So many hands have sown the ideas in this article, and over such a long period of time, that I have forgotten many of them. I can recall Richard McBrien declaiming from his book, Do We Need the Church? as he strides across the field, so sure and so impatient. I can hear Christopher Butler, in his black habit with the hood up, quietly chanting The Theology of Vatican II. But I cannot remember who it was that planted the most fruitful seed of all: “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was the first document of the Second Vatican Council. It would have been very different, if it had been the last”.

The ripening, I know, took place in the warmth and light of Avery Dulles’ Models of the Church. But his was the kind of sunshine that forced me to seek the shade of second thoughts; and once there, I wondered if I dared to disagree with him.

In this article, I present an argument which is made up of three suggestions about how we are to understand Vatican II’s ideas concerning the Church. To illustrate the point I am trying to make, I raise some questions about how this affects our view of the sacraments. And I ask whether this is not a case of the famous sensus plenior, the ‘fuller sense’ which appears to have been discussed only by scripture scholars up to now, but is surely relevant to the interpretation of council documents.

The article on Celibacy which appeared in the March issue of New Blackfriars was written last October and followed up by the rest of my book In Filial Disobedience, published by Mayhew-McCrimmon in June. Since March I have received a good deal of comment, both favourable and unfavourable, and in the light of this it has seemed worth while to add a final piece responding in particular to the major objections raised very seriously and kindly by some people. Could a priest really be morally justified in rejecting the Church’s law of celibacy with all the canonical consequences this entails? I have given my reply to that question the form of an article in the Summa Theologica. It is, hopefully, my last public contribution to the debate. This is not the most important subject for the Church today by any means, and yet it is a very important one both for its own sake and because it affects so many others. It is the key to a more flexible restructuring of the ministry. Yet if there is one thing which has grown in my mind in the last months it is the conviction that a law of so massive a nature, so tenaciously maintained by Rome with such powerful sanctions, cannot be defended or criticised primarily in terms of pragmatic pastoral advantage and disadvantage, whether in Europe or in Africa. It must be regarded primarily as a semi-doctrinal statement and one profoundly significant for the understanding and the misunderstanding of holiness.

Videtur quod. It seems that a secular priest may not marry.

Jesus was celibate. A priest should imitate Jesus as closely as possible because of his calling to be another Christ. In the words of Cardinal Hume, ‘Our Lord was celibate. Whatever reasons were important to him, I want to make mine’. (Searching for God, p. 52).

In July 1977 a group of Evangelical Anglicans addressed an Open Letter to the bishops of the Anglican communion. The Letter has recently been published together with a lengthy commentary, somewhat in the style of the Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) Agreements, in the general reception of which this is intended as a significant intervention. This document invites attention from Catholics, not merely on tactical grounds, because of the large number of Anglicans with a Protestant cast of mind who must be respected and accommodated in any reconciliation between Canterbury and Rome, but also because of the intrinsic importance of the theological questions that the authors raise.

The tenor of the Open Letter may be judged by the Preface: “Some speak as if with the appearance of the three ARCIC Agreements the main theological discussions are already over, and we can all now move on to arranging the nuts and bolts of intercommunion with Roman Catholics and union eventually. This shows how intoxicating is the strong wine of ecumenical bonhomie, and how churchmen, like motorists, can have their heads grow muzzy while feeling that their judgment was never better. Let it be said here, with emphasis, that the signatories think that the discussions which history will see as the main ones have hardly yet begun” (my italics). Evangelicals find themselves badly under-represented in ARCIC, and they consider that the Agreements so far reached on the eucharist, the ministry, and authority, do little to show that Catholics have yet “fully assimilated the doctrinal clarifications which came out of the Reformation conflict”. That the Reformation made Christian doctrine clearer, and that the Anglican communion ‘stands in the Reformation tradition”, are affirmations that are certainly often neutralised by ecumenists.

Heribert Mühlen’s “Introduction to the Basic Christian Experience” (wrongly entitled in English A Charismatic Theology), though not intended as a work of speculative theology, is nonetheless a theological work of considerable interest—probably the first so far to come from within Catholic Pentecostalism.

As we should infer from the very title of his book, one of Mühlen’s fundamental beliefs is that there is such a thing as “the basic Christian experience”. It is the “experience” of a real presence of Christ in his life, consequent upon a personal decision for Christ, that makes a man a Christian (p. 43). For Mühlen this can never be simply a private conversion experience, however: there is no experience of Christ which does not involve an experience of the church. The essential Christian experience is Jesus’s own experience of the Spirit, continued historically in the church. According to Mühlen, Jesus gave the church, not just the Holy Spirit, but his own experience of the Spirit. Reference is also made to Jesus’s experience of his Father, though it is not quite clear whether Mühlen believes the church to be the continuation of this experience too. He does maintain that the kernel of Jesus’s kerygma is his “Abba-experience”. He also says that “God gives us his experience of himself”. He regards it as an important sign that God is renewing his church that “the experience of the primitive church has today been bestowed in an historically new and surprising way to many Christians in all Churches” (p. 94).