors of the
seminary extensions of the early 1960s. Perhaps more signifi-
cantly, Mass attendance has declined to not much more than a
million each week, a quarter of the estimated Catholic popula-
tion. Once-flourishing Catholic organisations like the Children
of Mary have nose-dived, and the religious orders, especially
the active or 'apostolic' orders founded in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, have been decimated.

Living with 'Decline'

These apparent symptoms of decline are of course open to a
host of interpretations. Many of them are clearly aspects of
wider social change which has little to do with Catholicism as
such, and even the more spectacular manifestations of decline
are by no means unprecedented. Monastic recruitment has
always fluctuated with shifts within the culture. The religious
life seemed in near-terminal decline in France and Germany in
the eighteenth century. By contrast, the nineteenth century saw
an unprecedented blossoming of religious orders. Many of the
missionary, teaching and nursing orders founded then were
patently a Christian response to particular social conditions:
they recruited young men and women from backgrounds in
which economic, social, educational and, it needs to be noted,
sexual opportunity were rather limited. Quite apart from
spiritual considerations, which I would certainly not wish to

56
 TRADITION AND REACTION

minimise, the religious life offered economic security and

educational betterment for people who frequently could not
have expected much in the way of economic or domestic
security, and provided a culturally respected and worthwhile
outlet for untapped energies and abilities. The emergence of
alternative forms of opportunity for the laity in the developed
world in the last few generations is almost a sufficient explana-
tion for the collapse of at least the more recent and activist
forms of the religious life.
Almost, but not quite. The shrinkage of Catholic institu-
tions is clearly part and parcel of a much broader unsettlement
within Western society. It is not merely Catholic marriages,
for example, which are in decline, but, it would seem, the
institution of marriage itself. The moral pattern imposed by
the Church (slowly and with enormous difficulty) on Euro-
pean sexual behaviour and family structure from the early
Middle Ages onwards seems now to be collapsing. Later than
most of the rest of the Churches of the West, the Catholic
Church is increasingly confronted with the need to evolve a
modus Vivendi with these apparently inexorable social trends,
which can be lived by ordinary people with integrity. Marriage
is above everything else a social institution, and if the Church is
not to decline into being a sect for the saintly, ordinary
Catholic couples cannot realistically be expected to live lives
untouched by the social and sexual expectations and mores of
the culture as a whole. The tragically large and growing
number of Catholics in irregular unions is both an indicator
of the way in which the values of society shape the lives and
perceptions of Christians and also, in pastoral terms, a ticking
time bomb, which by one means or another is going to have to
be defused if it is not to decimate the Catholic community and,
more importantly, deprive thousands of people of the sacra-
mental support and light they need.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

The Danger of Ignoring Roots

The Church of course is called to transform cultures, not
merely to accommodate itself to them. A Christianity whose
moral and social behaviour is not much more than a sanctified
version of even the best secular morality is clearly in trouble,
especially when the culture patently lacks any consensus about
an agreed (much less an objective) code of morality, and in
which the fundamental moral good is the market 'virtue' of
choice. The experience of other Christian Churches in which
this process of cultural accommodation is more advanced than
in our own is not encouraging. That perception certainly in-
forms the tough pastoral line adopted by the Vatican on issues
of family and sexual morality, and the more general stiffen-
ing of Roman attitudes towards doctrinal and organisational
diversity which has been so notable a feature of the present
pontificate, as the Vatican has increasingly used the weapon of
authority to attempt to halt what it sees as a process of secu-
larisation within the Church.
This response is part of a wider conservative analysis of the
plight of Christianity at the beginning of the millennium,
which sees in the 'liberalisation' of Catholic doctrinal and
moral attitudes since the Council a disastrous capitulation to
the secular values of the Enlightenment. But the attempt to
close down particular lines of thought by the simple exercise
of authority has an unhappy history, and in our society has
little chance of success. No Catholic in their right mind would
want a rerun of the anti-modernist witch-hunts encouraged by
Pope St Pius X, or the unedifying harassment of great (and
holy) theologians like de Lubac and Congar which disgraced
the later years of the pontificate of Pius XII.
There is a tendency to describe those who call for the strong
exercise of authority, and the end of debate, as 'traditionalists',

58
 TRADITION AND REACTION

and that usage should alert us to something which has gone

badly wrong within the Church since the Council. Any Catho-
lic who lived through the 1960s and 1970s will recall the orgy
of destruction of the immediate past which took place in the
name of the Council - the gutting ('reordering') of venerable
buildings, the destruction or discarding of vestments, statues,
pictures, the scattering of libraries - precisely the aspects of
Catholicism which, in Miller's Canticle for Leiboivitz, are de-
ployed as potent symbols of the Church's stability in the midst
of the flux of the saeculum - stat crux dum volvitur orbis. This
sort of psychic evacuation is really a form of exorcism, and it is
a feature of any cultural revolution. It may be that something of
the sort was a necessary act of liberation for a community
which had inherited a past that sat heavy upon it, inhibiting
fresh development. The surest way of damning and dismissing
any idea, institution or emphasis in those years was to say that
it was 'pre-conciliar', as if the Council had invented the gospel,
and as if the test of Christian authenticity was radical discon-
tinuity with the Christian past. Of course, much that was then
discarded was indeed worthless or tacky, and much that posed
as 'traditional' was in fact the product of the quite recent past.
It is now possible to see, however, how wholesale and indis-
criminate this communal repudiation of the past was, and in a
Church which claims to set a high theological value on tradi-
tion and continuity, this is a mystery which needs explanation.
It is a mystery, because, by and large in the past, Catholic
theologians advocating change, even radical change, have been
as anxious to invoke the notion of tradition as have those
seeking to maintain the status quo. At the heart of the 'New
Theology' of de Lubac, Congar and the other theological mid-
wives of the Council, was a passionate call to rediscover the
tradition. They set about freeing the Church from the narrow
straitjacket of a debased neo-scholasticism by opening up the

59
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

riches of the deep tradition of the Church, in the Scriptures,

the liturgy, the Fathers. For them the past was not a sterile cul-
de-sac to be escaped from, but an inexhaustible well of Chris-
tian experience and wisdom, which liberated theology and the
Christian imagination by demonstrating how diverse, subtle,
endlessly inventive the Church has been, and is called to be, in
her journey through time.
Within ultramontane Catholicism, however, the notion of
tradition had been in danger of narrowing to mean little more
than the current Roman theology. Pio Nono's notorious 1870
aphorism 'I am the tradition' was a telling reflection of the
day-to-day reality of an increasingly powerful central author-
ity, which strangled Catholic theology (and episcopal teach-
ing) for a century. Most of the citations in the (rejected) draft
declaration of faith drawn up on the eve of the Second Vatican
Council by the Holy Office under Cardinal Ottaviani, for
example, were from the writings and speeches of Pius XII and
his immediate predecessors: no church document earlier than
the Council of Trent was cited, and there were no quotations
from Scripture. Tradition had shrunk from being a cathedral
of the Spirit to a storeroom in the cellars of the Holy Office.
The conciliar reforms did a great deal to correct this sterile
and authoritarian notion of tradition, to recover a sense of the
variety and richness of the Christian past as a resource for the
Christian present. But whatever the roots of reform, a good
deal of the emphasis in liturgical, theological and catechetical
work since the Second Vatican Council has been in fact with-
out much in the way of solid grounding in theology, and repre-
sented a search for immediacy or authenticity of experience,
rather than attentive encounter with the diversity, depth and
wisdom of the tradition. In place of a philistine authoritarian-
ism, cut off from the riches and complexity of the Christian
past by a mindset described as 'non-historical orthodoxy5, we

60
 TRADITION AND REACTION

have tended towards a non-historical liberalism which has if

anything even less to offer. The effects of this are evident in any
hymnbook, but they are visible even in the texts of the liturgy
themselves. The Collect at Mass for Trinity Sunday, for exam-
ple, resoundingly declares that, in sending into the world 'the
Word of Truth and the Spirit of Sanctification', God 'has
declared' (declarasti) his own wonderful mystery - the whole
prayer is an address to God praising him for his amazing and
gracious self-revelation. Characteristically, the version in our
current missals switched this emphasis round, from God's self-
giving, to our receiving - declarasti was 'translated' not as 'you
have declared' but 'we come to know'.

The Need for Recovery of Tradition

The equation of tradition with external and oppressive
authority, the dead hand of an unmeaning past, meant that
the implementation of conciliar reform often took the form of
the stripping away or abandonment of the externals of Catholi-
cism. It was widely felt that we had fiddled around with rules
and regulations too long, when what was needed was largeness
of spirit, a focus on essentials. At the time, it seemed easy to tell
them apart, to eliminate the inessential. It became a widely
accepted axiom that no observance could be truly sincere and
meaningful if it were obligatory. As a result, some of the most
ancient and eloquent expressions of Christian identity were
simply abandoned as so much unmeaning lumber. Though the
obligation to perform some penitential act on Fridays remains
in theory, for example, in reality Catholics are now without
any meaningful discipline of fasting and abstinence, a break
with universal Christian practice for 2,000 years, and with the
practice of Israel for centuries before Christ. Christianity's
most ancient and most resonant communal act of identification

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with the passion, of solidarity with the hungry, and of acknowl-

ledgement of our own frailty, became a mere devotional
option, and in practice has all but disappeared.
The effective abandonment of fasting and abstinence as a
communal observance rather than a private option was just
one example of the sort of ritual decentering which has char-
acterised the life of the Church in the years after the Council.
That decentering is certainly a contributory element to the
more general loosening of the Catholic community's hold on
Christian value, and its accommodation to the secular world
around it. Social anthropologists such as Professor Mary Doug-
lass sounded the alarm almost at once about the naivete of this
retreat from symbol, and emphasised the indispensable role of
external observance in the maintenance of religious value sys-
tems, but it is a warning which has gone largely unheeded. The
Church has increasingly accommodated itself to the rhythms,
and hence the beliefs and values, of the society around it, with
such apparently benign measures as the shrinking of the ritual
calendar, the displacement of holidays of obligation to the
nearest Sunday, and the desacralisation of Sunday itself. All
these moves can be perfectly sensibly justified in terms of prac-
ticality and convenience. But their cumulative effect is the elimi-
nation of more and more of the remaining expressions of what
one may call ritual resistance, without which it seems impos-
sible to maintain the larger counter-cultural values of Catho-
lic Christianity.
Yet these symbolic points of resistance seem to me at the
outset of the third millennium to possess a prophetic value for
the Church, the importance of which can hardly be exagger-
ated. Our culture sets an enormous value on the quick fix: the
instant delivery of information, the packaging of everything in
bite-sized - or sound-bite-sized - parcels. Anything complex is
too complex, anything difficult is too difficult, anything which

62
 TRADITION AND REACTION

does not yield its meaning immediately is fit only for the scrap
heap. Such assumptions pervade much of our thinking about
preaching, catechesis, the structure of the liturgy itself, and
they are the opposite of the ruminative, meditative work of the
liturgy, or the monastic practice of lectio divina, the slow,
reflective brooding over the tradition, which lies close to
the heart of a distinctively Christian critique of society. The
Church has never needed so urgently the sort of deep grounding
in its inherited wisdom, seen not as a strait jacket but as a
resource-pack. Modern Catholicism is strong on civilisation
and decency. But civilisation and decency are not enough.
The Church on the eve of the Council was narrow, and drew
strength from its narrowness. That narrowness in England
as elsewhere was the product of a unique blend of circum-
stances - Reformation history, Irish immigration, ultramon-
tane clerical formation: it cannot be recovered or repeated,
and nostalgia is a poor fuel for a march into the future.
We need now to find a new source of strength which does not
close down our horizons. The likely social realities of the
twenty-first century - the breakdown of the traditional family
structure and of monogamous marriage, the growing dis-
empowerment and probable redundancy of more and more
people in the global economy and the pressures of the market,
the reshaping and rethinking of the role of women - are not
forces outside the Church: many Catholics already live with
these things. If the Church is to find a Christian response
to these issues and energies, it needs more than decency and
pragmatism. It needs a stronger sense of its own identity, it
needs to re-establish its contact with its own deepest resources.
We need a liturgy which preserves the gains of the Council -
the vernacular, greater intelligibility, greater lay participation,
deeper and deeper encounter with Scripture - yet which is not
only expressed in worthier language but also transmits the

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distinctive wisdom, poetry and challenge of Roman Chris-

tianity, as our current translations do not. If, as Catholics, we
are to witness to and live out gospel values, in a world
increasingly bewildered and sceptical about such values or any
values, we need an educational ideal to match that wisdom:
we have to develop a shared attentiveness and asceticism, not
as a devotional option but as part of the fabric of Christian
believing. We need to foster a common vision, and one which
can be articulated in and shared with the culture at large. We
cannot, in Lodge's sense, recreate the 'Catholic metaphysic': if
we are to survive as a community, however, and deserve to
survive, we need to be able to explain to the culture at large,
and to ourselves, just who we are and what we stand for.
The neo-conservative phenomenon, in the Church as in the
world at large, is no answer to this problem. A sense of iden-
tity cannot be supplied by the exercise of authority: in a family,
you cannot maintain unity, love and shared purpose by kicking
people into line. A common mind and heart come from the
shared exploration of a common inheritance, and the shared
pursuit of a common hope. Tradition is not orders from above,
or the status quo, a code of law, or a body of dogma. It is
a wisdom, embodied in a complex tissue of words, symbols,
law, teaching, prayer and action, a way of life which has to be
practised before it yields its light. The Church of course has to
engage people living, struggling, suffering, muddling along; its
tasks are above everything else practical ones. If we have
learned anything in the 40 years since the Council, however, it
is that action must grow from deep spiritual and theological
roots if it is to remain Christian action. Our society is impa-
tient of reflection, unwilling to wrestle with difficulty, insistent
on instant intelligibility. It wants its knowledge in sound-bites,
it wants its uplift in soothing magazine-style snippets, it sees
religion as at best a comfort and a crutch. This dumbing down

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has been at work in the Church too, and has not always met
with much resistance. To recall the Catholic community to the
shared labour of living the tradition, attentive to its wisdom,
open to its fresh possibilities, seems a good item on a Christian
agenda for the twenty-first century.

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 Part II

The Unfinished Journey

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 4
On Having the Courage of One's Convictions1
Hans Kung

We all need courage and encouragement, not least theolo-

gians, journalists and editors. But encouragement for what?
There are many different answers to this question - and that
applies to the Church as well. Just think:
We live in a time when, after terrible misuse of the word,
talk of 'virtues' seems inappropriate and a 'virtuous' person is
often regarded more as a caricature of the free Christian.
Yet we live in a time when more than ever we need moral
attitudes which are effective beyond a particular day or a
particular action.
And we live in a time when these moral attitudes, too, are
subject to marked change: virtues like obedience and humil-
ity have become discredited, but others have become all the
more important.
I have felt that within the Church, originally a place of truth
and freedom, it is necessary to emphasise truth and even more
freedom, that freedom which Jesus lived out in his struggle, his
suffering and death, and which the apostle Paul put forward as
a programme to combat anything that might lead to its loss,
'the freedom for which Christ has set us free' (Galatians 5:1).
This is the freedom of the Christian which later Martin Luther
above all called for once again in opposition to the medieval
Roman Church system.

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Today, however, the issue is no longer just the freedom of a

Christian, as it was in Luther's time. It is human freedom
generally, and especially free speech and action. It is not only
apostolic boldness, but quite simply having the courage of
one's convictions, what in German is called 'civil courage'
(Zivilcourage). And what does civil courage mean, I have asked
myself, first of all for me? What does it mean for a theologian, a
scholar or a media figure - if you like, for an 'intellectual'?

The Meaning of Courage

There are good reasons for asking this question. For 'courage'
doesn't come from the 'intellect' or even from 'reason'. It is
not a product of the process of 'reasoning', judgement, reflec-
tion and verification which are characteristic of scholarship
and science. Perhaps it is because of this orientation to reason
that one looks in vain for the word 'courage' in some dic-
tionaries of psychology, sociology and education in which it
ought to appear.
It is clear that intellectuals of a variety of disciplines and
theologians of different Churches do not know what to make
of 'courage'. The origin of the term is quite clear: 'courage'
comes from coeur, 'heart'. 'Le coeur', runs Pascal's famous
word-play, which is almost impossible to translate, 'le coeur a
des raisons que la raison ne connait point' - 'the heart has its
reasons of which reason itself knows nothing'. If one is set
only on following reason - and I emphasise the 'only' - one
will seldom show courage. For know-alls, the boldest horse
is the blind horse - as if a blind horse ever won a race! They
say that only fools have real courage - as if clever people did
not have to be bold but above all cautious, restrained and
moderate!

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 ON HAVING THE COURAGE OF ONE'S CONVICTIONS

Blaise Pascal, who wasn't just a clever man but a real

mathematical, philosophical and literary genius, set the logic
of the heart against the one-sided reasoning of science. This
logic of the heart could combine 'reasoning' and 'sentiment',
both of which have their limitations. For Pascal, as for Luther,
who wears his heart on his sleeve, 'heart' does not mean just
the irrational and emotional as opposed to the rational and
logical. No, 'heart' means the spiritual centre of the person, its
innermost core, from which relations with others flow. To be
precise, 'heart' means the human spirit: not, however, in so
far as it thinks and argues in a purely theoretical way but in
so far as it is spontaneously present, has intuitions and knows
existentially.
So human courage has its seat not simply in 'pure reason' -
here the moralist Kant would doubtless agree, with his refer-
ence to 'practical reason' and the conscience - but in the heart.

'Civil9 Courage
And what about that term used in Germany, 'civil courage'?
The adjective 'civil' was taken over from the French as early as
the sixteenth century and is derived from the Latin civilis -
'for the common good'. This is the dimension expressed in the
term 'civil courage'. It is worth reflecting on.
Civil courage has to be dissociated from the proverbial
soldier's courage, which is so often misused in history. For
civil courage has a quite unmilitary meaning. It is the courage
that one shows by speaking one's mind openly and in public,
even to superiors and those in authority, without heed of any
possible consequences, speaking out fearlessly. If I am right,
the term 'civil courage' was coined for the first time in 1864 by
Bismarck, the 'iron chancellor' - not, however, to praise his
Germans but to criticise them for their lack of this virtue.

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Of course a fearless Chancellor could speak like this. But no

bishop of any Church would do so today; the exceptions prove
the rule. Bishops are normally afraid of speaking their minds.
Even Lutheran bishops rarely refer to Martin Luther, who was
exemplary in this respect - at any rate when they are address-
ing the pope. They usually leave the protesting to Catholic
reformers and leave themselves to be photographed with the
pope instead.

Christian Courage
That raises the question: when there is so much talk today of
having the courage of one's convictions, of 'civil courage',
what about 'Christian courage'? There is the courage of the
soldier who knows that only he who dares wins. There is
also the courage of the worldly, who fool themselves that the
world belongs to the brave. But why is there not a proverbial
Christian courage alongside civil courage, just as there is
Church law alongside civil law? Why has the term 'civil
courage' been coined, but not 'Church courage' or 'Christian
courage', both of which sound very strange because they are
artificial?
This Christian courage must once have existed. Other-
wise there could not have been people like the courageous
St George, patron of so many churches, who famously killed a
dragon. But the disparagement of courage by the Church must
have begun at a very early stage, else we would not read in the
ballad 'The Fight with the Dragon', by the classic German
poet Friedrich Schiller:
The Mameluke too courage shows,
obedience is the Christian's jewel.
Obedience the Christian's Jewell Bishops and popes love to
hear such statements. And in Schiller's ballad these words are

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in fact spoken by a high-ranking Churchman to a simple

Christian who really does kill a dragon, but in so doing un-
fortunately violated the oath of obedience which forbade him
to engage in any fighting.
What a long way we Christians have come from the one
who always said his 'Yes, yes' and 'No, no' so clearly, who
always spoke out fearlessly in public and to whom we owe the
saying, 'Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, and whoever
loses it will gain it.'
What a long way we have come from that 'apostolic bold-
ness', the parrhesia, once proverbial, with which the apostles,
like Jesus himself, spoke out in public, even against a hos-
tile public. How far we have come from the boldness of the
apostle Paul who, as he himself says, 'opposed to his face'
Peter, Kephas, 'the rock'. Why? Because Kephas/Peter, at that
time by no means yet infallible, did not 'live by the truth of the
Gospel'! That is a harsh remark to make to the one whom
people in Rome think was the first pope! And this narrative
is not a pious legend, like that of St George, but rather a
completely historical account from the second chapter of the
apostle Paul's letter to the communities of Galatia. At least
until the Second Vatican Council, however, the Church of
Rome, not particularly interested in this kind of courage, never
had this passage read out in the liturgy. Paul's courage could
have infected the episcopate and indeed the Vatican.
Bravery (fortitude), an attitude that has much in common
with courage (which is directed more towards the moment), is
one of the four great Platonic cardinal virtues. It is a virtue
mid-way between two extreme vices, which is how Aristotle
saw every virtue: between cowardice and audacity, between
not being courageous enough and being too courageous.
However, Aristotle already recognised that alongside militant
bravery, which Plato associated with the warrior, there is also

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a civil bravery, the bravery of fearlessly standing by one's own

convictions, even at the risk of coming into conflict with
others, especially the powerful.

The Cardinal Question

This virtue is important enough to be classified as a cardinal
virtue, yet does not seem to be a virtue of cardinals. Why is
civil courage - Christian courage - so often lacking in the
Church sphere, especially at its higher levels? This was a great
trial for me at the Second Vatican Council. Why did not
bishops protest about this or that? Why did not a cardinal -
who after all could not rise any higher - raise his voice in a
decisive session?
This 'cardinal question' bothered me so much that I put it to
other knowledgeable contemporaries, three famous scholars at
the University of Tubingen.
The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch replied: One often does
not argue for a cause because it has already been espoused by
someone with whom one does not want to be associated. One
is afraid of approval from the wrong side.
The liberal sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, now Lord Dahren-
dorf, formerly head of the London School of Economics
and Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford, replied: Even
those in high places do not like to make themselves unpopular.
To speak out freely requires a special psychological and moral
effort - even for a cardinal.
The philosopher and educationalist Otto Friedrich Bollnow,
who wrote an excellent book on The Nature and Transforma-
tion of the Virtues, replied: Bravery in civil life seems to be
even more difficult than bravery in war. It is probably con-
nected with the human herd instinct, which means that it is
easier to risk one's life in war along with others and even to

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allow one's bravery as a soldier to be exploited for reprehen-

sible ends than to swim against the powerful current as an
individual in civil life.

Escaping Tutelage
These are all important comments, remarks which touch on
partial aspects of the problem. Of the classic philosophers,
Immanuel Kant seems to me to have given the most elementary
and the best answer. In his What Is Enlightenment? he writes:

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large

number of people, having long released nature from alien
governance, nevertheless like to lead their lives in tu-
telage; and why others find it so easy to set themselves
up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be in
tutelage.

And indeed, effort, toil, risk are all bound up with having
the courage of one's convictions, civil courage. Some of those
who are well versed in such courage can bear witness that in a
great controversy it is not easy to bear the taunts of former
friends and colleagues. It is not easy to be outmanoeuvred by
those who think that they possess the truth, even if they only
possess power. It is not easy to be ridiculed publicly and by
certain media as an idealist with illusions, as a dreamer.
Certainly one can withstand many pressures. But this
resistance cannot be taken for granted. And it is even less
easy to keep showing civil courage in the face of all difficulties.
It is not easy for anyone to keep maintaining the courage that
is constantly sapped in one way or another. As a believing
Christian I would say that this courage too must be a true gift;
it is a real grace.

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So it is only with these reservations that I can agree with

the proverb 'God helps the courageous'. That often seems as
uncertain as the ancient promise Fortes fortuna adiuvat -
'Fortune favours the brave'. After all, who can rely on the
goddess Fortuna? Indeed, what brave man, what courageous
woman, does not know the lack of courage, the despondency,
the weariness which sometimes comes despite all courage, and
which threatens to become timidity and utter despondency?
In such moments it is better instead to say, 'God, my God, give
me courage to help myself.'
Of course I am well aware that today many people are
sceptical about belief in God. But I am convinced that after the
collapse of Communism and in the struggle for a new world
order the question of religion needs to be discussed again.
In our context it is worth reflecting on some words about the
courage of faith by the eighteenth-century German philoso-
pher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who was decried as a free
thinker. His sap ere aude ('Have the courage to use your mind')
at the same time recalls his contemporary Immanuel Kant:

One of the most difficult arts for a man is to give him-

self courage ... Since there is so much suffering in the
world which has to be encountered with courage, and
no human being can sufficiently give weak consola-
tion, religion is admirable. It is really the art of gaining
comfort and courage in suffering, and strength to work
against it, without any other means, by thinking about
God. I have known those whose good fortune was
their God. They believed in a good fortune and faith gave
them courage. Courage gave them good fortune and
good fortune gave them courage. It is a great loss for a
person if he has lost the conviction of a wise being who
directs the world.

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Happily not only in the time of the Reformation, but also

in recent decades, there have been many examples of civil
courage in the power of faith in God: the other Martin Luther
(King) and so many others in North, Central and South
America, as well as those in the Philippines, in South Africa,
Poland and the former German Democratic Republic.
My article also pays homage to all those who, like John
Wilkins, have ventured to speak out fearlessly and to act cour-
ageously. They know that persistence is more difficult than the
civil courage of the moment, bold speech or courageous action.
It is more difficult courageously to maintain a cause which
is seen to be right over years and decades. As we read in Der
Stechlin, a novel by the nineteenth-century German author
Theodor Fontane, 'Courage is good but endurance is better.
Endurance is the main thing.'
Courage to speak out undeterred, courage to persevere: that
is my heartfelt wish for this editor of The Tablet and his
successors. May they not be afraid when they have views which
do not suit the powers-that-be. Even more, may they not be
deterred from expressing such ideas in public. May all those
who are active in the Church media have the courage to listen
to people more and to the Church bureaucracy less, and to
put into practice what they have recognised as the truth of
the gospel.

Note
1 The editor wishes to express his gratitude to John Bowden, the
former director of the Publishing House SCM Press, for trans-
lating this article. Bowden writes: This is my bit of homage
to John whom I admire tremendously and I would like the
translation to be my minor contribution to the Festschrift.'

77
 5
Images of the Church: From 'Perfect Society5 to
'God's People on Pilgrimage9
Rembert Weakland

St Paul was a perceptive catechist. He knew that images were

more effective than a thousand abstract concepts. So to
describe the Church he put forth several creative images. The
Body of Christ, where Christ is the head and each part has its
own proper function and contribution, has remained through-
out history the strongest (1 Cor. 12:12-27; Rom. 12:3-8). Nor
should one forget the image of a building where Christ is the
capstone and each brick contributes to the structure's solidity
(Eph. 2:19-22). In using such vivid images Paul was following
the example of Jesus, the master himself, who offered many
striking ways, especially in St Matthew's Gospel, to depict the
nature of God's kingdom. And what example could surpass
that of the vine and the branches to depict a life-giving relation-
ship, one with such intimate vitality (John 15:1-7)?
For centuries these biblical images and the ways they were
interpreted helped to shape how Christians conceived the
Church and the active participation in it of its members. Yet, in
each period of its history the Church continued to create other
images to describe itself that corresponded to the times in
which it lived or that were reactions to the forces it struggled
against. It was only natural that the leaders and scholars of
the nineteenth century, too, had their favourite image for the
Church: that of the perfect society, the societas perfecta.

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The Perfect Society

This term, most popular in the nineteenth century among
popes, canonists and scholars, does not seem to have been
used in the Middle Ages. But the concept, predominantly a
juridical and defensive one, had its origins at that time, elabo-
rated by canonists during the struggles for power between
popes and emperors. Some civic officials, to limit the authority
of the Church, postulated a division of powers into spiritual
and temporal in an attempt to keep the Church out of the
temporal order and limit it to the purely spiritual. Medieval
canonists insisted that the Church was a complete society with
all the means a society needed to pursue its own aims. No-one
knows who invented the term sodetas perfecta to express
this kind of independence. When they used it, the nineteenth-
century canonists were declaring that the Church was, first of
all, a society', that is, a community that could be visibly delin-
eated, had its own reasons for existence, possessed aims and
ends particular to itself, was endowed with its own governance,
and not dependent on any other society even in temporal
affairs. Entrance into that society came through baptism where
only the Church could be the gatekeeper. Moreover, the Church
had the structures of authority needed, like any sodetas^ to
function in the temporal order; and did not need the State in
order to fulfil its mission.
This concept was especially convincing to Catholics of that
century as they struggled against the disastrous effects on the
Church of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. The
philosophies of the age sought to reduce religion to a private
affair while the ideologies of Gallicanism, Febronianism and
Josephinism wished to make the Church dependent on the
State. The concept of sodetas perfecta resisted such pressure.
Applied to the Church by popes and canonists in the nineteenth

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century, it reiterated those aspects of the Church as a society

that had been outlined in the Middle Ages. But it also affirmed
that religion was not merely a private affair, that there was a
horizontal relationship among the members of the Church,
which was a true society. They wanted also to refute those re-
formers who denied that the Church possessed the supernatural
means necessary for the salvation of its members. Finally, it
meant to them that the Church possessed the authority struc-
tures needed to function adequately and to enforce its decrees.
It is understandable why the theologians who put together
the schemata on the nature of the Church for the First Vatican
Council used these ideas as the basis of their definition. The
schemata were never discussed or voted on, but they corres-
ponded perfectly to the sentiments of Pope Pius IX in his
struggles with the newly formed Italian state and over the loss
of the papal states.
The description of the Church as a perfect society was
especially favoured by Pope Leo XIII, who used the term in
many of his encyclicals which dealt with the Church's nature
and its relationship to the State. In Immortale Dei of 1885 he
clearly called the Church 'a perfect society in its nature and in
its title' because it is a supernatural and spiritual society 'pos-
sessing all needful provisions for its maintenance and action'
(#10). In the encyclical Libertas of 1888, he affirmed that, as a
perfect society, the Church could legislate, judge and punish,
and must not be restricted to just exhorting or advising, as
some would have it. In Sapientiae christianae (1890) and in
Satis cognitum (1896) he did not hesitate to state that God
made the Church a society even more perfect and superior to
any other, citing its divine origin and more spiritual nature and
scope. With these statements he moved away from the juri-
dical approach - in which the Church was said to possess the
necessary means of salvation - towards implying that it was

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 IMAGES OF THE CHURCH

in actu the perfect society because it possessed the fullest degree

of holiness and spiritual perfection above all other societies.
The move from potential to actual perfection took place also
in the minds of many of his Catholic readers.
The theology manuals used in most seminaries during
the first half of the twentieth century continued to employ the
phrase in this fuller sense. Canonists, in contrast, tended to
hold to the older meaning. Pope Benedict XV, for example,
in promulgating the Code of Canon Law of 1917, used the
phrase in its more pristine form.
But it was not much of a leap for Pope Pius XII in his
encyclical Mystici corporis Christi, in describing the relation-
ship between Christ and the members within the Body, to state
that 'Christ wills His Christian community to be a Body which
is a perfect society' (#68). He made the Pauline metaphor of the
body coalesce with the canonical concept of the perfect society
so that 'perfect' refers to the life of Christ within the Church in
the here-and-now; at least, this was the way many spiritual
writers from then on interpreted the term. In this way he con-
firmed a trend among some Catholic writers to affirm that
the Church was the model society, to be imitated by all other
earthly societies, because it was the perfect society not only
potentially but in reality. Theologians were usually more re-
strained; but at times they gave the impression that the Church
had a kind of Platonic existence 'out there' somewhere, sepa-
rated from the baptised who are its members with their sins and
failings. Louis Bouyer described this tendency as an overly ideal-
istic view of the Church as appropriating to itself the holiness
of Christ himself.1 One could phrase the criticism in another
way by saying it was anticipating the Church of the eschaton
into the here-and-now, but shorn of its human imperfections.
The Prefect of the Holy Office and guardian of the ortho-
doxy of the faith at the opening of Vatican II was Cardinal

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Alfredo Ottaviani. In a second edition of his work on the nature

of the Church (Institutiones juris publici ecclesiastic!), pub-
lished in 1958 just before the opening of the Council, he stated
the theme of the perfect society in simple, terse, but unequivocal
Latin terms: 'Ecclesia est societas iuridica et suprema; iam-
vero, societas iuridica suprema est natura sua iuridice perfecta.
Sequitur ergo Ecclesiam esse societatem juridice perfectam.'2
('The Church is a juridical and supreme society; moreover,
a supreme juridical society is by its very nature juridically per-
fect. It follows that the Church is a juridically perfect society.')
Here the Church is not just a juridical society that is perfect
but a superior one.

Images of the Church at the Beginning of Vatican II

The bishops who gathered for Vatican II were therefore faced
with a medieval tradition reinterpreted by canonists, popes and
spiritual writers in the nineteenth century, enlarged by Pope
Pius XII in the twentieth century, and then taken up by the
scholars who prepared the preliminary schemata for Vatican II.
As was to be expected, this medieval tradition and these ideas
dominated in the preliminary drafts presented to the bishops as
they took up the document on the Church that was later to
become Lumen gentium. The first schema took the Pauline
image of the Body of Christ and, in accord with Pope Pius XIPs
Mystici corporis, interpreted it as an image of the perfect
society. The bishops rejected this approach, opting to begin
their document instead with the Church as mystery; and then
followed it with a chapter on the image of the People of God.
Giuseppe Ruggieri summed up the debate this way:

Thus on the nature of the Church there was the conflict

between a juridical conception of the Church as a

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 IMAGES OF THE CHURCH

society, reflected in the unyielding defence of the

identification of the Catholic Church and the Mystical
Body, and a conception of the Church that was more
sensitive to its mystery.3

But the image of the perfect society did not disappear. From
its original and canonical meaning of the perfect or complete
society there was still much to be saved: in the reference, for
example, to the visible Church as having all the means of
salvation necessary for its members and as possessing all the
qualities appropriate for governance as in any society. But the
more spiritualised definition of the perfect society as appro-
priating to itself all the holiness of Jesus Christ also continued
in the minds of many. Hence the consternation when, later,
Pope John Paul II began with some frequency to apologise for
past errors of judgement on the part of Church officials,
beginning with the case of Galileo. Not all the cardinals were
pleased with his gesture of asking for forgiveness: some
thought it placed a blemish on the record of the perfect society
and involved a clear contradiction; others asserted that to
apologise so often diminished the value of such apologies. The
second group had a point. But the more serious criticism came
from those who believed that such admission of error weak-
ened the idea of the Church as the perfect society.
The bishops at Vatican II avoided the trend towards over-
spiritualisation that tended to see a Church almost minus its
sinful members. Nor did the bishops accept the opinion of some
who, in reaction to an exaggerated spiritualisation, seemed
to reduce the Church to only its experientially visible realities.
The bishops retained the idea that the means of holiness,
through the Holy Spirit, were present to the Church and its
members, but that the full perfection would only come with
the eschaton. For that reason the Church was always in need

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of reform - semper reformanda - but full of hope because of

Christ's promise to remain with his Church till the end of time.
The images they finally accepted to express all of these aspects
of the Church can be summed up in two phrases: the People of
God and the Church on Pilgrimage. The bishops and their periti
found images that were biblical and at the same time vivid and
appealing - good catechetical tools as in the Pauline practice.

The Council's Images

Perhaps no other phrase sums up the popular view of Vatican
II as that of an assembly of the People of God. The image's
attractiveness comes first from its relationship to both the
Old and New Testament, in which Israel was called 'God's
people', a title also used of the fledgling community of Chris-
tians (1 Pet. 2:7-10). It is true that some of these New Testa-
ment texts have the flavour of 'replacement' theologies, but
most Catholics were unaware of such subtleties.4 The advan-
tage of using the word 'people' instead of 'society' was that it
implied a certain and equal 'belongingness' on the part of all
members and assumed a clear universalism, one that coincided
well with Catholics' aims and ideals in the twentieth century.
It is true that some interpreted this term, not in its biblical con-
text, but in a contemporary democratic way, which could
imply a non-hierarchical Church. By beginning with this image
and notion, however, the bishops consciously created the im-
pression that the Church is indeed the people - all the people,
and not just the leaders. There is no avoiding that perception;
it was an intended one. It also includes the ideas of the Church
as a society found in previous definitions and images, because
a people are by nature a social reality and communitarian.
As God's People, the Church could well see itself as having
been formed by God's will and not by the desires, whims or

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 IMAGES OF THE CHURCH

choices of the members. Within the Church, then, we experi-

enced a renewal of covenant theology that followed on the use
of this image. The two went well together. The use of biblical
language in one instance fortified its use in other circum-
stances. It also pointed out that the Church's formation was
God's design and that God first took the initiative. Covenants
also require a response: this concept gave birth to a new
articulation of moral norms and their biblical roots.
These have all been positive aspects of the image of People
of God. It is true that Christ and his role are not explicitly
mentioned by such a title; some of the bishops in their inter-
ventions at the Council were well aware of this shortcoming.
Believing that something was needed to complement the image,
they spoke often of the Church as a pilgrim, as being on pil-
grimage. Under this concept they were able to see the Church as
not yet fulfilled, as still sinful and in progress. This concept
satisfied the wishes of some of the members that the eschato-
logical nature of the Church also be emphasised. Cardinal
Karol Wojtyla was one of those who spoke in favour of the
expression 'People of God' but who also felt a need for some
qualifying term to make clear that the Church was indeed
'a perfect society, in the sense that it has all the means of attain-
ing its supernatural end'.5
The two images - 'People of God' and 'Church on Pilgrim-
age' - form the framework of Lumen gentium, the Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church. After talking about the Church as
mystery in the first chapter, the bishops went on in the second
to speak of its nature as God's People. In the seventh chapter,
the second to the last, they elaborate on the concept of the
Church as an eschatological phenomenon. Chapter 8, which
ends the document, is devoted to Mary, and acts as an epi-
logue and an admirable summation of all that the Constitution
sought to expound.

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In the second chapter on the People of God the bishops took

a starting point that was not common in previous Catholic
treatises since it based its approach on the way all the people
share in Christ's role as priest, prophet and king. Although it
did not want to give the impression that all shared in the same
way in these functions, it still gave preference to the idea that
all were equal members of the Church and equally called to an
intimate relationship with Christ in the fulfilment of their bap-
tismal commitments. As priests, all participate in the offering of
the Eucharist and the reception of the sacraments, albeit in
differing ministerial functions. As prophets, all are witnesses to
Christ and receive the gifts of the Spirit that correspond to their
calling. By sharing in Christ's kingship, they are called to a uni-
versal, a truly Catholic, Church. Amid this diversity of roles the
Holy Spirit is the binding force of unity among all the members.
The seventh chapter, truly one of the most important in the
document, was added, it would seem, through the insistence of
Pope John XXIII. It reminds all the members of the Church that
they belong to an Ecclesia peregrinans: that the Church is now
on pilgrimage, yearning for the consummation when all shall be
reconciled in Christ. In the pastoral constitution on the Church
in the modern world, Gaudium et spes (#45), all followers of
Christ are reminded that what this Church on Pilgrimage has to
offer the world in the here-and-now is 'the mystery of God's
love' for all. It reminds the faithful: 'The Lord is the goal of
human history, the focal point of the longings of history and
civilisation, the center of the human race, the joy of every heart,
and the answer to all its yearnings.' As members of the Ecclesia
peregrinans all are reminded that they hasten to that con-
summation of human history.
One can see why these two images taken together, Populi
Dei and Ecclesia peregrinans - 'God's People on Pilgrim-
age' - sum up the whole of the teaching on the Church. The

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 IMAGES OF THE CHURCH

other images are not slighted, but these two act as the frames to
give life to the rest.

The Extraordinary Synod of 1985

When bishops from around the world gathered in 1985 in an
Extraordinary Synod to study what had happened in the
Church since the Council, they produced a Final Report in
which they encouraged more study of the Council documents.
They named all the images that had characterised the docu-
ment on the nature of the Church and mentioned the 'People of
God' only as one among many. The omission was due to their
fear that the term had been used to create a false impression of
the nature of the Church, namely, that it is a democratic body
in which there would be minimal if any hierarchical structure,
and, if such a structure existed, it would have to correspond to
modern democratic norms, namely, be accountable to the will
of the majority of the people. It is a shame that the term 'People
of God', so popular among the faithful, had to be almost set
aside because of this fear. If it had been used with the com-
panion phrase of a Church on Pilgrimage with its clear eschato-
logical end, such a fear may have been averted. Many observers
noted at once the way in which 'People of God' had been
downplayed in the Synod. They felt the bishops at the Synod
were thus not being true to the documents of Vatican II them-
selves and to their own admonition that people should not
engage in revisionist views of the Council.
The most important contribution of the Synod of 1985 was
to add to the discussion on the Church the insight that its
nature is really one of a communio. This term describes the
nature of the Church primarily as consisting of relationships.
First comes the relationship with God, then with Jesus Christ
in the Holy Spirit, next among the baptised themselves, and

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

finally with all others in a given society. This theology of com-

munion was already a favourite in ecumenical dialogues and
had great merit. But it remains a theological term; there is no
adequate image to accompany it, and such an image continues
to elude both theologians and catechists. For this reason, it has
not gained much popularity among the faithful.

