- CRISIS IN THE
CHURCH
- The sixteen promulgated texts of the Second Vatican
Council, which ended in December 1965, ran in the Latin original
to approximately 105,014 words, exclusive of 992 footnotes of
varying length. Salesians lead very busy lives on the whole, and
in their off-duty periods may feel not in a suitable mood for
serious spritual reading, however much they may value it in the
abstract. The superiors felt it important that all members of the
Congregation should become acquainted with the teachings of the
Council, and Don Ricceri accordingly issued a directive that the
annual retreats in 1967 should include sermons and conferences on
the conciliar documents, instead of focussing in the usual way on
the four last things - death, judgment, hell and heaven - and the
general duties of the religious life.
- Father Williams, therefore, directed me to prepare a
special series of talks, based on the teachings of the Council, so
that I could preach a spiritual retreat to about seventy of the
priests of the English province in the summer of 1967. This meant
that, having finished my thesis, I now had, in addition to my
ordinary duties, to make a close study of the Second Vatican
Council. It became increasingly clear to me, as I read, that what
had been previously no more than a tenable theological opinion I
favoured among many equally Catholic was now, unless I was
mistaken, the officially received teaching of the Church.
- It was by their moral conduct and behaviour that
Christians had to show the extent to which Christ's death and
resurrection were real for them. The love of Christ had to blossom
and bear fruit in all aspects of their lives. While reliance on
some sort of system, old or new, was an abiding temptation for
members of the institutional Church, Christians had to learn to
believe in Christ and in each other. They were Christ's body. The
whole fault of the Pharisees had been to cling to belief in a
system, the law, and to refuse to believe in the person G-d had
sent. G-d wanted us to find our happiness in sharing life
together, sitting down together to enjoy the banquet of his
providence. We needed to be alive to the realities of
interpersonal relations, to appreciate the psychic interchange of
mutual presence, to open ourselves to the beginnings of not just a
temporary but an eternal communion, to discover and encounter G-d
living, present and at work in the hearts of all men and in all
the events of life.
- The Council called upon Catholics to “wipe out every
kind of separation, so that the whole human race might be brought
into the unity of the family of G-d.”* Christ was acting in
history through the unity of his Church. As Saint Irenaeus, Bishop
of Lyons, had said long ago, “In ecclesia
disposita est communicatio Christi” - “Christ
is communicated organically in his Church.” The Church's mission
was to restore all things in Christ, the fullness of whose
achievement was not only human, but also cosmic. Material creation
had been made for man, so that, through him, it might glorify G-d.
Men had to lend their voice, their intelligence, their heart on
fire with love to the whole of visible nature, so that, in and
through them, it might love the invisible beauty of its creator.
Reintegrated by the blood from Christ's cross, we had to tend
towards him in knowledge and love, carrying the whole of creation
with us. Only in the next life, when the union of all the just had
been achieved in Christ, would the completed growth of love be
achieved; only then would creation be in full, complete and
perfect harmony; only then would we know the fullness of Christ;
only then would G-d be all in all.
- In mediæval times men and women had felt the
need to bless everything they used in order to give explicit
expression to their belief in the unity of all things in Christ.
That was why Cajetan, the great commentator on Thomas Aquinas, had
called the incarnation the upsuge of the whole universe. That was
why Saint Paul, not as a metaphor, but as a plain statement of a
supernatural fact, wrote: “He has put everything under his
dominion, and made him the head to which the whole Church is
joined, so that the Church is his body, the completion of him who
everywhere and in all things is complete.”*
- It was only in modern times that individualism had
assumed its excessively predominant rôle in Christian
asceticism, preaching, theology and liturgy in the Western Church.
The Second Vatican Council had been badly needed to save the
teaching of the Roman Catholic Church from the individualism with
which it had been associated since the sixteenth century. Before
the Second Vatican Council many theologians had already sounded
the alarm. Yet many Catholics had still to discover for themselves
this dogma of the mystical body in which the Church consisted,
where there were joined limbs, a single nervous system, a single
circulation of blood and a single head. Christian sanctification
was the process of entering into this mystery of the unity of the
family of G-d, this unity of the mystical body without which the
Church taught that there could be no salvation.
- Already in 1966 the doctrine that there was no
salvation outside the Church sounded harsh. As a Catholic I
followed the Council in committing myself deeply to it, while as a
Christian humanist in the tradition of Saint Francis of Sales I
strove, again with the Council, to be all things to all
men.
- The Church was aware that it was now “more difficult
than ever for a synthesis to be formed of the various branches of
knowledge and the arts.” We were “witnesses to the birth of a new
humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by his
responsibility towards his brothers and towards history.” The
Council affirmed that it remained “each man's duty to preserve a
view of the whole human person, a view in which the values of
intellect, will, conscience, and fraternity are
pre-eminent.”*
- I felt Saint Theresa of Lisieux's expression of the
Gospel message remained appropriate: “Everything is grace.
Holiness consists in a disposition of heart. To love, to be loved,
to make love loved. Lord, in all that you do, you fill me with
joy.” To be in love with joy. Christianity was this new Pentecost,
this outpouring of the life-giving Spirit. It was G-d's grace
breaking into our lives. It was responding to G-d's action with
perfect abandonment, absolute confidence, with that gentleness and
humility which makes every deed righteous and wise.
- In this spirit I said in my retreat sermons how sorry
I was that Thomas Aquinas allowed a master to beat his slave, that
Bossuet, when Archbishop of Paris, had justified the treatment of
negroes, that Pope Pius XI had expected workers to accept without
rancour the place assigned to them by divine providence, and that,
in short, Christians had been and continued to be sinful, or
ignorant, or insensitive, or out-of-date in their attitudes and
behaviour. Stoicism, the astral and mystery religions, gnosticism,
the Constantinian tradition, the Hellenistic and Roman ideology
into which the Christian Church was born, had helped to make
institutional Christianity an opium of the people. Fortunately the
Second Vatican Council had now affirmed that “a hope related to
the end of time does not diminish the importance of intervening
duties, but rather undergirds the acquittal of them with fresh
incentives.”
- The storm clouds of war hanging over the face of the
Earth could be dispelled only by providing something to counteract
their originating sources: selfish passions in individuals and
unsatisfactory structures in society. The peace we needed was
healthy development - not the preservation of the existing
disorder, but the tranquillity of a new order, which had to be
brought about by worldwide consolidated action, by a complete
revolution, by a total qualitative change of life.
- I wanted all Christians to be involved in building up
the body of Christ, in spreading the reign of G-d which, in some
sense, was not of this world although it was in it. But I also and
emphatically wanted Christians and all persons without distinction
or discrimination of race, colour, sex or creed to rejoice
together in the humanity it was our privilege to share, to learn
to live together to build the Earth and to promote the continued
progress of mankind in what, as a Christian, I believed to be its
providential individual and social evolution.
- I admitted that it was far from easy to make any
detailed suggestion as to how the necessary transformation of, for
instance, the economic system could be most vigorously secured by
the intervention of national and international public authorities,
and always in such a way as to place it in the service of all men,
and under the effective control of the greatest possible number.
It was clear that any needed change of structures would have to be
accompanied by our own personal conversion towards a more
authentic love and a more genuine freedom.
- Each man was entitled to his own responsible
preference for the economic, political and social system he found
best adapted. Teaching, as she did, that all life is a mystery,
the Catholic Church in the Council offered no blueprint for the
future, and in its historical elements G-d's plan for mankind
would be very much what men cared to make it. Christians were,
therefore, encouraged to work and pray for the development and
amelioration of all systems and groups, considering them all as
having something of value to contribute to the higher synthesis,
as yet in the future, that would give effective natural unity to
mankind, and so provide a sound basis for the full incarnation of
the Word of G-d. Not the class struggle, not the survival of the
fittest, not compromise and mediocrity, but the restoration of all
things in Christ: that was to be our programme of renewal if we
desired to lead mankind forward along the Way of the Cross to the
glory of the Resurrection.
-
- In September 1966 Father Brian Jerstice, SDB, joined
the Beckford staff and lectured very competently on philosophy. I
have always regretted he never rounded off his philosophical
formation by doing a doctoral course, and still recall with
pleasure his lectures to me in 1953. It could well be a sign of
his philosophical maturity that he has never cared to do a
doctorate, that he never seemed to spend too much time preparing
his lectures, and that, as he said, he liked to pass many hours in
the countryside listening to the grass grow. I think he and
Wittgenstein would have got on well together.
- Unfortunately for my students, Father Jerstice in his
classes quite legitimately used the language of the traditional
scholastic philosophy to present an interpretation of Thomism
along the lines favoured by, for instance, Gilson and Maritain,
and brilliantly popularized by G. K. Chesterton. Meanwhile, I was
presenting in a different and contemporary language an
interpretation of Thomism along the lines favoured by Lonergan and
Rahner, which happens in fundamental ways to be contradictorily
opposed to the other interpretation. Although Father Jerstice, in
the midst of his many occupations, did not seem inclined to devote
long hours to the patient discussion of our opposed views outside
the lecture hall, he seems, perhaps unwittingly, to have conveyed
to the students the impression that we both held identical views.
As a result, when some of them could not understand how this was
so, their first reaction may have been to become even more
convinced than before that philosophy was a subject impossible to
understand, and that a naïve and uncritical acceptance of the
Church's current views was the future priest's safest
bet.
- Talent in philosophy has probably never been the
hallmark of the average Salesian seminarian, and in their later
priestly life most Salesians have no time for it. Since some who
were no longer students could not make head or tail of Insight, I
was not surprised when Father Williams told me he thought it must
be too difficult for the ordinary student. I suggested at the time
that it was easier for a student to assimilate than it was for a
priest to understand, the reason being that the student only
needed to learn Lonergan's contemporary language, while the priest
would also have to disengage his mind from the assumptions and the
linguistic usage of his earlier seminary training. The Provincial
did not seem to doubt the reasonableness of my standpoint, but
both his kindness and his sense of responsibility toward the
students led him to tell me that, if I wanted to use Insight, I
should provide the students with some prior and simpler
introduction to it.
- I never allowed the work either on my own thesis or on
my retreat conferences to stand in the way of that of thorough
preparation for my lectures. I believed that because my students
were beginners, I had an interesting challenge to meet, and that
my preparations should be greater than those I would make for a
lecture to my fellow academics. The latter would only call for
knowledge of my subject; in teaching beginners, I needed to find a
way of expressing my thoughts in a language that meant something
at their level. I had recognized this need long before in
collaborating with Father O'Brien on an English version of
The Companion of Youth in
a language intelligible to twelve-year-olds.
- I therefore welcomed Father Williams's call for an
introduction to Lonergan. My efforts to comply with his request,
and with the students' needs to which I had been sensitive all
along, have resulted in the publication of two articles along
these lines, and in the composition for my students' benefit of a
long unpublished commentary on Insight.
- While I was struggling to bring philosophy to life in
Beckford and making my over-optimistic attempt to communicate to
priests - some of them previously my teachers - the key-principles
of the Second Vatican Council, both in the retreat I preached at
Ingersley and, some months later, in the course in pastoral
theology for young priests that Father Williams asked me to
contribute to, the Provincial himself was, among other things,
busy changing the whole style of life in Beckford. The rule of
silence became more flexible. Students were allowed their own
choice of books for spiritual meditation. I was authorized to add
subjects such as biology, sociology and catechetics to the
curriculum. Students were permitted the use of informal attire
instead of black suits on their weekly walks. Instead of spending
the whole weekend in the studentate in accordance with a rigid
timetable, they were encouraged to help organize the recreation of
the boys in a neighbouring school for ESN children, to assist in
the Salesian school for children with severe learning difficulties
in Blaisdon, and to set up a Beckford Catholic children's club.
Visits from parents, previously very much restricted, were now
made frequent as well as welcome. The clerics were also given
generous access to newspapers, magazines, radio and television -
all previously taboo in the studentate - and allowed a small
amount of pocket-money. This all seemed a tremendous revolution to
those who had known Father Simonetti's spartan discipline, but the
young students soon took it all as a matter of course, as at best
a move towards more sweeping changes still.
- When I had gone to Beckford as director of studies, I
had seen each Salesian house as having ideally the form of what
has come to be called a psycho-therapeutic community. The label
remains unfamiliar to many, but the concept has always been
traditional in the Salesian way of life. Nevertheless, it was soon
brought home to me that my person-centred and rôle-conscious
approach to management came into conflict with the task-oriented,
rule-based and traditional model of administration approved, if
not consciously then at least implicitly, by some of my fellow
Salesians3.
- At Beckford, as elsewhere in the Salesian world and,
indeed, throughout the Church as a whole, only some were really
open to the changes called for by the Vatican Council. Others
resisted change from the outset. A third group sought a
compromise, and hoped that the universal acceptance of certain
changes as a symbolic token of goodwill and of lip-service to the
principle of aggiornamento would dispense them from the
challenging task of making any real change in their mentality, of
being converted from their private dream-world to the universe of
G-d's truth under the ceaseless dynamism of his Spirit.
- Until 1965 the Salesian story had been one of
tremendous expansion and success. Now numbers started to decline,
problems multiplied, and there arose confusion and bewilderment. I
have never been sure if Father Williams was open to fundamental
change, or only to extensive but relatively superficial
modifications. There was, however, no doubt that some of the
priests in Beckford thought he allowed the students too much of
the wrong kind of freedom, and showed insufficient appreciation of
the ancient usages and traditions. I, on the other hand, was
making it clear in my lectures that the Second Vatican Council was
to be seen as no more than a preamble towards a more total renewal
in Vatican Three.
- The humanist, I suggested, lives in the belief that
each person is of absolute value and an end in himself, that man
must always be considered as an end, never merely as a
means.
- The Christian humanist believes that the Word is made
flesh and now dwells among us. Man does not need to journey to the
Moon in search of happiness. We don't have to run away from life.
We do not need to escape from anything. The planet Earth still
holds the answers to lots of our questions.
- I recognized that many people feared to involve
themselves actively in changing further an already rapidly
changing world, and preferred to retreat into the cocoon of a
traditional pattern of behaviour. This desire to get away from it
all was not, I reminded my students, a recent phenomenon. When
Jacob the Old Testament Patriarch turned his thoughts heavenwards
to dream of some distant G-d, Yahweh had reminded him gently but
firmly of his life on Earth: “I will give to you and your
descendants the land on which you are lying. You shall spread to
the west and the east, to the north and the south. Be sure that I
am with you.”
- There was the same message in Hölderlin's
beautiful and inspiring poem, “Homecoming,” which I first read at
that time: “That which thou seekest is near, and already coming to
meet thee. It is the native land, the soil of the
homeland.”
- The Vatican Council had recalled the Christian ideal
that we share to the full the definite social and cultural
conditions of those among whom we dwelled, accepting our situation
from the hands of G-d in a spirit of faith, and seeking to
transform it for the better to his greater glory.
- This did not imply any criticism of the vogue for
space travel. The lesson was rather that man's journey through
space was not and should not become a running away from home. His
flight had not to be a form of escape. The exploration of space
was the natural consequence of man's dawning realization that the
whole universe was his home. He was expressing implicitly his
conviction that all things belong to man, in the spirit of Saint
Paul's: “All things are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is
G-d's.”
- Hence, all institutions, whether ecclesiastical or
civil, were in the service of life. Times changed, and with them
the requirements of the living. What, at a given period, might
have been a wise law of great importance, might at another period
have less value, perhaps become superfluous, insignificant, and
even harmful. As needs changed, institutions had to change too.
For each period had its needs, and institutions had to be adapted
in time to these changing needs.
- As the undoubtedly orthodox Pope Pius XII had pointed
out, real social reform meant striving by every means to ensure
that the laws of an institution were not just a collection of
exterior and useless regulations, whose letter, in the absence of
the spirit, killed.
- The prime need of any social collectivity was
solidarity among its members. Yet at times reason might not
warrant a preference for one solution to the problem of
restraining arbitrary power, enhancing the rôle of reason
itself, and adapting received traditions to emergent needs.
Awareness of the relativity of our ideological preferences could
lead in practice towards liberalism and primitivism. When diverse
social functions were in too tenuous or too intermittent mutual
contact, anomie could easily result. In its turn, a completely
unregulated society could breed a totalitarian dictatorship. Some
trust in man was needed. Man naturally reacted creatively and
intelligently to the situations in which he found himself.
Individualism needed to be avoided, lest freedom of choice be
reduced to total lack of direction. The spiritual in any person
was always an echo of what another spirit excited in him; a
teacher learned by teaching, and a pupil incorporated into his own
being some of the teacher's spiritual qualities; authority was
governed by the way in which it was exercised, and subjects were
formed by the quality of authority's response to their attitude
towards it.
- Authority might be feared as a threat to our personal
freedom. It could be valued because of the past achievements of
authority figures. It might be welcomed as a source of guidance in
collective living. It might be indispensable when the need arose
to coordinate the interdependent activities of various free agents
involved in a process of complexification.
