The theological writings of Professor Tillich deserve the attention of students of St Thomas, both for their positive

content, which is of the highest interest, and because on fundamental matters they explicitly and sharply join issue with Thomism. They invite the presumption of a certain common ground, certain affinities, and at the same time throw out a challenge which we cannot ignore.

To read these works, especially the great Systematic Theology (1951), is to encounter a powerful and original personality, a mind organized to an uncommon degree around a single centre. Tillich’s peculiar gift is for synthesis; a constructive thinker with a very wide range of interests, he is always striving to correlate and organize these on the basis of a singularly vivid intuition of being in general, the primary datum of the mind, which for him—as for St Thomas—represents the mind’s first opening onto reality as a whole, as both containing and transcending human nature. It is this consciously ontological character of Tillich’s thinking that seems to distinguish him among contemporary Protestant theologians; as J. H. Randall observes, he ‘stands in the classic tradition of Western philosophy’, in the tradition, derived from the Greeks, of speculative concern with being itself and wisdom. Let us stress this ‘concern’. ‘Ultimate concern’ is Tillich’s definition of religion, and by ‘ultimate’ he means ‘that which determines our being or non- being’. Man for him is the being who ‘asks the question of being’, and since God is ‘the answer implied in the question of being’, theology is essentially a searching into the same question.

There would be fairly general agreement among those who can remember earlier days that Catholic interest in ‘the social question’ has declined. It is not difficult to find the reason for this present lack of interest, for ‘the social question’ no longer exists in the form it did a generation or two generations ago. The development of industrialization in this country, as in many others, brought with it the growth of a wage-earning proletariat; and for many the wage which was their sole source of income was insufficient to provide them with the requirements of a decent life. Even at the outbreak of war in 1939, our social order was marred by the effects of low wages and unemployment, the twin evils produced by the low level of economic activity. Thus in 1936, Rowntree’s survey of York showed that something like one-third of the working-class population of that city was living in poverty, and that the major cause of such poverty was unemployment and low wages.

Today the position is very different. In a more recent survey, it was shown that now only three per cent of the working class population of York is living below the poverty line, and that virtually none of this remaining poverty is the result of either unemployment or low wages. If we look at the level of unemployment, the comparison with the years even just before the war is startling. The Government White Paper on Employment Policy published in 1944 was still thinking in terms of an average level of unemployment of eight per cent, and this was the figure used for actuarial calculations in connection with the National Insurance Scheme.

A hundred years ago there were four fairly well defined attitudes in the Catholic Church to the question of the papal prerogatives, and to infallibility in particular. First of all there was the Gallican position. Gallicanism, though still strong, had been on the wane in France since the revolution. It may be described—perhaps not quite fairly—as the idea of a constitutional Church in the interests of an absolute monarch. It was really the residue of the late medieval conciliar theory propounded at the Councils of Constance (1415-18) and Basle (1431), carried over into the post-renaissance Europe of absolute rulers. It is conveniently summarized in the four Gallican articles drawn up in 1682 and which (1) reject the pope’s power of deposing princes and of interfering in civil affairs; (2) assert the validity of the decrees of Constance (never ratified by any pope) on the authority of general councils over the pope; (3) declare that the exercise of papal authority is to be regulated by the canons, and in France by the customs of the Gallican Church; and (4) declare that in matters of faith and morals, while the pope has the chief part, his judgments are not irreformable of themselves, but only if ratified by the consent of the Church.

At the Vatican Council there was only one full-blooded Gallican bishop present, Maret, and he submitted to the Council’s definitions.

The contrary position to Gallicanism was the Ultramontane. It held to the papal, as opposed to the conciliar, view of papal authority.

It might seem excessive to claim that a Belgian diocesan congress, held fifty years ago, could mark a decisive date in the history of the Church. But it was the Congress called at Liege in 1909 to further an interest in the Liturgy, inspired by a young monk of Mont Cesar, Dom Lambert Beauduin, that was the true beginning of the modern liturgical revival, and the radical changes of recent years have their root in his prophetic understanding of the authentic place of the liturgy in the life of the Church. He freed the Liturgy from all that was antiquarian or derived: he saw it as the Piété de I’Eglise (the title of his first and fundamental book) and St Pius X found in him the most faithful interpreter of his intention to restore the Liturgy to the Church as its ‘most authentic form of Christian piety’.

It was small wonder that the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique, and the vigorous pastoral-liturgical movement that grew up in France after 1945, found in Dom Beauduin its patron and principal inspiration. He was in fact by then, and had been for some years, living in virtual exile from his native Belgium. For Dom Beauduin had an even greater claim to the gratitude of the Church as the Benedictine monk who had responded to Pope Pius XI’s appeal to the Order to undertake the cause of Christian unity. He was the founder of the monastery of Amay (since established at Chevetogne) in which Eastern and Western traditions were equally honoured, a place of reconciliation where the divisions of Christendom could, if not altogether be healed, at least be considered in the context of charity.