Consequences for the Church Today

Perhaps the most striking result of the use of this term 'People
of God' with its Old Testament roots, coupled with its eschato-
logical orientation in the phrase 'on pilgrimage', was that it
gave bishops the freedom to talk about the sinfulness of the
Church and so come to terms with some of the less pleasant
aspects of its history. In this sense, Pope John Paul's proneness
to ask for forgiveness was already anticipated by the Council.
In fact, Pope Paul VI had already begun this trend by apolo-
gising to other Christians for offences Catholics may in the past
have given them. Other bishops spoke of the need for the
Church to admit its own culpability in causing the divisions
that took place.
Already during the Council this acceptance of the Church as
imperfect and in need of constant conversion was evident. One
of the most moving interventions in this regard was presented
by Bishop Stephen Laszlo of Eisenstadt, Austria. He stated
that so often theologians talk of the Church as if it were one of
saints, when in reality it is one of sinners. He asked how we
should respond when this is pointed out to us. His words of
wisdom still ring true today:

If our answer wants to convince people of our day, it

must not be compounded of triumphalism and pretence,
but must be realistic and completely sincere. In other

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 IMAGES OF THE CHURCH

words, on the earth we may not proclaim only an ecclesi-

ology of glory; that belongs to the end of time. When we
speak of the pilgrim Church, we must always begin from
the ecclesiology of the Cross ... The Church cannot be
understood except as the eschatological people of God,
on pilgrimage through time, proclaiming the death and
resurrection of the Lord until he comes ... We say the
Church is on pilgrimage because in all its difficulties and
miseries this people is not without fault, not without sin.6

He rightly adds that if people wish to use the word commu-

nion, they must talk of a communion of sinners and con-
sequently a communion of penitents. Bishop Francis A. Quinn,
retired bishop of Sacramento, California, expressed this same
idea when he described the Church as 'not a museum of saints,
but a hospital for sinners'.7
Some observers, especially the Lutherans, criticised the
bishops at the Council for taking too optimistic a view of the
world. Perhaps one could say they also took too optimistic a
view of the Church. So much of the triumphalistic rhetoric did
not ring true. Theologians have been debating how deeply
wounded the Church can be while still maintaining its purpose
and function. But it would seem that Yves Congar's position is
the most solid. Certainly sin will be found - and frequently -
among the members, he noted. This includes the hierarchy, not
only in their personal lives but also in the decisions that touch
their official duties and functioning. But, he concludes, the
Church 'will always be faithful to the inner law of its being'.8
Because of its sinfulness the Church will have to be much
more humble now than in the past in how it presents itself,
avoiding all signs of haughtiness and superiority. The tendency
to want to witness to the world as the perfect society must be
guarded against. This more humble stance fits well with the

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

attitudes expressed in Gaudium et spes about the way the

Church should relate to the world around it, namely, more as
a companion on the journey that shares in all the joys and
anxieties of the others and as a source of hope and conso-
lation, rather than an aloof or other-worldly judge. As long as
it is in via, moreover, the Church must constantly admit its
own need of reform.
Finally, the Church must be a forgiving community. All mem-
bers are constantly in need of God's forgiveness and the for-
giveness of one another. Not to be a forgiving community would
be to betray its role as a means of salvation, an instrument
through which Christ's saving love can reach all its members.
Pilgrimage means walking together, sustaining one another,
encouraging one another, forgiving one another. Perhaps in
today's world the old adage, 'See how these Christians love one
another', should be expanded to include, 'See how these
Christians, as God's People on Pilgrimage, forgive one another.'

Notes
1 Louis Bouyer, The Church of God, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1982), p. 495.
2 Vatican Press, vol. 1, p. 150.
3 G. Alberigo and J. Komonchak (eds), History of Vatican II, vol. II
(Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), p. 281.
4 See Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, 'Why is the Church the People of
God?' in Lucien Richard, OMI, Daniel T. Harrington, SJ, and
John W. O'Malley, SJ (eds), Vatican II: The Unfinished Agenda
(Chicago: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 49.
5 Acta Synodalia II, 3, pp. 155-6.
6 'Sin in the Holy Church of God', in Yves Congar, OP, and Daniel
J. O'Hanlon, SJ (eds), Council Speeches of Vatican II (New York:
Paulist Press, 1964), pp. 45-6.
7 Francis A. Quinn, 'A looming crisis of faith', America, 188
(7 April 2003), p. 16.
8 Yves Congar, The Mystery of the Church, trans. A. V. Littledale
(Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1960), p. 92.

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 6
Wanted: The Other Half of the Church
Joan Chittister

I hear the statement 'I was raised Catholic' more often than I
like these days. Too often, it seems to me, it means that
someone formed in the faith no longer identifies with it. Too
often many of these people are women: middle-aged women;
young women; women on whom the future of the transmis-
sion of the faith depends.
At one time to say 'I was raised Catholic' had the ring of the
pedestrian to it: after all, so many of us were. In a Catholic
immigrant population, to be raised Catholic communicated a
person's cultural identity as much as it marked their convic-
tions. It bore the stamp of national pride and political meaning,
as much as it denoted a set of religious beliefs. To be raised
Catholic had something to do with a person's whole identity.
But even then the words carried a particular spiritual con-
notation for everyone. For me, they meant that I went to Catho-
lic schools and haunted Catholic churches like a small ghost.
In those days, churches were never locked until sometime after
dark, and children could do such things with impunity. I did
it all the time. I hunted churches down, tugged at the great
wooden doors that signalled their entrance into another world
and escaped into the cool, damp dark inside. There was some-
thing there for me that touched a quiet, inner place that was
touchable by nothing else on earth.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

I would skate around a neighbourhood corner and run right

into one after another of them: Hungarian, Polish, German,
Irish parishes, all catering to their own kind, all the same
and all slightly different. They existed to revere differences, to
acknowledge distinct histories and cultural customs. At each
place, I would take off my skates on the church steps, hide them
in the bushes outside and tip-toe down one dark church aisle
after another, smelling the candles, studying the windows,
struggling to read the Latin inscriptions that circled the frescoes
over the altars. I was a Catholic through and through. In the
church I felt safe. I felt at home. Something here both cat-
echised and completed me.
It took years before I began to realise, as have a number
of other women, that the fact is that a woman is not com-
pletely 'at home' in the Church at all. In fact, her 'complete-
ness' may be more in question here than any other place in
society. Her catechesis - that God is love, that God created all
of us in God's own image, that women, as well as men, are fully
human - remains always problematic.

Because They Said So

The words 'I was raised Catholic' have a particular connota-
tion for women. A woman discovers over time that there is a
difference between being raised in the faith and being part of
the Church. As the years go by, it becomes clear: women get
the faith; men get the Church to go with it.
That's the way things are, we hear. That's all there is to it.
That's the way God means it to be.
For centuries, the social parallels that developed out of that
kind of theology were obvious. Women were simply expected
to take the ancillary role God had decreed for them, every-
where, at all times, in all situations: in marriage, in politics, in

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business, in professional arenas, in the home and definitely in

the Church.
But the last half of the twentieth century, devoted to the
human sciences, awash in biological and genetic data, began
slowly but surely to give the lie to those ideas, to suspect the
rationale for those ideas, to shatter that assumption from one
ambit to the next. Theologically, the notion was even more
suspect. What kind of a God was it that made humanity of
two types: one superior, one inferior; one godly, one not?
Around us, every other organisation in the Western World
teetered on a consciousness of the fact that its composition
mirrored only half the human race, listened to only half the
human race, respected the insights of only half the human
race, incorporated into itself the ideas and directions and
agendas of only half the human race. But not the Church.
As all these other institutions and organisations restructured
themselves to remedy what was clearly an aberration of the
human condition, a distortion of both theology and Scripture,
of biology and science, the Church alone failed to address the
issue as a major theological question in its own right. Instead,
women were told that the Church was a divine institution set
up by Jesus himself to keep women at a distance from all
things sacred. The apostles were all men, we were told repeat-
edly, as if the 12 apostles - symbolic Christian surrogates for
the Twelve Tribes of Israel - were the only ministers in the
Church. No mention of Mary who bore Jesus, or of Mary
Magdalene and the women of Israel who were the first to
support Jesus 'out of their own sustenance', or of the Samaritan
woman to whom Jesus revealed himself as Messiah before
having said a word to Peter, or of the women who laboured
with Paul to build the early church. No mention at all of them,
of the women disciples of Jesus, of women in their own right.
Nothing.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

But then, astounding things, life-changing things, began to

happen. Pope John XXIII, in his encyclical Pacem et terris,
listed the woman's issue as one of the 'signs of the times', along
with poverty and nuclearism. Vatican II issued a document on
the vocation of the laity, and made no distinction between lay
men and lay women. New liturgical norms eliminated the altar
rail and allowed women entry into the sanctuary, the Holy
of Holies, alongside male lectors and male ministers of the
Eucharist and male altar servers. Com-munion in the hand,
with its clear implication that women as well as men were
worthy to touch the consecrated host, became a commonplace.
Apostolicam actuositatem, the Document on the Laity, said
it directly: 'Since in our times women have an ever more active
share in the whole life of society, it is very important that they
participate more widely also in the various fields of the church's
apostolate' (AA,9).
And for a while it looked as if they would. Male universities
began to admit women to degrees in the sacred sciences on a
par with men, in the same classes, under the same academic
requirement. Lay Ecclesial Ministry Programmes began to
emerge everywhere. By the year 2002, US universities had
graduated over 34,000 lay ministers, two out of every three of
them women, only 3 per cent of them women religious. Under
their aegis lay women, too, became theologians, canonists,
liturgists and parish administrators.
Clearly, even the Church was beginning to flirt with the
possibility that women were an idea whose time had come.
Finally, for the first time in history, in 1985, a pope wrote
an encyclical on women. It is a gracious letter and a fulsome
one. Nevertheless, the encyclical, Mulieris dignitatem, con-
tinues to imply the notion of a separate or dual anthropology:
that man, the male, is one kind of human but woman is
another. That biological differences have something to do with

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spiritual differences. That Jesus who became 'flesh' became

one kind of flesh that apparently does not include the other
kind. Ten years later, however, Pope John Paul II carved out
another new moment in the history of women in the Church
when he wrote a letter of apology to the women of the world
for failures of the Church in the past to recognise the equality
and value of women. He wrote: 'Such respect (for women)
must first and foremost be won through an effective and
intelligent campaign for the promotion of women, concentrat-
ing on all areas of women's life and beginning with a universal
recognition of the dignity of women.' Accent on 'effective and
intelligent campaign for the promotion of women' and 'on all
areas of women's life'. Surely here was the beginning of a new
world for us all. And for a while it seemed to be true.

A Step Forward
Dioceses everywhere, in response to the documents of
Vatican II and encouraged by papal support, began to include
women on boards, in chanceries, in parish administrative
positions.
Parishes accepted women into liturgical ministries: little
girls began to be altar servers alongside little boys, women
read from the Scriptures at Mass, lay Eucharistic ministers,
women as well as men, served homes for the aged, hospitals,
and at regular liturgical celebrations.
Congregations began to take for granted that women would
also serve in new kinds of parish work. Lay programmes gave
degrees in Pastoral Ministry, Theology and Theological Studies,
Divinity, Religious Studies, Spirituality and Pastoral Coun-
selling. Now marriage preparation conferences were as easily
staffed by women as by men. Liturgical planning, adult cat-
echesis, parish organisational activities and decision-making

95
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

positions on parish boards became common for women as well

as for men.
Most significant of all, perhaps, the Church began to change
the language of liturgical events to include the recognition of
women as part of the assembly.
Discussions began in theological circles about the theologi-
cal possibility of the restoration of the diaconate for women as
it had been for men.
Women, it seemed, had finally arrived as full adult members
of the Church. They were now in the language of prayer, in the
offices of the diocese and on the altars of parish churches.
Barely, perhaps, but there, nevertheless. Now it was only a
matter of new practices becoming ordinary before women
would be taken for granted as leaders in the Church and
bearers of the Spirit. Both the Fatherhood and the Mother-
hood of God were slowly coming into consciousness, into
public view.
Then, slowly but surely, the reversal began. The 'pro-
gramme' the Pope called for died a rude and insidious death.
Almost imperceptibly, at first, new statements began to be
released, most of them with little fanfare but with far-reaching
results. The doors, one at a time, began to close.
Seminarians were directed in Pastores dabo vobis in 1993 to
have priests as their spiritual directors, despite years of being
free to choose whomever suited them best: men or women.
Clearly the men of the Church had nothing to learn from the
women of the Church. That door closed.
Word leaked out, of course, of seminarians who asked their
women directors to continue with them regardless. But the
system itself stayed male, sterile, untouched by a regularised
feminine dimension of the mystical, a safer place, appar-
ently, but possibly a more barren one, as well. In fact, some
researchers estimate the lifespan of a new priest to be five

96
 WANTED

years, whatever the measures in place to encapsulate young

priests in a male world.

Two Steps Back

Sr Carmel McEnroy was peremptorily removed from semi-
nary teaching despite years of outstanding teacher evalu-
ations. The charge against her was that she signed a statement
asking the Church to open a discussion on the ordination of
women. One by one, teaching positions in theology closed
to women. In some cases the exclusion was more subtle.
Women were simply relegated to elective areas of theology
programmes so that traditional ideas, male ideas, could never
be broadened to include the insights or questions of women
on subjects of theological substance. Another door closed.
A woman religious with a certification in Clinical Pastoral
Education gave years of free service in hospital ministry. When
a vacancy arose, she asked the local bishop to hire her as
Catholic chaplain. He refused. That door closed. In the end,
she was hired by the hospital itself as 'ecumenical chaplain' -
which, ironically, makes her doubly effective in her work. She
meets more patients, gives more spiritual consolation, is
respected by more people. But, at the same time, she remains
officially unacknowledged by the Catholic community whose
faith informs her ministry. In the meantime, she answers every
emergency call in the deep of the night and then phones rectory
after rectory in an attempt to get priests to administer the
Sacrament of Healing to Catholic patients.
Altar girls have come to be more and more rare, not more
and more common. Some dioceses forbid them altogether and
without apology, let alone the grace to blush. Apparently the
Church against whom the gates of hell cannot prevail can be
brought to perdition by little 11-year-old girls carrying water

97
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

from one side of an altar to the next. With this door clos-
ing goes the commitment of many of the women of the next
generation.
In diocese after diocese, where they have served in official
capacities for years, women are being removed from every
office in the chancery except, perhaps, as vicars for religious.
And at the same time, new documents, notably the Instruction
on Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-
Ordained Faithful of 1997, remind priests that they hold the
ultimate authority in every dimension of church and parish life,
regardless of their lack of experience or professional prepa-
ration in any of them. In those cases, the doors to any kind
of official hearing of the issues or concerns of women have
closed soundly and completely.
One by one, inner-city parishes find themselves done away
with for lack of priests or served only by men too old, too tired
themselves to do more than say an occasional Mass. But
women, even those with degrees in lay ecclesial ministry pro-
grammes, who ask to be allowed to serve those parishes get no
welcome. So the parishes disappear silently where the congre-
gations are too small, too old, or too poor to have their protests
heard. This kind of exclusion has other consequences, as well.
Many of the women, after years of trying to serve the Church
and being rebuffed, go with them, to other work, to other
Churches, or to no Church at all. And they are taking their
daughters with them.
In 1965 in the United States, 549 parishes were without a
resident priest. In 2002, there were 2,929 US parishes without
a resident priest. Around the world, those figures had risen
from 94,846 priestless parishes in 1980, the first year in which
data began to be collected on a global scale, to 105,530
parishes in the year 2000.1

98
 WANTED

Bishop Raymond Lucker of New Ulm, Wisconsin, now

deceased, loved to tell the story of his attempt to maintain the
traditional parish structures in the face of the dwindling
number of priests. His solution was to assign a priest to three
parishes at a time, a kind of circuit-rider eccesiology. The
priest would reside in the largest of the three parishes, but
preside at the weekly Sunday liturgy for the other two, as well.
Women religious acted as residential parish administrators in
the parishes that had no daily access to a priest. After several
years of this arrangement, Lucker decided it was unfair for one
parish to have continual access to a priest while the other two
did not. He decreed then that the priest would move from
parish to parish every three years. Suddenly, he reported, the
mail started pouring in asking him not to do that. The under-
lying message in all of them brooked no doubt: 'We haven't
had this kind of parish activity for years', the letters said.
'We don't want a priest. Just leave Sister where she is.'
But every day that kind of joint ministry fades, those doors
close. Universities report that of the records they have on the
ministerial positions of their graduates, most now occupy
volunteer positions in catechetical programmes.
The diaconate programme, now restored for men only,
has grown to over 12,000 ordained deacons since its incep-
tion. But the thought of even discussing the restoration of
the diaconate programme for women, too - an institutional
staple in both the Eastern and the Western Churches for over
10 centuries - has been dismissed without consideration in
the document Institutionis Diaconorum Permanentiarum on
the grounds that it could lead to the expectation of priestly
ordination for women. Despite the fact that the same argument
is not used in regard to married men. Nor can ordained deacons
do anything that any other lay person cannot do without

99
UNFINISHED JOURNEY

permission (except, of course, maintain the male character of a

sacramental Church).
Finally, in what may be the most subversive move of all,
new documents - notably Liturgiam authenticam in 2001 -
completely obliterate female references from the prayers and
hymns of the Church, even in Scriptures clearly addressed
to the whole Christian community, let alone in references to
the infinite, unknowable and totally spiritual Godhead who
has been made completely captive to maleness. The door to
existence for women, even in the pronouns of the Church, has
been closed.
Philosophers and social psychologists alike know that what
is missing in the language is missing in the mind, and that
what is missing in the mind will never be embodied in the struc-
tures of a people, a culture, an organisation, a Church. Whom
we do not address in a conversation does not exist for us.
Language is not a trivial issue. Language is the ultimate delete.

Still Wanted: The Other Half

And the question is: why? Why all these exclusions in the face
of a Council of the Church that called for equality, an encyc-
lical on the gifting nature of women, a papal letter of apology
for the past sins of the Church against women and the promise
of 'programmes, etc.'? Why these sudden reversals of practice
in a Church that had found new life, new energy, new witness
in the world as a result of its long overdue recognition of the
full humanity of women? Why the changes now in the face of
the clear but new awareness of the implications for the Church
of the gospel descriptions of Jesus with women? Why the new
abandonment of women in the light of the theological signifi-
cance of a creation story that insists on the common human
identity of both Adam and Eve - 'bone of my bone; flesh of my

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flesh'? Somebody, Adam recognises, who is just like himself.

Where, in all of this, is the 'campaign for the promotion of
women, concentrating on all areas of women's life and begin-
ning with a universal recognition of the dignity of women'
promised by this Pope that will promote the advancement of
women in the Church as well as in all other sectors of society?
Why do we have thousands of priestless parishes, thousands
fewer seminarians and, at the same time, thousands of un-
employed lay ministers - most of them women - unless it is
more preferable to close parishes than to allow women to
maintain the very lifeblood of a communal Church?
What can we conclude? That the papal letter to women
lacks integrity? That the Council has been hijacked? That
papal messages are routinely ignored by those who claim to
accept them? It is a question of great ethical and ecclesiastical
import. On it may well rest not only the renewal of the Church
but its future as well: its future effectiveness, its future witness,
its very impact and influence in years to come - as secular
society, rather than the Church, leads the world to a new
understanding of creation.

Note
1 Statistics on Lay Ecclesial Ministers are from Center for Applied
Research in the Apostolate (CARA), Georgetown University,
Washington, D.C. (Cara.Georgetown.edu).

101
 7
Augustine, Aquinas or the Gospel sine glossal
Divisions over Gaudium et spes1
Joseph A. Komonchak

One of the most striking developments in the first decade after

the close of Vatican II was the splintering of the coalition of
theologians who helped at the first session to break the power
of those who had controlled the Council's preparation. Those
theologians played a major role in the deliberations which
resulted in conciliar documents marked by a quite different
spirit and offering a quite different message to the Church and
to the world. But then they bifurcated along paths symbolised
by two new theological journals. The first issue of Concilium
appeared in 1964, while the Council was still meeting; Com-
munio was founded in 1972 by several theologians who had
since resigned from the editorial board of Concilium (and was
inevitably therefore labelled an 'anti-Concilium'). The seeds
of this schism were planted long before the Council opened,
slept in the soil for the first two sessions, then broke into the
light as the Council moved to its close. Anyone interested in
healing the division would be well advised to trace them to
their roots.
The differences began to appear, especially, in the last stages
of the preparation of Gaudium et spes and were consistently
reflected, also, in the initial commentaries on the pastoral
constitution. I will consider those differences through the

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 AUGUSTINE, AQUINAS OR THE GOSPEL SINE GLOSSA

commentaries on the redaction of Guadium et spes of three

theologians: Marie-Dominique Chenu, Joseph Ratzinger and
Giuseppe Dossetti.

'What Now?': The Question of Schema 13

The split among the progressive majority suggests that the
theological dynamic of Vatican II was more complex - as
Giuseppe Alberigo, echoing Joseph Ratzinger, has observed -
than the simple opposition between a 'curial tendency' and a
'progressive tendency'.2 It is significant that both men made this
comment in the course of observations on Gaudium et spes.
For although differences among the progressives with regard
both to practical tactics and to theological orientations were
not lacking in earlier moments of the conciliar deliberations,
they had then been largely subordinated to the common inter-
est of opposing the ecclesiastical and theological system which
was reflected in the official texts prepared for the Council's
discussion and expected approval. In the midst of that struggle
it appeared sufficient to analyse the conciliar tension as one
between 'two tendencies in modern theology', to use the title
of Mgr Gerard Philips's famous essay.3 But once that struggle
had ended a question arose, nicely stated by Joseph Ratzinger:
'The preparatory work was unsatisfactory, and the Council
rejected the extant texts. But the question at this point was:
What now?'4 The question was particularly acute with regard
to Schema 13.
After its initial discussion during the third session of the
Council, Schema 13 was extensively rewritten, particularly
during and after the long and fruitful meeting at Ariccia in
January-February 1965. A useful description of the new plan
and method was provided by Mgr P. Haubtmann shortly
before the Council resumed its work.5 In response to criticisms

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of the previous version, the redactors had constructed a

Christian anthropology set out in the four chapters of the first
part of the schema, which was followed by a consideration of
material on some more pressing problems that previously had
been treated in appendices. Addressed first to Catholics and
through them to all people, the schema would take the form,
not of an authoritative claim to jurisdiction over the issues
discussed, but rather of a testimony, one that simply stated
what the Church is, what it believes, and what it thinks about
contemporary questions. This required a style and form both
simple and direct; it also called for a method that would begin
'from facts and truths the most commonly acknowledged,
would then illumine and judge them in the light of Revelation,
and finally would centre them upon Christ himself. The
method was theologically motivated: 'for facts and human
development ('devenir') in their own way constitute a locus
theologicus in which the believer must seek ... the appeals and
the solicitations of the Spirit'. The result was 'a sui generis type
of schema'.

Rahner9s Criticisms of Schema 13

The Ariccia text encountered serious criticism at the meeting of
German bishops in Fulda at the end of August 1965. A set of
observations prepared by Karl Rahner were discussed and in
large part adopted by the German and Scandinavian bishops.
Despite the great effort that had been expended on its revision,
the schema, according to Rahner, still had many defects.
First, it lacked a sufficient 'theological gnoseology' that
would explain how it had arrived at its analysis of the contem-
porary world - how much of it had been borrowed from con-
temporary analysts, how much derived from the faith - and
how the authors had come to the concrete and practical

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conclusions it stated. Secondly, Rahner argued that the schema

did not adequately address the relationship between the order
of creation and the order of redemption, particularly the
meaning of the human activity that was profoundly trans-
forming the world. The inner-worldly significance of this
activity was neglected in favour of its immediate religious and
moral significance. The concept of the 'world' in the text also
needed further clarification. Thirdly, the German Jesuit said,
the schema lacked 'a real and profound theology of sin': it
was content with lamenting immorality in a way that scarcely
surpassed what mere experience might yield. The ineradicable
depths of sin were overlooked; the ideology of a 'better world'
obtainable if people only willed it had replaced the 'legitimate
and necessary "pessimism" that Christians must profess before
the world'. Fourthly, said Rahner, it neglected what a Chris-
tian theology of history must acknowledge: 'that the antago-
nism between a world under the power of the Evil One and the
disciples of Christ will never be mitigated but will grow ever
more bitter in the course of time'.
Finally, said Rahner, the schema lacked the needed Christian
anthropology. The idea of the 'image of God' was presented
too rapidly and too briefly and ignored the complexities of
the notion. The reflections on human dignity were too abstract,
too formal, and too oriented toward contemplation. The text
lacked a 'theology of the cross' and of its implications for
the history of the world and of the human race. Rahner's pro-
posal was that the text either be remanded to a post-conciliar
commission or that it be reduced in authority from a 'pastoral
constitution'.
Joseph Ratzinger echoed many of Rahner's criticisms and
added others of his own. The text came close to a Teilhardian
identification of Christian hope with modern confidence in
progress, according to Ratzinger; it seemed 'unaware of the

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ambivalence of all external human progress'. Its descriptions

of contemporary movements were so polite and reasonable
that the eventual references to Christ seemed half-embarrassed
afterthoughts. Unclarified notions of the relationship between
the Church and the world reflected habits formed while the
Church had been retreating from the general course of modern
developments into its little ecclesiastical sphere from which it
was now trying to speak to the whole of humanity. After the
council Ratzinger would repeat many of these criticisms in his
commentaries on Gaudium et spes.
In order to prevent these disagreements among habitual
conciliar allies from endangering the text, several French- and
German-speaking bishops and theologians met on 17 Septem-
ber. After the former defended the schema from the cri-
tiques of the latter, the common decision was made to accept
the schema as a basis but to try to improve it. Joseph Rat-
zinger, who attended the meeting, described the 'new fronts
[that] had emerged in the face of new tasks and new problems'
as reflecting 'a certain opposition between German and French
theology' within the ranks of the progressives.6
But there was a third voice in the debate, that of Giuseppe
Dossetti (1913-96). Not very well known outside Italy, Dos-
setti played important roles at two of the most important events
in twentieth-century Italian history, as a layman at the Constitu-
ent Assembly of 1948 that produced the Constitution for the
new Italian Republic, and at the Second Vatican Council, where
he was the chief adviser to Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro (1891-
1976), Archbishop of Bologna. In Italian politics he had
belonged to the left wing of the Christian Democrat party.
Frustrated at his lack of influence, he began to work for a
renewal of the Church that might be able to promote a badly
needed different form of politics. After a quixotic run for mayor
of Bologna, he was ordained a priest in 1959. He established the

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well-known Institute of Religious Studies in Bologna. After

Vatican II, he withdrew into the quasi-monastic community he
had founded.
A very evangelical vision inspired the speeches Dossetti
prepared for Lercaro and a few other bishops and the memo-
randa he composed during and after Vatican II. He insisted that
if the Council did not embody and call for a very radical con-
version to the gospel (sine glossa, he liked to call it - without
extenuating commentary), it would fall short of the epochal
intentions of Pope John. The Council, of course, did not go
down that road, and Dossetti regarded its final texts as greatly
compromised by Paul VFs caution and his desire for near-
unanimity.
As the debate on Schema 13 was about to resume Dossetti
wrote to Cardinal Lercaro of 'our position between two fires
(the conservatives and the progressives)'.7 This comment,
along with the intervention Dossetti prepared for the cardinal,
reveals the presence of another, more radical and evangelical,
approach to the questions.

Three Theologians, Three Approaches

The three men - Chenu, Ratzinger and Dossetti - were in
broad agreement in a number of areas. They agreed on the
inadequacy of modern 'Catholic social doctrine' which argued
on the basis of a natural law, accessible, it was thought, to
right reason, and practised a method of deduction from rather
abstract first principles. They were all opposed, too, to an
approach - from within an ecclesiology of the sodetas per-
fecta - that would be content with service of a separate little
Catholic world. They agreed on the need for a biblically
inspired engagement of the Church and the Christian with the
world of history. They all wished to overcome an anthropology

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which so stressed the distinction that it became a separa-

tion between nature and grace, reason and faith, world and
Church. And yet, for all these agreements, their assessments of
Gaudium et spes often differed sharply. Why is this?
Leaving aside an inevitably superficial explanation in terms
of 'optimism' vs. 'pessimism', one might be tempted to be
content with the differences between an incarnational and an
eschatological approach. But who would wish to suggest that
any one of the three theologians would consider compromis-
ing either of the great mysteries, the Incarnation or the Cross?
The relative weight given to one or the other, in contrast, may
be traceable to differences in basic theological or methodo-
logical stances.
M.-D. Chenu was, by religious commitment, by training,
and by expertise, a Thomist. Within his comments on the
pastoral constitution one can hear echoes of the theological
epistemology and anthropology which he defended 25 years
before the Council not only in scholarly works on Aquinas but
also in works that urged a typically Thomist approach to
theology for a Church that is present in and for the modern
world. Then and later he saw the Thomist method as corres-
ponding to the logic of the Incarnation and of Redemption as
the recapitulation of all things in Christ, including the physical
universe and the embodied spirit of man. Then and later he
urged that theological anthropology had to go beyond the
realm of the psychological to include the social, cultural and
the historical dimensions and to see these latter, neglected,
dimensions not only to be constitutive of man but also the locus
of those same orientations toward and created capacities for
the supernatural that Thomism had defended, for example, in
categories such as that of 'obediential potency'. A sharp dis-
junction, such as the one that is content with the two categories
of sin and grace, was inadequate on Thomist grounds because

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it neglected the created autonomy and intelligibility of the

world of nature, man and history; and because it tended to
compromise the methodological autonomy of the sciences that
study it. Chenu's defence of the basic method and orientation
of Gaudium et spes did not derive, or did not simply derive,
from his congenital optimism; it had theological grounds.
In Joseph Ratzinger's assessment of the pastoral constitution
one can see a theological method and vision that stands far
closer to the streams of Augustinianism that during the Middle
Ages and in the post-Reformation era had been very reserved
towards the Thomist effort. Ratzinger seems far more at home
in the world of the Scriptures, the Fathers and St Bonaventure.
In his remarks on Gaudium et spes, as also in many other writ-
ings, he makes clear his preference for Augustinian (and even
Lutheran) notions of freedom and his belief that Thomists
(if not Thomas himself) had so stressed the autonomy of the
world and of human reason that the first constituted a separate
world capable of being understood by the second, with the
result that the world disclosed by revelation and accepted by
faith appeared to be a more-or-less arbitrarily imposed alterna-
tive. To a Thomist epistemology he regards as inadequate he
prefers a typically Augustinian distinction between scientia
and sapientia^ the former, imitated today by the necessarily
reductionistic modern empirical sciences, content with mere
phenomena and indifferent to the ontological truth of things,
which is only apparent to the latter, itself the fruit of faith. The
pastoral constitution continues to reflect the myth of pure
reason which leads it to a necessarily ineffective method of
dialogue that neglects that faith is not demonstrable; what is
needed is kerygmatic witness, the simple presentation of the
gospel and an invitation to enter its world of intelligibility and
rationality. The basic issue remains that of the relationship
between faith and understanding.

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Giuseppe Dossetti is more difficult to place. At least in his

participation at the Council and in his remarks on Gaudium et
spes, he appears more as a prophet than as a scholar, less as a
professor than as the engaged Christian he had been in both
society and Church. He seems closer to Ratzinger, first, in his
distrust of the modern self-professedly Thomist theological
tradition elaborated in the service of a societas perfecta that he
thought had compromised the evangelical engagement that
should mark the Church; second, in his preference for the
engagement typical of early Christianity; and, third, in his
insistence on the radical rupture in intelligibility, the redefini-
tion of rationality, required by the Cross. For him, too, the pri-
mary presence of the Church must be one of testimony (a word
used by all three men), but this is witness to an utterly super-
natural vision and reality, which in the end cannot be rendered
reasonable to non-believers. For that reason he quite disagreed
with Chenu's assessment of the analysis that underlay Gaud-
ium et spes, which he thinks scarcely surpasses the level of a
common-sense sociology that is content with a banal general
understanding and promotes a timid Christian engagement.
At the same time, he clearly disagreed with Ratzinger on what
the question of war and peace required of the Council, and so,
far from being content with Ratzinger's apparently inconsis-
tent resignation to the conciliar position on the question, he
regards the latter as indicative of the radical incompleteness of
the whole conciliar experience and achievement. For Dossetti
the Council missed a unique opportunity. Underlying the
failure, for him, is the Council's inability to escape, with the
radicality required, from the institutional constraints and from
the theology that served them, for the sake of a gospel sine
glossa. It must also be said that of the three men it is Dossetti
who actually attempted something like a reading of the 'signs of

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the times', while Ratzinger remained unconvinced of the very

idea and Chenu was content with remarks of great generality.
Of the three men, clearly Dossetti was the most radical in the
demands he placed on the conciliar fathers and in the criteria
by which he subjected their achievements to judgement.
Dossetti found the draft's analysis of the contemporary world
nothing but 'common sense propositions', at the level of
'journalistic popularisation'. The text should be revised, he
said, in order to give the response of the gospel to concrete
problems and to do this 'in the immediacy and relevance of its
most vigorous statements'. He, too, wished the Council to offer
an optimistic and positive message; but, he went on, there is a
great difference between 'an utterly supernatural Christian
optimism' that anticipates 'a transfiguration and regeneration
that is like a resurrection from the dead, solely in virtue of the
blessed passion of Christ', and a naturalistic optimism that
'indulges in a phenomenology of human progress and ignores
or flees the principle that everyone and everything must be
"salted with fire" (Mark 9:49), by the fire of the Cross and of
the Spirit of Christ'. The draft's optimism was not salted in this
way, he argued; it conformed to common opinions, was
uncritical and timid.
This affected most particularly, in his view, the text's
treatment of war and peace. The text tried so hard to be non-
judgemental, he thought, that it ignored the judgements on
contemporary evils the Church is called to make in the name of
Christ. On so crucial a point as war, he wanted the Council's
discourse to be 'absolute, synthetic, evangelical'. Only this
approach could respond to the anxiety of peoples; only this
could 'banish war and make peace, not by human calculation
but by the creative force of the Word of God'. This is the
witness to faith in Jesus Christ that the whole Church is called

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to give; in this moment of supreme danger, it could give no

truer response than to say to the world: 'Entrust yourself not
to defence by arms and by political prudence, but only to the
protection of the Lord Jesus.' When the bishops failed to fol-
low this evangelical call, articulated at the Council by Lercaro
and a few others, Dossetti thought that the value of the Council
as a whole was called into question. The failure demonstrated
how tight were certain institutional and theological knots that
could not be loosened 'except by a sword, by the sword of
the Word of God, clear and simple, beyond all other theo-
logical reflection'.
There is visible in his final assessments of Vatican II a good
deal of the distinct position he urged upon Cardinal Lercaro
from the first session onwards and which was reflected in the
speech in which the Archbishop of Bologna pleaded that the
whole conciliar agenda be reconceived in terms of the problem
of poverty. Dossetti was fiercely critical both of the method,
compromising from the beginning, reflected in the decision to
retain as much as possible of the preparatory schemas, and of the
at best only half-successful results this fatal choice permitted.
Neither in the Council's doctrinal texts nor in the texts on the
Church's relationship with the modern world did Vatican II
achieve the breakthrough Dossetti thought could alone corre-
spond to Pope John's vision. It was a theological, indeed a reli-
gious, commitment that underlay Dossetti's disagreement over
the Council's programme and tactics - a disagreement that, as
quickly became apparent, set him apart not only from the in-
transigent minority but within the progressive majority as well.

Aquinas vs. Augustine

The final stages of the redaction of Gaudium et spes also
revealed the sorts of disagreements within that majority that

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 AUGUSTINE, AQUINAS OR THE GOSPEL SINE GLOSSA

are illustrated in the figures of Chenu and Ratzinger and

that, perhaps inevitably, appeared when, with the preparatory
drafts rejected, the Council faced the question: what now?
It was one thing to delegitimise the theological system that had
guided the preparation of the Council; it was quite another to
write texts that would reflect the positive and pastoral aims
Pope John had set out in his opening speech. In the course of
the elaboration of the texts, it is clear that there were differ-
ences within the majority now in charge of redacting the
conciliar documents, even the ones on the Church ad intra but
especially in those on the Church ad extra, to use the unfor-
tunate division commonly invoked at the time. These differ-
ences inevitably reflected the theological background, training
and interests of the theologians employed in the tasks, as is
clear from the comparison of Chenu and Ratzinger.
Their differences may be traceable to the differences between
a typically Thomist and a typically Augustinian epistemology
and anthropology. Perhaps the analysis may be extended
beyond these two men. Commenting on the much-reduced
presence of St Thomas Aquinas in the final conciliar texts, Yves
Congar remarked that, nevertheless, 'St Thomas, the Doctor
communis, furnished the redactors of the dogmatic texts of
Vatican II with the foundations and the structure of their
thought.'8 In Congar's mind, if with Gaudium et spes and
Dignitatis humanae the Council had finally broken with
'political Augustinianism', it was because it achieved some-
thing similar to what the 'Albertine-Thomist revolution' had
effected in the thirteenth century.9
Ratzinger, however, provided a different account of the
Council's inspiration. In a generally negative paper written ten
years after the Council began, he asked what theological and
spiritual resources the Church had with which to face the
Council's disappointing aftermath. The only hope lay, he

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thought, 'in those forces that really had made Vatican II pos-
sible and shaped it but that shortly thereafter had been
overrun by a wave of modernity'. This was:
a theology and a piety which essentially were based on
the Holy Scriptures, on the Church Fathers, and on the
great liturgical heritage of the universal Church. At the
Council this theology succeeded in nourishing the faith
not only on the thought of the last hundred years but on
the great stream of the whole tradition in order thus to
make it richer and more vital and at the same time
simpler and more open.
He dismissed two other options: the post-conciliar progressi-
vism that had arisen out of J. B. Metz's transformation of Karl
Rahner's transcendental Thomism into, first, a theology of
hope and, second, a political theology. This stream Ratzinger
thought had lost its usefulness because of its uncritical sur-
render to vaguely Marxist analysis. As for the scholastic phi-
losophy and theology defended by conservatives at the Council,
Ratzinger said that it no longer played any role; in fact, he
observed how rapidly defenders of a pedestrian scholastic
theology had laid down their arms and surrendered to a vague
modernism.10 The omission of Thomas and the dismissal of the
Thomist tradition in these remarks is notable, reflecting, one
suspects, not only the state of Thomism at the time but also
Ratzinger's personal and theological preferences.
These differences with regard to the theological inspiration
of the texts of Vatican II suggest two lines of research which it
may be useful to undertake for the history of Catholic theol-
ogy in the twentieth century. The first is retrospective and
concerns the nature of the theological renewal that prepared
for Vatican II and which is often over-simplified today, as it
was then by its critics, as 'la nouvelle theologie', the singular

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 AUGUSTINE, AQUINAS OR THE GOSPEL SINE GLOSSA

term suggesting a single stream. If almost all the leaders of that

renewal agreed on the necessity of a ressourcement, it is also
clear that they drew their chief inspirations from various
sources. Louis Bouyer, Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac, Joseph
Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, for example, were
far more at home in the mental world of the Fathers, the
monastic theologians and the medieval neo-Augustinians than
they were not only in the watered down neo-scholasticism of
the modern era but also in the scholastic milieu and dialectical
methods of St Thomas himself. While certainly not neglecting
the Scriptures or the Fathers or the liturgical renewal, in con-
trast, Chenu and Congar were great admirers of Aquinas and
of what Congar calls the 'Albertine-Thomist revolution', and
with them may be linked in this respect men such as Karl
Rahner, Bernard Lonergan and Edward Schillebeeckx who
attempted a reconciliation of Thomism and the modern philo-
sophical turn to the subject. Within the ranks of the leaders
of the twentieth-century renewal of theology there were not
insignificant differences; which were almost bound to appear
in full force once the hegemonic power of neo-scholasticism
was broken at the Council.
My second suggestion is more prospective. It is striking to
note that after the Council it was among those who chiefly
promoted the recovery of the patristic and monastic traditions
who were most critical of what was happening in the Church
and in theology in the wake of the Council. One may think of
the often very critical and at times even bitter post-conciliar
writings of Bouyer, Danielou, de Lubac, Ratzinger and von
Balthasar. While not uncritical of post-conciliar developments,
the great promoters of Aquinas, such as Chenu, Congar,
Lonergan, Rahner and Schillebeeckx, displayed a greater sense
of balance, offered more careful analyses of the problems and
more nuanced responses to them, and took up a challenge

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which they often compared in extent and seriousness to the

one that faced Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Appreciation
of St Thomas, of course, is not by itself the predictor of these
differences in attitude, as the examples of Jacques Maritain
and Etienne Gilson show. (But they, of course, were philoso-
phers, not theologians.)
This line of research may be worth pursuing despite the
fact that, as Gerald McCool has written, The history of the
modern Neo-Thomist movement, whose magna charta was
Aeterni patris, reached its end at the Second Vatican Coun-
cil.'11 Its place has been taken by a very diverse plurality of
theological methods, no one of which has gained anything
like the hegemony enjoyed by the unitary method of neo-
scholasticism. This is not the place to attempt an inventory of
them all. Within their often chaotic variety, David Tracy has
offered a distinction,12 which might usefully be considered,
between a correlation-theology, the contemporary equivalent
of Aquinas's engagement with Aristotle, illustrated in the
work of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, and an epiphanic
theology, the contemporary equivalent of a more Augustinian
and Bonaventuran approach, illustrated in the work of Hans
Urs von Balthasar and in 'der Positivismus des Glaubens'
[a faith-positivism], as Joseph Ratzinger calls it.13 What is
called 'post-modernity', with its critique of universal reason
and of foundationalism and its insistence on the incommen-
surability of linguistically mediated worlds, is often considered
to resemble the latter approach with its abandonment of the
myth of pure reason and its insistence on the unbridgeable gulf
that the Cross of Christ digs with regard to the very notion of
rationality. In this line, Dossetti and Ratzinger would appear,
at least temporarily, to have won the victory. One suspects,
however, that Chenu would question whether this approach is
faithful to the achievement of Vatican II.