- The greater the evolution of a society, whether it was
natural or supernatural in its scope, the more necessary authority
became, and the more room was given to fully personal, individual
initiative. Authority and freedom grew together.
- Salesians should not be immediately concerned with the
authority of books, institutions, legal codes and symbols. This
was derivative. Authority was primarily the title to make demands
on others that stemmed from one's personal superiority or from
one's official function. It was distinct from all forms of power
and coercion, though often associated with them. For authority
existed to promote freedom, which coercion ended. Authority began
where it was freely recognized and ended where it became power -
the ability to exercise one's own freedom without the other's
prior consent.
- Authority could function pedagogically, of course, to
help those who were non-adult in any respect to reach their goal,
but it was insufficiently realized that it should in this sense
work to secure its own redundancy. The permanent function of
authority was the preservation of order in society, the regulation
and organization of life, the kindling and maintaining of a common
enthusiasm. Even in the permissive society, not to give due
authoritative directives, whether out of a selfish disregard of
others' needs or because of some feeling of personal inadequacy,
was to hinder or waste the potentialities of the
subjects.
- Community decision called for management. I believed a
healthy state of society was characterised by pluralism,
permissiveness and participation. Therefore, I did not want just a
traditional authority maintaining the historical procedures of
existing institutions, nor just the stereotyped maintenance of the
familiar machinery, nor reliance on the spontaneous intuitions of
gifted personalities, nor even a blind following of the developing
interaction patterns of evolving, intra-group, relational
networks. Community management ought to be consciously organic, a
living system continually adapting itself to the environment that
supported it, acting for maximum relevance in its complex and
changing circumstances, knowing what it was about, capable of
rapid adjustments and adaptation, displaying expert initiative in
the correction of its goals, able to preserve its living unity
despite the experienced threat to its own non-survival. It was my
belief that the traditional roots, the reasonable justification,
the charismatic appeal, and the human relationships that pertained
to authority came together best in the notion of the authority
figure as the head of a living body, as in the Catholic doctrine
of the mystical body of Christ4.
- The justification of authority in general was a
complex question. It seemed clear that the duty to submit, which
was the reverse side of the right to command, must depend on
whether authority tended to realize the ends that were held to
justify it. No one could be rationally committed to refrain from
judging for himself whether the authority had that tendency, or to
continue to recognize it as an authority once he concluded that it
had not.
- While Saint Francis of Sales had focussed on the
authority of the individual conscience illuminated by divine
grace, many were now emphasizing that the community was the only
legitimate source of authority. Arguments for this complementary
position were that the community was intellectually and
emotionally superior to any of its parts, that self-legislation
was needed for individual freedom, that people only obey laws and
governments chosen by themselves, and that what affects all should
be approved by all. In as much as it was seen as coming from G-d,
authority should strive for loyalty not so much towards itself as
towards man's Absolute End and Origin, G-d as the source of all
fulfilment. Since earthly authority was always ambivalent, this
made necessary a constant dialogue between subjects and authority
figures, so that profit might be drawn from constructive
criticism. Such dialogue called for emotional as well as
intellectual socialization, and supposed not only belief in
persons, but also trust.
- No one, of course, could pretend that official
authority called the individual directly to free action. What it
did do was to serve personal fulfilment indirectly by serving the
society that made personal fulfilment possible. It called for
recognition of the authority that served the community on the
basis of a prior recognition of the justification or necessity of
the existence of the Church, the State, the Salesian Congregation.
It was in this sense that the community was the social source of
authority, which was shared within the community, though never
equally.
- To eschew authoritarianism was not to abdicate
authentic authority, but when those in authority and their
subjects spoke of community, they genuinely should mean the
totality of authority figures and subjects plurally participating
in their distinctive ways. Without going so far as the anarchists
who, though they did not reject all authority, did reject the
claims of all official authority, I felt that one of our priority
requirements in the Catholic Church, and not only in the Catholic
Church, was freedom from a system that had taken over our lives.
Persons should be free to think as they pleased, to draw up their
own political schemes, to experiment with new forms of artistic
expression, develop a different mentality, adopt a fresh emotional
stance, and modify their states of consciousness.
-
- My lectures at the time reflected my growing concern
for the perilous condition of the Salesian Congregation in its
period of maximum expansion. It seemed to me that many were acting
blindly on the basis of traditional and possibly ill-adapted,
charismatically inspired conventions of behaviour, while the
growing need was for a clear-headed, rational and organic approach
to the ever-changing realities of the present social and ecclesial
situation.
- I do not think that I was outside these tensions and
just musing about them in an armchair. They seemed very much a
part of me - not only because of their connection with my father's
legalism and my mother's love of the primitive and the colourful,
but also because of my consequent sense of obligation both to the
Salesian way of life, as authoritatively presented in legal terms
in the Constitutions approved by the Pope's infallible decision,
and to the Salesian dream-world of Don Bosco's own childhood. In
other countries the Salesians had followed Don Bosco's example and
centred their work for young people in oratories or Church youth
centres, but in England they had concentrated on grammar schools
and failed to develop the more characteristic forms of Salesian
youth work for which there seemed to be a greater need than ever
before. Don Bosco, I felt, would have been at home with the
teenage drop-outs, but might have felt uncomfortable in a
sixth-form classroom.
- I appreciated that the issues at stake involved an
important emotional problem, and did not admit of any merely
abstract solution. Philosophy might be vitally interesting and
crucially relevant, but no student would make the efforts required
to become a philosopher unless he felt there was something in it
for him. I knew philosophy had meant a lot to me and wondered how
I could best communicate my enthusiasm.
- One day I was approached by a first-year student who
told me he had problems regarding sex and chastity, dreams of
himself enjoying intimacy with girls, and consequent guilt
feelings and anxiety. He also told me he could understand nothing
of what either the Provincial or the Rector had said on these
subjects for the students' guidance. Their language was a closed
book to him.
- Since by that time the Provincial was telling me my
language was a closed book to some of the students, I was
delighted to hear he also had problems of communication. I was
working very hard, often without the approval and encouragement I
felt I needed, and this made me appreciative of this student's
personal confidence in myself. I felt emotionally drawn to him,
and wanted to make some response to him as a person. However, in
the Salesian tradition at that time only the Provincial, the
Rector, and the priest in the confessional dealt with the
students' intimate difficulties. In the last few years there has
been some change on this point, but at that time I did not feel
free to allow the student to talk to me at any length about his
problem. Making what I took to be the relevant distinction, I told
him that I felt he must talk to the Rector or his confessor about
his problems, or to the Provincial when he visited the house, but
that in order to supply him with a language in which to express
himself I would tell him something about some of my own problems
as a student. While that was certainly an unusual thing for a
Salesian director of studies to do, I was not aware of any legal
prescription against it.
- I had no wish to imitate a certain Italian Salesian
priest I had known, an eminent theologian and mariologist, and a
peritus during the Second Vatican Council, who, when asked once by
an old, blind lady to help her cross a road, had told her, very
kindly and gently of course, that he was fully in sympathy with
her situation, but that he would do nothing to help her himself
because it might cause eyebrows to be raised in the neighbourhood
if he were seen to take her by the arm. He had assured her that
without delay he would request some other passer-by to come to her
aid at once
- I did not sit in judgment on the Italian Salesian,*
but I had been appalled by the tragic tension between legal
requirement and personal need. It seemed to me ridiculous, for
instance, that the Italian maidservant of the wife of an English
diplomat in Turin had delayed her shopping duties for half an hour
on the grounds that she could not leave her mistress alone in the
house with a priest. When an old lady in an Italian basilica had
confided to me in a whisper during solemn Vespers that she would
like to be tall enough to see at least the Bishop's mitre above
the heads of the crowd, I had at once lifted her up in my arms for
a few moments to give her a better view. I had been happy to give
my blessing to Italian peasants for five hours without a break, or
to distribute Holy Communion continuously for a similar period of
time. In seeing this student's troubles, I also wanted to
help.
- * Note: In actual fact, of course, Father Domenico
Bertetto's remarks to that old lady may even have been expressed
in a tone of voice that intimated a perceptible degree of quite
deliberate, although no doubt playful, sexual flattery and
innuendo.
- Accordingly, I ran over in my mind my memory, such as
it then was, of my childhood and adolescent difficulties with
regard to my own sexuality, and of my relationship with Father
Carlos. I wrote a short account of this, and lent it to this
student to read. In the event, he told me that he found it most
helpful, and that, because of it, he had been afterwards able to
communicate satisfactorily with the Rector, and had been able to
deal with his own problem.
- While I may have been mistaken in this, I had the
strong impression at the time that this student, whose attention
to his philosophical studies had previously been very slight, was
now not only taking a real interest in the subject, but actually
managing to understand something about it.
- I had other students of the inattentive variety, whose
intelligence in other fields seemed high enough, and who did not
seem short of energy. I wondered if G-d's providence had placed in
my hands the key that would motivate them to a proper study of
philosophy. I decided to rewrite my short paper about my emotional
difficulties, and to loan it to them privately. The results were
sufficiently encouraging to lead me to lend it afterwards to some
of the brighter students, who were independently interested in
philosophy already, and whose own comments in response were more
rewarding.
- Partly because of my use of this strategy, partly as a
result of my hard work in other directions, of my own personality,
and of the students' goodwill, and partly in answer to prayer, I
enjoyed during my years at Beckford an atmosphere of friendship
and trust between myself and the students, so that communications
were quite good. By reason of my official position I was also in
considerble communication with the Provincial, the Rector, and the
members of staff, and so I found myself, as it were, riding two
horses at once, tradition and progress, law and freedom, stability
and change, hierarchy and permissiveness, other-worldliness and
hippiedom, teacher-training and youth-leadership, obedience and
dialogue, organ music and guitars in chapel, and so on.
- My position was not an easy one. I had lots of energy,
considerable intelligence, and a strong religious commitment. This
made me involve myself deeply in my situation, preaching in
thought-provoking ways on thorny points at issue, conducting a
seminar on dialogue for non-Catholic clergy, addressing the
Cheltenham Newman Circle on Marxism and Christianity, and becoming
an active member of the London-based Priests' Philosophical Group.
My research into Ryle's philosophy had sharpened my appreciation
of the need to discriminate very carefully between the different
uses of ordinary and technical language, and I had developed my
own particular style of communication. I had work accepted by such
magazines as New
Blackfriars, the Downside
Review, the Clergy
Review, Philosophical
Studies,
Philosophy,
Catholic Education Today
and the Ethical Record.
These articles, all of them published since 1967, reflected my
concern with the nature of wisdom, the necessity of and the
conditions for human dialogue, the rejection of positive
statements purporting to be meaningfully about G-d and the
non-superstitious affirmation of G-d as absolute mystery, the
relationship and lack of relationship between Marxism and
Christianity, the metaphysical implications of our actual use of
language, the shortcomings of behaviourism, the meaning of
education, and the fundamentals of methodical inquiry. My lectures
also touched on such themes as Church administration and
management, the questions of authority and personal freedom, the
limits of obedience and the right to criticize, and on the social
nature of man's changing ways of thinking about what he is and can
become.
- I was deeply impressed by Berger and Luckmann's
classic, The Social Construction of
Reality, when it appeared in an English
edition in 1967 (Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman,
The Social Construction of
Reality, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press
1967). They described how men's subjective capacity to express
themselves led to their objective production of a variety of items
which were thereafter available not only to their producers, but
also to other men as elements in the world they shared. Men shared
certain features with the other animals, but their specifically
human characteristics were essentially social. It was only
together that men could make themselves human because their
biological equipment was insufficient basis for the establishment
of any enduring human style of life. How men made themselves human
and what they chose to regard as human depended on the culture
with which they provided themselves. Man's biological make-up did
not give him even a modicum of natural stability; it gives him
instead the world-openness and plasticity that characterize his
instinctual structure. In other words, man constructs his own
human nature, and he constructs human society. The world as we
know it is certainly objective, but only in dependence upon the.
human activities that have brought it into and maintain it in
being. Two people establishing a relationship are at first fully
aware that the meaning and value they attach to the world they
share, and to all that passes between them, is a function of their
mutual agreement to view life in a certain way. In relating to
other people they make allowances for the others' not being a
party to this collusive exchange, and find ways of translating
their meanings into terms accessible to the others, i.e., into
terms in a language common to them all. However, as activity
within the framework of a certain view of reality becomes
habitual, people tend to assume that this language, this world,
this outlook, is something simply given, an obvious fact, a datum
of experience. When they do this, they alienate themselves not
only from their objective world, but also from the reality of
their own creativity which might otherwise help them the better to
maintain that world healthily in being. Commonly this means that
such people's children grow up in a state of similar alienation.
Hence, their own subsequent interaction with these children
strengthens their illusion of a fixed natural world that is simply
given, and over a number of generations the amount of alienation
generated in this way has, indeed, been very considerable. An
Unamuno or a Shakespeare sees that 'reality' is no more than a
playful fiction, and far from exhausting the potentially infinite
possibilities G-d's actuality offers us, but most men and women
remain to a very highly marked degree hung up on their seriously
held belief that 'the facts' are independent of their
whims.
- Berger and Luckmann increased my sense of urgency in
my efforts to develop a communion of life characterized by
permissiveness, pluralism and participation, and my recognition of
the need to allow for the expansion of the unconscious aspects of
man's nature.
- It seemed to me that in a healthy permissive society
all who shared the desire for ultimate reality or truth or life or
joy or self-fulfilment (there were a variety of labels available)
strove to respond adequately to the requirements of their
situation, considered the possibilities intelligently, arrived at
certain rational affirmations, and committed themselves morally in
accordance with a basically identical pattern of progressively
dynamic self-expression. And even if they often contradicted one
another superficially (as they did, even violently) because of
their use of disparate modes of expression and of differently
structured languages, this very contradiction itself was, I
believed, a witness to the authenticity of their common underlying
humanism, of which it was the outer manifestation. And although we
could not know this with objective certainty, as a Christian I
believed such humanism always contained, in G-d's providence, an
implicit real assent to the claims of Christ's Church, whatever
the appearances to the contrary.
- I continued to believe that each man's individual
salvation was the free gift of G-d. The only condition of man's
sharing in it was faith, which involved trust. The works of the
law were not sufficient to justify any man in G-d's eyes, unless
one also considered the interior disposition with which they were
carried out. No amount of objective fidelity could take the place
of personal commitment. Knowledge and fulfilment of the moral law
had to be brought to life, related to man's last end by means of a
real, even if implicit and unconscious, spiritual intention, which
was alone capable of giving authentic value to his activity. Man
was good only in proportion as he directed himself effectively
towards G-d under the influence of G-d himself. Whether or not a
man consciously recognized the existence of G-d in so many words
was not really important. G-d's choice alone was the beginning of
man's holiness. Man's Catholicism might very well remain anonymous5.
- I, however, enjoyed the explicit belief that the love
of G-d came to me through Christ, and in Christ, and that the
principal manifestation of this divine love was Christ's death and
resurrection. Christ's sacrifice on behalf of the whole of mankind
was the supreme testimony of love, not because of the physical
intensity of his sufferings, but because of the eminent value and
dignity invested in his person. The universality of that love of
Jesus Christ towards men did not indicate any blindness on his
part to human defects and shortcomings; it was rather that all men
were justified and sanctified by virtue of his saving death and
resurrection. Divine love was rich enough to guarantee the worth
of those towards whom it was directed.
- As Christ's decision to die for all mankind had been
logically prior to man's justification and conversion to life in
union with G-d, we could be doubly sure of the constancy of his
love, now that we had been sanctified in him, and introduced into
his friendship.
- G-d's love for me in Christ called for my
collaboration. Living faith was my acceptance of the offer of
G-d's love, an acceptance which was, in its own turn, an act of
love. For living faith committed me entirely, in heart as well as
in mind. It was at once a sort of knowledge and an act of
surrender and homage. It was my spontaneous entry into the economy
of the Gospel, the total giving of myself to G-d my Saviour, and
at the same time a taking possession of all the divine benefits in
the anticipation that is hope.
- Such faith involved my real assent to the mystical
identity of the crucifixion and the resurrection. Only love, which
was increased and deepened in me by suffering, but the essence of
which included absolute joy, could bring me spiritual pleasure in
regard to those things which mortified my nature. Only love could
bring about in me, under the name of grace, that real
transformation which was the basis of its creative power.
- Faith also meant accepting my mystical identity with
Christ. This union with Christ was intimate, organic, like the
growing together of two plants that fused and became one. I and my
fellow men formed one being with Christ. We were one body in him.
We shared everything with Jesus Christ, even though some of us
might call ourselves atheists, while others among us might attach
too much weight to official Church membership. We were crucified,
buried, and brought back to life with him. We shared both in his
death and in his new life, his glory, his kingdom, his
inheritance. Thanks to this mysterious union with Christ, Christ,
I, Carlos, and all persons everywhere were persons quickened by
the same principle of life, moved by the same principle of
activity, living the same life.
-
- Such thoughts as these inspired my daily half-hour's
silent prayer of meditation. Whenever I am presented with a choice
between alternatives, I choose both, like Saint Theresa of Lisieux
who, when presented with a choice of fruit from a basket of
apples, said: I choose all. Only everything is good enough for me.
I believe my mother's darling can also be my father's son; that a
priest can live a useful life in the world; that a Roman Catholic
can be an agnostic; a philosopher, a poet; a lover of tradition,
progressive; a detached critic, deeply committed.
- On the other hand, I have my feelings. In Beckford I
was emotionally frustrated, and, indeed, had been for years.
Buried in my mind was my uncertainty as to whether I had become a
priest to please my mother, to please G-d, to please myself, or
out of hatred. This made me incapable in practice, however valid
my theories, of being fully and calmly aware of the emotional
realities of group-life in Beckford, and of acting in well-adapted
ways with regard to my total situation. My general impression was
that I was doing my best. The students for the most part
appreciated my efforts, but in the average case their achievements
were not anywhere near commensurable with them. The Provincial did
not seem to have any real interest in my philosophical work. I
received some support from Father John Mehers, SDB, who lectured
on philosophy during my third year in Beckford. He was still
engaged in his own academic research in the subject, realized its
practical value as a tool with which to promote renewal in the
Church, and certainly made a very positive contribution to the
students' philosophical formation. All the lecturers on my staff
had, of course, every right to conduct their own courses in the
way they did, but while, as director of studies, I made sure they
had full freedom to do so, as a philosopher with a personal view I
felt they were often undermining my efforts. I became increasingly
depressed; my saying of Mass never lost the intensity of the
religious fervour I brought to its celebration, but in reciting
the Breviary (the priest's official prayer-book), in saying the
Rosary (a prayer to Mary, the mother of G-d), and in my daily
meditation I grew more and more subject to distractions, and could
do little more than say, with a sort of humble obstinacy: “My G-d,
your will be done!”
- Accordingly, when the Salesian Rector Major, Father
Ricceri, made an appeal for volunteers for the missions in South
America, I applied to go. I reasoned that Father Jerstice and
Father Mehers were more than capable of providing the students at
Beckford with the sort of philosophical training that Father
Williams seemed to feel they should have. I knew from mixing
during my seven years in Italy with Salesians from all points of
the globe, that my approach to philosophy would go down very well
indeed with many in South America. I thought it possible that
several South Americans lecturing in philosophy would prefer to
undertake other duties with boys in schools or youth-clubs, and
that, if I replaced one of them, my knowledge of Latin and Italian
and my ability to read Spanish would permit me to take over that
person's academic duties immediately.
- I realized, however, that my emotional relationship
with my mother was still problematic, and I was too honest to
pretend that this was without bearing on my wish to emigrate to a
distant continent. I therefore wrote to tell Father Williams about
my hesitations on this score, asking for his judgment, and
providing him with a copy of the written account of my emotional
difficulties already referred to, so that he could have a basis
for a decision.
- I do not think there was anything in that document
that would have presented a serious problem to his predecessor in
office. Indeed, Father Hall had at various times been told the
whole story in substance. But, of course, there is a vast
difference between gradually informing another person about
oneself, and suddenly presenting material to an acquaintance of
several years' standing wihich paints an unfamiliar portrait,
particularly if it destroys his previous impressions and causes
him serious anxieties.
- I am in no position to say what effect my manuscript
had on Father Williams. I can, however, describe the subsequent
course of events. Father Williams had invited me to preach the
spiritual retreats in August 1968 to the Daughters of Mary, Help
of Christians of the Anglo-Irish Province, who came to their two
houses in Chertsey for that purpose. Some time before the start of
those retreats Father Williams had obtained a report on my
manuscript from Father E. F. O'Doherty, the Irish psychologist.
Apparently, the latter had recommended that I be given the
opportunity of professional psychoanalysis. Father Williams chose
to follow this advice, and also chose to remove me from my
position at Beckford, a move Father O'Doherty had not envisaged.
However, in order not to disturb me while I was preaching the
retreats to the Salesian Sisters, the Provincial also decided not
to inform me of his decision until those retreats were
over.
- It seems to me that by leaving me to preach these
retreats to the Sisters when he had already made up his mind to
provide me with the opportunity of being psychoanalysed, Father
Williams expressed a considerable measure of continuing trust in
my religious and theological and not only in my philosophical
abilities.
- When the retreats were finished, I took one week's
holiday in Bolton, and when I returned to Beckford received a
letter from Father Williams directing me to go to Salesian
College, Surrey Lane, Battersea, as teacher of religion, while
arrangements were made regarding the psychoanalysis. As the
school-term in Battersea begins rather early, I found I had only
thirty-six hours' notice. I was disinclined to accept the
directive because I had hoped to be in Beckford long enough to
complete the philosophical formation of two or three outstanding
students, to whose training I had given considerable thought and
attention. I also felt the letter was a slap in the face, and
resented it bitterly. I had confided a personal problem to a
priest who was supposed, by reason of his office, to be my father
in G-d, only to be met with what seemed to me like a brutally
administrative reaction. I can see now that no different sort of
response could have been expected at all realistically in the
circumstances, considering, that is to say, what I knew of Father
Williams: a brilliant chemist, a guardian of canon law, a lover of
everything Salesian, an efficient administrator, a generous and
kindly man with a simple trust in the goodness of G-d and a wish
to be able to trust his fellow men, a person of high intelligence
ready to acknowledge the value of expert advice in a specific
field, and a man without any apparent grasp of the hidden
emotional agenda of all human affairs. Emotionally speaking, I
blew myself up in smithereens, and destroyed my world in the
process. It is of faith that crucifixion is the secret path to
resurrection.
- Because I was opposed to the idea of leaving Beckford
at once, and supposing that Father Williams' decision to move me
was meant to prevent my contaminating the atmosphere there in some
way with my strange ideas, I hoped he might see the futility of
barring the door after the horse had gone, and told him that the
document I had sent to him was one I had already shown to several
of the students. His reaction was to speak to each of these
individually, and he was confirmed in his feeling that he had
taken the right course of action.
- Teaching in Battersea was not a pleasant experience.
The boys in the upper school were not expected to take any
O-levels or A-levels in religious knowledge, or any diocesan
examinations, and seemed to regard the Religious Instruction
period as one in which to work off their frustrations about the
less pleasant aspects of school life, and specifically of intense
preparation for O- and A-levels. Throughout the school, the books
used in connection with the religion period were very much out of
date, and often in a tattered condition. Each new eleven-year-old
pupil was given his personal copy of the Knox bible, and the
common result seemed to be that he grew bored with it before he
was old enough to understand how interesting the study of it might
be. The allocation of funds for religious instruction was slight,
so that there seemed little likelihood of doing anything very
radical to improve the situation.
- Having lectured on catechetics myself and having
compiled for my students' benefit a booklet explaining its general
principles, the three-fold structure of catechesis as instruction,
formation, and initiation, and the various aspects of the
catechism class and the religious instruction period, it did not
take me long to appreciate the serious shortcomings of the
situation in Battersea, which is, of course, rightly called a good
Salesian school.
- In any case, Father O'Donnell, SDB, the Rector of the
College, did not, despite the Provincial's indications, ask me to
give most of my time to religious education. As far as the Inner
London Education Authority was concerned, Father F. X. P. Thoburn,
SDB, was in charge of RI, throughout the school, and I was a
part-time teacher. In practice, I was in nominal charge of RI, and
took several classes myself. In the other classes, the teachers,
to whom I had given a copy of my booklet and of Derek Lance's book
of suggestions, 11-15,
which just about exhausted the financial allocation for that year,
taught what they pleased, which sometimes was not even RI, at all!
I had obtained a few copies of the New Dutch Catechism, hoping to
use these with the sixth-formers, but they were so apathetic to
any discussion of religious questions while under A-level
pressure, that there was little point in going through the motions
to satisfy the conventions. After all, their temporary apathy
suggested the lack of any immediate dissatisfaction with their own
situation in the Church, or out of it. At least, that was the
surface impression.
- Pope Paul VI's Encyclical on the abuses of birth
control, Humanae Vitae,
had appeared by that time. My position, after careful study, was
that I had a right to my own theological opinion, which happened
to be that the Pope had said the only thing anyone in his position
could have said at that time. I thought, too, that what he had
said was plainly erroneous, if it was interpreted as excluding in
all circumstances the practice of contraception, but that there
was not the slightest reason why an Encyclical in which the pill
was not mentioned even once, should be automatically assumed as
having been written to condemn the use of it! It seemed to me also
to be extremely inappropriate for a specialist to present the
conclusions of his careful thinking in the course of a few minutes
to boys only half listening, incapable of appreciating the nature
of the technical issues involved, and whose parents and parish
priests were possibly giving them some quite different view of the
question.
- At that time Father John Booth, SDB, was catechist in
the Salesian College, and so responsible for the spiritual life,
as distinct from the religious instruction of the pupils. I told
him that, granted the existence of the Encyclical and the widely
held theory that it had excluded the use of the contraceptive
pill, I, because of my own theological position, felt the best
thing in the RI class was either to pass the subject over in
silence, or, if I did need to discuss it, to say: this is what the
Encyclical says, this is what people are saying it means, and what
I think about it is my own business. Father Booth, however, wanted
me to give my own opinion, and to do so in such a way as to make
it clear that the Pope was right. I felt unable to fall in with
his wishes, and reluctantly took the course of saying briefly what
my positions was, by what path I had arrived at it, and in the
light of it why I thought the interpretation of the Encyclical
itself a doubtful matter, with the obvious consequence: if there
is doubt, there is freedom.
- However, as I have said, Father O'Donnell asked me to
give most of my time to other things. He told me to teach English
in form one, and Latin in forms two, three and five. He also told
me, despite my clear indication of my utter ignorance of and
complete lack of interest in football, that I would have to
referee a match each week!
- After only a week or so in Battersea, I picked up a
virus and contracted hepatitis, with a severe attack of influenza
at the same time. Thanks to this, I had two weeks' convalescence
in Eastbourne, where I celebrated Holy Mass in the convent each
day at mid-day, and saw the film “Girl on a Motor-bike” one
afternoon. So, although the resort is somewhat quiet for my taste,
my stay was enjoyable enough. But when I came back, the teaching
was hell. Obviously the boys sensed my emotional resentment
against the college authorities, and made hay while the sun was
shining. I don't mean I wasn't liked by the boys, or that they
didn't work well, but they seemed to bring the recreation-ground
spirit with them into the classroom. When I was there, they were
reluctant to concentrate on the class, as they did, perhaps to an
exaggerated degree, under other teachers. There were one or two
masters some boys feared outside the classroom; with me they were
always ready for a laugh.
- By October 1968 my three sessions each week of
Freudian psychoanalysis with Dr Ronald Thomas St Blaize-Molony,
the Harley Street consultant, were under way, at a cost to the
Salesians of eighteen guineas each week. The course of analysis
lasted, in practice, two years. My first impression was that the
analyst thought I had strategic difficulties in abundance, and
that he could perhaps help me to learn how to cope with them. He
never seemed to regard me as being in any sense mentally sick, and
our relationship was certainly a support to me at a time of
considerable stress, though cycling to and fro across London for
the sessions was also a strain.
- As well as being analysed, I read widely in the
literature about the psychological problems of authority and
permissiveness, the nature of envy and gratitude, the behaviour of
human groups, ideology, alienation, language games, dream
interpretation, and so on. Dr St Blaize-Molony helped me with
additional suggestions about specific books and articles. As well
as having analysed a number of priests and nuns, he was
particularly familiar with the difficulties facing anyone trying
to promote creative change in an established institution because
of his own experience of the problems involved in transforming a
traditional hospital into a psychotherapeutic community. He could
also sympathize with my pain that my academic abilities were not
being more fully recognized, because when he had first come to
England from Dublin it had been difficult for him to find a
position commensurate with his talent.
- The crisis of authority in the Catholic Church was at
that time finding a focus in the debate over
Humanae Vitae. The
Archbishop of Southwark arranged a number of gatherings of priests
to thrash out some of the pastoral problems involved, and one of
these meetings was held in his presence at Salesian College,
Battersea. I was asked to lead one of the small discussion groups,
and to send in a written report to the Archbishop for his personal
information. On 3 January 1969 Monsignor, later Bishop Alan C.
Clark, who had translated Humanae
Vitae into English for the Catholic Truth
Society, preached in the Salesian College on the occasion of the
annual feast of Saint John Bosco, and after discussing the
Encyclical with him after lunch, I promised to send him a written
account of my views about it. I also discussed the same issue with
the national secretary of the Catholic Renewal Movement, which was
then preparing its leaflet of practical suggestions on Family
Planning for progressive Catholics.
- Had it not been for the opportunities I found of
keeping in contact with adult thought in this way, I believe life
in Battersea would have been quite intolerable. The analysis
obliged me to recapture the feel of my own childhood, and the
classroom situation into which I had been thrown made me feel the
anguish of the pupils' hardly articulate demands for a more
humanitarian educational environment, while my vow of religious
obedience obliged me to maintain the Battersea variety of the
English Salesian discipline.
- In discussing Humanae
Vitae with thinking adults I noted that the
Second Vatican Council and Paul VI had approved and ratified the
efforts of sound theologians to present Christian teachings in
terms of a personalist ethic geared to the concrete realities of
our involvement in a constantly evolving world process,
translating it out of the objective language of set rules, which
had been suitable only against a background of a static world
view. On the other hand, the Holy Father had often strongly
deplored the bad theology of those whose attempts at translation
were a misrepresentation and mutilation of authentic doctrine, and
the incautious language of certain catechetical popularizers of
doctrine who either failed to state the truth, or did so in such a
way that it was easily misunderstood. Indeed, the whole problem in
a pluralist society was how to secure the healthy formation of
each in situations that varied so much, without distorting, or
scandalizing, or neglecting the consciences of others differently
placed.
- Legislation was not an adequate solution to this
problem. Christians had been legalists too long. Rules were made
to foster growth and finished by stifling life. The fault was not
with the law-makers, but in those who thought they had to keep to
the letter of the law faithfully, even when circumstances had
rendered that kind of conformity absurd. To obey the commandments,
or recite prayers in a routine way for fear of hell, or because
one had despaired of any life less like a railway time-table ever
winning official approval, or to avoid drawing the attention of
Church authority to the details of the rest of a life being lived
on principles quite alien to the official line, was rather
childish, and was not the response the Church desired of her
members. The Second Vatican Council had wanted dialogue.
- Protagoras, the ancient Greek sophist, once said that
“no one ever caused another who holds false opinions to change
them for true ones: it is not, indeed, possible to think what does
not exist, nor anything other than that which is experienced; this
is always true. But, I think, the man who because of an inferior
state of mind holds opinions of similar inferiority may be led by
an improved condition to hold opinions correspondingly improved.
Some through ignorance call these notions true; I, however, call
the one kind better than the other, but in no way truer.”
- I believed that if in our dialogue we placed the
emphasis on increase and growth, we should be less concerned about
the precise location of our present position, and more interested
in increasing mutual love and trust than in dreaming up quack
recipes for personal fulfilment.
- All persons, I felt, desired to be loved and to love.
I found, however, that group communication was hindered by the
members' ontological concern, fear and anxiety. I thought that my
radical and total commitment to dialogue in philosophy and
theology was one way of manifesting my faith in the concept of
mankind as a therapeutic community, in which persons met on the
basis of sharing in a common quest. This called for emotional and
not only intellectual socialization. Many projects for renewal
were too technical and rational; there was an urgent need for
gradual, progressive, fruitful, emotional change to dissolve the
walls and dispel the clouds of fear, prejudice, suspicion,
childishness, woodenness, obstinacy and pride. If you did not
burn, I I did not burn, if we did not burn, how could the shadows
become light?
- I recognized that my own philosophizing and
theologizing risked being the instrument of my lust for power.
Clearly reasonable, objectively true and impersonal statements
could express my personal aggression. An apparently broadminded,
inter-disciplinary approach that drew upon a weath of cultural
resources, ranged over the whole history of the subject, deployed
the complex, technical languages of a variety of contemporary
schools of thought, and quoted a multitude of authors subscribing
to the positions I wanted to advance, might be conceited
exhibitionism. Indulgence in emotionally charged, colourful,
poetic, seductive, persuasive, visionary, prophetic and creative
statements could tempt troublesome innovators to believe in the
realism of their own ideal, mistaking their violent onslaught on
honest lovers of the status quo for a crusade, their slavery to
their own aggression for noble commitment to the defence of good.
Cynical exploitation of people's attitudes to world poverty,
illiteracy, war and disease might win intellectual support for
views I was propounding out of vanity. My invitation to other
members of the Priests' Philosophical Group, when I spoke to them
early in January 1969 during their annual conference in the Maria
Assumpta Training College in Kensington, to share our ignorance
together, might, I suggested, mask my sadistic delight in
highlighting other people's shortcomings. Too facile a
self-identification with Abelard, Aquinas in disfavour, Boethius
or Socrates6 might hide the philosopher's own failure to come to terms with reality; historical reminiscence might
express his own present refusal to communicate.
