It is often said that Catholics believe in the development of doctrine. But it is not a doctrine of the Catholic Church that doctrine develops. The teaching of the Church is that its faith is immutable. The Church’s primary attitude to doctrine is the principle given by St Paul. ‘Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preach to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed’ (Galatians 1:8). There is, of course, an obvious sense in which doctrine does develop. For the number of defined doctrines has grown over time. But the Catholic view of this is that doctrines defined over time are contained in or implied by what was taught from the beginning. The primary role of the Church as teacher is to preserve what has already been given and to state what that amounts to as need arises. It retains the Gospel and articulates it.

If that is what the Church does, it seems fair to ask why we should believe what the Church teaches. Some would dispute this on the ground that the Church in a sense does not teach. ‘Why should we believe it?’ presupposes that someone has propounded what he takes to be a truth.

Einstein long ago said, ‘With the splitting of the atom everything has changed except our modes of thinking and thus we drift to unparalleled disaster.’ Our modes of thinking—that is the key, yet we change them with the greatest difficulty to meet a new, entirely new, situation. We now have got the power to destroy our world. We can do it slowly by exploitation, tearing up the forests, polluting the seas, piling up nuclear waste and filling even outer space with the dustbins of our technology. Or we can do it quickly. A war no-one expects suddenly starts—confusion reigns, troops panic, a nuclear weapon is fired and the gate to Armageddon opens. This is not a panic scenario. With 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world today it is a perfectly realistic one. We have, in our mad arsenals, something like 6,000 times the fire power of the whole of the Second World War. A cruise missile, made to sound so nice and small and tactical, has a warhead about ten times that of the Hiroshima Bomb—itself over a thousand times more powerful than the largest bomb of the Second World War. Yet our MoD talks about using them ‘to stop the Russians at the eleventh hour’.

Years ago the United Nations, in several serious reports, made it clear that this nuclear deterrence on which we put such reliance cannot be a stable system of security.

It would seem that literature these days is increasingly a matter of taste. We are helped, not to learn and practise discrimination between the good and the bad, but to buy and consume according to our ‘special interest’. We ask of a play or novel, not whether it will sharpen our understanding, nor whether it may damage our sensibilities, but that it should appeal. It has not always been so. When Chaucer chose to take his leave of the reader at the end of the Canterbury Tales with a formal apology—though no mere formality—for the ‘translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’ it was precisely their appeal for which he sought to make amends.

The recognition of the power of stories to shape character, and to shape language, has led to the Tradition, a canon judged worthy of study and constitutive of our culture. That Tradition is now under attack. Where it has not already been dismissed as irrelevant, it is rejected as ‘elitist’, a snub too hastily dismissive of Leavis’ wish for ‘an English School ... designed for an elite’ Literature, has even been deemed the creation of a powerful, wicked literary institution in which the universities are prime movers. Terry Eagleton has argued in his book Literary Theory that

I will begin by mentioning three possible definitions of the theological task that I cannot accept, on the principle that many good definitions are arrived at by ruling out what things are not. Each of these ‘negative definitions’ will be to some extent a caricature, yet all caricatures have some relation to reality. Moreover, each of the rejected definitions will prove to have incorporated in it an element of value. This element is capable of being disengaged and used afresh in a positive definition of the theological task to be offered in the second part of the article.

Three negative definitions

1. A first account of the theological task that one might meet has it that theology is the misguided attempt to turn into a science something which is strictly mysterious: the dogmas, or as we say (precisely) the mysteries of the Christian religion. Since these mysteries by definition transcend the scope of the human mind, what is the point of trying to work them out intellectually? As Lord Dacre of Granton has put it, theology is ‘sophisticated ninnery’. If we have accepted a revealed religion, we must take the consequences. The consequences are that we cannot theorise about a revelation. We can only reform our own attitudes and feelings on the basis of it.

Four years ago the contributors to Robert Nugent’s A Challenge to Love discussed the position of gay and lesbian Catholics in the Church in the aftermath of the 1975 Vatican declaration on sexual ethics. Now Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder with Father Nugent of New Ways Ministry, has co-edited with Pat Furey (a pseudonym used ‘for professional reasons’) The Vatican and Homosexuality. This is a collection of reactions to the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued in October 19863. Of the nineteen participants in the earlier symposium, only Gramick and Nugent re-appear among the twenty-five leading Catholic educators, journalists, activists and officials who write in it.

Gramick cites The Tablet as having called the document ‘violently hostile’, and The Month as having noted a failure to address ‘the reality of homosexuals in their living of Christian discipleship’ (p. 93). In the United States, the editors say, reactions were ‘as might have been expected, swift and strong’. One prominent Catholic and former Trappist monk writing in the Washington Post dismissed the letter as ‘homophobic rantings’. A more dispassionate and scholarly response came from the Archbishop of San Francisco, John R. Quinn: his article ‘Toward an understanding of the letter’, first published in America, is reprinted here.