While Vatican I is commonly regarded as the council of papal infallibility, and much time and energy were indeed devoted to that matter, both inside and outside the Council, the key to the doctrine, and the real stumbling-block for Christian unity, surely lies in the third chapter of the Constitution “Pastor Aeternus”. This is the text which commits Catholics in communion with the Roman see to the belief that the bishop of Rome as pope is endowed ex officio with “full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the universal Church, not only in things which relate to faith and morals but also in matters relating to the discipline and government of the Church spread throughout the world”. Our immediate concern at this stage of our enquiry must be to make sense of the notion of universal jurisdiction, but it should be stated now that the doctrine of papal infallibility needs to be situated in the perspective of the doctrine of papal jurisdiction. The right, and the duty, of having, on occasion, at last to define a matter of doctrine affecting the Church as a whole, must be treated as an implication, or an example of the exercise, of the claim for the successor of St Peter of an all-embracing pastoral care for the universal Church. “The supreme power of teaching”, in the words with which chapter 4 of “Pastor Aeternus” opens, “is included in the apostolic primacy which the Roman pontiff, as the successor of Peter, chief of the Apostles, possesses over the whole Church”.

In his Foreword to Edward Robinson’s The Original Vision, Sir Alister Hardy quotes a verse from Thomas Hood which expresses what is, I suppose, a fairly common feeling:

At least since the time of Wordsworth it has been possible for many people simply to take it for granted that it is this sense of the loss involved in growing up which provides the key to Christ’s saying, “Unless you turn and become like little children you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 18:3). Christ’s conditions for entry into the kingdom seem to fall easily into the same pattern as that which we accept readily enough, for instance, in Elizabeth Goudge’s delightful tale, The Valley of Song, in which a variety of respectable ladies and gentlemen shed their years and their cares to find new life in the enchanted Valley. No eyebrows are raised when Peter and Susan are informed that they can never return to Narnia because they are “getting too old” (Prince Caspian, p. 194).

Five years ago, (February 1973) I wrote an article for this journal entitled ‘On Teaching Religion in School’ in which I argued for a style of teaching religion in Catholic schools which had greater respect for the child’s own understanding of his religious identity. The fact that the majority of children in Catholic schools enter them with a Catholic label tied, as it were, round their necks, does tend to make those professionally concerned with the future of the Catholic faith in this country forget that, while for some children this label may be a pathway to great joy, for others it may be an albatross.

In the same article I pointed to a dilemma which lies at the heart of religious education in schools. This analysis still seems valid. It runs as follows:

I had better start by declaring an interest: Cosmas Desmond (hereinafter CD) is a friend from South African days, and it is in his flat that I write this review, of his book. Readers will be able to allow for any possible loss of objectivity; in another way the location is a positive advantage since CD’s flat is a centre of South African contacts and involvement. This is directly relevant to the work done in the book, since it is self-confessedly a committed work and a socialist work, not a piece of arm-chair theorizing but a thoughtful statement arising directly out of work in a traditional communalist (President Nyerere’s useful word, see p. 131) society, ruined as it is by White political and economic exploitation, work that is for a future African socialist state. It is refreshing to read a marxist argument in which “theoria” and “praxis” do not bespatter the pages till towards the very end, and this refreshment is directly related to the rootedness of the book: I remember a weary paper on “Theoria and Praxis” delivered by an Afrikaner philosophy teacher at Wits University, but the South African philosophical association is not the locus out of which any revolution, even a peaceful one, will come.

The thesis of the book is that the only Christian option in South Africa now is a socialist one. This is carefully argued both theologically-politically and politically-theologically (Part I and Part II); only theology has the right and duty to confess the emptiness of theology when faced with positive political option, only politics can argue positively for a particular political option — for one thing it has to be a realistic possibility, and theology can hardly calculate that.