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 AUGUSTINE, AQUINAS OR THE GOSPEL SINE GLOSSA

Notes
1 This is a fuller version of my article 'What road to joy?', The
Tablet (30 November 2002), pp. 11-12.
2 Giuseppe Alberigo, 'La Costituzione in rapporto al magistero
globale del Concilio', in Guilherme Barauna (ed.), La Chiesa nel
mondo di oggi: Studi e commenti intorno alia Costituzione
pastorale 'Gaudium et spes' (Florence: Vallecchi, 1966), p. 184n.
Alberigo cited Joseph Ratzinger, 'Der Katholizismus nach dem
Konzil', Das neue Volk Gottes: Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie
(Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1969), pp. 302-21 (316-17).
3 Gérard Philips, 'Deux tendances dans la théologie contempor-
aine: En marge du Ile Concile du Vatican', Nouvelle Revue
Théologique, 85 (1963), pp. 225-38.
4 Joseph Ratzinger, Die letze Sitzungsperiode des Konzils (Köln:
Bachern, 1966), p. 28; ET Theological Highlights of Vatican II
(New York: Paulist Press, 1966), p. 148.
5 P. Hauptmann, 'Le schéma de la Constitution pastorale "De
Ecclesia in mundo huius temporis" ', Études et documents, no. 10
(25 August 1965), llpp.
6 Ratzinger, Die letze Sitzungsperiode des Konzils, p. 30; Theo-
logical Highlights, p. 151.
7 Dossetti to Lercaro, 27 September 1965, published in Per la
forza dello Spirito: Discorsi conciliari del card. Giacomo Lercaro
(Bologna: Dehoniane, 1984), p.254n.
8 Congar, 'La théologie au Concile', Situation et taches présentes
de la théologie (Paris: du Cerf), p. 53.
9 Yves Congar, 'Eglise et monde dans la perspective de Vatican IF,
in L'Eglise dans le monde de ce temps, vol. III, (Paris: du Cerf,
1967), p. 31, where he adds in a note: 'This point about corres-
pondence is, of course, one of those that allows good commenta-
tors to regard GS as profoundly Thomist in inspiration.'
10 Joseph Ratzinger, 'Zehn Jahre nach Konzilsbeginn - wo stehen
wir?' in Dogma und Verkündigung (München: Wewel, 1971),
pp. 437-9.
11 Gerald A. McCool, From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal
Evolution of Thomism (New York: Fordham University Press,
1989), pp.230. See Joseph A. Komonchak, 'Thomism and the
Second Vatican Council', in Anthony J. Cernera (éd.), Continuity
and Plurality in Catholic Theology: Essays in Honor of Gerald
A. McCool, SJ. (Fairfield, CT: Fairfield University Press, 1998),
pp. 53-73.

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12 David Tracy, 'The uneasy alliance reconceived: Catholic

theological method, modernity and post-modernity', Theological
Studies, 50 (1989), pp. 548-70; see also John McDade, 'Catholic
theology in the post-conciliar period', in Adrian Hastings (ed.),
Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After (London: SPCK; New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 422-43.
13 Joseph Ratzinger, Einfuhrung in das Christentum, p. 32; Intro-
duction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990),
p. 28.

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 8
Power and Powerlessness in the Church:
The Chance for Renewal
Timothy Radcliffe OP

The greatest crisis which the Church in the United States has
ever faced is about power: its use and abuse. The terrible
scandal of sexual abuse by some members of the clergy is
about power. The root of the problem is neither clerical
celibacy nor the high percentage of gay priests, but the sexual
immaturity of those who cannot cope with equality and who
therefore seek relationships in which they can dominate. In the
United States, the anger at this scandal of abuse has been
vastly increased by the way that some bishops have reacted,
since this has also been seen as an abuse of power. The anger is
against a power that gives no account of itself to the People of
God, in which the only accountability is upwards.
There is no simple relationship between the abuse of power
by priests who sexually exploited minors and the structures of
the Church. The vast majority of bishops and priests do not
exercise power in a way that is abusive, and usually there is a
profound respect for the dignity and freedom of the People of
God. But such institutional structures mean that priests who
are sexually and emotionally immature are not necessarily
challenged to grow into maturity. These structures can provide
a shelter from demanding relationships of equality. The crisis
is also one of powerlessness. There is a crisis of leadership:
bishops seem paralysed, caught between the Vatican and the

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media; priests often feel powerless given the lack of leadership

of the bishops; and the laity feel powerless faced with an
institution that does not empower them. It is as if the structure
emasculates all attempts to find solutions. So we are faced
with a crisis of power and powerlessness.
The accusations against priests of sexual abuse and against
some bishops for covering this up have not been confined to
the US. In England we have suffered some of the same traumas
but less severely, because early on Cardinal Cormac Murphy
O'Connor appointed the Nolan Commission and its recom-
mendations have been widely implemented, so the relationship
of trust between the bishops and the people has been largely
undamaged. But the American crisis has focused our attention
on issues that must be faced by the whole Church. How today
should power be exercised in the Church?

Lessons from the New Testament

We can begin to look for a way forward by glancing at what
the New Testament teaches us about power.
The Church was born in a crisis of power. At the Last
Supper Jesus has lost control of his life. He has been sold by
Judas to his enemies; Peter is about to deny him; his disciples
are on the verge of fleeing. He will be imprisoned and killed.
The Church begins in this moment of utter collapse. It is also
the moment in which Jesus performs that most powerful ges-
ture upon which our Church rests. He takes bread, breaks it
and shares it saying, 'This is my body, given for you.' He shares
the cup of wine as the foundation of the new Covenant.
We have nothing to fear from crises. The Church was born
in one and is renewed through them; they are our speciality!
Every Eucharist enacts the memory of the crisis of the birth of
our community. We are living through a crisis today, but it is a

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comparatively minor one, compared with the Last Supper

and others of our history. If we do not panic, it will bring life
and renewal.
At the Last Supper the power of Jesus is exercised through
his words. It is the power of meaning. It is not a brute or blind
power but works at the level of significance. Jesus performs
the founding sacramental act, and all the sacraments are sym-
bolically powerful. St Thomas Aquinas says sacraments are
in genere signi.1 They are powerful through what they signify.
If the Church has always related the exercise of power to the
sacraments, then it is because power for Christians is insepa-
rable from meaning, from word and communication. God
created the universe through the speaking of a word.
This is hard for us to grasp since for the last few hundred years
our imagination has been captured by a mechanical understand-
ing of power. We have harnessed new forms of power to change
the world: steam, electricity and nuclear power. We have re-
shaped our world with dams, roads and railway lines. Power
equals force. God has been thought of as a mechanic or a
clockmaker. The idea of power as meaning has become either
incomprehensible or at best weak, something that happens in
our heads rather than the real world. In the real world it is not
ideas that are strong but the imposition of our wills.
Yet our world is changing. The old world of the industrial
market, founded on the production and distribution of goods,
is passing away. We are now entering a world in which what
are mainly exchanged are information, signs and symbols.
We are becoming members of the 'semiotic society'. What zings
around the World Wide Web are not so much heavy things like
cars and coal but concepts and culture and above all money.
We live in a world that may understand sacramental power
rather better than our immediate ancestors - though as a
Church we are, as usual, rather slow in getting this point.

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It follows that the Christian exercise of power cannot be

unaccountable. It belongs to its nature that it gives an account
of itself, because it is the speaking of a word of grace. Nicholas
Lash writes that all governance in the Church is an act of
teaching, 'set, from start to finish, at the service of our com-
mon apprenticeship in holiness and understanding'.2 Disciple-
ship is initiation into learning. A blind act of power would not
only be unchristian. It would also be, in the deepest sense,
ineffective, which is why in this crisis the Church is felt to be
abusive of power but also powerless.
So the exercise of proper authority in the Church necessarily
implies the engagement of our hearts and minds. There is no
teaching, and so no act of Christian power, unless there is
understanding. And this implies the asking of questions, the
demanding of explanations, the raising of objections, the shar-
ing of experience, the testing of arguments. Teaching is neces-
sarily a process in which those who learn are actively engaged.
As Aquinas wrote: 'If the Master decides a question simply by
using sheer authorities, the hearer will certainly be left in no
doubt that such and such is the case, but he will acquire no
knowledge or understanding and will go away empty.'3
As Master of the Dominicans I sometimes took decisions
that my brethren must have found incomprehensible. But in
our tradition for someone to obey without understanding is
not a good example of obedience: 'Brother John is wonderful,
planting all those cabbages upside down just because he was
told to.' Herbert McCabe OP wrote:

Obedience only becomes perfect when the one who

commands and the one who obeys come to share one
mind. The notion of blind obedience makes no more
sense in our tradition than would blind learning. A totally

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 POWER AND POWERLESSNESS IN THE CHURCH

obedient community would be one in which no one was

ever compelled to do anything.'4

So clearly the ordained priesthood cannot be a caste that

gives no account of its acts and life. It is at the service of mean-
ing. It is a way of life that belongs to the articulation of a
Word made flesh. And the Last Supper shows us that this is
a Word that gathers into communion and throws down the
divisions that divide human beings, the barriers between Jews
and Gentiles, saints and sinners, and ultimately between the
living and the dead.
The Last Supper transforms the Old Testament idea of
holiness. God's holiness is no longer in separation from all that
is impure and imperfect. This is a new covenant in which God's
holiness is shown in the embrace of all that is unholy, and even
that most impure thing of all, death. Holiness is shown in the
scandal of a dead body on a cross. All this is made explicit in
the letter to the Hebrews, where the high priest is shown dying
outside the camp. 'Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city
gate in order to sanctify the people by his blood. Let us there-
fore then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he
endured' (Heb. 12:12f.).
How can we understand the gap between this vision of
power and priesthood and what many people experience in the
Church today? It is tempting to blame it on centuries of
power-hungry clerics who have betrayed the original purity of
the gospel, as if all that is necessary is to return to the New
Testament and wipe out the intervening two millennia of
failure! That is tempting, but it would be both unjust and
naive. The renewal of the Church always occurs through a
return to the gospel but during those two millennia the Holy
Spirit has not been absent. She did not descend at Pentecost
and then disappear. If she had, then what grounds would we

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have for believing that we might do any better? Somehow the

Church as it has evolved, with all its failures and distortions,
must also teach us something of the nature of Christian power.

The Nature of Christian Tower'

Christian power should always be part of the preaching of the
gospel and so of the articulation of meaning. All that is said
and done should speak of grace. But this never happens in a
vacuum. Christian power is exercised in the context of the
powers of this world. In some ways it inevitably becomes
conformed to them, inculturated. In other ways it stands over
against them, and is counter-cultural. Our beloved Mother
Church as we know her today, with the power structures that
shape her, is the fruit of two millennia of inculturation and
counter-culturation. Of course, one person's inculturation is
another person's betrayal; and one person's counter-culture is
for a third unrealism!
All the institutions which are now most contested evolved
under the dual pressure for the Church to conform to the
powers of this world and to oppose them: a centralised
institution in the Vatican; the naming of bishops by Rome; and
a celibate clergy. All of these have certainly expanded because
of the desire for clerical power. But they have also been the
fruit of the resistance to other institutions that have wished to
deprive the Church of freedom. The Church has battled
against Roman imperial persecution, the Christian emperors,
the feudal aristocracy, the Holy Roman Empire, the rise of the
absolutist monarchies, the French Revolution, the nineteenth-
century empires, and against Communism and Fascism. The
Church is like an old warrior that has come to look in some
ways like her foes. If the papacy has become like a monarchy,
then it is because for centuries it fought monarchs. If the

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Vatican sometimes looks like the Kremlin, it is because Com-

munism for decades was seen as the Church's greatest foe.
In the struggle of the Church to remain free and counter-
cultural, there have been four institutions that were seen as
crucial. Two are contested today, one has passed away, and
the other is alarmingly weak in the West.
First, the evolution of a centralised Church bureaucracy and
the naming of bishops by Rome have been contested by secu-
lar powers ever since Constantine. The balance between the
cathedral chapters, secular rulers and the papacy has swung to
and fro. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the rise of
empires and secular states had almost entirely deprived the
pope of the power to name bishops. This was a profound
threat to the freedom of the Church. Of the 646 dioceses of the
Church, 555 were appointed by the State. The pope, as bishop
of Rome, had the right to appoint only 24 bishops: in Russia,
Greece and Albania.5 When the Code of Canon Law was
published in 1917 the pope claimed to appoint all the bishops.
Second, the celibacy of the clergy was deeply linked with the
Church's struggle to remain free as a counter-cultural institu-
tion, especially from the time of the Gregorian Reform in the
eleventh century, when dioceses and abbeys were threatened
with appropriation by the feudal aristocracies. Urban II, Greg-
ory's successor, boasted that the Church must be 'Catholic,
chaste and free'.6 Again, the absorption of the Church by the
State and the loss of its freedom often went with attempts to
abolish celibacy, whether in the sixteenth or the nineteenth
centuries.
Third, for most of the history of the Church the papal
states seemed central to the Church's freedom. Henry Man-
ning, the future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, declared
that the temporal power of the pope was the sign of 'the free-
dom, the independence, the sovereignty of the kingdom of God

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upon earth'. The papal states were 'the only spot of ground
on which the Vicar of Christ can set the sole of his foot in
freedom'.7 They have turned out to be unnecessary.
Fourth, religious life has been a bastion of counter-culture.
For the Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century, it was the
monasteries - above all Cluny - which powered the resistance
to feudal and royal power. During the Counter-Reformation
and the struggle against the rising centralised power of the
monarchies, then the Jesuits' obedience to the pope was crucial.
Today religious life has become very weak throughout most of
Western Europe.
My purpose in these superficial observations is not to justify
the Church as it presently exists but to help us to understand
the nature of the crisis that we now face and imagine how to
move beyond it. There have been and always will be power-
hungry clerics, but that is not a sufficient explanation for the
present state of affairs, and so merely denouncing clericalism
will not lead to renewal.

The Need for Undistorted Communication

If evangelical power is part of the preaching of a word of grace,
then ideally it calls for what Habermas calls 'undistorted com-
munication', communication undeformed by injustice, domi-
nation or exclusion. The most massive exclusion within the
Church is that of women. I will not dwell upon that because it is
obvious and frequently discussed. Instead I wish to focus on
some forces in our society that are less obvious and yet which
distort communication and so may deform Church power.
The Church needs spaces of undistorted communication.
We need places where our attentiveness reaches across the
divisions. These are sadly lacking. Even the Synods of Bishops
are not really places of deep discussion. For there to be such

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places of clear communion within the Church, it is not enough

to reflect upon the Church's institutions. We must think about
the social and political powers at work within our society that
might distort communication within the Church. What are the
powers at work that make our power blind and dumb? For us
to resist such deformation, then, the Church needs bases of
counter-cultural resistance. The Church has become as she is
because for two thousand years she has constructed such
bastions of alternative ways of thinking and being. What does
the Church need now if she is not to be sucked into conformity
with the powers of the world?
If the Church has a highly centralised power structure, this
is partly because most of her life she has been fighting other
centralised powers, from the Roman Empire until the Soviet
Empire. What are the structures of power within which the
Church must now live and against which she must sometimes
speak? Have we left behind the need for such a strong, central-
ised government?
Yes and no. We have entered the new age of the World
Wide Web. Here power operates in a different way. It is not
centralised but multifocal. It works not through rigid hier-
archies, but through horizontal networks. As Scott Lash and
John Urry write, we have moved 'from place to flow, from
space to stream, from organized hierarchies to disorganiza-
tion'.8 To be empowered is to be connected to the web. Jeremy
Rifkin wrote:

The gap between the possessed and the dispossessed is

wide, but the gap between the connected and the discon-
nected is even wider ... The great divide, in the coming
age, is between those whose lives are increasingly taken
up in cyberspace and those who will never have access to
this powerful new realm of human existence. It is this

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basic schism that will determine much of the political

struggle in the years ahead.9

In many ways this new world may be hospitable to the

Church. It may be more receptive to our sacramental way of
thinking. The link between power and meaning is more under-
standable than when power was the centralised control of goods
and armies. Its horizontal networks are closer to an understand-
ing of the Church as a communion of local churches. Horizontal
networks are more hospitable to a Trinitarian understanding of
the Church than monarchical power structures. If the structures
of the Church sometimes make us feel powerless, perhaps it is
because as an institution we have hardly begun to move beyond
that earlier monarchical world. We are like knights in heavy
armour, weighed down with the arms of the past, unable to
move swiftly in a new age when speed is key. We feel powerless
because power no longer flows vertically through endless chains
of command but horizontally around the web.
But it would be naive to think of the World Wide Web as an
innocent space in which the Church may flourish, freed from
the tyrannies of monarchs. It is a field of communication that
suffers from its own distortions. We must understand these if
we are to imagine the renewal of the exercise of power in the
Church. There are, at the very least, three interrelated powers
that rule this world: still-centralised states, the power of money
and the power of the media. How can the Church maintain its
freedom in the face of these?
There still are strong states that threaten the freedom of the
Church as they have done since the beginning. Think of China,
home to a quarter of humanity; or Vietnam, North Korea and
Zimbabwe. In all of these places the local Church needs the
support of the whole Universal Church. The authority of

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the pope to name bishops is still deeply important in many

places where otherwise state power might impose bishops who
were docile to the regime. The Chinese authorities understood
exactly what is at stake when they established the Patriotic
Church, which acknowledges no authority outside China. The
Pope understands this equally well, having grown up in the
Soviet Empire. The old battle is not entirely over.
There is only one empire left: the United States. There is a
profound nervousness about the future evolution of the States.
There are signs of a retreat from involvement in international
institutions such as the United Nations and the rejection of
international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol. There
was the refusal to ratify the International Criminal Court. The
war in Iraq lacked legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world.
As a Church we are concerned by power within the Church
that gives no account of itself. But the Church in America must
operate within a power structure that increasingly gives no
account of itself to the rest of the world.
American Catholics may be called upon to be increasingly
counter-cultural, to stand against the tide in their own country.
To endure they may need deep links with the wider Catholic
Church, a universal communion that includes the poorest and
most powerless. When war began to look imminent, the Do-
minican Leadership Conference of the United States issued
bumper stickers that said, 'We have family in Iraq'. The Synod
of the Americas was intended to fashion new links between
the local Churches of North and South America. Not much
has changed. We need to be inventive of new channels of
communication, new institutions, which will keep the Ameri-
can Church firmly rooted in its Catholicity. This is a challenge
in a country in which only 7 per cent of its citizens even
have passports.

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The Dangers of Riches

What principally circulates on the World Wide Web is money.
From the beginning, the Church has had to resist the distor-
tions of wealth in its use of power. The Eucharist is the arche-
typical Christian act of power, but already in 1 Corinthians
Paul complained that the rich use it to display their wealth and
humiliate the poor. For most of the history of the Church the
laity have been trying to get their hands on the wealth of a rich
Church; now it is rather the clergy trying to get their hands on
the wealth of the laity! In the modern Church the power of
benefaction is immense, especially in the United States. I have
seen Stations of the Cross in which every station proclaims
the recognition of a benefactor: 'Jesus falls for the third time. In
memory of Henry Jones Jr IIP! How far does the flow of wealth
threaten to deform power in the Church today? In the 1980s
the American Episcopal Conference published Economic Jus-
tice for AIL This infuriated many wealthy conservative Catho-
lic businessmen. How far do they mute our voices?
What nurseries of counter-culture does the Church need to
resist the deformation of wealth? In the eleventh century, it
was the monasteries that provided the focal points of resis-
tance. Celibate monks were free from the networks of blood
and hereditary wealth. Monks cannot found dynasties to hand
on bishoprics to their children. Does celibacy still offer us this
freedom? There is a real discussion to be had here. In a class-
ridden society such as Britain one could argue that celibacy
does dislocate us from social structures and gives us a real free-
dom to cross social boundaries. But I would not be completely
convinced that clerical culture is always an island of resistance
to the seductions of a comfortable life.
Religious life has always offered pockets of counter-culture.
In the eleventh century it was principally in terms of celibacy.

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In the thirteenth century, the mendicant friars embraced

poverty. Faced with the absolute claims of sixteenth-century
monarchs, the Church needed the absolute obedience of the
Jesuits. Certainly today we need communities of religious who
radically embrace poverty. Cardinal Etchegaray made a plea
at the end of the Synod of Religious for a real option for
poverty. The weakening of religious life in the West is under-
mining this traditional oasis of other ways of being.

How Can We Be Present in the Media?

The third great power in the World Wide Web is the media: the
newspapers, the TV channels, the cable networks such as
CNN. These are the powerful barons of today. They shape the
world in which the Church speaks. The question is not whether
we are in favour or against the media, but how we are to be
present in them.
Since the eighteenth century the media have reflected a new
form of power - public opinion.10 The media calls all institu-
tions to account. In many ways the present crisis would never
have happened if it had not been for the media, especially the
Boston Globe. We can hardly protest at this since it belongs
to the nature of Christian power that it gives an account of
itself. But who calls the media to account? The problem of un-
accountability is far more radical than simply that of the
Church but of governments, wealth and the media.
The media present us with the challenge of inculturation
and counter-culturation. Our preaching must take form within
this world, while resisting certain distortions and deforma-
tions. First of all there are only certain sorts of stories that are
told in the media. Typically these stories conform to a plot
that is confrontational. It is structured by the opposition of
Left and Right, of tradition and progress. It reflects the origins

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of the media in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its

broadsheets and coffee houses. Catholic thought can make
little sense of this dichotomy between tradition and progress.
For us what has been handed down to us is the source of
endless renewal and challenge. You can no more fit Catholi-
cism into the narrow confines of Enlightenment dichotomies
than you can squeeze a fat man into a thin man's suit.
The second challenge is that the world of the media is one of
total disclosure. But we Christians live by a language that is
haunted by silence. At its worst this is the silence of denial in
the face of this crisis. At its best it is the silence that comes
from living at the edge of language. How, in the world of 'The
Bitch in the House' can we keep alive ways of thinking and
talking which retain an acute sense of what cannot be said?
As Barbara Brown Taylor wrote: 'In a time of famine typified
by too many words with too much noise in them, we could use
fewer words with more silence in them.'11 The world of the
media requires of us a profound creativity. We need to create
new institutions that sustain other ways of being and thinking,
other forms of meaning. The Tablet has been a fine example
under John Wilkins's guidance.
The Church was born in a moment of powerlessness. In this
crisis Jesus was the creative, speaking, transforming Word.
The idea of an unaccountable blind and brute power makes no
sense for a Christian. All exercises of power are linked to proc-
lamation. When we look at the present crisis of power and
powerlessness within the Church then, like Jesus, we need a
creative response. It is necessary but not enough to look at the
functioning of the institution. We need to do that but more.
We must look at the world in which our words of faith must be
spoken. We must see how the powers of this world form and
deform communication. It includes the exciting new world of
the World Wide Web, with its horizontal structures and its

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celebration of sign and symbol. It still means facing centralised

states, the forces of wealth that operate even within the Church,
and the power of the media. To face all these we need faith,
hope and love, but also creativity. We need the grace of God's
infinite fertility. If we may be so blessed, then the Church will be
renewed by this crisis.

Notes
1 ST III 60.1
2 'Authors, authority and authorization', in Bernard Hoose (ed.),
Authority in the Roman Catholic Church: Theory and Practice,
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 59-71 (68).
3 Quaestiones Quodlibetales, Qn 9, art. 3, quoted by Lash,
'Authors', p. 65.
4 God Matters (London: Chapman, 1987) p. 228.
5 Eamon Duffy. Saints and Sinner: A History of the Popes (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 274.
6 Ibid., p. 128.
7 Ibid., pp.290f.
8 Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994), p. 323.
9 The Age of Access: How the Shift from Ownership to Access Is
Transforming Modern Life (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 13.
10 Cf. Charles Taylor, 'Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere',
Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press), pp. 257-88.
11 When God is Silent (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications,
1998), p. 113.

133
 9
Religious Freedom: The Limits of Progress
Michael Walsh

John Wilkins has never made any secret of the fact that he
owed to Vatican II his decision to be received into the Catholic
Church. Nor has he disguised his concern that some at least of
the achievements of Vatican II which so attracted him to the
faith have been eroded, especially during the pontificate of
Pope John Paul II. As I attempted to demonstrate in a piece
written for the series John commissioned to mark the fortieth
anniversary of the Council's opening, that erosion is to be
found in the the Pope's understanding of Religious Liberty as
it is enshrined in Vatican IPs Declaration on Religious Free-
dom, Dignitatis humanae.1
Perhaps no document produced by Vatican II occasioned
so much debate, both within the Council and outside it.
That Dignitatis humanae was accepted at all by the Council
fathers was one of the main reasons why Archbishop Mar-
cel Lefebvre eventually went into schism. The Church had
finally embraced, he argued, the principles of the French revo-
lution: liberte, egalite and fraternite. The first was endorsed by
Dignitatis humanae^ the second by Lumen gentium, the Dog-
matic Constitution on the Church with its teaching on col-
legiality; and the third by its Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis
redintegratio.
To be fair, the dissident Archbishop had a point. There is a
long tradition in papal encyclicals of freedom of conscience

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 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

being roundly condemned. For Pope Gregory XVI, writing in

Mirari vos of 1832, it was the 'false and absurd, or rather the
mad principle'. It was 'one of the most contagious of errors; it
smooths the way for that absolute and unbridled freedom of
thought which, to the ruin of Church and State, is now spread-
ing everywhere'. And it brought in its train, he went on, the
idea of 'liberty of the press, the most dangerous liberty, an
execrable liberty, which can never inspire sufficient horror'.
Gregory was responding to the situation in the papal states,
recently restored to the papacy by the Congress of Vienna. His
remarks went largely unnoticed, and would in any case not
have been too far out of keeping with the policies of most
of the European regimes of his day. It was far different when
Pius IX repeated the same sentiments in his Syllabus of Errors
of 1864 (cf. propositions 77-9). Not only were many states by
that time well on the way to democracy, but the papacy itself
had come to be a much more significant institution, despite -
or possibly because of - the virtual disappearance of the papal
states. Traditionalists and Ultramontanes welcomed the Sylla-
bus: many others did not. The distinguished Bishop of Orleans,
Felix Dupanloup, proposed that one should distinguish two
situations. In one, the Catholic Church was de facto the only
religion in a state (the thesis). In such a situation the condemna-
tion of religious toleration stood. In most countries, however,
there was a plurality of religions (the hypothesis). In these
religious toleration was acceptable.
It was scarcely a very satisfactory argument: that religious
toleration was acceptable but only where Catholicism was not
the majority faith. But for the time being it cooled tempers.
One would have thought, however, that the Vatican might
have learnt from the protests which followed the Syllabus.
It did not. In Immortale del of 18 85 Leo XIII recalled Mirari vos
with obvious approval and returned to the theme three years

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later in Libertas praestantissima which expressly described

liberty of worship as opposed to the virtue of religion.

The Twentieth Century

And that was how matters stood for the next three-quarters of
a century, reiterated in Pope Pius XIPs allocution Ci riesce.2
The Church was pragmatically prepared to accept religious
freedom where there was no alternative. But in Catholic eyes
this was an undesirable state of affairs. The ideal situation was
one in which a state professed Catholicism as the religion of its
people, and would not tolerate the public expression of other
forms of faith. 'Public' in this context is important: there was a
general acceptance that, regrettable though it might be, people
could be so misguided as to follow other versions of Christi-
anity, or profess Judaism or Islam. That was a matter for their
own consciences, and in their own consciences, it was agreed,
they could not be coerced. The problem only arose when Prot-
estants or others wanted to give public witness to their faith.
The best-known concrete example of this cast of mind was
Spain in the decades following the Civil War. Even when, in
the aftermath of the Second World War, when General Franco
felt the need to reduce the isolation of his country and pro-
duced a new quasi constitution or Charter, the Fuero de los
espanoles, article 6 still read:

The profession and practice of the Catholic religion,

which is the religion of the Spanish State, will enjoy
official protection. No one will suffer any interference
because of their religious beliefs> nor in the private exer-
cise of their devotions. No public ceremonies or pro-
cessions [manifestaciones externas] will be permitted
except those of the Catholic religion [my italics].

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 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Pius IX could not have put traditional Catholic teaching more

clearly.
The Spanish Evangelical Church, which had feared some-
thing worse, was enthusiastic, hailing the Charter as a great
opportunity. The door, said an article in one of their periodi-
cals, was beginning to open. Their enthusiasm was misplaced.
The apparent guarantee of private Protestant church services
led to attacks on Protestant chapels in Madrid, Seville and
elsewhere. In the Seville incident, on 4 March 1952, a party of
young men wearing, according to a report in the New York
Times, the badge of a Catholic organisation, broke into a
chapel while the minister was in the middle of a service, and
poured petrol over pews and hymn books, setting them alight.
The Spanish clergyman tried to stop them and was injured.
In the event little damage was done, but because the prop-
erty was British owned, questions were raised in the House of
Commons. On 19 March the Ulster Unionist MP for County
Antrim, Professor Sir Douglas Savory, asked the Foreign Secre-
tary whether he was aware of the incident, and would he pro-
test. He had a list of nine such attacks, said Savory, including a
recent incident in Orense where a Protestant chapel was blown
up by a bomb.3 These incidents took place at the height of what
came to be known as Spanish national Catholicism, though it
was not until after Vatican II that the term itself was first used -
by the theologian Gonzalo Ruiz in an interview he gave to the
French journal Temoignage Chretien.4 What national Catholi-
cism stood for is well described in a curious mimeographed
booklet, published in Madrid in 1955 by the 'Diplomatic Infor-
mation Office'. The anonymous author of the Prelimary Obser-
vation (all the several contributions are anonymous) wrote:

The fact is that Protestantism in Spain has never had

enough solidity to be raised to the rank of a problem. The

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incontestable truth is that it has never been able to take

root in our soil, despite all the efforts made to introduce it.
Some may say that it has been hampered by the pub-
lic authorities, civil and ecclesiastical. And that is the
great truth of Spain and the ultimate reason for Spain's
manner of being. For in driving it out of her orbit, the
public authorities have only acted as an instrument of
the general conscience. It has not been the work of a
Government, but the repugnance of the whole Spanish
people, manifested throughout centuries ...
The reason must be sought in the innermost nature of
the Spanish manner of being. Catholicism is an immanent
characteristic which goes together with Spain herself.5

The premise of national Catholicism, therefore, was the

identification of the faith with Spanish nationalism. Although
Franco had his critics among the Spanish bishops - Cardinal
Pedro Segura, said that the Generalissimo's title of caudillo
meant 'captain of thieves'6 - others, such as the Archbishop of
Madrid, Leopoldo Eijo y Garay, thought his title to govern was
little short of divine right.7 Whatever their personal feelings,
most, if not all, bishops regarded him as the providential saviour
of the nation, who had prepared the way for a re-evangelisation
of the Spanish people. They, and especially Segura, supported
the harassment of Protestants. In 1948 the committee of metro-
politans, the precursor in Spain of the bishops' conference,
issued a letter condemning freedom of religion as an error and
rejecting criticism from abroad of their, and the State's, stance
on the privileged position accorded to Catholicism.
Among these critics were many in the United States. The
oppression of Protestantism in Spain in particular was a signifi-
cant hindrance to efforts towards ecumenism. It produced much
hostile comment, aired most effectively by Paul Blanshard in

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 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

American Freedom and Catholic Power. It was first published in

1949 and went through several editions - including one in Eng-
land where it was simply called Freedom and Catholic Power.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution stated that 'Con-
gress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble ...' As Blanshard and many others
pointed out, this was in explicit contradiction to the traditional
doctrine on Church and State, and on religious freedom, which
was to be found in the teachings of the popes, as these have
been quoted above. Spain was the example which most clearly
demonstrated that such teachings were still in force, wherever
the Catholic Church was in a position to insist upon them.
Tension on these issues was heightened by John F. Ken-
nedy's bid for nomination as the Democratic Party's candidate
in the US presidential election. The Jesuit theologian John
Courtney Murray (1904-67) undertook to address the issues of
Church and State, and of religious liberty. He sought to recon-
cile traditional Catholic teaching with the US project, an enter-
prise which though it had the backing of some of the US bishops
was vigorously opposed by others. His opponents had the back-
ing of Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Secretary of the Holy Office,
once the Inquisition and now the Congregation for the Doc-
trine of the Faith, and their campaign effectively led to his
silencing. It was during this 'silence' that Murray published
We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American
Proposition* a collection of previously published articles. In
the Foreword Murray wrote:

The American Proposition makes a particular claim

upon the reflective attention of Catholics in so far as it
contains a doctrine and a project in the matter of the

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

'pluralist society', as we seem to have agreed to call i t . . .

The Catholic may not, as others do, merge his religious
and his 'patriotic faith, or submerge one in the other. He
must reckon with his own tradition of thought, which is
wider and deeper than any that America has elaborated.
He must also reckon with his own history, which is
longer than the brief centuries that America has lived.
At the same time, he must recognize that a new problem
has been put to the universal Church by the American
doctrine and project in the matter of pluralism, as stated
in the First Amendment. The conceptual equipment for
dealing with the problem is by no means lacking to the
Catholic intelligence. But there is the obligation of some
nicety in its use, lest the new problems be distorted or
the ancient faith deformed.9

The delicacy with which Murray debated the issues did him
little good in the eyes of many in the USA and in Rome.
He was, he told his friends, 'disinvited' from attending the
opening session of Vatican II as a peritus, or theologian to
the Council.

Religious Liberty at the Council

When the Council was first announced, Willem Visser 't Hooft,
the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches
(WCC) from its inception in 1948,10 expressed considerable
interest, and in particular the hope that it would lead to a
change in the Church's attitude to religious freedom. Pope
John XXIII had established within the Roman Curia a Secre-
tariat for Promoting Christian Unity (SPCU) under the inspired
leadership of Cardinal Augustine Bea with (the future Car-
dinal) Johannes Willebrands as its secretary. It was created

140
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

expressly as a preparatory body for the Council and at the very

first plenary meeting of the SPCU six topics of future work had
been outlined, of which the fourth was 'theological questions',
including religious freedom. In response to the WCC's express
concern, therefore, it began work on a schema (a preparatory
paper for the Council) on religious freedom. This caused con-
siderable irritation to Cardinal Ottaviani as head of the central
Theological Commission (TC), who thought that drawing up
schemata was the TC's job and no-one else's.
The TC then produced its own version, The Duties of a
Catholic State with Regard to Religion. It was all the SPCU had
feared. It was, indeed, basically a text prepared in 1958 by the
Holy Office and which, but for the death of Pius XII, might
very well have been published as it stood. It basically reiter-
ated the thesis/hypothesis approach put forward by Dupanloup
nearly a century before. According to the TC's document it was
the duty of the civil authority to support the Church, giving it
complete freedom and independence and excluding anything
which might inhibit it in its mission, in particular the spread
of false doctrines. This duty was limited to those states which
were wholly Roman Catholic: in non-Roman Catholic states
complete religious freedom was expected to be the norm. When
the SPCU criticised this document the Holy Office accused it of
having had too much contact with non-Roman Catholics.
Religious freedom appeared first of all as chapter 9 of the
draft schema on the Church.11 Critics of religious freedom
stuck to their arguments despite the fact that, as Schillebeeckx
pointed out, it left the Roman Catholic Church at odds with
the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights. These
critics insisted, in a time-honoured phrase, that 'error had no
rights'. But rights, Schillebeeckx replied, adhere to an individ-
ual, not to an abstract concept such as truth or error. It might
be correct to say that one had no right to err, but that could

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

only apply to knowledge of absolute truth, and human beings

do not have access to that. People act on truth as it is known,
and about that there is plenty of room for disagreement.
It is quite possibly true to say that no document of the
Second Vatican Council was more fought over. Paul VI men-
tioned it when he addressed the United Nations on 4 October
1965. A Spanish curial Cardinal, Arcadio Larraona, Prefect of
the Congregation of Rites, wrote a harsh note to Paul VI in the
name of a group of Spanish bishops trying to prevent religious
freedom being voted upon. Many Latin Americans and some
Italians sympathised with the Spanish contingent. They were
vigorously opposed by the US hierarchy. It is often said that it
was the efforts of John Courtney Murray which eventually
persuaded the Council to accept Dignitatis humanae.
For Murray, at the insistence of Cardinal Francis Spellman,
the Archbishop of New York, and despite the opposition of the
Apostolic Delegate in Washington, Archbishop Egidio Vag-
nozzi, had after all been made a peritus at the beginning of
April 1963. By that time a text on religious freedom had been
written, though it was not yet approved as suitable to be put
before the conciliar fathers. It was still part of the schema on
the Church: it only became a separate Declaration a year later.
In between times there had been an effort on the part of the
document's opponents to have it removed entirely from the
agenda of the Council, and only the efforts of the US bishops
kept it there.
Fr Herminio Rico, editor of the Portugese Jesuit journal
Broteria, who has made a detailed study of the conciliar
debate and Murray's role in it,12 distinguishes two opposing
groups. One group argued, as did the 12 bishops who wrote to
the Pope on 10 September 1964, that there was a lack of theo-
logical precision in the text; that it was confused; that it
was contrary to the declarations of the Magisterium in the

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 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

nineteenth century (as indeed it was) and that it was replete

with notions that successive popes had warned the faithful
against (as indeed they had). The other group were determined
to break away from Dupanloup's thesis/hypothesis approach.
But they, too, were divided. Some wanted a pastoral docu-
ment, recognising the fact of religious liberty, but providing no
theological justification for it. This approach was quickly
rejected. There was then a division between those, many of
them French, who wanted the arguments to be based on theo-
logical and scriptural grounds, and those (like Murray) who
based their arguments on political philosophy and on the
natural law - though, according to some critics of Murray,
a rather old-fashioned notion of the natural law.13
This taxonomy occurs in an important article by Murray,
The problem of religious freedom', which appeared in the
American Jesuit quarterly Theological Studies in 1964.14 The
purpose of the article, he says, is to state the two views which
were being expressed at the Council in order to institute a
dialogue between them. The first view is that of the Council
fathers who wish to uphold the traditional stance that the
'public powers' may never authorise the public existence of
religious error. The only reason for doing so, he said, was,
according to the first view, the need to maintain public peace:
'The political criterion, whereby the issue of the possibility of
intolerance, or the necessity of tolerance is to be decided, is the
public peace.'15 In contrast, 'the second view rejects the opin-
ion that public care of religion necessarily means, per se and in
principle, a political and legal care for the exclusive right of
truth'. The role of the public powers is simply to guarantee
religious freedom.16 'No public official is empowered by virtue
of his public office to enquire into the theological credentials
of any religious body'; the State may only intervene when, and

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

if, public forms of religious expression violate public order or

public morality, or the rights of other citizens.17 Murray rejects
the idea of a 'confessional State' (such as Spain) because this is
to confuse society (that is, the people who do indeed have a
duty of worship) with the State. This distinction between State
and society, he argues, was not available to Leo XIII; more-
over, talk of a princeps, as was commonly done to indicate the
source of sovereignty, abets the confusion of Church and State,
because a prince is towards his subjects as a paterfamilias
towards his children - and this gives him greater power to
impose religion than does authority in a constitutional state.
It was his intention, John Courtney Murray remarks at the
end of his article, to present the two views fairly and objec-
tively. He hopes he has done so but leaves it to others to judge.
In truth it is not difficult to see from his careful account which
of the views he favours. He was conscious that proponents of
the first view had the tradition of papal teaching, right down
to Pius XII, on their side. But he insists he himself stands in the
tradition, so long as it is understood that the tradition is a
developing one.
Though his own contribution to the final text of Dignita-
tis humanae was important, Murray afterwards insisted that
Mgr Pietro Pavan played an even greater part.18 Certainly there
were remarks in the Declaration with which he could not have
been wholly at ease - there is an allusion, for instance, to the
confessional State, and occasional suggestions that there was
an obligation to seek the truth. He did not think the latter
argument satisfactory, because an obligation to seek the truth,
or to follow one's conscience even if erroneous, does not, he
believed, imply a concomitant duty on the State to let you do
so. His position, though argued for with great care and com-
plexity in the article in Theological Studies, was fundamentally

144
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

a simple one: the State has no competence in religious mat-

ters. All that it can do and must do is to ensure the individ-
ual may practise his or her religion. The issue for him was one
of freedom.
There is no space here to recount the debate at Vatican II. It
seemed at times that the Declaration, which had originally
started life as chapter 5 of the paper on ecumenism, would be
lost. The Spanish bishops were opposed, and set up a special
commission to examine the nascent Declaration. Also opposed
were several Latin American hierarchies, especially that of
Colombia. Even Paul VI seemed to be bending. The US bishops,
however, kept up their pressure in the aula and in the corridors
of the Vatican. The Protestant observers were on tenterhooks -
one can sense the swing from hope to despair to (final) euphoria
in the Vatican Diary of the American Congregationalist Doug-
las Horton.19

Since the Council

When the Council was over the Spanish bishops were faced
with the task, not just of implementing the Church's new
stance on religious liberty, but of formally breaking with the
Franco regime. In the week of 13 September 1971 there was a
meeting in Madrid to seal the fate of national Catholicism.
One of those responsible for drawing up the document on
Church-State relations commented: 'Never did I dream that a
gathering of priests and bishops in Spain would pronounce so
clearly on the need for the Church to be independent of the
State.' The end of the integralist State, however, did not come
easily. There was an attempt, orchestrated in Rome by some
members of Opus Dei and at least one conservative-minded

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Spanish Jesuit to undermine the conclusions of what had

become known as the Asamblea Conjunta. The attempt,
which ostensibly came from the Congregation for the Clergy,
presided over by the American Cardinal John Wright, back-
fired, and served only to strengthen the position of the Arch-
bishop of Madrid, Cardinal Enrique y Tarancon.20 It seemed
as if, even in the heartland of the confessional State, the battle
for religious freedom had been won.
But 40 years on, questions have arisen. In my Tablet article
discussing Pope John Paul IPs understanding of religious free-
dom, referred to above, I made mention of David Schindler,
the editor of the American edition of the quarterly Communio.
To quote Joseph Komonchak, there are those in the United
States who believe 'that the American political experiment is
in fact incompatible with Catholic teaching because it is con-
trary to the ideal of the Catholic confessional state'.211 do not
know that Schindler would go so far, but in his Heart of the
World, Center of the Church he argues that Murray's argu-
ments for religious liberty have significantly contributed to
what he sees as the growing secularism at the heart of US
society.22
Not that Schindler would deny religious liberty. It is - as
almost everyone recognises - a fundamental human right.
Human rights are notoriously difficult to defend philosophi-
cally - the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Jeremy Bentham
famously said, was 'nonsense on stilts'. And even though, prag-
matically, we are ready to concede them, it is again difficult to
produce a list. Yet, as the American moral theologian Lisa
Sowle Chaill has argued, it is possible to claim that religious
liberty, at least as a central component of personal integrity,
is the one human right which may be claimed as absolute.2
At least on that Pope John Paul II would be happy to agree.

