Can it really be the case, as Hugo Meynell makes out in his meditation on Karl Rahner’s Grundkurs des Glaubens (New Blackfriars February 1980), that “the best living Catholic theologian” (p. 77) neither believes the doctrine of the resurrection in a recognisably traditional sense (p. 87) nor distinguishes the doctrine of purgatory from the belief in reincarnation which characterizes some Eastern religions (p. 88) — to cite but two charges in Dr Meynell’s arraignment? Can it really be the case that, in his ripe old age (for he is 76 this year), as he delivers what is plainly conceived as his theological testament, and prepares to die in the serenity of that faith which has never wavered since his proudly old-fashioned Swabian Catholic upbringing, and throughout his life-long grounding in the Spiritual Exercises (“I think that the spirituality of Ignatius himself, which one learned through the practice of prayer and religious formation, was more significant for me than all learned philosophy and theology inside and outside the order”), Karl Rahner’s Christology is not significantly different from that of a Nestorian or a Liberal Protestant (p. 87), and his idea of eternal life little different from that of (horrendous to relate) Professor D. Z. Phillips?

Well, in the epidemic of reactionary intransigence that is affecting so many of the best educated and the most formidably intelligent Catholics at the present time, no doubt such suspicions of Rahner’s orthodoxy may occasion little surprise and may even pass without notice. But Dr Meynell’s published work, for fifteen years and more, bears witness to his great knowledge of, and imaginative sympathy with, modem theological movements, as well as to his unremitting fidelity to Catholic doctrine in its most classical formulations.

The period between the publication of the encyclical ‘Divini Red-emptoris’ (On Atheistic Communism) in 1937 and the election of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, was marked by a definite and fundamental change in Vatican/Communist relations. This study attempts to chart this development, explaining exactly how and why this transformation has occurred. The few other studies of this subject have all lacked a historical perspective, and have therefore tended to encourage the false notion that the views and action of the successive popes have remained the same. Part I of this essay examines the hostile intransigence of Pius XI and Pius XII during the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, and centres upon the startling change of attitude promoted by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. The more cautious but perhaps more significant promotion and extension of this Joh-anine ideal by Paul VI over a longer period of time will be analysed (along with a brief look at the state of Vatican/Communist relations in the present day). In Part II this study is essentially Vatican centred; the Church is large and often ambiguous, and local hierarchies, groups of militant lay Catholics, Christian Marxists, prominent theologians, and individual clergy, have only been analysed when they influence or have helped to change the Holy See. Papal speeches and letters, promulgations and edicts from the Holy Office and the other Vatican Congregations, and particularly Papal encyclicals, have been used extensively, and other primary material such as journals, reviews, newspapers and other contemporary writings have been consulted where necessary. The change in the nature of communism and the policies of the communist world (primarily the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, but also China, Indo-China, Latin America and the European Communist parties) I have treated as a secondary development due to limitations of time, space and sources.

‘I wouldn’t belong to this bunch of macaroni merchants for another second if it wasn’t the way of laying hold on Christ’. My own feelings about the Church are not exactly the same as those of Stanley Morison when he made this statement many years ago to Tom Burns, but something like this principle has enabled me to remain in the Church as the body of Christ, without feeling obliged to belong to the Catholic club, throughout my three score years and ten. Unlike Morison, I am not a convert, but Catholicism intervened effectively in my life only after childhood. And my first contacts were not with an Italian but with what appeared to be a very Irish and clerical institution.

For those inside and outside the Church in 1908 Catholicism in the West Riding town of Keighley was personified by the parish priest, Joseph Russell, a fine figure of a man who until his death in 1945 was always seen outside wearing a top hat (except on one occasion when he realised halfway up Highfield Lane that biretta and frock coat did not go together). After studies at Waterford and Maynooth, he soon made his mark in the Leeds diocese as preacher and administrator, a successful money-raiser who established four parishes from St Anne’s in Keighley and largely paid for their churches before they were cut off. He was very concerned tor the rights of the Church, reluctant to accept English curates, but on excellent terms with the Anglican rector and active on the local board of guardians.

in the attempt to give order to a diffuse and contradictory experience each individual is an artist, as he or she proposes an ideal solution for a particular difficulty and directs every effort towards achieving the closest practicable approximation to such a solution. Looked at in this way, it might be said that the action of the human mind is inevitably directly towards a synthesis of content and form. Society itself – the arrangements men make in order to live together in mutual security and provide for their well-being in organised interchange – could be considered to be a work of functional art, designed to solve problems and overcome difficulties encountered in living.

The greatest difficulty, the most intractable problem which faces mankind is the problem of death. To say that we are deeply pre-occupied with the fact of our own mortality is not to say, of course, that death occupies the forefront of our conscious awareness all the time. On the contrary, our awareness of the certainty of our eventual death and the accompanying knowledge of the vulnerability of our bodies, a vulnerability which may at any time prove fatal, forms a kind of unacknowledged background to all our thinking, a mental and emotional sitz-im-leben which has lost all precise definition because of its sheer familiarity as an idea. In fact, we might turn inside out the arguments of the common language philosophers, who hold that death cannot be thought about because it has never been experienced as a fact of life, by saying, with Heidegger that we cannot contemplate our own mortality because we are unable to distinguish the thought of death from all our other judgments and attitudes, which can only exist as humanly meaningful propositions in the context of finitude and limitation. Life exists in the context of death, human meaning in the presence of its own extinction.

On 20 January 1977 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the “Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood,” reaffirming the Catholic position barring women from priestly ordination. The issue is complex and thorny. The major argument of the Declaration was that the restriction is founded on an “unbroken tradition” possessing a “normative character”. Later in the Declaration other arguments from fittingness, described as being in themselves non-demonstrative are brought forth.

One set of these arguments developed the sacramental idea of natural resemblance, listing in support various theologians, among whom was Thomas Aquinas. Because this latter part of the Declaration, with its attendant idea of maleness as a prerequisite for priestly ordination, attracted so much interchange in newspapers and periodicals, it behooves us to take a more careful look at the position of Aquinas referred to by the Declaration. While it is our opinion that the real strength of the Declaration hinges on the idea of “unbroken tradition”, and on which we are not commenting in this essay, it remains instructive to understand the context within which Aquinas’ views on ordination are elaborated. For this reason the essay is termed a Note and simply wishes to make a small contribution to a much wider discussion engaging theology today.