To the Archbishops and Bishops of England and Wales

Extract

Next November the Extraordinary Synod assembles to evaluate how far the Church has succeeded in faithfully implementing the decisions of the Second Vatican Council. It is for this reason that we are here presenting, for the consideration of you, the bishops of England and Wales, a response written by a group of British Catholic theologians to what the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had to say about contemporary Catholicism in his famous Jesus interview. This is an unusual thing to do. Isn’t it rather an impertinence? A possible affront to the Cardinal Prefect? A possible embarrassment to the bishops?

We are convinced it is not. With his wonderful sense of ‘Catholic wholeness’, Cardinal Newman believed that an essential feature of authentic Church life is internal dialogue—in other words, continuous interrelating between three facets of the life of the Christian community: theology, worship and government. (Professor Lash says a little more about this in these pages). The Church only remains properly Catholic, in the truth, in so far as the dialogue continues. Catholics still often often feel that it is disloyal in any way to question what comes from ‘on high’. The Catholic who in any way dissents is identified as not properly ‘orthodox’. But orthodoxy requires us to believe that the Holy Spirit is poured upon the whole Church. And that Church remains Catholic because the conversation between the theologians and the bishops and the laity carries on.