During 1965-66, India suffered the worst drought in living memory the monsoon had failed for the third time in four years; food grain production fell by 19 per cent, and there was widespread famine. Mothers spent hours searching the cracked earth for grains of rice or wheat with which they could feed their children; and would walk miles to the nearest good well for a couple of buckets of water. Life was reduced to the absolute basics. Women would cut a sari into two and wear half each. When the Brothers to All Men (B.A.M.) team first drove into the village of Kosila the people tried to take the canvas from the jeep for clothing.

Bihar is the most backward state of India, and the Gaya district is one of the poorest in the State. Thus B.A.M. established a team of volunteers in the town of Gaya in December, 1966. The first two volunteers began a well-digging programme in the worst-affected part of the district. This work was done in conjunction with the international Relief organization AFPRO (Action for Food Production) and was completed by April, 1967.

B.A.M. started its own programme in May, 1967, employing villagers to dig emergency irrigation wells on a ‘Food for Work’ basis. For this project the National Council of Churches provided a jeep, and a supply of food grain with which to pay the villagers.

As a result of the changes inaugurated by Vatican II our eucharistic experience is now very different from what it was a few years ago. But what about our experience of the sacrament of Confession? Here the shift during these same few years has rather been simply from experience to non-experience. Though statistics are hard to come by and motivation difficult to establish, it seems certain that the number of confessions has fallen.

Now this is not a shift inaugurated by Vatican II. The Council reaffirmed the value of this sacrament and reiterated the principle laid down in Canon Law that priests should ‘show themselves entirely and always ready to perform the office of the sacrament of penance as often as the faithful reasonably request it’ (Presbyterorum Ordinis, c. Ill, Abbott translation, p. 561). It seems clear that this does not mean merely the provision of regular times on Saturdays and on the eves of feasts but also urges that priests should respond unhesitatingly to a spontaneous request to hear a confession. Beyond this the Council did not go except to recommend a revision of the rites and formulas of the sacrament—a revision that has not yet been carried out. The falling number of confessions has been brought about, therefore, by the decisions of individuals. This growing feeling within the Church that the sacrament need not be received so frequently must be recognized and respected. It must also critically examined. Is it a development, orthodox and legitimate, of the Church’s experience of divine mercy? Or, on the contrary, is it an aggressive, individualistic deviation from the sound tradition of the Church? Rather than rush to any such sweeping judgments we must first ask what it is that this sacrament celebrates and what is the previous experience of the Church in this matter.

Any understanding of this statesman’s contribution to a new African ideology of reality and humanity in their political, economic and social doctrines has to be combined with an examination of the background from which he emerged.

Nyerere has been fortunate in inheriting problems which have not been as serious or restrictive of new policies as those experienced by the new presidents of Uganda and Kenya, even though there was the shared inheritance of colonialism, underdeveloped economies overwhelmingly agricultural and the shadows of a British style of administration too expensive for newly independent African states to maintain.

Tanzania’s historical background is remarkably free of the problems which continue to bedevil the politics of its neighbours. Tribal differences are minimal and mostly within the Bantu group so that the state has no inherited splits in its structure. There is the national language of kiSwahili, dating from before the colonial period and structured into the administration first by the Germans and then by the British; it is a real medium of communication centred on the towns and as such has associations with politics and progress which have increased its utility.

The capital at Dar-es-salaam on the coast is not dominated by one tribal group and the state had no semi-independent federated kingdoms to cope with; the progressive Haya and Chagga are too small in numbers and too far from the capital to be in any position to dominate national policies. The numerically superior Sukuma and Nyamwezi had neither the economy nor natural leaders to achieve the Kikuyu and Ganda ascendencies in their respective countries.

To stop, then, at the mere recital of topography would be like having ‘had the experience but missed the meaning’. Yet the meaning of the symbols which rise out of the topography enjoy a peculiar character precisely because, as Miss Gardner has already been quoted as saying: ‘The landscape of The Dry Salvages is a landscape remembered.’ I suggest that this symbolism, especially of the sea and the rocks and of the plight of the fishermen, has a peculiarly realistic quality. I use the word ‘realistic’ largely in an epistemological context, with, however, psychological and anthropological overtones. This quality refers to structure, theme and tone. Further, transforming and intensifying this realism is a structure best seen as deriving from a Christian imagination—an ‘approach to the meaning restores the experience/In a different form’.

