Anglicans and Roman Catholics are exploring the Uniate analogy as a model for reunion of their Churches. In this paper we propose to discuss briefly the development of the Uniate analogy and, thereafter, to suggest a way for Roman recognition of Anglican ministry.

Proponents of the Uniate model point to an impressive precedent in Gregory the Great’s commission to Augustine in 597. They argue that Gregory favoured a distinctive patrimony for the Church of the Angles. Obviously this precedent should not be pressed too far. Subsequent Popes, such as Vitalian and Gregory VII, were less favourable to pluralism and more inclined to uniformity than was the first Gregory. Nevertheless, Gregory’s commission to Augustine of Canterbury does provide a useful precedent that might well be endorsed today.

The pallium given to Augustine by Gregory connoted recognition of a Roman primacy, a recognition that continued for nearly a millenium. Since the Reformation the Archbishop of Canterbury has served as a pastoral centre of unity for the Church of England and, later, for the world-wide Anglican communion.

On Monday, 9th August, 1971, I was kidnapped from my bed by armed men, taken away and held as a hostage for five and a half weeks. I was not in Uruguay, Brazil, Greece or Russia. I was in the United Kingdom, an hour’s flight from London. Belfast.

A crashing on the door awoke me. It was 4.45 a.m. I went downstairs in my pyjamas to answer. As I opened it I was forced back against the wall by two soldiers who screamed at me: ‘Do you live here?’ Overwhelmed by their perspicacity I admitted that this was so, whereupon they ordered me to get dressed. I foolishly asked why. ‘Under the Special Powers Act we don’t have to give a reason for anything’, the officer said. ‘You have two minutes to get dressed.’ Through the window I could see in the dawn light half-a-dozen armed men in our tiny front garden.

I was given exactly two minutes to get dressed while a young soldier boosted his ego by sticking a SLR up my nose. My wife, not surprisingly was almost in tears as I was dragged down the stairs and into the street. She ran after me to give me my jacket and was roughly ordered back into the house. Our quiet residential bourgeois neighbourhood hadn’t seen such excitement in years as I was frog-marched at the double down the avenue by eight soldiers. As we sped down we were joined by a dozen more who had been hiding in nearby gardens. Those who looked out into the early morning mist must have imagined that a Vietcong patrol had been sighted in the locale.

‘Tie him up and gag the fecker’ (sic), an educated English accent ordered. ‘That’s hardly necessary’, I said, as I was frisked for the second time up against the lorry (or pig as they called it). This was accepted albeit reluctantly by the corporal who was positively twitching with desire to practise his Boy Scout knots upon me. My shoes were taken off me and I was put none too gently into the back of the ‘pig’. Two men with Sten guns covered me.

At the present time women are becoming more and more integrated into the public and professional spheres; they are taking posts of responsibility not only within the home, but outside of it, where they are being accepted not just as feminists but as members of the community with particular skills and aptitudes, which are not, moreover, merely ‘womanly’ skills and aptitudes. In many professional situations it is now no longer sensible to ask whether the applicant for a post is a man or a woman; the only criteria applied are those of professional competence. This change within the secular society is not reflected within Church communities. Women are systematically discriminated against; the most crude and powerful symbol of this is their exclusion from the sanctuary. Now, it is argued that ‘tradition’ supports this discrimination and any attack on it is an attack on the living and holy tradition of the Church, and moreover that woman’s place is sharply and strictly defined in scripture. We shall not be able to examine both of these objections, but must content ourselves with a partial examination of the second. Partial because we shall only look at the four Gospels and not at the Old Testament or the other writings of the New Testament. Also much of the work that has been done on this question is based on a study of the role of the Mother of God, but very little has been attempted in the study of the roles of other women mentioned in the Gospel narratives. Therefore, we shall concentrate on this area, hoping to discuss the unique and all-important place of the Mother of God later. Finally we should make clear that in spite of the content, this article is not a statement of a merely ‘feminist’ point of view. Issues will be raised that go far beyond the single problem of the status of women; rather this problem should be seen as one of many which present a moral challenge to the Church and which are all interrelated. Sexual discrimination is only one form of discrimination which may afflict a ‘Christian’ community.

‘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.

Perhaps it would be as well to start with the reminder that it is impossible to analyse South African politics in terms of political Right and Left, and quite misleading to try. Neither the United Party nor even the Progressive Party are really to the left of the Nationalist Party in any meaningful way. A case of sorts could be made out for saying that in some respects it is well to the left of the opposition parties, and certainly its policies are far less shy of radical solutions. But as I say, these terms do not really apply in South Africa, where we are living in a different set of dimensions from Europe or America.

The two basic drives that power the Nationalist Party are intense Afrikaner nationalism and White colour prejudice. The two are distinct in principle, and there are Afrikaner nationalists of sensibility who take pride in the nationalism and genuinely abjure and deplore the prejudice. But they are few, and in the soul of the average nationalist the two drives are almost identical, or at least serve to boost and intensify each other. One might say, rather academically, that the basic drives of the United Party used to be a kind of Smutsian imperialism and White colour prejudice, but that the imperialism has vanished with the course of events, and so only the colour prejudice is left. It is true, up to a point; U.P. candidates, some of them, have not hesitated to appeal to colour prejudice in their electorates, or in their attacks on some government actions. The Progressive Party bases itself more on reason and the more humane sentiments of the heart, which is why it lacks any potent appeal among the dominant racial group in this country.

Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. It is only to be expected that this strange looking-glass country should even oblige one to put platitudes back to front. In the seventies, all appears to be exactly as it was in the sixties, if not more so, with the Vorster brothers reigning supreme in Church and State—the Prime Minister’s elder brother was elected Moderator of the N.G.K., the biggest of the three Galvinist Afrikaner churches, at their synod last year. And yet there is a change in the smell of things, at least to my nostrils. I will try to illustrate this state of affairs by a miscellany of episodes that have marked the last eighteen months.

We begin with the Msini case. Mr Msini is a crippled African who works, I believe as a night watchman, for a firm in Wellington, about forty miles from Cape Town.

When thirty tons of stolen dynamite were recovered by the police in the Argentine province of Santa Fe in February, the local police chief told journalists that the entire responsibility for subversion in Argentina could be ascribed to ‘those cursed Third World priests’. He was exaggerating, but it is true that members of the Movement of Priests for the Third World along with other young Catholics in other parts of Latin America—both priests and laity—have become increasingly deeply involved in revolutionary activities. This does not just mean that many Catholics now accept the need for radical change in the structure of Latin American society and sympathize with the aspirations of the extreme left. An Uruguayan professor of sociology, writing last year of contemporary trends in Latin American Catholicism, has suggested that the old antithesis of Christianity or Marxism is disappearing, and that a new revolutionary synthesis is emerging: ‘Latin Americans have no time any longer for the parlour discussions that are so popular in Europe. They want a dialogue in action and for action, focussing on the political and strategic future of the Latin American revolution. They do not consider either Christianity or Marxism as immutable, selfsufficient or mutually exclusive options.’

This assumption that there is indeed a Latin American revolution which will lead sooner or later to the building of socialism in Latin America is central to a great deal of Christian thought in the region today. This is perhaps the first great political upheaval of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which Christians as Christians are in the vanguard.