This document was composed by the Dominican friars who have been imprisoned in Sao Paolo since 1969. It is the outcome of their joint reflections and those of other Christian prisoners with them. It falls into three parts: a meditation on the role of the Church in the world (extensively summarized here), an account of conditions in Brazil, and a consequent justification of the revolutionary position they have adopted.

The Church is the universal sacrament of salvation, continuing in time the presence, mission and work of Christ in the world. Jesus Christ came to make salvation a reality, and his whole life, including his death and resurrection, was a witness of love. The mission of the Church is to continue this living witness of love, and the Church is essentially missionary, sent to the world to witness to Jesus Christ among men.

The Church cannot exist on the fringe of the world; it is in the world and has to be constantly present to the world, since it is there that its mission lies, as light to the world, salt of the earth, the leaven in the dough. This is why the Council produced a Constitution on the Church in the World of Today.

There had been a derailment ahead of us at Dover, so I was late arriving in Brussels. More delay getting a taxi, because I couldn’t quite bring myself to use my elbows like everybody else; the hotel room booked for me, I calculated, would cost about £5 10s. a night, so unless I stopped eating or found another hotel I should have to return home well before the Congress ended. At last the Congress hall itself: the Palais de Congrés, past the illuminated fountains of the Mont des Arts and a small knot of cameramen, timidly into the Salle Albert 1 er—and it really hit one then: the long, high swooping hall, with what must have been a thousand people in it, the brilliant glare of the television lights reflected from the huge black and white poster at the back of the stage, bearing the words in English—

Schillebeeckx was speaking in French from the rostrum; his voice resonated effortlessly from the splendid amplification system, though soon one became aware of a counterpoint of high-pitched chirp and chatter from the badly adjusted earphones of theologians unaccustomed to the use of simultaneous-translation equipment; this was to form an accompaniment throughout the Congress. Photographers crawled and flashed unceasingly over the stage; from time to time the television cameras swivelled and turned their black snouts on the audience. I would return to England the next day, I decided; no, no, not this, not this.

The debate between Christians and Marxists has been under way now for more than a decade. Christians are admitting that they have in the past been too wrapped up in the institutional forms of religion, and that they have perhaps been seduced from the Gospel by the success of the institutional Church. Marxists, in similar vein, admit that they have in turn been too ready to castigate the outward forms of religious organization, and too little prepared to give consideration to the central message of the Gospels and the prophets. Here too the exigencies of party organization have brought about the same displacement of goals found in the Church. Each declares that the other has far more to offer than they had previously either suspected or been prepared to admit. The unhappy feature of the Christian/Marxist dialogue is that in ten years or so it does not seem to have progressed very far beyond ‘programme statements’, or declarations of intent, of this kind. The concrete and substantive advances made in debate appear to have been quite disproportionate to the expectations held of it. In particular, the development of a really coherent ‘Christian materialism’, hoped for by many participants in the debate, has not been realized.

One is compelled to ask why such an initially promising line of philosophical enquiry should have provided such meagre results. Is it that we were mistaken after all in thinking that progress could be made here? Is it that Christianity and Marxism in fact have nothing to say to each other beyond that which has already been said? Are they, in the last analysis, incompatible systems of thought?

The logic of the word ‘salvation’ involves the idea of a person or situation from which the subject of salvation is saved. There are a variety of models used in the Bible for describing such a situation or person; I choose to use that of slavery. Apart from other considerations, this model is useful in that it connects the idea of situation to that of person: slavery is always slavery to. Salvation is thus the setting-free of someone from slavery to someone else. In the Bible the paradigm case of salvation is the setting-free of the Israelites from their slavery to Pharaoh. Ultimately, however, in the Gospel, salvation becomes the setting-free of man from his slavery to the devil.

So much by way of defining how I intend to use the word ‘salvation’. I wish now to question our contemporary experience as to how far it contains anything which this model of salvation can help us to interpret. Do we experience a need which could be called the need for salvation? And if so, how does it show itself? What are the characteristic forms of the need for salvation today? Where, in our multi-storeyed modern society, does it show itself most clearly? To indicate at the outset the way in which I intend to deal with this question, let me say that it is in the sphere of language, or more generally that of communications, that I discern the clearest evidence of this need.

Consider the following. They are passages quoted in an article by W. A. de Klerk (a well-known Afrikaner novelist and playwright) in the recently published ‘Beweging Uitwaarts’ (‘The Movement Outward’), a collection of critical essays by de Klerk, Johan Degenaar and Martin Versfeld, that is at present causing quite a stir in Afrikaner cultural circles.

Aelred, or Ailred, Eilaf’s son, of Hexham, whom we know as Aelred of Rievaulx, was a wholly remarkable man for several quite distinct reasons. In the first place, he was English, or perhaps, to be more precise, Anglo-Scandinavian. The number of outstanding figures in the history of twelfth-century England who were English in this sense, ‘of fine old English stock’ as his disciple and biographer Walter Daniel put it, was so small as to be almost insignificant. The world which Aelred knew was one where lordship, both as ownership of land and as control of government and administration, was in the hands, almost exclusively, of Normans, Flemings, Bretons, Lorrainers, Frenchmen, of almost any save Englishmen, in fact, and a member of the governing order (such as Aelred was from 1143 till his death in 1167) who was also a thoroughly native Englishman was a prime rarity. Secondly, Aelred was a man of the north country, a Northumbrian born and bred in an age when it might be said that Northumbria had lost a culture and had failed to find a role. Thirdly, Aelred was a profoundly religious man in a characteristically English fashion—essentially unacademic, unintellectual, despite the great breadth of his reading and his undoubted facility for writing. Fourthly—but not lastly, by any means, for there were many sides to this complicated man—he seems perfectly to epitomize, in his career, his interests and his influence, the age through which he lived.

A deeply-felt inner pride is not incompatible with outward signs of lack of confidence, even of inferiority. Aelred moved among the great but in his relations with them he seems a little unsure of himself. He never quite took their measure or became one of them. In an almost naively idealistic way he expected too much of them.