St Thomas is one of those people who, like Queen Victoria, have become a myth : I use the word in a Jungian sense and by no means in depreciation. She became one during her lifetime, and on that count made an earlier start; still he was already five centuries ahead, and his image has been more variously encrusted with the tastes of different periods and regions, so much so as almost to have grown into several myths.

To discover what the real person was like, the prosopon of Patristic theology, you cannot do better than go by the biographical documents edited by Father Kenelm Foster, which record the witness of those who were as near to him as we are to the characters of the 1914 war. Yet it is with the prosopon in its earlier histrionic and later juridical sense, the personage standing for a cause, the legal person and sometimes, it must be confessed, the legal fiction, that the historian of philosophy and theology is occupied, for such is the public figure that engages the gears and sets into motion the vehicles that carry the ideas of groups.

Pius XII condemned atheism's “most ignoble corruptions” in his 1956 encyclical Haurietis Aquas, along with its “lethal tenets” in 1958's Meminisse Iuvat. Only six years later, however, in 1964, Vatican II's Lumen Gentium affirmed the possibility of salvation for “those who, without any fault of theirs, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God” (article 16). Furthermore, the following year's Gaudium et Spes 19–21, drafted by Paul VI's newly-founded Secretariat for Non-believers, offers, among much else, a sympathetic overview of contemporary atheisms, and invites their contemporary adherents to “a dialogue that is sincere and prudent”. These paragraphs, according to Ratzinger, “may be counted among the most important pronouncements of Vatican II”.

Evidently, comparing Pius XII's “lethal tenets” to Vatican II's salvific optimism, profound developments are manifest in the Catholic engagement with atheism. Primarily responsible for this are, I argue, two episodes in French Catholic history in the decades preceding Vatican II: a) the unprecedented dialogue of Catholic intellectuals with modern atheism, following the French Communist Party's main tendue (“outstretched hand”) during the period of the Popular Front (1934–38); and b) the ‘priest-worker’ experiment, initiated by Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel's 1943 publication of La France – Pays de Mission?

At the present time women are becoming more and more integrated into the public and professional spheres; they are taking posts of responsibility not only within the home, but outside of it, where they are being accepted not just as feminists but as members of the community with particular skills and aptitudes, which are not, moreover, merely ‘womanly’ skills and aptitudes. In many professional situations it is now no longer sensible to ask whether the applicant for a post is a man or a woman; the only criteria applied are those of professional competence. This change within the secular society is not reflected within Church communities. Women are systematically discriminated against; the most crude and powerful symbol of this is their exclusion from the sanctuary. Now, it is argued that ‘tradition’ supports this discrimination and any attack on it is an attack on the living and holy tradition of the Church, and moreover that woman’s place is sharply and strictly defined in scripture. We shall not be able to examine both of these objections, but must content ourselves with a partial examination of the second. Partial because we shall only look at the four Gospels and not at the Old Testament or the other writings of the New Testament. Also much of the work that has been done on this question is based on a study of the role of the Mother of God, but very little has been attempted in the study of the roles of other women mentioned in the Gospel narratives. Therefore, we shall concentrate on this area, hoping to discuss the unique and all-important place of the Mother of God later. Finally we should make clear that in spite of the content, this article is not a statement of a merely ‘feminist’ point of view. Issues will be raised that go far beyond the single problem of the status of women; rather this problem should be seen as one of many which present a moral challenge to the Church and which are all interrelated. Sexual discrimination is only one form of discrimination which may afflict a ‘Christian’ community.

One of St. Paul’s contributions to our understanding of the powers of evil is to sum them up in the phrase ‘principalities and powers’. For him they represent the sum-total of evil powers that threaten men both heavenly and earthly. The author of Ephesians takes over the concept in his emphasis of Christ’s exaltation and victory over evil. For him Christ’s victory and redemption is cosmic in scope, yet peculiarly practical in that its effects are to be worked out in the Church and in the lives of believers.

In 1:21 the ascended Christ is described as sitting at the right hand of the Father above, ‘all rule and authority and power and dominion’. This list represents the cosmic totality; everything that in any way is in a position of power and influence in the universe. The all-inclusive nature of the phrase is underlined by the addition of, ‘and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come’. There is no attempt made to set the powers in any order of preference, or to define any of their individual characteristics. ‘The Writer is concerned not to give us information about the denizens of the unseen world but to help our imagination to picture the exalted glory of Christ.’ Are the powers referred to good or bad? The need for them to be put in subjection under his feet points at least to the inclusion of subversive heavenly powers. By his exaltation Christ is not only supreme over the whole universe, but also head of the Church.

