Oscar Wilde is alleged to have said that there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about Fr Anthony spent a great deal of his life being talked about Many people have commented on his list of achievements: Catholic Chaplain at Edinburgh University, Deputy Chairman of the Scottish Parole Board, Chairman of the Scottish Catholic Historical Association, Provincial of the English Dominicans, Rector of the University of Edinburgh and many other distinctions. But like many priests, his most valuable work as pastor and counsellor was hidden. During his long career he was an instrument through which many were brought to glimpse the edge of the mystery of God, and through whom many came to hope in God’s goodness and to trust in his mercy.

It was often said of Fr Anthony that he was a man ahead of his time. In many ways he was precisely a man of his time, but in an age which could not make space for prophets. Like many of his generation, his experience was indelibly marked by economic depression and by war. He said himself that in the thirties he, “lost faith in bullets and ballots as a way of re-shaping society, and thought some kind of spiritual revolution was the only hope for the future.” It was this conviction which led him to the Church and to the Order. At the same time a group of theologians in France were stressing the need for a re-centring in the person of Christ and in his paschal mystery.

On the 30 March 1992 Damian Byrne, the former Master of the Dominican Order, wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger:

If today the fundamental innocence and theological integrity of Meister Eckhart are generally acknowledged, both within and outside the Dominican Order, this is due in no small measure to the efforts of people like Ursula. Today, when we read Eckhart’s work it is not with an inquisitorial gaze or scrutiny—rather, we ourselves feel we are under his gaze, his quiet scrutiny. Eckhart comes towards us almost as if he were one of our own contemporaries and as a master among them. We do not put him to the test, rather his words—ancient words, yet eloquently new in their serenity and freshness—probe and test us.

Needless to say there are still many difficulties that remain. But our questions today—my own questions at any rate—are not those bom of suspicion or fear, rather they are the questions of one interested reader, even a sort of disciple, who finds himself gripped and fascinated by what Eckhart is saying, but also sometimes confused and even bewildered by the extraordinary depth and range and daring of the master’s teaching.

It is often said that the earth and its creatures are God’s gifts to humankind. Animals and plants are understood to have been ‘sent’ for us, so that we may, by and large, do with them as we will. What we must do in return is express our thanks to the Creator for His generosity. We must say Grace over our meals. So John Locke wrote:

In the Christian tradition, discussions on the rights of ownership typically propose definite limitations on the private use of the earth: we may not supply ourselves with luxuries while other persons still lack basic necessities. But no limits are explicitly set on the common human use of the earth. The gazelle, then, would seem to have no right to the land on which she grazes; the lion no right to her prey. Only humans have rights of ownership, even over their own bodies. That anything non-human enjoys food, habitat or life itself is only by the mercy of homo sapiens.

A popular belief drawn from this is that certain animals are simply ‘made to be eaten’. A sheep is walking mutton. Within the Christian tradition this belief tends to be justified by an appeal to revelation.

Karl Barth was bom in Basle in 1886, the descendant of a long line of Swiss Protestant pastors and burghers, who included in their ranks Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of the Italian Renaissance. His family were patricians and devotees of music and the arts, but they also had a simple devotion to Jesus. In the biography of Barth written, on the basis of his autobiographical essays and letters, by his last academic assistant, Eberhard Busch, we hear that Barth’s earliest theological formation came from religious nursery-rhymes in the Basle dialect. His subsequent theological pilgrimage can be seen as a flight from, and then return to, the religious assurance of these children’s songs - albeit in an infinitely more sophisticated manner. As he himself wrote, these songs

Two autobiographical accounts by American Jesuit priests of their New Age involvement have gained considerable attention recently—David Toolan’s Facing West from California’s Shores: A Jesuit’s Journey into New Age Consciousness published in 1987, and Fr. Mitch Pacwa’s Catholics and the New Age, published last year and already reprinted.

David Toolan does not, so far as I am aware, attempt to define the New Age movement. But his encounters reveal this ‘epistemological revolution’ to be an amalgam of Asian mysticism, modem physics, and transpersonal psychologies. Its major proponents are the Esalen Institute, Jean Houston’s ‘Ritual Theater,’ and a host of physicists, psychologists, and naturalists, including Ernest Becker, Stanislaus Grof, Loren Eisley, David Bohm, and Ilya Prigogine, among others.

