Father Herbert McCabe was penalised, or disciplined, for having written that the Church is corrupt, and the censor who passed the statement for publication has been removed from office. I have very little doubt that it was the use of this word, ‘corrupt’, which brought down such indignation on their heads; and, indeed, I can readily understand how his statement, tom from its context, provoked feelings of anger and shock. Taken out of context, the statement appeared to bring against the Church the gravest possible charge, and to do so on a flimsy basis of four complaints about particular actions, only one of which (Cardinal Spellman’s militaristic speech) was obviously substantial. Of course, most people who have followed the affair know by now how misleading this appearance was. First, the general drift of the editorial was a rebuttal of Father Davis’s accusations against the Church, in explanation of his own withdrawal from it, so that the statement so widely quoted had the force of a concession to Father Davis of what Father McCabe found true in his charges, although he nevertheless found the general assessment incorrect. Secondly, the role of Father McCabe’s examples was not (as it appeared out of context) as proof of the corruption of the Church: rather, the proof was that we took such things as expected behaviour on the part of bishops and the like, instead of as shocking aberrations. It was, no doubt, foolish of Father McCabe to write a sentence so liable to be quoted out of context, and so misleading when thus quoted; but far less foolish than the behaviour of the authorities who dealt with the rcsulting situation by first silencing thc one man who could havc explained cxactly what he meant, and thus correctcd thc misinterpretation.

To come here for three days seemed rather meaningless beforehand. But since the itinerary included this visit, I did not want to miss it. It would at least be a preparation for the real journey one is always hoping for, with unbounded time at one’s disposal. Then there were other reserves: it’s no good hoping to penetrate the religious reality which lies below, behind, especially in so short a time; everything that obscures and blocks this — the tourists, the petty commerce, the local colour of the East, the apparatus of rival devotions — all this asserts itself in a much more clamant way.

No contact with the religious reality — that was a foregone conclusion. But man proposes, God disposes. I could hardly imagine a more brutal contact with this reality. I passed those three days in solitude, with the Gospels and Jerusalem. I had little idea that so charged a current would pass between these two poles.

Nevertheless, with every year that passes I am more and more seized by fear as I listen to the lamentations of Holy Week. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God.’ And I know that Jerusalem, which once meant the people ofjuda, the synagogue, now means the Church, Christianity, divided, heir not only of the promise but of the betrayal.

Leslie Dewart’s book, just published in England, is the most far-reaching philosophical reappraisal of Catholic belief that has appeared in this country in recent years. It is symptomatic of a shift of emphasis that has begun to appear in Catholic thinking generally — away from ‘progressive’ preoccupations with the modernisation of the church, the liturgy, the parish, the ‘community’ and towards a new way of thinking and feeling about God. The modernisation programme – at least in terms of books — is wearing thin. Its slogans no longer seem much more relevant than the ones they replaced. They do not offer a satisfactory answer to the question ‘What the hell does it all mean?’ As Sebastian Moore rightly says, in his new book God is a New Language (which is another symptom of the same shift in emphasis), ‘what is within the circle (i.e. of progressive theologians) a revolution appears to the wider world to be a purely domestic battle, offering no more than the journalistic interest of a palace revolution’. Whereas — the implication is — what is needed is a real revolution. Dewart’s work is largely subversive: helping to prepare for that revolution and suggesting the outlines of a strategy.

I have some reservations about Dewart’s thesis. In one sense I think he goes too far, and almost loses touch with the church as a community at all — and thus what is being hinted at is liable to become only an intellectual revolution, not one that overturns the world.

In the April issue of New Blackfriars, Terry Eagleton wrote a fair and interesting review-article on my book On Trying to be Human. This article is a comment on certain questions that arise out of the review. They are quesdons about politics and philosophy and theology, but what it is really about is the irreducible gap in human awareness of life, the edges of which my book was clumsily exploring, and the reality of which gap the reviewer denies. I hope to throw some light on what it is that makes for growth in a society or in an individual.

On Trying to be Human is a mixed book with some extremely turgid passages. Reading it over now, I find much of it unnecessarily complex and lengthy. On the other hand several people, whose scholarship and intelligence is unquestioned, have found it illuminating, and said so. The book was written in an attempt to use Christian ideas as a tool for interpreting the common experience of human life, without calling on support from faith or the idea of revelation. (This was what made some reviewers – Christian and non-Christian — wonder if I were really a Christian at all. As a matter of fact I scarcely was, when I wrote it.) Its starting point was that of many of those who are vaguely called ‘humanist’, and whose prevailing mood is a pessimism which is the only realism they feel is justified by the facts. It was a response to a view of life which can accept nothing but verifiable fact and refuses even to see connections between facts,

The German occupation brought to French Jews a fresh realization of the profound anguish of the Jewish condition — and also to those Jews in North Africa who had been emancipated by the presence of France, and who had adopted French as their literary language. Albert Memmi is the most articulate of these writing today, and his new book, La Libération du Juif (Paris, Gallimard, 1966, 15 Fs, the second volume of his Portrait du Juif) proposes what is for him the only possible solution to that condition. M. Memmi himself is a very interesting phenomenon, a Tunisian Jew who has described the life of the North African ghetto in Statue de Sel and has since analysed the psychology of colonialism in Portrait du Colonisateur. The fact that he was a member of an oppressed minority within an oppressed majority under French colonial rule made his situation rather special. The French language liberated him from the ghetto, but separated him from the Arab majority who, at the same time, were trying to free themselves from the French. The young Memmi obviously sympathized with their aspirations, whilst realizing that once they were achieved his own people would be far worse off than they had been under the French. And this in fact is precisely what has happened: the life of the North African Jewish communities has been made intolerable by the new independent Arab governments, whether monarchical or democratic-socialist, and another exodus has begun from what were once flourishing communities.

I should like to make a comment on Father Van Straelen’s book The Catholic Encounter with World Religions, reviewed by Agnes Yendell in your February number.

Reading it myself I was greatly surprised to discover in various places my own sentences (at times slightly twisted), simply stolen by the author without any acknowledgement. In all he has lifted a good sixty lines from my article ‘Missionary Thinking in the Context of Today’, New Blackfriars, August 1965. The references are as follows:

The dust cover tells us that the fifth chapter on ‘The Council and the Missions’ “was written specially for this book”. How curious when reading twenty-two pages of this chapter to find that no less than eight of them have again been lifted bodily from a writing of Father de Tourigny, W.F. There is, of course, no mention of Fr de Tourigny anywhere.

As we are rightly told on the cover Fr Van Straelen, who is a Ph.D. of Cambridge, a Professor of Philosophy, etc., ‘always produces something fresh and new’.

How odd too that the book, which includes some long quotations from Cardinal Heenan, was nominated by the Cardinal in the Catholic Herald as his ‘Book of the Year’ for 1965.