It seems strange to think in terms of ‘conversion’ when reflecting upon the experience of leaving the priesthood. The transformation, of the priest into the husband and father has been called many things, A ‘betrayal’—that was a bishop; a ‘defection’, an ‘act of madness’ a ‘second adolescence of the late thirties’, a ‘good riddance’, but hardly a ‘conversion’. Yet, for me, that is exactly it.

I think it is worth the trouble to try to explain why. Not least because the witness, both theological and personal, of a growing number of stable, happy husbands and fathers who were once priests may be of positive value in the midst of the Church. We think so, anyway. Our families meet regularly. One resolution we all share: to love the Church and to meet the occasional rebuff without bitterness. Howsoever we may be regarded, and institutional rejection is surely understandable at the moment, there is no doubting that we do increasingly present a new phenomenon in the life of the Church. We are convinced that we have more than embarrassment to offer to the Church, but something creative and fruitful. Perhaps it may lie in the emergence of trained theologians who are also devoted and happily married men immersed in the secular society. Theology has surely limped long enough in the idealistic world of the professional celibate.

Let me offer my own reflections, anyway, as a first contribution. If one word could express the whole new orientation of my own world, it would be ‘incarnational’. And this in an experiential context. My own saddest experience of priesthood was directly contrary. This may be a commentary on my own inadequacy, but yet I feel that it is the obvious defect of the Church ministry as a whole.

I recognize at once that any viewpoint I express on the Synodal Document on the priesthood is necessarily unrepresentative. There are relatively few of us who are priests in ‘secular’ employments. Because I have no specific mandate, as I would if I were a full-time priest-teacher in a diocesan seminary or school, or if I were a religious pursuing the community’s special ‘work’, it may be that I have put any opinion of mine out of court. I would hope, however, that there would be some who might accept that even two years’ experience in extra-diocesan work could be the basis of a small contribution to the debate on the nature and contemporary forms of priestly ministry.

While the Synodal Document has many indisputable matters in it, and also poses some questions more radically than one might have expected, I cannot help feeling that the difficulties it faces in the current crisis are intractable on the basis of its theological view of the ministerial priesthood. Almost by its own definitions, which have been our standard fare for centuries, it can allow for little development. The document seems to have settled, as matters not open to question, that the specifically priestly functions are clearly defined ontologically; and further that the priestly character pervades the whole life of the ordained man. In doing so, some facts of the church’s history are overlooked; or, if recognized, are touched on so lightly as to minimize their relevance to the contemporary situation.

The Church is both called and sent by God: called to sanctity and to salvation, and sent to preach the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16, 15), healing the sick and driving out demons (Matt. 10, 8). It is only where action and contemplation have become secularized (or, for that matter, sacralized—it comes to the same thing), that any contradiction appears; that is to say, it is only because we try to apprehend and to practise prayer or good works without seeing how they proceed from the mission of Jesus Christ, that the hoary problem of reconciling and balancing the two arises.

‘You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.’ ‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you . . . Receive the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 1,8; John 20, 2If). In their different ways, each of the evangelists (even the unexpanded Mark) concludes with some kind of experience of the risen, exalted Lord, coupled with a command to go and tell people, to bear witness, whether by word or by example. Luke’s Pentecost story is but the most dramatic version of this.

Now, as I have suggested, for those who did not live with Jesus on earth, baptism is the appointed way into the whole event of Calvary to Pentecost. In baptism we die with Christ and rise with him, receiving the Spirit that we may live no longer for sin and self, but for God. Of itself, this obviously does not entail any formally apostolic mission; but it certainly includes some kind of obligation to bear witness. ‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, and to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit ... for just as the body is one and has many members, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body’ (I Cor. 12, 7ff). Tertullian is quite in line with this when he exhorts the newly-baptized, as they emerge from the font, to pray for an ‘apportioning of charisms’.

The past two years in Northern Ireland have been a time of intense political activity among its one-and-a-half million people. The frequency and intensity of street violence has ensured international publicity and attention. Yet the causes underlying the disturbances remain much misunderstood at home and abroad.

It is a trite but necessary beginning to emphasize that the Irish problem is not one of religion. It is true that religious denomination neatly divides the political positions. Unionists are Protestant, non-Unionists Catholics. But however compelling it is to see the intermittent guerrilla warfare in Belfast or Derry in terms of Catholics and Protestants it must be resisted. These confrontations may have little formal political character, but in a real sense they represent a clash of different political forces; the resistance of a complex postcolonial social structure to new economic and social influences from within and without.

