That ultimate responsibility for true Christian doctrine is included in the universal primacy which the bishop of Rome as successor of St Peter possesses in the universal Church is a claim that should surprise no one who is prepared to entertain the notion of a universal primacy in the first place. This is, at any rate, the burden of the famous chapter 4 of “Pastor Aeternus”, the document in which Vatican I defined the infallible teaching of the bishop of Rome. What, with the approval of the Council, Pope Pius IX defined in the text that was promulgated on 18th July, 1870, as “dogma divinely revealed” runs as follows:

“The bishop of Rome, when he speaks ex cathedra, i.e. when, in discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, is, by God’s, help promised to him in St Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed in defining a doctrine regarding faith or morals; and such definitions of the bishop of Rome are therefore of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, irreformable”.

Assuming, then, that the bishop of Rome as successor of St Peter must in some sense be “the mouth of the Church and of the episcopate”, and must thus be able on some occasions at least to give voice to the faith that all alike hold, what are the problems of interpretation that this text contains? The fact that these problems have often been raised before, and that, in trying to resolve them, we have little new to say, will not deter us from covering the ground once again.

Towards the end of his many sided life Fr Vincent wrote “God knows how much I have striven and prayed to mend the shattered unity of Christendom”, words that may seem strange to those who only knew him in his later days, for he had developed other interests. But a study of his writing shows him to have been among the early Catholic ecumenists and to have kept up his interest throughout his life. His labours in this field span the formative years of the movement which is one of the glories of the Church in this century. Indeed it is plain that he not only laboured but suffered in the cause of Reunion -as it was known, and sometimes dreaded by many of his contemporaries.

In retrospect he traced his interest to lessons learnt at his mother’s knee, where he acquired “his first desire, never since quenched of seeking to love, even more than to convert, his separated brethren”. The uphill path he trod not only shows that ecumenism did not begin with Vatican II but how he dealt with problems that are still with us. While Prior at Woodchester, in the first years of the century, he was in correspondence with Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic. He was host to his Cotswold neighbour, the Rev Spencer Jones, Rector of Moreton-in-Marsh, who became a leading Anglo-Catholic after the publication of his classic England and the Holy See. He was also writing in the early issues of The Lamp, a paper edited by Fr Paul Wattson, who after his reconciliation was to promote the Unity Octave through it for almost half a century.

The modernists, those innovators of epic ellipses, almost did their successors out of a job. Their formal developments seemed terminal, one-way progressions to be achieved, then discontinued. In the United States the new techniques were taken on with exhilaration, but in Britain existing positions were defended more strongly. Apart from simple imitators, who usually missed the point in any case, those who have actually taken modernism as a genuine beginning have been few and far between.

This is understandable. Ezra Pound developed metrical technique and allusion in a dazzling fashion, but overall formal organization and control did not keep pace. Eliot himself shifted from the early concentrations and cinematic cuts to a discursive style of philosophical meditation, and then to the social niceties and equivocations of the verse plays. Modernism appeared as an interlude, bracketed away from the mainstream. So it comes about that Philip Larkin’s poetry enacts a continuous,insistent closure against modernism, and is in that act seen to be fully aware of the experimentation it refuses. Similarly, Jon Silkin sees a wrong direction, and goes back to the work of Isaac Rosenberg to start again. Basil Bunting’s Briggflats is a rare reconciliation of England to modernism. Meanwhile Christopher Middleton, eager to set out from the most exciting starting-points on offer, ends up in the U.S.A. his reputation in Britain absurdly small.

“We feel that, even if all possible scientific questions have been answered, our existential problems (Lebensprobleme) have not been touched at all”. suppose many people would agree that we feel that there must be more to life than just getting sensible answers to sensible questions, there must be more to life than “sweet reasonableness”. “He who does not dance, does not know what is going on”. In a short story by the Russian writer, Olga Larionova, a rebellious young lady who has fallen in love against instructions laughs at the “poverty-stricken wisdom” of her thoroughly rationalist commander from Logitania. In the words of e. e. cummings:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom