A sermon given by a London senior social worker on All Saints’ Day 1986, during the Spode House conference ‘The Catholic Church and Aids’.

It is a happy chance for me to preach the sermon at Mass on All Saints’ Day, because twenty years ago today I became a Catholic. It is a doubly happy chance that I should do this at a conference on the Catholic Church and Aids, for when we think about the saints and sanctity we will arrive at a clearer idea of what, Aids being in our midst, we can do about it.

For twenty years, each All Saints’ Day, I have heard homilies which have all had one theme in common—that today is the feast primarily of the unsung heroes of the Church—those countless men and women not singled out for special mention, through canonisation and special feast days, who are in heaven. As an antidote to the plaster statue school of piety which manages for me to make the whole idea of sanctity at once impossibly remote and unattractive, I can only applaud the general trend of All Saints’ homilies. (Who is really inspired by knowing that St. Aloysius, as a baby, refused his mother’s milk on Fridays?) Also it does us no harm to be reminded that we are all called to be saints, that our hallowing—so far from being some horrid obstacle course comprised solely of self-denial and martyrdom—is the great gift of life that God has in mind for all of us.

Early last summer, when he was in Peru, Cardinal Ratzinger disclosed that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was preparing a document on the ‘central issues of the Modernist crisis’. He enumerated these as the nature of doctrine, principles in the interpreting of the Bible, and the role of philosophy in theology.

If we want to get those thorny ‘central issues’ into historical perspective, how should we go about it? If one belongs to the Englishspeaking world, there is, arguably, no better way than to explore the thought of the Modernist George Tyrrell, who was born 125 years ago this year. However severe may be our final assessment of him, it is a fact that the questions Tyrrell raised were those of a theological genius, and we cannot ignore them or brush them away. To understand his thought we must trace its history—his ideas of what theology should be developed dramatically in the course of his life. And if we want to get to grips with what was really distinctive about his thought—where he was addressing himself to the ‘central issues’ which Cardinal Ratzinger has recently listed—then we must consider especially what he had to say about the notion of doctrinal development. His ideas of what theology should be formed, so to speak, a series of photographic lenses through which he peered at his favourite subject: the continuity and discontinuity of Christian tradition.

It is a Catholic teaching that when bread is consecrated in the eucharist it becomes the body of Christ, and that when wine is consecrated it becomes the blood of Christ. People have always had difficulty with this. The difficulty is basically a very simple one: what we call and share as the body of Christ bears no resemblance to what we should ordinarily call a body, and what we drink as the blood of Christ has at best a very superficial resemblance to blood.

This difficulty, of matching our words with what lies plainly before our eyes, has led some Christians, before, during, and after the Reformation, to deny that the consecrated bread is the body of Christ and the consecrated wine his blood. Rather, they are to be seen as symbols of his body and blood: they are not the body and blood of Christ, but signify them. This mainstream Christianity has always rejected. Though much of our activity in the eucharist is symbolic, and though the consecrated bread and wine are clearly signs and symbols in some sense, they are not to be understood as mere symbols, symbolically the body and blood of Christ as opposed to the reality. To quote Theodore of Mopsuestia as representative of early tradition:

Christ did not say: ‘This is the symbolum of my blood,’ but:

‘This is my blood.’ A change of the wine takes place.

An adapted version of a paper given in Oxford at the 1986 conference of Friend. Friend is a national organisation dedicated to the counselling and befriending of homosexuals.

Historians are accustomed to listening to the debates of theologians, but the theologians they listen to are usually those of the past; and they do not normally join such debates. I do not propose to alter that. But one of the workmanlike tasks of historians (as it is of philosophers) is sometimes to put aside their own books and see to the task of making tools others use in their work, and if they are to be taken seriously in a wider college of learning they need sometimes to fulfil this obligation. Sometimes they need to pay the rent.

In a small way that is what I would like to do in this paper, and the audience I have primarily in mind is composed of those moral theologians and practical pastors who are troubled by the tension that exists between homosexuals and the Christian Church. Inevitably, though, what I have to say is not equally relevant to all Christian churches. I have less to say to those who are ready to construct their moral theology afresh, from the beginning. For good or bad they are free of the past. But for many Christians, in varying degrees, this is not a possible option, and it is fundamentally not a possible option for Catholics, for whom an appeal to scripture and tradition—a willingness to listen to the past—is unavoidable.