Put another way, the Civil Rights campaign and the British Government’s involvement in that campaign and its aftermath represent attempts to dismantle, what had, under strain, become a semi-fascist state, and to replace it with something approaching social democracy. Just why the ‘Irish Question’ should once again irrupt into British politics, and at this particular time, is problematical. But an important factor which enabled a Labour administration to begin on the unfinished business of Ireland is the impact of economic change on the relationships between the parties involved, the Republic of Ireland, Ulster, and Britain. Economic change alone cannot account for all developments, but an analysis of recent events in Ireland which leaves them out altogether could only help to mystify further the reputedly already amazed Britisher.

Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus in his historical existence, the man whom God lived and who lived God for us, was God’s way of reading the world, God’s way of making sense of the world. His life amongst us was a hermeneutic of man in the world before God, an interpretation of the human condition which (in historical fact and not a fortiori) was and is a radical criticism of all other ways of reading the world; his life, and more particularly his death, which was the meaning of that life, shows that all other attempts to discover and express the significance of what it is to be human have been mistaken or deficient. The only true understanding of our living and dying is his living and dying; any other form of living and dying is to some degree perverted. Any living and dying that we might be able to manage ourselves is going to be less than true. Only his biography, his ‘name’, is able to make our biographies, our ‘names’, ultimately true readings of what it is to be human, to stand before God in the world. There is salvation in no other name. If we are to be whole, we have in some way to learn to abandon what we have received.

Baptism according to the tradition of the Church is ‘necessary to salvation’. That has come to be understood to mean that, at least so far as baptism in the straightforward sense of the sacrament of water-baptism is concerned, it is necessary to salvation for those who have been brought to see that it is so necessary. Baptism is the answer to a question, ‘What must (dei) I do to be saved?’ What shall we do?—The question asked by people who have heard the story of Jesus of Nazareth and felt themselves threatened by it, found themselves interpreted to themselves by it as out of true, as sinners.

‘Of course you English Dominicans have had a terrible time recently, losing relatively more priests than anyone else.’ My journalist friend’s job is to know facts and comment on them, and he was saddened at our dilapidated state. So I thought I’d look at the figures. The result is surprising, remembering that in 1860 there were 25 priests, and in 1960, 148.

Here are the figures. They include all who left for any reason, but exclude those in South Africa who never worked as priests in Britain. The ten-year periods are those during which religious profession was made; they are therefore the ‘years of formation’. The figures are of priests only and omit all those who left before ordination.

There is much more in this paper about angels than about Christ; but I am sure that you will forgive me this disproportion. Christ, so it seems, is already well known to us: we can take him for granted. But angels are new—there is news in talking about angels: they excite our curiosity.

At our disposal are numerous scholary treatises in which Christ’s personality is analysed and this nature is dissected in its several components. About Christ we may think we know almost everything there is to know. But angels. . . ?

Of course, we know they have not really got wings like birds, and that in fact they must be quite different from the naked babies that tumble from the skies in our baroque paintings. But what else is there to say?

To be fair only in the past century and a half have angels suffered a leakage of meaning ending in the present debilitated condition. Before that they were the objects of much serious speculation. Were they material or pure spirits; what sort of knowledge did they have; could they have intercourse; how many of them were there; etc. ? Indeed, angels were dissected too: Fr Cipolla (Brother Onion) treasured in a box a ‘penna dell’hgnolo Gabriello’ which was left behind on the occasion of the archangel’s visit to the Blessed Virgin (II Decamerone VI 10, 370)—supposing, of course, that Boccaccio is a reliable witness.

But alas, for us this wealth of information is buried in the past, unavailable because we do not even know how to make it appear relevant. The break with the past is pretty well complete: angels have been lost definitively in a welter of tinsel and feathers.

I am not concerned in this paper to talk about Beowulf for its own sake. I want to take Beowulf as an example of a more general point that seems worth making about literature and in particular about literary studies. It is a point I cannot make directly because if I expressed it in a series of propositions I should be misunderstood. I want to take a number of questions raised by Beowulf, some of which have been discussed in their own right by a series of scholars and with some of which I shall have to take issue: I am not, however, concerned with this or that interpretation of the poem but much more with pointing out certain difficulties in the way of understanding it that do not seem resolvable by conventional methods. I do not believe that these problems are confined to Beowulf but that they are part of the necessary business of understanding any literary work. The difference lies in this: Beowulf is a marginal work from the frontiers of literacy and the beginnings of English society, unlike the works most of us get worked up about which are much more central to our language and our way of life. We must beware of committing what the late R. G. Collingwood called the fallacy of precarious margins—that is arguing from marginal cases as though they were central, but it does seem that marginal situations—as the late Ludwig Wittgenstein has so brilliantly shown—have a power to point to things we take for granted without questioning in more central, more ‘normal’ situations.

