Oscar Wilde is alleged to have said that there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about Fr Anthony spent a great deal of his life being talked about Many people have commented on his list of achievements: Catholic Chaplain at Edinburgh University, Deputy Chairman of the Scottish Parole Board, Chairman of the Scottish Catholic Historical Association, Provincial of the English Dominicans, Rector of the University of Edinburgh and many other distinctions. But like many priests, his most valuable work as pastor and counsellor was hidden. During his long career he was an instrument through which many were brought to glimpse the edge of the mystery of God, and through whom many came to hope in God’s goodness and to trust in his mercy.

It was often said of Fr Anthony that he was a man ahead of his time. In many ways he was precisely a man of his time, but in an age which could not make space for prophets. Like many of his generation, his experience was indelibly marked by economic depression and by war. He said himself that in the thirties he, “lost faith in bullets and ballots as a way of re-shaping society, and thought some kind of spiritual revolution was the only hope for the future.” It was this conviction which led him to the Church and to the Order. At the same time a group of theologians in France were stressing the need for a re-centring in the person of Christ and in his paschal mystery.

In her commentary on St John’s gospel in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Pheme Perkins writes:

It seems to me that an exegesis of Chapter 4 of St John’s gospel might throw further light on this judgement as well as illustrating the psychodynamics of ‘conversion’ and interpersonal encounter with Christ. Chapter 4 stands on its own in the gospel and is a brilliant theological construction. It is an intricately woven pattern of wordplay, humour, symbolism, obfuscation, at least on the part of the woman. An examination of the dynamic of interpersonal relating might begin with a reflection on how anyone of us feels when meeting someone for the first time. How do we decide whether or not we want the relationship to go any further than our simply remaining on polite or distant terms? The decision we take in such circumstances is very complex, acted out nearly always at the unconscious level and made in an instant. We decide that the person is interesting enough to reward further acquaintance or we just move away uttering a phrase of polite disengagement.

It is a rare thing to find a film like A Winter's Tale, the latest work of Eric Rohmer, in which the protagonists talk about the knowledge of God and the leap of faith, and discuss reincarnation, abortion—to refute it—; invoke the theory of reminiscence; where they go into churches to pray, and in which the heroine thinks her partner ought to go to Mass, because it is Sunday and he is a believer. I should probably make it clear at the outset that this film was neither solicited nor financed by religious authorities, but was created by a film-writer who, while making no mystery of his Catholicism, has never paraded it.

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A Winter's Tale is a masterpiece of subtlety, of precision in dialogue and photography. It handles people and situations with understanding, and even if the people happen to talk about Pascal and Plotinus, there is never a sense of that heaviness which is sometimes discernible in Rohmer’s previous film, A Summer’s Tale, where references to Kant were a little ponderous at times. . . . The setting remains simple and homely, but we do not get the feeling that it was all thrown together in haste, as with some other works. To be honest, since 1982, friends of Rohmer and his films have defended them, at whatever cost, largely on the basis of the admiration lavished on his previous films. Even so, it has to be admitted that the six films made during this ten-year period, especially My Soul’s Friend (1987), were far superior to the average film production.

If everyone lived the love of God as fully as it is often talked about, it would not be a pious exaggeration to say that this world would be paradise. Unfortunately, in reality nothing is more rare than a pure, total love of God, and the proof of this is that there are so few saints, who are, by definition, people who do live this love to a heroic degree. It is also only too easy to draw up theories about the love of God and its various stages and degrees, but between word and deed there lies the will. Because Catherine was serious about living the love of God, we can sum up all her sanctity and the whole way she followed in one simple sentence, which she wrote in a letter to her bishop on 15 February 1552: ‘This is what my Lord pleases ... I want it to be pleasing to me too’ [CRE I 248], Or in what she wrote to Giovambattista de’ Servi on 20 May 1552, ‘Please pray that his most holy Majesty will, if it pleases him, grant me holiness enough to be able to fulfil my office [of prioress] to his honour; if not, then his will be done in me always, in this and in everything else’ [CRE I 266].

The rhetoric of ‘New World Order’ came to prominence in the period of glasnost and its dramatic denouement in the events of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of communism. First coined by Gorbachev in 1986, the phrase New World Order became popular particularly with Western leaders, most notably in America and Britain, as a way of describing the future development of international relations after the end of the Cold War. At the same time as Fukuyama was declaring the ‘end of history’, Western politicians were announcing that a new kind of international order would be established with the demise of communism. In the Cold War era, so the argument ran, the USSR and her allies had blocked the enforcement of international legality through the UN, and had fermented regional conflicts and wars for her own interests. The New World Order would allow the development of a new peace where the freedoms taken for granted in the West might be seen to spread throughout the world without the great obstacle which the enemy of communism, and the superpower conflict, had previously represented. The United Nations could now at last take on the role prepared for it after the Second World War. America and her allies old and new would be able to ensure peace in the world.