‘The problem of orders must be looked at . . . facing squarely the question whether the new situation calls for a new policy in the Catholic Church. This policy would include a careful determination of the arguments behind the Bull Apostolicae Curae and a candid judgment whether the development of doctrine has superseded the theological assumptions of 1896.’ That statement was followed, a week later, by a letter in The Tablet from Fr Edward Quinn: ‘May one express the hope, in good time, that this really will be a candid judgment ... if a new investigation shows that the assumptions have been superseded, let it also be clearly admitted that the decision was mistaken. Even if the Bull was not infallible, Pope Leo XIII declared in the most forceful terms that Anglican Orders were null and void, and followed this up by a letter stating that the decision was irrevocable. Development of doctrine cannot mean that one statement was true in 1896 and its opposite true in 1980 or whenever we come to revise our former conclusions.’ The following week, Bishop Clark, Roman Catholic Co-Chairman of the International Commission, wrote: ‘Fr Quinn touches the nerve of this discussion when he seeks to clarify the relationship of Apostolicae Curae to a development of doctrine. What, however, has guided the thinking of the commission is the principle that any development in doctrine must be consistent with its past.’

In spite of the very general title of this paper, my aim is extremely restricted. I do not propose to discuss past or present theories of doctrinal development, nor the relationship between notions of ‘development’ and related notions such as ‘progress’, ‘growth’ or ‘evolution’. Although I shall be obliged to touch on it at one point, I do not propose to discuss in detail the problem of the normative status to be accorded to the New Testament witness and to subsequent moments in the doctrinal history of the Church.

During the nineteen-thirties T. S. Eliot steadily extended his interests as a literary critic to larger social and cultural questions; the process can be traced in After Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society, and his editorials in The Criterion. This interest culminated in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, published in 1948. It is one of his strangest books, where profound insights are interwoven with the most superficial observations, and where seemingly firm statements are then qualified out of existence within a paragraph or so. The book’s excessively tentative title is characteristic; Eliot says many interesting things about culture but he never succeeds in defining it. In principle, he is concerned with culture in the broad or anthropological sense, rather than the narrow or Arnoldian sense: that is to say, the whole way of life of a society, all its inherited manners, customs and styles of living, as opposed to ‘the best that has been thought and said’ and the cultivation of the fine arts. In practice, however, Eliot slides from one sense of culture to another in a quite disconcerting way. The anthropological use of the word is descriptive and value-free; any discernible form of social organization above the merely biological level will have its accompanying cultural modes, however odd they may seem to the observer. And as anthropologists have shown, seemingly primitive peoples can often produce very complicated cultural forms. So that when Eliot laments the decline of culture in the twentieth century and contemplates a possible future ‘of which it will be possible to say that it will have no culture’ he cannot be using the word in the anthropological sense, since if organized human life persists at all it is bound to have its accompanying cultural forms. Clearly, Eliot is here using the word in a more particular, value-bearing sense, which is closer to the Arnoldian usage.

Between the promoters of the present discontents and the revolutionaries of the heroic early nineteenth century there seems to be one great difference: the refusal of detailed prescription for the society of the future. Our world is to be violently overthrown, but when we enquire what is to replace it, the answers are usually expressed in terms of a vaguely existentialist adventure, an undefined project thrust into the future, where love and risk will combine to create the millennium.

Older Utopias were vastly more specific. In fact it was almost a diagnostic feature that they had to be: either to carry the reader’s narrative interest, as in More’s Utopia or Wells’s The World of William Clissold (a book my provincial 1930s childhood fed on avidly), or to permit the social scientist to roam untrammelled in the realms of gold because his real appetite was a true romantic one for the poetry rather than the mechanisms of a new society. One who attempted to combine both poetry and mechanism was Charles Fourier, a prolific writer who has recently been expensively reprinted, more, I should imagine, for his impact on surrealism than for any residual value he may possess as a social analyst. Fourier was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out and died in 1837, after dabbling in a number of vaguely financial callings, and publishing endless works on the evils of industrialism and how they should be remedied.

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.

For most Catholics, a prayer meeting is a new and perhaps disturbing experience. However, in recent years an increasing number of Catholics have been meeting to pray together, in silence or in spoken prayer as they feel led by the Spirit; so it may be useful, for both enthusiasts and critics, to consider in general terms the advantages, objectives and principles of prayer meetings, and to face frankly the dangers and possible errors to which they are liable.

The basic principle of group prayer is the teaching of our Lord, that ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in their midst’ (Matt. 18, 20), and that ‘if two of you agree about anything on earth in prayer, it shall be granted’ (18, 19). For we are together the Body of Christ, and as such ‘members of one another’ (Eph. 4, 25). As Christians, we belong together; it is therefore natural and proper that we should exercise our most specifically Christian privilege of prayer together. This is what much of the recent liturgical renewal has been about.

Group prayer obviously falls into two kinds: formal, liturgical prayer, and spontaneous, free prayer. Originally, of course, these two were not separate. Even the Eucharistic Prayer, the Canon of the Mass, was originally extemporized by the celebrant. And it is clear that in the worship of the early Church the whole assembly would take part in various ways (except perhaps the women—and there St Paul may have been dealing with the particular situation!). Whether we shall ever return to this, or even whether it would be a good thing to return to this, I do not know. In any case, our situation is different, and we do have to distinguish between set prayer and spontaneous prayer.