‘A clean, well-lighted place’—the phrase occurs readily enough to anyone visiting Holland today and it has its own modulation when thought of in connection with contemporary Dutch Catholicism. Here, if anywhere, we can see translated into coherent and consistent practice much of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and it is hardly necessary to say that the notion of a Church as a whole seriously attempting to embody that spirit and not just paying lip- service to it cannot be other than impressive. A visit to Holland provides an opportunity to see some of the ‘progressive’ theological thinking in the Church ‘in action’, as it were—thinking which made us conscious certainly of ‘the well-lighted place’, but also, and more unexpectedly, of the shadows which fell across it.

Two propositions central to modern theological thinking are the importance of establishing a view of faith as a personal commitment and recognition of the pluriform cultures in which we live. And so it is not surprising to find these assumptions shaping contemporary Dutch Catholicism.

With regard to the first, in almost every conversation we had, words like ‘authenticity’, ‘maturity’, and ‘personal commitment’ occurred with unfailing regularity. Celibacy, to take the most obvious and topical issue, was felt to be significant only if it was a freely-chosen, maturely-pondered vocation. The individual had to accept it as the only mode of life in which his personal and social fulfilment could be envisaged. Celibacy as an obligatory pre-requisite for the priesthood or, at the least, intimately bound up with its meaning and function, was seen as a legalistic intrusion into the private conscience of the person concerned.

Professor Markus seems to be concerned with the city as symbol and as organization. What does the city now mean, and how does it and might it function ? These two questions are very closely related; even a purely technical system will, if it functions, have various significant impacts on the aesthetic and ethical levels. And if a symbolic system really involves efficacious symbols these will at some point cut into the world of allocations and preferences. If his questions 3 and 4 were to be answered as he would seem to wish, we would be at the same time well on the way to answering 1 and 2. The really efficient city where rights and duties were clearly mapped would be therapeutic and liberating. I think again he doesn’t see this therapeutic role of the city as something static—rather as being more like a group psycho-therapy where recovery and discovery are both part of the programme.

I think though that we must start distinguishing; there is man’s activity carried out under the sign of the city, and that carried out as man the tool-maker, if you like man the world changer. The city expressed in the agora, a community of citizens functioning as a juridical and political unit, is essentially a Mediterranean institution; of course, there were cities elsewhere, among the Arabs, in India or China, and for that matter in pre-colonial black Africa. But these lacked the characteristic patterns of the city-state, centring round the concept of a body of citizens with specific rights and duties constituting the polis. Despite the claim of Massignon, the Arab cities had no real system of guilds; the Hindu cities had activity which may be called political within the various quarters, but there were no overall civic democracies, or oligarchies, nor did the Chinese city have any greater degree of civic personality.

Eighty Catholic priests who live and work among the working classes in Chile met in April in Santiago to study the most effective way priests and lay people could help in building socialism in Chile. What follows is a summary made up from answers given to questions asked at a Press Conference on 16th April, to some questions asked later of some of the priests taking part, and from statements made in some of the papers read.

It has been compiled by the Uruguayan journalist MARUJA ECHEGOYEN.

Background

During the final Session of the study group, eight priests held a Press Conference at which they read out a prepared statement and answered questions from journalists representing both Chilean and overseas papers. Among these priests were Fr Gonzalo Arroyo, chaplain of the Catholic University of Santiago, and Fr Alfonso Pujadas, Director-General of the Workers’ Movement at the same University. The journalists mostly represented left-wing organs. Not long before, the Christian Democrat daily La Prensa had published, tendentiously and without prior authorization, with misleading headings, a private document circulated in November last year among a group of priests, wrongly making it out to be the starting-point for this meeting of Socialist priests. Gonzalo Arroyo attacked this action at the Press Conference, and it is indeed one more example of the growing inability of the more right-wing sector of Christian Democracy in Chile to listen and discuss rationally.

The Reviewer approached The Prisoner of Sex with a quickened heart-beat of keen expectation, but warily, unsure whether he hoped to find it a triumph or a failure. Norman Mailer was for his money one of the most interesting and entertaining of contemporary American writers, a man who had recovered from that direst of literary fates, the best-selling first novel followed by a string of failures, and by sheer effort and character remade himself as an artist in middle age. In particular the Reviewer admired semi-confessional, semi-documentary works, like The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago in which Norman wrote about himself in the third person, as the Novelist, the Historian, the Journalist, thus achieving a delicious ironic detachment from his own ego without which indeed his matter and manner could become tiresomely pretentious and irresponsibly extreme.

