A few years ago vehement opposition to the idea of further European cooperation and integration came from an unusual quarter. The Moderator of the Free Church General Assembly used the occasion of his moderatorial address to warn of the dangers to Protestantism posed by the existence of the European Economic Community. He was particularly concerned to warn the church that the Roman Catholic Communion was perhaps more dangerous to the Protestant polity at that time than at any other point in recent European history. In his view the Common Market was nothing more or less than the foreign policy of an imperialist papacy. He pointed out that, at that time, Catholicism was the religion professed, at least nominally, by the majority of inhabitants of the Community, that the founding document was the Treaty of Rome and that large numbers of the Community’s officers were associated with Christian Democratic parties which were closely linked with the Catholic Church.

The speech caused some embarrassment to his co-religionists and was widely reported in the press. Many people immediately assumed it was nothing other than the theocratic ravings of a small and paranoid body and dismissed it out of hand. However, it cannot be denied that many of the founding fathers of the pan-European movement were clearly influenced by Catholic social teaching and motivated by a strong desire to ensure not only the prevention of another European war but also the promotion of reconciliation amongst former enemies. The vocabulary of European integration was often theological in tone and conveyed the resonance of Roman juridical formulae.

As the book of Exodus tells it, when the People of God was formed out of liberated slaves from Egypt (a kind of early Liberia), Aaron and his sons were made the first priests of the new community. Like all the peoples around them the Hebrews took it for granted that a real established society needed a priesthood, just as we take it for granted that a society needs some kind of civil service or some kind of school system. Aaron was the first high priest of the children of Israel, he had a job, an important job, within that community. The priest’s job was to arrange the transactions with the gods of the community, to ensure that the gods did not become hostile, for this could be disastrous for the people. The priest had to find out what the gods wanted and arrange for the people to give it to them. So he stood as mediator, on the frontier, looking both ways, to the gods and to the people; communicating to the people the messages of the gods, communicating to the gods the offerings of the people.

But, of course, the Children of Israel were no ordinary society, they were something unique in human history; they made a gradual but huge revolution from which all subsequent humankind has benefited and (as with all revolutions) suffered too. For by the time the Book of Exodus was put together it was becoming clear that their God was not one (or more) of the gods, and this was going to make a difference to what such things as priesthood meant.

Jansenism and Lefebvrism arose in profoundly different worlds. Yet there are striking similarities between them in beliefs and practices—common tendencies, attitudes and assumptions.

Important similarities in the circumstances of their origins and development help to explain these. Not, of course, that the same weight can be given to all these similarities.

For example, both movements have been led by people with charismatic personalities. Central to the development of Jansenism was a series of individuals with powerful personalities such as Saint-Cyran, the Arnaulds, Nichole and Pascal. Their biographies are well recorded—all too well, for the Jansenists loved writing hagiographies of each other—and need not be retold here. Suffice it to say that ‘the personal factor’ was pre-eminent in the direction of the coterie.

Though vacillating and, by his own admission, inclined toward inordinate indignation, the personality and strong personal authority of Marcel Lefebvre, leader of the so-called ‘Tridentine movement’, has been central throughout the events linked with his name: his leadership at the Second Vatican Council of the conservative faction known as the Coetus Internationalis Patrum and his attack there against collegiality, against the declarations on religious liberty and against relations with non-Christians; his founding after the Council of the diocesan society ‘The Priestly Fraternity of S. Pius X’ in Fribourg; his setting-up of the seminary boasting preconciliar discipline, training and rites which was soon moved to Ecône; his illicit celebration of ‘Tridentine’ Masses and ordination of deacons, priests and finally bishops.

During General Zia-ul-Haq’s tenure, the escalating conflict in neighbouring Afghanistan brought Pakistan to the centre stage of international politics. However, at the popular level, it was Zia’s Islamisation campaign, particularly its more brutal manifestations, that drew shocked world attention. Following hard on the heels of the Iranian revolution, it raised fears of another Muslim fundamentalist sweep in the region. These fears were unfounded. Comparisons between the outcome of a mass movement and the impact of state-imposed measures introduced by a military dictator are unwarranted and one needs to remember that the religiously defined political parties (Islam-pasand) in Pakistan have consistently failed to mobilise wide-spread popular support. Furthermore, the current use of the term ‘fundamentalism’ is so loose that it obscures important differences between various religious political forces.

