The little alpine city of Trent is not a very important place today, nor was it in the sixteenth century, apart from its position on a fairly busy line of communication connecting Italy with Germany over the Brenner Pass; and it may well be asked how it came to be the site of an important General Council of the Church. The answer lies in the circumstance that still brings Trent and the Trentino into the news today, their mixed racial character. In the sixteenth century Trent, with an Italian majority and a German minority, was ruled by its Prince-Bishop, usually a prelate of mixed German and Italian connections. It was the capital of a Prince-Bishopric (one of so many in Germany) that formed a constituent principality of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the boundary of which curious organization with the free and sovereign Italian State of Venice lay not far to the south on the road to Verona.

We still know less about Walter Hilton than about any other of the great medieval English mystics, yet what we know is enough to show us that in his own age and during the fifteenth century he was more highly esteemed by students and practitioners of the spiritual life than perhaps any devotional writer of the times. Richard Rolle’s sensational works had earned for themselves the immense popularity which they deserved, but there were many who came to deplore this popularity, and it is evident that the influence of Hilton was regarded as both a salutary corrective to Rolle’s extremes, and as in itself beneficial. In the present century this development of later medieval thought has been again obscured, partly, though quite involuntarily, because of the new impetus to the study of Rolle given by Miss Hope Emily Allen, in her immensely scholarly if labyrinthine Writing Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and in her admirable little edition, English Writings of Richard Rolle. In this second work, published in 1931, she presented one solution to the problem which confronts everyone who wishes to edit a text which achieved a large circulation in the Middle Ages. Had she attempted a complete collation of all the surviving manuscripts (no less than ninety-three separate texts of the various English writings which she edited were known to her), she might well have been still engaged in the task. Instead, she took for each treatise or poem two or three of what she considered to be the best manuscripts; and so for the last twenty-four years we have been able to read good, early versions of Rolle’s own words largely free from the welter of footnotes with which most of those who are engaged in such scholarly pursuits still encumber their works.

The delay in publishing the Dead Sea scrolls, long a quiet academic scandal, was recently thrust into the forefront of the news by The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception?. Its authors, M.Baigent and R. Leigh, two qualified experts in discerning arcane conspiracies, manifestly Find the world a threatening place. They give reality to their nightmare of Vatican world domination by claiming that the moment the scrolls were discovered a prescient Vatican, foreseeing the damage that first-century documents (then still unread!) must inevitably cause the faith, inserted its inquisitorial minions, the Dominicans of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, at the beginning of a process which to date they have consistently subverted. An hilarious thesis to those who know the facts, but disturbing to those forced to rely on titillating innuendo.

A major archaeological discovery is usually a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Time and time again chance, not planning, is the decisive factor. Had Heinrich Schliemann dug another sector of Troy, he would never have found the spectacular gold objects he identified as Priam’s treasure. If Kathleen Kenyon had placed her main trench 15 metres further north she would never have brought to light the 8000 BC tower which is the earliest evidence of urban organisation.

The Acts of the Apostles relates how in the Jerusalem church “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all." The author of Acts is not simply reporting three separate facts about the apostles, how they felt, how they lived, and how they preached. Their preaching gains its power from their common faith and life. Their rejection of private property and redistribution of wealth, cutting at the roots of avarice, form an eloquent expression of their faith in the God who hears the cry of the poor, whose day of justice is at hand. The heart, the purse, and the voice are formed in a single apostolic life.

This picture of the apostolic life was at the heart of St. Augustine's vision of religious life and dear to the early Dominicans who adopted his Rule. Humbert of Romans in his Commentary on the Rule was adamant that the brother who even said “that’s my book!” and meant it committed mortal sin. All things had been shared before the Fall and would be in the Kingdom. Private property was a frequent cause of envy and strife. It tied down the heart. Humbert set out the different reasons why voluntary poverty was integral to the office of preaching. Preachers have to go everywhere and not everywhere could afford to support the retinue, the horses and servants, of a rich prelate.

The English Dominican Province has given to the Church five cardinals, seventy-two archbishops and bishops, several papal legates and nuncios, and to the state some ministers of prominence such as Archbishop William Hotham, the favourite minister of Edward I, and Bishop John Gilbert of Hereford, twice Lord High Treasurer. In theology, philosophy, Sacred Scripture and other branches of ecclesiastical science English Dominican writers of repute number more than a hundred, and it is easy to show that during the first three centuries of their existence they were by far the most prominent theological body in England, whilst extant MSS. of sermons and state documents testify to their ability and popularity as preachers. In contemplating this long list of eminent men the question has sometimes been asked why there are no English Dominicans officially enrolled in the Calendar of Saints either as canonized or beatified. The difficulty, which applies equally to the Irish Province with its lengthy list of martyrs, is not really hard to answer. At the time of the Henrican schism the feasts of six Dominicans only were kept in the Order, now the number is three hundred and four, of whom two hundred and ninety-four have been raised to the altars since 1600. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English Dominicans, persecuted and generally working in secret, and frequently in prison, had little leisure for gathering the information necessary to obtain the beatification or canonization of the many members of the Province noted for their sanctity or heroism as martyrs. It has been left to us in more propitious times to undertake this task, and surely we can hope that such a work will be blessed with success.

The emergence in the 1980s and 1990s of a renewed Thomistic moral theology showed that the same could and should be attempted in dogmatic theology, with full weight given to the biblical, patristic, and spiritual emphases of the Ressourcement movement

The word ‘Psychology’ has become a capacious umbrella which covers a baffling variety of literature. ‘Contributions to Psychology’ covers, a still wider, indeed an almost limitless, range. Nihil humanum a me alienum: there can be no pre-established boundaries to a study or practice, which is concerned with the sources, motives and patterns of the totality of human experience and behaviour. A biography, a novel, a drama, even a painting or a quartet, often reveals depths of the human psyche unattained by works on medical or academic psychology. But these also have immeasurably widened their scope in recent decades. The hypothesis of primitive unconscious layers (whether or not accounted for in terms of a ‘collective unconscious’), which find expression in myths, ritual, and social patterns, has made ethnology, mythology, folk-lore, comparative religion, history, pre-history and countless other fields of research, all tributary in various ways to psychology, while psychology in its turn has given to them a new stimulus and orientation. The breakdown of the post-Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter, with its restriction of psychology to the former, has also added increasingly to the psychologists’ concern with the biological and physical sciences, while the treatment of psychological phenomena in dynamic rather than purely mechanistic terms has opened new horizons to the theoretical psychologist which are as yet too indistinct to be accurately defined.

This paper offers a survey and proposal concerning Catholic ecclesiology in the post-Vatican II context. As a survey, it addresses the attempts by four major Catholic thinkers, de Lubac, Congar, Rahner and Balthasar to articulate dual dimensions of the Church. In the last century, the surge in biblical studies and empirical methodologies has wrought numerous ecclesial images, dimensions and models for understanding the various aspects of the Church. While many of these attempts are descriptive, or even symbolic, there is a need to move to an explanatory method for a more systematic apprehension of the various dimensions of the Church. The proposal of this paper will argue that such an explanation lies in how the Church understands itself with respect to each of the missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit as developed from the thought of Bernard Lonergan on the two dimensions of the Church. This will allow for a plethora of images, but simultaneously it will provide for some normative control of meaning over these various dimensions.