The evident concern of Pope Paul VI for the sufferings of mankind, his tireless labours for peace, and his willingness to adopt new initiatives have won him admiration and a respectful hearing far beyond the bounds of the Christian communion. The recent encyclical Humanae Vitae has attracted the attention of many scientists, partly because it is relevant to the population problem and partly because it contains a section specifically addressed to them. Many scientific periodicals concerned with science and human affairs have therefore devoted leading editorials to the encyclical, and many other scientists have commented on it in articles and letters.

Scientists are well aware that the population problem has arisen largely as a result of their work. Advances in medical science have decreased infant mortality, eliminated many killer diseases and increased the average life span, so that populations hitherto static or increasing slowly have begun to increase rapidly, thus outrunning available food supplies and leading to widespread poverty and malnutrition. This is an agonizing situation that cannot be ignored and indeed all those who struggle to solve it are following the command of Christ to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty and clothe the naked. Familiar with the properties of the exponential function, scientists know that the only way to solve the problem, and to avert catastrophic famines in the next decades, is to find some way of regulating births. To be effective, the method chosen must be usable by poor, simple and illiterate people.

A democratic Church? Last month, in the first part of this article, I discussed certain studies on attitudes to authority and the psychological components of such responses. My point was that awareness of the psychological mechanisms which may underly some of the antagonisms in the Church can perhaps help to ameliorate them. There is however a further and more fundamental question to be raised concerning the structure of the institutional Church. On the one hand its hierarchical organization has the advantages of apparent historical continuity, the visible demonstration of unity and the fact that it is congenial to a considerable proportion of its membership, on the other hand its very attractiveness to people of authoritarian personality has its dangers. People so attracted may try to mould it in their own image, as indeed seems so have happened from time to time in history, so that their preoccupations almost reverse the emphasis of Christ’s teaching on the spontaneous exchange of love.

At this point it is worth recalling the outcome of Lewin, Lippitt and White’s experiment, where spontaneous and mature behaviour was a feature of the democratic group rather than the autocratic group. It may seem facile to draw comparisons between the behaviour of groups of small boys and behaviour within vast and complex organizations like the Church. Furthermore, evidence has been cited that the cultural predispositions of some nations and the personality characteristics of some people mean that they may actively prefer the autocratic situation.

However, a lot of evidence has been accumulating in a variety of disciplines to show that in large organizations as well as small,

I

It is now clear enough that the disturbance in the Catholic world caused by the publication of Humanae Vitae was a symptom of much deeper stirrings in the Church than a difference of opinion about contraceptive methods of family limitation. We have to recognize that a profound shift of Catholic consciousness had already begun to take place, and that the publication of Paul VI’s encyclical served to precipitate this new consciousness and to make its protest against the old articulate.

The visible structure of the older Catholic consciousness is easily described: within the period between Pius IX and Pius XII, Catholics recognized their distinctive identity, especially in England, in terms of an explicit awareness of the Pope, Mary, eucharistic devotions as well as Mass, Friday abstinence and the unlawfulness of ‘unnatural’ methods of birth control. It is instructive to recall that the Pope who confirmed his predecessor’s withdrawal of the discussion of contraception from Vatican II and who could not accept the recommendations of his theological commission is also the Pope who insisted on giving Mary the title of Mater Ecclesiae in his allocution of 21st November, 1964, at the close of the third period of Vatican II, although the title was after consideration excluded from the chapter on Mary in the constitution Lumen Gentium on the Church; thus Paul VI continued the tradition of Pius IX and Pius XII in associating Pope and Mary in a special relationship to the Church. Paul VI is also the Pope of the encyclical Mysterium Fidei on the Eucharist.

This is the second stage of an attempt to make a fresh assessment of the foundations of Christian morality, or of Catholic moral theology, in the light of the ideas of some of the thinkers who are concerned with the possibility of an alternative society. We who are committed to living and thinking eschatologically are bound to be interested in every serious endeavour to transcend the existing state of things. This paper will try to bring out the analogy between Marcuse and Heidegger.

1 —Repression and Liberation

Herbert Marcuse’s work stands well outside the ordinary Anglo- American framework of academic social and political philosophy. The reason for this is no doubt that he belongs to a tradition in which the impact of Hegel has been undergone and assimilated. What this amounts to, as we should see, is that he can take for grant ed, in his philosophizing, the intimations about the nature of man and of meaning which we associate with the Romantic movement. This has become part of our common consciousness too, but on the whole extra-philosophically. Indeed, the specifying difference between English and continental philosophies at the present time is not so much to do with technique and approach as with acceptance or rejection of the Romantic idea of man.

It is instructive to reflect on the divided response to Marcuse's work. He is the most widely discussed thinker among the opponents of our way of life in America today. On the Old Left (orthodox communist Marxists and such-like) he meets with unanimous hostility: he is condemned as a defeatist, a pessimist, who thinks not scientifically but poetically.

To review Dr Leach’s Reith Lectures, A Runaway World, is not a straightforward task. It is not possible to take up the many points on which they invite comment or provoke disagreement without first defining one’s position towards the blanket disapproval with which they were greeted when originally delivered, and noting the implications of this opposition. The lectures were meaty and intentionally provocative: contrary to their author I think they make better reading than listening simply because there is too much to take in by the ear alone: which makes it all the sadder that so much comment was lavished on them as radio talks and so little in their printed form. Reith Lectures have, of course, proved controversial in the past but none has provoked quite the response these did, and this must, at least in part, be explained by timing and the topic.

The whole conception of the Reith Lectures assumes a hierarchical public opinion with a narrow apex definable largely in terms of who knows who but predominantly drawn from certain professions and the public service and the so-called quality newspapers, transmitting downwards through the universities, the colleges of education to eventually the secondary modern schools, the right opinions and the tolerated areas of disagreement. Quite suddenly in the last three years this hierarchical structure has started to break up and voices quite outside the old establishment, more strident, much less informed, but sometimes more passionately concerned have started to make themselves heard and been shown to carry weight.