A Chilean Jesuit priest who is also an expert on agricultural economics, Gonzalo Arroyo was a technical adviser on problems relating to agricultural reform for the ten years previous to the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973, and is one of the founders of the world-wide movement called Christians for Socialism. Now living in exile, he gave this interview last June. Here, utilising in his argument methods proper to the Theology of Liberation, he gives his reasons for believing this world-wide movement is going to be of rapidly growing importance in the uncertain years ahead.

Q. In your opinion, what are the principal problems facing mankind?

A. I shall restrict myself to the five which seem to me the most crucial.

1. The ecological problem, that is the problem of conservation and renewal of natural resources like water, soil, air and forests which capitalist industrialisation does not manage to take seriously, subject as it is to the dictates of the frantic race for production and consumption.

It is clear that the early Christians expected the coming of the Kingdom almost at once, and equally clear that it has not come. This long period of waiting has caused a number of problems for the Christian church and it is intended here to consider some of these and the way they were solved until recently in the Catholic church.

A number of them are those which are inevitable in an organisation that goes on a long time. The original spirit of the movement is replaced by routine. Rules and regulations are drawn up. Early practices lose their meaning—this is particularly true of liturgy—but, since they continue, new meanings are invented for them. A clear example of this is the old rule of eating fish on Fridays. When the original connection with fasting was lost people began to argue that it was about establishing one’s identity in an alien environment. The history of the Mass and the complicated meanings attributed to the most trivial and accidental details are another obvious example.

In the same way a form of organisation develops which, as time goes on, becomes increasingly complicated and unwieldly. A special class of people, the clergy, grows up for running it, all with a career structure and rewards of their own and their established place in wider society—and so a gap forms between the clergy and the other members of the church.

It was Tertullian who coined the phrase, anima naturaliter christiana. This means that in the innermost depth of every human being there is alive a sort of natural religion with its standards of true and false, good and evil; it means that man is pre-programmed to a sense of wonder and awe before the mystery of his existence and meaning within the universe.

Plays, like The Glass Menagerie and A Streztcar Named Desire in this essay, often imply this basic truth of man's openness to the transcendent when a man's dreams are seen to surpass both his personal resources and those of his society for their attainment, yet dream he must. In fact, his dreams may become more real for him than any other reality of his historical condition, bearing witness to that reality which underlies human awareness and, nevertheless, transcends human definition.

Sometimes the dream is associated with madness when a man, tragically deluded about the meaning of his life, destroys himself in his attempt to force reality to conform to the shape of his illusions. There is a profound pathos in a man's faithful response to a destructive illusion, to the wrong dream : even this, however, is perhaps better than no dream at all. In any case the theatre in general and Tennessee Williams's Glass MenaEerie and Streetcar in particular reveal much about man and the quality of his dreams; they reveal how much man and his society can be transformed for better or for worse by them.

It has often caused the present writer some admitatio that in 1 Cor 1 : 14-17 Paul appears to show such reluctance to baptise but upon reading Kildahl’s The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues an insight into the situation was suggested to her.

In 1 Cor 1 : 14-15 Paul declares:

I am thankful (or I thank God) that I baptised none of you except Crispus and Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptised in my name.

Such a statement is not found elsewhere either in the Pauline Corpus or the rest of the New Testament, or to my knowledge in Christian writings: this would suggest that a special situation in Corinth warranted such reluctance. One main peculiarity of the Corinthian Church was its overenthusiasm and its stress on the gift of tongues. The Acts of the Apostles demonstrates that on extraordinary occasions the baptism of candidates was either preceded or followed by glossolalia. That ‘tongues’ might have accompanied baptism in Corinth also is suggested by the fact that Paul, after listing the spiritual gifts (1 Cor 12 : 4ff), emphasises the unity of the Body, which is the Church, by using a phrase occurring only once outside the Gospels and Acts ‘in one Spirit were we all baptised into one body’ (1 Cor 12:13).