The 27th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 15th May 1997

Nineteen years ago, when I delivered the 8th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture, I said this:

History obliges Jews to take account of the figure of Jesus, because Jewish life is lived in the midst of the gentiles, and for the majority of Jews that means in the midst of Christians. We are compelled to respond to Jesus—not Jesus the ancient Jew but Jesus the Christian Lord.

And I concluded with the positive judgment of Franz Rosenzweig:

Before God, Jew and Christian both labour at the same task. He cannot dispense with either.

I fully share Franz Rosenzweig’s optimistic vision, and it is in the light of this belief, and in the spirit of my earlier talk, that I accepted the invitation to come back and give a second lecture in memory of the man we are gathered to honour. We owe it to Cardinal Bea and to other predecessors who, like him, laboured to clear away the bitterness and hatred of centuries, to continue this work, each one of us in whatever way we can.

I would like to take this opportunity to push my own thinking further than I was willing or able to do nineteen years ago. In the intervening years my thoughts have moved on, and so has the climate of Christian-Jewish dialogue. I think we are ready now for some tougher talking. I hope I am not wrong about this.

Since Vatican II the restored Permanent Diaconate in the Latin Church has played an increasingly important role in the life of the Catholic Church, particularly in Western Europe and North America. Is there a theology of the diaconate, and if so what are the contentious issues? How far is the diaconate really distinct from the priesthood and the ministry of laypeople? A way forward is to revive the subversive character of διακονία, both in practical pastoral ministry and in serious engagement with Catholic Social Teaching; this necessitates major changes to diaconate formation programmes. A clearly defined diaconate would be able to help the Church renew and reform its understanding of ministry.

This article raises the question whether Christianity might itself, at least in part, be responsible for the modern waning of belief in God because of its New Testament teaching, unlike that of the Old Testament, that God is ‘love.’ After examining whether the Bible does in fact present two incompatible views of God, the article looks at some signs of how the traditional Western view of God might be changing, in response to modern sensibilities. It concludes by considering how it might still be possible to speak about the God of Christianity despite the new cultural conditions of today.

One of the most interesting features in Aquinas’s theory of mind relates to his view that the human intellect is inferior to that of an angel. St. Thomas gives the impression that if only our minds could act in the same way as those of the angels, many of our noetic difficulties would disappear. The weakness of the human mind is due, he believes, to the discursive process of human cognition which results from the application of our understanding to the potentially intelligible data that is acquired from the senses. Aquinas quite frequently deplores this mental condition, claiming that it represents a form of intellectual weakness (e.g. S.T. 1.58.3). The result of such a discursive process is that the human mind struggles to understand by means of lengthy and arduous mental efforts (S.T. 1.89.1). By comparison, the intuitive grasp of the angelic mind is swift and immediate, capable of directly obtaining knowledge of first principles (S.T. 1.58.3). Aquinas perceives the latter ability as a sign that angels are truly intellectual beings in a way that humans are not and he reserves for us the term rational (rationales vocantur) as a way of describing our slower intellectual ability. In such a context, rationality obviously does not constitute a positive description but rather denotes a form of mental weakness (ex debilitate intellectualis). The latter, according to S.T. 1.58.3, is quite clearly the result of our present mode of mental discursiveness in which the intellect proceeds gradually towards the knowledge of truth.

The dangers which threaten the Catholic historian writing on controversial topics were all too plain in the works of Hilaire Belloc. Great as Belloc was as a writer, outstanding as he was in his capacity to recreate the past, he was nevertheless primarily a controversialist with a number of bees in his bonnet, and tragically, in many ways, he was a man in a hurry who had to turn out many books in order to support his children, who were, he said, crying out for pearls and caviar. All this helps to explain why Belloc, who was capable of being on occasions so brilliant an historian, wrote a remarkable amount of bad history. Moreover, partly because he had been denied the opportunity of pursuing his work without the perpetual nagging of financial worries, he turned on the university which had failed to give him the chance of exercizing his undoubted talents, and built up a picture of official academic historians, stupid, prejudiced, deceiving their readers by a spurious critical apparatus and footnotes which on investigation did not support the text. The stupidity, the ignorance and the deceitfulness of the dons became something of an obsession with him, and he thought official historians had entered into a conspiracy to conceal the truth. Now it must be admitted that when Belloc started writing, there was accepted by most educated Englishmen a picture of, say, the Middle Ages or the Reformation which is vastly different from what would be accepted now, and it is probable that Belloc’s writing did something to break down the old myths and prejudices, but it is still true that if Belloc was not acceptable to many non-Catholic historians it was because much of what he wrote was unbalanced and unsound.

He witness of The New Scholasticism, a quarterly review and the organ of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, to a vigorous Thomist movement in the United States, is confirmed by a book recently published, Contemporary Philosophy and Thomistic Principles, in which Thomism is presented as a complete and authentic philosophy, not a sort of philosophical parasite on a religion of authority; and as a philosophy able to meet present problems and complete the solutions advanced by modern thinkers. It lays the ghost, evoked by Mr. Wyndham Lewis in Time and the Western Man, of a Thomism incurably conservative, forever the old against the new, anti-modern in a stupid historical manner. The page-references to Aquinas, Thomas, steadily grow in the index to names in books of science and philosophy. His name comes readily to the journalist’s pen and the mouth of that public which reads the review pages of the more serious dailies, and a lady over the tea-pot can quite easily remark, ‘Of course, Mr. So-and-so, you know, is a tomist.’

