‘This phrase (the option for the poor) burst upon the ecclesiastical scene only a few years ago. Since then it has become the most controversial religious term since the Reformers’ cry, “salvation by faith alone’’.’

These are the opening words of Donal Dorr’s recent book on the option for the poor and Vatican social teaching. He is not exaggerating. I should say that the challenge to the church, to almost all our churches, represented by this term ‘option for the poor’ goes far beyond anything envisaged by the Reformers. It challenges both Catholic and Protestant, and it challenges us in a very fundamental way.

Here, I should like to do little more than open up the debate about the option for the poor in South Africa. The question has been raised here and there in a variety of forms, mostly without the term ‘option for the poor’; but in South Africa there has been no systematic Christian practice based upon it and not much research and reflection around this controversial phrase. My intention, then, is to open up the specific approach implied in this new theological term for further research, reflection, debate and practice.

There is a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about the meaning of the phrase itself, and even a measure of deliberate distortion of its meaning. Hence, in the first place, it will be necessary to state quite clearly what we are talking about and even more importantly what we are not talking about.

Walter Kasper’s name is by now well-known among English-speaking readers of theology: the 1984 translation of Der Gott Jesu Christi following on the translating in 1976 of Jesus der Christus established his reputation as a writer at once conceptually rigorous and historically well-informed. What is less understood, however, is the total context to which these works belong. From Kasper’s background in the Tubingen School his writings so far can be shown to represent a total theological programme of a quite distinctive kind. This programme is not only of considerable intrinsic interest. It also has a wider church-political significance in the light of Kasper’s selection as the official theologian of the Roman Synod Secretariat, encharged with the collation and theological analysis of the ‘submissions’ made to the Holy See by national conferences of bishops in readiness for the 1985 Synod on ‘The Church after Vatican II’. His appointment offers a useful key to the debate about the intentions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and more generally, of the Roman Curia in its higher echelons) in the middle 1980’s. In particular, it helps to determine whether these intentions are best described as ‘Neo-Ultramontane’, as argued (in effect) by a group of writers in New Blackfriars in June 1985, or rather, as the present author has maintained, as offering a via media or re-accentramento (‘re-centring’) for Church and theology, amid the competing voices of left and right-wing radicalism in post-conciliar Catholicism. This is a debate which has not ended with the ending of the Synod.

A. So we are agreed that since God is the Creator he is responsible for everything that happens in creation.

B. That would seem to be so.

A. But how are we to understand ‘responsible’ here? Could it mean that God does everything that is done?

B. Apparently it does. For what is done is done either by God or by something else. Yet what something other than God does is created and God is therefore responsible for it. So everything that is done must be done by God.

A. That seems to follow. But it is subjects who do things, is it not?

B. If that means that what is done is done by something or other, then, of course, I agree.

A. And does not this mean that what is done is done by an agent?

B. Certainly.

At the end of their National Conference this summer, the bishops of the Philippines spoke out strongly against human rights abuses in their country. They recited a long list of the names of people killed in the past year, including priests, journalists, trade unionists and other community leaders. Such denunciations of violence and repression are now fairly standard parts of the conclusions of many bishops’ conferences, but the Philippine bishops’ statement is interesting because it singles out the use of ‘religious fanatics’ in the government agencies’ counter-insurgency campaigns. The bishops condemned this as an ‘unholy strategy’, and claim that it is only ‘conducive to the worst forms of terrorism’. The arming and training of fanatical religious groups to fight the New People’s Army had led the civilian Home Defence Force to become ‘instruments of terror rather than peace’.

Though the Philippine bishops’ conference was addressing itself to its own local situation, they are clearly aware that this use of certain groups of Christians by repressive governments is not peculiar to their own country. Other local Catholic hierarchies have spoken out strongly against various religious groups. In recent months Mexican Church leaders, together with labour leaders and others, have called for the expulsion of various evangelical, fundamentalist sects from Mexico. The enormous financial resources of these sects, together with their political and social impact, has led to accusations that they are an integral part of US foreign policy in the region, and even that they operate as a front for the CIA.