By Rather Dim Lights

Extract

I don’t see how the rather obnoxious Tory voters can be excommunicated. They are acting according to their rather dim lights (something that most ‘progressive’ Catholics applaud when it is a matter of Humanae Vitae).

Peter Hebblethwaite New Blackfriars December 1984 p. 499

Perhaps one of the most rewarding things to remember when one is playing with ideas is that nothing remains as it is for very long, and, what is rather more awkward, just as ideas are soon outmoded and superseded, so too the nature of the problems with which we are engaged changes before our very eyes. It is as if the entire process is taking place on a cinema screen where the credits continuously merge into new lines.

Even the apparently successful outcome of some process of study or legislation can be seen in the long run to have produced not so much a final answer as a formidable tariff of new problems. Medical science’s ability to reduce infant mortality and prolong the average expectation of life has created a situation in which—were it to be taken seriously—the Church’s traditional pastoral and moral teaching, with its primitive emphasis on fertility, would be a serious threat to the future. Recent matrimonial legislation to improve the position of women has been so successful that further legislation is now urgently required to protect not only husbands, but the unfortunate wives of second alliances. In the early years of this century it would have been impossible for pioneers in the Labour Movement to foresee that within a man’s lifetime the power of the unions mobilised for sectional self-interest under the laissez-faire banner of ‘free collective bargaining’ would play a decisive role in destroying a Labour government.