Just over ten years ago, as now, there were debates about the freedom of television; but they had a very different emphasis. Then, the argument of a commercial pressure group was that the bbc represented ‘state’ broadcasting, too official, too unfree. To counteract this, Independent Television was introduced. Now, the argument of a puritan-christian pressure group is that the bbc is too free and should have the measure of control stepped up to the level already prevailing in Independent Television. How and why has this happened, and for what party is the aid of all good men required ? These are the questions which this article tries to answer.

The Clean-up Television Campaign (CUTV) began in January 1964, when Mrs Mary Whitehouse, schoolmistress-wife of a company director, and Mrs Norah Buckland, wife of an Anglican vicar, jointly issued a five point manifesto:

We have all been aware, indeed for some years now, that Prof. G. R. Driver was preparing a work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we knew that it would be a major work, and that it would certainly tell us something new. It was a long wait, but now it is ended, and here is the book, of more than 600 pages, which is throwing to the ground certain positions which had come to be regarded as established. It is the work of a scholar, who is considered one of the finest Hebraists of our time, and of a courteous man, who has many friends, among whom I have the honour to include myself. I cannot forget his charm and humour as chairman at one of my Schweich Lectures on these very same manuscripts in 1959, nor his kind words in the preface which he graciously agreed to write to these lectures when they appeared in print, nor the long talks we had and the meals at Magdalen College and at his home at Oxford, nor the visit we made together to Qumran. All this makes it the more painful to me to be compelled to disagree with what he has written. After I have shared bread and salt with him (and a little more too), he might well say with the psalmist (he would say it in Hebrew): ‘He who did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me’. But this book is without question one of the most important which has been written about the scrolls, and judgement about it must be made with complete honesty and frankness.

When Pope Paul came to New York last October and said Mass in Yankee Stadium, before a congregation of 40,000 and a hidden audience of untold million television-viewers, he made a special point, no doubt because he was in the world’s most Jewish city, of extending his blessing to ‘the sons of Abraham’. The Mass he said was the Votive Mass for Peace, which has a Gospel beginning: ‘Late in the evening that same day, the first day of the week, although the doors of the place where the disciples had gathered were bolted for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood before them and said: “Peace be to you!” (John 20.19-20). For days afterwards one could meet Jews saying: ‘So that’s what we mean, that’s exactly what we mean’. Quite a few Catholics were bothered about it too (e.g. an angry Jesuit letter to The National Catholic Reporter: ‘unthinking acceptance of scriptural readings chosen long ago by unskilled hands’). The incident with all its sensitiveness and misunderstandings on both sides, was typical enough of the atmosphere in which the ‘Schema on the Jews’ was received in the U.S.A.

Ever since the close of the second session the American Jewish press had given prominent space to articles and news reports echoing widely current rumours about the strength of the forces in or near the Vatican opposing a definitive statement on anti-Semitism.

‘The king kisses the hands of my lady Abbess’, rang the cry across the convent walls. The year, 1602, and the occasion, a hunting trip made by Henri IV in the neighbourhood of the Cistercian foundation of Port-Royal. The abbess in question was just eleven years old, and pattens had to be found for her to stand on to receive the king properly. It was not the abbess he came to see, though, but her father, Antoine Amauld, who to all intents and purposes controlled the abbey of Port Royal. His daughter, Jacqueline, was only nine when she took her vows in October, 1600, though the request addressed to Rome for her to be made at once coadjutrix of the abbess described her as seventeen. Under these inauspicious circumstances of flagrant royal patronage and deception of the papal authority began the startling career of Angélique Arnauld and the two institutions of Port-Royal which were the most significant phenomena in the religious history of the ‘great century’ in France.

It is useful to be reminded how this purest of all the religious movements of the seventeenth century began in an atmosphere of simony and corruption, because it goes some way to explain the lazy monastic ideal against which Mère Angélique, a very vigorous, shrewd and forthright French version of St Teresa of Avila, later rebelled, and it also gives us some inkling of the family strength of the Arnaulds and their connections, which enabled Port-Royal to stand up to the Archbishop of Paris and the royal incursions under Louis XIV as long as it did.