Many years ago, when I was unsettled about the Anglican position, I read Salmon’s Infallibility with great care. It had been recommended to me as ‘a devastatingly unanswerable criticism of the validity of the Roman claims’.

Though I did not realise it then, this book was a determining factor in my decision to become a Catholic. I had read at the same time Wilfrid Ward’s Life of Cardinal Newman and Newman’s own Essay on Development, the classical exposition in English of the doctrine of tradition. I saw at once that the infallibility which Salmon was attacking was not the infallibility which the Catholic Church claims and which had been defined with greater precision by the Vatican Council. I realised, too, that when Salmon wrote of tradition he meant something different from the tradition so clearly analysed and cogently expounded by Newman.

I knew that according to Catholic theology reason can go so far as to show the consonance of revealed truth with knowledge acquired by reason, and even to infer that what is revealed is true and should be believed. The assent of faith however is supernatural and cannot be produced by such knowledge, but is wholly dependent on the word of God in revelation. It was plain that Salmon had no clear conception of this distinction and was in constant confusion about the respective functions of faith and reason.

The notion of ‘the feminine Other’ is a vexed one for feminists. In the opening pages of The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asks, ‘Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: “Even in Russia women still are women”.’ For de Beauvoir the verbal symmetry of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine is merely a matter of linguistic form. In the real world of work and love—in life in general—man is the norm and woman is man’s ‘other’, thus her famous remark, ‘He is the Subject... she is the Other’, the ‘not man’ defined by men.

Levinas may be a ‘recent read’ for many of us but already, writing in 1949, de Beauvoir quotes him; ‘Otherness’, says Levinas, ‘reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.’ T suppose’ de Beauvoir comments, ‘that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her own consciousness. . . . But it is striking that he deliberately takes a man’s point of view. When he writes that “woman is mystery”, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.’3 And one which, we can note with de Beauvoir, can stand in a long line of philosophical evocation of ‘the female’ and ‘the feminine’ from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and beyond.

In the existentialist rubric of The Second Sex de Beauvoir sees the problem as this—a woman, like anyone else, is an autonomous freedom, yet she discovers herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as the ‘Other’. Woman, philosophically speaking, lacks her own subjectivity.

Pope Benedict XVI often uses the concept of the dignity of the human person in his discourse. This article firstly attempts to present a synthesis of Benedict XVI's understanding of human dignity. The result is a multidimensional understanding of human dignity based on the belief that the human person is created in the image of God. Human dignity is constituted by the given-ness of human existence, the capacities inherent in being human—freedom, reason, love and community—and the telos of human existence, namely, spiritual union with God and the practical realisation of a peaceful and mutually edifying human coexistence. Based on this understanding of human dignity, Benedict XVI develops a normative morality. The second part of this article asks whether interpretations of this normative morality that would claim that some of these norms are absolute moral norms are in fact correct. Particular attention is paid to the apparent equation or reduction of human dignity to the dignity of life. The conclusion is, though it is possible to read Benedict XVI's normative morality as advocating absolute moral norms, such an interpretation would be usually incorrect in light of Benedict XVI's more comprehensive understanding of human dignity.

One of Catherine of Siena's principal teachings is self‐knowledge, i.e., knowledge of oneself and knowledge of God. Catherine adapted the Christian spiritual tradition on the subject and presented it anew using a number of ingenious images such as a well, a cell within a cell, a peaceful sea, a mirror. So important was self‐knowledge in her life and teaching that she came to regard it as virtually prayer itself.

In a topic as controversial as the Turin Shroud, it is always surprising to note that there remains a large area of consensus among scholars who hold opposite opinions on the origin of this piece of fabric. According to the consensus view, neither science nor history can prove that the Turin Shroud shows signs of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. However, the reasons provided for this important claim are not convincing, especially in light of recent developments in historiography and analytic philosophy.

‘The members of the Holy Office use methods which, if they were in Great Britain, would soon land them in court. The Holy Office ruins reputations and destroys people’s careers.’ The English Jesuit, Archbishop Tommy Roberts, formerly Archbishop of Bombay, made these grave allegations in a full session of the Second Vatican Council. They are well illustrated by the way the French worker-priest crisis was dealt with between the sumrtier of 1953 and the spring of 1954. Obviously I can only record such a richly complex period in summary form—almost telegraphically. But even such a résumé gives an eloquent demonstration of the way the hierarchical authority of that time functioned, particularly in regard to the human rights of the baptised.

