So many hands have sown the ideas in this article, and over such a long period of time, that I have forgotten many of them. I can recall Richard McBrien declaiming from his book, Do We Need the Church? as he strides across the field, so sure and so impatient. I can hear Christopher Butler, in his black habit with the hood up, quietly chanting The Theology of Vatican II. But I cannot remember who it was that planted the most fruitful seed of all: “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was the first document of the Second Vatican Council. It would have been very different, if it had been the last”.

The ripening, I know, took place in the warmth and light of Avery Dulles’ Models of the Church. But his was the kind of sunshine that forced me to seek the shade of second thoughts; and once there, I wondered if I dared to disagree with him.

In this article, I present an argument which is made up of three suggestions about how we are to understand Vatican II’s ideas concerning the Church. To illustrate the point I am trying to make, I raise some questions about how this affects our view of the sacraments. And I ask whether this is not a case of the famous sensus plenior, the ‘fuller sense’ which appears to have been discussed only by scripture scholars up to now, but is surely relevant to the interpretation of council documents.

After the initial furore provoked by the Vatican Declaration nearly two years ago the discussion of women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church has come to a virtual standstill. The debate has stalled largely because both defence and criticism of the Declaration have not always been on target.

For one thing insufficient attention has been paid to the significant developments which this document embodied. For the first time the Catholic Church officially abandoned many of the standard theological arguments which had been used in the past to legitimate the traditional policy barring women from ordination. The Declaration conceded that the patristic and scholastic arguments, previously accorded such weight, were in large measure conditioned by prejudicial attitudes and beliefs about women’s alleged innate deficiencies as compared with men or their inborn aptitudes for domestic and nurturing roles. The traditional policy thus came to be defended for wrong or inadequate reasons.

In the Declaration’s central argument traditional claims about women’s inferiority and subordination to men, or their alleged incapacity for pastoral responsibility played no part. Moreover claims about the direct bearing of gender-specific traits on female/male role differentiation in society and the church were used to highlight rather than to demonstrate the propriety of the traditional policy. Such claims were combined with ecclesiological doctrines to yield an argument for the complementary distribution of male and female roles in the church, and with christological doctrines to yield an argument for the necessity of maleness for the priesthood’s representational function. But the Declaration carefully qualified the persuasive force to be accorded these arguments in its overall case by designating them as illustrative rather than demonstrative.

Like the Cambridge ladies of e.e. cummings’ poem, who ‘believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead’, we most of us indulge in the interdisciplinary performance of literary and theological study. Walking home from the Sunday morning service we appraise both the englishing of the liturgy and the structure of the homily without much thought of whether we are right to mix literary and theological judgments. In this we ought to be encouraged. And we ought to encourage others.

It is, perhaps, for such encouragement that an undergraduate asks when he puts his name down for a course advertised in ‘Literature and Theology’ like that proffered at the University of Kent. My acquaintance with such young men and women suggests to me that for them literature and theology are not at first differentiated as autonomous disciplines, for they are experienced as modes and moments of one conversation. Their centre is in the undergraduate talking.

Yet the self spinning at the centre is not enough. Those works of literature and theology about which the young people talk witness to the experiences of others and thus become encouragements for them to think of those others. The ‘blessed rage for order’ proclaimed by the poet and the theologian communicates to the undergraduate a sense of their strivings and of his own unordered existence. And, though I intend to indicate here only that ordering of experience which may be suggested to those who attend to literature and theology, I am aware that something of the same discontent affects men in many disciplines and that these have all an interest in the new order.

The question of the relations between body and mind, the physical and the personal, this question is the strongest example one could cite of a philosophical question. If one wanted to teach someone just what the strange inquiry known as philosophy is, or has traditionally been thought to be, this, rather than the question about chairs and tables in untenanted rooms, would, I think, be the right question to choose, both for its richness and for its puzzling character. The puzzle about the relations between the mental, the personal, the spiritual, on the one hand, and the physical, the bodily, the material, on the other, is not (or doesn’t seem to be) a puzzle about what is in fact the case. It is not a question such as the question “What is the function of the pancreas?” might be. Even if we don’t know the answer to this question, we know the kind of observations that would be relevant to settling it. But if to the question “How are body and soul/mind/spirit/personality related?” we give the reply, “Look and see!” the point seems to have been missed. We have all the information we need in order to answer the question, surely; we know what it is to walk and run, to speak and sing, to add up a column of figures, to look out on the world and pick out the roses and the blackbirds, the sun and the moon and the constellations, to distinguish the smooth from the rough, the sphere from the cube, the animate from the inanimate, the past from the future; we can even, though this gets very difficult and our lives are filled with mistakes in this respect, distinguish friends from enemies, true lovers from false, the solidly good from the merely clever.