146
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Notes
1 'U-turn on human rights', The Tablet (14 December 2002),
pp. 7-9.
2 Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 45 (1954), pp. 788-9. 'Not to inhibit
[error]', said the Pope, 'by means of public laws and coercive
methods can nevertheless be justified in the interests of a higher
and a greater good.' But, he insisted, error has no right to exist
and certainly none to be disseminated.
3 At this point Dennis Healy intervened: 'Is the right honourable
and learned gentleman [Selwyn Lloyd] aware that that is the
normal condition in another country? Is he aware that a Catho-
lic church in Willowfield, Belfast, was bombed, and that the
friends of the honourable Member for Antrim [Savory] were not
prosecuted?'
4 At least according to Jose Andres-Gallego and Anton Pazos in
their Histoire religieuse de I'Espagne (Paris: Du Cerf, 1998),
p. 153.
5 Op. cit., p. 10.
6 Cf. William J. Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875-
1998 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press,
2000), p. 395. Segura was Primate of Spain from 1927 until his
expulsion in 1931. He returned from exile in 1937 as Archbishop
of Seville.
7 Ibid., p. 390. It was Eijo y Garay who first granted juridical
status in the Church to that institutional embodiment of national
Catholicism, Opus Dei.
8 New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960.
9 Ibid., pp. x-xii.
10 He retired after the Council, in 1966.
11 This account largely follows that to be found in G. Alberigo and
J. Komonchak (eds), The History of Vatican II, vol. 3 (Louvain:
Peters; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000). In his opening address to
the Council, Gaudet ecclesia, John XXIII had sided with the
modernisers on religious liberty, which he specifically mentioned:
'It pains us that we sometimes have to listen to the complaints of
people who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with an
overabundance of discretion or measure. They see in modern
times nothing but prevarication and ruin. They keep saying that
as compared with past ages, ours is getting worse, and they be-
have as if they had learned nothing from history, which is

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

nonetheless a teacher of life, and as if in time of the preceding

ecumenical councils everything presented a complete triumph for
Christian ideas and Christian life and for a rightful religious
liberty. But we think we must disagree with these prophets of
doom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of
the world were imminent.'
12 John Paul II and the Legacy of 'Dignitatis humanae* (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002).
13 Cf. David Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1996), pp. 75-6. That Murray was a rather old-fashioned Thom-
ist is, by all accounts, fair comment.
14 Vol. 25, pp. 503-75. Rather oddly, this is not cited, at least not
directly, by Rico in the bibliography to his book.
15 Ibid., p. 509.
16 Ibid., p. 522.
17 Ibid., pp. 527 and 530.
18 Cf. Richard Regan, 'John Courtney Murray, the American
Bishops, and the Declaration on Religious Liberty', in John Ford
(ed.), Religious Liberty: Paul VI and 'Dignitatis humanae'
(Brescia: Istituto Paolo VI, 1995), pp. 51-66 (53).
19 They were published in four volumes, 1964-66, by the United
Church Press of Philadelphia and Boston.
20 I wrote about this at the time: 'Spain on the move', The Month
(June 1972), pp. 163-7, 175.
21 'Interpreting the Council', in Mary Jo Weaver and R. Scott
Appleby (eds), Being Right (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1995), pp. 17-36 (26).
22 Schindler, Heart of the World, pp. 43-88.
23 Towards a Christian theory of human rights', Journal of
Religious Ethics (1980), pp. 277-301. I am grateful to Dr Cath-
erine Cowley of Heythrop College for the reference.

148
 10
Where Does Catholic Social Teaching
Go from Here?
Clifford Longley

How well has the post-conciliar Catholic Church lived up to

the great charter of contemporary Catholicism proclaimed in
the opening of Gaudium et spes! The Second Vatican Coun-
cil's brilliant synthesis of Catholic teaching and its application
to the modern world declared:

The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the
people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any
way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs
and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing
genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.

It seemed to launch a new and exciting age of Catholic

humanism, and to provide a bridge to other philosophical or
religious systems with which the Catholic Church previously
had difficulties. Gaudium et spes was made possible, first, by
the change in Catholicism's internal intellectual climate as a
result of the pontificate of John XXIII and, secondly, by the
sense of self-confidence that the fathers of Vatican II began
to feel as the Council moved towards its conclusion in 1965.
By the time this so-called Pastoral Constitution was taking on
its final shape, the bishops of the world had risen far beyond
the constraints imposed on them at the outset by the Vatican

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Curia in 1962 (which by this time was fighting John XXIII

tooth and nail). This was to be their most mature achievement,
not least because no such document was envisaged at the out-
set and hence the Curia had produced no draft of one.
The immediate inspiration for Gaudium et spes surely
belonged in Pope John's momentous encyclical Pacem in terris
in 1963. This encyclical showed a radical confidence in re-
shaping the tradition in the light of the changed demands of
modernity, for instance, in its bold incorporation into Catholic
teaching of the hitherto suspect, not to say downright heretical,
notion of human rights. If Gaudium et spes had illustrious
parentage, it too grew to have healthy offspring of its own, in
the shape of the series of papal documents, encyclicals and
others, that developed the tradition of Catholic social teaching
far beyond the boundaries set by the two normative works up to
that point, the 1891 encyclical of Leo XXIII Rerum novarum
and its 1931 successor Quadragesima anno of Pius XL
The children of Gaudium et spes therefore include Popu-
lorum progressio of 1967, which unequivocally put Third
World development at the centre of attention; Evangelii nunti-
andi of 1975, which reconciled work for social justice with the
preaching of the gospel; and the remarkable series of discourses
on social teaching from Pope John Paul II, of which the prin-
cipal items were Laborem exercens (1981) on the dignity of
work, Sollicitudo rei socialis (1987) which took on board some
of the radical insights of liberation theology such as 'option for
the poor' and 'structural sin'; and Centesimus annus (1991),
which updated the tradition's critique of capitalism and dis-
trust of economic liberalism.
These last three may yet prove to be John Paul IPs most
enduring contribution to the Church, not least because the
need for a theoretical basis for limiting the demands of capital-
ism in the name of morality and humanity was made all the

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 WHERE DOES CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING GO FROM HERE?

more urgent by the collapse of communism. Up to that point

capitalism was challenged by an external as well as an internal
Marxist enemy, and if its cruelties became unbearable the
people had, or at least felt they had, some other ideology to turn
to. That factor was itself a major constraint on capitalism's
tendency to overdo itself in the name of profit. But without such
a threat, the world seemed to belong to markets, which alone
were henceforth to be sovereign. It needed another 'ism' to
stand up to it, and the Church had one available.
Certainly the affinities between the Pope's updated brand of
Catholic social teaching and the 'third way' theories of Tony
Blair and Bill Clinton were much remarked upon. Essentially
their common proposition was that it was legitimate (and often
necessary) to limit free-market capitalism in the name of the
common good. The obviousness of this, in the minds of many,
rather obscured the fact that theoreticians of the free market
often talked as if it was king, not to say God, and interference
in market forces was as near as a right-wing economist could
get to the concept of blasphemy. And such ideas held strong
sway, inside the United States, in Britain under Margaret That-
cher, and in the world at large once they became the prevailing
orthodoxy in the IMF and World Bank. The international debt
relief campaign prior to the millennium (organised under the
banner of Jubilee 2000) was a striking example of the idea that
pure economics sometimes had to give way to the overriding
demands of humanity, and it is no coincidence that the inspira-
tion for the campaign originally came from Pope John Paul II.

The Common Good

The concept of the common good was characteristic of Catho-
lic social teaching throughout the twentieth century, as was

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explicit in the statement published by the Catholic bishops of

England and Wales in 1996, The Common Good and Catholic
Social Teaching. That document follows Pacem in terris and all
subsequent papal texts in accepting and applying a doctrine of
human rights; but went slightly further than they did in
assuming that democracy itself was the universally desirable, if
not ultimate, form of social and political organisation. To-
gether, human rights and democracy plug what was otherwise
a nagging gap in Catholic thinking about the common good.
Provided right-wing dictators like Mussolini or Franco could
claim to be acting to promote the common good, their political
systems seemed beyond the reach of Catholic social teaching to
criticise. Certainly they would have been prepared to tame the
excesses of capitalism. But they would also have been prepared
to place the common good above such humanistic considera-
tions as human rights. The suppression of freedom in the name
of the common good seemed to have been made papally accept-
able, and Catholic dictators in Europe and South America par-
ticularly seemed content to proclaim as a political creed
something like 'The Common Good - c'est mo/.'
Clearly modern post-conciliar Catholicism, chastened by the
experience of the Second World War, could not give comfort to
right-wing dictators, whatever had been its role before the war.
But once democracy and human rights became canonised as
fundamental values of the Catholic tradition, the door was
closed on Fascist leaders and parties who had claimed the sanc-
tion of Catholicism while continuing to oppress their people.
Indeed, the proper and natural home of the Catholic social
teaching tradition henceforth seemed to be, as in the West,
liberal democracy. The common good became part of a trilogy,
alongside democracy and human rights, on which civilised
societies depended. Thus in theory a government was elected
by the people to pursue the common good, and if it failed to

152
 WHERE DOES CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING GO FROM HERE?

do so it would not be returned to office; one of its primary

functions, implicit in upholding the common good, was the
defence of human rights, which could not therefore be set aside
when the common good demanded it. (That is not strictly true,
as for instance in war time, but the principle was clear enough.)
Nevertheless there remain tensions between the inner dy-
namic of liberal democracy and the requirements of the Catholic
tradition as so far developed. Democracy in particular gives
weight to majority opinion above all else, even natural law.
Democracy itself is morally neutral. It is a method of making
decisions, not a basis for making them. Of course, constitutional
democracies have tended to limit what could be achieved by the
sovereign will of the people by enshrining codes of human rights,
which stood both below and above the law as made and remade
by legislatures.
But this merely transferred the debate to other areas, such as
who was to be covered by the guarantees of human rights and
who was excluded from them. Were human embryos to be
regarded as possessing inalienable rights, for instance, or could
states legislate to allow their destruction by abortion? Were
refugees, asylum seekers or even terrorist 'prisoners of war'
covered by human rights guarantees, or did they first have to
achieve citizenship? The idea that some rights depended on
citizenship and some were universal and inalienable seemed
logically necessary; but who was to say which was which? And
what happened when, as was inevitable, rights collided? Was
there a hierarchy of rights, some absolute and some condi-
tional? The Catholic Church's adoption of human rights lan-
guage did not offer much insight into how to handle a conflict
of rights whenever it arose. This remains an area requiring
more development in human rights theory, which is not helped
by the tendency for debates about human rights to be taken
over by lawyers.

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In his study Catholic Social Teaching, 1891-Present1 the

American moral theologian Charles E. Curran drew attention
to the limitations of the concept of the common good as
applied to nation states per se. He makes a distinction between
the tradition that Pope John Paul II seems to be following, of
seeing the common good as the business of the State, and
the more limited scope of the role of government that appeared
to be envisaged in the Second Vatican Council's Declaration
on Religious Liberty. The American Jesuit philosopher John
Courtney Murray is often hailed as the architect of that decla-
ration, which was pushed for above all by the Catholic bishops
of the United States (waking from what had been until that
point the sleep of the theologically illiterate).

The Worlock Diary

It is intensely fascinating - and entirely within the traditions
of Catholic journalism - to see a glimpse of the process at
work, through the eyes of one who was at the Council. Derek
Worlock, later Bishop of Portsmouth and Archbishop of Liver-
pool, who was present as a peritus at that stage, also reported
regularly on the progress of Vatican II for the BBC. His radio
account of the battle over the declaration of religious liberty
written for public consumption, vivid though it was, was far
surpassed by his private diary entry, not published until after
his death.

You remember [Worlock said in his BBC report of the

matter] that it came up for discussion a year ago and
there was widespread disappointment when, at the end
of the second Session, the document was not put to a
vote because there was no time. Last September saw it
back again, though cast in rather different form, and

154
 WHERE DOES CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING GO FROM HERE?

after the debate it went back to the Secretariat for

Christian Unity, charged with its revision in the light of
opinions expressed at that time.
For some time now there have been those strange
Roman rumours about strange Roman happenings
which always seem to add up to delay ...

Once more there seemed to be an attempt to block it. The

report in his secret diary is even more dramatic than the ver-
sion he gave the public:

Thursday 19th November will rank as one of the his-

toric dates in the history of the Council both for good and
for evil... I had spent the early part of the morning at my
desk at the College and didn't arrive at St Peter's until
just on eleven o'clock. By then things were really boil-
ing. It seems that before the debate started Cardinal
Tisserant, acting in the name of the Commission of Presi-
dents, announced that the Council would not after all
proceed to a vote on Religious Liberty. The previous day
he had said that a preliminary vote would be taken to
see whether or not the Fathers wanted to deal with this
matter during the Third Session. But today he announced
that a sufficient number of persons had asked for more
time to consider this new Declaration that the President
decided to postpone further discussion on the matter
until the next Session.
One recognises of course that the new Declaration did
contain a certain amount of new matter but the manner
in which this thing was handled was certainly sufficient
to set off the furore which followed. It seems that as soon
as Cardinal Tisserant had made the announcement. Car-
dinal Meyer got up from the table and went to Cardinal

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Tisserant to dissociate himself from this announcement

made on behalf of the Presidents. His objections were
obvious and clearly and quickly spread into the Aula
itself. Nearly all the American bishops trooped out of the
benches and moved into the side aisles and they were
followed by a large number of others who were gravely
disturbed at what was reckoned to be a calculated attempt
by possibly the Curia and some of the right-wing con-
servatives - the Spaniards were named, though they sub-
sequently denied that they were responsible - to block
this contentious matter once again. When I arrived it was
in time to find the American periti setting up shop in the
side aisles where they had large sheets of papers and
bishops were queuing up, one behind the other, to sign a
petition to the Holy Father to beg that a vote be taken on
this Declaration this Session. It was an incredible sight.
The story went round that in order to prepare the
petition, one of the periti had slipped into the office and
pinched Felici's typewriter. [Archbishop Felici was head
of the council secretariat.]
Be that as it may, the organisation of this protest
petition was remarkably efficient, even though one could
regret the vehemence with which the whole matter was
being tackled. It soon became clear that the majority of
the bishops present were prepared to sign this petition
but could anything be done about it? Meantime Bishop
de Smedt had been called to the microphone in order to
read the Relatio for the Declaration, even though it
was not to be voted upon. This of course was just the
opportunity that was needed for high drama. Bishop de
Smedt started off by saying that it was with feeling that
he introduced the Declaration - and here he changed his
text from 'which is now to be voted upon' to 'which is

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now not to be voted upon'. As he began his impassioned

plea for a matter which is thought generally to be closest
to his heart, his full flights of oratory soared around the
ceiling of St Peter's. He sobbed, his voice broke, and he
delivered the most impassioned appeal that I have ever
heard, even from a Continental. As he was drawing
towards his end, those bishops who had been out in the
side aisles all packed in round the President's table and
the Confession of St Peter's and looked down the Aula
to where this lone figure was standing in a state of high
emotional tension.
To an Englishman it was all rather embarrassing but
there is no doubt that the cause was served by this Conti-
nental oratory on this occasion. Archbishop Heenan told
me afterwards that he squirmed as he listened to his friend
but I do not think that it was a put-up performance: he
really felt as he sounded. Finally he regained control of his
voice as he reached the end of his text. In a complete
monotone, which was the more effective in that it fol-
lowed after the high oratory of the earlier parts of the
Relatio, he quietly said that the Secretariat for Christian
Unity had finished with this document and passed it
to the Co-ordinating Commission some three or four
weeks ago: I forget the exact date which he mentioned.
It seemed that nothing had happened about it until a short
time before and then it had been suggested that the
Vatican Press, which has to do all the printing of the
official documentation for the Council, had become abso-
lutely jammed up with the various documents which had
to be given to the Fathers. He left it quite open as to
whether one accepted this story or not and he merely gave
the date on which the document had reached the Fathers,
earlier in the week. Then with great deliberation he said:

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'Let us pray at this moment for the guidance of the Holy

Spirit in an issue which is of supreme importance to
the Church.'
There was thunderous applause, quite the loudest I
have ever heard in St Peter's, and after a while one realised
that it was going to take a long time before it died down.
When eventually it showed some sign of flagging, it rose
once more from the far end of the Aula and it became
evident that what had started as applause for a feat of
oratory had now turned into a positive attempt to pass the
document by acclamation. Cardinal Meyer was standing
in the side aisle with some of the other American bishops
and the atmosphere was quite electric. On several occa-
sions the Moderators tried to break in over their micro-
phones but the applause did not cease. In fact it continued
for about four and a half minutes, so far as I could time it,
but when at last it did die down Cardinal Dopfner, the
Moderator, called the first speaker for the debate on the
remaining document of the Sacrament of Matrimony.
Once it was realised that the Presidents had carried
the day, the atmosphere changed from one of exhilara-
tion to one of acute bitterness and disappointment.
Cardinal Meyer went back to the Presidents' table,
clearly in two minds as to what he should do. He was
beckoned once more to the side and I saw Fr Molinari,
an Italian Jesuit and a very good man, advising him quite
straightly that he should take the petition directly to the
Holy Father. Word evidently reached Cardinal Ritter
and Cardinal Leger, both of whom left their places in the
Aula and came down to join Cardinal Meyer. The peti-
tions were brought in by the periti from the various parts
of St Peter's and Cardinal Meyer rolled them up and put

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them under his arm. It was reckoned that there were over
800 signatures already and later that day we were told
that the number had risen to over 1,000. It was a straight
request for a vote of some kind on the Declaration before
the Session stopped.
As poor Cardinal Gilroy laboured away, almost with-
out anyone seeming to listen, on the subject of Matri-
mony, the three cardinals with some other bishop whom
I could not recognise in attendance walked slowly across
behind the Confessional and away up the stairs towards
the Holy Father's apartments. I could not help wonder-
ing what would have happened had the cardinals walked
the whole length of St Peter's before making their way
out to the doors to go to the Pope. I fancy that half the
bishops would have stood up and gone with them.
Perhaps it was as well that they didn't but even so it was a
moment of great tension and drama: something which
one is unlikely to see again ...
Rome buzzed all that day with the excitement of the
morning and not without reason. Some of the periti,
notably Mgr Osterreicher, could be seen after the morn-
ing Congregation giving a full account to the press and
inevitably the thing was blown to fantastic heights in the
press reports which followed the next day. (When I got
back to London I found this incident described widely as
a 'punch-up' which it certainly was not.) But there is no
doubt that it was all very regrettable and, though one
must question the policy of Cardinal Tisserant and the
General Secretariat in the decision which they made,
there was little evidence of approval of the bitter vehe-
mence of the American bishops. They seem to think that
they have a corner in this question of Religious Liberty

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but I suppose that they were so disappointed in their fail-

ure to take the document home at the end of the Second
Session that this third delay was just the last straw.
After supper that evening I heard that old Cardinal
Heard [semi-retired judge of the Rota, resident at the
English College in Rome] wanted to see me about the
Jews and I could not think what was worrying him. I
had heard earlier that the Pope had summoned all the
Cardinals that evening in order to discuss with them the
troubles of the morning but I could not think that this
had anything to do with Heard's message. When I got to
see him he told me that he thought that there had been
some row with the Jews in the Council that morning and
what insufferable people they were! He asked me if I
would let him have any documentation that I might have
on the subject as apparently the Pope had asked him to
give a judgement about it in the morning. I was very
perplexed and I went back to my room and looked over
my notes and came to the conclusion that he must be
thinking of the row over Religious Liberty, which of
course had nothing directly to do with the Jews.
I checked with the Archbishop [Heenan] who was of
the same opinion and then went back to Heard. Gently I
tried to tell him that it was not a Jewish issue which was
at stake. I told him what had happened in the morning
and it seems that the old man was so deaf that he had
very little knowledge at all of what had gone on. What
made it even more remarkable was that during the audi-
ence with the Pope, the Holy Father had apparently
decided to refer the protest received from the American
bishops to the Tribunal of which Heard was a member.
They were to meet before the following morning's ses-
sion and give judgement on the point which had arisen.

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 WHERE DOES CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING GO FROM HERE?

It was a most extraordinary anticlimax to all the high-

level excitements of the day that I should have found
myself trying to explain to the old judge just what it was
all about. So far as I could I remained dispassionate but
it was remarkable how, once the old man had got a
picture of what had happened, the judge in him returned
to the surface. He said that it was a perfectly simple
issue. Had Tisserant (whom he profoundly dislikes)
exceeded his powers in giving the decision which he had
given? If the powers were provided for in the Regola-
mento, then so far as the Tribunal was concerned, they
had merely to give judgement that the Presidents had
acted within their powers.
If the Presidents had no such powers in the Regola-
mento, then they would have to go back on it the fol-
lowing day. It was quite clear cut in the old man's mind
and I left him looking into his red-bound copy of the
Rules. The question of whether or not the decision was a
good one or a bad one did not enter Cardinal Heard's
mind. The fact that a thousand bishops might have
wanted to vote on the matter was again beside the point.
It was a question of the Presidents staying within the
powers. It might have been interesting had he been able
to determine whether the President of the Commission of
Presidents, i.e. Cardinal Tisserant, had adequately con-
sulted the other members of his Commission. But this
did not seem to have entered into the matter and I had
little doubt which way the decision would go the follow-
ing morning.2

The Declaration on Religious Liberty was indeed safely

passed by the Council in its fourth and final session the
following year, 1965. It was the singular - and momentous -

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contribution of American Catholicism to the universal Church,

with implications that have by no means been exhausted.

The Role of the State

The idea that the common good is the business of states
belongs, in Murray's analysis, to the age when Church and
State were usually deemed a unity - a form of political 'mon-
ism'. It is a legacy, though he does not say so, of the ancien
regime mindset still often encountered in the Vatican in the
1960s, which resented being asked to adjust to the post-1789
world. This monist polity was usually said to be according
to the teaching of Aquinas, to whom Pope John Paul II in
particular was wedded. This teaching said that the State had a
duty to align its laws with natural law, and so to promote the
good of its citizens. In the spiritual sphere this had to mean
steering them into the arms of the Catholic Church and keep-
ing them there.
Thus a state had no duty to provide tolerance for other
religions or denominations, which were likely to distract
people from the claims of the One True Church. Where a state
could do so, therefore, it had to enact laws which, for instance,
prevented divorce, prohibited the sale of contraceptives or out-
lawed abortion. It had no duty to enact laws to protect freedom
of worship or even freedom of speech where religion was con-
cerned. The exception would be where the Catholic population
was in a minority, when attempts to impose Catholic teaching
by law in the moral sphere were ill-advised because it was im-
practical. Thus a Catholic 'monist' (or integriste] political sys-
tem had no scope for dissent or conscience: error had no rights.
The American example sat very uncomfortably with that
doctrine, as Murray well knew. He therefore argued for a more
restricted role for the State than this all-embracing concern for

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 WHERE DOES CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING GO FROM HERE?

the common good, confining it instead to the preservation of

public order. Promoting the common good remained the prior-
ity of society and the duty of all its members - but society and
the State were no longer to be seen as coterminous. His defi-
nition of public order owed a good deal to the American experi-
ence, where 'big government' had always seemed to be some
sort of public enemy in a way quite unfamiliar to Europeans.
Nevertheless the notion that the common good is the duty of
society rather than just the State has a distinctly modern ring
to it, as nations all round the world tried on the clothes of
Western-style liberal democracy without necessarily having
emerged from a condition where State and society were one.
It left scope for the 'unofficial' or 'voluntary' sector, for all the
small and big platoons of private or public initiative that
constitute the intermediate institutions of civil society. Indeed,
commerce and industry too, being largely in private (that is to
say non-government) hands, were also planted in that area of
society which was not directly organised by the State.
This issue has a direct bearing on one of the thorniest consti-
tutional issues of the modern age, namely how to organise the
government of a secular society without making it aggressively
'secularist' and therefore anti-religious. This either-or is hard
to escape - either religion rules the roost, or it is pressed to the
very margins of concern. What is insufficiently developed is a
theology of religious and moral pluralism, showing how reli-
gion can remain as important as its adherents can make it, but
without either suppressing the rights of others or being sup-
pressed in turn. This is the handicap, in the post-modern world,
of the meta-narrative - a theory which embraces everything.
The English constitutional solution to this dilemma would
seem to run along the lines of 'Don't ask theoretical questions,
just get on with it', but as such, that is hard to export. In any
event, proposals for the disestablishment of the Church of

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England or even for an English republic would still require an

answer to these State-Church questions. How is a secular
society to be genuinely plural and not secularist? Can the State
remain officially indifferent to religion while society continues
to take it seriously? Or does indifference by the State lead to
indifference by society?
The American example could be cited on either side of this
debate. Its apologists describe the American nation state, as a
result of the 'separation of Church and State', as secular. In the
late eighteenth-century sense, that it has no established Church,
that is true. (It is important to remember that various member
'states' of the USA such as Massachusetts and Connecticut
actually had established Churches both before and after the
Revolution and even after the adoption of the 'secular' federal
constitution in 1789.) But the ideology of 'Americanism' is per-
meated through and through with religious insights and ideas
which can be traced directly back to the colonial founders,
whether Puritan and republican in New England or monar-
chist and Episcopalian in Virginia. In that sense the American
project can be described as a complete synthesis of Church and
State (cleverly disguised as the opposite): America is itself a
'Church', with its own creed, its own worship, even its own
initiation ceremonies. One of the flaws in Murray's depiction
of the American Church-State 'separatist' solution as a model
to be universalised was his failure to see that God was inextric-
ably present in the American social and constitutional wood-
work, not detached from it.

John Paul II
Curran's thesis, in his review of Murray's success at Vatican II,
was that Catholic teaching under John Paul II remained in

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captivity to the unexamined assumption that the common

good and the responsibility of the State were one and the
same. He relates this in part to the fierceness of the Pope's
own opposition to abortion, and his determination to insist on
a complete ban on it enforced by the criminal law. (A Polish
pope may even have had in mind contemporary Church-
State tension in Poland over this issue.) Certainly, the notion
that Catholic politicians cannot promote, and Catholic elec-
tors may not vote for, anything that relaxes the prohibi-
tion on abortion was a regular theme of the American Catholic
bishops in their interventions in public debate. They had
failed to follow the logic of the declaration they (or their pre-
decessors) had so vigorously campaigned for in the Second
Vatican Council. This was, in Curran's view, a consequence
of regarding it as still the responsibility of the State to pro-
mote the common good and all it entails, and not just re-
garding public order as the outer limit of the functions of
government.
To follow the latter course would reduce the vexed question
of abortion to a public order issue: to what extent is it con-
ducive to public order to prohibit or to allow abortion? That in
turn presupposes that individuals in society might, if they were
aggrieved by too lax or too strict an abortion law, become a
threat to public order. To relieve that threat the law would be
moved in the appropriate direction until it achieved a new
equilibrium of maximum public tranquillity, minimum threats
to the peace. But this means that to change the law all that
would be necessary would be to threaten violence. That does
not seem a very healthy basis for law-making in a democratic
society (though insisting that the law follows exactly the
requirements of Catholic moral teaching on this point is not
particularly helpful either).

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For some reason, possibly the fact that the current situation
is set by a judgement of the Supreme Court and not by a vote
in Congress, the abortion issue festers in America in a way it
hardly still does in Europe and elsewhere. Perhaps this is
because Murray's solution - confining the State to upholding
public order, leaving the common good to be the responsibility
of society (defined as larger than the State) - has already
implicitly been adopted without fuss elsewhere in the West,
with only Americans still worrying away at it.
But without a theoretical basis for this pragmatic adjust-
ment, it must remain unstable and liable to give way under
pressure. It is clear that non-American Western societies are
pluralist in theory but deeply unhappy at some of the apparent
consequences. Should Western tolerance of Muslim beliefs and
customs in the name of pluralism extend to allowing Muslims
to practise polygamy, for instance? Should it extend to allow-
ing Muslims to promote female circumcision (notwithstand-
ing that most Muslims in the West would deny it is a practice
required by the faith)? Should Muslims who regard all things
Western as Satanic (while living in the West all the same) be
allowed to behave accordingly towards Western institutions?
Should they be allowed the freedom of speech, for instance, to
encourage terrorism in the name of Islam (provided, in the
name of public order perhaps, that they do their terrorism
elsewhere)? Or is it the job of some non-Muslim authority or
other - the police, the courts, Parliament - to decide what is
or what is not compatible with the Muslim faith, allowing this
but prohibiting that? And how does this differ from Pope John
Paul IFs insistence that state law should follow Catholic teach-
ing on abortion and other moral issues? If Muslims cannot
have their way on, say, polygamy, why should Catholics have
their way on abortion?

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 WHERE DOES CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING GO FROM HERE?

The issue is sharpened for Catholics by the fact that Mus-

lims also see the State and society as coterminous - at least in
the Muslim ideal. They have their own concept of the common
good, but its basic principles are those of the Koran rather
than Catholic social teaching. How is this mutual incompat-
ibility to be resolved?
These dilemmas are not far below the surface in recent
debates about the 'place of God' in the new constitution of the
European Union. Formal recognition of such a place implies
that religious teachings may from time to time cross over from
the private sphere, where most religious activity resides most
of the time, to the public sphere, where they may influence
public policy. Lack of such recognition (it was feared by some)
might amount to a constitutional declaration that religion
must stay in the private sphere. In fact, of course, in a democ-
racy electors may be influenced by whatever they want to
be influenced by, including their own religious faith or lack
of it. What some European framers wanted, it seems, was an
aggressive separation of Church and State in the American
theoretical mould - though without the implicit background
of a national religious ideology like Americanism.
Curran, following Murray, sees the Vatican II Declaration
of Religious Liberty as an important plank of social teaching,
even though it is not normally regarded as belonging to that
corpus at all. But as long as Catholic social teaching is treated
as being concerned with all 'common good' issues rather than
purely economic ones, it clearly does belong. The same should
be true of Catholic teaching about, say, criminology and penal
reform; and must be true about the just war tradition, where
a state's responsibility to the common good looms large. But a
theology of war and peace does raise a challenge to the com-
mon good tradition of a different kind, a challenge also raised

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by issues such as terrorism, genocide, asylum and refugees,

and global environmental concerns.
The Catholic philosophy of politics that says its aim is to
advance the common good begs the question: what is the limit
of the community whose common good is under consideration?
The tradition tends to be uncritically applied to a post late-
nineteenth-century world where the political unit is the nation
state, and that determines the scope of the common good.
While in the process of acting on that automatic assumption,
the Catholic tradition also contradicts it. The duty of solidarity,
which Pope John Paul II weaves into the concept of the common
good, takes its force from the dignity of common humanity, not
from shared citizenship or national identity. Similarly a Catho-
lic doctrine of human rights cannot be confused with a doctrine
of local citizenship rights, for human rights pre-exist any
notion of the sovereign nation state. For instance, a refugee
seeking entry to such a state has the same human rights as one
born into it. An Afghanistani Taliban prisoner held in indefinite
detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay has the same
human rights as the President of the United States, notwith-
standing the tendency of American ideology and practice to
treat non-Americans as almost a species of sub-humanity
where human rights are concerned.
The Murray/Curran approach of regarding the envelope of
Catholic social teaching as wider than purely economic issues,
important though they are, is surely right. Indeed, Gaudium et
spes seems to follow the same line. Its opening words ought to
be regarded as stretching the task of Catholic social teaching
to embrace all that is human - sharing, analysing and address-
ing 'the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the
people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way
afflicted'. It is a big undertaking. And as a mission statement
for Catholic journalism, it would be hard to beat.

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 WHERE DOES CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING GO FROM HERE?

Notes
1 Charles E. Curran, Catholic Social Teaching, 1891-Present
(Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002).
2 Extract taken from Clifford Longley, The Worlock Archive
(London: Geoffrey Chapman, 2000), pp. 196-201.

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 11
The Scientific Search for the Soul
John Cornwell

Before the Second Vatican Council there was a tendency in

some Catholic traditions of spirituality to stress the dualistic
nature of the human person: a distinction between body and
soul. Underpinned by various notions, it was widely believed
that souls and bodies were composed of two quite different
kinds of stuff: mortal material stuff that could be measured
and non-material immortal stuff that was spiritual. The spirit-
ual stuff accounted for the more interesting things of which
human beings were capable: free will, love, the exercise of the
intellect, imagination and consciousness itself. The asocial
consequences of such thinking were as inevitable as they were
deleterious.
Dualism of this sort was certainly not new to the modern
period, and can be found, for example, by implication, in the
severe nostrums of the Imitation of Christ,, written in the fif-
teenth century, but still popular in the late 1950s, which coun-
selled: 'Whenever I go abroad and mix among men, I return
home less a man.' The assumption was that an individual soul
was capable of a relationship with God that could be funnelled
straight 'upwards', as it were, with no reference to others, no
acknowledgement of one's social being. One of the advantages
of substance dualism, of course, was the simplicity of its
explanation for the intermediate afterlife: what happens to us
between death and the resurrection of the body; the body goes

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 THE SCIENTIFIC SEARCH FOR THE SOUL

to its grave while the spiritual, separable soul, wafts off to

heaven, purgatory or to hell; the infant unbaptised to limbo.
Vatican IPs pastoral constitution on the modern world,
Gaudium et spes, confirmed the error of substance dualism by
emphasising early and uncompromisingly that 'though made
of body and soul, man is a unity'. This is no novelty in
Christian thought: the Council of Constantinople IV (870)
taught that, while the soul is sometimes distinguished from
the spirit, the Church teaches that this distinction does not
introduce a duality into the soul. Through his very bodily
condition, moreover, continues Gaudium et spes, 'man sums
up in himself the elements of the material world'. At the same
time, the social nature of personhood is stressed: 'Life in
society is not something accessory to man himself: through
his dealings with others, through mutual service, and through
fraternal dialogue, man develops all his talents and becomes
able to rise to his destiny.'
Theoretical underpinning for the unitary nature of person-
hood, the embodied soul, of course, has a long pedigree: back to
Thomas Aquinas, and ultimately to Aristotle who saw the soul
as the 'form' of the body. There are sturdy antecedents for the
unitary nature of the human person, moreover, in Judaic anthro-
pology, pervasive in Christian Scripture. It was early modern
theorising, in fact, which introduced the quasi-scientific expla-
nation for dualism associated with Descartes - a spiritual
substance dwelling within a material, mechanical body, linked
by a part of the brain known as the 'pineal gland' - alienating,
at the dawn of the Enlightenment, the individual subject from
nature and the universe, with far-reaching consequences.
We can see, as Fergus Kerr has eloquently argued in his
Theology after Wittgenstein, the philosophical inadequacy of
dualisms down the ages for Christian theology. Meanwhile,
cognitive scientists, several decades later than philosophers of

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mind ( such as 'no-ghost-in-the-machine' Gilbert Ryle) have

been attempting to explain the nature of the mind-brain rela-
tionship on a non-dualist basis (with the notable exception of
the late Sir John Eccles). But has science yet produced an
account that would satisfy Christian philosophy? With Aquinas
as a necessary yet not sufficient guide, the challenge for Chris-
tian philosophers of mind in the post-conciliar era has been to
make connections with new developments in cognitive science
(the combined disciplines of psychology, neurobiology, artifi-
cial intelligence, neuroscience). The urgency of the task, more-
over, is recognised by the conciliar imperative (also emphasised
in Gaudium et spes) to distinguish between the 'order of
persons' and 'the order of things'. To what extent, then, does
recent science provide a basis on which to confirm the embodi-
ment of the soul, without doing violence to moral agency,
imagination, and the dignity and social nature of persons?
What is new brain science telling us about human identity?

