All over the ‘developed’ world, children left their homes this morning and went to school. All over the undeveloped world, parents were wishing their children could do so.

All over the developed world, millions of children are accepting school as an unavoidable bore, or actively hating it. Some weep, some play truant, some produce psychosomatic symptoms to avoid going to school. Most just put up with it and long for the holidays. A lucky few enjoy school, at least until the age when the shadow of public examinations falls over their lives. Yet all over the undeveloped world, angry or wistful teenagers see schooling as the means to a good life—a means withheld from most of them.

The greater part of the world’s children long for what those who have it dislike. And even those who loathe it grow up to assume it has an absolute value, and should be imposed on every human child. No wonder the whole notion of schooling as a method of education is coming under fire. But too often the question of schooling or not schooling is treated in isolation from its social and economic setting. What follows is an attempt to consider a few of the problems involved, and possible solutions, for there have been changes recently, in the way people think about the schooling situation. For one thing, an uncomfortable realization is spreading that the schooling systems of the prosperous nations are not working too well. Violence in schools is frequently in the news, and organized as well as spontaneous protest by school children is not uncommon.

If I were very irreverent, and had thoughts only of a world from which Coco Chanel and Maurice Chevalier have disappeared, I’m not sure I ought to take with desperate seriousness the defection of one young clergyman from the ranks of Parisian ecclesiastics. Or is this being frivolous? In a sense, it is, because although there is something banal about the way in which the press here or in France seizes upon the marriage of a priest for a ready headline, Barreau is not just any priest. His origins, for one thing, were most unusual in a candidate for the priesthood. His parents were atheists, with those Freemasonry connections which make French Catholic hair stand on end in a Pavlovian instant; in fact his grandfather was chef de cabinet to Combes, whose anti-religious education laws under the Third Republic in the early years of this century drove the religious orders—for a time—out of French education. To cap it all, his great-grandfather was a communard, shot by the Versaillais. All in all, the number of tongues that wagged with I-told-you-so’s and what-can-you-expect’s must have been pretty considerable when Barreau announced his intention to marry one of his parishioners. But he had come to the Church the hard way. His education at the lycée Condorcet and then his studies in law at the University can have done nothing other than confirm him in the dry positivism which characterizes a good many French agnostics. For Barreau, though, there was the Christianity of the personal encounter which made all the difference. His history teacher at Condorcet was Olivier Clément, whose person and example converted him to Christianity. Not that Clément preached at his pupils. But what Barreau learned from him of the true nature of the real evangelical message—‘subversion, scandal, madness to the world’—showed him that he had been content to dismiss what was merely a caricatured Christianity, itself dechristianized.

One of the words we learned at school about the Eucharist was ‘transubstantiation’ : we were given to understand, quite rightly, that the use of this word marked off Roman Catholic belief here from what had traditionally been Protestantism, and that the Council of Trent had declared the word to be used very suitably by the Church. Another thing we learned at school was that a consecrated host looks like bread, tastes like bread, but is not: we are sometimes told, again quite properly, that this phrase puts into popular form what Trent asserted.

I reject what Trent said. I don’t believe in transubstantiation and I think that a consecrated host is still bread, bread in precisely the way that an unconsecrated host is bread. I want to show you why I hold these views. What I have to say is derived from a book I am writing, and I obviously can do no more than give you a brief glimpse of some of its contents. I have not written my book to deny the eucharistic presence: but I have written it to try to persuade people that the ways we talk about it are misleading and empty; and to suggest some better ways. It will be on the negative part of the book that I shall be dwelling for a good part of the paper, expounding and criticizing first the views found in Trent, then the views found in certain authors today, particularly in Holland. As you will know, one of the many bickerings between the Dutch and the Vatican concerns the eucharistic presence: my contention is that both sides are saying basically the same thing and that both sides are wrong.

The recent coadjutor appointment in Nottingham diocese met with some criticism. I could sympathize with the critics—and with the chosen candidate. However, the situation was more than an example of non-consultation about episcopal selection. Clouds of debate and confusion around the freshly-embroidered mitre obscured something deeper, farther back in time.

For some years, the Ordinary of the diocese has been a target of comment for allegedly rigid views and activities. In particular, his stance on Humanae Vitae (H. V.) was strict in its expectations of what priests should teach about the encyclical. Five priests were suspended on the issue. In 1968 and 1969, widely-reported arguments and public meetings were held in the diocese about H. V. and its aftermath.

I chaired one of these meetings in March 1969. It was attended by four hundred people. Many of them were for liberal interpretations of H. V. and against the Bishop’s sanctions on priests who did not accept his line. Some in the audience were supporters of the growing Renewal Movement. Many more people were concerned about the need for an articulate but critical lay voice in the Church. I directed part of my summing up at the meeting to these groups. I suggested that, perhaps, enough had been said and done locally about H. V.; that attention should be turned to more important, if less exciting, issues. The example I offered was the manner of appointment of Bishops. I said that, in Nottingham, discussions or protests about this would be too late after a retiral or death. As far as I am aware, nothing was done from that time in 1969. Yet when Mgr McGuinness was appointed in 1972, the protest was strident.

When Walter Stein, in his book Criticism as Dialogue, proposes his version of criticism and takes it into the area of tragedy, we are challenged to reconsider some essential notions. It is when faced with tragedy, perhaps, that criticism meets its most exacting responsibilities; what it makes of tragedy reveals its inner nature most clearly. What, then, are we to make of Stein’s argument that the demands which criticism faces are nothing less than metaphysical? What do we say to the various stages of his argument ?

Do we agree, for example, that in Arnold we have a key-figure who fails to meet these demands and whose work can be characterized by such words as ‘reductio’ and ‘surrender’ ?

Again, how shall we formulate our uneasiness at the following suggestion ?