Described by some as the high point of fundamentalism in Pakistan, the last decade should be seen as one which witnessed the convergence of interests between the military rulers and the Jamaat-e-Islami. The former needed political support for credibility; the latter saw in the situation the possibility of access to power, otherwise remote. Thus the slogan of Islamisation became the meeting point. If viewed in terms of social configuration this was the opportunity for the emerging class of traders and entrepreneurs to attain political power.

During the month of his seventy-fifth birthday, November, 1989, Edward Schillebeeckx published the final part of what now stands as a three- volumed Christology. His new book, Mensen als verhaal van God (‘Human Beings as the Story of God’), has taken twelve years to appear. It completes a trilogy begun in 1974 with Jezus, het verhaal van een levende (‘Jesus: The Story of a Living One’), and continued in 1977 with Gerechtigheiden liefde: Genade en bevrijding (‘Justice and Love: Grace and Liberation’). These three ‘opera magna’ combine approximately eighteen hundred pages of reflection on the identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the specificity of Christian faith. What follows is a description of the third part of Schillebeeckx’s Jesus-Quest with an overview of its structure and contents in the light of its two companion volumes, and comments on its governing preoccupation. The description is intended more as an interpretative commentary than a critique.

Professor Schillebeeckx began the exegetical research for the first instalment only a few years after the closure of the Second Vatican Council. His intention in the initial volume was not to provide an apologetical support for official church teaching, but rather to discover what was distinctive about Jesus, not as his individuality is codified dogmatically but as it is found in his practice and preaching, as these are reflected in the early credal formulas of the New Testament. Schillebeeckx sought to examine critically the intelligibility of Christological belief in Jesus of Nazareth for people today (1,33—34). Whereas the first volume addressed the issue of the ultimate identity of Jesus, the second gave more attention to various theologies of grace, especially the New Testament. The most fundamental presuppositions on which the first two books were constructed related to conditions for professing a Christian faith in the modern world. Schillebeeckx maintains that people today will no longer embrace Christianity simply on the basis of authority: conditions for believing must in some way be anchored in contemporary experiences.

The feelings of trepidation and resentment aroused in Britain by the imminent unification of East and West Germany, and too accurately voiced in July by Mr Nicholas Ridley, derived as much from the disturbance of illusions about ourselves as from any rational insight into the affairs of our most powerful and important neighbour. ‘Don’t mention the War’ was a good joke because it precisely identified a British obsession: since 1945 a mythologized version of the Second World War (‘the War’) has stood in as the image of a national identity which neither the twilight of Empire nor our ever shabbier political institutions, let alone our industries or our culture, could provide. Mr Ridley’s outburst expressed the fear that soon we should not be able to tell the joke any more. We may even, in the Europe of tomorrow, be forced to face the truth about those forgotten, untried, unpunished, uninvestigated war- crimes: not just a few wicked old collaborators who escaped to Britain rather than Latin America, but the collusion of an entire supposedly civilised ruling-class in the deliberate and systematic burning, machinegunning, dismembering, and burying alive of hundreds of thousands of women and children in what until a few months ago were regularly and not incorrectly referred to in GDR official publications as ‘the Anglo- American terror-raids’ on German cities. ‘Murder is murder’ are words that we must hope will return to haunt the British popular conscience.

Yet, at the same time as the Ridley affair, the revelations about the Chequers seminar on Germany showed that even at the highest level at which in modern Britain the political and intellectual worlds can interact (and quite evidently not all of the seminar was conducted at that level) the subject of Germany is peculiarly beset by illusions.

What is the connection between the cross-cultural phenomenon of the gender subordination of women which has led to domestic violence, genital mutilation, Indian widow-burning, Chinese foot-binding etc., and, on the other hand, the contemporary ‘received’ Christian theological tradition on women? This was the fundamental question underlying the reflections and discussions at the 1989 Maryknoll Summer School on the ‘Global Agenda of Feminist Theology’

This is not a report on that Summer School; rather, it is a presentation of ideas that emerged at it. The 65 participants were drawn from 20 countries and all continents, and were made up of single women, married women, single men, religious sisters and priests. They came from a variety of Christian faith commitments, though the majority were Catholics, and from a variety of academic backgrounds and life experience. From their perspective of involvement with grassroots organisations, local support groups and women church communities, they addressed themselves to many issues which face humankind, but primarily in order to integrate their conversion to Christian feminism into a global discernment on the position of women. They gathered at Maryknoll to look at developments in churches and societies and critique them from a feminist point of view, pointing to the areas where the holistic, inclusive and non-competitive aspects were missing.