Human Identity: The Lessons from Science

Amid a vast number of cognitive science research programmes
the most ambitious and relevant to the above questions focus
on the nature of human higher-order consciousness. What
processes in the brain and the central nervous system account
for the sense we have of looking out at the world from the
secret theatre of the self? What accounts for your uniquely
personal experience of the sight and scent of a rose? That
raging toothache - agonising for you and nobody else? Seeing
the point of a New Yorker cartoon? Or sensing a pang of angst
at the contemporary condition? Moral and social behaviour,
a sense of worthy and unworthy actions, artistic expression,
aesthetic appreciation, imagination - all involve an account
of personhood that crucially includes conscious awareness,

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 THE SCIENTIFIC SEARCH FOR THE SOUL

conscious autonomy, both in oneself and in others. The impor-

tance of discovering the link between our physical brain states
and consciousness needs no special pleading, for consciousness
lies at the very heart of what it means to be human. In the West-
ern tradition consciousness is the very eye of the human soul.
Scientists' neglect of consciousness through much of the
twentieth century seems at first sight strange. The neuroscien-
tist Eric Kandel wrote somewhat ineptly in the preface to his
1985 edition of Principles of Neuroscience that 'one of the
last frontiers of science, perhaps its ultimate challenge, is to
understand the biological basis of mentation'. But why, at that
time of writing, had neuroscientists been so laggard in a cen-
tury marked by the huge strides in most other scientific explora-
tions of nature?
In the first place it was the very vulnerability and vast com-
plexity of the brain that kept researchers at bay. They did not
have the tools or techniques to enter the living cortex without
devastating what they explored. This had not daunted the
hubris of those cognitive scientists who believe that real brains
are as dispensable to the study of thinking as feathers are to
aerodynamics (widely known as 'functionalism'); hence some
researchers in the field of artificial intelligence were optimistic
about replicating human 'mentation' with silicon and circuitry.
Some even believed that the day would come when humans
would download their minds into suitable software and so
initiate an immortal existence. Such schemes, widely publicised
in the early 1980s, have proved disappointing to date.
By the late 1980s, however, the prospects for cognitive
science were transformed by advances in neuroscience and
neurobiology. Just as the invention of the telescope and the
discovery of mathematical physics gave rise to new ways of
understanding the Universe, so rapid advances in non-invasive
brain imaging and techniques of measuring at a micro level the

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activity of individual neurons, receptor sites and neurotrans-

mitters revolutionised the exploration of the brain and the
central nervous system.
At the same time, the increased power of computers enabled
researchers to test their theories with ever more sophisticated
models. After a century in the doldrums, neuroscience was, in
its own estimation, on a voyage to the final frontiers of science.
But the idea that the 1990s would be special to brain
research was due not solely to the inspiration of academic
science. A crucial economic and social impulse came from the
pharmaceutical industries which announced a new age of
rationally designed brain drugs with cure-alls for everything
from depression to Parkinson's disease. On 1 January 1990,
the lobbyists were rewarded with a joint resolution of the
House and Senate of the United States to designate the 1990s
the 'Decade of the Brain'. A principal stated reason behind the
initiative was the official estimate that some $350 billion was
being lost to the US economy each year through brain-related
ills, including depression, Alzheimer's and the consequences of
aggressive behaviour (which alone attracted grants of $500
million for neurogenetic research in 1994).
The promise of major social and medical advances was
driving the momentum and direction of investment and fund-
ing in cognitive science. But even as the discipline was being
feted in anticipation of a host of social and medical benefits,
there were growing expectations, evident in proliferating sym-
posia and published academic papers, that neuroscience had
a significant role to play in the Holy Grail of Kandel's 'basis
of mentation'.
Through the 1990s there appeared a new genre of 'mind-
brain' or 'soul' books to explain the rapid advances and new
theories to a non-scientific reading public. To mention just a
few: Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained (1991), John

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Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), Gerald Edel-

man's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), Francis Crick's The
Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul
(1994), Ian Hacking's Rewriting the Soul (1995), Paul Church-
land's The Engine of the Soul (1995). It soon became obvious,
as these works filled the bookshops, that scientists and philoso-
phers of mind, despite agreeing at many points on the eluci-
dations of neurobiology, were not about to agree on anything
like a single theory or account of personhood.

The Problem of Consciousness

There were profound disagreements, to begin with, over
the definition of consciousness itself, leading to fundamental
clashes over prospects for a consensus on other crucial issues.
The British philosopher Colin McGinn, for example, argued in
his The Problem of Consciousness that consciousness was
resistant to explanation in principle and for all time; while the
American philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett countered that
a complete explanation not only lay ready to hand but also
would soon be exemplified by the construction of a conscious
machine called COG at MIT (COG, to date, has not yet erupted
into consciousness). Consciousness, the self, in Dennett's view
was a delusion. Borrowing a notion popularised in literary
theory, he likened human identity to a series of 'multiple drafts'.
The nub of the divide, however, was the issue of method-
ology itself, which brings us to the second difficulty that faced
scientists keen to explore the mind-brain problem: the pros-
pects for solving consciousness by means of reductionist science.
Could reductionism, by which scientists come to understand
phenomena by examining their most reducible physical aspects
and processes, solve anything so elusively holistic and phenom-
enological as the mind-brain, soul-brain relationship?

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Students of consciousness inclined to sympathise with this

scruple began to talk about the 'hard problem' and the 'easy
problem' in order to highlight a central paradox. While
acknowledging that reductionist science would make progress
in solving the so-called 'easy' problems - accounts, for exam-
ple, of the mechanics of the neurophysiology of vision - the
'hard problem' of consciousness, the phenomenological prob-
lem, what it feels like to be a subject, would persist. The
Australian philosopher of mind, David Chalmers, author of
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a fundamental Theory,
puts the 'hard problem' like this:

Often work [on consciousness] addresses what might be

called the easy problem of: How does the brain process
environmental stimulation? How does it integrate infor-
mation? How do we produce reports on internal states?
These are important questions, but to answer them is
not to solve the hard problem: Why is all this processing
accompanied by an experienced inner life?1

There was nothing particularly new, in the mid-1990s, about

this separation of the 'hard' and the 'easy' problems of con-
sciousness; philosophers like Thomas Nagel and John Searle
had done much to popularise the conundrum in the 1970s,
warning against easy solutions, or definitions, that fail to get
to grips with the central riddle: which, put bluntly, is how does
one explain subjectivity by means of purely objective descrip-
tions? What seemed new by the late 1990s, however, was the
vehemence of the confrontation between those who recognised
the authenticity of the 'hard' problem, and those who seemed
to think that it was illusory, destined to somehow simply fade
and vanish in the cold light of reductionist knowledge of the
processes of the brain and central nervous system. Also new

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were indications that dualism was making a fitful come-

back under the banner of difficult physics. First there was the
Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose, who contended that
consciousness might be explained by quantum physics in the
brain (the action of myriad 'microtubules' in cytoskeletal
structures of neurons). Then David Chalmers gave notice of
what he called a psychophysical solution, a non-reductive
theory of consciousness that would stem from basic laws of
nature as yet unknown. For many philosophers of mind, reared
on the influence of Gilbert Ryle, the positing of quantum
physics, or a new kind of physics, as an explanation for the
'hard problem' looked like a surrogate ghost in the machine.

Closed vs. Open Theories

But amid the assorted warring theories, accompanied by
private-language insults - 'silly reductionist', 'surrogate mys-
tic', 'spooky-stuff dualist' - it became clear that there were
basically two approaches emerging, which can be described as
the 'closed theories' versus the 'open theories'. Identifying these
separate approaches may be of some help to Christian phi-
losophers in deciding how science might come to the aid of a
unitary description of body and soul.
Two Nobel prize-winning scientists who have invested
heavily in neuroscience as a means of understanding the mind-
body relationship are Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman.
Contrasting and comparing their methods and conclusions is
instructive. In his Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific
Search for the Soul, Francis Crick has declared, unexception-
ably, that if we are to make headway in our understanding of
consciousness, we have to start somewhere: best, therefore, to
begin with something physically observable and definite rather
than get lost in foggy abstractions. Hence Crick focuses on the

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fact that when higher animals appear to be aware of an object

their neurons oscillate in unison at the rate of 40 cycles per
second. The finding fits with his conviction that the brain is
just a very complicated computational machine or device.
Crick's leap from this modest proposal to his published
hypothesis is, indeed, astonishing. 'You, your joys and your
sorrows,' he writes, 'your memories and your ambitions, your
sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more
than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their
associated molecules.' That phrase - 'no more than' - is key.
In the vulgarised shorthand that finds its way into general
mass media acceptance, it translates into: the mystery of
human consciousness is no more than 40 hertz oscillations!
Crick's reasonable protestation that his strategy is confined
to empirical data, merely as a secure starting point, is hardly
corroborated by a subtext that rumbles through his book like
bottled thunder. For Crick's astonishing hypothesis is as much
a sustained attack on religion as it is about oscillating neurons.
To understand Crick's motives for bolstering a scientific argu-
ment with campaigning atheism, we need to turn briefly to the
views of one of his closest philosophical allies, Patricia Church-
land, author of an influential work on the philosophy of mind
entitled Neurophilosophy. Churchland urges a view of human
identity, based on computational neuroscience, that will be
more 'adequate', she says, than 'that rough-hewn set of con-
cepts, generalisations, and rules of thumb we all standardly use
in explaining and predicting human behaviour'. In other words,
the inadequate 'folk psychology' of history, literature, 'arm-
chair' philosophy, common sense and, yes, religion, which are,
she opines, but 'the homey generalisations of belief and desire'.
Central to Churchland's strategy (wholly endorsed by Crick)
is the elimination of mind-body dualism, which, she believes, is

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sustained and perversely perpetuated by religion. Against this

background, Crick appeals for the abandonment of religious
faith in order to eradicate dualism and to make way for the
Nueroscientific Enlightenment. 'If revealed religions have
proved anything,' Crick declares, 'it is that they are usually
wrong. Only scientific certainty (with all its limitations) can in
the long run rid us of the superstitions of our ancestors.'
By identifying the error of substance dualism as 'religious',
Crick gives the impression that his hypothesis offers a wholly
new start; that he and those who agree with him hold the key
to the human personhood by a conclusive, reductionist, com-
putational explanation of the mind-brain relationship.
In contrast to Crick's 'closed' approach we have the thesis of
Gerard Edelman. Edelman won his Nobel prize in 1978 for
work on immunology, but he has toiled some 30 years on
research programmes aimed at producing a neuroscientifically
informed theory of the mind-brain problem. Edelman believes
that the way the brain works has more in common with a vast
jungle or ecological habitat than a computational system.
He calls his hypothesis the Theory of Neuronal Group Selec-
tion, which argues that the brain develops, before and after
birth, by a process not unlike natural selection in evolution.
As a model, or a metaphor, nothing could be further from the
Crick-Churchland brand of computational neuroscience which
sees the mind as a machine and the world as a piece of computer
tape. Edelman stresses the dynamism, the ceaseless novelty, the
ceaseless creativity of mental processes (each act of memory, he
declares, is a new act of creation, rather than a mechanical
replication) and draws constant contrasts between the machines
of our own devising and the brain's predicament as an evolved
living (and dying) organism. He concludes that while evolu-
tionary theory can elucidate the problem of consciousness, no

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ultimate scientific explanation of a human individual is pos-

sible. Yet, he is emphatically not a dualist, nor is he an anti-
reductionist in terms of scientific method.
Importantly, Edelman argues for a clear distinction between
reductionist method and reductionist philosophy. To reduce a
theory of human behaviour to a theory of molecular inter-
actions is simply silly,' he writes, 'made clear when one con-
siders how many different levels of physical, biological and
social interactions must be put into place before higher-order
consciousness emerges.' Quoting Diderot, he likes to remind
his readers that 'to be human is to go beyond physics'.
As with Crick, Edelman's theory has attracted some dis-
tinguished supporters from neighbouring disciplines, including
the writer-neurologist Oliver Sacks, who believes that Neu-
ronal Group Selection is ideally suited to his holistic approach
to clinical neurology. Edelman has also caught the attention of
many outside science and clinical medicine, for example, the
Catholic theologian Nicholas Lash, who has publicly wel-
comed 'Edelman's attempts to put the mind back into nature'.
If Crick is right, we must acknowledge that our minds have
been finally circumscribed by reductionist neuroscience. If Edel-
man is right, we are invited (in the light of neuroscience, rather
than despite it) to launch our imaginations with renewed con-
fidence into the never-ending journey in every culture and civili-
sation, without arrival, of exploring what it means to be human.
Edelman's recourse to the open nature of theory in relation
to the human mind, and hence our ability to reach final
solutions, accords with a perspective that has been debated by
philosophers of science for more than a century. In 1900 the
distinguished German mathematician David Hilbert set math-
ematicians a list of problems to be solved in the new century.
One of the most crucial of these problems was how to demon-
strate that mathematics is a self-proving, complete system.

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It took another 30 years for the Austrian mathematician Kurt

Godel to come up with his famous proof, which demonstrates
that no non-trivial axiomatic system can be both complete and
consistent. What this means in terms of physics is that no final
theory of everything is possible: that it will always be, in the
final analysis, either incomplete or inconsistent.
One of the most famous and hubristic statements in popular
science in recent years was the claim of Stephen Hawking, the
Cambridge cosmologist, that in a short period of time physi-
cists would indeed produce that theory of everything. This
would be the ultimate triumph of science, he recorded in his
book A Short History of Time, 'for then we would know the
mind of God'. The importance and seminal influence of Godel's
proof, published in 1931, was amply demonstrated in April
2003 when Hawking, having reconsidered the implications of
Godel, told an audience in Davis, California: 'Maybe it is not
possible to formulate the theory of the Universe in a finite num-
ber of statements.' Discussing physical theories of the Universe,
Hawking told his audience, 'We and our models are both part
of the Universe we are describing. We are not angels who view
the Universe from outside.' As a result physical theories are,
like Godel's proof, either inconsistent or incomplete.
Christian philosophers should not turn their backs on what
science attempts to tell us about our nature. But we should be
vigilant for facile attempts at theoretical closure, attempts to
define human identity as scientististic, final, limited and neces-
sary givens. In a gentle riposte to John Searle's 'Rediscovering
the Mind',2 Nicholas Lash reminded the audience of a sym-
posium on consciousness in 1997:

Hydrogen does not decide what being hydrogen will be.

In contrast, determining what a human being will be is
part of what it means to be a human being. It follows, as

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the Indian theologian Felix Wilfred remarked recently,

that 'Defining the human is not and cannot be the pre-
rogative of one civilization or one people'.

There lies the danger, and the challenge for Christian

philosophy today. At the heart of the current controversies
over consciousness is the bid by a vociferous group of thinkers,
highly popular within the genre of public understanding of
science, to reduce and distort the nature of consciousness, self-
hood, freedom, in order to make a fit with closed, reductionist,
computational explanations. For the reductionisms would
urge what Christian philosophy would deny: that traditional
notions of human identity are illusory figments of 'folk psy-
chology'. And if believing in moral agency, as Galen Strawson
has pointed out, is a condition of being a free agent, it seems
plausible to say that in our era, backed by the power of mass
media, the reductionist factions could shape, determine and
finalise our understanding of the nature and scope of human
identity, the soul. Reflecting on the social and unitary nature
of the soul, in both the light of the Second Vatican Council
and current researches into cognitive science, thus bestows a
fateful responsibility on us all.

Notes
1 David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a funda-
mental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. xi-xii.
2 Nicholas Lash, 'Recovering contingency', in John Cornwell (ed.)
Consciousness and Human Identity (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), pp. 197-209.

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 12
The Place of Philosophy in the Life of the
Church: A Time for Renewal
John Haldane

The second Vatican Council was conceived in part out of a

concern to open the Church to the wider world in order that
the former might better dispose itself for the benefit of the
latter. Ideally, nothing good would be lost from the Church,
and the process of development might be advanced so as to
bring forth abundant and appealing blossoms followed by
further wholesome fruit.
Notwithstanding the strident complaints from different
quarters that the Council failed in its aims, either by leaving
the Church an inward-looking and defensive bastion of anti-
modernism, or by fostering doctrinal dissent, moral relativism
and liturgical barbarism, the fact is that at this distance, and
amid the other changes of the second half of the twentieth
century, it remains hard to judge the general effect of the
Council. It may also be a mistake to suppose that even positive
development in the life of the Church can be a process of gain
without loss. Aquinas writes of how the coming-to-be of one
thing necessarily involves the ceasing-to-be of another, and also
of how what exists ('has being') is to that extent good. It fol-
lows that change involves the loss of some goods and not
merely per acddens.
One might reply that this kind of loss will not matter if the
net result is gain, that is, more good; but apart from the risk of

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sliding into theological consequentialism there is also the pos-

sibility, emphasised in secular terms by philosophers in both
the British analytical and Austrian phenomenological schools,
that any field of values is comprised of a plurality of genuine
but incommensurable goods, such that the pursuit of any one
may of necessity be at the expense of another. Socialists and
libertarians have often sought to define liberty and equality in
ways that eliminate the appearance of tensions between these
values. Thus egalitarians have often held that the redistribu-
tion of resources is liberty-promoting; while libertarians have
maintained that economic freedom expresses the equal right of
all to the ownership of their labour and its fruits. We are now
unlikely to regard these claims as anything but self-serving
sophistries, for we can see that the state redistribution of wealth
involves non-voluntary transfers, and freedom can easily be at
the cost of distributive justice. The implication is not that if we
choose to pursue one policy the other turns out not to have
value, but rather that, whichever we choose, to some extent at
least, we lose something genuinely worth having.
Similarly, whatever the real value of the following policies,
a greater emphasis on transparency and intelligibility in liturgy
is liable to be at the cost of the sense of transcendence and pro-
fundity; the promotion of pastoral study and of social justice
ethics is likely to diminish understanding of fundamental moral
theology and to dilute the sense of personal sin; the cultivation
of the notion of a 'pilgrim Church' travelling toward a desti-
nation it has not reached - and which may remain far off -
makes problematic the idea of the ark of salvation furnished
with the deposit of faith. I am not concerned to debate what in
these cases counts as gain and what loss, but only to point out
what change involves and to suggest that it is in no-one's inter-
est to pretend otherwise. Whether, overall, the post-Vatican II
Church is better or worse than that which preceded it is a

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question that should be felt to be difficult to answer, and even

problematic to contemplate, for it is, after all, one and the
same Church as was founded by Christ and as will persist until
his return.
This said, one can certainly look at particular ways in which
the Church and Catholic life and culture more generally differ
now from the pre-conciliar period and consider what gains and
losses the changes have involved. I wish to do something of this
with regard to philosophy, relating the history of the practice
within Catholic circles to that in the English-speaking world
more generally. The restriction to the English-speaking world is
for reasons of space and circumstance, as well as of compe-
tence; but it is worth adding that given the extent and
influence of British and American philosophy this is hardly a
parochial restriction. As well as describing the past and
characterising the present I aim to say something about the
future as it might be and, as I believe, it should be.

Jerusalem and Athens

Anyone raised in or otherwise familiar with the Roman Catho-
lic tradition will recognise at least something of the extent to
which it has long drawn upon philosophy to shape and defend
its teachings. Yet even if it was inevitable that this should
happen, it was certainly not obvious to members of the early
church that Jerusalem had much to do with Athens. In antici-
pation of his journey to the heart of the empire St Paul appealed
to rational reflection, maintaining that:
What can be known about God is perfectly plain for men
to see, for God has shown it to them: ever since the
creation of the world, the invisible existence of God and
his everlasting power have been clearly seen by the
mind's understanding of created things.1

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Given that his intended readership was probably largely one of

educated Gentile Romans it is perhaps unsurprising to find him
writing in terms reminscent of Cicero's observation in the
widely read philosophical work On the Nature of the Gods that
'nothing can be so obvious and clear, as we gaze up at the sky
and observe the heavenly bodies, as that there is some divine
power of surpassing intelligence by which they are ordered'.
Yet the unhappiness of Paul's own direct engagement with the
sages of Athens must have been fresh in his mind: the Acts of the
Apostles tells us that when he spoke to the philosophers, 'at his
mention of rising from the dead, some of them burst out
laughing';2 and around the same time he quoted with approval
from Isaiah where it is written that the wisdom of the wise is
doomed,3 adding on his own account that 'God chose those
who by human standards are fools to shame the wise ... What
I spoke and proclaimed was not meant to convince by philo-
sophical argument but to demonstrate the convincing power
of the Spirit'.4
If there is a tension here it is easy enough to see how it might
be resolved. According to Paul, reason is able to discern gen-
eral truths about the existence of a deity and his governance of
the world - hence there is no excuse for ungodliness; but it is
foolish to think that human wisdom is adequate to discern the
nature of God or that the unaided will is sufficient to bring
men to salvation - hence the need of revelation and of grace.
This combination is a coherent one and it later took the form
of a distinction between the preambles to faith and the dog-
matic content of the faith itself, depositum fidei. Viewed from
the perspective of rational enquiry it is reasonable to read
Paul's passage in his letter to the Romans as an instance, be
it a limited one, of natural theology, and hence as an implicit
endorsement of philosophy of religion so conceived. What it
remains silent on, however, is the validity and value of the

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practice that has come to be known as philosophical theology.

The latter makes no distinction between the sources of the
concepts and propositions it investigates (natural or revealed),
but is concerned to evaluate them in terms of their coherence,
intelligibility and possible truth.
It is not difficult to construct a Pauline case against philo-
sophical theology on the grounds that if the concepts investi-
gated are other than those delivered by natural theology or by
Christian revelation then it is at best idle and at worst blas-
phemous; and if they are of the latter sorts then the gospel tells
one all one needs to know. Yet apart from the fact that there
might be some intellectual value in investigating ideas to which
one is not antecedently committed, the fact is that there is a real
question of how to understand gospel teachings. Moreover, as
the Church developed so its theology broadened and deepened,
and ideas were generated of which Paul could have had little
understanding, even where they derived from things he himself
had introduced such as that Christ's resurrection instituted a
new creation (1 Corinthians), that believers are one body in
Christ (Romans) and that righteousness is to be associated with
faith not works (Galatians). Accordingly, rational reflection
upon Christian ideas seems not merely legitimate but required.
That conclusion was reached long ago, implicitly at least
by the time of the First Council of Nicea (325) at which the
homoousion ('of one substance') formulation was received as
orthodox in preference to homoiousion ('of like substance'). By
the Middle Ages theologians moved with ease between general
reasoning about the existence and nature of God and specific
argumentation concerning the Trinity, the Incarnation, the
Communion of Saints and the varieties and operations of grace.
Modern readers of Aquinas are liable to be impressed by his
range, which is indeed astonishing, but they would do well to
attend to the fact that this crosses all sorts of regions between

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which later writers, particularly in the Protestant tradition,

such as Kierkegaard and Earth, attempted to erect barriers.
Since for Earth reason is unable to achieve knowledge of God,
which is available only through the divine revelation in Jesus
Christ, it follows that natural theology is an impossibility - as
is substantive dialogue with non-Christians.
While the medievals of the Latin Church did not exactly
practise interfaith dialogue they were certainly willing to learn
from Jewish and Muslim philosopher-theologians such as
Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon) and Avicenna (Ibn-Sina),
referring to them with respect. And although the Reformation
put Catholicism on the defensive it did not curb the practice of
interweaving philosophy and theology. It is true that scholasti-
cism declined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but
that was owing to the general Western rejection of Aristote-
lianism upon which medieval Christian/philosophical synth-
eses had drawn. Aquinas was named a Doctor of the Church in
1568,5 years after the close of the Council of Trent and 7 after
the birth of Francis Bacon. The next 40 years would see the
births of Hobbes and Descartes, and within a century Aristotel-
ianism had been widely rejected in favour of empiricist and
rationalist philosophies that regarded Catholic theology as
being either insufficiently warranted by history and experience
or else too closely tied to them.
The fate of scholasticism reflected the general circumstance
of the Church in the modern period: battered from without
and subject to conflict within. The intellectual and social dis-
ruptions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries unsettled
Catholic education and scholarship and resulted in a confused
plurality of opinions and approaches. In part because of this
some Church leaders saw a need to re-establish a coherent
position. In 1846 the newly elected Pius IX reaffirmed the
compatibility of faith and reason and in so doing encouraged a

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return to scholasticism. Explicit papal endorsement of the

medieval style of synthesis, and more precisely of that provided
by Aquinas, came in 1879 with the encyclical Aeterni patris
published by Leo XIII in the year following his own election as
successor to Pius. The Thomist revival quickly took root in
Continental Europe, initially among religious but later among
lay intellectuals, and from there it was exported to Britain and
more importantly to the United States.

Since Vatican II

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born two years after the publi-
cation of Aeterni patris. Within a year of becoming Pope John
XXIII in 1958 he too had an announcement to make to the
universal Church: that he wished to convene an ecumenical
council for the purpose of renewing its religious life and re-
expressing the substance of its faith. At that time most Catho-
lics engaged in philosophy were Thomists. Much of what they
thought, talked and wrote about was internal to the scholastic
tradition, being concerned with the interpretation of Aquinas's
texts and doctrines, and with debating the merits of later
interpretations and developments. While a few looked outward
in order to engage with other traditions, the vast majority
regarded modern non-scholastic philosophy as a series of errors
to be avoided or refuted. Pius XIFs 1950 encyclical Humani
generis condemned a range of positions that were gaining
ground in post-war theology (including some dissent from
seminary scholasticism). An adaptation of the phrase used as
the English title of the encyclical could as well serve to
characterise the view of empiricism, rationalism and idealism
held by most mid-twentieth-century Thomists - as 'false trends
in modern thought'.

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It is hard to say exactly when the change came, but it began

in Europe and North America with a series of studies of post-
Kantian continental philosophers: Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard,
Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, and progressed towards appro-
priation and not just description of their views. By the close of
Vatican II in 1965 the pre-eminence of Thomism was seriously
threatened and by the end of the following decade it was but
one strand of Catholic philosophical thought and a diminish-
ing one at that. Significantly, however, intellectual aggiorna-
mento tended not to draw upon the form of philosophy domi-
nant within the English-speaking world, namely, conceptual
analysis. There are two main reasons for this. First, the very
idea of clarifying the content of terms can seem a trivialisation
of philosophical enquiry and not at all suited to the presen-
tation of transcendental subject matter - it was common, even
within Britain, to complain that this style of philosophy was
just concerned with 'words'. Second, it was generally assumed
that the sort of philosophy that was practised in Oxford and
Cambridge and in Harvard and Berkeley was essentially 'logi-
cal positivism' which was famously associated with the claim
of A. J. Ayer and others that religious, moral and aesthetic
statements are meaningless. This second consideration also
encouraged the turn to 'continental' thought among Catholics
disenchanted or just bored with Thomism. It was well known
that most continental and analytic thinkers had mutual disdain
for one another's philosophies; and since analytic thought was
presumed to be hostile to religion many Catholics inferred that
an enemy of that approach must be a friend.
My own view is that overall these trends have been unfor-
tunate for, while there is no doubt that the seminary scholas-
ticism of the 1950s was often a dull and degenerate form of
what in its medieval heyday was a glorious tradition, it was a

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serious mistake to abandon Thomism, given its claim to be the

most effective general synthesis of Catholic doctine and philo-
sophical truth thus far achieved. In addition, it is a mistake to
suppose that analytical philosophy - the philosophy of Rus-
sell, G. E. Moore, the early and later Wittgenstein, Elizabeth
Anscombe, Peter Geach, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett,
Bernard Williams, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and many
others - is simply concerned with clarifying concepts or that it
is the continuation of logical positivism by other means. Of the
philosophers listed half are theists and three are Roman Catho-
lics: Anscombe (deceased), Geach and Dummett. All of those
named have contributed significantly to the pursuit of deep and
important issues concerning the nature of reality and the char-
acter of human thought and action; and the Catholics have all
addressed topics of enduring religious interest such as proofs of
the existence of God and the nature of God's operations in the
world. Furthermore, the turn to continental thought, particu-
larly in its recent post-modernist variants, far from bolstering
the claims of the faith has tended to produce in many who have
taken that route a kind of ironic agnosticism, and even a
convoluted and unspoken atheism.
More to the point, however, is the fact that philosophers in
the English-speaking world are now increasingly open to dif-
ferent styles of enquiry and to the full history of the subject to
a far greater extent than has ever been the case. In this respect
at least the present is a rich and promising age. Where British,
American and Australasian thinkers stand in greatest need of
development is in respect of what John Paul II describes in
Fides et ratio as the 'sapiential dimension' of philosophy.
There he writes of a crisis of meaning arising from a fragmen-
tation of knowledge consequent upon scientific development,
and from an aura of scepticism produced by the proliferation

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of philosophical and related theories of the world and human

life (section 81). It is well worth quoting in full what John Paul
has to say on the matter of how philosophy might now proceed:

To be consonant with the Word of God, philosophy

needs first of all to recover its sapiential dimension as a
search for the ultimate and overlapping meaning of life.
This first requirement is in fact most helpful in stimulat-
ing philosophy to conform to its proper nature. In doing
so, it will be not only the decisive factor which determines
the foundations and limits of the different fields of scien-
tific learning, but will also take its place as the ultimate
framework of the unity of human knowledge and action,
leading them to converge towards a final goal and mean-
ing. This sapiential dimension is all the more necessary
today, because the immense expansion of humanity's
technical capability demands a renewed and sharpened
sense of ultimate values.5

The Task of Philosophy Now

John XXIII attributed his calling of Vatican II to the inspira-
tion of the Holy Spirit. Whatever its source, the intention of
opening the Church to the wider world in order that that
which was established by Christ might more effectively serve
all humanity was a noble one. It is superficially ironic that in
the period since the Council the influence of the Church in the
world appears to have declined. Some, of course, argue that
the former was the cause of the latter, but anyone familiar
with the general trend of Western culture over the last three
centuries will know that the decline began long before the
Council, so that the critics are not even in the position of
having committed the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. The

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 THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH

current position of religion in Europe is in part a consequence

of the philosophically sceptical temper of modernity and in
part a result of a rampant combination of individualism,
materialism and hedonism. These causes have given rise to a
variety of worrying trends: to the substitution of technology
for learning, to the growth of relativism, to the commodifica-
tion of relationships, to the decline of marriage and the family,
and to the instrumentalisation of life itself. In the world of
politics we have become familiar with the management of
effects, but what science and philosophy both teach is that
conditions are cured not by treating the symptoms but by
tackling the causes.
Philosophy is sometimes castigated for its practical irrel-
evance. Yet nothing could be more relevant than a means of
changing minds, for while natural forces may reconfigure the
face of the earth it is minds - and only minds - that can
change the world in accord with a plan and a set of values.
John XXIII saw the necessity for the Church to re-express the
substance of the faith in terms intelligible to the contemporary
world, and John Paul II has seen the need to have a clear and
effective understanding of the nature of philosophy in order to
use it to think about matters of substance.
Neither perception diminishes the achievements of the past
but both require Catholic philosophers to think hard about
how best to carry the subject forward so as to be true to its
vocation as the love of wisdom and to be effective in engaging
the problems that confront us. There are those who will say that
all would have been well if we had held fast to the Thomism
that prevailed in Catholic circles in the first half of the twentieth
century; and there are those who would consign that tradition
to the wasteland of failed metaphysical approaches. Neither
judgement is sound and both exhibit the tendency to think that
all change must either be deterioration or improvement. As I

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remarked in the opening section, change necessarily occasions

loss, but just as one should not regard this as implying a wors-
ening simpliciter, nor should one think that if something good
comes to be that this shows that overall change is for the best.
The primary task facing philosophers today is that of giving
substance and general purpose to their enquiries. In so far as
philosophy is an intellectual discipline it needs to be rigor-
ous and precise (to the extent that any particular subject mat-
ter allows). Analytical philosophy has made virtues of rigour
and precision, and since its rediscovery of metaphysics some
40 years ago it is more likely to put these virtues to significant
use. At the same time it tends not to have a reflective sense of
its own nature as an activity directed towards comprehensive
truth. By contrast, continental European philosophy in the
styles best known to the layperson, speaks grandly of the total-
ity while failing to deliver much in the way of rigorous and
precise argumentation. Readers of the Summa Theologiae, of
Aquinas's 'disputed questions' and his commentaries on works
of Aristotle, will know that he manages to maintain a sense of
the structure and importance of the wood, while also identi-
fying the distinguishing features of, and navigating between,
the trees. That provides an excellent model, but if the sub-
stance of Aquinas's Catholic/Aristotelian synthesis is to be
communicated and win converts it must first be cast in a form
intelligible to the best and most rigorous non-Catholic thinkers
of the day. To achieve this, it would be wise to consider the
forms deployed by those very thinkers, not in the spirit of
uncritical emulation but in that of further synthesis. Happily
this has been happening for some while and there is evidence,
confirmed by the increasing use of the expression 'analytical
Thomism', that the efforts at constructive engagement are
bearing fruit.

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 THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH

Yet the task of philosophical aggiornamento is not com-

plete, and in the nature of the case it never can be, short of
the end of the world and the final coming of the kingdom.
That may well be some way off; alternatively it is an old and
good practice to prepare for it as if it may happen at any time.
Philosophers who took the latter possibility seriously might
well attach priority to developing the sapiential dimension of
the subject, which is perhaps one reason why John Paul II
recommends attention to it.
G. K. Chesterton once observed that philosophy is just
thought that has been thought out. More strictly, one might say
that it is thought-out thought about the highest things as these
admit of rational contemplation. That kind of thinking has to
have a central place within the life of the Church and of the
world; otherwise human beings will have failed to realise their
nature as rational creatures made in the image of God for the
purpose of knowing, loving and serving him. There really is
no merit in looking back to a supposed golden age of pre-
Vatican II Catholicism, for even if some things were better then
than now, others were worse, and in any case the Catholic
should live facing forward - the direction of life itself.

Notes
1 Rom. 1:19-20, 57-8.
2 Acts 17:32.
3 Isa. 29:14.
4 1 Cor. 1:27; 2:4.
5 Faith and Reason (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1998), pp.
119-20.

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 13
Captivated Ambivalence:
How the Church Copes with the Media
Lavinia Byrne

I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that

we can see out and the people can see in.
Pope John XXIII (1962)

John XXIII's proposal looked so innocent. Through opened

windows, as he saw it, the great spiritual riches of the Catho-
lic tradition would become accessible to the outside world.
Through the medium of the Second Vatican Council, the
Church would be able to shed the trappings that had kept
these treasures powerful - magical, even - but also the posses-
sion of an elite. The project was a grand one: the Council
would offer a means of renewal for all the faithful, as well as
initiating a mission to the world. Both those within and those
without would benefit because, significantly, the traffic would
be in two directions. The people of God were to look out and
the Church would be visible to all.
What a boost for modern media! Radio, television and
newsprint would ensure that the images from these opened
windows could be propelled around the world. The television
crews rolled into Rome; news correspondents set themselves up
in a variety of delightful venues. The media were welcomed in
because their technology could work the appropriate miracles.
'More' suddenly became 'better'. We saw pictures which

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 CAPTIVATED AMBIVALENCE

before we had never dreamed of seeing; we sat in front of our

televisions enjoying the sights and sounds of Rome and proces-
sions of bishops and cardinals. Above all we loved the slightly
rotund figure of John XXIII himself, because he, too, seemed
to be enjoying himself. We began to search out transmissions
from Vatican Radio on the frail buttons of our transistors.

The Initial Enthusiasm

The Church had embraced radio from the early days when
Guglielmo Marconi would walk with the Pope around the gar-
dens of the Vatican and discuss the potential of this amazing
new medium. In 1933 he installed a microwave link between
the Vatican and the summer home of Pius XI, so that the Pope
could transmit broadcasts from Vatican Radio directly. In Ser-
tum laetitiae, the Encyclical celebrating the one hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the hierarchy in the
United States, promulgated in 1939 by Pius XII, this enthusi-
asm found full expression:
We have learned with not little joy that your press is a
sturdy champion of Catholic principles, that the Mar-
coni Radio, whose voice is heard in an instant round the
world - marvellous invention and eloquent image of
the Apostolic Faith that embraces all mankind - is fre-
quently and advantageously put to use in order to ensure
the widest possible promulgation of all that concerns the
Church, and We commend the good accomplished.
When Vatican II was called, there was more in this vein.
Not only had the Church apparently nothing to hide, but the
Council Fathers realised that their theological reflections and
teaching should encompass the 'means of social communi-
cation', as they called the mass media. They sounded upbeat:

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The reporting, description, or representation of moral evil by

the media can lead to a deeper knowledge and exploration of
humanity', they noted, 'and by employing suitable dramatic
effects, to a portrayal of the true and the good in all their
splendour.' Their document on social communications, Inter
mirifica, was promulgated in 1963.
The assumption was that the whole drama of human experi-
ence would be played out on the silver screen, on radio or on
television, and that 'the true and the good' would somehow
prevail. These were heady days for the media, and for the
faithful too, carried away by the movies we enjoyed: Mrs
Miniver, Monsieur Vincent, The Bells ofSt Mary's, The Nun's
Story. Our stars were Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. Good
Catholics could be media stars without compromising their
eternal destiny. We loved seeing the Pope on telly. After Mrs
Dales' Diary we began listening to New Every Morning - and
even learned some Protestant hymns.
We had yet to see violence on screen. For most people, that
moment came when Jackie Kennedy cradled her wounded
husband's body in the back of a car in Dallas. Subsequent
images from Vietnam unravelled the myth yet further. Pictures
of anarchy from Algeria or Northern Ireland became a regular
feature of our evening viewing.
Even as we watched, pop culture became increasingly secu-
lar. Pop music in particular reflected an irreligious world where
people sought their spiritual highs in sex, drugs and rock and
roll. Yet because the images were so compelling, we developed
a repertoire of icons, of new saints for the secular age, people
whom we admired and imitated. We bought new clothes and
with them new lifestyles as image suddenly became over-
whelmingly important and the TV acted as a mirror, feeding
our illusions back to us. A naive fascination with the media
needed to give way to something more discerning.

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Wanted: A Theology of Media

In 1971, in response to a request from Vatican II, a more
complete document on social communications was issued:
Communio et progressio. Article 11 suggested that, 'Commu-
nication is more than the expression of ideas and the indication
of emotion. At its most profound level, it is the giving of self
in love. Christ's communication was, in fact, spirit and life.'
Communio et progressio too offered an exalted theology of the
media and its potential for good:

[These means of communication] ... serve to build new

relationships, and to fashion a new language which
permit men [and women] to know themselves better and
to understand one another more easily. By this, [all
men and women] are led to a mutual understanding and
shared ambition. And this, in turn, inclines them to jus-
tice and peace, to good will and active charity, to mutual
help, to love and, in the end, to communion. The means
of communication, then, provide some of the most
effective methods of cultivating that charity among
[us] which is at once the cause and the expression of
fellowship.

The promise was of community and shared values. The

promise was of a world in which good would prevail through
the transmission of 'mutual understanding and shared ambi-
tion'. The popular Canadian communications guru, Marshall
McLuhan, wrote with the same kind of optimism in The
Medium is the Message, published five years earlier:

Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of 'time' and

'space' and pours upon us instantly and continuously the

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue

on a global scale. In an electronic information environ-
ment, minority groups can no longer be contained-
ignored. Too many people know too much about each
other. Our new environment compels commitment and
participation. Ours is a brand-new world of allatonce-
ness. Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished.

We now live in a global village - a simultaneous happening.

In the event, human reality turned out to be much more dense
and complicated than these prophetic voices could realise.
Instead of a global village, what do we have? A fragmented
world in which people actively protest against globalisation,
and a post-modern world which shuns in horror the very idea
of a shared narrative of meaning. In 2003, our experience is
that, far from encouraging one world, global communication
systems have instead fostered rather the kind of competitive
pluralism that we are surrounded by today. Ours is such a
different world from that of the 1970s that an upbeat spir-
itual or theological reflection on the media - which now include
the Internet - would seem to be out of place. In particular there
are many who are now convinced that the mass media are the
enemy of religion, be it Christianity, Judaism or Islam. As
religious believers, they perceive religion to be a cohesive force,
because it deals with eternal verities rather than transi-
ent ones. It follows that they consider that the media are in-
herently bad because TV, the radio and the newspaper appear
to dance to a different tune.
This judgement is severe. It claims to be based in the sense
that the media deal with illusion. Media people are seen as
alchemists who try to distort the truth by weaving spells with
pictures and words. They create casualties because they ruin
reputations. They are not honest brokers of truth: they spin it

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 CAPTIVATED AMBIVALENCE

and contort its meaning. Not only is this true of words, but
doubly so with pictures. In some deep-down way that we do
not ordinarily bother to articulate, we know that the media
manipulate - or so the logic goes.
Yet we cannot deny that we are captivated. We connive, for
we turn on our radios first thing in the morning; we await the
thud of the newspapers on our doormats; we enjoy crashing
out in front of the telly. With access to the Internet come end-
less possibilities: on-line banking, instant holidays and endless
information about things we never knew we wanted to know.
We are hooked, whether we like it or not. Human beings love
stories and here come stories in abundance, packaged for our
interest and entertainment.
More than that, we inhabit a media-saturated world. In-
escapably, we are captured on close-circuit televisions; our
transactions at the supermarket are monitored, even as we
receive fidelity points for shopping there; we are tracked on
giant satellite maps because our mobile telephones log our
position on the planet. We are watched and we watch. We listen
and are listened to. Billboards jump out at us from street
corners. Junk mail clutters our mailboxes. We are material
people in a material world, media people in a media world.

