This is an attempt to see what some of the underlying assumptions in the current debates on the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic priesthood are. It seems to me that the debate is not getting anywhere because of the lack of common language of discussion. In such a quandary, the best thing to do would seem to be to look at the implicit assumptions of both sides. Perhaps we are really present at one of those night battles which both Newman and Matthew Arnold saw as characteristic of controversy in their own day, where neither side understands either the explicit arguments or the implicit assumptions of the other. If so, the best service an observer can do would be to see how these implicit assumptions plug into wider world-views.

One of the major arguments for the ordination of women is that the Church is inevitably affected by the social structures and cultural values of the age it is living in. Therefore the supposed argument from tradition lacks weight. There were not women priests for the same reason that there were not women lawyers or engineers. Objection to the ordination of women is just another case of the way in which religion of any sort seems to become a bulwark of extreme conservatism in social ideas, perhaps because of religion’s sociological role in stabilizing society and maintaining identities over time. Another form of this argument is that the Church cannot afford to continue neglecting the very great pool of ministerial talent that undoubtedly exists among women.

It is now nearly a decade since Edward Norman’s controversial Reith lectures, subsequently published as Christianity and World Order, helped to generate a great deal of debate about the appropriate sphere of Christian moral concern.

...the teachings of the Saviour clearly describe a personal rather than a social morality.

Any attempt to outline a Christian social morality—to ‘involve the Church in politics’—means compromising the proper concern of Christians with what is transcendent. It entails sanctifying whatever prevailing political world-view is current at the time. Among Western nations, Norman argues, this means supporting what he calls a ‘Human Rights Ideology’. The Human Rights movement ‘has elevated Western liberalism to the apparent authority of eternal truth’. As a consequence, ‘... the Churches now see Human Rights as the essence of the Christian message’. Christians in politics are engaged, then, in a process of absolutising a relative (Human Rights), identifying the essence of Christianity, which must be changeless, with a prevailing political ideology which represents only the view of a liberal twentieth century establishment in the West. In doing so, they obscure the truly changeless essence of Christianity, which lies in eternal values, values which by definition cannot be political.

Criticisms of Norman’s thesis have been numerous, and the arguments on both sides are now well-rehearsed. Any attempt to outline a Christian personal morality, no less than a Christian social morality, involves the apparent compromise of associating with current secular ideologies, it has been pointed out.

On August 31st 1984, ten women arrived at Blue Gate, the entrance to the American Cruise missile base at Greenham Common to do the night watch for the peace camp there—and simultaneously to keep the vigil of the Passion based on the gospel of St. Mark. It so happened that that weekend was the anniversary of the women’s peace camp—three years since it had been set up in 1981. The camp had been evicted and destroyed many times. But the women return and remain, gathering around the fire, huddled under sheets of polythene at night and in the rain. Old prams stand at the ready for the women to wheel away their few possessions when the bailiffs come in the morning—as they do most days.

The women of the camp welcomed the night watchers and extended the hospitality of their fire, before going off to sleep under the polythene sheets. The vigil women remained around the fire to keep the watch, gathering each hour on the hour to face the guarded gates of Greenham, to sing a psalm, read from the bible and pray. Towards morning at 6.00 a.m., as dawn came up over the base, and Mark’s gospel told of Jesus being led away and delivered to Pilate, the night watch prepared to depart. Meanwhile, another woman was getting up in London and going to continue the vigil in the church beside her house.

Without the presence of the women’s peace camp at Greenham, this theological initiative for peace on the part of Christian women would not have taken place.

Prayer is a form of bleeding, a wound which we may not staunch. Its source is in the incompleteness of the human person and its continuance depends upon that incompleteness, that wounding being maintained. To be a prayerful and spiritual person requires an affirmation and an acceptance of one’s incompleteness. It requires a realisation that the important thing about human beings is their incompleteness. Human beings are characterised by the unstaunched wounds within their nature. They reveal these wounds by being those who continually and consistently look towards the future, always seeking a new heaven and a new earth, always hoping, always moving forwards. Doing this is what makes us human. To settle into a final completeness of understanding is to accept an ideology. To believe that you have found a complete explanation, a way of seeing things that explains and welds into a complete pattern all of the inconsistencies of life, this is to lock oneself into a diminishment of the human person. To believe that you have finally uncovered and understood the means of human fulfillment is to embrace the roots of fascism. We are all radically incomplete, wounded at the centre. The Christian gospel is that which asks us to accept that incompleteness and to accept it as being, in itself, good news. Prayer then becomes the outpouring of the self which radically maintains and affirms our incompleteness, springing, as it does, out of our longing and desire. Prayer keeps us incomplete and to remain incomplete is the fulfilment of mankind.

