Professor Gaffney begins by positing an important if disputed principle of interpretation: that the circumstances of the production, publication and reception of any text, and therefore of a biblical legal text, form an essential element of its interpretation. It could be argued that only on this methodological basis is it possible to respect the distance between the past and the present, the world of the text and that of its interpreter. Where this principle is set aside, the way is clear for the interested appropriation of texts as authorization for positions on which the interpreter has already made up his mind—and nowhere more so than in the sphere of ethics.

The example offered is that of the death penalty for blasphemy in the Old Testament. In this instance it may seem altogether too obvious that the religious and cultural bases for this stipulation of law have altered, and that therefore, on any but the most doggedly literalistic reading, the Bible at this point provides no warranty for judicial policy. The matter is less obvious with the prohibition of killing in the decalogue with reference to the crucial issue of the death penalty. A formidable obstacle to arguing on this basis for the abolition of the death penalty is the exegetical fact that Israelite society sanctioned the death penalty and, in fact, had recourse to it more often than some other ancient Near Eastern societies (e.g., the Sumerians). I am not saying that there are no good arguments against capital punishment which draw on Jewish and Christian tradition, but we are warned against a simplistic and interested appropriation of isolated biblical texts in support of particular ethical constructions.

Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter published on May 22 1994, by coincidence the anniversary of the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake, stated in peremptory fashion that the admission of women to priestly ordination is not subject to debate among Roman Catholics, and the nonnegotiability of this statement has been insisted on more recently by Cardinal Ratzinger. In deference to this admonition I propose neither to debate the issue itself nor evaluate the theological and exegetical arguments on both sides, though it will not be possible to leave them completely out of account. What I would like to do instead is reflect on what is at stake for the church leadership, theologically and practically, in excluding women from the ministerial priesthood and doing so in such uncompromising terms as to even forbid the faithful to debate the subject. To pose the question in this way is not meant to insinuate that there can be no reasonable and arguable grounds for an exclusively male priesthood nor does it imply a dismissive attitude to arguments put forward in official documents in favour of the exclusion of women, much less assume that these arguments are advanced disingenuously. At the same time, I think it can be said that our reasons for holding certain positions are often unacknowledged and unarticulated even to ourselves, and are in any case more primordial than the arguments we elaborate in defence of these positions. In other words, our agenda is not always fully displayed in our arguments, which I imagine also holds for arguments put forward in official church documents.

There is one side to the transformation of the Church going on today which might seem to have a purely liturgical bearing but which in fact goes wider and deeper – the general abandonment of the Latin language. This doesn't just imply the return to an intelligible and genuinely public liturgy but the abandonment of the lingua franca of what has been for centuries a clerical world and the moving out into the open and as yet largely unchartered waters of a lay and secular church – a church of the people, fully in the world.

Anti-clericalism is a lot easier to recognize than clericalism and therefore a lot easier to deprecate. Rather than merely deprecating it, however, with its long and ugly history especially in some Latin countries, we would be better employed in finding out to what extent it was justified and in fact at times made necessary by circumstances. It might, for instance, be considered rather significant that the part of Italy where communism and anti-clericalism is strongest, where there are still people who ‘baptize’ their children in wine out of contempt for the Church's sacraments, is precisely that part which formed the Papal states.

Clericalism is a historical phenomenon and has to be studied historically. It is, of course, a pejorative term and does not refer to the existence in the Church of a section of people called clerics, those who, in the definition of canon 108 of the Code, are ‘tied to divine service, having received at least first tonsure'.

The oldest biblical view of man, that which is contained in the corpus put together towards the end of Solomon's reign or the early period of the divided monarchy, brings out with a concrete and satisfying amplitude of vision arid with compelling images a profound intuition into the ambiguous position which man holds in the hierarchy of nature, to which he certainly belongs but which he in part transcends; he is an animal, but he is also ‘just a little lower than the elohim.’ Yahweh God made him out of clay and breathed into his nostrils the breath of Life. He thus became a ‘living soul’ - nefesh hayyah. The word which is usually translated ‘soul’ seems to have been primitively connected with breathing, as also was ‘spirit’ - both words in Hebrew and cognate languages started off with the meaning ‘throat'.

In the West the word ‘liturgy’ is used to cover a considerable number of acts addressed ideally to God, but the very multiplicity of forms which it subsumes tends to obscure what might seem a fact too obvious to comment on. Sometimes the question is put in a rather naive way: Who is the object of our worship as Christians: God or Jesus Christ? (distinction of persons); Has Jesus Christ, in whom is certainly the fulness of the godhead, ‘taken over’ from the God of the Old Testament as the centre of our liturgy? Before dismissing such a naive formulation too hastily we might remember that exegetes are not always unanimous on who the kyrios, addressed here and there in the prayer of early Christians as recorded in the Acts, really is—whether Yahweh (as in the Septuagint translation) or Jesus raised to the right hand of the Father.