The changes you see are not always the ones that really matter. True, the new buildings invade what is left of the urban sky and demand to be noticed. The jets are sleeker and the freeways are faster and the television programmes are more insistently mindless than ever. But even after only eighteen months away – separated, too, by President Kennedy's assassination and all that has happened since – you are aware after a while of a hidden stream of change, a shift of accent and attitude that is hard to define but is none the less decisive.

You could call it a mood of self-appraisal, a critical undertone that is a new note in the carefully orchestrated harmony of America's need to conform. Of course the harmony was always a celestial hope rather than a terrestrial reality. The very structure of the United States has meant a constant tension between ‘the truths we hold’ and the local understanding of their application. The Supreme Court gives its judgments, the federal agencies move in to implement them, but Alabama is not greatly affected – yet. Nevertheless the change is there; sometimes publicly plain in such events as the sit-in protests on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, more commonly reflected in less sensational ways.

In the evolving life of the Catholic Church in America the external changes are indeed evident enough. Improvised altars facing the people have sprung up everywhere: unlikely trestle-tables that carry on a silent war with the shrines of St Jude and the fitted carpets.

Looking over the list of speakers scheduled for the International Convocation on Pacem in Terris, a Catholic economist remarked, I'm afraid it is going to be an international name-dropping jamboree.’ Another reaction was that the gathering would represent no more than the attempt of a feuding family to ‘bury the hatchet’ long enough to pay respects to a deceased and much loved grandfather. As I looked over the massive gatherings at the United Nations and in the grand ballroom of the New York Hilton, I experienced something much more hopeful. For the four days of February 17-20,1965, less than two years after Pope John XXIII addressed his letter to all humanity, 2,300 persons from 20 countries concentrated on that letter. The over-riding impact of the International Convocation was the intensity with which humanity was combing Pacem in Terris for guidance, and yes, for hope.

Paul G. Hoffman, Director of the United Nations Special Fund, in introducing Vice-President Hubert Humphrey at the opening ceremony, stated: ‘When Pope John renewed our awareness that war and peace are not only political matters but moral matters, when he reminded us that a cynical divorcement of the moral from the political has historically been the prelude to disaster, he gave us a message that we need and must not fail to heed.’ This was indeed the theme of the Convocation. ‘Peace is a process, not a miracle', said Vice-President Humphrey, and added that the encyclical offered a basis for a ‘politics of hope'. ‘In the encyclical, John XXIII presented to the world a public philosophy for a nuclear era', Humphrey pointed out in his prepared text.

It is quite evident that the ‘new’ Mass arouses so much comment and genuine interest that people approach many of us older ‘pioneers’ with a sincere expression of good will on their lips. Naturally they want to know how it feels to belong to the winning team ! But could it be that we find it disappointing to witness what is only a superficial outward change? That the outward changes should attract so much comment, favourable and unfavourable, is only natural: we cannot look inside people and can only judge what appears. Nevertheless we maintain that a truly internal reform will follow naturally if things are left to develop. After all, that has always been our whole thesis. Things were left to the ‘unliturgical’ forces for too long and never had a proper chance to follow a theology inspired by the Bible and the sacramental system. Quod erat demonstrandum finds its first chance only now. While the unexpected vote on all phases of the Constitution on the Liturgy was in itself almost miraculous, we cannot pin our hopes of a ‘follow-through’ on another miracle. What we now need is hard work and intelligence (and, above all, prayer).

The slightest contact with the liturgical movements of forty years ago gave the impression that few ‘liturgists’ had any changes or reforms in mind which would give the people a more profound understanding of what they were supposed to do with their ‘whole hearts and minds'.

All theology springs from the fact that man, faced with a revelation that makes certain demands upon him, finds that at the same time he must accept the demands of his own humanity and of his life in the world. The reason is that man cannot accept revealed truth without submitting it to interpretation by his reason, in terms of truths he knows as a rational thinker. A man finds that he cannot be true to revelation unless he is true to himself as a man in the world.

And revelation is a very wide concept. Some revealed truths are not immediately concerned with matters of ordinary human experience. Of such a kind is the revelation of the Trinity. There is no particular rational factor that would automatically make us tend to interpret this truth in one way rather than in another. Other revealed truths however are concerned with matters of ordinary experience, and so experience itself provides a framework for a rational interpretation of the revealed truth, enabling us to accept the revealed truth as running parallel, so to speak, with the truth we have learned for ourselves. Where revelation concerns death, for instance, we have an example of this kind of ‘ready-made’ interpretation being used. Because death in our human experience means that particular event which is the termination of life in the world, we are inclined to think of death, where the word occurs in statements of revealed truth, as that event.

St Thomas is one of those people who, like Queen Victoria, have become a myth : I use the word in a Jungian sense and by no means in depreciation. She became one during her lifetime, and on that count made an earlier start; still he was already five centuries ahead, and his image has been more variously encrusted with the tastes of different periods and regions, so much so as almost to have grown into several myths.