In a paper published in New Blackfriars a few months ago, Mr Eagleton applied a number of political insights to our understanding of relationships within the Church, in an attempt to prevent the formulation and implementation of theological ideas that would be at variance with a correct understanding of our society. He is convinced that ‘our changing ideas about the priesthood aren’t only theological but are part of a general pattern of change in our whole society which for over a century has been redefining relationships, values, functions, attitudes’. He is concerned lest we block this process of development by merely changing our tone of voice, or our terminology, leaving intact and unquestioned a pattern of ecclesial relationships that is inappropriate to our contemporary understanding of political reality. Much that he says in criticism of what he describes as the ‘liberal paternalism’ of English Catholicism is both penetrating and important. But it seems to me that his analysis is defective because he has failed adequately to ask the question: what is a priest? It is certainly true to say that ‘we have in fact to make a clear division between what theology tells us about the priesthood, and the whole historical accretion which this has gathered in society’, but, if insufficient attention is paid to the data of revelation, we shall extricate the idea of the priesthood from one particular historical entanglement only to drown it in another: that of the dominant perspectives of contemporary politics.

Yes, even the last ones are threatened, and it becomes a matter for congratulation, let alone relief, to catch sight of the one opposite the Palais de Justice, or the few they have left in the Latin Quarter, outside the Ecole de Médecine or opposite the Place de la Sorbonne. Other visual clichés of Parisian life are disappearing, too, for ever. A few weeks ago, unthinkable red and grey buses began to appear on a few Paris routes, heralding the disappearance of the familiar ugly green monsters with their capacious platforms, still the best, if somewhat unstable, way of seeing the city. By 1966 at least one Métro line will be running without drivers and dispensing tickets from machines (it’s always been supposed that if they allowed people to travel free on the Métro and dispensed with drivers and clippies the loss of revenue would be less than the wage-bill . . .). And an old landmark is about to disappear from the skyline at the end of the long perspective of the rue de Rennes, where the Gare Montparnasse is making way for a vast new office-block and modernised station. The present station is inadequate to deal with the vast increase of traffic, but some memories will go with it: the ghosts of Modigliani and Soutine haunt it and it was here von Choltitz surrendered to Leclerc when the city was liberated in 1944.

The Second Vatican Council draws to a close amid the rather general realization that the Catholic Church has reached the end of a historic age. Indeed it is sometimes, provocatively, said that we find ourselves now in the ‘post-Christian era’. Naturally this term has such undertones of pessimism and ambiguity that it cannot be taken too seriously. From the point of view of theology, there can be no post-Christian era. Since the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us, and since ‘behold He is with us all days even to the end of the world’, all ages are His and He is the King of Ages, immortal and invisible. Yet on another level, that of social and cultural history, it may perhaps be possible to find certain fruitful suggestions in this insolent expression.

For over a thousand years the Catholic Church in Western Europe has first helped to build, then to sustain a Christian culture, a ‘Christendom’, which has after all been not without its glory. It is the culture and society not of the last days of the Roman Empire, though inspired by Augustine and the other Latin Fathers, but of Garolingian and then Medieval and Renaissance Europe: the Christendom of Chartres and Canterbury, Paris and Rome, Cambridge and Salamanca, of St Anselm and St Thomas, of St Bernard and Peter the Venerable, of St Francis and St Dominic, Duns Scotus, St Theresa, St John of the Cross, St Ignatius . . . What need is there to go on?

The phrase ‘ministry of the word’ is still an unfamiliar one even to Catholics who are fairly well instructed in the traditional theology of the eucharist. By comparison with talk about the ‘sacrifice of the mass’ the phrase seems odd, and even perhaps quasi-heretical. Historians of the liturgy can tell us a good deal, of course, about the way in which the ministry of the word, as an original and necessary part of the eucharistic celebration, fell into comparative decay, and indeed became almost entirely forgotten as an object of theological reflection for centuries. But here I want to point to an aspect of this subject somewhat different from that which is given to us by the liturgical historian. There is, I think, an important philosophical truth which needs to be dug up from the liturgical rubble in which we have all been poking around for the last few years, before we can give an adequate definition of the ‘ministry of the word’ as part of the whole eucharistic act, and therefore before we can begin to realise once more in practice what it means.

It can be taken as agreed, to begin with, that the eucharistic celebration has to do with the real presence of Christ. It is the permanent sacramental means by which Christ is made present to us and, indeed, in us. But, notoriously, the notion of the presence of Christ has been very variously interpreted.

One might put the point by saying that, in the past all the emphasis, in discussion of the real presence, has been upon the reality of the presence, whereas what we need to explore today in order to restore a balanced theology of the eucharist is the presence of the reality.