Peeking into the opening pages of the new book, the Reviewer was glad to see that it was written in the ironic third-person mode, but he was well aware too of what polemical purpose it in this case served. The same cultural trade-winds that had brought across the Atlantic tidings of the growing strength of the movement for Women’s Liberation, and the growing fame of its chief prophet, Kate Millett, had also conveyed whiffs of the excitement greeting Norman’s counterblast, originally rushed to the public in a single issue of Harper’s magazine, to Women’s Lib in general and Kate

Millett in particular. For Kate, in her monumental study of man’s oppression of woman, Sexual Politics, had singled out Norman, along with D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, as prime examples of male chauvinism in modern literature.

The subject of this article invites (and has received) discussion at a high level of abstraction, but the basic question can be posed quite simply: are religious social work organizations (such as the Diocesan Rescue Societies) religious organizations that undertake social work or social work organizations that are religious? To some this will appear an unhelpful contrast, but I hope to show that analysis in these terms yields fruitful results. Clearly, the question is based on certain assumptions, the most important of which lies in the discontinuity between religion and social work. Such an assumption runs counter to some commonly held ideas concerning the relationship between these two. These ideas are, I believe, mistaken, but I cannot at this juncture do more than make a brief outline of some of the main themes in what I would consider an adequate history of the relationship between social work and religion.

Such a history would have to deal with at least three important themes. Firstly, the practice of religious protectionism and denominational exclusiveness, which is difficult to reconcile with the universalism implicit in social work, will require consideration. Historically there have been strong traditions, not only that particular religious groups ought to care for their own, but that their members would suffer penalties if they received help from ‘non-believers’. Thus, in 1677 the York meeting of the Society of Friends refused help to a member who had applied to the Lord Mayor, whilst in ancient Jewry a Jew living publicly on non-Jewish charities was considered to be like a pork eater and was disqualified from testifying in court.

The most distinctive and controverted doctrine of the Pentecostals is that of the ‘baptism in the Spirit’. This was the hallmark of the original Pentecostal movement, as it still is of all Pentecostal-inspired renewal in all the Churches, including, most recently, the Roman Catholic.

Essentially, the doctrine is this: after conversion (and ‘water baptism’), there remains a second blessing, associated usually with the laying on of hands, in which one receives the fullness of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, experiencing for oneself what the first disciples experienced at Pentecost. Some manifestation, usually tongues, is expected; indeed, strict Pentecostals demand it—‘no tongues, no baptism in the Spirit’. Thereafter a person should increasingly realize in his life that he has been ‘endued with power from on high’, he will know that he is ‘led by the Spirit’, he will expect to receive and, when necessary, to perform miracles, especially healing. The whole doctrine rests on an appeal to texts like Mark 16, 17-18, and the obvious passages in Acts (all the texts that respectable commentators like Chrysostom have had to explain away).

I have already argued that we must take the Pentecostal challenge seriously, though expressing some doubts about the propriety of ‘Catholic Pentecostalism’. Here I shall simply examine what they call ‘baptism in the Spirit’. Without wishing at all to devalue the experience, I think it is essential, at least for us in the traditional Churches, to consider how far their doctrine of it is theologically and exegetically sound, and what precisely is the spiritual and psychological significance of the experience. Something must also be said about the gift of tongues.

The gospel begins with the appearance of John the Baptist, preaching a baptism of repentance, in view of the impending arrival of the Messiah who is to execute an eschatological baptism of judgment, in Spirit and fire.

It was not until a fairly recent visit to the United States that I came across and wondered at the emphasis put on counselling by the clergy over there. It struck me at first hearing that this must be something for which specially selected clergy were specially trained, put through courses, taught techniques—something for which I had never been qualified. A closer appraisal made it clear that though some may indeed have been on courses, most were more likely to be doing not much more than what I have always summed up as ‘being available’—available for what? Well, almost anything—meal, bed, tea, sympathy, cash, a ready ear, a shoulder to be wept on, a sponge to absorb, a tap to turn on, a man to pray with, a person who can be silent, a pillar of strength, a place of peace, a warm area of concern, a vehicle of love, a man of God, a secular human being who will be interested.

What I am trying to say is that a counsellor is one who is available to God and to his or her fellow men and women to put at the service of both all that he or she is—and has to give. How much there is depends initially on God, secondarily on heredity, background, education, etc., and thirdly and continually upon the individual’s openness to the Spirit, as the Spirit moves in the world and in him.