The Church and the Media: Ambivalent Partners

Not surprisingly this ambivalence is played out on an even
more toxic scale when the Catholic Church and the media
meet. Put candidly, the media's job is to disclose, to reveal, to
deal in bad news as well as good. The Church's job is to deal in
good news, to proclaim an everlasting and ever-living message
freshly for every generation. Iniquity, sin, human frailty are
not ignored, but safe liturgical boundaries contain them. The
proper place for sin to go to is the confessional, where silence

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and secrecy rule. Daily transgressions are dealt with at the

beginning of the Mass when we receive immediate absolution.
In a word, we are to seek forgiveness for our sins because we
need to, not because we are afraid of them appearing in the
newspapers or the press.
In that sense, the Church has always been in the sin game.
It knows about good and evil. It is good at sin. From the Seven
Deadlies all the way through to minor transgressions, sins
have been itemised as lovingly as goods on our supermarket
shelves. They do not have sell-by dates because their effects go
beyond the constraints of time. But there is hope. For deep
within the Catholic imagination lies the certainty that sin, con-
trition, confession and a firm purpose of amendment go hand
in hand and that they secure eternal life for us. The media inter-
vene, though, when someone in public life sins. The media do
not have the same handle on the sense that sin can lead to for-
giveness and redemption. No life is more public than that of a
cleric, a supposedly good man. So when he transgresses, in the
eyes of the press and TV and radio, the consequences are dire.
The media close in and the story gets told. The Catholic
Church has been profoundly damaged by the catalogue of bad
news stories that have been released over the past ten years.
Child abuse sends a shudder through the public imagination;
now our priests are implicated. They have lost the aura that
protected them from public scrutiny.
So, too, have transgressions against the discipline of celi-
bacy. When homosexual or heterosexual priests get 'caught at
it' the media are unforgiving, because they are not in the for-
giveness game. When they investigate, they are in it for a 'kill' -
a good story. Story is all. Yet the obverse is true as well. There
is such a vocation as that of the religious journalist. The title is
not an oxymoron. Put simply, top-quality investigative journal-
ism may do more to renew the Church and the priesthood than

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 CAPTIVATED AMBIVALENCE

we presently understand. Top-quality investigative journalists

are not afraid of the power of the hierarchy because they speak
from a different place. If anything, they have everything to
gain from exposing the dysfunctionality of the Church, as of
any other great institution of public life.
So to present the media as the enemy of religion is to miss
the point. For it is appropriate to ask questions about celibacy,
for instance, or about the ordination of women; about what
happens to Church money and about the consequences of
clericalism. It is appropriate to explore the ordinary everyday
expectations of people who believe that the Church is an ark
of salvation and that it exists to serve rather than to subdue the
people of God. A secular or - in the case of religious journal-
ism - a lay-owned press can present both sides of any argu-
ment without being answerable to the Church for doing so.
That is where their strength lies and why the Church needs
them, like it or not.
But there is a further issue: jealousy. Christians believe that
they have good news to proclaim. Surely this means that the
media should welcome their contribution and have, as it were,
the right to proclaim such good news? So they profess to love
the media. The trouble is in the subtext: we love the media
when it is 'on side', when the television cameras crowd around
and make us feel important. In our curiously media-saturated
world, to be on telly is somehow to exist. When the stories are
good, or when the Church looks visually sublime - captured,
say, at a good liturgical moment - we revel in the affirmation
that TV gives.
And we love the unseen masses of people the media reach.
As a Catholic woman, I cannot preach in church. Yet six mil-
lion people know my 'Thought for the Day' on the flagship BBC
news programme Today. When I have broadcast the Daily
Service on BBC Radio 4 Long Wave, I have taken the Word of

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God into untold homes, hospitals, cars, nursing homes. Which

is seductive stuff - if one did not realise that the wireless is the
most ephemeral of media: it does not - cannot - create super-
stars, and will not tolerate for long people who take themselves
too seriously.
Like Pius XII and Marconi, I love the technology itself, in its
own right. So did Hilda Matherson, whose little book Broad-
casting was published in 1934. Miss Matherson, who worked
closely with Lord Reith, the first Director General of the BBC,
invented the Shipping Forecast - that indomitable friend of
insomniacs at either end of the day or night. She saw the devel-
opment of the media as a human adventure on a grand scale:

Broadcasting is not strictly another machine; it makes use

of apparatus (although the tendency is moving rapidly
towards simplification); but fundamentally it is a harnes-
sing of elemental forces, a capturing of sounds and voices
all over the world to which we have hitherto been deaf.
It is a means of enlarging the frontiers of human interest
and consciousness, of widening personal experience, of
shrinking the earth's surface. It is only possible to see it in
its right perspective by seeing it in the scale already
suggested - a milestone in the development of communi-
cations as momentous as its forerunners, and, like them,
accompanying and assisting a new stage in civilization.
Broadcasting as we know it, moreover, is in its infancy; it
is comparable to the rudest scratchings on the cave-man's
dark walls, to the gutteral sounds which served the first
homo sapiens for speech. It is not possible to pass final
judgment upon its full significance; this is still wrapped in
shadows ... Broadcasting, and its allies, telegraphy and
telephony, are only stages in the long process that began

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 CAPTIVATED AMBIVALENCE

with man's existence some three hundred thousand years

ago, and may end in some form of thought transference
of which we now have no conception.
Hilda Matheson sensed that broadcasting was better than the
narrowcasting that went before, the endless 'dialogue of
the tribe' as T. S. Eliot called it. When John XXIII wanted
to throw open those windows on the world, this is the risk he
took: 'we can see out and the people can see in'. It was a
metaphor perfectly suited to the television age.

The Church in the Digital Era

How can the Church engage with the media in its present-
day manifestations - radio, TV, video, DVD, Internet? One
answer is to see these media as a set of tools for us to use, as kit
to enable the Church to enjoy a higher profile in a media-
saturated world.
So we go out and buy the technology. We set up offices to
teach people how to use it. We train specialists who do great
work training other specialists and so it goes on.
At best, this strategy works. After all, people can be trained to
be microphone- or camera-literate. But the temptation becomes
to try to train them to sound sincere. And there is a huge niggle
here. If they are sincere already and - as religious people, one
would hope that they are - then surely the training is redun-
dant? Cardinal Hume in an interview with the Today pro-
gramme once referred to it as 'your show'. Had he been trained
to take the programme's iconic status a bit more seriously,
I doubt if he would have felt free to make such a revelatory
remark. The media liked him precisely because he was sincere.
Another response is all about size. The Church missed the
first print revolution, the argument runs, and is in danger now

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of missing the digital one. Bigger is better; massive is best of

all. So wheel out the Catholic or Christian TV and radio chan-
nels; swamp the opposition; get the technology on side to
deliver the goods on a global scale.
But these arguments re-run the global village fantasy of the
late 1970s. The more serious question, it seems to me, goes
something like this: how can the best of religious voices engage
with the questions that genuinely exercise people, not of right,
but because they have something to say? How can religious
believers, whatever their faith community, embrace the values
of openness and debate represented by the media and thereby
contribute in the public domain? In the case of the Catholic
community, there is a further question: for the images of light
and luminosity generated by television in particular are deeply
familiar to the Catholic imagination. We should not be afraid
of them. If that light falls in such a way that it reveals our
darkness - as has happened - do we experience the shame of
seeing our sins on screen as an intrusion or as a call to live in
the light?
Radio, too, is a medium with spiritual resonances for Catho-
lics, for we believe our world to be populated by angels as well
as ourselves. There is always more going on than we can
presently see. Radio rejoices in the sound of human speech and
human music. We should not fear them either, for we have a
song to sing, along with the gospel to proclaim. And the
wireless loves a good debate.
As for the Internet, it opens a dynamic world of interactive
communication where genuine information will be greeted in
a million homes and hearts, and where propaganda will be
revealed as just that. The challenge is there. Who is going to
evangelise the Internet - 'so that the people can see in'?
What is promised by the media is not so much a global
village, not some idealistic community of shared values and

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ambitions, but a context in which discussion can flourish and in

which debate can draw in and support the casualties of our
post-modern world. The Christian journalist, like the informed
Tablet reader, has a vocation as well as a task. We are called to
intelligent faith, profound hope and endless charity. None of
these, as the Church must realise, precludes engaging with
contemporary discussion and debate.

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 14
The Church and the Media:
Beyond Inter mirifica
Alain Woodrow

Religion is of its essence communication. The word comes

from the Latin religare, to bind or to link. The three mono-
theistic religions claim to be 'revelations': God speaking to
human beings. For Christians, the gospel is the good news that
must be spread abroad: in other words, broadcast. On a theo-
logical level, the central doctrine of Christianity, the Trinity,
teaches that the One God exists in three Persons, who 'com-
municate' eternally: the Father 'generates' the Son and the Holy
Ghost 'proceeds' from the Father and the Son. St Augustine, in
his De Trinitate, compares this double procession of the Divine
Life, the Word (the Son) and the Spirit (the Holy Ghost) to the
analogical process of human self-knowledge and self-love.
Religion and the mass media (or 'Instruments of Social Com-
munication' as the conciliar decree of 1963, Inter mirifica,
describes them) should logically therefore go hand in hand.
Unlike iconoclastic theological traditions in Islam and early
Protestantism, Catholicism has its long tradition of sacred art,
with its emphasis on the tangible and the physical (relics, holy
pictures, sacramentals, incense) and Ignatian appeal to the five
senses. The Church regards the media, and television above all,
as the ideal instrument to relay the pageantry and splendour of
the Roman rite. One need only compare the successful exploi-
tation of the media by the charismatic John Paul II, in his

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worldwide evangelisation of the masses, with the much lower

profile kept by the mainstream Protestant Churches to under-
stand their antithetical approaches.
The Catholic Church was quick to grasp the way it could
utilise the media for its own ends, but much less willing to
accept the legitimate demands made upon it by those same
media. This uneasy attitude is shown clearly in the disastrous
handling by the Second Vatican Council of its decree on the
media. Inter mirifica is, in fact, the least satisfactory of all
the conciliar documents. The Secretariat for the Instruments of
Social Communication, created in 1960, was one of the ten
commissions and two secretariats set up to prepare the Coun-
cil. Its brief was complex and ambitious: to formulate the
Church's doctrine on the media, to train the Christian con-
science with regard to the right use of these media, and to make
propositions for bringing the cinema, radio and television into
line with faith and morals, and for making use of them to
spread the gospel.

The Weakness of Inter mirifica

The Secretariat worked in three sections: one for the press, one
for the cinema and one for radio and television. A draft
schema was drawn up which comprised an introduction, four
sections and a final exhortation. The first section dealt with the
Church's doctrine on the media (the teaching of the Church,
the objective moral order, the duties of citizens and of civil
authority); Section II dealt with the apostolate (spreading truth
and Christian doctrine, the means of achieving this); Section III
was devoted to discipline and order (Church discipline, the
organs of Church authority); and Section IV offered some
observations on certain media (the press, the cinema, radio and
television, other forms of communication).

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It was unexpectedly announced that the schema would be

presented to the bishops during the first session of the Council,
in November 1962. The decision to bring the discussion for-
ward (although the schema came last but one in the printed
volume of draft texts) was to give the Fathers an 'easier' schema
to discuss after their lengthy examination of the liturgy and con-
troversial, not to say acrimonious, discussion of the 'Sources of
Revelation'. It was even suggested that, since the subject of this
schema was not a theological one, the bishops should accept
the draft without a great deal of argument.
But this was not to reckon with the criticism levelled at the
text. Archbishop Stourm of Sens drew attention to the crucial
role played by the media in today's world and its prodigious
power, through information and entertainment, over the pub-
lic. Some (Archbishop D'Souza of Nagpur and Cardinal Leger
of Montreal) pointed out that the rights of the Church were
unduly stressed, while others (Bishop Enrique y Tarancon
of Solsona and Bishop Menager of Meaux) objected that the
role of laypeople - who had more qualifications and experi-
ence than the clergy in this field - was not adequately acknowl-
edged. Opinions were divided. Some welcomed the optimistic
tone of the document; others wanted to denounce the misuse of
the media and 'image worship' in modern civilisation. Cardinal
Suenens recommended the establishment of professional ethics
for journalists, Cardinal Bea suggested merging the world's
Catholic news agencies and Bishop Hoffner (Minister) praised
the cooperation between German Catholics and Protestants in
this domain.
After barely two and a half days of debate in St Peter's, it
was proposed that the schema be approved in substance but
drastically pruned, a decision welcomed with relief by a mas-
sive majority of the Fathers. In the interval between the first

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and second sessions the commission reduced the schema to its

bare bones (cutting its 40 pages down to 9), while attempting
to address the more important criticisms that had been raised.
It became clear during the second session that none of the
major schemas, apart from the Constitution on the Sacred
Liturgy, would be ready for promulgation, so that the Council
would have only one finished document to present to the pub-
lic at the end of two whole sessions. This explains why the
Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication was hur-
ried through, in order to provide a second finished document,
mainly to appease those who accused the Council of being all
talk and no action.
The new shortened text pursued two main aims: first, to set
forth the Church's teaching on the supremacy of the moral
law, the right to be informed, public opinion and the forming
of conscience; second, to stress the importance of the media
for the Church's pastoral work, namely, the preaching of the
gospel to all men of goodwill and establishing the kingdom of
God throughout the world. The document again came under
sustained criticism, from two very different quarters. One salvo
was fired from outside the Council by a group of American
journalists who were in Rome to report on the event, the other
came from within the assembly itself, delivered by a group of
its members.
Two documents were produced: a statement by the journal-
ists and a petition by the Fathers. The first was signed by John
Cogley of Commonweal, Robert Blair Kaiser of Time and Life
and Michael Novak of the New Republic. This document -
which received the approval of three leading periti (theological
experts), the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, the
French Jesuit Jean Danielou and the Argentinian Jorge Mejia -
stated that the schema, far from achieving an aggiornamento,

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

was a retrograde step since it reflected a hopelessly abstract

view of the media, unrecognisable to journalists working for
the 'real press'.
Their objections were fivefold.
1. The moralistic approach of the schema contradicted the
intrinsic value of a work of art and denied the integrity of
the Christian artist.
2. The 'right to be informed' only concerned the moral
obligation of those who pass on information (the journal-
ists), not of those who are the source of the information
(the hierarchy); thus the real problem of authoritarian
secrecy, and its victims, was conveniently ignored.
3. The Catholic press was presented as though it possessed
some quasi-infallible doctrinal authority lacking in the
secular press, implying that the latter contributed nothing
to the formation of public opinion in the Church.
4. The schema appeared to interpose an ecclesiastical author-
ity between the journalist and his employer, compromis-
ing the integrity of the laymen working for the media.
5. Two important passages granted governments control
over the media; such control not only threatened the free-
dom of the press but was expressly forbidden by the consti-
tutions of a number of countries, among them the United
States.

In contrast, the petition was signed by 90 Fathers, including

Cardinals Frings, Gerlier and Alfrink. This second document
also gave five reasons why the schema fell short of the stan-
dards expected of a conciliar decree.

1. Although the text claimed inalienable rights for the

Church, it disregarded the fact that all communication

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 THE CHURCH AND THE MEDIA

springs from a search for the truth and the desire to

express it.
2. The media were described technically, as a means of
addressing people, rather than as a means of true com-
munication, a genuinely human dialogue.
3. No mention was made of true Christian and human educa-
tion, which is not a matter of remote, abstract knowledge
and judgement but implies a sympathetic concern for the
fate of others.
4. It was most regrettable that Catholic laypeople were not
given their due but kept under clerical tutelage even where
they were more competent than the clergy.
5. Many problems concerning the media were not to be
addressed by the Council but by national or regional
bishops' conferences.

Both documents called for a radical revision of the schema

or, failing this, its removal from the agenda since, in its present
state, it could only 'astonish those competent in the field' and
'bring discredit on the Council'. But it was too late: the
schema, with its amendments, was approved by an over-
whelming majority. The protests continued, and some bishops
even attempted to have the text removed for re-examination
before the final vote, but the moderators, who were afraid to
set a precedent which might affect weightier theological issues
in subsequent votes, announced that a schema could not be
withrawn once it had been accepted in a valid vote. The final
vote was taken on 4 December 1963, at the last public
assembly of the second session, with 1,960 Fathers in favour,
164 against and 27 abstentions. The decree, together with the
Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, was solemnly promul-
gated by the Pope.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

According to the German theologian Karlheinz Schmidthiis,

Inter mirifica

was treated as a stop-gap between deliberations which

seemed a good deal more vital to the Fathers. It repre-
sents a compromise between two irreconcilable attitudes:
one which would have little time wasted over this matter,
and another which would not neglect a subject of such
importance from the pastoral point of view. Small won-
der if the result was hardly worthy of that pastoral impor-
tance and really left everyone dissatisfied. The main
weaknesses of the Decree are, first, that having been dis-
cussed and disposed of so early in the day it does not take
account of the insights into the nature of the Church and
her relationship with the world which the Council subse-
quently reached, and can therefore well be called a 'pre-
conciliar' document; and, second, that it looks shabby
when one considers the present state of discussion among
intellectuals. In short, it is worthy neither of the Council
nor of the learned world.1

The Persistent Problem of Centralism

Unfortunately, the pre-conciliar attitude responsible for this
decree remained largely untouched by John XXIII's aggiorna-
mento. Even today, 40 years after Vatican II, the Catholic
hierarchy and the media are still uncomfortable bedfellows.
Why did the Council fail to change clerical mentalities on this
question? One reason is the failure of the Council as a whole
to follow through its daring programme of reform. Another is
the very nature of the modern media, based on complete
autonomy and freedom of speech, which constantly challenges
the Church's claim to possess the 'absolute' truth.

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 THE CHURCH AND THE MEDIA

According to the French Dominican theologian Christian

Duquoc, 'the conciliar revolution is more of a myth than a
reality'. Those who lived through the heady times of Vatican II
hoped for the 'second Spring' predicted by Newman, expect-
ing that the Catholic Church would open its doors to the
modern world, to other Christian Churches and to other reli-
gions, ushering in a new age of theological pluralism, spiritual
liberty and renewal. They soon had to face the hard reality of
the Church as institution; and witnessed, with the election
of John Paul II, a return to centralised, authoritarian govern-
ment. Revolutions are invariably followed by Restorations.
The problem, suggests Duquoc, is that while Vatican II
presented a daring new vision of the Church as 'People of
God', thus standing the hierarchical pyramid of the old power
structure on its head, it failed to provide the means to turn this
vision into reality or transform the institution. 'The Council
simply poured its new wine into old wineskins', adds Duquoc
wryly, 'and we have seen the result.'2
There is nothing new in this. Throughout history, authori-
tarian and liberal popes have succeeded each other. And the
excesses unleashed by the Council (priests and religious aban-
doning their ministry, Marxism being preached under the guise
of 'liberation theology', Catholics adopting a 'self-service' atti-
tude to the Church's teaching) were bound to provoke a back-
lash in Rome. But the election of a pope both charismatic and
authoritarian, socially progressive and theologically conserva-
tive, popular and intellectually powerful, has singularly com-
pounded the problem.
Roman centralism, an ever-present temptation, has been
accelerated by the ubiquity of this pope (thanks to television),
his self-appointed (and widely accepted) role as universal
leader, his sole right to appoint bishops, the multiplication of
Roman documents, often bearing his personal stamp (one

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

forgets that papal encyclicals only date from the sixteenth

century), and the excessive role assigned to Cardinal Ratzinger,
prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The
main obstacle to free speech in the Church - particularly free
theological expression - stems from the bureaucratic func-
tioning of Roman authority, whose principal aim is the self-
perpetuation of the system. 'Bishops come and go', as the
Roman tag has it, 'but the Curia goes on for ever!'
The growing conflict between Rome and the local Churches
is exacerbated by the prevailing liberal culture in Western
democracies, which regards absolute authority as an obstacle to
free speech and freedom of conscience as the ultimate good
to be protected by a state. The laws of Western democracies are
defined to preserve individual liberty (my liberty stops where
yours begins); while the State - unlike totalitarian systems -
refuses to provide an ultimate 'meaning' to life. The Western
democracies do not answer existential or metaphysical ques-
tions (Who am I? What should I believe?), but offer a climate of
tolerance - for them the supreme virtue - for the free exercise
of the private beliefs of their citizens.
The Council's ambitious task remains incomplete because it
would not - or could not - tackle the thorny question of papal
supremacy. The present imbalance in Church authority is not
only between pope and bishops but between the three 'voices of
the Church' defined by Cardinal Newman: that of government
(tradition), that of theology (reason) and that of pastoral
experience (the laity). The Canadian Dominican theologian
Daniel Cadrin, assistant to Fr Timothy Radcliffe when he was
Master of the Dominicans in Rome, describes the current
relationship of the 'three voices'. There is, he says,

a verbal inflation of the first voice, that of the Curia,

which has assumed an usurped authority. The second

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 THE CHURCH AND THE MEDIA

voice, that of the theologians, is too often stifled,

whereas they should be allowed freedom of research
and doctrinal pluralism. As for the third voice, that of
the laity, they have no recognised forum in which to
express their opinion. The promises of Vatican II have
not been fulfilled.3

What about the voice of public opinion in the Church?

Pius XII himself spoke of public opinion as legitimate and
necessary. And Yves Congar firmly believed in the sensus
fidelium, the necesssary reception of the teaching of the magis-
terium by the whole community of believers, not as a simple
echo of official teaching but as an original contribution. The
French Dominican liked to quote Newman when he spoke of a
'conspiracy' of priests and faithful, that is, an active cooperation
resulting in something richer and wider. The Church authorities
continue to mistrust public opinion, however, especially when it
is voiced by the media and reported by journalists. The 'forum'
for the laity, whose absence is regretted by Fr Cadrin, is in fact
the media, Catholic or otherwise, where they can make their
voice heard, directly or through the mediation of the journalist.
Public opinion is nourished by two different modes of con-
temporary thought: a scientific language (the earth revolves
around the sun) which is rigorous and admits no contradiction;
and a free, subjective language where everything - philosophy,
politics, the economy, morality, even religion - is open to
question. In the second, everything is probable but uncertain,
and therefore open to discussion. Belief itself has become an
opinion among others. This situation is unacceptable for the
Church which bears witness to a word spoken by Another,
by Jesus who said, 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life'.
The Church forbids its members to define their own beliefs
according to a democratic debate which is open ended.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

The Trouble with Journalists

The trouble with journalists is that they are not accountable to
the Church, even when they happen to be Christian. Their
legitimacy comes from below. Journalists should never be part
of the establishment, whether political or religious. They are
the emanation of the public opinion they are supposed to rep-
resent and their 'mandate', delegated to them, stems simply
from the freedom of speech enshrined in the universal Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man. Their sole justification is the con-
fidence placed in them by the public which buys their work.
They are the spokesmen not of some higher authority but of
the public.
Obviously a distinction should be made between the religi-
ous and secular press. Journalists working for the Catholic
media cannot flout the teachings of the Church without being
in flagrant contradiction with themselves and could rightly
be accused of living a lie. But a large pluralism of opinions exists
(or should exist) in the Church, and even Catholic journalists
are bound to follow their conscience. Christian journal-
ists working in the secular media have greater latitude, but
their work is precious to the Church and should be encouraged
insofar as they are useful mediators between the ecclesiastical
authority, with its arcane language, and the often theologically
illiterate public at large.
Moreover, the line between the religious and secular media
is often tenuous, and freedom of speech is essential to both.
There is obviously a difference between official Church organs
such as UOsservatore Romano and 'Catholic-inspired' maga-
zines such as La Vie or Temoignage Chretien in France. The
American papers Commonweal and the National Catholic
Reporter, the French periodicals Les Etudes and VActualite
religieuse dans le monde\ and in Britain The Tablet and, until

218
 THE CHURCH AND THE MEDIA

recently, The Month, have all done much to further the cause
of religious freedom in general and freedom of speech in the
Church in particular by their high journalistic standards, toler-
ant pluralism, responsible reporting and fundamental loyalty
to the Church.
I have worked both for the Catholic and for the secular press.
The difficulties in the former are greater since the Church as an
institution wishes to communicate its message 'undiluted' in
such a way as to convey its own image of itself; and it expects
the loyal Catholic journalist to relay the information obedi-
ently and passively, asking no awkward questions and resisting
any temptation to investigate the reality behind the official line.
To complicate matters, Church authorities claim a privileged
relation to 'the Truth' and often speak in the name of God, or
Christ, which makes them hard to contradict.
But there are other difficulties in the secular press. The
greater freedom (with regard to the hierarchy) enjoyed by the
journalist working for the secular press is counterbalanced by
his need to defend his pitch (religion) in a newspaper which
often regards the subject as unimportant, trivial or in the same
category as horoscopes, black magic or the weirder cults. The
religious affairs correspondent is torn between his loyalty to
the Church, which he tries to portray truthfully, and his
loyalty to his newspaper, which he tries to serve profession-
ally. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, he is
often reviled by both.

A Religious Journalist's Decalogue

After spending twenty years on the religious affairs desk of the
French daily Le Monde, I submit the following 'Ten Com-
mandments for the religious journalist':

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

1. Independence. Religious journalists in the secular media

do not speak for the ecclesiastical institution; still less are
they 'apostles of truth'. The Church has its own publica-
tions for that. They are not even neutral intermediaries
between the religions and their public. They are indepen-
dent, professional journalists with minds of their own.
2. Competence. They are judged not by their militancy or
missionary zeal, but by their ability in their chosen field,
just as are political or scientific correspondents in theirs.
According to some churchmen, a religious journalist must
be a member of the Church in order to understand it from
within. But by the same token one should be a Communist
to write about the Communist Party, or a Moonie to write
about the Unification Church. At the other extreme, some
church leaders prefer 'theologically illiterate' journalists
who will simply relay the message without intervening.
What annoys the hierarchy most is an informed, articulate
journalist (often an ex-seminarian or priest) who knows
his subject. One needs to be competent in order to trans-
late ecclesiastical jargon and the abstruse language of many
Roman texts into words understood by the average reader.
3. Openness. Like all non-democratic institutions the Catho-
lic Church loves secrecy. Preaching virtue and claiming to
be a 'perfect society', it does not like admitting its mis-
takes. It has only recently published its financial accounts
(hence the enduring myth about the wealth of the Vatican)
and still draws a veil over the workings of the Curia (the
appointment of bishops, the secret trials of theologians).
The journalist has a duty to break down these taboos in the
interest of the Church itself, as The Boston Globe did in
the United States when it revealed that bishops had failed
to act against clerical sex abusers. In France, a long battle

220
 THE CHURCH AND THE MEDIA

to persuade the bishops to open more of their annual

sessions to the press has failed: they have reverted to their
former practice of holding all their meetings in private.
4. Truthfulness. The argument put forward to justify secrecy
is that the Church should not wash its dirty linen in
public. But this often means that the linen does not get
washed at all. The duty of the press is to publish the truth
about an institution that claims to be 'an expert in
humanity'. Journalists are often reproached for insisting
on the negative aspects of the Church instead of singing its
praises. But by their nature the media deal with the extra-
ordinary: bridges that collapse, not those that stand firm;
priests who marry, not those who remain faithful to their
vows; bishops who are in favour of contraception or the
ordination of women, not those who toe the party line.
When journalists single out a controversial phrase from
a sermon, they are accused of 'distorting the truth'; but a
newspaper, which has a limited amount of space, natu-
rally reports the remark that stands out from a text of
pious platitudes.
5. Freedom. The 'freedom of speech' claimed by the journal-
ist - both with regard to the ecclesiastical institution and
his editor or television boss - is not a personal privilege,
but a necessary tool for doing the job of revealing the truth,
however unpalatable, in the face of any pressure group,
whether political, financial or religious. The media con-
stitute the 'fourth estate', indispensable in any democracy
to counter the abuses of the other three (executive, legis-
lative and judiciary). Nothing would have been known
of the shady financial dealings of Bishop Marcinkus, or of
the secret power of Opus Dei in the Vatican, without the
tenacity of the investigative media.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

6. Respect for the media. Certain Church leaders, such as

John Paul II, Cardinal Lustiger or Jacques Gaillot, have
learnt to handle mass communications to their own best
advantage, but most representatives of the Church have
no inkling of the demands and constraints which the
media impose. It should be obvious that television is a
magnifying (and distorting) glass, that a news bulletin can
only give a few seconds to a given subject. This may be
deplored but it is one of the rules of the game. Yet bishops
still produce long, detailed written statements that are of
no use on television. This is why Church leaders would do
well to learn how to master the media, and why the
religious correspondent is a necessary mediator between
the Church and public opinion.
7. Honesty. A journalist is necessarily conditioned by age,
sex, upbringing, background, and political and religious
opinions. These biases must be taken into account, and cor-
rected. Honesty implies verifying a fact, placing an event in
its historical and geopolitical context, questioning as many
witnesses as possible. In presenting a papal document, for
example, one should separate fact from commentary. The
document should be summarised honestly and factually,
and the journalist's analysis presented separately. Tacts
are sacred, comment is free' was an axiom often quoted by
the founder of Le Monde, Hubert Beuve-Mery.
8. Fairness. One should take care to give space to all the
Christian Churches and to other religions. In France,
after the Catholic Church which dominates the scene,
the second largest religion is Islam, with its five million
adepts. Religious reporting should include all manifesta-
tions, from the new cults to the New Age, and should not
forget the increasing role of religion in many of today's
ethnic conflicts.

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 THE CHURCH AND THE MEDIA

9. Equal-bandedness. The fairness to all religions should also

be shown to those marginalised and rejected by the Church.
An independent paper should be a mouthpiece for the
powerless and mute members of society. It should find space
for the minority groups in the Church, the protest move-
ments, the silenced theologian, the deposed bishop. The
more the Catholic Church seeks to impose a single voice, the
more the press should encourage free debate.
10. Humility. Leading national newspapers such as Le Monde -
and, to a lesser exent, magazines such as The Tablet -
wield real power in society, and are capable of making
and breaking people and their reputations. There is a
great temptation to use this power indiscriminately and to
become self-important. Religious journalists do not exer-
cise a rival teaching authority to that of the Church, which
is why one should know when to bow out gracefully.

There will be nothing strange in this decalogue to John

Wilkins. He has been a demanding, scrupulous - if sometimes
infuriating - editor, who has shown the courage of his con-
victions while remaining critically loyal to the Church. He has
always respected the freedom of his contributors, submitting
any corrections to them, proved an excellent copy reader and,
last but not least important, introduced a healthy dose of
humour (text and drawings) into a basically serious magazine.
Like many other responsible Christian journalists, John Wil-
kins has done much to live up to such a code. I wish him Bon
vent\ and a fruitful retirement.
Meanwhile, Inter mirifica remains an unsatisfactory docu-
ment: it is abstract and theoretical, ignoring the practical
aspects of journalism. If the Church wishes to speak with any
relevance to today's media it will have to adopt a different
tone - less sermonising and more empathising - and, above

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

all, acquaint itself with the real problems faced by journalists

daily: the need to meet deadlines (how to combine accuracy
with speed), the temptation of sensationalism (how to square
lively reporting with the truth), and the fight against financial
or political pressure groups (conscience against censorship).
The high ideals preached by the Church (truth, integrity,
charity) need to be translated, for the media, into a clear and
simple professional code of ethics.

Note
1 In the Herbert Vorgrimler (ed.) Commentary on the Documents of
Vatican II, conceived by Karl Rahner (London: Burns & Gates;
New York: Herder and Herder, 1967).
2 The remarks were made at a conference held at the Dominican
monastery of Sainte Marie de la Tourette in 1'Arbresle, near
Lyons, in 1995. See Alain Woodrow, Tree speech in the Church',
The Tablet (26 August 1995), pp. 1093-5.
3 Ibid.

224
 Part III

Signposts from Afar

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 15
A Lead from Asia
Thomas C. Fox

As I look into the early years of the twenty-first century I see

a hopeful vision of Church coming out of Asia. It is a vision
being forged by the Asian bishops and theologians. As a jour-
nalist and professional Church observer now for nearly a
quarter of a century, I can say that this Asian vision of Church
is both fresh and imaginative. The Asians are so excited by
their vision and its radical nature that they call it 'A new way
of being Church'.
How our Church views its mission in the decades ahead is
of enormous consequence to the entire human family. Within
the Church today, there are considerable differences of opinion
as to how the Church's mission is to be shaped in the twenty-
first century.
This Asian vision has been taking shape now quietly for some
30 years, largely off-stage and out of sight. We have heard
relatively little about it. But during these past three decades
this vision of Church has already become deeply etched into
the pastoral practices of Asian Catholics. It is shaping the
Asian Catholic consciousness. It is shaping the Asian Catholic
approach to their continent and to the broader world.
It is a vision that places the Church in solidarity with the
poor. It places the Church in dialogue with other religions.
It places the Church in dialogue with local cultures, borrowing
from them as it seeks its own spiritual paths.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

This vision of Church first appeared on the Catholic world

stage during the Asian Synod in the spring of 1998. Since then
it has come to receive more attention within the Church, but
not without attracting controversy. Some feel that the Asians
are giving away the baby with the bathwater; and they are not
pleased. They feel the Asians have become too accommodating
and risk losing their Catholic identity.
The Asians responded, in essence, by saying all they really
risk losing is their European identity.
In the 1970s and 1980s, many of these same critics were
very critical of the initiatives of the Latin-American bishops
and the influence that liberation theology was having on them.
Today these advocates of the status quo have shifted their
concerns. You don't hear from them talk about the threats of
liberation theology. What you do hear from them today is the
threat of religious pluralism. No doubt, you will be hearing
more of this so-called threat in the years ahead.
In truth, certain critical theological and pastoral issues are
in need of greater clarification as our Church comes to the end
of one pontificate and prepares to enter another. How these
questions get resolved will shape the direction of Catholicism
for decades to come.
It is therefore very important that we know the issues at hand
and become participants in the discussions. In these matters,
I believe we have much to learn from the Asian bishops and
theologians.

Questions That Must Be Faced

Consider, for example, some seemingly abstract questions
that, as they are answered, will have large impacts on how we
live our lives as Catholics.

228
 A LEAD FROM ASIA

How, for example, will our Church come to see the place of
the Holy Spirit in the wider world? How will our Church see
the hand of God operating in the other religions? How are we
Catholics to view the teachings and the prophets of other
religious traditions? Have these teachings been inspired by
God? How are we Catholics, in turn, to evangelise the faith?
Is it primarily by word of mouth? Is it by proclaiming that
Jesus is the saviour to all humankind? Or is evangelisation
primarily a matter of witnessing to the Gospels?
And how will we define the mission of the Church in the
twenty-first century? Is the purpose to grow in numbers? Does
this mean seeking converts from other religious traditions?
Or is the purpose of all religions to work together for a
larger mission? Is the purpose of all religions at this time in
history to be working together to build a more just and peace-
ful world? Is it to feed people's spiritual and physical hunger?
Jacques Dupuis, one of the leading Jesuit theologians, charac-
terises the purpose of all religions today as promoting the
values of freedom, peace, justice and love in all human rela-
tions. This is what it means, he and others argue, to follow the
teachings of Jesus and to build the reign of God on Earth.1 But
what is the unique role of Christianity in this environment, we
are entitled to ask? Is Jesus the path of redemption and salva-
tion for all peoples? Is Jesus the unique saviour of the world?
The Asian Catholic response would be something like this: 'yes
and no'.
Yes, Jesus is unique. Jesus represents the peak of God's self-
manifestation to humankind. But, no, Mohammed and Buddha
were inspired as well. They, too, are manifestations of God on
Earth. The Asian mind often has less difficulty embracing seem-
ingly contradictory ideas. It does not operate out of an Aris-
totelian logic of exclusion.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

More typically it instinctively tries to find patterns of inclu-

siveness. Opposites are resolved in a larger arena. Opposites
find resolution in a yin-yang pattern of complementarity.
Within the Asian mind, there seems to be more room for
ambiguity and paradox.
These critical Church issues will have to be resolved and
there is no clear indication how this will happen. But this
much is clear: how the issues are resolved will shape the course
of Catholicism at a very critical time in our Church's evolv-
ing history.
During his pontificate. Pope John Paul II has taken signifi-
cant steps to advance inter-religious dialogue. But much more
needs to be done. If the world's religions learn to cooperate for
the common good of humanity, the twenty-first century could
become an important and liberating watershed in the human
journey. If they do not - if suspicion, fear and hatred have
their way - the future is gloomy indeed.
At key moments in our Church's history, believers have
been called upon to reimagine the scope of the Church and
to make it a more inclusive community. This first happened
during the early years of Christianity when, at the First Jeru-
salem conference, the early Jewish followers of Jesus decided
to open their communities to Gentiles without first forcing
them to become circumcised or to follow Mosaic law.
I believe our Church today is reaching a similar new moment.
It is again being challenged to become a more inclusive com-
munity, opening itself this time to non-Western cultures.
We call ourselves a universal Church, but only now, after some
20 centuries, is our Church truly becoming Catholic - that is to
say, universal.
Allow me to use an analogy. Back in the 1970s, many
Western women began to say to us men: 'You don't get it.'

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 A LEAD FROM ASIA

What they meant by this was that while we men thought we

had the whole picture of Western history we were, in fact,
getting only half of it. We had not begun to see and hear the
story through women's eyes. It was as if for centuries we had
been walking on one leg without knowing it. In much the same
fashion, the Asians are saying to us today: 'You don't get it.
What you think to be the universal Church resembles to us a
basically Western template of Church. Until you really open
yourselves to Asia and Asian ways of thinking, you are not
seeing the full picture.' Our Eastern Catholic brothers and
sisters are telling us we have only grasped the Yang, and still
wait to meet the Yin.
The question is: 'Do we get it?' Are we willing to open
ourselves to new ways at looking at our Church? And are
we willing to take necessary risks to become more inclusive,
more open, and more sensitive to other cultures and religions?
Are we willing to allow these cultures to influence our own
approaches to faith and religious practices? Are we really will-
ing to believe that evangelisation is a two-way process, that as
the Church evangelises people, cultures evangelise the Church?
We hear it again and again: we are living in an era of rapid
change. But can we grasp the deeper dimensions of this change?
Take simple demographics. The human family is changing
shape - and rapidly. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
there were roughly 2.6 billion people on the planet. At the end
of the century, those two digits had reversed: there were
6.2 billion on the planet. If the world's population were shrunk
to a village of 100 persons, Asia would be a very prominent
villager. There would be 58 Asians and 33 Christians, of
whom 17 Catholics. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
80 per cent of Catholics lived in the northern and western
hemispheres: in Europe, North and South America. By the

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year 2020, this, too, will have been reversed. By then, 80 per
cent of all Catholics will live in the eastern and southern
hemispheres. Already, 70 per cent of all Catholics live outside
Europe and North America.
These figures beg further exploration. Like it or not, we are
becoming a Church of the poor. For some 17 centuries our
Church has lived in an environment of relative privilege;
increasingly this is no longer so. As the number of Catholics
has grown, so, too, have the ranks of the marginalised, the
hungry and the poor. Some 60 per cent of the human family,
remember, lives on only one or two dollars a day. And as this
essay was being written the Church officially announced that
its membership now tops the one billion mark.

