One of the Brothers at the Irish De La Salle school where I began my education had a brisk warm-up routine for frosty mornings. It consisted of a rapid-fire set of catechism questions round the class. If you faltered or made a mistake you got a ferocious slap on either hand with a whippy three-foot cane, and went to the back of the line to be questioned again. The remembered tingle of swollen finger-ends as the second inquisition drew near is still capable of bringing me out in a sweat. It is some testimony to the effectiveness of this pedagogic technique, however, that while I have now wholly forgotten the Brother’s name, I have almost total recall of any question in the catechism, even at a distance of thirty years, and coasted through the first year of doctrine tutorials in my undergraduate theology degree- course on the strength of it—“I see that Duffy is the only member of the class who has actually read the Chalcedonian decrees”.

Indeed, it was as an elaborate mnemonic device that I think I chiefly valued it. Not just the riveting stacatto crispness of the question and answer form, and not just the lapidary elegance and compression of many of the answers, which seemed then, and seem still, admirable—‘What is prayer? Prayer is the raising up of the mind and heart to God’. Best of everything were all those wonderful lists: the three theological virtues and the four cardinal virtues, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost and the two great precepts of charity, the seven corporal works of mercy and the eight beatitudes, the seven deadly sins and the six sins against the Holy Ghost, the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance, the three eminent good works and the four last things.

The aim of this study is to understand what Paul means by his statement about the resurrection in I Corinthians 15:44: ‘It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body’. We must examine Paul’s use of the terms body (soma), physical (psychikon and psyche) and spiritual (pneumatikon and pneuma). One of the fullest recent expositions of Pauline usage is Robert Jewett’s Paul’s Anthropological Terms (Brill 1971), which criticises idealistic treatments of the subject and seeks definitions in particular historical settings. This is a sensible approach to the subject, since it allows for both development and contradiction, but it meets with the difficulties that we do not know for certain which of the epistles attributed to Paul are really Pauline; and we know neither in what circumstances nor in which order they were written.

Most sholars agree with Jewett in judging Ephesians, Colossians and the Pastoral epistles to be Deutero-Pauline, and I shall not include references from them in my argument. I have not followed Jewett in attempting to define the development of Pauline thought in terms of an historical schema, but have noted related uses together, in order to show the range of particular kinds of usage more clearly.

No one will deny that in the last twenty years since the Second Vatican Council there has been a wonderful growth in the ecumenical movement among Christians. Not only has the whole climate changed in the relation of the Christian churches to one another, but formal agreement has been reached with Anglicans, Lutherans and reformed churches on such formerly controversial subjects as the Eucharist and the Ministry. But there still remains one insuperable obstacle to Christian unity, which no amount of discussion has so far been able to overcome, and that is the claim of the Roman Church to the ‘universal jurisdiction’ and the ‘infallibility’ of the Pope. Is there no way out of this dilemma or is the Ecumenical movement doomed finally to break down at this point?

An answer to this problem has been offered in a recent book published in India, which proposes a solution from the Roman point of view on strictly orthodox lines. Its author is a Spanish Jesuit, Luis Bermejo, who is a professor of theology, formerly dean of the faculty of theology, at the Papal Seminary at Poona. His book consists of a series of articles contributed to theological reviews, which make a careful, scholarly survey of the historical grounds for these doctrines. His contention is that only a strictly historical method can answer the question of the validity of these doctrines. In the past it has been only too easy to read into the evidence of the New Testament and the Fathers the developed doctrine of a later age.

Recent confrontations between the Vatican and the Sisters of Mercy, as well as with other groups of women religious, particularly with Americans, reveal a fundamentally different understanding of the relationship of Church and State, the sacred and the secular, held by the nuns, on the one hand, and the Vatican, on the other. Current Vatican policy assumes a rigid line between Church and State which makes any office-holding, either elected or appointed, in government, by either a priest or a nun, incompatible with the religious vocation. Although the first conflict between the Vatican and Sister Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy appeared to be primarily over differing interpretations of the relationship between personal morality and public policy in the specific case of payments for abortion, subsequent conflicts with the Sisters of Mercy over other nun office-holders went beyond specific differences over Church teachings on moral issues. The holding of any public office was defined as out of bounds for priests or religious: in other words, the Vatican pressed (and continues to press) for a very harsh interpretation of the restriction in the new Code of Canon Law (canon 285, 3) and for its world-wide observation.

A similar line has been taken in the case of the four priests who hold public office in the Nicaraguan revolutionary government and, most recently, the Italian priest who has been elected as a socialist to the European Parliament. In each case the resolution of the conflict is to force the person involved either to resign the public office or else be removed from their religious order (or, in the case of a diocesan priest, be suspended from priestly duties).