Feminism stresses the need to recognise ‘difference as a crucial strength’, to quote Audre Lord. If we do not do this, we will fall into the trap of patriarchy. The terms ‘feminism’ and ‘patriarchy’ are used to encapsulate different cultural and power systems, and ‘patriarchy’ is a system which is dividing and conquering, and doing this as a norm of control.

I am one of many people of faith active in the African National Congress and the Mass-Democratic Movement in South Africa. What I propose to do in this paper is to make you party to a discussion about religious pluralism which presently exercises people of faith like myself in the ranks of the ANC and the Mass-Democratic Movement. As part of a discussion in progress, conducted in a context which values collective work and the achievement of consensus, it is deliberately rough-edged, tentative and open-ended, intended to facilitate the extension of the discussion rather than to say the last word in it.

What Hick calls ‘the universe of faiths’ is well-represented in the ranks of this liberation movement. In it people of different faiths are united in a common struggle for justice and peace in their land. People of faith involved in the struggle for justice and peace do not lead lives in which the religious and the political are split one from the other. On the contrary, the political and the religious come to form a seamless whole in the lives of people of faith involved in the struggle. If I may borrow a phrase from Albert Nolan, the struggle is experienced in a religious mode by people of faith, and this religious modality of the struggle for unitary non-racial democracy is a common feature of the experience of comrades of different faiths. But struggling for fundamental change in a country makes theological demands upon people of faith, not the least of which concerns religious pluralism.

What are the effects on moral theology of the arrival of the AIDS virus? In society as a whole, both in individuals and institutions, we could say that this virus has functioned as a ‘catalyst’, emphasising the reflexes, the ideologies, what is commonly shared and what is unspoken. In the Church as well, the stir has been significant, and we have more than once commented on the episcopal statements which have appeared in all the countries affected. The moral theologians have had to face questions from journalists, from colleagues or in their relationships with the Magisterium.

Besides the strong recommendation to become involved without discrimination in the care of people infected by the virus, a striking phenomenon in this stir is the widely-shared impression—widely shared inside as well as outside the Catholic Church—that a certain kind of moral language is not suitable for those who are in the most direct contact with AIDS: the sick or people who are HIV Positive, their families, those caring for them, those responsible for public health, the scientific researchers and the pastors themselves. This gap was evident even at the international level, at the 4th Conference on AIDs organised by the Vatican, which took place on the 13—15 November 1989. Some of the moral theologians appointed to speak from the platform left speechless the majority of the thousand participants—priests, religious, doctors, directors of institutions—who had assembled from all over the world.

The years since Vatican II have hit religious brothers hard. Brothers have been leaving religious life in greater percentages than priests or women religious. The brothers’ present search for identity in this vocational crisis may take years to work itself out. Meanwhile, brothers need to reflect on a phenomenon not affecting women religious or priests: general silence in the Church about their vocation. The question is: what do we make of the silence?

Before exploring the silence, I want to first situate the brother’s vocation in a historical perspective. Brothers are presently caught between two contradictory historical forces. On the one hand, the lay religious life has an ancient, valid, and venerable tradition in the Church; on the other hand, male religious life has become clericalized since the middle ages.

In western monasticism, by the ninth century the vocation of the lay monk suffered gradual diminishment as more and more monks were ordained. The identity of the brother suffered further obfuscation during the Gregorian Reform. A monastic reform accompanied Gregory VII’s battle against the abuses of lay investiture. New communities such as the Camaldolese and Cistercians arose; other monks (e.g. William of Hirsau) attempted to reform Benedictine monasticism without breaking away. During this monastic reform, some orders created a new class of religious: the laybrother (at that time called conversi Laybrothers were not considered monks. Some orders, particularly the Cistercians, established structures of class distinction. Cistercian laybrothers, for example, had no vote in chapter, wore a habit different from that of the monks, were not allowed into the cloister, and could not be taught reading and writing.

There probably has never been a generation since the year 1329, when the Holy See in Avignon condemned fifteen propositions extracted from Eckhart’s writings as heretical, when the justice of the condemnation has not been questioned. The object of this paper is to take account of some recent publications which seem to support the decision of the Dominican General Chapter at Walberberg in 1980 to initiate proceedings for a reexamination of Eckhart’s case.

One is by Richard Woods OP, and it may be commended for its concise and factual account of the troubled times in which Eckhart lived and suffered. Sagely he observes that some of the Church’s grievous problems, which she may be thought to have visited upon the German friar, are still afflicting her, so that the Order of Preachers, in seeking to restore to him his good name, is not merely indulging in Dantesque brooding over the parish pump.