The Spirit scatters his gifts: none of us possess all. God is God—too great for us—how wonderful that we can and should go on growing in wisdom and grace before God and man, till we meet each other and Him—face to face—and know what we are now ‘seeing in a glass darkly’.

There has been a remarkable convergence in recent years between Catholic and Protestant theology in the field of christology. The old pattern was that Catholic theologians offered scholastic interpretations of the incarnation, centring on such conciliar and scholastic concepts as person, nature, subsistence and existence, while Protestants followed some form of kenoticism. Kenotic theories of the incarnation, ostensibly based on the ancient hymn in Philippians 2, 5-11, affirmed some sort of change of the Logos or Word of God into human form, and ran into insuperable difficulties concerning the immutability of God as taught by the Bible (cf. Wisdom 7, 27, James 1, 17, and especially Psalm 102, 25-27 and Ecclesiasticus 42, 20-21).

Instead of this dichotomy, there is now emerging a new type of christology, which I classify as ‘translation christology’. Among its supporters I would list J.-J. Latour, Christian Duquoc, Edouard Schillebeeckx, Christopher Butler and Charles Davis among the Catholics, and John McIntyre and Wolfhart Pannenberg among the Protestants. Many other modern authors can be quoted in support of the view, although few if any have explicitly made the concept of translation the heart and centre of their christology.

But pride of place must go to Eustace of Antioch, that staunch supporter of St Athanasius who was deposed from his bishopric by the Arians. ‘As God the Son, he says, is the image of the Father, so is the man whom He wore the image of the divine Son, though in a different material.’ A modern Catholic theologian would want to phrase this differently, and to speak of the manhood which Jesus assumed rather than of the man whom Jesus wore.

Bearing in mind Vatican II pronouncements on the desired relationship between Church and State, the Catholic Church’s relationship with the West German State appears well-nigh ideal. In Western Germany all Churches are by law disestablished, but most of them, including the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church, enjoy corporate legal status (Gemeinschaften des öffentlichen Rechts) in the same way as trades unions and similar bodies. This gives these Churches legal recognition and allows them to enter into legal agreements with the State. The legal relationships between the Catholic Church and the West German State are laid down in the so-called Reich Concordat of 1933 between the Holy See and the German Reich. Although promulgated under the Nazi government, it is, with a few modifications, still legally binding. Furthermore the West German constitution (Grundgesetz) guarantees freedom of belief, conscience, religious conviction, and the right of the Churches to give religious instruction in State schools. Those Churches with corporate status are allowed to gather Church Tax on the basis of government tax-rolls.

So far, so good. But in fact the picture is more complicated than it appears at first sight, as is shown by increasing criticism from both Catholic and non-Catholic quarters of the Catholic Church’s relations with the State since the war. The German mind is quick to draw the distinction between de facto and de jure (cf. the debate over the recognition of the GDR), and some have said that although there is no de jure establishment of the Churches in Western Germany, the Catholic Church has been as good as established de facto since the war. Such critics draw attention to the close working relationship between the Catholic Church and the Christian Democrat (CDU/CSU) governments of the fifties and sixties, the effects of this relationship on post-war legislation, the Churches’ privileged financial position, and the influence of the Catholic Church on the pattern of German education.

Anyone sensitive to symbolism must normally shudder at the words of eucharistic consecration. Not because of the current English translation. Something that cuts deeper: the priest takes the chalice and says: ‘And when supper was ended, he took the cup, saying: This is my blood. . . .’ Most chalices are still lined with gold, a mark of respect, the most precious metal alone allowed to touch the consecrated wine. Yet that gold, enshrined at the heart of our celebration of love and peace, is also, still, at the base of the international monetary system; more specifically, it underpins the economy of South Africa, the world’s largest gold-producing country: the blood that is relevant here is also the blood of apartheid. The hasty response, that a gold-lined cup is a mere container, can only be dubious in the light of a sacramental theology that recognizes the sign-value of form. More honest to admit the contradiction, acknowledge indeed the wider interlocking of the eucharistic community itself with that systematic exploitation revealed in a minor, everyday detail.

The other words of consecration, ‘This is my body’, have resonance for another sacrament: matrimony. Bellarmine traced a further echo: ‘The sacrament of marriage ... is similar to the Eucharist, which likewise is a sacrament not only in the moment of its accomplishment, but also as long as it remains.’ But the eucharistic bread, one might argue, can decay and corrupt; it may not ‘remain’; an opening, by analogy, towards divorce appears: individual relationships may cease adequately to measure up to the form of marriage; the core corrupts, the sign decays.