In 1971 a Joint Working Party was set up by the Bishops’ Conference, at the request of the National Conference of Priests, to study the question of a Pastoral Strategy for the Catholic Church in England and Wales. It was the result of much heart searching and uneasiness expressed by the priests of the Conference about their own service in the mission of the Church.

In The Church 2000 (the first paper issued by the Working Party) the question was asked: ‘What did Christ establish the Church to do?’ We then went on to ask ourselves what the Church in England and Wales should be doing in the years ahead. We tried to answer both in the light of Vatican II applied to our own situation.

Four years ago the contributors to Robert Nugent’s A Challenge to Love discussed the position of gay and lesbian Catholics in the Church in the aftermath of the 1975 Vatican declaration on sexual ethics. Now Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder with Father Nugent of New Ways Ministry, has co-edited with Pat Furey (a pseudonym used ‘for professional reasons’) The Vatican and Homosexuality. This is a collection of reactions to the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued in October 19863. Of the nineteen participants in the earlier symposium, only Gramick and Nugent re-appear among the twenty-five leading Catholic educators, journalists, activists and officials who write in it.

Gramick cites The Tablet as having called the document ‘violently hostile’, and The Month as having noted a failure to address ‘the reality of homosexuals in their living of Christian discipleship’ (p. 93). In the United States, the editors say, reactions were ‘as might have been expected, swift and strong’. One prominent Catholic and former Trappist monk writing in the Washington Post dismissed the letter as ‘homophobic rantings’. A more dispassionate and scholarly response came from the Archbishop of San Francisco, John R. Quinn: his article ‘Toward an understanding of the letter’, first published in America, is reprinted here.

Professor Michael Dummett, in the article in New Blackfriars which has stirred up so much controversy, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’ (October 1987, pp. 424—431), seems to have taken as a criterion of Catholic faith what Avery Dulles, calls in his book Models of Revelation a propositional model of revelation. Professor Dummett is a distinguished logician. No doubt, then, he is accustomed to think of abstract logical thought as a norm of human discourse. But, if it is religious discourse we are considering, this is an assumption which can be extremely misleading. As Avery Dulles says, it tends to ‘reduce meaning and intelligibility to the narrow confines of conceptual logic’. In place of this Dulles suggests a symbolic model of revelation, which seems to me to give much more meaning to faith and to present a much more convincing model of the Church.

The proposition which Professor Dummett proposes as fundamental to a Catholic understanding of the Church, that ‘it is enjoined on us, whatever the provocation, never to take any step to disrupt the unity of the Church’ (p. 424), seems particularly unsatisfactory. In the first place, as Dummett acknowledges in regard to the schism between the Eastern and the Western Church, there is the problem of who was responsible for the split. And there is the further problem, that Dummett thinks that the Protestant Reformers ‘did not even pretend to form a rival Catholic Church’ (p. 425).

This, however, is a minor point. It is the whole idea of a propositional model of revelation which needs to be questioned—even at the risk of repeating here much that is familiar.

Can God be closer to you than you yourself are? I believe that the answer to this question is ‘yes’. Indeed, God is such that it is impossible for you to be closer to yourself than God. Surely this is a paradoxical claim. It would be paradoxical to maintain that something could be closer to, say, a stone than a stone. Not even God could get closer to the stone than the stone itself. How then could God be closer to you than yourself? In part, I believe that the answer lies in appreciating the nature of what it is to be psychologically present to someone, including oneself. There is more to ourselves than meets our eyes, but not the eyes of God. A rich appreciation of personal identity and psychological presence can illumine the sense in which God is supremely present in our lives, indeed closer to us than we are. I spell out the nature of this Divine human proximity and conclude with reflection on what it is for someone to be indwelt by God.

I shall be assuming the intelligibility of certain classic tenets about the God of Christianity. God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, loving Creator of the cosmos. I shall also help myself to some garden-variety claims about persons. Persons have beliefs, emotions, desires, and sensations. They have a conscious and unconscious life. They act (or are capable of acting) in the world. They often have a past and future. These are not to be taken to be necessary conditions for personhood.

In his inspiring and moving reflections on the church in Latin America Jon Sobrino can speak of that church as an identifiable and representative community; identifiable in the struggle against poverty and injustice, representative of many different sections of society:

In England there are obviously Catholics who are living an option for the poor, without necessarily appealing to the example of Latin America. During the last few years I have witnessed the commitment to the homeless at Mary and Joseph House in Central Manchester; kept in touch with efforts to improve race relations in Leicester; seen the diversification of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society’s work for the poor at the east end of Newcastle; and been drawn into what seems to be an unceasing quest on behalf of the third world by Justice and Peace groups in Nantwich and Surrey. But, despite such options for the poor in different parts of the country, I do not believe that the Roman Catholic Church as ‘an identifiable and representative community’ will take an option for England’s poor.