The second is by a Dutch Jesuit, Paul Verdeyen, who has with Romana Guarnieri’s permission reprinted, in 1986, as volume 69 of the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis her text of the French Mirror of Simple Souls, parallel to his own critical edition of the manuscripts of the Mirror’s Latin translation. Though Verdeyen’s work is flawed (particularly by one strange misapprehension—that the translation was produced by the Inquisition in Paris before the author of the Mirror, Margaret Porette, was tried, condemned and put to death for heresy), nonetheless Verdeyen has made valuable contributions to our further knowledge of Margaret’s perplexing and engrossing case. Very soon I shall attempt to support my belief that it is relevant to that of Eckhart.

Disquiet in ethics, or moral philosophy, has its main sources (a) in an irreducibly subjective or personal element contained in moral judgement, (b) in a tension between virtue and happiness, and (c) in the nature of moral disagreement. It will be useful to consider each of these in turn.

(a) It is evident that people worry more often about the objectivity of morals than about the objectivity of fact. A statement about, say, the conditions on a certain planet, even if it cannot be verified, seems to them objective in the issues it raises, because although the human mind is involved in making the statement, it is not involved in what makes it true or false. Thus, what makes it true that there are mountains on the moon would hold even if the human species had never existed. Moreover, the same point applies to factual statements much greater in their complexity. For example, one cannot verify the theory of evolution as one can a simple statement in astronomy; nevertheless, everyone believes that what makes it true or false is independent of human views about it.

The term ‘objective’, no doubt, has many uses; but none is more fundamental than the one discerned above. My view is objectively true, when in holding it I am in contact with reality, when I am forced into believing it by reality itself. So long as I believe that of my view, I shall never be shaken free of it. It is of secondary importance whether I can get others to agree with me or whether I have reasons for my view. For many of my beliefs about the past, for example, I have no evidence at all.

‘If God knows how people like Hitler are going to behave, why does he create them?’ One reply to this objection goes as follows. It is impossible both for God to know what Hitler is going to do and for God to decide not to create him. If He is not going to create Hitler, there will be no Hitler to do anything and no future act for God to know. God’s knowing what Hitler will do presupposes the decision to create. God does not first know how Hitler will act and then decide to create him. It is the other way around. It is as if God is ‘surprised’ by the results of his decision to create—not that he learns something he did not previously know, but that he knows from all eternity something he would not otherwise have known. The decision to create is, in a sense, taken blindly.

While it is true that God does not know what people are freely going to do unless He decides to create them, it is also the case according to many that without having to know whom he shall choose to create he knows what people will freely do in case they are created. He is able, therefore, to take into account these hypothetical choices when deciding to create. If this is true, then the problem of evil becomes more acute. God creates with the prior knowledge of moral evil. One then has to show that the good which comes from creation outweighs the evil byproduct.

Last January the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie was giving one of the addresses in the service being held at Westminster Cathedral to mark the 25th anniversary of Vatican IPs decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. Referring to the ecumenical implications of the use of the words subsistit in, he said: ‘After Vatican II the Church “subsisted” in the Roman Catholic Church, a small linguistic change, but a world apart in self-understanding.’ He was echoing the thoughts of Fr Grillmeier, the distinguished Jesuit theologian: these two words ‘constituted a development of unforseeable dimensions’.

Sadly, it appears that there are those in Rome engaged in preparing the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church who would wish to change the words of the Council fathers. To understand properly what is going on we must go back over some familiar old ground.

Lumen Gentium, the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, states that the visible Church, structured hierarchically, and the invisible Church, the Body of Christ, are not to be thought of as two realities, but as one complex reality having a human and a divine element:

‘How does it feel to be a Muslim in Britain?’ asked a young student during one of my lectures in a British school.

Having been brought up in Egypt, where freedom of worship is a matter of course, the question was something of a surprise to me. It just did not occur to me that, in the Britain of today, a young student would wonder about a question like that.

‘It is easy,’ I answered. ‘I can pray any time and anywhere, I can fast any day of any month, I can give alms to the poor, I can go on pilgrimage, and I can freely declare my faith. And as for the moral values of Islam, I can see no contradiction there. On the contrary, I see respect for the Islamic moral code.’

The question did, however, reverberate in my mind, and, I have to admit, I am one of the privileged few who can do what they want when they want to, simply because I am my own boss. I know of fellow Muslims who are not permitted by their employers to pray on time, or to fast the month of Ramadan. On the major Muslim feast days, many Muslims cannot take time off to celebrate without putting their jobs at risk or losing an important school day. Many Muslims cannot take time off work to go for the mandatory Friday prayer, even though it takes place during their lunch hour.