The loss of the working classes to the Catholic Church in France in the nineteenth century had for a long while made social issues prominent in French ecclesiastical thinking. The spiritual humanism with socialist leanings to be found, for example, in the influential periodical Esprit (founded by Emmanuel Mounier in 1932) was gradually accepted even by some members of the hierarchy. The publication in 1943 of the book by A. Godin and Y. Daniel La France, pays de mission?—the question mark was included at the request of the ecclesiastical authorities— helped to spur concrete attempts to bridge the gap between the Church and the working class. By far the most outstanding among these was the decision by the bishops to permit some of the clergy to combine their priestly ministry with day-to-day sharing in the lives of manual labourers, in other words working beside them, joining their trade unions and living among them in working-class fiats.

It has been shown that the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, St Thomas Aquinas, was an important theological influence on John Owen, the seventeenth-century English puritan theologian, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, especially in the areas of the divine being, grace and Chalcedonian Christology. Suzanne McDonald has argued that, while Aquinas is unmistakably a source for Owen's doctrine of the beatific vision, Owen surpassed Aquinas's doctrine in a manner she judges to be correct, theologically speaking, and which exposes the deficiency of Aquinas's account. Owen achieved this particular ‘Reforming’ or rather ‘re-forming’ of Aquinas's doctrine, she argues, by way of a ‘Christological re-orientation of the doctrine’ in terms of what is seen in the beatific vision and how it is seen, that is, its content and means. This article replies to McDonald from a Catholic and Thomist perspective, in response to her suggestion that Owen's account of the beatific vision opens up possibilities for ecumenical dialogue. The article attempts to achieve this first by reassessing the Christological contrasts McDonald draws between Owen and Aquinas in terms of content and means, and then by offering several suggestions as to why one might want to prefer Aquinas's account over Owen's.

Chesterton never gave a systematic account of what he meant by Distributism anywhere in his writing, but the outline of this sociopolitical philosophy is clear to anyone who is familiar with his work and that of the circle of writers to which he belonged. As the name implies, Distributism meant first of all that property should be distributed in the widest possible way. Belloc stated the case for this policy in The Servile State, which he published in 1912 and which became the text-book of the movement. He argued that Socialism and State Capitalism were helping to create the same kind of society in which power would be concentrated in the hands of a small ruling-class and security would be given to a permanent proletariat whose econonomic position would be fixed by law. The only alternative to the ‘slave’ state was the Distributist state of small peasant ownership and workers’ guilds. The nearest approximation to this simple society was found in medieval times. Consequently Distributists must be prepared to repudiate modern industrialism in its present form and work for a return to the past. The way in which this theory was interpreted among Belloc’s followers is best illustrated by a quotation from a Distributist manifesto published twenty-five years later:

The presence or lack of certain philosophical or religious preoccupations at any period has a great deal to do with the prevailing attitude towards children and their education.

In primitive or spontaneous forms of human society the child is not a special subject of study. Children are naturally and roundly brought up in the large circle of the home, with its traditional wisdom and salutary rough and tumble.

In many of the Greek states, where political life was allpervasive, it was inevitable that educational theories should emphasize the primary importance of education for citizenship—a phase reproduced for us in modern states such as Italy and Germany.

A Jansenistic theology once darkened men’s outlook on human nature and, in consequence, on its budding period. This gloom and the severity which harmonized with it persisted throughout the Victorian age. It was a time when children were habitually treated as criminals latae sententiae, an evil and perverse generation, to be repressed and chastized without mercy and without truce. For men of this epoch the child was, before all, a nuisance. It had no proper place in an adult world. A child (as Maria Montessori points out) was not to sit on the grown-ups’ chairs. Nor was it to sit on the stairs. Hence, having no chair of its own, it could sit down only when some big person condescended to offer it the hospitality of a pair of knees.

Beginning with the question of whether Aquinas's Summa theologiae inevitably distorts the meaning of biblical texts by removing them from their narrative context, this essay suggests that one way to think about Aquinas's use of Scripture in the Summa theologiae is to read together, as an ensemble, the biblical texts that he cites when treating a particular theme. Focusing on his first four questions on the virtue of faith (ST II-II, qq. 1–4), I argue that Aquinas's selection of biblical texts from across the canonical Scriptures enables him to provide a nuanced biblical perspective on a particular theme even without finding it necessary to quote Scripture in every article. I seek to bring to light the way that the various biblical texts in the question—whose functions within the articles are widely diverse, from providing the hinge for a responsio to framing a minor objection–complement and echo one another.