Nobody who cares about the future of religious life should fail to study the recent essay on the subject by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, an Irish Dominican who teaches at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem— an entire issue of Supplement to Doctrine and Life is given over to it (No. 45, May-June, 1973). What he has to say is so illuminating that it is worth repeating the main idea here, adding some comments and observations to back up his argument.

1—The raison d’etre of religious life

The question of priorities is crucial. What service do religious have to offer the Church and society? As they proceed to retrenchment and reform, the dilemma that confronts religious today is as follows: are they to decide what work they should be doing (teaching, nursing, preaching, whatever) and then allow the style of their life to be determined by that, or are they to make the form and quality of their community life the priority? Fr Murphy O’Connor is categorical : ‘What is important is that religious recognize that the primary service they render to the Church and to the world is the witness of their life together as a community’. Though religious increasingly do regard their service to the Church and to society as teachers, nurses, preachers, etc., as the primary determinant and seek to define the nature of religious life in terms then of work, this job- oriented approach in fact distorts religious life and leads to the disintegration of religious orders and communities.

For how can religious define and justify their existence as religious primarily in terms of the jobs they undertake ? Does a woman have to become a nun in order to teach or to nurse ?

Burundi is very small by African standards, almost the same size as Belgium, its former colonial master. Situated at the northern end of Lake Tanganyika, Burundi’s neighbours are Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire. Hills like vast sandcastles rise from a narrow plain along the lake to heights of over 2000m on the Nile-Congo watershed. Burundi’s population is estimated at 3.7 million. Because the density of population is so high, and because there are no minerals or other natural resources worth exploiting commercially, all except the educated elite are poor subsistence farmers and herdsmen. The sale of coffee—nearly all of which is bought by the United States, supposedly for political reasons—accounts for some 80 per cent of all foreign exchange earnings, though attempts are now being made to diversify agricultural production with tea, cotton and rice as secondary cash-crops.

Three ethnic groups make up the population: the pygmoid Twa, only per cent of the total and politically of no account, the agriculturist Hutu, a Bantu tribe who make up 85 per cent, and the cattle-herding Tutsi (14 per cent). Legend and some facts assert that the Tutsi are of Nilotic-Hamitic origins, that they came late to Burundi and reduced the Hutu to client status by leasing them cows in return for personal service and food. ‘Tutsi’ is somewhat of a simplification : there appear to have been two separate invasions, first the Abanyaruguru clans, literally ‘those from the north’, and then later the Hima clans who entered and now occupy mainly the southeast part of the country.

Spokesmen for the present government claim that it is the colonialist who is to blame for the very existence of tribal conflict in Burundi

It is trite to say that anniversaries stir the memory but it is true enough. As I write this down I am remembering a young Dominican who died a year ago this July. His death was not only a deeply felt personal loss, for it was something more in that it challenged us with the problem of his unfinished work and involved us directly and intimately in a conflict of which we had previously only been spectators. It was—and is—a whole situation we had not understood till he came to live our life with us.

It might at first seem odd to select this one man’s history out of so much that has happened to the Province in the last few years. Disasters and desolation, unparalleled since the period of the French Revolution, that laid us waste with a real death of God: this has been met with courage and constancy by the old and in a spirit of dutiful endurance by many of the elderly. The turmoil of renewal and the tensions created by change conflicting with ancient customs has led to a new experience of the role—not always pleasant—of discussion, a development that has associated itself with or sprung from the generous energy of the young determined to recreate the common life and rediscover a style of worship suited to the needs of today. After a spasm of rejection, almost anarchic in character, there has been in the studium a return to the tradition, even the text of St Thomas, purged of the trivialities of the manualists. All in embryo, all signs of hope and all associated with men loyal to their vocation as preachers. Why, then, pick on this one man when there obviously are so many others? Why this particular one, when we live with all our dead, having them in constant and loving memory-some well known to the public, others known only to their brethren?

Stiff opposition from the Socialist and Communist parties in Japan has forced the Japanese Government to cancel the visit to the United States of a marine biologist, author of Some Hydriods of the Amakusa Islands and ten other works. Censorship ? Persecution of intellectuals ? No, nothing so sinister. The distinguished scientist in question also happens to have another role, and is known, outside the pages of biology periodicals, as the Emperor of Japan. This gives the postponement this week of his visit to America planned for the autumn an importance of a different kind. The Socialists and Communists claim that the Liberal-Democratic party is misusing the person of the Emperor by making him a factor in relationships with the US. It is, they say, giving him a political role, and this is in direct contradiction with the Japanese Constitution of 1947. Indeed, that constitution does state quite clearly in Article 1 that the Emperor ‘shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power’. It doesn’t matter now that this new constitution was largely American- inspired, in ideas and language; what matters is that a totally new concept of the Emperor’s function was forcibly introduced into Japanese life by it. The Meiji Constitution of 1889 had stated categorically that the Emperor was sacred and inviolable, the heir of a ‘line of emperors unbroken for ages eternal’.

So now we know. Hans Küng’s massive criticism of the critics of his views on infallibility reached me with the newspapers announcing that the Pope was to proclaim a Holy Year. It was the same week in which sensational headlines about the Lambton case gave way to the reassuring news that the heart of the establishment was sound: fox-hunting, hard-riding Anne would really marry her stalwart and even more hard-riding Mark.

The juxtaposition is hardly fair. The announcement of Anne’s engagement may well have been timed without regard for less edifying events in high places. And Kiing’s worst enemies only find fault with him for his purely intellectual activities. Nor would the most narrow-minded curialist conceive the Holy Year as a counterblast to one theologian’s suspect views on infallibility. But institutions under attack have a way of seeking the support of the simple masses by providing them with an occasion for junketings: a marriage in England, a jubilee and indulgences in Rome.

Mr Taha is a model of Muslim piety and exercises a strict control over his household. A family joke has it that he once suffered severely from scruples on discovering that he had eaten some jam which had become fermented. As a member of a distinguished landowning family of Azerbaijan he has never had to work and has spent most of his life as a kind of gentleman scholar, leading an austere existence and devoted to prayer and such pursuits as collecting Old Korans. My impression is that, through leading this withdrawn life, he has allowed himself to become an isolated personality. A timid and nervous man, with a thin ascetic face, he betrays a tendency towards extreme excitability when discussing matters that involve his deepest convictions. On one such occasion I noticed that his features became distorted by his attempts to control his feelings and the veins on his forehead stood out. His family commented on this to me afterwards and said that he had not spoken at such length nor so vehemently for many years. It was evident that though they obeyed him externally he sensed that they were not with him in spirit. Consequently he no longer spoke about what was closest to him, which is to say that he hardly spoke at all. The visit of a Christian priest was like the breaking of a dam. Almost as soon as I arrived in Tabriz I was invited to his house—he is a relative of my Iranian friends—and hints were dropped that religion would be discussed.

We arrived at his house about the middle of the morning and after leaving our shoes at the bottom of the stairs were shown up to a long saloon which occupied a substantial part of the first floor, an arrangement which I understand is typical of the better class houses of Tabriz. The saloon has four large windows looking out over the garden which, during the hot hours of the day, are shielded by bamboo mats suspended from the exterior of the frame, so that however hot and glaring it may be outside, the room is shadowed and cool.