My aim is to make some observations on the recent Instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (summarised in The Tablet of 30 June, pp. 838—841) in an attempt to clarify certain issues and assist the debate which has been initiated, of which this journal has revealed ample evidence. These are observations bom of the awareness that the language of this document finds interesting echoes within my own tradition and consciousness as a Reformed theologian.

The very notion of a vocation of theology is an interesting reflection of the sense that theology is a church-related activity. As terminology employed to specify a certain view of ecclesiastical polity it is in fact reminiscent of Calvin’s Institutes and so—naturally—this view of theology and the theologian has been one of the main features of 20th Century Protestant theology, with its rediscovery of Classical Reform. Part of that lovely sense of theology as a church-related and indeed church-based activity has been the realisation that theology is of necessity an ecumenical task. When this is ignored its practice is less than its profession and its efficacy is at once frustrated. Hence my title; for it is neither as an onlooker judging somebody else’s concerns nor as an outsider with no interest or involvement in the issue that I would make these comments. Rather, this is the deliberate attempt to bring what assistance one part of the Church can offer to another—and this on the basis of the unity of our common faith and the singleness of theological purpose.

On the occasion of the publication, in March 1987, of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, and foetal experimentation, there appeared a cartoon in a Roman newspaper, in which two bishops are standing next to a telescope. In the distant night sky, in addition to Saturn and the Moon, there are dozens of test-tubes. One bishop turns to the other, who is in front of the telescope, and asks: ‘This time what should we do? Should we look or not?’ Many see the Galileo affair as a prime example of the fundamental incompatibility between science and religion, between reason and faith. Stephen Hawking, in his recent best-seller, A Brief History of Time, writes a two-page biographical appendix on Galileo which offers ample evidence for the persistence of the view that the accomplishments of Galileo must be understood in the face of the opposition of Aristotelian science and Catholic theology. Galileo, Hawking claims, ‘was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.’ Hawking, in commenting on his participation at a conference on cosmology sponsored by the Vatican at which he challenged traditional interpretations of Big Bang cosmology, evoked the image of himself as a potential Galileo:

The Sabbath that immediately precedes Pesah (Passover) is called Shabbat ha-Gadol, the Great Sabbath. It is this day that is commemorated in the Christian calendar as Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is a day whose mystical significance has not, perhaps, been sufficiently drawn to our attention.

Holy Saturday is in every way a Nothing Day. There is no liturgical celebration. The churches are empty. The altars are stripped. The tabernacles have been vacated and their doors stand ajar. Nothing whatever is happening. What does this mean?

It is the Great Sabbath—the Great Silence, the Great Nothing that precedes the Feast of Redemption, of liberation from slavery, of entry into the New Life of freedom.

To begin to appreciate it, to experience and savour it, we need to study the significance of the Sabbath in general. It is, no doubt, an endless study, for not only have scholars thought about it for thousands of years, but worshippers commit themselves to live it and experience it deeper and deeper throughout their lives.

‘Sabbath’ comes from the Hebrew shavat = ‘to rest’. It recalls the Creation and God’s rest when it was completed. It is characterised by cessation of creative physical activity.

He appeared at the end of the day. Suddenly. Out of nowhere. I had seen my last patient. I was ready to go home. The end of another day. Thank God.

I opened the door to leave my consulting room—and there he was. Standing still, staring—or so it seemed to me—fixing me with that gaze, that look I cam to know, and hate. And love. Those eyes which looked inside me until I could not bear it any longer. The emptiness. The loneliness. The endless horror of it all.

But now, that first time, he just stood there, passively, waiting. Waiting for me, it seemed. How long had he been there? What did he want? How could I get rid of him?—these were my first thoughts. Later I asked another question, simpler still: who was he?

Moments passed. I stood there awkwardly and as I looked at him I became aware of a kind of disgust rising in myself. He seemed hardly human. I couldn’t tell if he was young or old, carefree or past caring. His face was wrapped up, as if he had something terrible to hide. A wound, a scar, something so deep it would be there for all to see. But all I could see were the eyes, watching. Watching my disgust trying not to show itself.

He must once have been the tallest of men but now, now he was bent over, as if he was carrying a great weight on his back. The thought, the cliche, came into my head: he looks as if he’s carrying the problems of the world on his shoulders.