Between November 1927 and January 1929 there appeared in the pages of the then Blackfriars a series of articles under the name of Alexander Michaelson. They were mostly biographical vignettes in which the author recalled famous friends and acquaintances of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties: Browning, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Pater, Leslie Stephen, Wilde, Beardsley. Alexander Michaelson was the pseudonym of Mark Andre Raffalovich, a wealthy man of letters and benefactor of the Church and, in particular, of the Dominican Order. Five years after the appearance of the last Blackfriars essay he died at the age of seventy-four. His family were Russian emigre Jews who had settled in Paris the year before his birth in 1864. There he had been brought up in the world of the salon; Claude Bernard, Henri Bergson, Ernest Renan, Sarah Bernhardt were among the visitors to the Raffalovich’s house.

In 1882 he was despatched to England, with his former governess as housekeeper, to complete his education. Instead of going up to university, the young man sought introductions to the literary and artistic men of the day. He would write articles on authors he admired, publish them in the Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg, and send copies to their unsuspecting subjects. Thus he met R. L. Stevenson, Swinburne and Meredith. Others he met more conventionally; but almost always his friendships were marked by precociousness on his part.

His acquaintance with Wilde turned sour. Wilde reviewed a book of Raffalovich’s verse; it was not so much a bad review as a mocking one, and in the published correspondence which ensued Raffalovich was made to look more of a fool. And, of course, there was Wilde’s stinging wit which so aptly showed up pretension. The story went about of how Wilde and some friends, having been invited to lunch, arrived at Raffalovich’s front door and asked the butler for a table for six.

In one of the exchanges between Fergus Kerr and William Mathews on Lonergan, Kerr describes Lonergan’s treatment of literary language in Method in Theology as ‘jejune and unsatisfactory’, as lacking in ‘delicacy and inwardness’; a ‘lacuna’ in his sytematic exposition (New Blackfriars, February 1976, p. 60). This may seem a little harsh given that Lonergan’s overarching concern in that book is not literature but a viable method for contemporary theology. But even as a convinced Lonerganian, I believe Fergus Kerr, in reporting somewhat uncritically the findings of what is, overall, a bad book (Looking at Lonergan’s Method), has picked out a weakness or blind spot in Lonergan’s philosophical awareness. There can be no doubting the somewhat wooden and—the word is inescapable— external character of Lonergan’s pronouncements on literary language and, I would add, on art generally. William Mathews tends to agree, though he adds a tantalizing qualification: ‘I agree with Fergus Kerr that Method is seriously deficient in its treatment of the poetic but unlike the Republic, I believe that poets and dramatists will be welcomed in Lonergan’s theological democracy’ (New Blackfriars, August 1977, p. 367). Mathews lets the matter rest there, but I should like to take up and elaborate his suggestion (or what I take to be his suggestion) that Lonergan’s basic cognitional theory, or transcendental method, can be shown capable of integration with the nature and function of literary language, for it is surely a sound test of any account of how language functions that it can explain how and why poetry affects us as it does.

It was stated here that I’d give a general outline of relations between the Church and the state in Cuba. It seems to me it would be convenient if I were brief in my opening remarks. I’d like to start by saying the following: in our country a very profound revolution took place which brought about a radical change in the relations of production and in social relations.

History shows that whenever such revolutionary events have taken place all sorts of conflicts have arisen, including conflicts between the Church and the state. This happened during the French Revolution, as you know; it happened during the Mexican Revolution, many problems of that nature arose; and it also happened during the Russian Revolution.

Well, also in our case, in Cuba, some conflicts arose in the beginning. Actually, in my opinion, this was due on many occasions to the leadership body of a given religious congregation or to the social group most closely connected with such a religious congregation.

The difference between Catholics that comes out very plainly in recent writing on the Resurrection (New Blackfriars, October and November 1977, pp 453-461 and 506-515) prompts questions and reflections about the nature and extent of the diversity of belief that exists within the Catholic communion. This is particularly urgent and apposite at the present time, in England, as Catholics seem to be moving, slowly but inexorably, towards some degree of communion with the Anglican Church—long mocked as the home of incompatible beliefs. As Cardinal Hume said, in his address at Church House, Westminster, on 1st February 1978:

That avowal of ignorance—which is also clearly a word of hope— must seem to many Catholics even now very like an admission of defeat. Surely, they will say, the one thing that Roman Catholics can be clear about is what diversity of doctrinal emphasis and difference of practice are permissible. How is it possible that, on any but trivial and peripheral matters, there can be a serious question about this? Do we not already know, have we not always known, what doctrinal differences we cannot permit—far less desire—within the communion of the catholica? How can a cardinal archbishop ask such a question?