It is commonplace to say that Eliot’s poetry is deeply indebted to the French Symboliste tradition. It is also commonplace to say that this tradition, as its theory and practice developed from Baudelaire through Rimbaud and Valéry, became more and more self-enclosed and private in tone and meaning.The strong idealist tendencies of its epistemology and its premises of the poet’s isolation from society are well known.

If the present writer could have been suspected of megalomania for his earlier article on The Role of the Church in Asia (New Blackfriars, January 1970), he should at least not be guilty of inconsistency. And so, in this sequel, on the one hand, the minimum view is advanced that the little island of Ceylon is an interesting case-study of the contemporary Church in Asia and, on the other, the maximum view that Ceylon’s place is crucial in the role-context of the Church in Asia and the World.

The basic figures of Ceylon’s demographic and geographic littleness are quickly enumerated. In the early 1960s, in a total Asian population of nearly 1,800 million, Ceylon had a population of nearly 11 million. In Asia’s total Christian population of 73 million, the Catholics numbered a little more than three-quarters of a million, while the other Christians numbered a little more than 100,000. Geographically, Ceylon is a small island, 25,332 square miles in area, situated at the southern tip of the Indian sub-continent and separated from it by a narrow strip of shallow water.

Yet, Ceylon has an importance far greater than its size would warrant. Her people have a higher degree of literacy than in most other countries of Asia. The standard of living, though very low in comparison with Western attainments, is high for Asia. Her educational, political and religious institutions and her tri-lingual press are highly developed. Her systems of easy island communication and her position as a sea and air port of call between Europe and the East have made her important for world trade and have turned her capital city, Colombo, into a large and crowded cosmopolitan and commercial centre.

‘. . . I persisted in denying, and they continued to give me electric shocks, kicks, blows with a rod and punches in the ribs.

Once Captain Albernaz had me open my mouth to “receive the sacrament of the eucharist”. They put in an electric wire. My mouth became completely swollen, preventing normal speech. They shouted accusations against the Church, saying that priests are homosexuals because they do not marry. At 2 p.m. they finished the session. They brought me to the cell where I lay stretched out on the floor.

At 6 p.m. they brought me something to eat but I could not swallow a thing since my mouth was one big wound. A few minutes afterwards, I was led to the interrogation room for an“explanation”. There I found the same team of Captain Albernaz. They asked me the same questions and repeated the same accusations. To explain my resistance to the torture, they concluded that I must be a guerilla and I was hiding my participation in attacks on banks.

The questioning began again, in order to make me confess my share in the attacks: electric shocks, kicks in the genital organs and in the stomach were repeated. I was beaten with small planks of wood, cigarette butts were snuffed out on my body. For five hours I was subjected to this dog treatment. Finally they had me walk the “Polish corridor” (a torture consisting in having the prisoner pass between a double file of soldiers who are beating him all the while until he falls unconscious). I was assured that this was just a sample of what would happen to the Dominicans.

The publication of Colour and Citizenship, the report on British race relations prepared by E. J. B. Rose, Nicholas Deakin and seven others, and published by the Institute of Race Relations, was registered by the Press as a major event. It was the first occurrence of a kind favourable to those who hope for the defeat of racialism to have been so registered by the mass media since the publication of the P.E.P. Report on Discrimination. Those who prepared the Rose Report did so with a sense of urgency. The Survey of Race Relations, which did the work on which the Rose Report is based, had originally intended a series of detailed studies, of which four, including Rex and Moore’s Race, Community and Conflict, have already appeared. But, as the situation so rapidly and palpably deteriorated, they saw this response as inadequate: what was needed was a single comprehensive study, to make an impact on public awareness and official policy, and not a library of volumes which only the ‘experts’ would read.

