Any serious analysis of the systematic oppression of women must focus the greater part of its attention on the structure and role of the family. For us in the West the prevailing ideology identifies as central to a woman’s task in life the running of a husband-and-family, while for the man, his wife and family belong to the private, ‘unimportant’ side of life—to his ‘spare time’. We are taught to equate marriage with having a family, and a family with the bourgeois nuclear family of two parents and a few children living as a self- contained unit. In this guise the family is justifiably condemned by feminists and some psychologists as the most immediate locus of the oppression of women and children. It has the complex function of underpinning the capitalist economy by being the consumer unit it depends on, and of perpetuating both itself and the repressive economic and political system by being one of the most influential places (along with school) where children are brought to see themselves and the world in the terms of the prevailing ideology, and thus to become law-abiding citizens. On top of this is the severe economic pressure on women to marry, while men can afford not to if they like. Working-class and many middle-class women cannot earn enough to survive on their own.

The means proposed by various feminist analysts for the economic, political, psychological and sexual liberation of women always include the abolition of the nuclear family. A Christian committed to the struggle for women’s liberation must question the point and form of Christian marriage as it is normally expressed.

The quasi-episcopal jurisdiction held by abbesses over the ‘separated’ territories of exempt orders has been presented by some writers of today as an abuse. I am alluding to such authors as Giovanni Mongelli, who has written on the mitred abbesses of San Benedetto, Conversano, Italy, and Jose Maria Escriva, who has written on the abbesses of Las Huelgas de Burgos, Spain. Bath these abbeys, like very many others, received innumerable papal bulls in their favour confirming them in their independence of any bishop and accepting their civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Although many religious orders in Europe lost exemption at the time of the French Revolution, the Abbey of Las Huelgas de Burgos, after a brief lapse of some eight years, continued to be exempt up till 1874. The system was brought to a close by Pius IX in a bull entitled Quae diversa addressed to all religious orders in Spain, both men and women. The reason given was that the system was no longer suitable to the changed social conditions.

Such a reason is plausible; but to consider the jurisdiction held by abbesses as an abuse is pure prejudice. Abbesses, like queens or empresses, had a right to rule when their position was officially accepted. Such a system was in keeping with early Christian custom, throughout the feudal period and up to the fall of the nobility at the time of the French Revolution.

The ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction of the abbesses of Las Huelgas de Burgos covered a territory extending over some sixty-four towns and villages, and over the clergy and people within these places. It was the duty of the abbesses to issue licences to the clergy for the celebration of Masses in the churches within their territory.

This essay is an attempt at a modest diatribe against some of the themes often associated with the ‘new moral theology’. It is my contention that in our enthusiasm for the seeming freedom promised in the new love ethic we have forgotten that the self must be transformed if we are to see the world as it is, and that the transformation into loving persons is not accomplished overnight by declaring our good intentions but by submitting patiently to the suffering that makes us real. We have impoverished our ethics by assuming that our lives can easily embody and reflect the good. In our moral behaviour, we have tacitly accepted existence in a world where God does not exist; in such a world, evil often appears beautiful and even kind. Such a situation is all the more pernicious because we claim to base our self-imposed blindness on love, kindness, justice, and even Jesus Christ. The main purpose of this essay is to try to locate some of the problems that have led us to confuse illusion with reality, for only when we understand the nature of our self-deception can we begin to appreciate how wonderful and yet how painful it is to live in a world where the good is not easily done.

Georges Simenon writes detective stories, many featuring the amiable Inspecteur Maigret, almost too human to fit the traditional image of the sleuth. Simenon may be read more for atmosphere than for thrills, for Maigret's Paris, or the provincial towns of many non-Maigret stories; the weather mostly wintry with long evenings, the interest in trains, back streets, canals, bars, the small homes of small people in small worlds. And among these I find even more intriguing those with a Belgian scene, the Meuse, the industrial zone around Liege where young Simenon began as a reporter on the local press. Here are his native tow-paths and backyards, alleys and impasses, and a certain quality of mud, of earth and water and the two compounded.

Simenon does not normally set out to retail experiences that demand a transcendental world, least of all that purveyed by the Church. Where religious detail slips in it is seldom more than part of the narrative, handy description—as far as the author is concerned echoes from childhood, and usually no more than that for the characters too. Churchgoing is something children do and it is good for them; subsequently a minority elects to remain in this church sub-culture and becomes a characteristic feature of Sunday mornings.

Yet Simenon stands for something good. I have not combed his works to draw out loose hairs of self-sacrifice or the pursuit of values, but they are there. Monsieur Maigret is good with a comfortable home-loving Gallican middle-class goodness that stands while the world of crime revolves. This goodness has its temporal reward—the adequate recompense of an apartment managed by a faithful helpmate. Mme Maigret is a patient wife who cooks meals and keeps them warm and bears with her husband’s professional irregularities.

The Reverend Joseph Berington (1743-1827) has never had a particularly good press even from sympathetic Catholic historians. This is almost certainly due to the fact that he was a leading supporter of the cisalpine, if not gallican, Catholic Committee and was one of those Catholics who belived that an Oath of Supremacy, properly understood, was not incompatible with Catholic principles. As a result of his attitude and activities, he was at one stage censured by the bishops and deprived of his faculties. Berington himself felt that English Catholics had suspected him since he taught philosophy at Douay where he was regarded as being too modern and bold in his philosophical opinions, and that this explained the later questioning of his orthodoxy. Joseph Gillow simply claims that Berington’s ‘love of novelty and of the affected liberality of the day created great prejudice against his writings, which, however, was considerably removed before his death’.

Yet according to a ‘Memoir’ published in the Catholic Miscellany, Berington made ‘the first open and bold attack ... on the immense mass of Protestant prejudice that had been accumulating against Catholics for more than two centuries’, while the Reflections addressed to the Rev. John Hawkins was described as his ‘principal work on religious controversy’. The story of this particular publication began in America during 1784 when Charles Wharton, one of the first American Jesuits, published his Letter to the Roman Catholics of the City of Worcester. This personal apologia for leaving the Church was addressed to the English Catholics whom he had served as chaplain.