Dr. Bandas begins with a particularly firm and downright piece of writing on Fundamental Principles (Chapter I). The foundation of Thomism on Being is clearly indicated, as well as the transcendental value and immunity from empirical criticism of the principles immediately deriving from Being—identity and contradiction, substance, sufficient reason, causality.

On Christmas Day 2007, Channel Four took its viewers for two hours on an alleged search for ‘the real Jesus’. The programme largely failed to introduce any real experts; there were errors and painful gaps in the ‘information’ provided; there was hardly any recognition that, over and over again, there was another side to the positions being presented. Among the fantasies once again trotted out was Jesus’ supposed life and death in India, a ‘thesis’ that was invented without a shred of evidence in the 1890s. The presenter repeatedly pushed theories about early followers of Jesus reworking beliefs and practices from Gnostic and other sources. St Paul was portrayed as the ‘real’ founder of Christianity, without a word being said about this view being proposed and long ago refuted. The poor quality of this programme was astounding. One expects something much better, especially on Christmas Day.

The row over exorbitant salaries for the bosses of private monopolies has resurrected an ancient belief: namely that we can distinguish just from unjust prices. ‘Just prices’ — as distinct from prices set by market forces and the profit motive — once formed part of the ‘moral economy’. A just price for some article had to be proportionate to the amount of work that went into making it and to the contribution it made to the common good.

The great enemies of justice in fixing prices were (and are) ‘damnable avarice, sensuality and pride’ (as the fourteenth century writer Henry of Langenstein rightly remarked). His views resonate loudly today in the columns of the newspapers and on the tops of Clapham omnibuses. But they can hardly be squared with the economics of Adam Smith or his modem disciples. For the tradition which Smith initiated put things asunder which the earlier tradition regarded as having been joined together by natural law and ultimately by God: in particular, ethics and politics (and therefore economics).

A commentary by an eighteenth-century Spanish scholastic on Adam Smith’s political economy may seem an unlikely place in which to find a sharp and telling critique of ‘the state we’re in’ (to use Will Hutton’s punning phrase). Yet (as Scott Meikle’s recent article in the February 1995 New Blackfriars shows) Fray Antonio de la Santisma Trinidad, who was appointed in 1791 by the Spanish Inquisition to examine The Wealth of Nations, was able to reveal something fundamentally amoral with the ideology which afflicts contemporary Britain.

In The Grain of Wheat, Hans Urs von Balthasar quotes St. Basil on the intent contemplation of God's works. In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis speaks of making “every pleasure into a channel of adoration”, by praising “these pure and spontaneous pleasures” as “‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” According to Iris Murdoch, such attentiveness requires a degree of “selflessness” that resembles aesthetic contemplation and— it may be inferred — prayerful reflection. Using these passages and others by Kathleen Norris and Simone Weil, this essay offers related perspectives on the process and the effects of attentiveness, in poetry and prayer. Poets practise, and thereby teach an attentiveness that is analogous to that achieved in certain forms of prayer. Prayer, like poetry, gives thanks for the mysteries — even as it seeks to understand and respond to the injustices and sufferings — of life. Denise Levertov illustrates in her poetry an awareness of how such attentiveness can be productive, in her late religious poems especially.

Over a century before the principles of the “new evangelization” were proclaimed in 1965 in Gaudium et spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modem World) Catherine McAuley (1781-1841), vigorously promoted its two key principles: (1) the dignity of the human person and (2) the virtue of solidarity with the suffering poor, sick, and ignorant. From her First Conferences alter founding the Religious Sisters of Mercy in 1831 in Dublin, Ireland, Mother Catherine consistently taught her Sisters to put these principles into practice in their apostolic work in education and health care.

Drawing upon Venerable Catherine McAuley’s original writings and biographies of her life and works, this article will demonstrate how she helped prepare the way for consecrated persons in the new evangelization of the Church in the modem world. The themes are divided as follows: Part I—The Dignity of the Human Person, Part II—Solidarity with the Poor, Sick, and Ignorant, and Part III—Urgent Problems for the Church in the Modem World.

The other day the members of a Youth Club asked if something could be done to prevent people who came to address them from talking about sex. They said, with considerable feeling, that nearly every speaker seemed to think that youth was interested in very little else; which is, of course, not true. It is not teenagers who are so much concerned with sex as their elders, who continue to produce and read a stream of books and articles. Reaction against secrecy has led to an over-anxious campaign to assert the importance of sex, which in turn is in danger of producing the reaction that sex does not matter much anyway. A good many people have become bored by sexual experience itself, and the last thing they want is to be further bored by reading about it.

A balance has to be struck somehow, and the four books listed below illustrate awareness of this in very different quarters. On the whole they illustrate the growing recognition that the fundamental question to be tackled has to do with the nature of human beings; what is being human ? For the Christian this is a theological question, answered in terms of our creation by God in his own image and likeness. Our life, even on the simplest level and at any time or place, must be somehow like God’s own life if it is to be truly human.

We are told something of what God’s life is in the doctrine of the Trinity.