Church and World

Extract

Mr Terry Eagleton made, in his article The Language of Renewal in the October issue of New Blackfriars, some criticisms of certain things I had said in How Corrupt is the Church? in the August issue. I am not replying in any polemical spirit: for I think that much is gravely wrong inside the Church, and that, in seeking to see what is wrong, we are all of us peering through a fog; and so I hope that what I wrote will be both criticised and supplemented. All the same, some clarification on my part may promote fruitful discussion.

Mr Eagleton accuses me of ‘accepting and reinforcing a whole social status quo’; and, in this, he regards me as representative of the defects of progressive thought. I should like to rebut this accusation. I might, indeed, claim the highest conceivable authority for the presumption with which he saddles me, that we shall have the poor always with us; but perhaps this would be a misapplication of our Lord’s words. I must, however, repudiate his implication that I regard class division and the inequitable distribution of wealth as desirable. I do not: my views are rather strongly egalitarian. But what I was concerned to suggest was how Christians should behave within a society of which inequality and class division are features. I do not say, what Mr Eagleton attributes to me, that these are the inevitable conditions of human life: but I do say that there is no immediate prospect of their disappearing, at least from Western society.