Thomas More, lately Lord Chancellor of England, was beheaded on Tower Hill on 6 July 1535. Thomas Cranmer, lately Archbishop of Canterbury (who had tried to save More), was burnt to death in Oxford on 21 March 1556. William Allen left England for good in 1565. The ‘Roman Catholic Relief Act’ was passed in 1829. Anglican orders were declared invalid, in 1896, through defect of both form and intention. Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, visited Pope Paul VI in 1966 and they decided to set up a joint theological commission which reported to them two years later (the Malta Report). The first meeting of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) took place at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, in 1970. The concluding meeting was at the same venue in 1981. The Final Report appeared, after mysterious delays, on 31 March 1982. Pope John Paul II is due to arrive in England at the end of May. These dates signpost the four hundred and fifty years during which the majority of the people of England and Wales (not to mention Scotland) have been out of communion with the Apostolic See.

The Final Report is now offered to the churches in communion with Canterbury as well as to the churches in communion with Rome, for us all to decide in due course whether the doctrine here set forth is sufficiently consonant with our conscientious understanding of the faith for us to proceed towards “the restoration of complete communion in faith and sacramental life”, to quote ARCIC’s original statement of intent.

Somehow, the subject of new ministries always calls up to my mind the picture of those hundreds of young people who, in the course of an ecumenical session held in Manchester in 1970, had filled a vast auditorium to hear Canon John V Taylor give an address on possible new forms of ministry. Expectations were running high. On the Protestant side, there was the widespread feeling that the pastorate was welded to the establishment rather than in live contact with people. On the Catholic side, there was the vexing combination of decreasing numbers of vocations to the priesthood and growing numbers of resignations from it. The Canon’s address was challenging and one could feel that the crowd was of one mind with him: indeed there was a vital need to re-assess the Church’s ministerial structures and to re-distribute ecclesial functions. The trouble began when he went on to propose his list of reformed ministries. These turned out to be a selection from the wide choice offered by the New Testament, and they rallied no one; to some they appeared to be no match for the priesthood, to others they seemed to be too ancient to again deserve a place under the sun. The question-period soon degenerated into a high-pitched barrage of objections and confusion was the net result of the day.

Ten years have passed. In the Catholic Church at least, the question of priesthood and ministry has been studied from all angles and there is a growing consensus on the need to disentangle the two. Some concrete steps have been taken in that direction, as witnessed by a recent issue of Pro Mundi Vita Dossiers (June 1980).

What binds together the three steps or stages in Lonergan’s theory of knowledge — experience, understanding, judging - and makes them into one dynamic activity, is the pressure in the inquirer to discover the truth, what Lonergan has called ‘the eros of the mind’, the free, unrestricted desire to know. Knowing is a conscious, intending activity and what is intended is the truth. It is this intention to know, this psychic drive or thrust and not sensory extroversion to what is presumed (as in Hume) to be ‘already out there now’ that is the overarching criterion of truth. What is known is related immediately to this self-transcending nisus; understanding and judgment are simply answers to the questions generated by the desire to know. Put another way, the questions leading to understanding and judgment are an unfolding of this basic intentionality. The desire to know is something that arises spontaneously and irresistibly in human beings and is present in the reader who is attending to what is being said in this article, striving to understand it and asking if this understanding is true. But while this striving for the truth is the overarching criterion of objectivity, each level of cognition has its own peculiar function to perform and so its own criterion of objectivity; or we might say that the quest for objective knowledge is manifested in different ways at the different stages of knowing.

What is peculiar to the data of experience is their givenness — they are there — and hence the criterion of objectivity at the level of seeing, hearing etc, is to see or hear what is there and not to see or hear what is not there. At the level of sensation the subject must be submissive to the givenness of the data (and not, for example, fabricate his own evidence or grounds).

During the last ten years, a new form of Christian lifestyle has begun to be lived out — that of the consecrated virgin living in the world. At a time when many people are searching for ways of ministry in the Church that allow for real depth of commitment combined with real freedom of expression, it has escaped many people’s notice that the Church now gives her blessing to the ancient lifestyle of consecrated virginity. The consecrated virgin is a deeply committed woman who publicly vows to remain celibate for life, in order to give all her loving energies to Christ and his Church. But she keeps a real freedom of lifestyle, always choosing where, how and with whom she will live; she is thus free to follow the creative leading of the Holy Spirit in a way unprecedented among women religious in recent centuries.

The life of virginity has existed from earliest times. Christ claimed this lifestyle, according to Matthew, with his rather stark statement: “There are eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can”. (Mat 19:12). He too apparently valued the lifestyle for the freedom it gave him — freedom to spend whole nights in prayer without depriving a loving wife of his attentions, and freedom to live how, where and with whom he liked, in order to best do his Father’s work.

St Paul, as “one who, by the Lord’s mercy has stayed faithful” to his Master’s celibate lifestyle (I Cor 7:25), several times describes virginity with tenderness and simplicity.

The desire to consider Jesus from the perspective of Judaism may arise for various reasons. I have recently returned from New York City, where for years a formal and informal “Jewish-Christian dialogue” has been flourishing. Judaism is a major cultural force in New York, and the Church must relate to Jews if she is to engage the society in which she lives. Accordingly, this dialogue is not only historical and theological; its agenda is often determined by practical conflicts between Christians and Jews. A more purely theological root of the desire for such dialogue is, on the other hand, often expressed. The three great forms of biblical monotheism — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — have so much in common, it is frequently claimed, that each should be able to learn from the others, and certainly should appreciate enough about the others to avoid the sickening instances of religious oppression which deface the histories of each. Finally, there is a sound historical reason for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Jesus was Jewish, and the New Testament was written during the most crucial period in the development of Judaism. As we will discuss, one cannot be adequately understood without reference to the other. This basic, historical side of Jewish-Christian dialogue is our present concern, although we would by no means deny the importance of its theological and pastoral aspects.

There is no doubt that Jesus was Jewish, not only ethnically, but also socially and theologically. We find him in the Gospels teaching and disputing as a rabbi, discussing questions of how Torah should be applied, using figures of speech and methods of argument also used by other rabbis. A recent volume by Geza Vermes, entitled Jesus the Jew (1973), represents a bold attempt to place Jesus in the context of Judaism. His work is subtitled, A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, and certainly to understand Jesus as a Jew is historically crucial.