H.G. Barnes was baptised ‘Harry’ but usually known, in Oxford at least, as ‘Roger’. To simplify, I will call him Barnes from now on. He spent many years teaching German language and literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, becoming a Fellow of the College in 1957. He was my tutor from 1955—58. Although we stayed in touch and indeed became friends, he rarely spoke about his past life—or if he did, I missed the significance of it. This article is about the unknown Barnes who worked for the BBC’s German service during the war. At a time when the cliches of propaganda filled the air, Barnes insisted that German Catholicism was an important element in the national tradition, and therefore in the post-war reconstruction. He devoted his life to the teaching of German literature, but was always attentive to religious factors.

His main work as a literary critic was on Goethe’s enigmatic novel, Die Wahlverwandschaften. In 1958 he was invited to address the Tagung of the newly revived Gorresgesellschaft in Salzburg. The result was a paper on Catholic responses—mostly negative, it turned out—to Goethe’s novel. In Modern Language Review for 1963 he reviewed the Jahrbuch in which his Salzburg lecture had been published. He reported Romano Guardini’s suggestion that had Rainer Maria Rilke ever completed Kindheit, an elegiac fragment, it would have surpassed the Duineser Elegien. (Barnes was surprised to find a priest and theologian who could also be a good literary critic.)

In Luke 7: 36—50 there is a story, found with variations in all four gospels, of an expression of extravagant love for Christ by a woman, a woman with a certain reputation in town, who came to dinner uninvited and anointed his head or his feet with tears or myrrh, and in Luke and John wiped his feet with her hair.

The story is presented as a lesson Our Lord taught about the Jubilee legislation in Deut. 15, in which every seventh year all debts would be forgiven, all slaves released and all property revert to its original owners (probably a greater challenge to the excesses of capitalism than anything Karl Marx ever said or wrote). Deuteronomy stresses that this should not be an excuse to fail to help the poor in the land when the Jubilee year approaches. Deuteronomy claims that there would be no poor in the land if all Israel obeyed God and all his commandments; but the truth is, Deuteronomy goes on, you will always have the poor with you in the land; therefore, open wide your hand to the poor and needy. Those in the gospel story who apparently knew the law in Deuteronomy quite well were the indignant disciples in Mark and Matthew, Simon the Pharisee in Luke, and Judas in John’s gospel. They were offended by the woman’s apparent extravagance, and especially this woman’s extravagance, seeing who she was.

Two years ago the West German Green Party described itself like this: ‘We are for an economic system orientated towards the vital requirements of people and of future generations, towards the preservation of nature and the judicious handling of natural resources.’ This awareness of the environmental dimension to economic problems led to its getting 8.5% of the West German popular vote in 1987.

We may ask ourselves where Christians have been while this awareness has been unfolding. Is Christian anthropology inadequate to care for the earth? Or have the followers of Jesus somehow lost the delicate balance between taking from the earth what is necessary and caring for this planet?

The problem seems to be with the balance. A key biblical text is Genesis 1:28, which the R.S.V. translates ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’. Other translations have ‘conquer it’, ‘have dominion over it’ and ‘dominate it’. Yet the idea Genesis is conveying is that man is God’s viceroy commissioned to care for God’s garden, which is ‘very good’. C.H. Moule observes,

There are two main barriers to Christian faith set up by our twentieth-century secularised culture. The first is the conviction that faith is irrelevant to the real problems of the twentieth century. The second is our inability to accept the reality of a being with powers that transcend our own. These two barriers are very different, the first being very concrete, the second very abstract. Yet they are connected by the Christian belief that we—the citizens of the twentieth century, and the rest of humanity too—are caught in a predicament which only one with powers that transcend our own can overcome.

In this article I want to do two things. I want to give an account of the predicament in which we are caught that will show both that there really is one, and also that it is a predicament that human powers alone are insufficient to overcome. I also want to present an argument to show that at least one notion of a transcendental power (and being) answers to something real and cannot be dismissed as mythical, symbolic or ‘religious’.

The predicament in which we are caught is our inability to create the kind of community that we cannot but desire. To give a better idea of the nature of this community the lack of which constitutes the essence of our predicament, I will give two examples of attempts to achieve it and try to show why they fail.

According to Malachi 3, v. 6 God declares that ‘I the Lord do not change.’ Citing this text and presenting arguments which conclude that God is ‘the unchanging first cause of change,’ Aquinas maintains that God, as the ‘first existent’ which is ‘sheerly actual and unalloyed with potentiality’, evidently ‘cannot change in any way.’ This doctrine, whether assumed as axiomatic or defended by reasoning, has been widely accepted throughout the history of Western theism. Reflection, though, suggests that it is also a doctrine which, while supposedly expressing the faithful’s belief, in effect creates a considerable tension between the faith which in practice governs the lives of many such people and the understanding which in theory identifies its basic character. Although, for example, the faithful may consider God to become compassionately aware of their needs as they arise, may look to God for intervening grace, and may pray for divine action to produce changes in their situation, rational reflection on theism apparently requires that God be held to be immutably and timelessly the same in every respect. Consequently some have considered that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the God in whom believers actually put their trust and the deity described in reputedly ‘correct’ theological understanding.

