There is a number of substantive issues that divide Catholic opinion today, and which have been brought to the fore by the forthright statements of Pope John Paul II – clerical celibacy, for example, and the ordination of women. But the all-important, primary, basic issue that has to be discussed and fought about in the Church today is not a substantive one but, in a sense, a procedural one: how, where and by whom should such substantive issues be decided? The all-important question, in other words, is the question of authority: what is the nature of authority in the Church of God, and where does it reside? At a profounder level you could say it is a question of ecclesiology: what is the nature of the Church? Here I shall only touch on that question by implication.

On the subject of authority there are, as there have been for centuries, two rival points of view, two conflicting parties in the Catholic Church. In the middle ages there were the papalists against the conciliarists; in the 19th century the names, and to a slight extent the precise issues at stake had changed, and there were the Roman ultramontanes (direct heirs of the medieval papalists) against the cisalpines and the gallicans.

A major difficulty in any discussion of abortion is the immediate impulse that most people experience to label one another as either pro- or anti-abortion. The abortion debate has been stultified by this facile stereotyping and authentic dialogue rendered virtually impossible.

On the one hand, the anti-abortion camp is characterised as populated by conservative Catholics blindly following male-originated absolutist directives. While on the other side, the ground is depicted as thick with radical feminists driven by self interest while despising children, marriage and men.

One of the main points of crisis in modem civilization concerns, in my view, the relation of conscience and authority. Where these two are not simply taken to be polar opposites, neither tolerating the claims of the other, the one is often subordinated to the other. This may be right. Unfortunately what should then dominate is often made subordinate and vice versa. Thus Fr Eric D’Arcy writes:

D’Arcy goes on to quote Newman in support:

Now we may I think take these authors as referring here to a common, non-technical notion of conscience which, we might want to say, is our knowledge, either of what we ought to do or of the rightness or wrongness of what we have done, or merely the memory of an unambiguously evil deed. But here at once the difficulty would meet us of the erroneous conscience. If this is as much a conscience as a correct one is then it seems we cannot characterize conscience as knowledge, not even as our knowledge. It will only be a seeming knowledge of right and wrong, and a seeming only to ourselves moreover.

Acquiring the faith in 1946 was a process that lasted a year and a half and was predated by two circumstances that probably had an influence which outlasted the years of belief one was that I happened to have an uncle who – despite never going near a church even at Christmas – was a quite remarkably good man, and the other was that apart from the conventional influences of my Anglican school I was brought up in a fundamentally pagan and easygoing home.

No doubt because of this nominally religious background, when the faith did impinge on my adolescence it was all the more virulent – there had been no saving inoculation. Certainly it was quite unlike anything I had previously come across.

I had better begin with some disclaimers. I am not confident of my ability to write adequately about the justification of being a Catholic now - this seems to have become far too complicated a problem: this issue, the sheer complexity of the problem, emerges again below, and I will have more to say about it there. Furthermore, I am certainly unable to say anything original about this or that disputed point in a theological or philosophical way. I hope then to proceed by working very carefully within my limits, at least as I conceive these to be, and to simply give here no ‘justification’ but an account: an account of some aspects of what ‘it feels like’ for one man to be a Catholic now. Naturally, this will engage me in questions that look like issues of justification, but in so far as they are these I hope to steer clear of anything that could be called ambitious and theological (in any really exacting sense), and stick with what I can cope with - perhaps best described as a more subjective (or perhaps better: privately held rather than publicly held) account of how I (rather than we) find Catholicism to be meaningful and true.