According to Pacwa’s descriptive (and to my way of thinking very limited) definition, the New Age Movement ‘is a loosely structured, eclectic movement based on experiences of monism that lead people to believe in pantheism, with a tendency to hold millennarian views of history’ (p. 13). (No one, of course, with the possible exception of some professional philosophers, experiences monism or believes in pantheism or even holds millennarian views of history. What Pacwa means is that some people have experiences that he considers monistic rather than dualistic, or entertain ideas about God that he considers insufficiently distinct from ideas about the world, and who tend to think the world might end soon.)

A sharp-witted analyst of the church’s contemporary situation once said: No previous council spoke so extensively and so profoundly about the Church as the Second Vatican Council. After no other council was there such great confusion over the question of what the church is and which form it should take. Church is, as Luther said, a blind, vague word. Indeed it is not easy to say what we mean when we speak of Church.

For one thousand five hundred years the church has lived out its existence and often enough suffered to sustain it in adversity. But not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did the church begin expressis verbis to reflect on its nature. This reflection originally took place against a background of conflicts: conflicts between the papacy and the up-and-coming nation states, conflicts centred around John Wyclif and Jan Hus and above all against the background of debate and argument in the Reformation era. Yet, although the quarrels of the Reformation were not only concerned with individual ecclesiological questions, but much more with the general understanding of what Church is, the sixteenth century did not get as far as reflecting on what the Church’s teaching on the term ‘church’ should be. Not until the nineteenth century, in the wake of Romanticism, did the understanding of the church as such become the subject of consideration. It was Friedrich Schleiermacher who determined the direction of the Protestant Church. On the Catholic side the thoughts of Johann Adam Mohler, the theologian from Tubingen, led the way.

In this article I would like to focus attention on the unique American religious experience as it relates to Thomas Aquinas. For the ideals articulated by Aquinas and his Dominican associates in the medieval university, especially the left bank academic institutions which eventually became the University of Paris, deeply influenced the founder of the American Dominicans, Edward Dominic Fenwick.

To remember, at this time, Fenwick and the historical context in which he devoted his life is quite appropriate. For not only is this the anniversary year of the founding of the Diocese of Columbus, which has offered one hundred and twenty-five years of service to central and southern Ohio, but it is also the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding and dedication of the first Roman Catholic Church in Ohio: St. Joseph’s near Somerset. The person who founded and dedicated St. Joseph’s was the Dominican friar, Edward Dominic Fenwick. It is, in addition, the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the religious community of St. Mary of the Springs where this article was first delivered in lecture form.

One of the pleasures of reading resides in the flourishing condition of biography. According to publishing statistics, biographies sell better than any other genre of serious literature. Some, such as Leon Edel’s five-volume life of Henry James or Michael Holroyd’s three-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw, not to mention Martin Gilbert’s monumental series on Winston Churchill, may seem so overwhelming as to tax even the most devoted student of other people’s stories. Really great biographies, however, such as these all plainly are, only hold their readers in thrall to the next instalment. It was a long wait from Edel’s first volume (1953), which got James to the age of twenty seven, to the final instalment (1972), but no reader once under Edel’s spell would easily have lost patience. Even then, Edel’s one-volume abridgment (1985), no doubt all that any reader but a fanatical Jamesian would now tackle, is arguably better still than the original work. But one could easily list a dozen other superb modem biographies H Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, by Robert Bernard Martin (1980), for example, to mention only the one that has most recently come my way.

Peter Hebblethwaite records that, when he submitted one chapter of his new book, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (Harper Collins, London, 1993, £35), to Archbishop Luigi Barbarito, Pro-Nuncio to Great Britain, for comment, he was told that it would not be possible to write a ‘true and objective life of a Pontiff’

In the false Spring of our times, everything is painted green: it is the appointed liturgical colour for our post-historical sabbath. It’s to everyone’s taste, the guarantee of minimum respectability. There’s a Green party, but that doesn’t get very far, because it appears to appropriate for a particular cause the symbol that belongs to all. The colour has a utopian hint, or rather that of a puritan arcadia, but at the same time it soothes the passages of capitalist economic exchange. More than that: the guarantee of a ‘good’, ‘healthy’ relation to nature, as to one’s own body, increases surplus value. Capitalism has already incorporated, in the interests of profit, the new religiosity of our times, which takes the form of transcending one’s humanity in order to celebrate nature or animality as the ‘other’ with which one nonetheless seeks to become united.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. The planetary structures which support life have been dangerously interfered with; much natural beauty, along with the delicate and long-developed harmonies of people’s everyday environments has been ruined or destroyed. Technology is employed indiscriminately and for the mere sake of size and complexity. However, ‘Green consciousness’ is not the complete answer to all this: in too many ways it may collude with precisely what it purports to oppose.