- I saw no need to dismantle the institutional Church.
There was nothing wrong with rules as such. When there was chaos7 and confusion the search for order might become a priority. The outcast from the Church was not free, and there was no need to
envy either the rebel or the anarchist. But the robot in the
Church was not free, and rules were for men, not men for rules.
This had been the policy of Jesus Christ: “I have come that they
may have life, and have it more abundantly.” The Church gave men
this life, and we should be grateful, glad to be alive, eager to
share this life and pass it on to others. This was joy and
holiness. Freedom meant having a heart that beat in unison with
the heart of Christ. But men could not tell how G-d's heart
ticked. There were no blueprints for living, no recipes for
holiness. Order was only a means to an end, needed for the whole
range of human emotions and feelings to come to their full,
varied, and proper self-expression. Only enough order was needed,
and it was important that it was of the right kind.
- In the Encyclical Humanae
Vitae Paul VI had sought to clarify the
meaning of marriage. Husband and wife, he wrote, through that
mutual gift of themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them
alone 8, developed that union of two persons in which they perfected one another, in order to cooperate with G-d in the
generation and education of new lives. The marriage of those who
had been baptized represented the union of Christ and his Church.
Married love was fully human, total, faithful and exclusive,
creative of life. Hence, parenthood had to be responsible. The
Pope called for study to elucidate better the conditions
favourable to a lawful regulation of procreation. He claimed that
unless we were willing that the responsibility of procreating life
be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we had to accept that
there were certain limits, beyond which it was wrong to go, to the
power of man over his own body and its natual functions. The
Catholic Church's own moral teaching on marriage was based on the
natural law as illuminated and enriched by divine
Revelation.
- In Catholic theology natural law is a theological
rather than a philosophical notion, Hugh of Saint Victor having
said in the middle ages in his Didascalion that positive justice
and moral discipline originate from the natural justice expounded
in the scriptures; by observing how G-d acts, man comes to realize
how he, in his turn, ought to behave.
- However, there seemed to be no clear answer in the
deposit of revelation to the question about the morality of birth
control, so that faith and the revealed aspects of natural law
were not central, and it was rather a problem of practical
behaviour. The Encyclical was a pastoral directive called for by a
crisis of authority in the Church which had been needed to
preserve continuity in the life of the Church in practice. It was
not infallible, but left the theoretical question open, while
aiming to remove practical doubt. No Catholic theologian at that
time denied that a positively and directly contraceptive mentality
was to be absolutely condemned, but the Pope had gone much
further. Although the Encyclical was a plea for obedience rather
than a statement of belief, it implicitly and strongly taught that
contraception was intrinsically evil by natural law: “Any use
whatever of marriage must retain its natural potential to
procreate human life.”
- Given the gravity of the issue, it would be
unreasonable for any thinking Catholic to obey such a directive
without asking how authority knew this directive was prudent. The
reasons explicitly brought forward in the Encyclical were
certainly not weighty enough. Moreover, the Encyclical was not at
all points clear. It excluded intending contraception as an end or
means, but not, apparently, tolerating it as a consequence. Hence,
it seemed unwise to exclude a subsequent development allowing
intercourse truly expressive of love to take place in
circumstances that, while not procreative, were a-conceptive
rather than contra-ceptive in themselves, even if, from some point
of view, contraceptive in their consequences.
- Although lying was wrong, novels and poems, which did
not communicate factual information, could be admirable
expressions of the human spirit. Contraception which turned the
expression of one's love of life into a lie seemed wrong to me,
but I saw no reason why sexual activity need always be open to the
biological communication of life by tending directly towards
procreation, and suggested it could have human meaning and value
as the poetry of love-play and celebration9.
- However, it seemed silly to me to discuss
Humanae Vitae without
adequate attention to the whole question of the relationship
between religion and sexuality. My Freudian analysis was making me
focus increasingly on this area of tension, and I was glad when
the London University Catholic Society invited me to address them
on the theology of human sexual response. My talk formed the third
part of a series, with Jack Dominian, a Roman Catholic
psychiatrist, discussing the psychology of the sexual encounter,
and John Marshall its physiological and moral aspects in the light
of his work as a neurologist and his experience as a member of the
Pope's birth-control commission.
- The work I put into the preparation of this talk may
have been an aspect of my resistance to what was going on in my
analysis, an attempt to sublimate my unsatisfied sexual energies
into my theologizing, and a restful escape from the rough and
tumble of grammar-school life in Battersea.
- Gebsattel, I found, as a result of his specialist
studies in the field, believed sexual perversions failed to yield
ultimate satisfaction because they were obsessional urges which
rendered impossible I-Thou relationships based on mutual freedom.
Wilhelm Reich, however, an Austrian psychiatrist, social critic
and ex-member of the Communist party, who had died of a heart
attack when mentally ill in a Lewisburg Penitentiary in 1957, had
thought it was religion that was harmful. Neurotic symptoms and
other destructive attitudes could usually be dissolved only in
fully satisfactory sexual intercourse. Destructiveness was
basically anger at sexual frustration, and religious or mystical
feelings were anti-sexual substitutes for sexuality.
- Reich seemed to have a point. While waiting for a bus
to take me from Battersea to Harley Street for my analysis on a
day when it was too wet to travel by bicycle, I met a Persian
nurse and began to discuss a recent richly symbolic dream of hers,
while sharing the journey into central London with her. After that
we met once a week for the space of about two months in her room
in a Battersea hospital, during her off-duty hours. Ostensibly I
was, as well as helping her to interpret her dreams, helping her
with her spoken English, purely out of kindness, and because I
happened to have a little spare time. However, we usually kissed
and embraced. On one occasion, although with some reluctance, I
allowed her to look at and fondle my penis, and to masturbate me.
On a subsequent visit, I got her to strip, lay on top of her, and,
while kissing her vagina, ejaculated between her breasts. It
seemed to me afterwards that, in this foreign nurse, I had been
both loving and hating my mother, whom she resembled in stature,
hair colour, and in the shape and colour of her eyes. We discussed
this together, and concluded it was dishonest for us to make any
further attempts to relate sexually. She then left London to study
elsewhere, and I lost contact with her. I felt particularly sorry
for having expressed towards her by the way I ejaculated my angry
resentment at my mother's persisting control of my way of thinking
and feeling about life.
- Accordingly, though I felt he was trying to achieve
his objective in a quite misguided way, I sympathized with the
concern of Reich's pupil, A. S. Neill, to make freedom the normal
condition of life10. I also tended to accept Sigmund
Freud's claim that many neuroses stemmed from repressed sexuality,
and approved of his forerunner Ehrenvel's questioning of moral
restraints on sexual behaviour.
- I was pleased to find that Rozanov, a Russian critic
and philosopher who died in 1919, had also emphasized the
generative power of sexuality. Unlike Reich, he considered it
man's noumenal aspect, the one relating him most intimately to
G-d. Aware of the way in which the Old Testament calls the chosen
people the bride of G-d, I appreciated his criticism of
Christianity's failure to recognize the holiness of elementary
animal processes and its denial of the flesh in preaching celibacy
and fasting. I saw, too, that Tantra11 could be
authentically religious, though it might sometimes be a
perversion.
- I enjoyed reading Erich Fromm, and learned that, like
him, Paul Goodman, one of the major voices in educational protest,
was emphasizing the value of human togetherliness. Life, however,
should be various in delight, and I wished to find a way of being
simultaneously holy, sexy and joyful.
- Psychoanalysis, I maintained, and I don't think Dr St
Blaize-Molony disagreed with me, could not prove there was a G-d
or that there wasn't one. Jung's coupling of sexuality with
pre-Olympian Greek religion and other mythologies had not to be
accepted at face value. I thought it was a welcome sign that
Michael Balint, the neo-Freudian, admitted explicitly both that
the analyst could only find out what was going on in the patient's
mind through the transference, and also that there might very well
be other dimensions to the mind which lay beyond the reach of
analysis. I felt that no amount of psychoanalysis would either
validate or invalidate my specifically religious experience; it
could only help to demythologize it, and even here, its function
was far less radical and important than that of philosophical
analysis. That was why, as a theologian and philosopher, I felt my
psychoanalyst should have been paying me for enlightening him,
rather than the Salesians paying him. His view seemed to be that
the social system determined money to reach me through Church
collection plates, and him through his clients, and that this did
not imply any real lack of equality and mutuality in our
reciprocal interdependence.
- I had been familiar for many years with Freud's
insistence in tackling neuroses on our understanding the mechanism
for repressing the memory of real or imaginary childhood traumas
which have disturbed our early experience of anal, oral and
genital pleasure. I regretted that I did not remember any dreams
to help me understand my childhood even more deeply than I already
did. On the other hand, I appreciated Melanie Klein's and
Fairbairn's swing away from stress on repression and primary
narcissism to an emphasis on splitting and object
relations.
- Splitting is a sort of leaving the left hand in the
dark as to what the right hand is doing. It consists in projecting
out of oneself onto others not so much the distressing ideas
belonging to one's own personality structure, but rather the
disassociated emotions that really belong with them. I, for
instance, accept without difficulty my areas of weakness and
confusion, but I do so objectively and intellectually, and in this
way evade my emotional distress, and even pity people who are less
articulate about their inner life for having themselves this
distress that I project onto them in this way.
- The difficulty about object relations is that, as a
human being, I cannot know another person simply as he is in
himself, but only in terms of his significance or otherwise in a
given context or horizon. This is, however, only a limitation on
objective knowledge; knowledge by contact and presence transcends
such restrictions to reach the complete person of the other in
trust. This is why I am grateful for Balint's criticism of
Fairbairn's generalization about object relations.
- Philosophers such as Bernard Lonergan and Emerich
Coreth, an Austrian Jesuit whose thinking broadly belongs to the
same school, have drawn our attention to the fundamental and
comprehensive horizon of being, with which any genuine metaphysics
is concerned, and have invoked transcendental method to affirm G-d
as the condition of the possibility of authentic human freedom,
without which there is neither joy, nor complete sexual
satisfaction, nor holiness. They have tried to show how G-d is to
be apprehended as the primary mystery in a sort of contemplative
contuition, a term I borrow from the Anglican theologian Eric
Mascall to refer to my simple apprehension of G-d present in my
consciousness and not as an object of my consciousness.
- Perhaps I cannot clarify my mind on this point without
introducing too many technicalities, but this is not because the
apprehension of G-d is complicated, it is the simplest thing in
the world. In contempative contuition ideas move more like knights
than rooks or bishops. While one eye focuses on an object that
happens to crop up in some everyday situation or in some altered
state of consciousness, the other arrives at an experience of G-d
through or in the following realization: it is not merely a
logical truth that it is necessarily the case that if objects can
enter into the world of fact, or if consciousness can be in a
state of consciousness, then it is necessarily a fact that this
can, not just logically, but metaphysically, be the case.
- In other words, the basic unity of human experience
that transcends its differentiation into states of consciousness
and levels of awareness is the experiential platform from which
the religious mind extrapolates or, better, tunes in to G-d.
However, despite his disclaiming any attempt on his part to
undermine my religious faith, my Freudian analyst seemed to
dismiss it as an irrelevant mysticism, whereas I felt that only
mysticism was really relevant, and collaborated in the analysis
primarily because my Provincial, my father in G-d, had made the
analysis my chief religious duty. Emotionally, despite my
intellectual self-confidence, I felt threatened in my
philosophical integrity by Dr St Blaize-Molony, and defended
myself by a sort of splitting - I gave him my objective and
detached trust and confidence, but looked elsewhere for an
emotional relationship.
- Evkathrin Schmidt (for more recent photographs cf:
friendsb.jpg,
friendsc.jpg), an alert and highly
intelligent, young and extremely pretty, Swiss medical student
was, while engaged on a period of training in a London hospital,
at this time living at 55 Kingsmead, a pleasant avenue on the
borders of Streatham and Tulse Hill, as a house-guest of Nurse
Joan Wells, a friend of Archbishop Roberts, SJ, and the mother of
one of my 6th-form students in Battersea. I was introduced to her,
and after a few meetings in Kingsmead with Evkathrin and another
house-guest, her Australian trainee social-worker friend, Jill
Craig, we saw a film in a cinema in central London together, and,
after supper in a restaurant, discussed our relationship while
taking a stroll in Saint James's Park. Later I allowed her to
masturbate me as we lay together in bed, I kissed her and I fondly
caressed her breasts. However, she said that while she didn't see
any sense in priestly celibacy, and felt that I individually would
do well to marry, she didn't think she was the right person to be
my wife, and hoped I would find a suitable English girl. She
believed this wouldn't be hard, since I was gentle and
affectionate. After this, as my visits to Joan Wells's home and my
encounters with her large circle of neighbourhood and overseas
friends increased in frequency and duration, Evkathrin and I quite
naturally continued to meet and embrace, but there were no more
sexual intimacies. There was a love of friendship between us, and
this has endured. I told her all about myself and she discussed my
situation with a Catholic theologian she knew near her then home
in Zürich, procured for me Rey's study of the mother-complex
in Catholic priests, and introduced me to the novels of Hermann
Hesse, which I found fascinating. Together with Jill Craig she
also joined me in attending one of the earliest of the 1,998
epoch-making London performances of Hair at the Shaftesbury
Theatre, and she and Jill both encouraged me to do all I could to
continue to widen my circle of acquaintances.
- Why, I began to ask myself more urgently, should my
love of G-d prevent my loving one of his creatures in a
particularly close and intimate way? Why should love of the woods
forbid me to delight in any single tree?
-
- One of the delights, surely, in the encounter between
man and woman is wonder that two persons can be so different, yet
so utterly one. This is the miracle that Adam sang of: “Here” in
this person so marvellously different from me “is bone of my bone,
flesh of my flesh” (Gn 2:23). Sex is one of the greatest sources
of human joy, and it was during a wedding-feast at Cana that Jesus
worked his first miracle; it was realizing my first real
girl-friend and I were one in our humanity yet utterly different
in our individuality that gave me the biggest thrill in our
encounter.
- In the Old Testament it is written:
- “Fair wife, blithe husband; as no other lure, beauty
draws us. What of her tongue? If that, too, has power to charm, if
that is soft and gentle, never was man so blessed. Good wife won
is life well begun; a comforter you have, of your own brood, a
stay to support you” (Si 36: 24-26).
- “Take your pleasure with the bride your manhood wins
for you. Your own bride, gentle as a bird, graceful as a doe; be
it her bosom that steals away your senses with the delight of a
lover that loves still” (Pr 5:18-19).
- And according to Saint Paul:
- “You who are husbands must shew your love to your
wives, as Christ showed love to the Church when he gave himself up
on its behalf. He would hallow it, purify it by bathing it in the
water to which his word gave life; he would summon it into his
presence, the Church in all its beauty, no stain, no wrinkle, no
such disfigurement; it was to be holy, it was to be spotless. And
that is how husband ought to love wife, as if she were his own
body; in loving his wife, a man is but loving himself. It is
unheard of, that a man should bear ill-will to his own flesh and
blood; no, he keeps it fed and warmed; and so it is with Christ
and his Church; we are limbs of his body; flesh and bone, we
belong to him. That is why a man will leave his father and mother
and will cling to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
Yes, those words are a high mystery, and I am applying them here
to Christ and his Church. Meanwhile, each of you is to love his
wife as he would love himself” (Ep 5:22-30).
- Saint Thomas Aquinas states quite categorically that
sexual activity gives glory to G-d, and that the pleasure
following from sex increases its moral value and excellence. He
says that those who refrain from marriage for the love of G-d do
not in any way condemn sex, but are rather sacrificing something
good in order to be more free for the things of G-d for the
benefit of the rest of mankind.
- The question obviously arises as to whether, in our
contemporary state of society, abstinence from marriage does in
fact free the priest to give himself more completely for the
benefit of the rest of mankind. It is not clear to me that it
always does.
- In the Eastern Church priests have always been allowed
to marry, and it is very far from evident that the Western section
of Catholicism has nothing to learn from the East in this, as in
other respects.
- When I reflect upon the life-style of my own
priesthood in the past, and think about the sufferings and
harshness that the traditional practical interpretation of
Catholicism makes such a large feature of individual, family and
social life, I am sad, angry, and thoroughly shaken. The
difference, almost the total contradiction, between the
understanding of Catholicism that I have gained from a careful,
prayerful and scientific study of theology, and the experience of
Catholicism as I enter a typical Catholic school, church or
family, leaves me completely staggered. I believe faith can move
mountains, and I am quite sure there are a lot of mountains to
move.
- Even when my fellow priests are intellectually open,
and very often they are not, there can be tremendous emotional
opposition to theological renewal, and there exists a great deal
of unconscious hostility to pluralism in theology. It is a sort of
spiritual birth control. The conservative grown-up children of the
Church of the Ages deny the birth-right and freedom of those with
bright young faces.