In an article in The Times, published to coincide with the premiere of the film Amadeus early in 1985, the playwright Peter Shaffer said that his own apprehension of the divine was very largely aesthetic. What he meant is illustrated by a remark he quoted from his play Amadeus, on which the film was based: ‘The God I acknowledge lives, for example, in bars 34 to 44 of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music’, and indeed by the whole of that play. Shaffer’s statement and the view expressed in his work raise some profound theological questions, and provide an interesting point of comparison with a leading 20th-century theologian, Karl Barth, for whom Mozart ranked almost as a Father of the Church. I want to use the comparison between them to raise some questions about the role of the Holy Spirit in creation, particularly the Spirit’s connection with beauty, both in nature and in art.

Shaffer and Barth

Shaffer’s theology is simple: for him Mozart was an instrument of the spirit of God. The remark which he quoted in his article is put into the mouth of Antonio Salieri, the Viennese court-composer, who is depicted by Shaffer as recognizing the spirit of God speaking through Mozart, but led by jealousy to attempt to block this spirit. Early on in Amadeus Salieri says ‘Dimly the music sounded from the salon above ... It seemed to me I had heard a voice of God—and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard—and it was the voice of an obscene child’ (p. 37).

The initial reaction of nearly all theologians and religious people to the very idea that it is possible to talk about ‘the theological dimensions’ of the existence of robots would—today—be dismissive, and, more often than not, scornful. ‘It makes no sense,’ most theologians would say. Before beginning to argue that one day, on the contrary, it will make a lot of sense, something much more general must be said about robots, or, more specifically, about Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI as it is usually abbreviated, is the study of computer models of intelligent behaviour. Some scientists are interested in using AI to understand human behaviour, others in designing intelligent mechanisms. As a discipline in its own right, it has existed since about 1950, with the pioneering work of John McArthy. It has two separate strands in its historical origin. Psychologists after the dark ages of behaviourism, which banished all talk of mental models as unscientific, started to study cognition (commonly called thought), which formed the subject of cognitive psychology. In devising models of mental processes they naturally turned to computers for an appropriate language of description; thus were born information processing models of human cognition. In order to formulate precise and testable theories of mental processes computer models were found to be indispensible. Models have been developed for memory, understanding natural language, vision, learning and, more recently, emotion.

Computer science has probably had a longer historical interest in AI, although one could argue that cogwheel and pneumatic models were an early attempt by psychologists to understand the mechanics of the mind.

Reading Simon Tugwell’s book The Way of the Preacher led me to consider what St Francis of Assisi had to say about preaching and what is the place of preaching in the life of the Franciscan.

Given that both the Dominicans and the Franciscans are essentially mendicant, it is not surprising that over the centuries they have been heavily involved in both preaching and teaching. As Fr. Tugwell ably demonstrates, the Order of Preachers came into being as the practical response of St Dominic to the most urgent need of the Church in southern France, namely, the need for competent and devout preachers. St Dominic realized that to reverse the serious decline of the Church in southern France (and elsewhere too) there was a need for preachers who could be relied upon to expound and if necessary defend the authentic catholic tradition. Such preachers were not easily to be found and when they were to be found they were not easily retained. St Dominic did the obvious and eminently practical thing, he began what was soon to become the Order of Preachers. Preaching, for Dominicans, is very much a matter of self-definition. For Franciscans it is not quite so straightforward.

Many studies have sought to isolate the distinctive characteristics of the Franciscan charism but few, if any, would list preaching as being among its most noteworthy. Having said this, it would be hard to trace the growth of the Franciscan movement without encountering such notable preachers as would compare with the great preachers of old.

A. So we are agreed that since God is the Creator he is responsible for everything that happens in creation.

B. That would seem to be so.

A. But how are we to understand ‘responsible’ here? Could it mean that God does everything that is done?

B. Apparently it does. For what is done is done either by God or by something else. Yet what something other than God does is created and God is therefore responsible for it. So everything that is done must be done by God.

A. That seems to follow. But it is subjects who do things, is it not?

B. If that means that what is done is done by something or other, then, of course, I agree.

A. And does not this mean that what is done is done by an agent?

B. Certainly.

TIME: the present.

SCENE: A coffee-shop on the way to Piraeus. Two ladies, Clodia and Augustina, both in their early forties, sitting at adjacent tables. Clodia gets up and tentatively addresses Augustina; she sits down at Augustina’s table once she has introduced herself.

Clodia: Excuse me—I seem to know you, though I can’t for the life of me remember from where and when.

Augustina: My dear Clodia, how lovely to see you again! Let’s see—it’s over twenty years. Don’t you remember, we used to sit together whispering at the back of O.B.’s class on informal logic.

Clodia: Oh yes, Augustina! Have you got a few minutes? I have, and would very much like to find out how life has been treating you. Don’t look pained so directly—surely the last twenty years haven’t been that bad for you!

Augustina: Well, I doubt whether it has been as bad as the siege of Leningrad or the Warsaw ghetto. But if you sincerely ask me whether I have been in general happy during the time since we last met, and you expect an honest answer, that answer must be no... By the way, why was our esteemed lecturer called O.B.?

Clodia: That I can remember. O.B. was short for Old Bedsocks. According to the more charitable, the reference was to the mustiness of his discourse. Those who sat in the front row said the mustiness also pertained to his person.

Augustina: Well, never mind about O.B. What I remember most about the two of us at the time was how proud we were to be Catholics, in those days of obvious moral chaos in the world at large, and exuberant theological absurdity (as it seemed to us) among the non-Catholics, in the early sixties.

This article was originally presented (in a modified form) to the continuing seminar on Pastoral Theology of the Catholic Theology Society of America at its 1985 annual meeting. There, and here, it is intended to be the starting point for a discussion and reflection on the nature and significance of a theological process which is playing an increasingly important role in the life of the Catholic Church and other Christian bodies. We refer to it as ‘theology in its natural environment’. It is also variously called indigenous theology, contextual theology, local theology, practical pastoral theology, or theological reflection. The variety of names and of methods all point to an essential quality of theology in its natural environment, its specificity or particularity in terms of a concrete community whose essential unit is the small group.

Our experiential base for theology in its natural environment has centered in seven years of work with the Education for Ministry Program of the Bairnwick Center at the School of Theology of the University of the South, U.S.A. Currently enrolling nearly 6000 students in six countries, this is the largest program of theological education by extension in the English-speaking world. At its heart is a model and various methods for theological reflection that enable people to do theology in their daily lives with the ongoing critical support of a small group of six to ten peers.

At the end of their National Conference this summer, the bishops of the Philippines spoke out strongly against human rights abuses in their country. They recited a long list of the names of people killed in the past year, including priests, journalists, trade unionists and other community leaders. Such denunciations of violence and repression are now fairly standard parts of the conclusions of many bishops’ conferences, but the Philippine bishops’ statement is interesting because it singles out the use of ‘religious fanatics’ in the government agencies’ counter-insurgency campaigns. The bishops condemned this as an ‘unholy strategy’, and claim that it is only ‘conducive to the worst forms of terrorism’. The arming and training of fanatical religious groups to fight the New People’s Army had led the civilian Home Defence Force to become ‘instruments of terror rather than peace’.

Though the Philippine bishops’ conference was addressing itself to its own local situation, they are clearly aware that this use of certain groups of Christians by repressive governments is not peculiar to their own country. Other local Catholic hierarchies have spoken out strongly against various religious groups. In recent months Mexican Church leaders, together with labour leaders and others, have called for the expulsion of various evangelical, fundamentalist sects from Mexico. The enormous financial resources of these sects, together with their political and social impact, has led to accusations that they are an integral part of US foreign policy in the region, and even that they operate as a front for the CIA.

In his article of this title, which we published last January, Gilbert Márkus OP wrote about the political and social influences of some of the evangelical groups now in Central America, and he mentioned World Vision, which has its headquarters in California. The Director of World Vision of Britain writes:

The incidents to which your author refers, predominantly in the present tense, occurred approximately five years ago and this in itself is extremely misleading. World Vision, while we have 75 development projects in Honduras, caring for some 10,000 children and their families, together with some other general development work, has no involvement whatever in relief projects or refugee involvement in areas where fighting is going on. This has been the case for approximately four years so, again, your article is misleading.

July 18th 1986 saw the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the event has been widely commemorated both in writing and in exhibitions, both alike often focussing on the heroism of the men of the International Brigade who made the cause of the Spanish Republic their own. Less attention has been paid to the fact summarized by Professor Adrian Hastings in his recent History of English Christianity 1920—1985 that ‘probably at no other moment in 20th-century history has the English Catholic community, as such, taken up so strongly a political position, and to such effect’ (p. 325). The largely uncritical endorsement of the rebels’ claim to be engaged in the defence of the Catholic Church in Spain against a threat vaguely and frighteningly characterized as a ‘Communist-anarchist dictatorship’ was powerfully and passionately sustained, and the nationalists’ atrocities, for instance at Badajoz on August 15th 1936 or (at the hands of their German supporters) at Guernica in April 1937, either brushed aside or denied.

Of course, the cause of this enthusiasm lay in the appalling actions that accompanied the revolutionary situation of July 1936. The lapse into chaos defined for the nationalists by the murder of the right-wing deputy Calvo Sotelo on July 13th inevitably increased the readiness to welcome the military pronunciamento long in preparation, by social groups feeling their future threatened by the quickening pace of social change. The moderate socialism of Prieto was rapidly being taken over by the radicalism of Largo Caballero, and the fundamental, seemingly intractable issue of agrarian reform tackled no longer by legislation but by spontaneous occupation of land long denied to the landless.