A good friend of mine from Montreal, by profession a notary, told me two years ago that, judging from his experience since 1970, of the couples who come to register their marriages before proceeding to the Church, at least one in five gives the same address; meaning to say that, in the proportion of 20%, couples now seeking a Church-Marriage have been cohabiting for probably no less than a year. That figure, while not providing statistical evidence, is indicative of a trend which is gaining popularity among young people in my country—making sure their union has a chance to last before committing it to the punctilious care of the Church and Law—a trend not infrequently lamented by a sizable section of the clergy as a sad result of those young people’s loss of faith and lax morals.

Since then, I have crossed the ocean and settled in the country parish of Ngote, Tanzania, ministering to a Christian community hardly three generations old and, by God’s grace, still little touched by the mixed blessings of industrialisation. Yet of the 18 marriages celebrated in the parish in 1975, only five were between couples for whom Church-Marriage would mark the beginning of conjugal life. In 1970, such marriages had numbered 19 out of 37, while last year they were down to three out of 22. Those figures suggest that ‘trial-marriages, a troubling new fashion at home, are here becoming the norm.

Clearly linked to the issue of trial-marriage (in the sense, for this part of the world, of a matrimonial alliance locally acknowledged as legitimate even though still lacking the Church’s sanction and thus officially regarded as void by the Church) considered in this article is the problem of the decreasing ratio of Church-Marriages in relation to the overall number of conjugal unions entered upon by Church members.

The foundation of Christianity, as fact and doctrine, is the resurrection from the dead of Jesus who was crucified,

Great efforts have been made over the centuries to spell out the presuppositions and implications, historical, metaphysical and theological, of this event, and it is unlikely that anything wholly new will be discovered now. In the last ten or fifteen years, on the other hand, study of the resurrection narratives in the New Testament has quickened dramatically, among Catholics, and it is important for us all to recognize that some divergence of interpretation is now established. Without attempting even to summarise the ever increasing Catholic literature on the subject, or to examine the various problems which the divergence creates, and which the new interpretation involves, it seems worthwhile to delineate briefly some features of the approach to the gospel accounts of the Resurrection to be found in some recent Catholic theology from Germany. The same approach may be traced elsewhere, most notably in major works by the Dominican theologians Christian Duquoc and Edward Schillebeeckx, but since neither of these has yet been translated into English, it seems more useful to limit this survey to three more accessible works: Hans Küng’s On being a Christian, Walter Kasper’s Jesus the Christ, and The Common Catechism. It is not a matter of accumulating authorities for the new approach; it is rather a question of registering how widely accepted the new approach already is.

One of the factors that has constantly bedevilled the debate about the admission of women to the priesthood is the uncertainty about what a priest is in Christianity. It must be obvious that we can’t come to any sound conclusions in this matter until we have a theological understanding of the meaning of priesthood and how it relates to the other ministries in the church. The relationship with other ministries is one of the important things to establish if we are going to arrive at a clear idea of what priesthood is. Is it a universal category that in some way comprehends all the other ministries in the church? Or is it just one among many, the central one perhaps, yet not including the others? (One of the questions we have to face after all is why many women who seek to take their rightful place in the ministry feel that they will have got nowhere until the priesthood itself is open to them. What idea of the priesthood lies behind this ambition? Is it the right one? Or is it a historical distortion?)

It is a fact that many theologians in modern times have deplored, that in the Roman Catholic Church there has for many centuries been a gradual absorption by the ordained, sacrificial priesthood of nearly all the other ministries in the church. This is well illustrated by the way in which the sacrament of Orders has been administered since the early middle ages. Ordination meant essentially giving to a man the power of celebrating the Eucharist. The climax of a long series of preparatory rites was the anointing of the hands of the candidate and the bishop’s handing over to him the sacred vessels.

To echo Denys Turner, the debate in New Blackfriars has by now ranged over so many different issues and mobilised so many separate arguments that it is impossible to answer every objection that has been raised against my position, nor shall I be able to take all the incidental points not raised directly in relation to my own views but which nonetheless warrant answers from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint. Equally it would be tedious (for anyone can read the debate for themselves) if I were to spend much time simply restating my earlier remarks and taking issue with every instance of their misinterpretation by my opponents.

Therefore, I shall rehearse my argument only in very general form, and then attend to the issue which is central to the debate— the differential characteristics of science and ideology.

My initial strategy was not to offer a substantive contribution to this debate but to carry out a reading of it, as it exists in certain texts, in order to expose the silences, incoherences and contradictions enforced on a writing that engages in what is, for the whole thrust of my argument, a project which has already failed even before its inception. Because, as I contend, Christianity is an ideology (as well, of course, as an ensemble of rituals, practices and institutions) and Marxism a science, and because they suffer a high level of mutual unintelligibility deriving from their very different epistemological statuses (the one, potentially at least, an object of the other), Marxism has no ‘contribution’ to make to this ‘debate’ except to define its character as an irresolvable ideological encounter.

When people become religious believers, when they talk about their religion or engage in verbal activity in practising it, what are they doing? Although he does not believe that a simple, unqualified answer can be given to this question, Patrick Sherry thinks that it is important, that certain ideas of Wittgenstein are a help in trying to answer it and that a proper answer raises problems of truth and justification which are often ignored: “Let us then ask ourselves what pictures and concepts are used in religion and theology: we want to know how doctrines are related to the world— what is their subject matter and what kind of description are they trying to provide? Now it is unlikely that we will be able to reach a simple answer to such questions, because so-called ‘religious language’ is of many different kinds ... even putatively ‘descriptive’ or ‘fact-stating’ uses of religious language are of many types (p. 18)... We need to ask how and why the religious ‘universe of discourse’, which supposedly structures the believer’s experience, ever arose in the first place (p. 45) ... There are three tasks which need to be tackled if we are to produce a viable Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. These are to characterise the language-games and forms of life of religion by explaining their place in our lives and experience, to relate them to other language-games, and to deal candidly with the problems of truth and justification.