Two words sum up the present situation of the Church, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘confusion’. One the one hand, we have hierarchical structures and inevitably, we are steeped in hierarchical language and assumptions. Beside this we have an increasing vocabulary acknowledging and inviting ‘participation’ and ‘equality’, issuing from the senior hierarchy and directed especially to the ‘laity’.

We might be moved, as we read, to examine whether we had been taking our baptismal responsibilities as seriously as we ought. However, should we glance back to Can. 207:

our sense of urgency might dwindle somewhat ... especially when we consider that ‘the others’ form something like 98% of the total. If what we, the ‘laity’, do is not by divine institution and our ministry not sacred, but rather is other, then our sense of participation, our sense of responsibility is diminished. We are diminished. Similar examples abound in all Church documents.

India had been exercising more and more of an attraction on me for some years, and I did occasionally wonder why this was so. Then I came across a saying of André Malraux to the effect that there is a secret India in the heart of each one of us. I began to realise why I was in India: I was exploring my own heart, yet, like Jung in regard to Africa, I needed the India without to bring out the contours of the India within. And this is in fact how my experience of India has gradually evolved: the outer world that now swam into my ken has helped to disclose new potentialities within myself.

At the same time I am also a child and representative of the European culture in which I was brought up, so the potentialities that India was opening up in me could also be those of my culture as a whole. And this is the spirit in which I offer these reflections from India: immediately they represent one person’s experience of getting in touch with new possibilities, ideas and directions, but, in so far as others who share my heritage can recognise themselves in what I say, they can serve as pointers to the way in which we might together help our Western society as a whole to direct itself anew.

‘In one Spirit we were all baptised into one body’ (1 Cor. 12 : 13a). Repentance and faith give a man koinōnia—participation—with the Holy Spirit and by virtue of that partaking he has koinōnia too with all his fellow-Christians who are partakers with him of the same Spirit. He belongs to and within the communion of holy people, of the holy people who share holy things, the sacraments and mysteries of the Church. But the body into which we were all baptised by the one Spirit is itself the body of the Son, the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God made man. The Church, the body of the Messiah, the messianic community, is koinōnia with Jesus Christ as well as koinōnia with the Holy Spirit. True, it is through the koinōnia of the Spirit that the Church becomes the koinōnia of the Son, but nevertheless it does really become that. Paul writes to Corinth:

An article in The Guardian in November last year described Highgate cemetery as ‘the last resting place of 166,400 souls’ (italics mine, needless to say).

Recently an elderly friend of mine remarked that the trouble about getting old is that the body wears out while the mind stays bright as a child’s. If pressed (somewhat pedantically) she would readily have agreed that the trouble is really that parts of the body wear out while the brain part of the body does not.

Sometimes we use soul for the whole of a person (‘there is not a soul left behind’). Sometimes we use body for the whole (as in ‘anybody’ or ‘somebody’). Other times we use these words as opposite parts (‘keeping body and soul together’).

The ambiguity of our language betrays our uncertainty about who or what we really are. We have many implicit models as to what body is, and it is a mistake to try to tidy up the ambiguity or opt for a single model.

There are two main ideas, or models. One is that my body is a thing I have. The other is of body as a mode of being which I am.

In his article ‘American Pastoral’ (Thought 27/102,1952, pp. 365—380), John P. Sisk explains how a particular literary form reflects a basic human aspiration and its liabilities. Sisk’s examination of the relationship between literature and life in American pastoral is relevant to the human problematic reflected in both the tragic and melodramatic interpretations of human experience. An overview of Sisk’s study of American pastoral allows insights to emerge about the interrelationship of these three versions of human experience.

Pastoral poetry idealized shepherds and shepherdesses in idealized rustic surroundings. The pastoral form is artificial and unnatural. However, if we turn from the subject matter conventionally associated with pastoral to the attitude that is at work in this subject matter, we discover that the essential thing in pastoral, according to Sisk, is a certain critical vision of simplicity. It is basically critical because it is an argument. Its argument is that a certain simple state of affairs is more desirable than a certain complex state of affairs. To state its case effectively, it must use the tools of argument, among them abstraction and hyperbole. Abstracting from life only what will not hurt its cause, it too often exaggerates unscrupulously in the interest of the cause. Ironically, then, in the very act of opposing truth to falsehood what truth the pastoralizer possesses is distorted into falsehood.

The sociology of religion is unevenly developed. If you want to read a good book on one of the sectarian forms of religion, such as the Moonies, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Hare Krishna movement, you can generally find what you are looking for. But on Catholicism there is a dearth of good sociological literature: a paradoxical state of affairs when one considers the enormous scope the subject offers for analysis informed by sociological insight rather than by theological or administrative concerns. For this reason, the publication of such an excellent study as The Two Catholic Churches is to be warmly welcomed.

