In this article and the next I want to say something about the sacraments of penance and the anointing of the sick. What I have to say is more than usually tentative; where it differs from what is more commonly taught it should be regarded as an attempt to throw additional light on the topic, not to supplant accepted ways of thought.

First I must explain why I treat these two sacraments together: it is because I regard each of them as a sacrament of return to the eucharist. Each of them belongs to a situation in which the Christian is for one reason or another prevented from sharing fully in the mass. Penance deals with the obstacles created by sin, anointing with those due to sickness. As I have suggested earlier, we get the clearest view of any sacrament when we see how it is eucharistic, how it is related to the common meal that symbolizes Christian love. To see how a sacrament—or anything else for that matter—belongs to the eucharist is to see its function in the Church; for the Church is centred upon the Lord's Supper.

In an earlier issue of The Life Of The Spirit I said: ‘The kingdom of God is here, these are the last days and, therefore, this is the time of heaven; we await the completion of the kingdom of God only in the sense that for a little while the effects of this situation are suspended'. I think that the idea of the kingdom of God is neglected in popular Catholic instruction and thinking, and that if we are to understand the community of God properly then we must try to understand what is meant by the idea of the presence in the world of the kingdom of God. The difficulty facing most people when they approach this question seems to be engendered by a mistaken understanding of that ambiguous term ‘the four last things'. The phrase has too great a history in Catholic thinking to be abandoned, but we must see what is meant by it, or rather, we must see how it is applied.

In the last article we spoke of the Church as the community of those who have been baptised. It is the new creation consisting of those who have left behind their old out-of-date lives in the waters of baptism and been born again to a new life, a share in the life that Christ brought back from the dead. In this article we shall look at the Church from another point of view. Last time we said that roughly speaking the Church consists of those who have been baptised and have not renounced their faith, this time we start from the rough generalisation that the Church consists of those who go to mass. Last time we found that the formula we started from had a lot more in it than immediately met the eye and we shall find the same in this case, but once more we shall begin with the obvious straightforward meaning and leave the qualifications until later.

It is a fair question for the enquirer who encounters theological talk to ask at what point, and in what way, such talk is rooted in common human experiences that can be discussed. His difficulty is that, while not wanting to deny to theological talk some empirical foundation, he is at a loss to know what this foundation is. The problem is especially acute when there appears to be a claim by believers that only ‘insiders’ can really understand the language that is being used: that is, when credo ut intelligam is interpreted as ‘unless you are prepared to believe what we believe you won't be able to understand what we are talking about’. The enquirer feels that he is being invited to take a blind plunge, on the grounds that only real swimmers can know what swimming is, when he has no idea what it is he is being invited to plunge into, or how to do it.

To be a Christian is to believe in Christ; and this in its fullness is to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnate Word of God: to accept Christ as God made man, who through his Passion takes away the sins of men, and through his Resurrection restores to them a life of communion with the godhead. This life of communion with God—in which lies the possibility and reality of man's perfection—is in and with and through Christ, through faith in him. And the proper place of this life is visibly in the Church on earth, which he founded, with her sacraments through which her members meet with him whose body she is, together with and in just relation to her ministers and saints, who play their necessary and leading rôles within her life. All this, and one's relation to it in faith, is relevant to one's life as a Christian. If those who Profess Christ are wrong about these points, they are at least endangering the solidarity of their life in Christ. The more firmly the Christian believes these things, and the more he appreciates their significance, the deeper is the possibility of his spiritual life in Christ.

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

It may be worthwhile in conclusion to recapitulate briefly my main train of thought. Because the Church is a human society directly gathered together by God, and since the liturgical assembly is what makes this society encounterable in the world, it follows that we must take the liturgical assembly as the prototype, or model, for any human organization which is to approximate itself to Christian ideals. For a Christian, the society brought into organic community by God must take precedence over any purely human and secular model. But what has tended in the past to obscure this insight has been the monolithic and institutional appearance of the Church.

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

The way in which the first phase of the second Vatican Council developed has surpassed the most optimistic expectations. It is undoubtedly true that constitutionally nothing has been decided, nor has a single conciliar document been definitively approved. Denzinger is as yet unable to adopt anything from this Council. And yet I feel that it has already passed the turning-point.

The expression ‘synoptic orthodoxy’ will be used in what follows to designate the view, first, that the authors of the first and third gospels oth used the second gospel in a form very similar to that in which we have it; second, that they neither of them had access to the other's work, but both used a document consisting mainly of sayings of Christ (Q) as well as the second gospel; and third, that all the gospels were originally written in Greek, however much their language may have been coloured by the Semitic background of the authors or of the good news which they proclaimed. For the moment the first three gospels will be referred to respectively simply as ‘Matthew’, ‘Mark’ and ‘Luke’, without prejudice to the identity of their authors; a more complex terminology will have to be coined when the need arises.

I want to turn, in the second part of this article, to the eucharist, which is prayer par excellence. And I first want to draw attention to the scholastic distinction between ex opere operato and ex opere operantis. Certainly this distinction has led to a very mechanical attitude to the sacraments; so long as one goes through the motions then God produces the results. The distinction has probably been responsible for a good number of abuses, but it is valuable as long as it is not misapplied. I mention this because I am going to deal with the eucharist as a sacrament and as the sacrament of prayer. In this context it is most important to remember what the distinction means. Because, putting it very briefly, the first part of the mass is really all done ex opere operantis and the second part of the mass is increasingly done ex opere operato; that is to say the effect of the eucharist and our participation will depend largely on the way we prepare ourselves.

The Council of Florence, about which I have recently been reading Fr Gill's monumental work, is surely one of the more poignant, and I would say gallant failures of history. I feel also that it has a special interest for me as a Dominican, since the chief spokesman on the Latin Side in the theological debates was the Dominican John Montenero; a Greek Dominican bishop, Andrew Chrysoberges, played a prominent part in the negotiations that preceded and followed the Council; and finally the patriarch Joseph II, who died a few weeks before the union was proclaimed, was buried in the Dominican church of S. Maria Novella.

But for two more substantial reasons it is also of particular significance for subject this evening; it did achieve a union, however precarious and short-lived, between the Latins and the Greeks, and a union elicited from genuine hard discussion of the points at issue between the two Churches; and secondly it really settled once and for all the issue that Was dividing the Latin Church on whether or not a council has authority over the pope.