The Asian Catholic Story

To understand better what the Asian Catholics are saying we
need to go back in time by at least one generation. The latest
phase of the Asian pastoral story began shortly after the Second
Vatican Council in the late 1960s. It was an exciting time for
the Church worldwide and Asia was no exception. In Asia at
that time the bishops and theologians could still remember first-
hand the painful experiences of Western colonialism. They,
too, were spirited by a greater sense of national pride and cul-
tural identity in the post-colonial period.
It was in 1964 that Pope Paul VI, responding to some of this
new fervour, travelled to Bombay for a Eucharistic Congress.
During that trip he made several stops in India. He became so
moved by its poverty that he gave the limousine in which he
travelled to Mother Teresa. She, in turn, raffled the car and
raised $100,000 for her work.
Pope Paul later noted that that trip helped inspire his 1967
papal encyclical, Populorum progressio, 'On the Development

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 A LEAD FROM ASIA

of Peoples'. For Asians, that encyclical was the defining point

of his pontificate. For a host of reasons, Humanae vitae never
had a major impact in Asia.
It was in 1970 that the then 73-year-old Pope Paul VI
returned to Asia. The highlight of that trip was a three-day
stopover in Manila where 180 Asian bishops from 15 Asian
nations had gathered to receive him.
By all accounts the Manila meeting, which focused on Popu-
lorum progressio and the theme of development, was a major
success. As the bishops approached the end of that meeting,
feeling empowered and resolute, they issued a series of state-
ments helping to define themselves and their mission. Notably
at the top of their list their number 1 resolution was their
desire to express themselves as a Church of the poor. After all,
nine out of ten Asians live in poverty.
This was really more remarkable than at first glance one
might think. For up until that time Asian Catholics were often
cut off from other Asians. They often lived in Catholic ghettoes.
The local Asian Churches had benefited from the colonisers.
And they had become alienated from other Asians. Further-
more, these Asian Catholic Churches were cut off from each
other. But when their leaders finally came together, they real-
ised they shared many common experiences, concerns and
hopes. It was during those heady days in Manila that several
bishops, led by Cardinal Stephen Kim of Seoul, Korea, hatched
the idea to keep the spirit of Manila alive by forming a new
Asian bishops' umbrella organization. Eventually it came to be
known as the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences
(FABC). Despite deep suspicion on the part of some Vatican
officials, the federation came to life - with Pope Paul's
personal endorsement - in 1972.
In the last three decades the FABC has sponsored countless
seminars, study groups and pan-Asian conferences. It has met

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in plenary session, to work out priorities and vision, every five

to seven years.
At first, Rome feared the formation of the FABC. They
were afraid it would become a counterweight in dealing with
matters of faith and morals. Rome insisted from the beginning
that the proposed FABC have no canonical 'binding author-
ity'. This suited the Asians. They replied that they were not
interested in tackling faith and morals as much as they were
interested in setting pastoral directions. Ironically, as Cardinal
Kim later told me in an interview, by not having this official
Church authority, the FABC felt much freer to discuss Church
matters and hammer out pastoral initiatives. Taking them-
selves less seriously, as it were, allowed them to get more work
done - and to become bolder in their visions.
At the time that the FABC was coming to life so too were
many Asian pastoral centres and book publishing houses. It was
atime of much energy. It was also a time of great pride: pride
in being Asian, pride in being Vietnamese, Malay, Japanese
and Filipino. What was developing was a clear focus on
local identity. This, in turn, led to a focus on local Church
and local religious experiences: local language, local theol-
ogy and local rituals.

Dialogue and renewal

The early 1970s was also a period in which Asian bishops and
theologians were hammering out what were to become the
essential components of their pastoral vision of Church. They
worked through a consensus process: not by majority votes,
but rather by trying to bring everyone aboard. It needs to
be noted that some of the progressive-conservative divisions
that we experience in our Western Churches do not exist in
Asia. This is because the Asian Churches are relatively young

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and there is less of a pre-Vatican II model to go back to.

Furthermore, the Asian bishops have placed a great emphasis
on maintaining harmony - a key Asian value.
At the core of the Asian pastoral vision is what the Asians
call the 'triple dialogue' - dialogues with the poor, with local
cultures, and with the other religions of Asia. Dialogue, the
Asians say, is both the process and the substance of evangelisa-
tion. The Asians very much see evangelisation as a two-way
street. Within dialogue there is recognition that everyone has
something to offer everyone else and everyone also has some-
thing to learn. No-one has full truth. Dialogue, then, takes place
within the Church as well as within the wider world setting.
First, dialogue with the poor means the Church lives in
solidarity with and learns from the poor. Second, dialogue with
cultures means the local Church witnesses to and takes from
local cultures all that is good and sacred, and puts the chal-
lenge of inculturation at the top of the Asian pastoral mission.
Third, dialogue with other religions means Asian Catholics see
grace at work particularly in the religious experiences of all
men and women.
When the Asian Catholics first began to consider their own
identities and their own places in the universal Church, they
confronted some basic questions about their own heritages.
It quickly became clear that it would be an insult to think that
God first came to Asia with the colonisers. At the first plenary
gathering of the FABC in Taipei in 1974 the Asian bishops
declared in an emphatic tone: 'How can we not recognise in
the religious traditions of our peoples the way in which God
has sought them through their history?'
So when did God arrive in Asia? God came to Asia with life
itself and with the first humans and as part of their first reli-
gious experiences. Therefore God's plan is, by nature, plural-
istic. Creation itself confirms this, the bishops have stated.

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They further reasoned that the hand of God operates in all

religions. Other religions are not simply to be tolerated. They
are to be studied and supported and celebrated.
At the 1998 Synod on Asia held in Rome, for example, some
Asian bishops proposed having religious texts from other
religious traditions integrated into Eucharistic ceremonies.
Rome would have nothing to do with it.
Inter-religious dialogue is a good thing. And not just to con-
vert, but to understand the mysterious and unfolding work of
God in the world. Furthermore, inter-religious dialogue for
the Asians is not simply a heady matter that takes place among
theologians; openness to other religions means sharing in the
work of building community. It is concrete. It means figur-
ing out who's going to pick up the garbage on Tuesdays and
Saturdays.
The Asian vision is about Church renewal. It is my opinion
that Catholic Asia is today at the cutting edge of Church
renewal. Should this surprise us? Should it surprise us that
renewal is coming from what we - at the alleged centre of the
Church - view as the periphery? Should it surprise us that
renewal is coming from Catholic communities that represent
small fractions of the populace in their own countries?
Most often the Asian Churches represent not more than
2 per cent of any one nation. In this regard, they are prone to be
more humble Churches. Curiously, they are more like the early
Christian communities of the first, second and third centuries.
In the West we have seen, especially in recent years, a fair
amount of hostility - or at least suspicion - between bishops
and theologians. In the East, the Asian bishops are more prone
to respect and look up to their theologians. This is because
Asians place high value on education. Academics are 'masters'.
In fact, in virtually every Asian language the word for theo-
logian is the equivalent of 'master'.

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 A LEAD FROM ASIA

Can you imagine the way working relationships would

change in our own Church if our bishops referred to their theo-
logians as 'masters'? In Asia, the bishops and theologians work
closely with each other and most often in greater harmony.

A More Collegial Church

The Asian Catholic vision believes that the local Church is the
primary Church. Theirs is a decentralised model of Church.
The universal Church, in turn, is a network of local Churches.
These ideas are not popular in Rome today. Because of their
vision, the Asian bishops, as a group, have become the fore-
most advocates for a return to a more collegial Church.
If the local Church is primary, it follows that theology is
primarily local. Local theology grows out of the experiences of
local Christians as they reflect on their relationships with each
other and with God. In this regard, Asian Catholic theology
borrows heavily from Latin-American liberation theology. But
in addition to Latin-American liberation theology, which relies
on the social sciences, Asian theology adds a specifically spir-
itual dimension.
During the 1970s and 1980s, when Vatican officials had their
sights set on limiting the influence of liberation theology in
Latin America, Asia's own version of liberation theology went
generally unnoticed in Rome. It was only in 1989, after the fall
of the Berlin Wall, when liberation theology no longer raised
the spectre of socialism through the back door, that Roman
prelates began to look suspiciously at Asia. But by then it was
too late. The horses were already well out of the stable.
The Asian Synod, one of several called by the Pope to pre-
pare the Church for the new millennium, opened on 19 April
1998. It was the first time the Asian bishops had the oppor-
tunity to present their vision of Church outside of Asia. In the

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month that followed, observers witnessed a struggle between

two distinctly different views of evangelisation. It was all very
polite and all very remarkable. Vatican prelates said evangelisa-
tion was all about proclaiming Jesus as the saviour to the world.
The Asian bishops, in contrast, virtually to the last person,
stressed that evangelisation was all about witnessing to the
gospel. In many nations, some bishops noted, to proclaim Jesus
would be a capital crime. The Asians came to the Synod with
many suggestions as to how to run the Church. By the time it
ended, the Vatican had thrown virtually every one of them out.
One Asian bishop seemed to characterise the feelings of many
others when he said: 'They didn't pay any attention to our ideas
here and we won't have to pay attention to theirs after we
return home.'

The Lead from Asia

What emerged at the Synod was a model of Church that places
at its centre the vision of building the reign of God on earth.
It is not a vision of Church focused on gaining more conver-
sions. It is a vision of Church based on working for the building
of a more just and peaceful world.
I see this model of Church in dialogue with the world, giving
and taking, serving and learning, gaining grounds in many
parts of the Church. The Spirit is alive in the world. She will
lead us if we are open to discernment and to taking risks. She
will lead us if we remain imaginative and committed Catholics
and faithful to the Gospels. She will lead us if we remain
followers of Christ.
My sense is that we need to continue to dream and to en-
courage each other. We need to support each other. We need
to challenge each other. We need to place our Church at the

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service of a very hurting and very fractionalised human family.

We can do this. We must do this. And above all we must never
stop being hope-filled people.

Note
1 Jacques Dupuis, SJ, 'Christianity and Other Religions: From
Confrontation to Encounter', series of three articles, The Tablet
(20 October 2001, pp. 1484-5; 27 October 2001, pp. 1520-1;
and 3 November 2001, pp. 1560-1).

239
 16
How Base Communities Started:
Paraguay's Christian Agrarian Leagues
Margaret Hebblethwaite

Of all the continents, none more than Latin America seized

the Vatican II torch of inspiration and carried it forward. The
Council had understood the Church as 'the People of God'.
In Latin America, the people are poor, so the Church became
seen as the Church of the Poor, and the gospel as good news to
the Poor. It was simple, but revolutionary.
The bishops' conference that decisively drew together the
threads from the Latin-American countries and wove them
into a new garment was the meeting of the bishops' confer-
ences in Medellin, Colombia, which took place in that year of
universal world upheaval, 1968. This was Latin America's
Vatican II, which turned the Church upside down, so that it
became bottom-up instead of top-down. In particular Medellin
promoted what it called 'the Christian base community' as 'the
first and fundamental nucleus of the Church' and 'currently
the prime factor in human promotion and development'.1
All this is familiar and well-worn ground. What is not famil-
iar, and never published in English - and barely accessible
even in Spanish - is how this extraordinary ferment began in
one of the earliest and most daring ventures of Christian base
communities - the Christian Agrarian Leagues (Ligas Agrarias
Cristianas, or LAC) of Paraguay. When historians trace the
origins of Christian base communities, they customarily look

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 HOW BASE COMMUNITIES STARTED

towards Paraguay's big neighbour, Brazil: either to the cat-

echists in Volta Redonda, near Rio de Janeiro, in the late 1950s,
or to the Movimento de Educafdo de Base, with its radio
schools, in Rio Grande do Norte in the early 1960s. The Brazil-
ian military coup of 1964 gave added motivation to work in
base communities - because a vehicle of resistance was needed.
The Bishops' Joint Pastoral Plan of 1965-70 (which began in
the year Vatican II ended) explicitly said: 'Our present parishes
will or should be composed of various local communities and
basic communities.' Then came Medellin.
The part of this story that has not been told is how, at the
same time as Brazil was making its first moves towards Chris-
tian base communities in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Para-
guay was too. The memory has been lost, partly because
Paraguay, unlike its powerful neighbour Brazil, is a small, over-
looked country with poor communications, and partly because
the Paraguayan versions were totally eliminated in 1976. For a
number of years the communities in both countries flourished
under persecution, growing in religious credibility and sanctity,
but in the end the Paraguayan Leagues were bloodily wiped
out - and almost wiped out of memory.
Rediscovering these early communities - the forerunners of
the huge network of Christian base communities that we have
today - involves studying a few surviving examples of badly
duplicated, typed pages on yellowing, crumbling paper, often
written in Guarani. There are six such papers, preserved by
Jesuit priest Vicente Barreto (himself a torture survivor from
the persecution, and today parish priest of Santa Maria in
Misiones, Paraguay). They are only fragments of a history, but
they provide half a dozen snapshots of a story familiar all over
Latin America in the wake of Vatican II. Nowhere was the
early story of the base communities more poignant than in
Paraguay, and nowhere was it more intense.

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The Birth of the Leagues

The Leagues began in Jesuit parishes in the rural area of
Misiones. Like so many of the first Christian base commu-
nities, they developed under the influence of Catholic Action,
with its methodology of 'see, judge, act' that brought Christian
commitment right into the heart of everyday life. In 1960 the
first Leagues began in Santa Rosa. Two years later, a Regional
Federation was formed (Federation Regional de las Ligas
Agrarias Cristianas, FERELAC), taking in the four neighbour-
ing municipalities of Santa Rosa, Santa Maria, San Ignacio
and San Patricio. The first three had been Jesuit Reductions in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - another Jesuit-
initiated movement for organising the poor (at that date, the
indigenous) which was forcibly suppressed in 1768. History
repeats itself.
Were the Leagues, in fact, some of the earliest Christian base
communities - possibly even the first ones? That is a matter of
definition. They did not belong to the Church structure in the
way of the 'ecclesial base communities' defined by the Latin
American bishops' general conference of Puebla in 1979 - by
which time the Leagues had been suppressed. They had more
lay independence than in that definition, but it is abundantly
clear from reading the typed documents that this vibrant,
biblically based movement for transforming society belongs
to the same family as the Christian base communities (the
term used at Medellin), whether or not it is formally identified
with them.
The first yellowing, typed document is a 25-page booklet
called La Iglesia Ko'agdgua Ne'e ('The Word from the Church
Today'), duplicated in October 1970. The type changes half-
way through from capital letters to a conventional type. The
leaflet simply translates into the local language of Guarani

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 HOW BASE COMMUNITIES STARTED

some brief selections from four official church documents:

the encyclical Populorum progressio, Vatican II, Medellin and
a Paraguayan bishops' joint pastoral on education. There
are five themes - the plan of God, justice, peace, politics and
education.
Next, written on the same capital-letter machine, comes a
32-page report from a 'National Seminar of the Christian
Agrarian Leagues (23-29 April 1970)', in which 80 partici-
pants from 22 Leagues tried to hammer out exactly what kind
of organisation they were - what a theologian would call 'the
ecclesiology of the Leagues'. There are eight questions sub-
mitted for discussion, and the answers express many ideas
typical of the Vatican II-Medellin ferment, such as the dignity
and independence of the laity, the essential interlinking of this-
worldly and other-worldly salvation, and the importance of
collaboration with non-Catholics seeking the same goals.
'Are the Leagues an economic organisation?' Answer: No.
'The economic dimension alone will not liberate people from
their exploitation. The spiritual and moral formation of the
campesinos must accompany the economic.'
'Are they a trade-union organisation?' No. 'The Leagues
seek the integral liberation of all people, whatever their class.'
'Are they a political organisation?' Yes, in the sense that
they 'seek the common good'. But 'we have no interest in party
political polkas or colours, nor in anything else that divides
campesinos'.
'Are they a confessional organisation?' No-one could agree
on this. Yes, in that they are 'inspired by the Gospel', and
'based on Christian social doctrine'. But they are not closed to
those who are not Catholics.
'Are they a Christian organisation?' Yes. 'Christianity to-
day is really revolutionary', they declare. 'The documents of
the Council and of Medellin are really revolutionary, but the

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Gospel continues to be the most revolutionary of all.' They

continue, 'This is not a parish or a diocesan organisation. It is
run by its own authorities, without depending on any priest or
bishop.' There is a reason for this, for 'very often the priests
themselves fall into a paternalism which prevents the Leagues'
growth, and this happens all the more because the campesinos
accept so easily any idea that comes from the priests'. So 'the
priest can help, but not manage, the Leagues'.
'Are the Leagues an independent and autonomous organi-
sation?' Yes. They are 'made up of campesinos and directed
by them'.
'Are they a unitary organisation?' All agreed on the need
to unify the two Federations, the 1964-founded FENELAC
(Federation National de Ligas Agrarias Cristianas] and the
1965-founded FCC (Federation Campesina Cristiana], which
operated in different regions. The unity actually came the
following year (1971), under a new network called KOGA
(Kokuegudra Okaraygua GuaraniAty or 'National Coordina-
tion of Christian Campesino Bases').
'Are they a democratic organisation?' Yes, and 'when a
small group of leaders makes decisions without the participa-
tion of the campesinos it is an affront to their dignity'.
After these eight questions comes discussion on how change
can be brought about, with many ideas typical of liberation
theology, such as 'We want to make the human person the true
subject of change'; 'Change is necessary if we are to work to
live, not work to die'; 'If we do not change, a few will have all
the wealth and the rest nothing, and this does not correspond
to God's plan.' The term so much associated with Brazilian
educator Paulo Freire, conscientisation ('awareness-raising'),
makes an appearance - Freire's team had in fact visited Para-
guay - as does that great Latin-American word lucha, or
'struggle'.

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 HOW BASE COMMUNITIES STARTED

Conscientisation is important because it motivates

campesinos to commit themselves to struggle for a just
structure ... The capitalist structure is like a house that
we all live in. Its pillars are rotten and need shoring up to
prevent the building collapsing, and we campesinos are
the ones who are removing the props. If we do not
dismantle the house we will not be able to breathe the
fresh air that we need.

In retrospect we might point out the danger of using such

language in a political context where criticism of capitalism
was taken as evidence of communism, and where to be a com-
munist was to be deemed worthy of death. Talk of the gospel
as revolutionary no doubt was also liable to misinterpretation.

The Activities of the Leagues

The Seminar leaflet goes on to mention the activities of the
Leagues, which are typical of the services of solidarity found in
many Christian base communities, but here conceived with a
Paraguayan flavour. There are economic services such as the
community agricultural work of minga, the administration of
food through bulk buying, the mutual help to those in need
called jopoi, and the campesino schools.
A fuller description of these services is given in a book
published in 1982, during General Alfredo Stroessner's 35-year
dictatorship and for safety written anonymously and published
in Colombia.2 The minga was an ancient indigenous custom,
by which several men would work in turns in each one's field,
to make the work lighter and quicker and to strengthen friend-
ship. They could also work a field owned in common. The
women would more typically keep a common henhouse, raise
pigs in common or cook something to sell.

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The money earned by the minga would be used to buy food

in common, which by bulk buying could be secured at a 40 per
cent discount. The Leagues would run their own shops, staffed
by volunteers on a rota, so that the cheaper prices could
benefit more people, not just League members but anyone who
was needy, if they paid a symbolic quota. This annoyed the
shopkeepers, who found they were losing trade and charged
the Leagues with 'communism'. But, say the authors,

These community shops are a prophetic cry of protest

against the fact that a few, precisely because they have
more money than the others, can exploit the majority
precisely because they don't have money. In this way the
rich get richer and the poor get poorer.3

The jopoi was another ancient Guarani concept, which

again became incorporated in the Leagues. A traditional
expression of it would be that when one family kills a pig, it
shares it with the neighbouring families, and they in turn do
the same when they have an animal to eat. The idea of helping
neighbours became incorporated in the Leagues, and often
Saturday would be set aside for the jopoi, much of which was
to repair houses.
The campesino schools are the subject of a separate small
document of three typed and stapled pages. They began in 1971
as a response to the needs of children whose families could not
afford the cost of books, shoes and uniforms, or who had been
labelled as 'problem kids' because they were children of League
members and put awkward questions to the teachers. So the
Leagues began training teachers themselves: 28 schools were
opened, serving 628 pupils. The Leagues believed strongly that
the schools should be run 'from the bottom upwards', and that
the teachers should be 'campesino-born, truly Christian,

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 HOW BASE COMMUNITIES STARTED

exemplary, pacific, and with a deep knowledge of the principles

of the Leagues'. As for teachers who were not from the
campesino base, 'we need their collaboration, but they should
accept our revolutionary cause'.
The importance of the campesino schools is well expressed
in another anonymously written book shortly after the end of
the dictatorship, which mostly consists of interviews with
torture survivors:

They had the audacity to create the explosive campe-

sino schools, because they were discovering and simul-
taneously putting into practice a previously unknown
weapon: education. This was no longer domesticating
education. It was not education for domination, humilia-
tion and fear, for quietism and for state control. The edu-
cation they discovered had a capital E: it was the educa-
tion confirmed by the second meeting of Latin-American
bishops in Medellin as true education. Education that
is liberating, that sets the whole person - individually
and socially, spiritually and materially - on the road to
development and liberation.4

The fourth crumbling document is a stapled hymnbook

called Onopehengueixa ('As Brothers'). It is the only one with a
picture on the front - a simple black silhouette of a man in a
sombrero sitting on a stool and playing a guitar, while a young
man and a woman with a babe in arms stand behind him to
sing, all of them underneath a little thatched roof. Theologi-
cally, this is the most interesting document of all, as its Guarani
hymns (with Spanish translations) capture a theology that is
so biblically based that the hymns run in chronological order
from Genesis to the Epistles - a systematic rendering of the
Bible into song that I have never seen before in a hymnbook.

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Putting the Bible into the hands of the people - and the
language of the people - was one of the most important
advances of Vatican II. In Latin America that meant discover-
ing the insights of the poor, for whom more than anyone the
message is good news. It has been a long-term process, for the
first complete Guarani translation of the Bible was only
published in 1996, nearly 30 years after Medellin and 20 years
after the Leagues were suppressed.
The crucial act of putting the Bible in the hands of cam-
pesinos has been well expressed by Ignacio Telesca (an Argen-
tinian ex-Jesuit historian who has been working in Paraguay
for many years):

It was only after the Council that the Bible began to be

used by the campesinos, and by the people in general.
Up to that moment the Bible seemed to be a sort of
secret book that only a few people had the right to use.
Not so any longer. The Bible became the key book for
innumerable campesinos.
It is not easy for us, who were not alive at the time, to
imagine the change that would be implied by being able
to read the Bible, the power to take part in Masses that
were now being said in Spanish. But above all, to dis-
cover that the history of the people of God, the history
of Jesus himself, had so much in common with the
history of so many men and women of the campo.
Imagine the situation: a group of campesinos hold a
meeting in a circle, in the house of one member of the
community or in their small chapel, and in the middle of
them is the coordinator. All have their Bible in their
hand and opening the very first pages they discover that
God created us to live as brothers and sisters.

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 HOW BASE COMMUNITIES STARTED

It is no longer that the priest is saying this in his

homily, or that some leader come down from Asuncion is
giving a talk on brotherhood. It is in the Bible itself that
they find the dream of God for humanity, a dream that all
should be brothers and sisters. This is the fundamental
starting point. Every course begins here, with the full
conviction that what the Leagues wanted to achieve was
precisely what God wanted for all human beings.5

In Oriopehengueixa the hymns do indeed begin with precisely

that theme. The message of creation is that 'We were created
brothers and sisters', while the theme of original sin is 'Broken
brotherhood'. Moses' story is interpreted as 'The struggle for
liberation', and the prophets bring a message that 'God does
not listen to the exploiters'. In the New Testament, a hymn
about Jesus is called 'Christ the Liberator':

Christ came among the poor because he knew his

doctrine would bear fruit there:
From the poor and with the poor, the whole world can
move forward.

Then there is 'Levelling out the inequalities' (the message of

John the Baptist), 'The Liberator of the oppressed' (Luke 4, in
the Nazareth synagogue), 'God trusts in the poor' (the calling
of the Twelve) and 'Conditions for the Reign of brotherhood'
(the Beatitudes):

Blessed are those who seek the reign of justice,

With a clean heart, so as to be pleasing to God,
Without politicking, without double intentions,
Without misleading the people, without abusing them.

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Jesus' words, 'On the foundations of Moses and the Prophets',

illustrate how central the Exodus theme is in liberation
theology:
What Moses and the Prophets said in bygone times
Will be for ever a firm foundation of the brotherhood
which is on the march.
We live today as in Egypt, in oppression and in fear,
And there will only be Christian love when the slavery is
brought to an end.
The blood of the New Covenant' teaches:
With his redeeming blood he calls everyone on an
equal basis
To form a new People where Brotherhood reigns.
We renew this pact in the Mass, which is love,
It is the union of brothers and sisters, to give yourself
for others.
Moving on to Acts, 'The First Communities' evokes the text so
often used by Christian base communities:
Land, work and harvest, the new people of brothers and
sisters held everything in common,
No one would suffer misery, everything was done
together. [Acts 2:42-7]
The theology of the Agrarian Leagues is clear from these
hymns: God made us brothers and sisters, but the experience of
our poor is on the contrary one of exploitation and oppression.

Repression of the Leagues

The fifth yellowing document comprises four typewritten
pages and is headed 'Persecution of the Church in the Misiones

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 HOW BASE COMMUNITIES STARTED

region'. This is an early record, running for only three years,

February 1969 to May 1972, while the climax of the violence
which wiped out the Leagues came in 1976. But it shows how
the Leagues were persecuted from early on for their alternative
lifestyle and economy. Here are a few extracts to give a flavour,
beginning with a reference to Stroessner's huge network of
informers:

1969, March: General threat of the authorities against

the campesino organisations: LAC, JAC (Ligas Agrarias
Cristianas, Juventud Agraria Cristiana). There are
reports that the Army, through the Ministry of Defence
(two generals and various colonels and officials), has
developed systematic and efficient channels for getting
hold of information on all the Misiones region ...
1970, October 26: San Patricio: The Government
Delegate, Dr Juan Crisostomo Gaona, in a talk to the
teaching staff of the High School, gives the order to
report members of the Colorado party who spend a long
time talking with priests or campesino leaders. He for-
bids the teachers to go to Mass and listen to the priests ...
1971, May 17: Isidro Arguello, Corcino Coronel.
Arrested and held incommunicado in the Delegation of
Government. Submitted to hard labour, with system-
atically interrupted rest. With psychological torture that
they will all suffer consequences for their health. Freed
on 27 May ...
1972, February 22-23: detention and expulsion from
the country of Fr Vicente Barreto, who was working in
San Ignacio with the campesinos ... [This is the same
priest whose papers we are reading.]
1972, March 26: San Juan Bautista: Photographer
summoned before the Government Delegate, requiring

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him to hand over the photographic reel of the work he

had just been doing at the Palm Sunday ceremonies ...
1972, April 18-23: San Solano (Santa Rosa), Marriage
course. Esteban Gonzalez (householder), captured and
disappeared. The next day three campesinos received
summonses and were seized: Gonzalez (brother of the dis-
appeared man), Garay and Medina. Transferred to San
Juan Bautista and then sent to the Technical Department
for the Repression of Communism (Asuncion). Interro-
gated. Put in narrow cells and on permanent fast. They
were in prison one month and 20 days. They were freed,
declaring that they had been taken innocently.

There are some impressive stories of solidarity among the

campesinos as they faced arrest. In 1970 in Quindy, when a
summons was issued for a campesino leader, 150 campesinos
turned up at the police station. 'Which one of you is so-and-
so?' asked the officer, and they all replied they were, with one
voice. Then a spokesman explained that what concerned one
concerned them all, because they were brothers, and they were
all willing to be arrested. Then they sat down in the street and
sang at the top of their voices. There were special songs written
for such times of arrest, of which the most popular went:

Let us lift our hands, let us embrace,

for we are brothers and we did not know it!
Our journey has been a long one and it has been
very hard
To discover this beautiful idea, so long hidden.6

The sixth and final document picks up the story later, after
a gap of a few years, and is simply four pages of narrow
typescript, in two columns, headed 'List of those arrested from

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 HOW BASE COMMUNITIES STARTED

the Agrarian Leagues 1977-1979'. There are 392 names, and

they include three men personally known to me today as
among the most devout and reliable Catholics of Santa Maria.
Those years of 1977-79 marked a different stage: no longer
were the Leagues harassed, but totally suppressed.
What had happened was this. In 1976 an underground
organisation, the OPM, was discovered, and a few of the mem-
bers - not many - were also members of the Leagues. OPM
stood for Organization Primero de Marzo (1 March was the
date of death of Paraguay's nineteenth-century hero, Mariscal
Lopez) and it was dedicated to working for the overthrow of
the dictatorship. But the more militant also began to call it the
Organizacidn Politico-Militar. The work of the OPM was
dangerous; whenever possible, members were prevented from
knowing the identity of their colleagues in case they revealed
the information under torture. They would sit, for example, in
church pews, one behind the other, and talk without seeing the
other's face. Despite the precautions, OPM papers were found
by the police, one discovery led to another, some members
were killed directly, others died under torture, and others again
were forced to betray their colleagues. One of these was Diego
Abente, recently a presidential candidate, but nicknamed 'the
golden beak' or 'the singing cockerel' for what he revealed
when his pregnant wife was tortured beside him.
Because a link with some members of the Leagues had been
discovered, the campesino movement was completely wiped
out. The series of arrests was known as the Pascua Dolorosa,
the Sorrowful Easter, because it all happened in Holy Week
1976. Some campesinos were killed; others were imprisoned
for years in awful conditions; all were tortured; and their
wives, left at home, frequently had miscarriages with the shock
and the worry. Which is worse: to suffer yourself, or to imagine
the unseen sufferings of a loved one? The Leagues were never

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refounded, though campesino Christian Communities (Comu-

nidas Cristianas) were, in the late 1980s, with a more church-
centred orientation.
The Jesuits involved with the Leagues, being mainly Span-
iards, were simply expelled. The exception was the Paraguayan
Jesuit, Vicente Barreto, who was both tortured and expelled.
All the expelled Jesuits went on to do valuable work elsewhere,
but they did not lose their commitment to Paraguay, and when
the dictatorship ended they nearly all came back.

The Sign of the Leagues

How prophetic were these words of the 1970 Seminar booklet,
to be fulfilled just six years later:
Christ himself, who came into the world to free people
from everything that enslaved them, was not under-
stood, and was persecuted to the point of being killed.
Christ had true love. Those who accepted and followed
his example were persecuted, imprisoned and slaugh-
tered. Today we call them saints. In this sense, if we take
the work of the Leagues seriously and with Christian
responsibility, it is very possible that saints will also
appear among ourselves.
The words contain a challenge for the future, for where there
are saints there must be an inspiration for future genera-
tions - what Rome calls, in its conditions for canonisation,
a 'cult'. There must be a memory of the past. And all over Latin
America today, as people gain confidence that the age of
dictatorships is over and they will no longer be imprisoned for
speaking the truth, there is talk of 'recovering memory'. One
phrase that is often repeated is nunca mas - 'never again' -

254
 HOW BASE COMMUNITIES STARTED

which was used as the title for dossiers documenting dis-

appearances in Guatemala and Argentina compiled by human
rights organisations. Nunca mds means that only by recalling
the abuses of the past, and condemning them, can a society
have any confidence that those days will not recur.
The memory of the Leagues is weak. Even though there are
survivors - in many cases with permanent health problems
from their torture - they live side by side with the people who
were informers or policemen. The society has to heal, as people
live together a new life without rancour, but at the same time
the temptation must be avoided to suppress the past. The
balance is a tricky one, as Chile in the post-Pinochet era has
shown. Many of the younger generation in Misiones today
have not even heard of the Agrarian Leagues, even when they
come from families directly involved in the organisation. Fear
has wiped out the transmission of the memory: often it is the
historians from Asuncion who know more about the Leagues
than the younger campesinos. Outside the country, the story is
virtually unknown, and the recovery of memory is an inter-
national task that faces us all. When campesinos find their story
valued by those who come from far away, they are helped to
value it themselves.
Shortly before this book went to press, a tiny but beautiful
initiative to recover the memory of the Agrarian Leagues
began in a craft workshop of Santa Maria. In response to an
order placed by Ignacio Telesca, the older women began to
make banners to commemorate the life they had known in the
Agrarian Leagues, with applique and embroidery. There is a
series of six, showing the minga and the jopoi, the biblical
reflection groups and the campesino schools, the arrests and
the tortures, all set in the Paraguayan landscape of bright sun,
scruffy palm trees and gently rolling hills.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

'A beautiful way to remember', is how the German lib-

eration theologian, Margot Bremer, who lives in Asuncion,
describes the initiative:

No one could live with photographs of torture on their

walls, but by converting these experiences into works of
art, the story can be lived with on a daily basis. This is
the way to hand the story on to our children.

Notes
1 'Pastoral de conjunto', Documentos finales de Medellth (Medellin:
Segunda Conferencia General del Espiscopado Latinoamericano,
Septiembre de 1968). Author's translation.
2 En busca de 'la Tierra sin Mai': movimientos campesinos en
el Paraguay 1960-1980 (Bogota: Indo-American Press Service,
1982), with a prologue by the Brazilian Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga.
3 Ibid. p. 45.
4 Comisidn National de Rescate y Difusion de la Historia Cam-
pesina, Kokueguara Rembiasa (Asuncion: CEPAG , 1992). The
four volumes consist of interviews with torture survivors.
5 Extract from the book he is writing on the history of the Agrarian
Leagues, not yet completed. I acknowledge with gratitude his help
in preparing this chapter.
6 En busca de (la Tierra sin Mal\ p. 49.

256
 17
Truth beyond Division:
Eastern Meditation and Western Christianity
Shirley du Bonlay

Since the Second Vatican Council's declaration on non-

Christian religions, Nostra aetate, two tides seem to be run-
ning in opposite directions. On the one hand interreligious
dialogue flourishes and countless individuals practise medita-
tions based on Eastern traditions; on the other, the Church's
generosity to other religions seems to have ebbed, its new atti-
tude one of suspicion rather than the joy of discovery. This has
been apparent notably in its attitude towards Christians prac-
tising Eastern meditation.
I first came across Eastern meditation in the early 1960s.
After just a few weeks, for the first time after years of rather
desultory Anglicanism, I began to glimpse the meaning of the
Fourth Gospel; I thrilled to a new understanding of what
the Psalmist meant when he said, 'Darkness and light to Thee
are both alike'; I read The Cloud of Unknowing, moved to the
core by lines such as 'A naked intention directed to God, and
himself alone, is wholly sufficient.' Twenty-five years later,
after hours of Eastern meditation, much reading of Eastern
texts and Christian mystics, in particular Meister Eckhart,
I became a Roman Catholic. The East, far from taking me away
from Christianity, had drawn me to its heart in a new way.
Ten years earlier, a devout Catholic layman had made a
similar journey, one that was to have far-reaching results. John

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Main was working in Malaysia when he met a Hindu Swami,

who ran an interfaith centre in Kuala Lumpur. The Swami intro-
duced John Main to a method of Eastern meditation, telling
him it would deepen his experience of Christianity. It did; and
on returning to England he became a Benedictine monk of
Ealing Abbey in west London, where he was advised by his
novicemaster to give up his practice of silent meditation.
But this was far from the end of the story. While studying
the early Christian tradition and the Fathers of the Church, he
found a method of meditation mentioned in the Conferences,
conversations with the great leaders of Eastern monasticism
collected at the beginning of the fifth century by John Cassian.
It was essentially the same method he had been taught by the
Hindu Swami and been advised against practising by his mon-
astery. In 1975 he began to teach this method to a few people at
Ealing. The group grew steadily; and now, 20 years after John
Main's death and under the leadership of Laurence Freeman,
also a Benedictine monk (of Cockfosters in north London), it
is known as the World Community for Christian Meditation.
It is impossible to estimate the numbers who now practise, but
there are some 2,000 groups spread through 60 countries,
meeting in churches, homes, prisons and hospitals. Its quarterly
newsletter goes to 25,000 people and its website receives hun-
dreds of thousands of visitors. This 'monastery without walls'
has saved countless Christians from giving up their faith, for
they find in it not only a simple method of meditation, but also
one that is acceptable to their Church.

The Pull of the East

Why are so many people drawn to Eastern meditation? What
do they find in it that they cannot find in the prayer and

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 TRUTH BEYOND DIVISION

liturgy of their parish churches, and why does it make the

Vatican nervous?
In the sixties the thought of spending half an hour in silence
was thought odd rather than sinful; I remember being told I
was 'much too cheerful to need to meditate'. Once I suggested
that a weekend conference on prayer should start with silent
meditation in a circle and was told first that it wasn't possible,
because there would be people there of different denomi-
nations, and then, horror of horrors, that 'people might SEE
each other'. Again, as I looked for Christian parallels with
what I was finding in the East, I lit on the eighteenth-century
Jesuit, Jean Pierre de Caussade, who did much to rehabilitate
mysticism, and was warned off him.
Yet despite resistance from some quarters, many Westerners
have explored the Eastern traditions and in bringing back this
wisdom have helped Christians to discover meditation in their
own tradition. During the latter half of the twentieth century
these include the American monks Thomas Merton and Thomas
Keating, and the Jesuits Anthony de Mello and William John-
ston. Two European Benedictines who between them spent over
60 years in India and wrote about their experience at length
were the Englishman Bede Griffiths and the Frenchman Henri
Le Saux, who took the name of Abhishiktananda. Bede Griffiths
said he went to India to find the other half of his soul:

I had begun to find that there was something lacking not

only in the Western world but in the Western Church.
We were living from one half of our soul, from the con-
scious, rational level and we needed to discover the other
half, the unconscious, intuitive dimension. I wanted to
experience in my life the marriage of these two dimen-
sions of human existence, the rational and intuitive, the

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

conscious and unconscious, the masculine and femi-

nine. I wanted to find the way to the marriage of East
and West.1

Abhishiktananda, who was led to India by a blind urge he hardly

understood himself, was, like Bede, devoted to the Catho-
lic Church but painfully aware that it was in crisis. He was
convinced that the salvation of both the Church and the world
lay in the 'simple deepening of the sense of the intimate
presence of God'.2 His longing for it burst out in a letter to a
priest friend: 'If only the Church were spiritually radiant.'3
Later he admitted that it was in his deep dissatisfaction that his
desire to go to India was born.
The pull to the East is part of the wider trend towards
globalisation, but there can be no denying that there was -
and still is - a large element of dissatisfaction with the insti-
tutional Churches. Every institution faces this danger. The
structure that longs to preserve the original spirit risks be-
coming frozen in the letter - hence the famous remark of the
Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung: 'I am so glad I am Jung and not a
Jungian.' Human institutions tend to become more human, less
divine, as they get further from their source; which is perhaps
why the mystical dimension of Christianity is little in evidence
to most churchgoers, who often express sadness that the Christ
they worship is presented under the trappings of a legalistic
Church. It is that mystical dimension to which so many people
are drawn today. The diversity of modern living has strength-
ened our need for unity; the flight from God to science and
technology has led to our realisation that we are nothing if we
do not make the journey inwards.
Abhishiktananda maintained that interiority is the special
grace of India, and that, despite the mystical depths experi-
enced and formulated by Christians such as Ruysbroeck, Tauler

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 TRUTH BEYOND DIVISION

and Meister Eckhart, Western rationalism has always defied

and feared the mystery of the beyond; above all it has feared
Anteriority.4 Yet there is today a thirst for mysticism, for interi-
ority, a longing for experience, a total experience of head and
heart over a preoccupation with doctrine and dogma - even
over liturgical beauty. Though in the West this yearning tends
to be overshadowed by theological formulations, it is there, for
instance, in the seventeenth-century English poet and divine,
Thomas Traherne:
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth
in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and
crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole
heir to the whole world, and more so, because those are in
it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can
sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold
and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.5
So, as people searching for the vibrant spiritual life they
found lacking in their Churches looked to the East, a two-way
traffic began. Some physically travelled to India; many more
stayed at home, read Eastern scriptures and took to Eastern
practices. The traffic came the other way, too: there was an
influx of Easterners, particularly Indians, bearing the message
of the East to the West. There were wastrels and idlers among
those going East, and the travelling gurus included charlatans
and bearers of instant enlightenment. But in among the dross
was gold, the gift that is the goal of every true seeker.