- I find a lot of comfort in the Gospel account of
Jesus's presence at the wedding-feast at Cana in Galilee. I feel
in my bones that sex is among the greatest sources of human joy. I
am strangely moved by Christ's reminder, in Luke's Gospel, that
“the Queen of the South came from the ends of the Earth to hear
the wisdom of Solomon.” I regard this as a beautiful and powerful
image of the integration of our sexual being into the fullness of
a joy that is supremely human.
- The Book of
Genesis says: “It is not well that man should
be without companionship. That is why a man is destined to leave
father and mother, and cling to his wife instead, so that the two
become one flesh” (Gn 2:18.24). Commenting on this, Jesus Christ
proclaimed: “What G-d has joined together, let no man put asunder”
(Mt 19:6), but he certainly never said that G-d joined together
every couple that went through the external ritual of a marriage
ceremony. True marriages are celebrated in heaven.
- Christ himself never married12. Two thousand
years ago, which seems only yesterday in terms of the still widely
accepted ‘scientific’ account of man's long evolution out of lower
forms of life, Jesus was preaching in an environment in which
woman was definitely regarded as man's inferior, and sometimes
placed on a level with animals and household furnishings. In that
context it seems to me that one thing he was doing by not
marrying, was refusing to play the contemporary social game. He
did not make an idol of woman and freeze her on a pedestal, but he
did not debase her either. He accepted her as an equal, and called
his own mother, woman.
- Today more and more people are insisting that what
human beings have in common is more important than their
differences in gender, colour, race or creed. The human
prerogative is freedom. Freedom is well worth fighting for, and
opposition to obligatory celibacy for priests is, therefore,
welcome. Every human being has a right to marry, and it should not
be restricted in any arbitrary fashion. Religious and sexual
taboos exist, but should not persist. Man's developing freedom
needs encouragement, not repression. Social life is subject to too
many needless tensions, and the sooner we cut ourselves loose from
the aftermath of our rather childish superstitions, the better we
shall be.
- In studying the relationship between sexuality and
religion, I therefore have been particularly concerned with what
the Scriptures, the Popes, and the Councils of the Church have had
to say on the subject, and have wanted to avoid being snared in
the net of less authoritative theological speculations, as they
would reflect their authors' bias.
- Saint Paul has provided certain practical
recommendations:
- “To avoid the danger of fornication, let every man
keep his own wife, and every woman her own husband. Let every man
give his wife what is her due, and every woman do the same by her
husband; he, not she, claims the right over her body, as she, not
he, claims the right over him. Do not starve one another, unless
perhaps you do so for a time, by mutual consent, to have more
freedom for prayer; come together again, or Satan will tempt you,
weak as you are. The wife is not to leave the husband (if she has
left him, she must either remain unmarried, or go back to her own
husband again), and the husband is not to put away his wife” (1 Co
7:2-6. 10-11).
- This seems to me well-meant advice, and in the society
in which Paul belonged perhaps it proved of some help to quite a
lot of people. Nowadays, however, the situation has become vastly
different, partly because of our increased psychological awareness
and social complexity, and I feel that if Paul were still alive he
would find it necessary to be much more fluid and flexible in his
comments13.
- Consider the Old Testament arrangements. The high
priest had been commanded to marry a virgin of his own clan (Lv
21:13-15). All men had been obliged to take wives from their own
tribe and clan, and women had had to marry within their own tribes
(Nb 36:7-8). Solomon had not been criticized for having a thousand
wives, but because many of them had been foreigners, and so likely
to beguile Jewish hearts into the worship of strange gods (1 K
11:1-3).
- Women in the Old Testament were considered as the
property of their husband, their country and their G-d, having no
rights of their own, but always subjected to the authority of
their father, their husband, or the male-dominated community.
Adultery was thought an infringement of the rights not so much of
the woman concerned, but much more of the male members of her
family, her husband, the Jewish people and G-d, while the man
committing adultery was also held to be defiling himself (Gn 20:5;
Ex 20:17; Dt 22:22; Lv 18:20; Jdt 16:26).
- The married man was advised:
- “Never turn to look at the wanton, that would catch
you in her snare, nor spend your attentions upon some dancing
woman, that has power to be your undoing; nor let your eyes linger
on a maid unwed, whose very beauty may take you unawares. And for
prostitutes, let nothing tempt you to give way to them, as life
and possessions you hold dear; look not round in the city streets,
nor haunt the alley-ways. From a woman bravely decked out turn
away; have no eyes for her beauty that is none of yours. Woman's
beauty has been the ruin of many before this, a spark to light the
flame of lust. A prostitute? Then trample her down like mire in
your path. The love of stolen sweets has been the ruin of many; a
word with her, and the spark is lit. Sit down never with another
man's wife, nor lean your elbow upon her table, nor bandy words
with her over the wine; if she steals your heart away, your life
is forfeit” (Si 9:1-13).
- There was a religious exclusiveness about Jewish
obedience to the command, “Increase and multiply; occupy and fill
the earth” (Gn 9:7), and I feel Roman Catholics have inherited
this misguided exclusiveness. All contact with non-Jews was
frowned upon in Old Testament times: “Would you yield to the wiles
of a stranger; would you dally with her embraces that is none of
yours?” (Pr 5:20). “Keep my commandments, and do not defile
yourselves by imitating your forerunners; am I not the Lord your
G-d?” (Lv 18:30). Jewish women who turned to prostitution were not
burned alive because of their particular occupation considered in
itself, but rather because their involvement in it was considered
as detracting from the national dignity of the Jewish people and
their G-d (Gn 34:2.7.31; Dt 23:17-18). Thus, the life of Rahab the
prostitute was spared because she had shown kindness towards the
Jews (Jos 6:17).
- For the Jews, any forgetfulness of G-d meant the
temporary medicinal withdrawal of the special tokens of his love:
“No throne any longer for that queen of the Chaldean folk we knew
once, so dainty, so delicate. Get along to the millstones and
grind there, ready to expose your nakedness; off with your veil,
here are streams to be crossed bare of leg. You shall be exposed
to shame, your naked form uncovered; I mean to take vengeance on
you, and no man shall stay my hand” (Is 47:1-3). “That is why I
will pull your skirts about your ears and manifest your shame;
adulteries of yours, and lasciviousness, and all the guilt of your
debauchery, the foul deed I have seen done on hill-tops, in the
open country-side. Fie on you, Jerusalem, that will not come back
to me and be cleansed! Shall it last for ever?” (Jr 13:26-27).
This was powerful rhetoric to cement Jewish national unity around
the idea of their dedication to a jealous and exclusive
G-d.
- As a Catholic I believe the Bible to be the inspired
word of G-d, and I believe in the unity of all men and women in
the mystical body of Christ. As a priest, I identified myself in a
special way with the manifestation in the universe of G-d's
justice, love and mercy. Not physically, but spiritually and
poetically I imagined myself to be making love on G-d's behalf
with every virtuous maiden, wife, widow or nun, and, equally on
his behalf, rejecting until they learned better those women who
denied the exclusive place that G-d and their husbands held in
their lives, and prostituted themselves sinfully in unlawful
unions. I felt myself to be in love with the universe, because G-d
had made it, and because he had made it well.
- I still thrill with joy when I read how G-d spoke to
his chosen bride, the Jewish people:
- “When you were born, there was none to cut the
umbilical cord, wash you in healing water, harden you with salt,
wrap you in swaddling-clothes; never an eye melted with pity, none
befriended you, you were cast away on the bare ground, a thing of
abhorrence, that day of your birth. Who but I found you, as I
passed on my way, blood-bespattered as you were, and trodden under
foot; in that plight I preserved you, bade this defiled thing live
on. Swift as the wild blossoms I bade you grow; you grew and
thrived, and came to woman's estate, the breasts formed, new hair
shewing; and still you were all naked, and blushing for your
nakedness. Who but I came upon you, as I passed on my way? And
already you were ripe for love; cloak of mine should be thrown
about you, to hide your shame; my troth I plighted to you, the
Lord G-d says, and you were mine. Water to wash you, all your
stains gone, oil I brought to anoint you; clad you with
embroidery, shod your feet with leather; of fine linen your
under-garment should be, of silk your wear. How I decked you with
ornaments! Bracelets for those arms, a collar for that neck; a
frontlet on your brow, rings in your ears, on your head a
magnificent crown. Of gold and silver your adorning, of fine linen
and silk and embroidery your apparel, of wheat and honey and oil
your nourishment; matchless beauty, too, was yours, such beauty as
brought you to a throne. All the world heard the fame of your
loveliness; I had made you so fair, says the Lord G-d, utterly
fair! My covenant thus ratified with you, you shall know my power
at last; I have pardoned all your ill-doings, says the Lord G-d”
(Ez 16:4-14.63).
- Even if I see this expression of G-d's desire to
decorate his bride as manifesting the Jewish scribe's own need to
deal with guilt feelings about sleeping with women out of a sense
of his own masculine power, rather than in an atmosphere of mutual
freedom, it is still very moving.
- The New Testament arrangements differed, of course,
from those of the Old Testament. “In the ages that are past, G-d
allowed Gentile folk everywhere to follow their own devices” (Ac
14:15), which I suppose were pretty much the same on the whole as
the Jewish devices. Now, however, “G-d's way of justification,
through faith in Jesus is Christ is meant for every body and sent
down upon everybody without distinction, if he or she has
faith”(Rm 3:22). “No more Jew or Gentile, no more slave and
freeman, no more male and female; you are all one person in Jesus
Christ”(Ga 3:28). “If your justice does not give fuller measure
than that of the scribes and pharisees, you shall not enter the
kingdom of heaven. So if you are bringing your gift before the
altar, and remember there that your brother has some ground of
complaint against you, leave your gift lying there before the
altar, and go home; be reconciled with your brother first, and
then come back to offer your gift”(Mt 5:20.23-24). I feel it was
in obedience to this practical rule given by Jesus Christ himself
that I tried to reconcile myself to my Provincial's having
excluded me from the apostolic life of the Province, and to
involve myself as completely as I could in the analysis of my
emotional situation, especially with regard to my feelings towards
my mother.
- Among other things, I wondered if Catholics were right
in generally regarding masturbation as gravely sinful. Consider
the Old Testament once more. “You shall not defile yourself by
intercourse with a beast; nor shall a woman allow any beast to
have intercourse with her; it is foully done”(Lv 18:23). “The man
who is guilty of bestiality must pay for it with his life”(Ex
22:18). “You shall not have intercourse with a man as if it had
been with a woman; such intercourse is abominable”(Lv 18:22). I
could find no comment on other forms of homosexual behaviour.
There were various social conventions and rules of hygiene that
had to be adhered to: “A woman must not wear man's clothes, or a
man go clad like a woman”(Dt 22:5). “You shall not approach a
woman and mate with her during menstruation”(Lv 18:19). “The man
who loses the seed of procreation must wash his whole body in
water, and remain unclean till evening comes; wash, too, in water
his garment of stuff or leather, and that, too, till evening
comes, is unclean. If he has had intercourse with a woman, she,
too, must wash, and she, too, till evening comes, is unclean”(Lv
15:16-18). As far as I could see, the Old Testament made no
specific recommendations about the use of sex in marriage, said
nothing about pre-marital sex, omitted any mention of
masturbation, and was even completely silent about the unborn
child's right to live, which I found surprising in the light of
Roman Catholic opposition to abortion: “If men fall out, and one
of them strikes a woman who is pregnant, so that the child is
still-born, but no harm is done, he must pay whatever sum the
woman's husband demands, and the judge agrees to; if harm follows,
then life must pay for life. So it is to be: an eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot; burning
for burning, wound for wound, bruise for bruise”(Ex 21:22), but
for the death of the child, nothing!
- However, Christ himself took a different line: “You
have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth. But I tell you that you should not offer resistance to
injury. Love your enemies. Your heavenly Father will forgive you
your transgressions, if your forgive your fellow-men theirs”(Mt
5:38.44; 6:14).
- I could not help but think about Paul VI's generally
unnoticed but wise acknowledgment in Humanae Vitae that marriage
is in reality each husband's and wife's “mutual gift of
themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them
alone”(§8), and about the bitterness surrounding the
publication of that Encyclical as a whole, as I read the words of
Saint Paul: “Each of us will have to give an account of himself
before G-d. Let us cease, then, to lay down rules for one another,
and make this rule for ourselves instead, not to trip up or
entangle a brother's conscience” (Rm 14:12-13). “I am free do do
what I will; yes, but not everything can be done without harm. I
am free to do what I will; but I must not abdicate my own liberty.
Your bodies belong to the body of Christ. The fornicator is
commiting a crime against his own body. Surely you know that your
bodies are the shrines of the Holy Spirit, who dwells in you. And
he is G-d's gift to you, so that you are no longer your own
masters. Glorify G-d by making your bodies the shrines of his
presence”(1 Co 6:12.15.19-20), not, I noted, by neglecting them,
or treating them as objects. “Make it your first care to find the
reign of G-d, and his approval”(Mt 6:33).
- Whatever the correct interpretation of
Humanae Vitae, Paul VI
certainly made it clear he intended to maintain the rule of
celibacy for priests of the Latin rite. In 1969 I became
acquainted with a certain priest then studying sociology at London
University, Father John Roberts, not a Salesian; he told me that,
despite the opposition of various Catholic friends, he was
planning to get married without going through the formalities of
seeking any dispensation from the Pope of his vow of celibacy. He
appreciated that I did not favour such a line of action myself,
and also that, for personal reasons, I did not feel he was ready
for marriage at that stage. Nevertheless, when he requested my
objective theological opinion about the legitimacy of his
standpoint, I could only reply that if he saw religious
institutions and authority figures as obstacles to living unity
and as signs of disunity and contradiction, his creative
disaffiliation from some of the institutional structures might be
among the best available expressions for his personal commitment
to Christ in his mystical body, and might be a genuine
contribution towards that unity for which Christ had prayed so
much. I remembered the words of Teilhard de Chardin: “Unity
differentiates, and all that genuinely ascends, eventually
converges.”
- I had no wish to water down the Gospel. “You must
serve G-d or money; you cannot serve both”(Mt 6:24). “The Father
loves his Son and so has given everything into his hands; and he
who believes in the Son has eternal life, but anyone who refuses
to believe in the Son will never see life; G-d's displeasure hangs
over him continually”(Jn 3:35-36). Jesus Christ said: “If anyone
does the will of my Father who is in heaven, he is my brother, and
sister, and mother”(Mt 12:50). When a woman from the crowd
exclaimed, “Blessed be the womb that bore you, the breasts which
you have sucked,” he replied, “Shall we not say rather, Blessed
are those who hear the word of G-d, and keep it”(Lk
11:27-28).
- “The children of this world marry and are given in
marriage; but those who are found worthy to attain that other
world, and resurrection from the dead, take neither wife nor
husband; mortal no longer, they will be as the angels in heaven
are, children of G-d, now that the resurrection has given them
birth”(Lk 20:34-36).
- I still feel that these words need to be pondered
carefully in any inquiry into the value of priestly celibacy. It
would, as my analyst once remarked, be a strange twist of fortune
to have a married priesthood at the very moment when the other
members of society seemed to be leaving marriage behind, perhaps,
I thought, in order to live as twice-born in the spirit of the
kingdom. “A man cannot see the kingdom of G-d without being born
anew”(Jn 3:3), but it remains within him all the time, there for
the seeking. Therefore, “let us abandon the ways of darkness, and
put on the armour of light. Let us pass our time honourably, as by
the light of day, not in revelling and drunkennes, not in lust and
wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves
with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and
nature's appetites”(Rm 13:12-14).
- The more I thought about it at the time, the more I
was bewildered and confused by the contrast between Don Bosco's
insistence that Salesians should avoid the company of women,
Father O'Brien's emphasis on the need to wage war on the flesh,
Pope Paul's views on birth control and priestly celibacy, and
Jesus Christ's own relaxed view of the link between legal adultery
and fidelity to personal values. “Woman, where are your accusers?
Has no one condemned you? I will not condemn you either. Go, and
do not sin again henceforward”(Jn 8:4-11). “He who casts his eyes
on a woman so as to lust after her has already committed adultery
with her in his heart”(Mt 5:28), and lots of men undoubtedly feast
their eyes in this way, so why all the fuss when someone actually
acts out his feelings!
- Of course, in the Christian view “a man does well to
abstain from all intercourse with women”(1 Co 7:1). “It is better
not to marry at all. That conclusion, however, can be taken in
only by those who have the gift”(Mt 19:11), because this degree of
personal freedom is a gift, not the result of legal
enactments.
- Jesus Christ, who lived in virginity and did not
marry, had a very religious mother and no ordinary human father.
For a man who was also G-d to have experienced no need of the
companionship of marriage is one thing, to suppose that all who
share his priesthood in the Western Church are similarly placed is
quite another. The advantage of the Christian priesthood is,
perhaps, that it affords the priest an opening for making himself
an integral and not merely a biological father in a world not
short of population, but in great need of spiritual stimulation. I
came to feel that if some priests were women, this goal of
integral parenthood might be more easily attainable.
