I regard this article as part of a continuing debate in New Blackfriars concerning the relations of Christianity and Marxism. But it is also an attempt, within that context, to ask and answer the question why we should continue to believe in God. I raise the question here because, it seems to me, that most of the effort expended by earlier contributors, particularly Denys Turner has been towards showing that it is possible, and even necessary for a Christian to be a Marxist. Obviously, if a Christian must be a Marxist, as Denys Turner argues, then the question whether he can, or should, continue to believe in God is raised at once. For it is a pretty widely accepted opinion among Marxists that belief in God is incompatible with their own view of things, and that anyone who is a Marxist and believes in God is something of an oddity, a man with a private religious hang-up, and quite probably an unreliable ally. Denys Turner rightly affirms that, in holding to this view of religious belief, Marxists are themselves merely hanging on to a private opinion that has nothing to do with their Marxism as such. But a Christian cannot be content with remaining there. What the Christian needs to be able to show is that, if he ought to be a Marxist just in order to be a complete Christian, it is equally the case that the Marxist ought to be a Christian just in order to be a complete Marxist. Nothing short of this will do, from a Christian standpoint: to pretend otherwise is to connive at a sell-out. I believe that at the present stage of the game there is a real danger of just such a sell-out. For example, to say, as the editorial committee responsible for Crossleft do, that ‘there can be no question today ... of Christian modification of Marxist praxis’ (which, if it means anything, means that being a Christian Marxist makes no difference at all to what, as a Marxist you are prepared to do): or that ‘the Church is basically on the side of the oppressor’ (what else, strictly speaking, can ‘basically’ mean here but ‘from the very foundation’?)—to say things like this suggests to me a readiness for just such a sell-out as I have indicated.

Gregory the Great is important because he was born to the purple of what was left of the classical world—he was related to both Symmachi and Anici, to Symmachus and Boethius—but used the position his status gave him to further the cause of the revolutionary and subversive elements of Christian society, the hippies of his day, the monks. The Rome of his day was the apex of a wedge-shaped territory extending from the Adriatic, near Ravenna, to the Mediterranean, at Ostia. This, like all Italy, was supposed to be part of the Byzantine Empire. To the north, what is now Tuscany and Lombardy were ruled by the Lombards who were bitter enemies of the Byzantines, who could afford to maintain an unremitting hostility to them, and of the papacy, which could not. The so-called exarchate of Ravenna, of which Rome and its environs, the so-called duchy of Rome, were a part, was the object of a policy of covetous nibbling by the Lombards. The exarchate was Byzantine in that it recognised the sovereignity of the eastern emperor, who appointed the exarch, but in practice it had to be self-supporting. Inevitably the bishop of Rome played a greater and greater part in all this and the duchy of Rome at least was often in practice ruled by the pope of the day insofar as it was ruled at all.

The ruler of Rome had always had some responsibility for feeding the population: before Gregory became pope in 590 the Tiber overflowed its banks and inundated the city’s granaries. Plague had followed in the wake of the flood and carried off Pope Paschal I, Gregory’s predecessor. Rome was full of refugees from the Lombards, Gregory himself estimated there were 3,000 destitute nuns alone in Rome and appealed for help in feeding them.

The branch of Wodehouse’s work which compels the attention of the historian more than any other, is his treatment of the communications media. Whatever criticism can be made of his choice of themes of which he had little experience and less contemporary knowledge, it must be acknowledged that he surveyed the media men, women and fashions with a perpetual eye to their nature and changes, their strengths and their phoniness. He also remained as vigorous in his power of parody and satire as he had ever been; and his increasing sophistication lent additional bite to his analyses with the advancing years. Naturally the problem of his place as a historical witness increases with the improvement in his writing. We can go to old Blumenfeld in The Inimitable Jeeves for a naturalistic presentation of the New York theatre manager of 1920, specifically because it is almost a line-by-line portrait of Erlanger. On the other hand, what is to be said of his much more professional and much more savage Barmy in Wonderland, written thirty years later? Certainly Wodehouse, in attacking the exploitation and commercialism of the theatre, was drawing on a lifetime’s knowledge, and some of the material presented might have more to do with 1938 than 1948. One could not have the confident reliance on detail with which one turns to the road show passages in Jill the Reckless. But as an insight on tendencies, attitudes, practices, responses, in the world of the New York theatre in his lifetime, it deserves the higher accolade we give to the artist whose eye sees deeper into an epoch than a mere reporter can hope to do.

The image of the Church was already a complex one in the years leading up to Vatican II, whether one thinks of the picture portrayed in theological writing or of the meaning glimpsed, and perhaps apprehended, in day-to-day living, in personal prayer and in worship. But within the complexity there was in Catholic theology and practice a special stress upon the priesthood in the Church, and therefore upon the Church as a sacral, hierarchical institution, endowed with a fullness of priestly powers : of order (magisterium) and jurisdiction. This sacral-bureaucratic view came to fullest expression in Journet’s The Church of the Word Incarnate, in which order precariously maintained a primacy of honour over jurisdiction. Bishop De Smedt took a fresh and critical look at the same image when he denounced triumphalism, clericalism and juridicism in a speech he made at the Council. Freedom and fraternity were not the only fundamental Christian values to come into their own again; the stress on the living Word of God and his coming into expression in the scriptural word, and the shift towards existential modes of thinking in response to the demand of faith seeking knowledge in us and for us, in and for our time, called into question a static, clerical-priestly and authoritarian Church.

The ten years after the Council have been a testing time for us all, and not least for the priests of the Church. There has been a spate of theological writing about ministry and priesthood, verging indeed, at popular levels, on the narcissistic and obsessional. Too little of it has seen that behind the question of the ministry there stands a more fundamental, christological question about the meaning of Christ’s priesthood. The more welcome, therefore, to Fr Sabourin’s study of Christ’s priesthood and the history that led up to it.