Our concern here is with the issues Archer has raised rather than with the book itself. So, in writing about the portrait he presents of present-day English Catholicism, I shall be concentrating on the interpretation which he offers rather than on the descriptive element. But his description and his interpretation are so closely dovetailed that commenting primarily on the latter is a rather artificial procedure. In doing so, moreover, I may seem not to give this highly readable and stimulating book the praise it merits, since the interpretative framework strikes me as being more vulnerable to criticism than Archer’s account of what it was like to be a Catholic in Newcastle before the Second Vatican Council. Yet it is in the nature of interpretations to be open to question; thus, if in what follows I do question some parts of the analysis, that in no way lessens my admiration for Archer’s skill in conveying to nonCatholic readers something of the social reality of Catholicism in England.

Some years ago there was a competition in the New Statesman magazine to produce the most startling newspaper headline anyone could think of. Among the winning entries, as I remember, was this: ‘ARCHDUKE FERDINAND STILL ALIVE. FIRST WORLD WAR A MISTAKE’.

A mistake, a war in which 20 million people died? It seems of course preposterous: a bad—if clever—joke. And yet historians now almost universally agree that the First World War was a mistake. Not in the sense implied by that headline, that it was fought for the wrong reasons. No, a mistake in the sense—perhaps even more depressing—that there were no reasons for war at all: except, that is, for the drive to war itself. The great powers had got themselves into a fierce arms race, Germany was being made to feel increasingly encircled; yet rather than seeking obvious remedies—reversing the arms race, or resorting to more positive diplomacy—the generals and the statesmen pushed on towards the cataclysm as if they were no longer masters of their fate.

Today, as we know, there are disturbing parallels. Once again, the great civilisations of the world—the very nations that gave us our literature, music, painting, our ideas of peace and of democracy—are locked into a unending cycle of hostility. Once again there is a grim competition for superiority in arms, in trade, in attitudes, in righteousness.

What is the church? Who is the church? Today that question is difficult to answer. A real marvel of contemporary Catholicism has been its ability to maintain within one church differing and sometimes blatantly opposed groups of believers. Throughout the United States pockets of church offer a spectrum of church experiences. Among those pockets are some 116 local chapters of DIGNITY, Inc., a lay organization of lesbian and gay Catholics and their friends, founded in Los Angeles in 1969. To a growing number of American Catholics, Dignity offers an alternative experience of church. Indeed, for most of its members, Dignity offers the only possible experience; without Dignity they would simply forget about being Catholic.

Certainly Dignity is on the fringe of official Roman Catholicism. Some believe that the October 30, 1986, Vatican ‘Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons’ officially proscribes Dignity. But only consideration of what the Dignity chapters actually are would determine whether or not they provide an authentic Catholic experience of church. So here a priest who has ministered to various Dignity chapters for over ten years offers an inside picture so judgments to be made may be based on the evidence.

It was late summer or, perhaps better, early autumn. I remember there were flowers growing. In those days the station master grew flowers to brighten up the Junction platform. I have been on the same Junction since; there are no flowers now. There is, however, a great deal of graffiti. But when I set out on my journey to ‘become a priest’ the walls were clean.

It is vital, nevertheless, to point out that the absence of graffiti should not be understood, or interpreted, as an indication that there was nothing to protest against or nobody to hate or love. In fact I think there were vague efforts, even frightened attempts, to inform the world in pencil about life’s hopes and problems. And, of course, the more adventurous had attacked various wooden surfaces with pen-knives. The comparative cleanliness should be attributed more to the absence of aerosol sprays and felt pens than to the lack of desire, in various sectors of the public, to address their fellow citizens about their bitterness or enchantment with life. In fact there was a lot to be bitter about in that late summer or early autumn. We had, more or less, just come to the end of one of our periods of global killing. The time had come to number such periods. The one just finished would be known historically as World War II. And it had come to an end with an event, or an act, which had not totally sunk into our world consciousness—we had dropped an Atomic bomb on Japan. The world would never be the same again.

There is a growing literature on the sociology of the Catholic Church which attempts to explain that institution’s present condition in terms of tension between an official church and an unofficial one, both of which now exist inside what was once monolithic Catholicism. The work of Vallier on Latin American Catholicism and of Coleman on the Roman Catholic Church in Holland uses ‘two-church’ models, though their theoretical framework is integrationist, in a Durkheimian sense. More explicitly, and on the specific issue of the respective roles of hierarchy and theologians, Dulles argues in the chapter, ‘The two magisteria; an interim reflection’ of his recent book on ecclesiology, that there is need for ‘two kinds of teacher—the official teacher, whose task it is to establish the official doctrine of the Church; and the theologians, whose function is to investigate the questions about faith with the tools of scholarship’. The law which should rule the relationship of these two elements is a dialectical one of ‘relative autonomy within mutual acceptance’, (p. 127). Using the two-church model in a more general way, Peter McCaffery, in his excellent thesis, ‘Catholic radicalism and counter-radicalism’, has analysed one tension between official and unofficial mind-sets within Catholicism. With the help of surveys of the literature, opinions and activities of ten groups in the Catholic Church in England and nine in Holland he probes the mediating role played by more or less loyal Catholic opinion in these national churches. He concludes that an unofficial presence has occupied a space inside the Church between the official Church and its external critics.