The 27th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 15th May 1997

Nineteen years ago, when I delivered the 8th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture, I said this:

History obliges Jews to take account of the figure of Jesus, because Jewish life is lived in the midst of the gentiles, and for the majority of Jews that means in the midst of Christians. We are compelled to respond to Jesus—not Jesus the ancient Jew but Jesus the Christian Lord.

And I concluded with the positive judgment of Franz Rosenzweig:

Before God, Jew and Christian both labour at the same task. He cannot dispense with either.

I fully share Franz Rosenzweig’s optimistic vision, and it is in the light of this belief, and in the spirit of my earlier talk, that I accepted the invitation to come back and give a second lecture in memory of the man we are gathered to honour. We owe it to Cardinal Bea and to other predecessors who, like him, laboured to clear away the bitterness and hatred of centuries, to continue this work, each one of us in whatever way we can.

I would like to take this opportunity to push my own thinking further than I was willing or able to do nineteen years ago. In the intervening years my thoughts have moved on, and so has the climate of Christian-Jewish dialogue. I think we are ready now for some tougher talking. I hope I am not wrong about this.

Introduction

Awareness of environmental issues, seems, if anything, to be on the increase. In spite of fears that the public debate about the ‘green’ agenda would fade, rather like the anxiety over a threat of a nuclear holocaust, which is now far less prominent compared with the 1970s, politicians today seem even more aware of the need to include environmental concerns in their policy statements. Yet there still seems to be a gap opening up between political affirmations and cries for more radical restructuring. This gap has led to heightened tension, exemplified by the high profile displays of attachment to the land shown by characters such as Daniel Needs, alias ‘Swampy’, who, in January 1997 buried himself underground in an attempt to prevent an A30 ‘improvement’ programme near Fairmile in Devon. Such actions may seem extreme, but they epitomize the dissatisfaction, especially of the young, with the ineffectiveness of politicians to make any real difference and an almost total lack of clear national transport policy. Such dissatisfaction is expressed in other ways as well: now more young people belong to voluntary environmental groups than political parties. Official jargon and teaching feels alienating for those who want to see real practical advances in the way we treat our planet. Such language also spreads into official Church documentation on other issues in a way that alienates many ordinary men and women.

What is one to make of the phenomenon of Séamus Heaney? Widely praised by academics and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, he has held chairs at Harvard and at Oxford, is the subject of an extraordinary number of theses and studies, and in 1996 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In addition, he has a huge and enthusiastic following among the general public, and his latest volume of poetry The Spirit Level was last year on the best-seller list for several weeks, and this year has won Whitbread awards not only in the poetry section but also as Book of the Year.

Heaney has many very obviously appealing qualities as a person. With his traditional Catholic upbringing in a large family, and his still surviving rural background in Co. Derry, he seems an enviably rooted man. Much of his poetry is direct and accessible, and in the lecture-hall or on the radio he is a relaxed and affable presence. Yet alongside the warmth and ease of manner lies a complex and at times agonised character who has searched deeply both into his vocation as a poet and into the function of poetry itself, and some of his own words about this quest may justify referring to it as a truly spiritual pilgrimage; for example, in an article written in 1978 he describes the poetic vocation as requiring ‘a religious commitment to the ever-evolving disciplines of the art, which the poet has to credit as his form of sanctity’, and it is one of Heaney’s most disarming characteristics that he has not shirked from making known the pressures and tensions of his search.

In his ecumenical Marian theology, Fr. George H. Tavard has a fine chapter entitled “Mary in Anglicanism,” in which he traces the development of Marian teaching from Thomas Cranmer to the present. Tavard’s essay is not intended to be comprehensive and so. while he maintains that it would be “an exaggeration to speak of a Marian movement in contemporary Anglicanism,” nonetheless significant contributions have been made in recent times, for example, by Canon Donald Allchin and Professor John Macquanie. Had the nonagenarian Anglican priest-theologian Norman Pittenger’s Our Lady, The Mother of Jesus in Christian Faith and Devotion been published before 1996, no doubt Fr. Tavard would have included some mention of it as yet another contemporary Anglican contribution.

[The Gospel: “I call you no longer servants but friends...”]