To discover what the real person was like, the prosopon of Patristic theology, you cannot do better than go by the biographical documents edited by Father Kenelm Foster, which record the witness of those who were as near to him as we are to the characters of the 1914 war. Yet it is with the prosopon in its earlier histrionic and later juridical sense, the personage standing for a cause, the legal person and sometimes, it must be confessed, the legal fiction, that the historian of philosophy and theology is occupied, for such is the public figure that engages the gears and sets into motion the vehicles that carry the ideas of groups.

The promulgation at the third session of the Second Vatican Council of the three Constitutions De Ecclesia, De Oecumenismo and De Ecclesiis Orientalibus Catholicis is clearly an event of outstanding ecumenical importance, though its full significance will clearly appear only in the light of future thought and acitivity. Anything like a detailed consideration of the contents of the Constitutions would be quite impossible in the space at my disposal, but I hope that the comments which I shall make from an Anglican standpoint on some of the more striking characteristics of the first two may be of some interest and even perhaps of some usefulness to the readers of New Blackfriars.

To begin with De Ecclesia. In spite of the vicissitudes through which the Constitution has passed since the introduction of the original schema on November 30th, 1962 (and for information about this I am indebted to the extremely illuminating article by Père G. Dejaifve, S.J., in the Nouvelle Revue Théologique of January 1965), the overall impression which one receives is that of a remarkably systematic, comprehensive and unified document; only one section, which I shall refer to in more detail later, bears some visible marks of a clash of views which reached something less than full reconciliation. Most impressive of all is the way in which the presentation of the doctrine of the Church in primarily juridical and governmental terms which has characterized most Roman Catholic documents and treatises in the past has been completely superseded by an approach which is in the fullest sense biblical and theological.

I take the terms ‘Christendom’ and ‘Jewry’ to mean the cultural and political embodiments of the Christian and Jewish religions. Christendom is the socially visible manifestation and product of Christianity, as Jewry is of Judaism. It is with these products of the two religions that I am concerned, not directly with the systems of religious belief and practice that constitute the two religions.

'Christendom', however, the concrete equivalent of the abstract ‘Christianity', is a much less definite term than ‘Church', which is so to speak the official and necessary embodiment of the Christian religion. Now it is in the almost Protean development of the indefinable, ill-disciplined, not always very Christian reality meant by ‘Christendom’ that I see much irony; not in the mysterious theological reality meant by ‘the Holy Catholic Church'. And I am presuming – I hope fairly enough – that as Christendom is to Church, so mutatis mutandis is Jewry to Israel. Jewry in its very different manner I find as ironical a reality as Christendom. My point, in fact, will be that in some ways Christendom would have been a much more suitable correlative to Israel than to the Church, and Jewry more suited to the Church than to Israel.

I take it as a starting point that some sort of visible embodiment in human society is of the essence of both religions. And that is why I cannot altogether agree with Dr James Parkes when he makes the generalization in one of his Parkes Library booklets (Jewry and Jesus of Nazareth by Maurice Eisendrath and James Parkes), that, whereas Judaism addresses man as a social being, Christianity addresses man as a person.

The presupposition of the argument of this paper is that all Catholic theology occurs in the first place within the context of some Church-mediated experience of God. This does not mean reducing theology to spirituality or to the conceptual elaboration of personal piety. It is simply saying that theology requires a starting-point, a source of intelligibility, which is encounter with God himself: for without some prior relationship to its ‘object’ theology can never be anything more fundamental than the philological investigation of more or less ancient documents. What we are therefore taking to be theological understanding (hermeneutic), even of classical texts in theological tradition, depends radically on some personal or anyway epochal (in a sense to be explained) experience of what theology is about in the first place: that is, on somehow being addressed by God himself. Doing theology at all depends on hearing the word of God: God must be allowed to speak to us before we can begin to speak about him. It was on the basis of this presupposition, and in the context of collective reflexion on the challenge to theological renewal facing one of the older religious orders at the present time, that the following observations were originally adumbrated.

‘The Church must enter into dialogue with the modern world’: this is a phrase and a programme with which we are familiar today. It is not always noticed, however, that all the terms of it are very obscure. We are not at present very clear about the nature of the Church nor about the nature of the modern world, and any dialogue between the two is consequently very difficult to visualize. It may be said that we are at least aware that we are not very clear about the nature of the Church; the real difficulty is that we tend to suppose there is no problem about the nature of the modern world.

It is not quite forty years since I produced my first published writing concerned with Christian unity; it was a review article on the Report of the Malines Conversations, which the then editor of Blackfriars asked me to undertake, soon after I finished my studies for the priesthood. But my thought and ideas about ecumenism – the clumsy word had not then been invented – have deep roots in my Anglican background. I have always been profoundly grateful for the religion I was grounded in by the Church of England; and that I was able to take it with me into the Catholic Church whole and entire. With a minimum of detailed adjustment – but a complete re-orientation of mind – I was received, without conditional baptism, in 1917.

What I took with me was a religion essentially biblical and liturgical. From earliest childhood – in our daily family service at home, and in similar daily services at school and at Cambridge, I learned to recite the psalter and listen to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Built into this biblical background was the training, more by atmosphere and surroundings than by explicit teaching, of a happy home life, in a large family, with parents at the heart of whose religious practice was the deep personal love of Christ characteristic of the sober Tractarianism of Keble and Newman.