For the next three weeks, as Lent builds up more intensively towards Easter, the gospel readings at Sunday Mass abandon the ordinary course of readings for the year (Luke this year) and go over to John. And that for a very good reason, which is internal to the gospel according to John. What Lent is all about, as we have been seeing this last couple of weeks, is a longish preparation for Easter—a preparation that once was the final spurt of adults preparing to be baptized during Easter night, and then also of already baptized Christians who had fallen away in some pretty serious regard and were now getting ready to come back to the heart of the Christian community on Maundy Thursday, and then finally a sort of extended retreat for the whole Christian people. Because everybody realized that they all needed to come back closer to the heart of things—every Christian had fallen away to some degree, every Christian was in some way an internal emigré—they realized that they all had to come back closer to the heart of things, and that meant recovering something of their first flush of enthusiasm and their first entry into the Church, their baptism. And baptism from the beginning was an Easter affair, an Easter affair even before there was an Easter kept as an annual feast; already in the New Testament letters, baptism was seen as a sharing in Christ’s death and in his being raised again.

I.R.F.E.D.—Institut international de recherche et de formation en vue du diveloppement harmonist, the International Institute for Research and Training towards Integrating Development—was founded in 1958 by Fr L. J. Lebret; in spite of the originality of its research and activities, the Institute is still virtually unknown to the British public.

I.R.F.E.D. defines development as the constructive use of all natural and human resources in order to promote the collective and interdependent progress of mankind. This means that I.R.F.E.D. seeks to tackle development in every sphere and at every level; it is concerned as much with making peoples aware of their situation as with the structural reorganization of international trade and finance; with socio-cultural change and strategies for industrialization; with the appropriate spiritual, moral or political conditions for participation as well as with the rational, economic or technical constraints on planning. This global approach demands a simultaneous and concentrated emphasis on a series of different activities —fundamental and applied research, analysis in depth, programming, training, publication, the stimulation of public opinion, etc....

Development is the key word in the work of the Institute; but how is it visualized ? Since the discovery of underdevelopment has made people aware of the word, the concept, the myth of development, its significance has evolved concurrently with the different stages in the analysis of underdevelopment and the elaboration of strategies or policies to combat this. I.R.F.E.D. has followed this evolution, taking part in its different stages, and progressively acquiring a deeper understanding and a clearer insight into a pattern of development which is dependent on man’s gradual assumption of control over his world-wide destiny.

The recent report on ‘Colour and Citizenship’ was greeted by the press with mild bewilderment and a sigh of relief. Britain apparently is not, after all the fuss, on the edge of racial violence. Three-quarters of the population are demonstrated to be ‘tolerant’ or ‘tolerant-inclined’, and it is precisely in those areas where coloured immigrants actually live that there is most tolerance.

In this respect Colour and Citizenship, like the laborious P.E.P. report on discrimination, is useful. But more than volumes of sheer fact are needed if we are to come to grips with the race problem. We would be mistaken to point out too enthusiastically that the majority of people in this country have been shewn to be tolerant. ‘Tolerance’ is a pretty word and one that is heavily overvalued by the prevailing ideology. In effect it means ‘indifference’. It makes little difference to the established economic system whether people have purple or green wallpaper, whether they worship in Anglican churches or synagogues, whether they sleep with members of the same sex or not. These are matters of indifference to capital organization and only a paranoid will be really intolerant of the options that people make. In other circumstances those choices could become significant. Only a minority of the population (10 per cent) are prejudiced in the strictly defined sense of Colour and Citizenship and for many of those it is apparently a symbolic issue (like the members of the Conservative Party in Surbiton—where there are some hundred black people out of a population of over 60,000—who wish to replace their liberally minded M.P. with a supporter of Enoch Powell).

With all its attendant weaknesses, the current popularity of drawing parallels between the findings of animal ethologists and human behaviour may well prove to be a fruitful aid to our understanding of the human condition. I would like to take one rather commonplace example: It frequently happens in ethology laboratories and poultry farms that a group of hens meet each other in a fairly confined space for the first time. In the case of grown birds which are strangers, a series of single combats is engaged in, with each bird pairing off with every other in a way which to the casual glance appears random. Actually, what is developing is a ‘peck-order’ in which the leader of the flock can peck any other hen without herself being pecked, the second hen can peck all but the top hen, and the rest are arranged in a descending hierarchy ending with a hen which is pecked by all, but pecks no one. The amount of aggressiveness shown in the contests varies with different individuals, but once the peck order has been determined, pecking starts to decrease, as individuals recognize their superiors, and eventually simply raising or lowering the head can be sufficient to register dominance or submission respectively.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea that there has been some change in our understanding of the nature of the Church in the last ten years or so. I suggest that we are being encouraged to think now more in terms of the Church as the people of God and as mystery, but that these two themes finally converge. There is, of course, no prospect of tying up all the loose ends that there must inevitably be in a paper as brief and ambitious as this.

My first thesis is that we are in the middle of discovering a new sense of the Church as a community, as a community with a mission, as a ‘movement’, and that this springs from our retrieval of the original primitive Christian insight that the Church is nothing if it is not the people of God, and should then issue into a renewed belief in the fraternal structure of the Church. I should emphasize that this is a discovery of what the Church should be, not of what it actually is.

It is clear that the documents of Vatican II have made it respectable to talk about the Church in terms of the people of God. It was not always so. While it is, of course, impossible that any single concept could ever catch what one means by any phenomenon as complex as the Church, it is important to decide which to start from, for this will govern one’s whole understanding of the Church.