- Christ himself related to men and women as free
persons rather than seeing them merely as actual or prospective
parties to the responsibilities of married life, which was not his
central concern. “If the unbelieving partner is for separating,
let them separate; in such a case, the brother or the sister is
under no compulsion”(1 Co 7:15), Saint Paul wrote, giving one of
the few grounds for divorce recognized so far by the Roman
Catholic Church.
- Although the basic human relations in the Christian
community do not seem to me to be those of husband and wife, I
feel I must concede to Freud that they are not devoid of a certain
sexual quality. Christians are invited to live as children of
their Father in heaven, and as brothers and sisters of Jesus
Christ. Sexuality is thereby released from its restricting link
with genital sexual development, and, somewhat in the way later
envisioned by Marcuse, it expands into a diffuse, total and
all-embracing eroticism, for example, in the life of Francis of
Assisi. Such eroticism has a value of its own, and is also the
matrix for the expression of authentic spiritual joy. The
condemnation of adultery and fornication does not mean that
sexuality itself is to be extinguished, repressed, devaluated or
transcended, but only that it needs Christ's liberating redemption
for it to be made truly human. In other words, Freud, no doubt
influenced by nineteenth-century reductivist materialism,
underplayed sex by his rationalistic and puritanical attitude, and
showed insufficient imagination and a lamentable lack of spiritual
insight.
- Within the context of human communication, which is
the process whereby men and women grow out of their self-centred
isolation into a genuinely organic community of interests and
values, sexual approaches and responses cannot be merely a stream
or even an ocean of conscious and unconscious openings,
experiences, drives, glows, surrenders, meetings, thrusts,
journeys, developments and ecstasies; they have to be all of these
things, I feel, and to be them intelligently, reasonably and
responsibly.
- The spectres of Manichæism14 and
Jansenism, with their severely repressive attitudes towards sex,
continue to haunt the Roman Catholic cupboard, but their skeletons
seem best left undisturbed. Seen in proper perspective, the
sometimes strange dispositions of ecclesiastical authority are
more the expression of the Church's psychological, pedagogical and
pastoral prudence and lack of prudence in given sets of
circumstances, than attempted statements of moral principle.
“Books which of set purpose discuss, narrate or teach lascivious
or obscene things are to be quite forbidden since one must
consider not only faith, but also morals, which are easily
corrupted as a rule by the reading of books of this kind. However,
because of their propriety and elegance of expression ancient
books written by pagans, although they must in no way be read to
boys, are allowed” (Paul IV, 24 March 1564).
- Unlike the Old Testament Jews, the Roman Catholic
Church has always frowned on masturbation, and on heterosexual
encounters outside of marriage which, even if they fall short of
intercourse, make likely either loss of seed in the male or orgasm
in the female. Thus, in 325, the first ecumenical Council of Nicea
declared that self-castration was an obstacle to the reception of
holy orders. Leo IX, writing to Saint Peter Damien in 1054,
imposed canonical penalties on persons in holy orders masturbating
alone, or with the hands of another, or spilling their seed
between a person's thighs, or practising sodomy. In this century
Pius XI declared that it is possible to commit grave sins against
chastity with unmarried persons without having actual intercourse,
and that the sin in question is a breach not only of positive law,
but of natural law, too - natural law being here meant, of course,
in its theological, not its philosophical sense. The circumstances
envisaged in these declarations, however, have been usually those
of cases in which one person at least of those concerned either is
or has been married. Because I accept the Church's official and
definitive teachings without reservation, and disassociate myself
only from the private restrictive opinions of theologians, and
from the related pastoral rather than doctrinal guide-lines of
temporizing Popes, I am glad to find that in the pre-marital phase
of life, the Church in her explicit teaching has been concerned
not so much with individual behaviour patterns, as with
educational procedures, social mores, and institutions to enable
people to grow towards a happy married life or a mature choice of
celibacy, as a result of their being increasingly attentive,
intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and open to development and
conversion.
- While I was teaching in the Salesian College,
Battersea, Father Terence O'Brien was a member of the same
religious community, having moved the national centre of his
Dominic Savio Guild from Bollington to 34 Orbel Street. Despite
our differences in theology there was a good relationship between
us, and he took an interest in the course of my Freudian analysis,
of which I don't think he really approved. In the summer of 1969
he invited me to accompany him to the annual conference of the
Guild of Pastoral Psychology, which was being held at Lancaster
Gate, but a last-minute engagement prevented his attending, so
that I went there alone.
- During the reception after the conference I met Dr Ann
Faraday, now well known as the author of
Dream-Power (London:
Hodder & Stoughton 1972), and she introduced me to John
Wren-Lewis, who had contributed to
Psychoanalysis Observed
(Charles Rycroft , editor, Psychoanalysis
Observed, London: Penguin Books 1968). They
were both very much interested in the relations between psychology
and religion, in social change, and in educational improvement,
and we became friends. Their influence stimulated me to deepen my
questioning of my own vocation as a priest, of my position as a
believer in the Christian G-d, and of the validity of the Freudian
claims. They opened my eyes to the real possibility of a better
life in a better world as a result of my fuller insertion into
current developments in London.
- My analyst also felt that my teaching appointment in
Battersea was not helping the progress of my analysis, and Father
Williams agreed both to its termination in July 1969, and to my
beginning, in addition to my continuing individual analysis, and
again at the expense of the Salesians, to attend the Richmond
Fellowship training-centre in Holland Park each Thursday to
participate in regular sessions of group-dynamics, and to attend
lectures in social psychology, as well as taking part in an
on-going seminar on the technology of human relationships. Since
the Salesians place such a great emphasis on community, my analyst
and I had felt the Fellowship's course would help me improve the
quality of my own contribution to the Salesian life. In the
Holland Park centre I mixed with clergy and nuns belonging to the
different Christian Churches, and also with social-workers,
youth-leaders and probation officers. This helped me to feel less
alone in my quest for more genuine forms of community, to
appreciate more deeply the difficulties to be faced, and to
understand in a more practical way some of the principles of
renewal.
- The next thing was to try and achieve some practical
results, and it seemed unwise to try and tackle something as large
as the renewal of the whole Salesian Congregation, even in
collaboration, without the experience of some smaller
pilot-scheme. In 1969 Father Thomas Walsh was living in a small
house in Blackheath, adjacent to the parochial house, and was
trying to prepare students to go to South America as missionary
priests. He had formed a new organization called the Crusade of
the Holy Spirit for this purpose, and, after a period in Spain, he
had chosen Blackheath as a possibly suitable base of operations.
He wanted another resident priest to help with the studies and so
that the students would have another priest to whom they could
talk, and asked Father Thomas Hall, in his capacity of deputy
Provincial, if the Salesians had anybody to spare for such a
work.
- I was informed of the project, and I felt community
life in a new missionary training-house would provide me with an
opportunity of learning in miniature how to feel and think as a
Salesian of the new age. The Salesians, I knew, were preparing
themselves for big changes, but had to move slowly because of
their numbers, and because of their being caught up in a complex
legal framework. The Crusaders, however, being without any
canonical status whatever, had no rules to hamper them, and could
move as freely as Father Walsh allowed. His main problem, in fact,
seemed to be that of finding a bishop willing to ordain his
students at the end of their course, and he may have solved that
problem now.
- At all events, I agreed to go and live in Blackheath
in September 1969. While I was there, Father Walsh always left me
with the impression that he was well pleased with my company and
my contribution to the life of his community, and emphasized that
I was free to arrange my own programme and come and go as I
pleased. The journey to and from Harley Street now became more of
a headache, but I didn't complain.
- As things turned out, I stayed in Blackheath less than
six weeks and was soon living in the Salesian house in Battersea
once more, while one or more of the then Blackheath students
subsequently moved to an already thriving missionary seminary at
Mill Hill in north London, formally to begin their official
training for the priesthood there.
- Father Walsh had told me that he wanted another priest
in the house so that the students would have more than one priest
to speak to, and most of the students, during my first week there,
chose to help me become acquainted with the life and spirit of the
Crusade, in which I was extremely interested, by speaking to me
often. Father Walsh also furnished me with some books he had
written about the Crusade to explain his ideas and the spirit that
lay behind them, and I read these with great care. I did what I
could to respond thoughtfully and honestly to the students'
questions. They were men in their twenties, and some of their
queries showed quite a degree of Christian maturity.
- I found there were times when their questions could
not be answered in practice, save by a person with the competent
authority. If they wondered if I would sing Mass in English
instead of in Latin, my reply was to express my willingness to fit
in with their wishes, and to refer them to Father Walsh, as their
superior, for a decision. Not being myself a Crusader, I felt it
unfitting that I should try to act as go-between.
- Other questions were even more difficult, since they
raised issues calling for official ecclesiastical authority, as
distinct from the family authority Father Walsh had in his
community. Because the Crusade was without canonical standing, he
was himself without any canonical authority whatsoever, and on
these questions I could not refer them to him. I felt the only
course open to me was to refer them to another priest possessed of
such authority, and in the more important matters to cover myself
I gave a report of my understanding of the situation to Monsignor
Charles Henderson, the Vicar General of the Diocese, as the
closest competent authority (he was, in fact, our next-door
neighbour in Cresswell Park, since he was also Parish Priest of
Blackheath's parish of Mary, Help of Christians), and to Father
Williams, because he was my own superior, explaining to the
students that this was the most I could do.
- On 3 October 1969 Father Williams thanked me for
sending him this document, agreed with the opinion expressed to
him by Father Walsh that because of the harm I had done I should
leave Blackheath at the earliest possible moment, and hoped that I
would be able to return to Battersea on the day on which I
received his letter in order to help his secretary, Father Thomas
Swanzey, SDB, whom I already knew very well, with official
translation work.
- I can only suppose Father Walsh's constant expressions
of pleasure in my company masked his fear of real communication
with me, and were not a complete statement of his feelings. I
regret that he never shared his negative impressions with me at
all. I presume he aired these in full, without any reference to
his pleasure, in speaking about me to Father Williams, who then,
in entire good faith, reached his decision.
- Back in Battersea I was asked to share in the
translation from Italian to English of five volumes of proposals
and counter-proposals for the complete reorganization of the
Salesian Congregation in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council,
to undertake the general revision of the overall translation, and
to prepare an English translation of a new critical study in
French of the life of Saint John Bosco. Father Williams was kind
enough to say that one of his reasons for wanting me to do such a
work was that I was very efficient at it, and when I suggested I
might be so good a translator as to make documents emphasize the
points I wanted to have made and slide over others I disliked, and
this without being in any sense literally inaccurate, he laughed,
and told me not to overcomplicate life. Being familiar with all
the relevant Vatican Documents, more conscious than ever of the
need for a correct methodology in the work of renewal, and eager
to make my maximum contribution to the aggiornamento or up-dating
movement in both the Church and the Salesian Congregation, I set
about this new task very gladly.
- It was, in fact, a wonderful opportunity to make
myself conversant with the general state of feelings for and
against this or that sort of change throughout the whole Salesian
world, and for maturing my own opinions on the points at issue in
the light of the newly available critical study of Don Bosco's own
life. The five volumes of What Salesians Think
of Their Congregation
Today - A Thumbnail Sketch based on the Discussion of the First
Special Provincial Chapters held from January to May
1969 contained no less than 54 chapters,
1,017 pages, 3,753 carefully tabulated proposals with an
indication of the votes for and against each one of them in each
of the 73 provinces of the Salesian world, and 274 concluding
points at issue. My study of these in the light of my experience
certainly gave me plenty of material for my
psychoanalysis.
- In theory the Salesian life is marvellous. In practice
my own experience of it was always that it was wonderful fun, in
spite of everything, and I look back to my earlier life as a
Salesian with affection and gratitude. How was I to account for
the distress of many Salesians at not being able to put the
Salesian ideal into practice, or give an attractive witness to it?
Today I personally feel less interested in the general theory that
explains the overall situation, and am much more concerned in
helping individual Salesians answer this question for
themselves.
- To do this I must, as Carl Rogers, the American
psychologist says, be perceived as being trustworthy, dependable
and consistent in some deep sense; I must be able to communicate
unambiguously what I am; I must allow myself to experience
positive attitudes of caring, liking, warmth, interest and respect
towards each individual I encounter; I must respect my own
feelings and needs and be strong enough to remain separate as a
person from the other, permitting him his separateness and his
freedom to be what he is - honest or deceitful, despairing or
over-confident, infantile or adult; I must be able to enter the
other's private world so completely that I see his feelingss and
personal meanings as he does, and lose all desire to evaluate or
judge them; I must be able to accept each facet of his personality
unconditionally, and to communicate this attitude, so that my
behaviour is not perceived as a threat, I free him from the threat
of any external evaluation, and I meet him as a person who is in
process of becoming, instead of being bound by his past or my
past.
- There are, however, obvious historical reasons for the
present crisis in the Salesian life. Incompetence is partly to
blame. There has been a failure to develop the necessary
sensitivity to the signs of the times. This resulted from a
mistaken concentration on scientific analyses of situations, which
easily became a partly escapist evasion of the realities of those
situations themselves. There has been a tendency to regard the
Second Vatican Council documents as static and conclusive answers,
while the Council provided only the dynamic beginning for further
inquiry into the best ways of refounding the Church. There has
been an excessive preoccupation with fidelity to the past and some
refusal to face the challenge of the future. There has been a
relative neglect of dogma and an attaching of too much weight even
to the moribund prescriptions of the present Canon Law, instead of
courageously anticipating the renewal of the Law15. All of
this seemed to me to indicate a certain regrettable lack of faith
in the Church and the presence of at least unconscious anxiety
about the vitality of the spirit of Don Bosco today and tomorrow.
Fortunately, G-d will provide.
- Don Giulio Girardi is one Salesian who has refused to
be a prisoner in the ghetto of routine thinking. It was learned in
Rome, on 18 September 1969, that this former tutor of mine, a
leading expert on Marxism, and a Vatican consultant of the
Secretariat for Non-Believers, had been suspended from his post as
professor of philosophy in the Pontifical Salesian University, and
that Father Gérard Lutte, whom I also knew slightly, a
specialist in the psychology of the adolescent, had been removed
from his chair at the same time. Two other Salesians were reduced,
apparently, to the lay state. A fifth was kept on only after going
in for self-criticism. Two or three lecturers with relatively
conservative views were also removed from their posts. This news
came as a great shock to me, principally because of my friendship
for Father Girardi, who had taught me so much.
- I wrote to consult Father Girardi myself on behalf of
Father John Roberts, who had previously, as I earlier mentioned,
told me he wished to get married, and who was still undecided
about his position. In his reply of 14 November 1969 Father
Girardi referred to the difficulty of justifying obligatory
priestly celibacy, to the need to reform structures that hinder
Christian living, and to the personal judgment of conscience which
can, in certain circumstances, oblige an individual, for the sake
of some important value at stake, to break with the present
institutions of the Church.
- Father Girardi has remained enthusiastically a
Salesian, despite the depressing effect of the events of September
1969 on his sensitive personality, but on the occasion of his
removal from his professorial position in the Salesian University,
Father Fedrigotti, SDB, the Rector Major's deputy, told him: “Your
ideology is not that of the Congregation and so you yourself ought
to feel uncomfortable in this centre of learning. As for the other
professors who think as you do, they should either review their
position or withdraw in their turn from the
Athenæum”
- Ideology means that ideas which are really derivative
are wrongly treated as primary. Ideology means that the emphasis
is deliberately placed on the wrong points in discussing political
and social issues. It means that people are given only a
misleading or incomplete picture of the facts at issue which
concern them. It means that myths are created or preserved as a
means of governmental control. Time and effort are wasted on the
development of theories in abstraction from the reality of praxis.
Men entertain the vain hope that a mere system of ideas will
provide the key to social improvement. There are authoritarian
attempts to fit people into social schemes, instead of planning
for persons in the first place.
- I have no ideology of my own. I believe that all
religious behaviour degenerates into a superstition whenever the
objective content of religious language is mistaken for a direct
expression of the living mystery of which it can be no more than
the symbolic mediation.
- As a Roman Catholic I unequivocally accept the dogmas
of the Trinity of three divine Egos in one divine psychological
consciousness, and of the hypostatic union of a divine and a human
consciousness in the unique person of Jesus. My meditation on
these Christian mysteries has helped mature my conviction that man
is not a duality of body and soul, of flesh and spirit, of good
and evil, of light and darkness, in the manner in which many
Catholics seem to me to continue to believe that he is, and in
which, certainly, he is unhelpfully described as being in the
Manichæan, Platonist,16 Augustinian, and Jansenist traditions, still so influential among nominal Christians,
including some, perhaps many, Salesians. By the end of 1969 I was
more than ever convinced that bodies were nice, that matter was
good, and that everything had to be looked at in the
light.
- In my experience, we do not have bodies; we are
bodies. And even this is not a satisfactory way of putting it. The
Russians do not say “the sky is blue” but “the sky is bluing,” and
I began to maintain that I was bodying. I did not experience
myself as a body, as a static or precisely assignable object; I
experienced myself dynamically involving myself in being and
living bodily in and about the world. My bodying was the subject17 more than an object of my conscious living.
