It was stated here that I’d give a general outline of relations between the Church and the state in Cuba. It seems to me it would be convenient if I were brief in my opening remarks. I’d like to start by saying the following: in our country a very profound revolution took place which brought about a radical change in the relations of production and in social relations.

History shows that whenever such revolutionary events have taken place all sorts of conflicts have arisen, including conflicts between the Church and the state. This happened during the French Revolution, as you know; it happened during the Mexican Revolution, many problems of that nature arose; and it also happened during the Russian Revolution.

Well, also in our case, in Cuba, some conflicts arose in the beginning. Actually, in my opinion, this was due on many occasions to the leadership body of a given religious congregation or to the social group most closely connected with such a religious congregation.

The ‘Catholic Left’ in Britain, during its short life, showed little interest either in spirituality or in political activity outside journalism. There are quite good reasons for these omissions, but it is interesting to find that they are not repeated in the practice of leftwing Catholics in Latin America. Action and spirituality, and the tension between them, are important themes of Sheila Cassidy’s account of her experiences in Chile, and her story is all the more interesting because she is so patently not a Catholic left groupie.

The personality which comes through this book is very much that described by Michael Hollings in his introduction: ‘enthusiastic . . . efficient, impetuous, starry-eyed, down-to-earth, practical, emotionally uninhibited, politically a child’. The rambling and occasionally gushing narrative almost makes one forget at times that its author was obscenely tortured with electric shocks by the Chilean secret police.

These qualities also give the story an appealing freshness. It is almost a classical adventure story, in which the author became involved largely by accident. No political or religious motives took Dr Cassidy to Chile. She had got to know a Chilean medical student during her own studies, and one of Chile’s attractions was the chance to gain surgical experience with less night work than in Britain. Dr Cassidy spent two years in Chile before returning to England to see her dying father, and a further two from the beginning of 1974. The military coup against the Allende government took place towards the end of the first period and Dr Cassidy’s imprisonment occupied the last two months of the second.

Some time ago, a television programme dealt with the state of affairs in Uganda—a country that has gripped the news media for a long time. It gave the impression that the army and police were instrumental in the horrors perpetrated against the population. The police and army were set up in Uganda, as in other countries, by the colonial powers to defend the population from violence and crime at home, and aggression from outside the country’s boundaries. In so doing, the colonial powers transplanted their own institution of social control.

What was intended to help the local population has become in fact in Uganda, for example, an institution of violence, aggression, crime and exploitation of the very people it was supposed to protect. Hopefully, Uganda is an extreme case but it is not the only country in Africa where governments act in a like manner. Thus one of our western institutions, established for the good of the community has become quite the opposite of what was really intended.

The army and police are not in fact the only ones to have gone this way. Throughout the years that I spent living and working in the rural areas of East Africa, I constantly came into contact with doctors, nurses and other members of the medical profession working in hospitals and clinics run by the Government or the missions. One constantly heard the same story from doctor or nurse, man or woman, black or white, government or mission employed that they were frustrated. Desperately sick patients would be brought to them only to die after a short period in hospital.

When E. Gordon Craig in 1922 wrote,

he was making the distinction between the role of language as a vehicle for communicating essentials, and the role of language as an art-form. As a theatrical designer who was to revolutionise traditional concepts of theatre, he was keenly aware of the difficulty in using language to represent exactly those things we wish to communicate to others. One word may have a variety of meanings, or because of constant use in a multitude of ways, have lost much of its original meaning. Reliance on the word itself is therefore not always the best or most effective guide to meaning. He continues:

Francis Barker’s argument to prove that Christianity is always ideological, and never scientific, won’t do. Since the reason for this is of some general theoretical importance, it is perhaps worth pointing out what is wrong with it.

Barker’s thesis is that being tautological is a mark of the ideological. (‘all ideological discourse is ... strictly speaking tautological’ p. 476). But he also wants to argue that not every utterance within an ideological discourse has to be tautological: some of them may be just false. Fair enough so far. So ‘God exists’ is not tautological after all, but just false. But this, he says, doesn’t stop Christian discourse in general from being tautological—i.e. from being set within a framework of tautology. Barker’s reason for saying this is that in Christian discourse, words like ‘because’ and ‘therefore’ are not used (as in science) in a diachronic way, but merely to ‘conjugate’ or ‘spatialise’ the optative paradigm. This dark saying is then illustrated by an argument that purports to show that ‘God made the world’ certainly is tautological. The reason for choosing this example is presumably that it is the fundamental case of a Christian discourse in which the use of ‘because’ is crucial. For ‘God made the world’ can be construed as equivalent to ‘the world exists because God made it’; and presumably in this sentence, according to Barker, the ‘because’ is simply ‘paradigmatic’. Now I think it is a fairly simple matter to show that this is quite wrong: pace Barker, ‘because’ in this sentence is used in just the same way as it is commonly used in ‘science’.

Kenelm Foster’s new book is a collection of essays written between 1959 and 1977. With one exception, all these studies have aspects of Dante’s work as their subject. The book falls readily into three parts. Chapters 1-5 deal with general topics: “An Introduction to the Inferno”, “Courtly Love and Christianity” (the only non-Dantean topic, but, obviously, very relevant to the main subject), “Dante and Eros”, “St Thomas and Dante”, and “Dante’s Vision of God”. Chapters 6-9 are readings of various cantos of the Comedy (and one of the pleasing features of the book is the successful retention in these and other essays of the semi-informality of the lecture style): Inferno XIX, Purgatorio XVII, Paradiso X and XIX. Chapters 10-12 consist of one long essay (over a third of the work) from which the book gets its title, on the presence of morally good pagans in Limbo, and on the philosophical and theological assumptions which lie behind this unusual idea.

I cannot summarise here the main themes of this rich and varied book. But since I want to recommend it warmly to specialists and non-specialists alike, let me try to specify some features which lead me to do so. Specialists particularly will gain from Father Fsoter’s interpretation of certain passages which run counter to commonly received opinion: lucid expositions combined with detailed accounts of where and why he finds other critics’ views unsatisfactory, as for instance on Par. XIX 64-66 (“Lume non è ...” pp. 149-152). Of particular value to the non-specialist are the apparently casual but in fact careful and judicious outlines of political, literary and theological developments (e.g. pp. 34-36, 87-88, 152-54).