The forms for my Poll Tax registration are sitting in my kitchen as I procrastinate about how to deal with them. The whole process of registration and the tax to which it is a prelude seem so despicable that I would gladly decide at this point not to fill in the form and begin the process of non-compliance. When Ministers say that this tax is fairer than the present system I feel anger and also a sense of powerlessness. There seems to be little doubt about the injustice of a tax which charges the richest person in a locality the same as the poorest. Yet another part of me recognizes what a fruitless gesture non-compliance would be, seeing that the mechanism exists to sequester my resources: I will have to pay it whether I like it or not. Is there room for manoeuvre in responding to this injustice? How best can I work constructively to remedy this injustice when there seems to be little space for any alternative action?

In situations like this there are two important tasks for me as a Christian. Firstly, I am determined to join with those who feel similar revulsion to this piece of legislation, with its regressive attitude to taxation and alarming implications for civil liberties. Secondly, while I have to renounce my desire for ready-made answers to my problem, whether in Scripture or Tradition, I must attend to what the Spirit is saying to the churches today, but use the necessary discernment to enable my path of discipleship to be in continuity with our ancestors in the faith. What I want to attempt in this article is to put on paper some of the clearing of the Biblical ground that enables me to continue the journey of faith and take into account this new challenge to our contemporary witness.

‘Jesus announced the Kingdom, and it was the Church that came’. The remark (made by Alfred Loisy) locates, with pin-point accuracy, the place of the Church on the map of salvation-history. Its existence here and now, in the time-span between the Lord’s first and second Comings, is to be a sign of that Kingdom where there will be no more need for Church. By its very being the Church proclaims the comings of that Kingdom and is committed to being a question-mark set against all earthly societies and against any particular form of social organisation, institution or project. Among Christian thinkers few can have rivalled Augustine in constructing their thought within such an eschatological perspective. A sense of the huge distance that divides ‘here’ and ‘now’ from ‘there’ and ‘then’ runs like an axis through his mature thought. The first part of this article attempts a brief summary of his view of the nature of human society ; the second part is a reflection within such a perspective on the political tasks of a prophetic Church in a modern secular society.

Christian thought in the first three centuries was dominated, as it was bound to be, by the Pauline and, for that matter, the rabbinic tradition of thinking about social existence: the Christian, like the Jew, was necessarily an alien in his society, a traveller with no permanent home in it, The one and only just society was that which God would bring about in His Kingdom. In relation to earthly societies, Christians were aliens; in relation to God’s Kingdom they were subjects, awaiting God’s act to establish the society in which they would be gathered, rather than active participants in its creation, still less, its rulers.

Lecturing On the Philosophy of History in the United States in 1955, Jacques Maritain thus restated a theme he had elaborated in Spain in the high summer of 1934, 23 months before Franco’s uprising. I shall argue that we should answer Maritain’s rhetorical question, No: it is a philosophical and theological mistake to suppose, as he did, that the temporal vocation of the Christian—or the Christian’s conscience in political matters—requires a ‘comprehensive aim’ such as the ‘concrete historical ideal’ of building a new or better Christendom.

In March 1955 the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, used words which have survived as expressing the reality of the nuclear age, and the hope which has guided the masters of the age: ‘safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’. The West’s new armaments, he said, would increase ‘the deterrent upon the Soviet Union by putting her ... scattered population on an equality or near-equality of vulnerability with our small densely-populated island’—a vulnerability matched by that of the West’s populations. The threat expressed by Churchill, to destroy Soviet populations by ‘a crushing weight of nuclear retaliation’, has remained the indispensable element in the deterrent threats and accompanying operational plans of the U.S., Britain, and France ever since.

On Clydeside in Glasgow, beside the early 19th-century Catholic Cathedral, there now stands a substantial modern glass building reminiscent of an oil company HQ or international bank. It is the new Curia for the Archdiocese of Glasgow, a gleaming symbol that the Catholics ‘have arrived’. Inside, the presence of a portrait of the Queen alongside one of the Pope underlines the political message behind the concrete and tinted glass. Catholics in the West of Scotland have come out of their mental and physical ghettoes and now feel secure enough to take to task, in a much more critical manner than hitherto, the establishments which govern Scottish society.

In one sense, it is amazing that the Scottish hierarchy, of all episcopal conferences, should take such a consistently radical stance, though I am sure most bishops would baulk at the phrase. The change was a long time in coming, in part because of the introversion of native Scottish Catholics and in part because the incoming Irish kept their heads below the parapet and concentrated on material improvements for their community. They faced considerable prejudice from a Presbyterian Scotland where the calvinistic version of the Reformation had taken deeper root than anywhere else in Western Europe. 1923 is not that long ago—the time when the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved a report on ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality‘.It was little wonder that the Catholic bishops kept stumm on social issues.

Yet lay Catholics, after 1906 and the emergence of the Catholic Socialist Society, gradually took an active part in Labour Party politics, breeding a mafia which is still strong in the City Chambers of Glasgow and other West of Scotland towns.

There can be little doubt that British education is in a state of crisis, and that Kenneth Baker’s so-called education reforms have simply compounded that crisis. We are likely to witness in Britain in the next decade perhaps more than at any other time since the passing of the Shaftsbury Act over a hundred years ago, the fiercest ideological battles around issues to do with the purpose and function of education and schooling in a liberal democratic society, the rights of the child and of the student, and the relationship between education and the national economy. In such battles the Church will be heavily involved—Catholic schools will see to that. Government legislation may hit Catholics hard in other areas and receive scant criticism, but schools are where the hierarchy believes the Catholic community finds and passes on its own identity. Perhaps bishops also think that Catholic schools are among the last places where the hierarchy has real power. Thus in recent months we have seen the dispute between Cardinal Hume and parents over whether one school should or should not ‘opt out’ of the State system. The danger, exemplified by the case of the Poll Tax in England and Wales, is that the Church will fight what it sees as its own corner, but will then keep silent in the wider battle. Its intervention may be dangerously misplaced.

This article seeks to set out what has happened to British education and the vision which a prophetic Church should champion.

Our sense of history should tell us that we have a responsibility to safeguard and to extend the hard-won rights that generations before us have secured through their struggles and their blood, even to the point of sacrificing their very lives.

The spectacle of Mr Casey waving the pope’s nose over the Christmas dinner table towards the irate Mrs Riordan seems a good place from which to approach the issues of Church and State, not least for its exposition of the prejudices, half-truths and common assumptions that will crown round and must be thought through: the Church is really the hierarchy; the bishops’ word is final in a Catholic country; religion should be kept out of politics. But it indicates also the way Church-State relations in Ireland are the product of a complex history, just as they are in most countries. Without proper attention to that history, it is impossible to analyse the present situation adequately. The description and analysis on offer here are bound to be sketchy and incomplete, yet it is possible and timely to pick out some of the key features of the historically moulded present and then reflect on the potential opportunities and challenges in the immediate future.

Historically a predominantly Catholic country, Ireland has known only one established church, the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. Since its disestablishment in 1869 no attempt has been made to substitute any other in law or constitution. This is one simple but important fact of Irish history which immediately sets it off from its nearest neighbours in England and Scotland. Its implications are manifold, something not always appreciated by the churches in Ireland themselves, who have sometimes behaved as if they did enjoy some kind of established status as churches of majority populations, Catholic in the South and Protestant in the North.