- I learned from Marshall McLuhan that the world was
only an object for me to the extent that I was alienated from it.
Civilization was an extension of my body, a development in human
bodying, thanks to which we came to live comfortably in the
universe, to be at home in it, to experience ourselves on a world
scale instead of feeling ourselves to be encapsulated in our
skin.
- I had long been interested in Christian mysticism,18 and life in London drew my attention to the vogue for
Zen Buddhism, and the new popularity of transcendental meditation.
In the wake of Eastern Gurus, some Western LSD trippers showed a
keen appreciation of the unity of human consciousness, the
unrestrictedness of its field, and the need for its subjects to
resist the tempting demands of objectivity. They seemed to favour
at least a partial return to that primitive participation mystique
which we think of as having characterized the social consciousness
of preliterate man. I recalled the claim of a certain retired
British Army Colonel, whom I had known in Beckford, that, when on
foreign service in India, he had been able to smell a rainstorm
several hours away.
- Consciousness, I recognized, had no assignable limits.
It was intersubjective from the start. In my encounters with
others, I was becoming more fully “I” involving myself with “You”
and so responsible for “Us.” In the experience of encounter I
appreciated what it was to have acquaintances, companions,
colleagues, friends, lovers. As living thoughts in the heart of
popular tradition encountered in daily living had always moved me
more deeply than the bloodless anatomical specimens delineated so
carefully in my academic textbooks, so Grimm's fairy-tales,
Tolkien's The Lord of the
Rings, the parables of Jesus, the dreams of
Don Bosco, the pageantry of Coronation Day and the State Opening
of Parliament meant more to me than my technical knowledge of
academic philosophy. Like Gilbert Ryle, I found living animals
more interesting than stuffed ones in museum cases.
- Too many of my fellow Salesians seemed alienated and
cut off from real life. The alienated man inhabited a strange
world of objects and knew the fear and dread experienced by Mole
in The Wind in the
Willows when he first ventured alone into the
darkness of the wild wood; the integrated self, on the other hand,
was at home everywhere and could experience in every place the
cosy warmth that Mole found, thanks to the kindness of Rat, when
he returned to Mole End.
- The Salesian Congregation and the Catholic Church are
caught up in contemporary men's state of alienation. Contemporary
man feels powerless, because his behaviour fails to procure the
satisfaction of his needs. He finds life meaningless, because he
cannot make up his mind what to believe. He is completely at a
loss about where to go in life, because the only way open to him
seems to necessitate his trampling under foot all the prevailing
standards of society. He is isolated and alone, because he feels
compelled to reject even in principle the values on which society
has been built. He is even a stranger to himself, because the
satisfaction he seeks for himself in the future cannot be hoped
for as the result of anything he can really do in his immediate
situation.
- I see man alienated from the realization of his
historically created human possibilities, from the satisfaction of
his personal needs, from the cultivation of his finer feelings,
and even from his own body. He is, quite simply, alienated from
himself.
- The Second Vatican Council has described his
situation: “While man extends his power in every direction, he
does not always succeed in subjecting it to his own welfare.
Striving to penetrate farther into the deeper recesses of his own
mind, he frequently appears more unsure of himself. Gradually and
precisely he lays bare the laws of society, only to be paralysed
by uncertainty about the direction to give it”
- My analysis helped me to understand that because I was
a humanist, I could not settle down to be merely a conventional
Englishman, a twentieth-century European, or a traditional Roman
Catholic, an uncritical Salesian. Committing myself in faith to
the paschal mystery of Christ's mysterious bodying towards G-d in
an infinitely expanding cosmic consciousness, I had to become
totally open. I was appalled by Father Fedrigotti's talk of
ideologies.
- I do not suppose that Father Fedrigotti, of whom I had
previously formed a very high impression when I had known him at
close hand both in Rome and Turin, would say today what he said in
1969, and I cannot identify my own situation with that of Father
Girardi, no matter how extensive the similarities. However, the
knowledge I had of the deputy Rector Major's position at that time
made it seem unrealistic for me to live from day to day as a
Salesian, solely on the basis of my theoretical hope that in a few
years' time everything would be different.
- In a letter of 5 November 1969 Father Girardi
suggested that those who were anxious about the future of the
Salesian Congregation because of what had happened to Father Lutte
and himself, should not lose time over the details of their
particular case, nor lessen their love and affection for those who
shared Father Fedrigotti's view about what the Salesian ought to
stand for. He felt that a spirit of prayer, dialogue and family
unity should be cultivated. In the interests of mutual
understanding he asked those who favoured renewal to make sure the
Rector Major heard their voice, so that he might appreciate fully
the existence of a real desire for renewal in very many members of
the Salesian family, and might not think that the majority were of
Father Fedrigotti's sort of persuasion.
- I saw my tutor's dismissal as a sort of Salesian
Galileo case, and my reaction to Father Girardi's letter was to
compose a short circular on “The possibilities of the survival of
the Salesian Congregation as a contribution to a dialogue in love
on some aspects of our present task before G-d,” which I sent to
the Rector Major, to the English-speaking Provincials, and to the
Rectors of the Salesian houses in England, on the feast of my own
patron-Saint, the original Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas of
Bari, 6 December 1969. In it I claimed that every Salesian had not
only the right but also the duty to judge and act according to his
conscience, but that no individual had the right to believe his
theology was automatically and infallibly that of the Church, or
that it should be that of the Congregation. If young Salesians
formed in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council were placed in
hostilely conservative surroundings they would be unable to think
things through for themselves. They might very easily regress to a
more infantile state, with the consequent disintegration of their
still fragile personality, loss of identity, rôle confusion,
increase of uncontrolled aggression, and over-indulgence in
pleasure. Such behaviour would not augur well for the future of
the Salesian Congregation. Unless the circumstances that rendered
it necessary were altered, and that quickly, the Congregation
might be unable to survive. I wrote:
- “The main thing wrong with our Congregation today is
the blatant contradiction between the community and the individual
methods of dealing with situations. We fall between two stools,
and can easily have the worst of both worlds.
- The family spirit brings superiors, confrères,
boys, and members of the extended Salesian family together in many
ways, so that we can truthfully talk of our life together, of us,
our, and we. On this score we are the Congregation of today, bang
up-to-date, with the world in the palm of our hands and a rich
apostolate all around us. Young people all want this community
solidarity and intimacy and shared sincerity and
self-sacrifice.
- On the other hand, in confession, meditation,
manifestation, and the exercise of authority, the individual
one-to-one relationship is exercised in a way that still fails to
match in with this community approach. Senior confrères do
their duty by the community, but are content that superiors decide
things for them, provided they are left privately in peace to
manage their own affairs for a certain minimum amount of time -
the evenings, or weekends, or holidays. Hence, while criticizing
superiors those confrères do not want the community
approach, but want to keep their privacy.
- Recently the sorry substitute for community dialogue
and communication is the use of provincial circulars,
questionnaires, votes, sounding out the opinion of various
individuals. From the point of view of the community approach now
becoming common in the world and the Chuch, particularly among the
young, these are all meaningless irrelevancies, and indulgence in
them is seen as a time-consuming way of running away from
reality.
- To put it candidly, truthfully, and with, I must
recognize, a bluntness that many find disconcerting, the only
solution is for the real community approach to be instituted and
made to work first of all among the members of the Superior
Council, among Provincials, among a Provincial and his Rectors,
among the members of the House Council. It is only after you have
experienced, understood and appreciated the value of the community
approach, not as a theory, but as a reality, that you can, without
risks that are too great to take, encourage it among others in
novitiate, houses of formation, Better World retreats, and the
rest.
- When you meet formally and officially you need to
learn to meet not just as individuals discussing objective
problems, but as persons sharing your feelings and developing a
common emotional attitude towards the personal repercussions in
the emotional life of yourselves and others of the practical
decisions it is your task to take. Without this awareness, which
will vary in depth, you will, in my view, be courting
disaster.
- Of course, I believe in G-d's providence… it may be
G-d's providence that is speaking to you now through me.”
- The superiors in Turin translated their copy of my
circular letter into Italian and, presumably, it went into the
scales with other letters and papers reaching them in response to
Father Girardi's earlier circular.
- In England, Father Williams, in a letter of 17
December 1969, said that even if one granted the truth of the
rather naïve notion that the Rector Major would not have
known what the “pro-Girardi” group thought unless I had
enlightened him, it would have been more logical for me to have
written to him in Italian, and not to have sent a circular letter
in English. There is, of course, some substance in this point of
view, though the point of writing to the Rector Major was never
that of merely informing him about certain facts, but of helping
him to appreciate the extent and intensity of the desire for
aggiornamento.
- In addition to this, Father Williams said that by
writing to the English Rectors in the way I had done I was tending
to strengthen a growing opinion that I was unbalanced, and that in
consequence my views were not worth serious consideration. On the
surface it seemed that the course of my psychoanalysis was only
aggravating the problems he had hoped it would solve. He had no
doubt that I honestly felt I was doing good, but many others were
convinced I was doing a great deal of harm, particularly among
younger confrères. One of his own problems was that of
finding me some place and kind of work where such harm would be
reduced to a minimum. He did not think he had yet
succeeded.
- I for my part was forced to conclude that I had not
succeeded as yet in getting my point across. I felt that I was
being scapegoated by some Salesians in England. If young Salesians
found it hard to accept the style of life in certain Salesian
communities, this was not because something was lacking in the
spirit of those communities, but because I had perverted the
mentality of these young Salesians during my period in
Beckford!
- It seemed to me possible that my image had not been
helped by the document about my own emotional difficulties which I
had written in Beckford, and had at that time shown to a small
number of students, and to the Provincial. In the light of my
subsequent studies, and of my experience in psychoanalysis, I
decided to rewrite it with greater technical exactitude, and an
improved presentation. I hoped this would help to clear the air,
by making it easier to understand, and also by rendering it more
difficult to accuse me of any uncritical acceptance of certain
ill-considered forms of untraditional behaviour. Apparently, I was
wrong.
- In a letter of 8 March 1970 Father Williams informed
me that I was not to undertake any further commitments beyond
those I already had in hand. He could not guarantee to keep me in
the London area beyond the end of the school year, and if I had
any engagements beyond that period, they might have to be
cancelled. He very much regretted that he did not seem to be able
to find me any work that I could undertake without causing
difficulty to the Congregation in one way or another. He was in
the course of consulting the Superior Council in Turin on the
problem.
- This letter made me feel considerable concern about
the prospects of the Salesians in England. It did not lessen my
belief in the value of the document I had written, with which one
non-Salesian academic, who had known me for several years, had
already expressed himself as being very much in sympathy. Among
other things he wrote:
- “I've been trying to think how best these ideas might
be disseminated. I can well believe that many have found your
ideas uncomfortable and disquieting - I've experienced similar
reactions though in a minor key myself. So much of what you say,
in fact all of it, needs to be said, and said loudly and clearly.
It all depends, of course, ultimately, on the sort of men one has
as superiors. To some, what you say would read as a manifesto for
revolution (which is what it is in the non-pejorative sense of the
word), and I know some superiors who would take the easy option
and reject the statement and the person… However, for me the
analyses are immensely revealing of a situation which is real, and
that which you express so movingly is a not uncommon
picture.”
- This kind testimonial from a brother priest was not
the only one I received, and I am grateful for such encouragement.
At the time, because Father Williams had told me he was writing to
Turin, I decided I had better send them a copy of the document
which had provoked his reaction, and in my accompanying letter I
said that I did not wish to leave London, and that I had no wish
to replace Father Williams as Provincial when his own term of
office reached its conclusion, which was fast
approaching.
- ADDITIONAL
NOTES:
- 3. Briefly reviewing the 1973 edition of
Ecstasy and Vendetta in The Universe on 10th
August that year, Father Thomas Corbishley, SJ, whose welcome new
translation of The Spiritual Exercises of
Saint Ignatius had been published by Burns
& Oates ten years previously, 'quoted' only this sentence,
with the “of” omitted, as 'evidence' in support of his claim that
in my book: “Real argument is almost totally lacking." The
sentence if, of course, an implicit reference to P. F. Rudge's
well known Ministry and
Management (London: Tavistock Publications
1968). Students of The Spiritual
Exercises may also wish to refer to the
earlier English translation and commentary by Alosius Ambruzzi, SJ
(Bangalore: St Joseph's College 1955).
- Other reviews of Ecstasy and
Vendetta appeared in The
Australian (12th January 1974),
Baptist Times (26th July
1973), The Birmingham
Post (29th June 1973),
Catholic Herald (21st
September 1973), Church of
England
Newspaper (20th July
1973), Church Times (13th
July 1973), The Daily
Gleaner (19th November
1973), The Irish
Press (28th July 1973),
Liverpool Daily Post
(29th June 1973), Manchester Evening
News (28th June 1973),
Mercury (Hobart,
Tasmania: 26th January 1974), The Northern
Echo (Darlington, Durham: 10th August 1973),
The
Press (Christchurch, New
Zealand), Rand Daily
Mail, The
Scotsman (4th August 1973),
Spectator (21st July
1973), The Sunday Times
(8th July 1973), The
Tablet (7th July 1973),
The Times Literary
Supplement (1st March 1974),
and The Yorkshire Post
(5th July 1973).
- The review in The Irish
Times was, incidentally, by Brian Power who
wrote: "intending readers should be warned that his arguments do
not always make for light reading." Writing in the
Liverpool Daily Post Don
Smith also felt Ecstasy and Vendetta
was “by no means an easy book to read,” but
considered it offered “tremendous insight.” Perhaps Father
Corbishley already had more than enough on his plate, when he was
invited to review my book, and failed to allow it the attention
its contents merited. Alternatively, like W. D. Cattanach, the
author of the discerning review in The
Scotsman, he may have sensed the radical
importance of the questions the book raises - if so, he would have
done well to follow Cattanach's brave example, and to have shared
his own related uncertainties with his readers.
- As Desmond Fisher noted at the time in his review in
the Spectator: “Between
1939 and 1963, only 315 priests throughout the world were granted
Vatican dispensations from the Roman Catholic ministry. A survey,
commissioned by but so far suppressed by the Vatican, forecasts
that between 1971 and 1985, 41,840 priests will be laicised
against a total intake of 25,976.”
- 4 This paragraph epitomises the main thesis of Peter
Rudge's book, cited in note 3.
- 5. What I affirm on this and in the following pages
may at first appear to be of little use to those readers who have
not been brought up to believe in the saving work of Jesus Christ;
it doesn't sound like the right story to them! So, what about
those who have never heard of Jesus Christ? Indeed, what about
animals? Nowadays I prefer to respond individually to personal
inquiries and to relate to individual animals also individually,
but several important relevant questions are explicitly considered
much more fully in Voice I+N The
Darkness, where I also provide more and more
detailed notes. Meanwhile, I particularly recommend Joan D'Arcy
Cooper's Culbone - A Spiritual
History (1977),
The
Ancient Teaching of Yoga and the Spiritual
Evolution of Man (1979),
The Door Within (1979),
Corner Stones of
the Spiritual World
(1981), and Guided Meditation and the Teaching
of Jesus (Element Books, 1982); all Joan
Cooper's books may be obtained from Culbone Community Trust,
Porlock Weir, Somerset.
- 6. Closer parallels in my own case are with the
central characters in Michael Fairless's classic tale:
Brother Hilarius, and in
Brian Bates's The Way of
Wyrd (Arrow Books 1984).
- 7. Holistic theologians more sensitively attuned to
the actual differences between 'disorder' and 'chaos' than I then
was, and than, indeed, most contemporary speakers and writers of
English still appear to be, will appreciate the value of
person-centred courses and workshops exploring The Theology of
Chaos - as well as the chaos of theology! Cfr: James Gleick,
Chaos - Making a New Science
(London: Heinemann 1988).
- 8. "Husband and wife, through that mutual gift of themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them alone, develop that union of two persons in which they perfect one another, in order to cooperate with G-d..." What I have grown to feel, see and understand to be the profound anthropological and mystical significance of Pope Paul's pregnant phrase, which I have here placed in italics, and which appears on page 10 of the original 1968 CTS English-language edition of this controversial encyclical, has so far been largely ignored by commentators and theologians - there is a sense in which each marriage is specifically distinct from any and, therefore, from every other marriage! In other words, every sacramental marriage is a law unto itself - somewhat as the beauty of every individual Chinese vase may only properly be assessed by reference to that particular aesthetic criterion it exclusively exemplifies.
- Orthodox bishops, priests and theologians have never sought to peep round the bedroom door, so that it is hard to understand why recent Popes have felt obliged to interfere in any individual marriage partnership's cooperation "with G-d"! Clearly, however, the last 3 lines in paragraph 7 are untrue; in writing as he did, Paul VI was not obeying the Second Vatican Council in general, nor adhering specifically to any directives contained in its Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes - indeed, in this respect at least, he was rather disregarding their primary emphasis and direction.