The Church's Response: Three Documents

The Catholic Church responded to the growing impact of East-
ern religion in three documents. The first, proclaimed dur-
ing the Second Vatican Council in 1965, was Nostra aetate,

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a gentle, conciliatory document which encourages dialogue and

collaboration with the followers of other religions, rejects any
sort of discrimination or harassment against those of other
faiths and urges that past differences be forgotten. The docu-
ment esteems Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, and makes clear
that The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy
in these religions', acknowledging that they 'often reflect a ray
of that Truth which enlightens all men' - a passage which Bede
Griffiths in particular saw as a green light in his work towards
the marriage of East and West. Four years later Archbishop
Pegnedoli, Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangeli-
sation of Peoples, in his inaugural address to the All India
Seminar of 1969, described India as 'a land intoxicated by God'
which 'appears today as a hope and a light of history and for
the future of humanity'.6 The doors were opening; Christians
were encouraged to believe that the exploration of Eastern
mysticism, far from being forbidden territory, was approved.
However, 25 years later the Congregation of the Doctrine of
the Faith felt it necessary to respond to what it described as the
'urgent need' for sure criteria of a doctrinal and pastoral char-
acter on the subject of Eastern meditation. The CDF's 'Letter
to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on some aspects of
Christian meditation' of 15 October 1989 warns, in a section
provocatively called 'Erroneous ways of praying' that the
attempt to 'fuse Christian meditation with that which is non-
Christian' is not free from dangers and errors - though it later
softened this with the assurance that these ways should not
be 'rejected out of hand simply because they are not Chris-
tian'. Yet methods of meditation from Hinduism and Bud-
dhism, Zen sitting, Transcendental Meditation and Yoga were
now described as a 'problem'. The Vatican consulted no-one in
India and its letter presented a purely Western view. It conies as

262
 TRUTH BEYOND DIVISION

no surprise to learn that it was badly received on the sub-

continent, not least by the Indian bishops.
What were Catholics following these practices supposed to
do? They were not finding fulfilment in their parish churches,
nor were they encouraged to follow practices which they
found renewed and deepened their Christian orthodoxy. But
official documents have rarely stifled spiritual movement: the
drift from the Churches continued, and interest in the East
continued to grow.
Then, in September 2000, the CDF released its declaration
on the unique salvific power of Jesus and the Church, Domi-
nus lesus. The document is critical of 'one-sided accentuations'
which, for instance, are silent about Christ, on the grounds that
he can only be understood by Christians, yet speak at length of
the kingdom, because 'different people, cultures and religions
are capable of finding common ground in the one divine real-
ity'.7 Similarly the document criticises people who say little on
the mystery of redemption, but who stress the mystery of crea-
tion, reflected in the diversity of culture and beliefs. Surely this
attempt to find common ground is a ray of light for interreligious
dialogue? Should it not be encouraged rather than rejected?
Those charged with writing this document would have
known that it was inflammatory and would be greeted with
dismay both in ecumenical circles and the interfaith movement.
The non-Catholic Churches were told that they 'suffer from
defects' and could not be described as 'Churches in the proper
sense'. While it was granted that they contained elements of
sanctification and truth, the Church of Christ, Dominus lesus
said, 'continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church', add-
ing, with barely concealed triumphalism, that these Churches
'derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth
entrusted to the Catholic Church'.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

The same attempt to be even-handed, yet in the end to

dismiss, was made in regard to the non-Christian religions. The
personal equality of people in dialogue was acknowledged, but
specifically in opposition to equality of doctrinal content: there
was quite simply no question of that. It was granted that the
various religious traditions contain 'elements which come from
God ... Indeed, some prayers and rituals of the other religions
assume a role of preparation for the Gospel.' However, hard on
the heels of this morsel of encouragement comes the statement
that this cannot be attributed to divine origin. Furthermore, the
document goes on, 'other rituals, insofar as they depend on
superstitions or other errors, constitute an obstacle to salva-
tion'. The document states that the Church has sincere respect
for the religions of the world. But this is followed by the line
most cited in the weeks following the promulgation of Domi-
nus lesus:

If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive

divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking
they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison
with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the
means of salvation.

There was an outcry. Jewish, Protestant, Buddhist and

Muslim leaders were deeply hurt at what they understand-
ably took to be a presumption of the inferiority of their faiths
and Churches. There was also dismay on the part of other Chris-
tian Churches, who had been stung by a Note which accom-
panied the declaration making clear that it was not correct to
refer to them as sister Churches because the Catholic Church
was the 'mother' of all the Churches. A Lutheran bishop
described the document as 'bullying' and the then Archbishop
of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, said that the document did

264
 TRUTH BEYOND DIVISION

'not reflect the deep comprehension that has been reached

through ecumenical dialogue and cooperation'. The World
Council of Churches warned that dialogue could be hindered by
such a document. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches
responded with 'disappointment and dismay'. A dialogue
between Christians and Jews, due to take place at the Vatican,
was cancelled as leaders dropped out in protest. Among many
negative reactions by Catholic clergy, a cardinal said the
document failed to reflect the ecumenical climate, while an
Indian Jesuit described it as the equivalent of a fatwah.
Defences were offered. The CDF's secretary, Archbishop
Tarcisio Bertone, stressed that the declaration had been been
approved by the Pope. In an effort to steady the situation, a
month later the Pope himself spoke out to make clear that
salvation was not denied to non-Christians and that all who
live a just life will be saved even if they do not believe in Jesus
Christ and the Catholic Church. But the negative publicity
caused by Dominus lesus had done great harm. It was a tor-
pedo in the hull of 30 years work in the field of interreligious
dialogue. Members of other faiths could hardly be expected to
be interested in a dialogue whose ultimate aim was conversion
to Catholicism. The doors opened by Nostra aetate were clos-
ing again, and the official position was hardening.
This may all seem rather remote from the wish of Catholics
to practise Eastern meditation. It is not. The effects of such
documents are felt even by Christians who would never read
them, or read about them. They change the very climate in
which the Church lives.

Calling Christianity to Be More Itself

So just what do people find in the East? They find a sense of
the sacred, a respect for the earth, a search for the experience

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of unity. They find that God need not be claimed as the

exclusive property of any one religion - though no faith is
entirely free from this - but that the various religions have the
same goal: that there are 'many ways up a mountain', as an
Indian poem has it. They see no reason why Western Chris-
tianity should not draw on the infinite wisdom of Eastern
spirituality - Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian - just as
there are certain aspects of Western life which could enrich the
East: for instance that, as the East is strong on symbolism, so is
the West strong on concepts.
So, too, many discover an understanding of different levels
of consciousness, from the outer levels of activity to the still
centre of peace. They find that the word 'God', which, through
nobody's fault, has become associated with an external, judge-
mental concept of the divine, can be expressed by words such
as 'illumination', 'enlightenment', the 'kingdom of Heaven
within' or 'Nirvana'. Jesus called it 'the pearl of great price',
and this is what they seek.
There is a genuine search for meaning, for an answer to the
question 'Who am I?' There is even the beginning of an answer
in the emphasis on the importance of simply being. Western
society is concerned with doing, whereas the East is more
content simply to be-, yet 'being' is at the heart of the Judaeo-
Christian tradition. In the Old Testament, God describes
himself to Moses as 'I am that I am' and tells him that he
must tell the children of Israel that 'I AM has sent me to you'.
In the Fourth Gospel, Christ uses the same expression: 'Before
Abraham was', he says, 'I am'. Today there is less concern
with labels, whether we are Catholic, Methodist or Hindu, as
with a yearning for the experience of being itself. As Murray
Rogers, an Anglican priest who has spent many years in India,
says: 'Our consciousness is an echo of the Consciousness of the
Universe, of God.'8

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 TRUTH BEYOND DIVISION

In his spiritual diary, Abhishiktananda writes with impres-

sive simplicity about the search for meaning, the longing simply
'to be'. It is a huge, all-encompassing vision, much influenced
by his deep experience of advaitic Hinduism:

The goal of the universe is consciousness of being, the

final unveiling of the intuition that constitutes the human
being. There were sages, there were seers, there were
prophets, and each of them grasped something of the
mystery within, the mystery within every being. And their
intuitions are stars, beacons for their brothers. From the
shore they send a signal, and on the rock they have lighted
a flame. And this flame is a call.9

Perhaps most of all, these seekers, often poorly taught in the

way of Christian prayer, welcome the practice of meditation;
in particular two aspects of meditation that are not much
taught in Christianity: method and posture. In the West such
'methods' tend to be criticised as elevating technique before
grace, but we would do better to learn from them, giving them
their due as helpful aids on the path of reflection and con-
templation. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the fundamental
texts for Hindus, the Lord himself gives precise instructions on
how to meditate. The meditator should sit, it is written there:

with upright body, head and neck, which rest still and
move not; with inner gaze which is not restless, but rests
still between the eye-brows. With soul in peace, and all
fear gone, and strong in the vow of holiness, let him
rest with mind in harmony, his soul on me, his God
supreme.10

Westerners also welcome the emphasis on direct experience

rather than being encouraged to pray with concepts. Even if

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the experience is intermittent, occasional or slight, whether the

experience is of boredom and restlessness, or, however briefly,
the joy of simply 'being', it can be vouched for: it gives joy and
confidence. Those who meditate regularly find their lives are
enriched. They learn the value of silence and that silent medi-
tation can lead to a sense of union, travelling beyond doctrine
and dogma to a glimpse of the transcendental reality; though
there are many methods of meditating, they all lead to the
same place. This means more to today's seekers than dogmatic
and doctrinal formulations of a religion, for they want to
reach the source, the still point which every religion shares.
The meditator is taken beyond the duality that pervades so
much Western thinking.
Meditation, John Main used to say, 'verifies the truths of
your faith in your own experience'. Christians who are drawn
to Eastern spirituality do not - or rather, need not - pose a
threat to the Church. If only the Church would act as cel-
ebrant, or at least as an eager participant, in the marriage of East
and West, it would find its membership growing and its congre-
gations more content. Those who look to the East for spiritual
nourishment do not wish to reject Christianity - though many
do - but instead feel the relationship between East and West
could enlighten both; for not only could Christianity learn from
the ancient wisdom of the Upanishads and from the great
Chinese sages such as Lao Tsu, but also the East itself might be
enriched by reading her rich and beautiful texts in the light of
Christ. Most people long to stay with the faith of their
childhood and their culture; few choose the wilderness when
they have a warm and welcoming home.
That it is possible to practise Eastern meditation and to
remain in the Catholic Church is seen in the life and work of
people like Bede Griffiths and Abhishiktananda. Though Abhi-
shiktananda struggled to reconcile Christianity with the deep

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 TRUTH BEYOND DIVISION

knowledge of Hinduism that changed his life, both remained

Catholics until the end of their lives. They neither became Hin-
dus nor sought to convert Hindus. Of the many people making
the journey from the East to the West the most spiritually
charismatic, the Dalai Lama, has constantly advised people to
practise in their own tradition rather than become Buddhists;
he confirms what the Swami told John Main: that meditation
will enrich their Christianity. Many people will testify to this.
The Dalai Lama has also brought science and medita-
tion together, by encouraging scientists to examine advanced
Tibetan spiritual practitioners. They discovered that:

Mindfulness meditation strengthens the neurological cir-

cuits that calm a part of the brain that acts as a trigger for
fear and anger. This raises the possibility that we have a
way to create a kind of buffer between the brain's violent
impulses and our actions. Experiments have already been
carried out that show some practitioners can achieve a
state of inner peace, even when facing extremely difficult
circumstances. 1

So, as the Dalai Lama's extraordinary ability to forgive his

country's oppressors bears witness, meditation can play a
powerful part in promoting world peace.

Future Paths
What can the Churches do? Curiously, as the official attitude
coming from the Vatican hardens, so, in practice, there is
evidence of a more encouraging environment. Many monks
and priests go their own way, not allowing themselves to be
too worried by Vatican injunctions. Laurence Freeman finds
there is a growing awareness of meditation in the institutional

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Church; he frequently receives encouragement from bishops to

teach meditation.
As in so many ways we try to live as one world, so we
should taste the wisdom of the East and be free to practise
methods of meditation which come from her traditions. It is
not entirely risk-free - but nor is any prayer. Some Christians
suspect that meditation can lead to introspection rather than
prayer; there are risks of self-aggrandisement or of falling into
the pax perniciosa against which John Main warns. But can-
not something be done to feed the hunger of those who want to
devote more energy to the overriding part of our spiritual lives
where we are one, for whom there is one truth, not exclusively
owned by any particular faith? Could we not widen the goal-
posts enough to let Christians learn from the East? If this is too
much to ask, could the priests and parishes not do more to
revive Christian methods of silent prayer and encourage daily
meditation, both in groups and individually?
If the resistance to anything savouring of what the Vatican
documents refer to as 'other religions' is still too great to be
overcome, could we not have more silence? Even at a Good
Friday service there are rarely silences of longer than a few
moments; many Sunday Masses allow no silence at all. Yet
Meister Eckhart says - and who would argue with him? -
that 'there is nothing closer to God than silence'.
Let the Christian Church have the humility to accept that
there is a depth of wisdom in the East that can enrich our lives,
and bring us more deeply into our own faith. Encourage the
reading and absorption of ancient texts, many of them written
500 years before the Gospels. Learn from their practices of
meditation. Read the ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts in
the light of Christ, until one blazing, transcendent truth is
revealed - a truth beyond all religious division. Let us fulfil

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the charge given to us in John 17:21, the ultimate call to non-

duality: 'May they all be one. Father, may they be one in us, as
you are in me and I am in you.'

Notes
1 Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West (London: Collins,
1982), p. 8.
2 Abhishiktananda, letter to his sister, 29 May 1972, in James
Stuart, Swami Abhishiktananda: His Life through His Letters
(Delhi: ISPCK, 1989), p. 301.
3 Letter to Canon Lemarie 24 October 1960 in Stuart, Swami
Abhishiktananda, p. 147.
4 This was written for a book that was banned by the Censor in
1954. Published in 1979 in Initiations a la spiritualite de Upani-
shads (Sisteron: Editions Presence), pp. 41-7.
5 Thomas Traherne, Centuries (London: The Faith Press, 1963),
p. 14.
6 Quoted in All India Seminar Church in India Today (New Delhi:
CBCI Centre, 1969).
7 Declaration Dominus lesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Uni-
versality of Jesus Christ and the Church (Rome: Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith), 6 August 2000.
8 In conversation with author, April 2003.
9 Abhishiktananda, Ascent to the Depth of the Heart: The Spir-
itual Diary (1048-1973) of Swami Abhishiktananda (Dom H.
Le Saux) (New Delhi: ISPCK, 1998), 22 October 1966.
10 The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Juan Mascaro (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1962), p. 70.
11 Tenzin Gyatso, 'The monk in the lab', New York Times (26 April
2003).

271
 18
Oscar Romero, Bishop-Martyr
and Model of Church
Julian Filochowski

The call from El Salvador woke me at 5 a.m. on 25 March 1980:

Oscar Romero was dead, shot through the heart with a marks-
man's bullet as he raised the host at the offertory in a Mass he
was celebrating in the hospital chapel where he lived.
I was shocked and sickened to lose a friend. But the sadness
went deeper still: a light in the world had gone out. There are
moments when one catches a fleeting glimpse of God at work in
the world and of Christ's presence among us. The man we all
knew as 'Monsenor' provided such a glimpse for me. Oscar
Romero's three years as Archbishop of San Salvador had so
many parallels with Jesus' own three-year public ministry - up
to the violent death he could probably have avoided but knew
in the end he had to face - that for a time those of us who loved
him were as gutted as the disciples must have felt after the
crucifixion.
Monsenor was a Gaudium et spes bishop in a feudal society.
Trained in the Church of Popes Pius XI and XII, he was
chosen to be archbishop because he was known to be bookish,
timid and naturally inclined to the preservation of order.
Through his courage to respond to the love and expectations
of the poor he ended up the paradigm of a Vatican II bishop,
one who is immersed in the joys and anxieties of his people

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 OSCAR ROMERO, BISHOP-MARTYR AND MODEL OF CHURCH

and who empties himself for others. Romero presented a model

of Church and of leadership which was as close to that of
Christ as can be found in the twentieth century. This is why
his memory remains so powerful, and grows greater as time
passes.
And like the Jesus he followed, death has also been, in many
ways, his victory. The death squads linked to the far Right and
the security forces - and in particular to the former military
intelligence officer Major Roberto D'Aubuisson - which plan-
ned and carried out his murder, sought to snuff out a prophetic
voice. They wanted to obliterate not just his presence but his
memory. Yet Archbishop Romero has not been an absent dead
man. As a martyr who shed his blood for his suffering people he
lives on in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of Salvadoreans
and Latin American people struggling for survival. He is an
icon, a symbol of holiness, a source of hope for the poor and
oppressed, the patron of justice and peace and protector of the
Church which everywhere chooses to place itself alongside the
suffering poor.
His death did not end the violence. El Salvador's orgy of
killing, which he worked so hard to prevent, if anything grew
worse in the decade after his funeral: 60,000 non-combatants
had died violently by the end of the 1980s. The repression
which had been the constant backdrop to his ministry even
followed him to the grave. His requiem Mass on Palm Sunday,
30 March 1980 - I was there with Bishop James O'Brien from
Westminster; Peter Bottomley MP, who represented the British
Council of Churches; and Bishop Eamon Casey from Ireland -
was never allowed to finish. The mourners gathered in the
cathedral plaza were bombed and fired on from the Ministry of
Defence building, leaving more than 40 dead in the ensuing
stampede and mayhem. I witnessed that massacre; 23 years on,
it remains indelibly etched in my mind.

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

But Romero's legacy has grown stronger and stronger.

There is a Hollywood film starring Raul Julia, an English oper-
etta (written and performed by Worth Abbey school), as well as
countless plays, poems, songs and hymns written in his mem-
ory. Several biographies, his homilies and his personal diary
have been published in many languages. In Central America
children named 'Oscar Arnulfo' are everywhere. Libraries,
scholarships, prizes, trade unions, plazas and boulevards have
been named in his honour. Even a little street in Brixton in
south London, where the British Catholic aid agency Cafod has
its home, was renamed 'Romero Close' in 1988. The West
Door of Westminster Abbey carries a statue of Archbishop
Romero, one of ten modern martyrs unveiled by the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury in the presence of the Queen and Car-
dinal Hume at a magnificent ceremony during the Lambeth
Conference in July 1998. A Romero tradition has grown up.
People gather at his tomb daily; the place where he died and
the place he lived have become hallowed. The day he died,
24 March, is Romero Day in the popular liturgical calendar of
Latin America. His sanctity has been recognised by popular
acclamation, and there is a movement for his canonisation
which grows apace.

An Unlikely Martyr

Little of this could be seen in the man who was appointed

Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. Born 60 years earlier in
Ciudad Barrios, Oscar Arnulfo Romero was ordained in Rome
in 1942 and for nearly thirty years worked quietly as pastor,
administrator and journalist. There followed four contro-
versial years as auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, when he
showed his conservative stances on social issues and the role of
the Church after Vatican II, followed by three years as bishop

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 OSCAR ROMERO, BISHOP-MARTYR AND MODEL OF CHURCH

of the rural diocese of Santiago de Maria. As both priest and

bishop, he was a gifted communicator: he wrote articles, com-
mented on the radio and edited three diocesan newspapers.
But because his outlook was so cautious, his nomination -
against a background of increasing repression - was for
many a bitter disappointment. He was widely thought of as
the candidate of the coffee barons; most priests and religious
favoured Bishop Arturo Rivera Damas, who was strongly
supportive of the Christian base communities and the peasant
organisations emerging among the poor in the countryside.
But no-one had reckoned on Romero's damascene con-
version following the brutal killing of his friend, the Jesuit
Fr Rutilio Grande, by a death squad in March 1977. Now
the repression reached directly into the heart of the newly
appointed archbishop, and he responded dramatically. He
closed Catholic schools for three days, and ordered all the
churches in his diocese to suspend Mass the following Sunday.
There would be only one Mass, in front of the cathedral, to
which all were invited. The Mass would lament the death of
Fr Grande and his two companion passengers who died with
him in his car, and would draw attention to the barbarity
which lay behind their deaths.
Not long after, I met him on a visit to San Salvador as Latin
America education officer for the Catholic Institute for Inter-
national Relations (CIIR) in London. He did not seem to be
made of the stuff of twentieth-century martyrs: he was shy,
retiring and self-effacing. He led a very simple and frugal
life, living in a small room attached to the Divine Providence
cancer hospital where he was looked after by the Carmelite
sisters who ran it. In that room he had a small stereo, and his
special treat was to listen to classical music. But he was too
embarrassed to meet our small British delegation there (I was
accompanying Lord Chitnis and the MPs Peter Bottomley and

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Denis Canavan, representing the Parliamentary Human Rights

Group) and so arranged to greet us in the dining room of the
hospital. A humble, gentle and straightforward man, he was
not well travelled, and was moved to hear that other bishops
in South America and Africa were facing similar difficulties
to his own.
He received all his visitors, whether they were high officials
from the State Department in Washington or illiterate peasant
farmers, with the same unfailing courtesy; his answers were
always straightforward and direct. When I was in San Salva-
dor, I saw the streams of campesinos, catechists, city workers,
mothers and wives of prisoners who came to see him every day.
He was very obviously and palpably close to them in their suf-
ferings, their poverty and their sorrow. He loved them dearly.
I later spent time with Monsenor at the Council of Latin-
American Bishops' Conference held in Puebla, Mexico, in
1979, which was when the 'option for the poor' entered church
documents. I was there for CIIR working with some of the
theologians and writing for the British Catholic press. Romero
asked me to advise him on dealing with the media. He was
always disarmingly open and frank with me and sought out
information and advice about the foreign press and the news
coverage of the crisis in El Salvador. He also wanted to know
about Church personalities from overseas who had contacted
him and about whom he knew little, and about European
agencies which might be able to help his radio station, his
printing press and other programmes. He would talk about
his hopes and his fears of events in El Salvador, his pain over
the continuing hostility of the papal nuncio (who had backed
his appointment because he was sure Romero would not make
waves) and some of his fellow bishops, and his gratitude for the
unbelievable worldwide solidarity which had been demon-
strated for the Church in San Salvador as it assumed the role of

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 OSCAR ROMERO, BISHOP-MARTYR AND MODEL OF CHURCH

the voice of the voiceless. Puebla bolstered Romero, because it

showed him he had support from fellow bishops in the wider
Latin American Church.
It is easy to forget just how isolated Romero was at home.
His fellow bishops resented him drawing attention to the rep-
ression, believing that any forthright criticism of the author-
ities would be incendiary. But Romero did not appear to resent
them. He once told me about the Bishop of San Miguel,
Alvarez, one of whose priests had been detained and tortured.
Romero said to him: 'Now that they've tortured one of your
priests, will you support my attempts to stop the persecution?'
But the priest had not been tortured because he was a priest, the
bishop had answered, but because he was a subversive. Mon-
senor told me the story with huge sadness but without a trace
of anger.

Daring to Speak Out

Romero's preaching was legendary. If away from the pulpit he
was self-effacing and bookish, in the pulpit he took on an
utterly compelling fearlessness, directness and power. His ca-
thedral was only half built, but as soon as he became arch-
bishop he suspended the work on it. The cathedral was hot,
humid and crammed with people who listened in total still-
ness, occasionally erupting into applause. He used to spend
half the week praying over the gospel in preparation for
Sunday. The homilies would last an hour or more; first, he
broke open the gospel, then he proceeded to the news. His
words went out live on the archdiocesan radio, and it seemed
as if the whole of San Salvador was listening: Monsenor's
voice rang out from radios in taxis, on the street, in the shanty
towns. The National Guard made vain efforts to put the cork
in the bottle: they entered cantinas in rural areas to force them

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to change stations, and repeatedly blew up the diocesan radio

station itself (which was rebuilt with Cafod's help). But the
opposition Monsenor roused only confirmed to the people his
authenticity. Romero's own response to the bombing was to
entreat his congregation themselves to become 'microphones
of God' - spreading truth and hope.
Romero's courage in his preaching reached a pitch the day
before he was killed: he had already called on US President
Jimmy Carter to suspend arms shipments; this time he urged
soldiers not to obey an unjust order: 'I beg you, I order you, in
the name of God, stop the repression!' In speaking out like this,
he knew he was marked. The threats and intimidation had
grown more urgent and more intense, but he never wavered or
drew back; like prophets down the ages, he continued to speak
of the massacres, the persecution, the disappearances, the
corruption and the calumnies, and nothing would cause him
to stop.
He had many offers to leave El Salvador, but he knew he had
to stay. Once he refused an invitation to visit Britain we had
extended to him to speak about the repression and injustice.
In a beautiful letter he explained that to speak truthfully out-
side the country could be interpreted as great provocation by
the government. Tor the present,' he wrote, 'I believe the place
from which to defend my people is from my own cathedral.'
El Salvador was his home, and he knew it was also his
Gethsemane.

Good News for the Poor

His preaching and teaching were entirely orthodox, as even
those who have read and reread his sermons sniffing for heresy
have had to admit. But besides the orthodoxy or 'right teach-
ing' there was always the concomitant 'right action' or ortho-
praxis, as he sought that the Church in San Salvador live out

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 OSCAR ROMERO, BISHOP-MARTYR AND MODEL OF CHURCH

the gospel message of love, truth, justice and freedom in a way

that offered something real for the poor in their daily existence.
Romero's closeness to the poor was a fact. He called them 'my
people', and saw in their faces the disfigured countenance of
God. With great affection they knew him in return simply as
'Monsenor'. In his life and in all his choices the poor came first;
he in turn was evangelised by the poor, transformed by them.
Oscar Romero was a model 'evangeliser': he preached the
gospel of Jesus Christ clearly and explicitly, in season and out
of season. He brought the good news particularly to the poor,
to those in distress, to the peasants living in near feudal
helplessness, to the slum-dwellers in the shantytowns, to the
prisoners and their families. But he also endeavoured at every
stage - and this was crucial - to make the Word of God real
and effective in the concrete situation of El Salvador, in the
lives of the poor.
The gospel was not a book so much as a reality; it was Good
News for the poor. It was the light with which to make a criti-
cal judgement on everything in society which was contrary to
God's plan. In so far as they were unable to heed it, the Good
News for the poor became bad news for the wealthy and
powerful. He preached the God of Life and he denounced with
the ferocity of the prophets of old all those things which
brought death to his people - not only the torture and killing
by the army but the exploitation on the plantations and in the
factories, and the unjust land system which brought a slower
but equally certain death through hunger and disease.
His challenge was always to conversion. The Word of God
was addressed to all; while it was a challenge to the interests
of the powerful, it was primarily for their change of heart.
Romero pointed to the sinful systems and thence to the source
of the sin which he described as the idols of his country and his
time: riches and private property when they become absolutes,

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the idolatry of national security. He spoke out, too, against the

idols of the Left: he warned the new mass organisations then
forming of the idolatry of the 'organisation' or the 'party', and
he consistently refuted violence on either side.
The gospel is known, in part, by the opposition that it
produces. His appeal was so straightforwardly gospel-based
that it produced fury in those who believed that the gospel
could be made safe. His option for the poor was the demand
not of ideology but simply of love. He said on one occasion:
I would like to define the preferential option for the poor
more precisely. When I say this I am reminded of the mes-
sage from Puebla that we should not divide the Church -
the poor on one side, the rich on the other - but (and this
is important) a preferential option for the poor is calling
without exception to all classes to become truly commit-
ted to the cause of the poor as if it were our own cause.
That is the secret. Like Christ who said, 'whatsoever you
do to the least of my brethren you do to me'.
I offer you this by way of example. A building is burn-
ing and all are watching it burn with arms folded. But if
one of them is told, 'Look here, I saw your mother and
your sister go in and they still haven't come out', the
situation changes. 'Your mother is burning' and you
would go in even though you would get charred to rescue
them. That is what it means to be truly committed.
If we look at poverty from the outside as if we were
looking at a fire, that is not to opt for the poor - no
matter how well meaning we are. We should get inside
as if it were our own mother and sister who are burning.
Indeed it is Christ who is there, hungry, suffering.
The poor were oppressed; he defended them. He did so,
first, by simply telling the truth about their oppression and the

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 OSCAR ROMERO, BISHOP-MARTYR AND MODEL OF CHURCH

atrocities they suffered - by relaying and amplifying their

voice and articulating their call for redress and justice. Second,
he placed himself right alongside them and offered them all the
services of the archdiocese - legal aid, shelter, advice. The
poor were resigned; Romero gave them hope. He encouraged
them to organise to defend their interests. He validated their
struggles. So often those murdered were described as 'crimi-
nals' and 'subversives' by the powers of the State and their
media. He called them 'martyrs', and reminded them that the
blood of martyrs brings life and fruit. Most of all they saw he
was really with them without any secret motive or hidden
agenda but simply because he loved them and he restored
dignity to them and hope for a better future.

A Saint for Our Time

Archbishop Romero was not, then, simply a great catechist
who explained the Christian faith but also a great evangeliser
and a tenacious advocate for fundamental human rights. The
Church was persecuted and defamed for that preaching and
that action: 'Be a Patriot; Kill a Priest' was a popular bumper
sticker frequently seen on limousines in the rich suburbs of San
Salvador. Six priests were killed before Romero. Many more
would be killed after his death. In the end he too paid the
ultimate price for his teaching and action.
In March 1980 the threats became feverish. Romero knew
he was going to die. He accepted it with great equanimity,
preparing himself, and even offering his own view of that
death which came just days after he gave an interview with a
Mexican newspaper.
I have frequently been threatened with death. I ought to
say that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without
resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the people

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of El Salvador. I am not boasting, I say it with the great-

est humility.
I am bound, as a pastor, by a divine command to give
my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvador-
eans, even those who are going to kill me. If they manage
to carry out their threats, from this moment I offer my
blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador.
Martyrdom is a grace from God which I do not be-
lieve I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life,
then may my blood be the seed of liberty, and a sign that
hope will soon become a reality.
May my death, if it is accepted by God, be for the lib-
eration of my people, and as a witness of hope in what is
to come. Can you tell them, if they succeed in killing me,
that I pardon and bless those who do it.
But I wish that they could realise that they are wasting
their time. A bishop may die, but the Church of God,
which is the people, will never die.

A week after Archbishop Romero was gunned down at the

altar Cardinal Hume paid tribute to him at a memorial service
in Westminster Cathedral. In his peroration he said, 'It would
be wrong for me to anticipate the mind of the Church, but I
personally believe that one day Oscar Romero will be declared
a saint of the Church.' The cause for Romero's beatification
was launched in San Salvador in 1990. In 1998 Basil Hume
wrote to Rome in support of the beatification in the hope that
Romero would be one of the martyrs recognised by the Church
during the celebration of the Great Jubilee. His action was
followed by similar letters from many other bishops, cardinals
and episcopal conferences. Today, with little curial support,
the cause languishes somewhere between the Vatican's Con-
gregation for the Saints and the Congregation for the Doctrine

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 OSCAR ROMERO, BISHOP-MARTYR AND MODEL OF CHURCH

of the Faith. Meanwhile, the poor of Latin America pray to

'San Romero', their beacon of hope, for support and inter-
cession. In their hearts he was declared a saint a long time ago.
Oscar Romero's sanctity will be formally recognised in the
course of the next ten years. He will be for the future a para-
digm example of a Vatican II pastor who underwent personal
conversion and with a profound, God-centred spiritual life,
became a champion of the Christian gospel embodying love,
truth and justice in himself and in his every action. In life he
was known as the 'voice of the voiceless'; in death he has
become the 'named of the nameless', the face of thousands of
Central American martyrs who gave their lives, massacred or
disappeared, because of their faith in the God of life who
brings justice.
What does remembering Archbishop Romero mean? From a
Christian point of view 'remembering' means something very
different from a panegyric or a nostalgic speech. The funda-
mental Christian model of remembering is Jesus' command at
the Last Supper, to 'do this in memory of me'. For the Church,
to remember Archbishop Romero must first mean to continue
his work and to imitate that option for the poor which he
embraced and his whole ministry in San Salvador epitomised.
The chasm between rich and poor, North and South, in our
world is widening. Globalisation has brought with it a process
of globalised impoverishment. There are over 800 million
people in our globalised world who are hungry all the time,
malnourished, sometimes starving. Their simple aspiration is
to be able to eat, something, three times a day. Yet we also
perceive breathtaking and undreamed of wealth elsewhere
in the global market world where material greed seems to
know no bounds. Globalised poverty, globalised injustice
demand globalised solidarity and prophetic witness to chal-
lenge the complacency and moral indifference. Oscar Romero

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UNFINISHED JOURNEY

would not be silent. It is the vocation of the whole Church

today, as evangeliser, to be the voice of the voiceless poor.
To speak out in the face of financial systems and choking debt,
arms contracts, trade agreements and economic sanctions
which are all too often structures impregnated with sin when-
ever they are death-dealing (rather than life-giving) contracts,
systems and treaties.
Oscar Romero turned the world upside down for his poor.
His life and martyrdom inspire not only Salvadoreans and Latin
Americans - but that whole bread-sharing, justice-seeking,
Christian people who reach into every corner of the earth
intent on globalising compassion and globalising solidarity,
precisely what The Tablet has championed this last 21 years.

284
 Part IV
Postscript
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 19
John Wilkins: A Tribute
Hugo Young

Those of us who write for the British broadsheet press think we

know the supreme value of journalistic independence. Even the
editors of Rupert Murdoch's tabloids will go to their graves
reciting with sincerity their lifelong defence of the freedom of
the writer - the columnist, the reporter, scribes of every kind -
to perform without interference from government. Proprietors
may be another matter, but in the eyes of most British editors
who work for powerful proprietors, the owner's instructions do
not count as interference. So we all have our ways of wallowing
in the pieties of the British way of journalism. We observe no
official agendas. We think we have no constituency except our
readers, otherwise known as markets. We can rattle off the
canons of independence, even though in the grubby worlds
of commerce and propaganda these may not always be per-
fectly observed.
Editing a paper that speaks out of, and to some extent into, an
avowedly authoritarian institution such as the Roman Catho-
lic Church is an altogether subtler task. The ground rules are
different. The usual pieties cannot erase the context, or the
sense that there is a particular constituency to be addressed.
Independence requires a more scrupulous definition than is
usually to be found in the self-serving cliches of the Daily Mail.
The Tablet has not become arguably the most influential
Catholic weekly in the world by flailing against all authority.

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Such is the nature of its audience that it would not have

survived had it taken that path. And yet, within its own con-
text, it has retained, above all else, independence.
The genius of John Wilkins - I do not use the word lightly -
in his two decades as editor of The Tablet is to have trodden a
path between the traps that lie in wait for anyone in his
position. He has preserved the paper's identity, embedded in
the Catholic Christian tradition, as a loyal friend of the Church
from which it grew. Yet he has insisted that neither loyalty nor
friendship require servility or obedience. He has maintained the
kind of independence that no journalism, whatever niche it
occupies, can afford to sacrifice if it wishes serious readers to
believe what it writes.
This definition of The Tablet's role has not been as easily
accepted within the Church as some of us had every reason to
believe it should have been. John's time as editor, after all,
began when the philosophy of Vatican II, which the paper had
dedicated itself to serving ever since the end of the Council,
still appeared to bathe the Roman Church - certainly the
English branch of it - in the glow of openness and tolerance
that is consistent, among other things, with the best kind of
journalism. But old mindsets die hard. Not every bishop is a
born Jeffersonian democrat, and by no means every strand of
English Catholicism has foresworn the blind fealties of the pre-
conciliar faith. While John was far too canny to engage in
open battles with the hierarchy, there were vigilant eyes over
his shoulder that still have only a shallow understanding of an
editor's perspective. They assumed - still do, in some cases -
that the task of The Tablet was to be the unquestioning voice
of Rome.
Nowhere was this misunderstanding more palpable than in
Rome itself. Throughout John's editorship, the very influence
his paper acquired redoubled the complaints in the Vatican that

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its orthodoxy did not come up to muster. We witnessed the in-

capacity of the truly authoritarian mind to understand the most
elementary meaning of journalistic independence. In certain
corners of the Vatican The Tablet is criticised for its hetero-
doxy but more so, even after 20 years' evidence to the contrary,
for the perception that it is itself an organ of the English branch
of the Roman Church and therefore engaging in the heresy of
criticism with official blessing. Some English bishops - a small
minority perhaps - might like it to be more like that. Some
Church leaders in John's time have thought nothing of calling
him in for discussions that were not meant to be entirely col-
legial conversations between equals. But they knew, in the end,
their limits. In Rome, the concept of a paper that is both truly
Catholic and truly independent is literally beyond the compre-
hension of cardinals steeped in the culture of their own institu-
tional power.
John has seen off these challenges thanks, in my opinion, to
four great qualities he brought to the job of editing. He once
told me he regarded the job as his vocation. I inferred this to
mean it was the job above all others he was born to do, and
to which he could bring the kind of commitment one might
liken to that of a dedicated pastor.
This highlights his first virtue: an almost fanatical industry.
He has cared about every word appearing in every issue of
the paper he edited. He has been a hard-driving editor, not
always easy for his small staff to work with. But great editors,
especially of weekly papers, are often like that. They have to
be. Their personal passions are what make their paper special,
and their dedication to the details are usually what make it
unique. There needs to be an element of benevolent dictator-
ship, which, rather like William Shawn, the legendary editor of
the New Yorker for several decades in the mid-twentieth
century, John duly supplied to The Tablet. Day and night,

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seven days a week, he toiled over the commissioning, the re-

writing, the sub-editing, the correcting and - very necessary -
the rejecting of what next week's paper might contain.
Personally I have never known him lose his cool or courtesy,
though perhaps his staff have seen his collar get a little warm.
But there was an iron rigour about his references and stan-
dards. He was a catholic as well as Catholic editor, but always
clear that The Tablet should consist of pieces that passed his
own subjective test of what was worth printing. The Tablet be-
came his paper, as it had to be. John earned this right by giving
his life to it, paying the costs as well as gaining the satisfactions
of that degree of commitment.
This opens up his second great quality: the fact that he devel-
oped a vision of what The Tablet should become, and worked
by slow degrees to make it happen. The formula proved an
extraordinary success. He knew what his readers wanted,
the tone that stimulated them, the range of subjects that would
appeal. The circulation all but tripled in his time, without ben-
efit of the massive marketing that pushed one of The Tablet's
contemporaries, the Spectator, at much expense, into a differ-
ent league. The more interesting comparison is with the New
Statesman, whose present circulation barely exceeds The Tab-
let's. As The Tablet's audience grew, the New Statesman's
shrank.
How did this happen? I think it owed much to a twin
approach, subtly brought about, that has made John's Tablet
distinctive. On the one hand, he eased it out of the Catholic,
and even the religious, ghetto. It retained that special feel. But
what it had to say about the politics and complications of the
moment, especially when they were international, made it a
mainstream presence. On the other hand, its agenda, like its
perspective, remained its own. From the start, this was, of
course, ecumenical. That was elementary, and added greatly

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to The Tablet's audience. But it amplified a wider journalistic

point. Read down The Tablet index of contents in any week,
and compare these with what its secular competitors announce,
and you find, unfailingly, many fewer pieces that simply re-
hash the issues the daily papers have incessantly chewed over.
Time and again, its roots give it something else to say. For
readers in search of fresh fields of controversy to graze, The
Tablet offers much the largest diet of originality.
In the international field especially, there is no contest. The
universal Church supplies not only a religious dimension to
the discussion of global problems. It also guarantees a more
universal agenda, and supplies a far-flung network of contribu-
tors, often people of unusual distinction outside journalism,
the like of which is much harder for a secular weekly to estab-
lish. The core of this internationalism may be the Church in the
World reporting at the back of the paper, a section to which
John particularly applied his famous industry. But at the
front, enlightening features regularly appear - whether about
Latin America or Eastern Europe, especially - covering ground
neglected throughout the rest of the British press. In a global-
ised world, John's unfailing resistance to parochialism has
been a major explanation of his paper's steady success at home
and abroad.
Thirdly, he knows his subject as well as he understands his
audience. John, let's never forget, is a serious Catholic. He has
read the encyclicals and the other texts. He has penetrated
deep into the faith, as converts often do, putting us cradle
Catholics to shame. He knows the post-conciliar history of the
Church as well as any man alive.
He knows the back alleys of Rome and the Vatican, the safe
houses where contacts may still be found by an editor not
entirely approved of by Cardinal Ratzinger. No prudent bookie
would fix odds on likely papal successors without touching

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base with John - even though he expressed as much sceptical

uncertainty as anyone about how the forces in the consistory
would in the end be ranged. His role in the Church nearer home
has been just as sophisticated.
Though The Tablet's readership is conspicuously global, its
domestic voice matters. John's editorship coincided with a
series of battles for supremacy between the Vatican and domes-
tic hierarchies, especially over episcopal appointments. Under
Cardinal Basil Hume, the English Church was remarkably free
of the divisions that scarred its continental counterparts. The
cardinal had his ways of pre-empting the imposition of bishops
from what one can only call the hard Right. Himself personi-
fying the English temperament of tolerance and moderation,
Hume ensured for the most part that John Paul II was deflected
from making appointments that would challenge if not in-
sult that national characteristic. But The Tablet had a big role
there too. As the main lay tone-setter for both intellectual and
political Catholicism, it nurtured a climate in which Hume
was able to defend his offshore outpost against the turbulence
that some forces in Rome desired to unleash upon it. Without
John's personal knowledge and watchfulness, and the respect
in which he himself is held, this could not have happened to
such benign effect.
Finally, though, one goes back to his grasp of the elusive
quality that few other editors have to think about so carefully.
In this, he would agree, he has been supported throughout his
time by The Tablet's owners. The paper is not a wholly, or
even partly, owned subsidiary of the Church. The owners and
the board have been as assiduous as the editor in sustaining
that position, just as they have scrupulously avoided interven-
ing, except sometimes on necessary budgetary matters, in the
editorial decisions the editor makes. They, too, know what
independence means.

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But it is the editor who has to apply that easily stated phi-
losophy in more complicated practice, and this is what John
has been doing for 20 years. He is a friend of the Church but
not its slave, an ally but not one subornable into believing that
criticism amounts to disloyalty. Above all he has been a friend,
through some taxing times, of The Tablet's ever-expanding
circle of readers. Without that bond, an editor will always
fail. He must know how to challenge as well as satisfy them.
In the challenge lies the satisfaction, for readers of a paper
like The Tablet. Supplying both is what made John Wilkins a
great editor.

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