The initial response must have been encouraging to the authors. The Press, that very haphazard and often insensitive seismograph for measuring the importance of what occurs, recorded the publication of the Report as an event of the first magnitude. But already disappointment must have settled on those who worked at desperate speed to get the book out before it became pointless to publish such a book at all. The columns devoted in The Times and The Guardian to summarizing the book’s contents have initiated no debate, in the correspondence columns or elsewhere, on Britain’s racial policy; the speeches of politicians contain no reference to it, nor do they seem in any way altered in tone as a result of it.

Aelred, or Ailred, Eilaf’s son, of Hexham, whom we know as Aelred of Rievaulx, was a wholly remarkable man for several quite distinct reasons. In the first place, he was English, or perhaps, to be more precise, Anglo-Scandinavian. The number of outstanding figures in the history of twelfth-century England who were English in this sense, ‘of fine old English stock’ as his disciple and biographer Walter Daniel put it, was so small as to be almost insignificant. The world which Aelred knew was one where lordship, both as ownership of land and as control of government and administration, was in the hands, almost exclusively, of Normans, Flemings, Bretons, Lorrainers, Frenchmen, of almost any save Englishmen, in fact, and a member of the governing order (such as Aelred was from 1143 till his death in 1167) who was also a thoroughly native Englishman was a prime rarity. Secondly, Aelred was a man of the north country, a Northumbrian born and bred in an age when it might be said that Northumbria had lost a culture and had failed to find a role. Thirdly, Aelred was a profoundly religious man in a characteristically English fashion—essentially unacademic, unintellectual, despite the great breadth of his reading and his undoubted facility for writing. Fourthly—but not lastly, by any means, for there were many sides to this complicated man—he seems perfectly to epitomize, in his career, his interests and his influence, the age through which he lived.

A deeply-felt inner pride is not incompatible with outward signs of lack of confidence, even of inferiority. Aelred moved among the great but in his relations with them he seems a little unsure of himself. He never quite took their measure or became one of them. In an almost naively idealistic way he expected too much of them.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea that there has been some change in our understanding of the nature of the Church in the last ten years or so. I suggest that we are being encouraged to think now more in terms of the Church as the people of God and as mystery, but that these two themes finally converge. There is, of course, no prospect of tying up all the loose ends that there must inevitably be in a paper as brief and ambitious as this.

My first thesis is that we are in the middle of discovering a new sense of the Church as a community, as a community with a mission, as a ‘movement’, and that this springs from our retrieval of the original primitive Christian insight that the Church is nothing if it is not the people of God, and should then issue into a renewed belief in the fraternal structure of the Church. I should emphasize that this is a discovery of what the Church should be, not of what it actually is.

It is clear that the documents of Vatican II have made it respectable to talk about the Church in terms of the people of God. It was not always so. While it is, of course, impossible that any single concept could ever catch what one means by any phenomenon as complex as the Church, it is important to decide which to start from, for this will govern one’s whole understanding of the Church.

The impossible is becoming a reality in Brazil, the unthinkable has become a fact. Methodical violence, unjustifiable repression, systematic use of denunciation and torture are emerging in a country where they were least likely to do so. Nothing is so opposed to Brazilian culture. Yesterday, speech was still circulating freely in the streets as the light and blood of communication. Today, blood is flowing in police cellars where so many men and women have fallen without knowing why: torture and corpses impose fear and silence everywhere, and dumb and terrifying rumours. Tongues fall silent, censorship and suspicion are rife.

Yesterday, the intelligence, subtlety and the manifold resources of human relationships were enough to solve or cope with all problems. Today, relationships are shattered by the suppression of all discussion; violence breaks age-old links, the brutality of a military order tends to multiply withdrawals, retirements and breaks, except between those who profit from the rCgime. The liberal tradition which inaugurated the first Brazilian Constitution in 1824 is thrown out as so much refuse.

This brutality takes the Brazilians by surprise, in the way in which horror suddenly strikes out of a morning sky which seemed to be dawning like any other. ‘Que cosa!’ Brutality strikes them before they have time to realize that it was possible. And the military may be maiming for a very long time a sort of national Brazilian genius in the way in which they are maiming so many victims of torture.