- Nor is paragraph 9 on page 11 a fair statement of the Roman Church's way of acting. Rome has rather tended to make married women their husbands' harlots and children-producing slaves, so that, though welcome, John-Paul II's prayer to G-d to forgive His Church for ill-treating so many women was long overdue.
- But I must not hide in generalities. The blemish in the page-long paragraph 9 occurs not on page 11, but at the top of page 12. Correctly, we are reminded that "Love is creative of life." A primary reference is, of course, Genesis 1: 22. 28, "G-d blessed them, saying, 'Be fruitful, multiply...' ... G-d blessed them, saying to them, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters...' "
- Notice that what G-d imparted was a blessing and a very broad recommendation, one, too, that committed to our first parents a great degree of authority, in the sense of mastery. I know that all true mastery is self-mastery, but none of G-d's recorded words authorise Paul VI's acceptance of the word "ordained" in this sentence at the top of page 12: "Marriage and married love are by their character ordained to the procreation and bringing up of children."
- Ecclesiastical Rome, as heir to Imperial Rome, with a Canon Law still at least tinged with the spirit of ancient Rome's military style of command, easily slips into "orders" - but the justification for any "orders" at all is, biblically speaking, of a very different provenance. In this context, "ordained" is not at all appropriate. Indeed, all that I have just said is implicit in the very next and final sentence of paragraph 9 of the document the Pope himself signed: "Children are the outstanding gift of marriage, and contribute in the highest degree to the parents' welfare." Orders don't lead to gifts; neither does welfare flourish to the highest degree when children are unwanted!
- Matthew 7:14 doesn't read: "Narrow is the gate and hard the road", but "Narrow is the gate and confined the road" - as opposed to "spacious". So, let not the Church blame either G-d or Nature for the difficulties and hardships her own officials have invented:
- "If all I know is a fraction - then my only fear is of losing the thread. The Great Way is easy, but people are forever being taken down side-tracks. They look after the palaces, but ignore the fields! The granaries are empty - but they wear wonderful clothes! They go about with arms, and gorge themselves on fine food and drink. How rich they are - and they have stolen it all from the poor. They are the robber barons of now - This is not the Way!" (Cf. Man-Ho Kwok, Martin Palmer & Jay Ramsay, Tao Te Ching - a new translation, Element Books, 1993, chapter 53.)
- Sadly, John-Paul II has so far not distanced himself sufficiently from Humanae Vitae's implicitly sadistic, even if unintentional and largely unconscious, chauvenist despotism, legalistic double-talk and doctrinally at least materially heretical failure faithfully to echo the Christian message transmitted to us in G-d's Word of Life - and of Life more abundant.
- The last paragraph on page 9 and, in particular, that portion of it which I have just examined above, illustrates this well. The "answer" proffered is harsh and despotic - but G-d is not a despot; Abraham and Lot will gladly confirm this truth.
- The "reasoning" about G-d's law regarding marriage on page 14 is quite needlessly twisted; marriage is, indeed, blessed by G-d, but there is no scriptural warrant for regarding it as involving "ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called." Even granting that by "man" here, Pope Paul VI clearly means "each and every adult human, whether male or female", it is hard to square either the celibacy of the priesthood or that of monks and nuns with any such "ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood." Whoever constructed this sentence seems to place a higher value on eggs than on chickens!
- Despite the wording of the final sentence of paragraph 12, "our contemporaries" are, and the evidence is already superabundant, more than capable of sensing the general invalidity of this portion of the late Holy Father's legacy to G-d's Church... Thank G-d, Genesis 1: 22. 28 is, as I have sought to emphasise, quite clear enough!
- And take the passage at the bottom of page 15. If it were never permissible to cut a person with a knife, why are surgeons paid high fees for cutting up their patients' bodies for those same patients' good? Or are we to say that their doing something "intrinsically bad" has suddenly become "good" because their intention is a well-meaning one? Despite the syllogistic form in which these sentences towards the end of paragraph 14 are arranged, no reason at all is suggested for the final: "It is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong." The plain fact is that no justification is required...
- The line of "reasoning" adopted by "Rome" in recent centuries has never sounded quite right to ordinary Catholics, and it is no wonder that Jesus Himself, in the course of several of His more recent, credible apparitions, has stated that His Church has inherited several wrong teachings from the old days of "the Dark Ages".
- Little wonder, then, that the Holy Father is suffering, trying his best to be good though he clearly is. What paragraph 17 on page 17 of his predecessor's Letter about the alleged "grave consequences of artificial birth control" states is almost the very opposite of the truth. I say "almost", because it is true that this teaching or "doctrine" has been "laid down by the Church" - but, a majority of that Church's living members affirm, not by G-d, and, therefore, not as a doctrine characterised by "truth".
- If I may venture to improve on the late Holy Father's words: "Let all pastors of souls consider how easily any un-Christ-like acceptance of the flawed teaching of Humanæ Vitæ can lead to the way being wide open to marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards." It is the Church's own marriage "laws" that occasion the most infidelity. There are, moreover, credible indications enough that, before he departed this world, Paul VI himself had grown to understand this.
- A very clear indication of the main problem appears in the 2nd paragraph on page 25: "For this reason husbands and wives should take up the burden appointed to them willingly... Then let them beg the help of G-d..." That word "should" clearly implies a command that is to be obeyed - but it is the Roman Church's command only, not that of Jesus of Nazareth; He came to Earth to remove our "burdens", not to increase them!
- Although several writers within the "Christian" tradition, such as Thomas à Kempis, seem to have had an unhealthy appetite for needless suffering coupled with an exorbitantly low degree of self-esteem, and although many priests, monks and nuns, including a few canonized Saints, have either brain-washed themselves or been brain-washed by others into believing that "Jesus sometimes inspires in His chosen followers a keen desire to imitate Him in His sufferings," with the important exception of all such sufferings as are simply part and parcel of what is involved in following the example of the Good Samaritan in his efforts to lessen and, if possible entirely eliminate our Neighbour's suffering, any so called "inspiration" inclining us to seek to suffer, far from being an expression of G-d's Will, is a Satanic temptation it is our Christian duty prayerfully and peacably to reject.
- Hence, instead of begging G-d's help to carry any diabolical "burden" of unnecessary suffering imposed on them by the Diktat of a misguided hierarchy, increasing numbers of truly Christian Roman Catholics are following the voice of Conscience, and wisely rejecting the heretical "teachings" of Humanae Vitae. This "teaching" is not one that can ever be "received".
- When St. Paul, the great Apostle of the Nations, wrote to husbands: "Love your wives!", he was not, as Paul VI seemed to imply, recommending marital rape, unwanted pregnancies, sexual dis-ease and mutual frustration, in other words, hell on earth leading to an early grave... What on page 24 is alleged to be "G-d's law" is often nothing other than hierarchical tyranny. "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy G-d!"
- Readers familiar with the Catechism of The Catholic Church will appreciate that all I have said above is fully consistent with the general tenour of its paragraphs 2376-8, and specifically with its insistence that "a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children", to priests and people, and also with its clear statement that "a child is not something owed to one" - whether this "one" be either a selfish parent or some supposedly voracious 'God', "but is a gift" (italicised in the original) both from G-d and for G-d I+N Love - and, therefore, essentially and, hopefully, increasingly Living not according to 'law', but as moved by The Spirit that sets us Free...
- I hope and pray that what has been stated and discussed elsewhere within this website may also prove to be a healthily helpful antidote to all such poisons as I have here complained of. Schism, however, is far worse than heresy, and I certainly do not wish to separate myself from the Love of Christ, that True Charity in which Paul VI, I and, please G-d, you, too, are ever One...
- He began his pilgrimage to India with this prayer: "From the unreal lead me to the real, from darkness lead me to light, from death lead me to immortality - OM, asato ma sadgamaya, tamaseo na jyotirgamaya, mruthor ma amritamgamaya." Amen, to that.
- 9. Bronowski's observation that the sex act between
humans is, at its best, performed mutually and not, as with
animals, a tergo, is regarded by J. D. Solomon as strong evidence
in favour of his thesis that the natural function of human
sexuality is not solely that of procreation.
- 10. Because of their widespread influence the writings
of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later named Osho, are also relevant,
e.g.: The New Child
(Nederland, Osho Publikaties 1991 - co-production with Ko Hsuan
School, Chawleigh, Chulmleigh, Devon EX18 7EX).
- 11. Cfr. Mitsou E. Naslednikov (Margo Anand),
Le Chemin de l'Extase - Tantra: vers une
nouvelle sexualité (Paris: Albin
Michel 1981) and The Art of Sexual Ecstasy -
The Path of Sacred Sexuality for Western
Lovers (Aquarian Press 1990); Harish
Johari, Tools for Tantra
(Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books 1986); J. Mumford,
Ecstasy through Tantra
(St. Paul, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications
1988); Marc Allen, Tantra for the West -
Everyday Miracles and
other steps for Transformation (2nd edition,
San Rafael, CA: New World Library 1992); Nick Douglas & Penny
Slinger, Sexual Secrets - The Alchemy of
Ecstasy (London: Hutchinson 1979) and
The Pillow Book: Vol. 1,
The Erotic Sentiment in the Paintings of India
& Nepal; Vol. 2, The
Erotic Sentiment in the Paintings of China
& Japan
(Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press, 1989
& 1990); J. Marques Rivière,
Tantrik Yoga (Aquarian
Press 1973); Max Lake, Scents and Sensuality -
The Essence of Excitement (London: John
Murray 1989); P. Baba, Temple of the Phallic
King (New York: Simon & Schuster 1973);
Robert Bates, Sacred Sex - Erotic Writings
from the Religions of the
World (Fount-HarperCollins 1993); Rufus C.
Camphausen, Encyclopedia of Erotic
Wisdom (Inner Traditions International 1991);
Alain Daniélou, The Complete Kama Sutra
(Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press 1994)
- and also, on account of the high quality of its argument: Roger
Scruton, Sexual Desire - A
Philosophical
Investigation (Phoenix
1994).
- Margo Anand was my teacher in August 1987, when I took
part in a 5-day intensive residential course, open to both couples
and free-floaters, based on her Le Chemin de
l'Extase - Tantra: vers une nouvelle sexualité
(Albin Michel, Paris, 1981), at the Arbre de
Vie Centre in the Château de Blacons. Later that month I
shared another 7 days with her as a member of an Advanced Tantric
Group. I was also with her at Gaunt's House, just outside Wimborne
in Dorset, from 6th to 8th January 1995, when she was in the U.K.
for the first time for about twelve years.
- John Hawken & Monica Entmayr are two licensed
SkyDancing teachers she has accredited, and have now established
their programme of Tantra Training for Couples Workshops, and of
4-day and weekend residentials for Couples/Singles. Programme
information is available from John Hawken, Lower Grumbla Farm,
Newbridge, PENZANCE, Cornwall TR20 8QX (tel: 01736-788-304), or
from SkyDancing U.K.'s information and booking team - Dave
Thompson & Louise Maingard, 47 Maple Road, Horfield, BRISTOL,
Avon BS7 8RE (tel: 0117-983-0958). I met John, Monica, Dave &
Louise, too, in January 1995, at Gaunt's House.
- On page 77 of The Art of Sexual
Ecstasy Margo mentions that Tantric
lovemaking includes an acknowledgment "that you are connected to
the four universal forces - water, earth, air, and fire - of which
your body is a reflection." Jean Houston in her Foreword to
Blanche Gallagher's Meditations with Teilhard
de Chardin (Bear & Co., Santa Fe, 1988,
my italics) affirms that one of the greatest privileges of her
life was "the opportunity of knowing a man given to human wonder
and divine seizure who was in turn so loving of everyone and
everything whom he saw or met that the universe turned a corner
for those of us fortunate enough to be in his presence." Being and
presence are the living heart of Highest Yoga Tantra.
- This is why Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was able to
write: "Love, in conformity with the general laws of creative
union, contributes to the spiritual differentiation of the two
beings which it brings together. The one must not absorb the other
nor, still less, should the two lose themselves in the enjoyments
of physical possession, which would signify a lapse into plurality
and return to nothingness. Love is an adventure and a conquest. It
survives and develops like the universe itself only by perpetual
discovery.
- Little by little, love becomes distinct, though still
confused for a very long time with the simple function of
reproduction. No longer only a unique and periodic attraction for
purposes of material fertility; but an unbounded and continuous
possibility of contact between minds rather than bodies; the play
of countless subtle antennae seeking one another in the light and
darkness of the soul; the pull towards mutual sensibility and
completion.
- When the maturing of its personality is approached for
the Earth, humans will have to realize that it is for them not
simply a question of controlling births, but of increasing to the
utmost the quantity of love liberated from the duty of
reproduction. Enforced by this new need, the essentially
personalizing function of love will detach itself more or less
completely from 'the flesh' which has been for a time the organ of
propagation. Without ceasing to be physical, in order to remain
physical, love will make itself more spiritual." (loc. cit.,
pp.91-3.)
- To that end I encourage all persons within the Neith
Network individually to read deeply and, in particular, to
meditate the mutually complementary writings of Joan D'Arcy
Cooper, Bernard Lonergan and Helen M. Luke, as well as the
anonymously and posthumously published
Meditations on the Tarot - A Journey into
Christian Hermeticism within their only
proper context - The Book of
Life.
- One male member of the Neith Network confided to me
recently that his partner finds the monthly magazine,
Forum -
The International Journal of Human Relations
“a bit seedy - especially the commercial ads”
and. as Preliminary LibrArian, I thought long and hard before
using its columns for four months in 1994 to offer "personal,
strictly non-commercial, gracious discipline through
self-correction, mediated by raja yogi, tantric initiate,
alchemist, shaman, catholic priest."
- 12. Although I lived for several years in the company
of highly educated Christians of many different nationalities,
even as recently as 1973, when Ecstasy and
Vendetta was first published, I had never
been involved in the nowadays quite frequent discussion about Jus
Asaf's alleged burial shrine in Kashmir, where some locals claim
direct descent from an ancestor whose teachings and dates are
likewise alleged to match those of Jesus of Nazareth. Some claim
he spent his youth there, and that he also returned there after
the Resurrection. I am inclined to think that any such presence of
Jesus in India was astral rather than physical, although I do not
deny that the alleged burial shrine may mark the resting-place of
some otherwise unidentified flying booth in which he may
occasionally at some stage have transported himself. I give much
more credence to Joan D'Arcy Cooper's assertion that Jesus visited
what is now the Culbone valley, just west of Porlock Weir on the
Somerset coast, in the early winter of the year 25 A.D., and
stayed there for eight days, granting a new degree of initiation
to the resident solitary who had already been there for several
years in preparation for Christ's visit, and also teaching and
healing other visitors from other West Country locations. As
regards Barbara Thiering's claims in Jesus the
Man and in Jesus of the
Apocalypse (Doubleday 1992, 1996) that Jesus
married Mary Magdalen, fathered a family, and later divorced… I
feel it is best to leave her arguments to speak for
themselves.
- 13. J. D. Solomon regards Paul's treatment of
sexuality as positively Manichæan, claiming that the
‘burning’ the Apostle mentions characterizes only the appetite,
which is needed to ensure the continuance of the species, though
not of the individual.
- 14. Although Saint Augustine did well to reject as
heretical that system of thought and life he characterized as
Maniachæan, further research suggests that his knowledge of
and insight into real Manichæan life and teachings had never
attained a very high level. Hence, it appears more than probable
that the teachings of higher initiates walking that way, far from
being heretical, are worthy of respect.
- 15. The new Codex Iuris
Canonici, promulgated by authority of Pope
John-Paul II, was published by the Vatican Press in 1983 with a
most important Preface by Cardinal Rosalio José Castillo
Lara, SDB, which has, however, been entirely omitted from the
English version, published the same year by Collins as
The Code of Canon Law. As
well as enunciating the ten principles underlying the new Code,
His Eminence tempers his positive assessment of the likely
pastoral value of the Commission's work with a frank recognition
of the inevitable need for further changes:
Quod si ob nimis celeres hodiernæ
societatis immutationes, quædam iam tempore iuris condendi
minus perfecta evaserunt ac deinceps nova recognitione
indigebunt…
- 16. The Persian prince Mani (216-274 A.D.) appears
never to have subscribed to the sort of Manichæism that
Saint Augustine had for some time embraced. Similarly, there are
good reasons for doubting that Plato himself was ever, in the now
customary pejorative sense of the term, ‘a Platonist.’
- 17. This is already true prior to any visuo-tactile
acquaintance with the surface of our bodies. J. D. Solomon
suspects that all enjoyment and suffering translate into
frequencies of bodying. The pre-bodying mind is, he suggests, very
different from the verbal processing mind, and he maintains that
it is at the heart of the former that G-d-in-us primarily
resides.
- 18. I especially recommend Lois Lang-Sims,
The Christian Mystery - An Exposition of
Esoteric Christianity (London - Boston -
Sydney: George Allen & Unwin 1980).
© The Neith Network Library 2002
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- Shalom & Welcome! -