I am associating Privacy with “Do not disturb, I want to be left alone”. On the face of it, this is an egoistical anti-social standpoint. But is there anything that can be said for being anti-community? In this paper, for the sake of argument, I align myself with this attitude because from this position I can make certain observations and raise questions related to the other.

Whether we like it or not, the mood of the day favours privacy rather than community. Individual privacy is more and more sought and jealously guarded.For many people community is bad news. It evokes a sense of restriction and narrowness rather than openness, conflict rather than harmony .One has only to think of, Islamic community, Serbian community, Protestant community, Roman Catholic community, David Koresh’s community at Waco, the European Community—all these give out negative signals. Even ‘basic community’ has echoes of an in-group and can be seen as a form of protest or elitism. Sometimes it seems as if the only communities that have any popular appeal are fictional ones like Ambridge or Coronation Street. These are fanciful, idealistic creations, real life is much more grim. Survival depends on individual effort. This rejection of community is often the result of its failure to satisfy our needs or its degeneration into such positions as extreme nationalism. But a denial of community often leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness. We can note that both the 1991 General Household Survey of the U.K. (published in 1993 and the recent Report into European Lifestyles by MINTEL draw attention to the fact that over a quarter of all British homes are single person households and about 14% of households are people living alone.

W.E.B. Dubois, speaking of his experience of being a black man in North America in 1903, wrote:

For Dubois, the greatest injustice that African-Americans faced was not the outright malevolence of the ignorant, but the general tendency of even the enlightened to assume that blacks, by virtue of their being physically different from the majority of those in the dominant ethos, posed some kind of problem that needed to be addressed. Even those who “accepted” Dubois and treated him respectfully caused him to wonder why he needed to be “accepted” in the first place, and why he could not assume the respect of others. Dubois realized that the oppression and injustice he experienced was deeply rooted in the very presumption that his physical distinctiveness outweighed the immense commonality he shared with others and called into question his status not only in this culture but in the human community.

At the beginning of the 13th century, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) sanctioned a number of fresh efforts at evangelization. Among the major pastoral concerns that the conciliar decrees addressed, the sacrament of penance figures in a prominent way. Having established the requirement of annual confession as a fixed element of Christian life, the conciliar Fathers at the same time recognized the need to supply qualified priests who could competently exercise the ministry of reconciliation.

With Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, St Dominic was present at the Fourth Lateran Council, after which he obtained official approbation for his newly-begun work of preaching and hearing confessions. In 1221, Pope Honorius III granted universal faculties to Dominic’s band of preachers-confessors. The international character of Dominic’s mission in the Church meant of course that his fiiars would hear the confessions of persons caught up in the displacement that marked the beginning of European cosmopolitanism. This circumstance explains the advice that, according to Paul of Hungary, St Dominic himself gave to his brother priests, namely, that they should discreetly enquire during the course of the confession from where the penitent came, so that their spiritual counsel could take account of certain regional differences, such as local fasting customs. Of course, such advice would be hardly necessary for a parish priest who heard the confessions only of those under his permanent pastoral care.

Recent scholarship suggests that we should not underestimate the importance that hearing confessions played in the pastoral ministry of the early Dominican friars.

This festchrift honours the notable theological career of Dr. Maurice Wiles, Regius Professor emeritus of Divinity at Oxford University. In their Preface Drs. Coakley and Pailin state: “Throughout his distinguished career he has been a staunch supporter of a liberal approach to Christian theological understanding” (p. v). The essays in this volume take up a major, if not the major, preoccupation of Professor Wiles’ “liberal approach”, that of the making of Christian doctrine in the early Church and the remaking of it today.

The majority of the authors endorse, and so champion, in some fashion, Wiles’ initiative that Christian doctrine be remade in light of the demands of historical criticism, contemporary philosophy, and cultural experience. Thus J. Barr, J. Hick, M. Hooker, G. Kaufman, R. Lyman, S. McFague, J. Macquarrie, S. Ogden, and D. Pailin argue, in a variety of ways, that the traditional understanding of Christian doctrine, based on an often unscriptural (Hooker, p. 74), supernaturalist (Macquarrie, p. 168), interventionist (Barr, p. 9), and dualistic (Kaufman, pp. 99-100) understanding of God’s relationship to the world, must be fundamentally reconceived and replaced by an understanding of doctrine where God’s activity is restricted within the enclosed process of history and human activity, and interpreted through human experience and philosophical insight. As Ogden states: “I hold that one of the lasting achievements of revisionary theology right from the beginning is to have shown that the credibility of Christian witness can be validated, finally, only by appeal to what anyone is capable of experiencing simply as a human being” (p. 196).

Although the Dominican Order was not in existence when the Crusades began, during the thirteenth century the Dominicans developed a strong presence in the Holy Land and found themselves laying the new network of Church administration, as they took over many of the newly created Latin sees, and establishing links with the Greek and Oriental Churches they encountered. Great travellers and great critics, they bequeathed to the Church a closer understanding of what kind of religion Islam really was, what the Eastern churches were really like, and insights into the whole nature of the Crusades just as the Crusader States were finally collapsing. Their findings and opinions may be found in such works as: Burchard’s “Descriptio Terrae Sanctae”; the “Itinerarium” of Riccoldo de Monte Croce, and the “Opus Tripartitum” of Humbert of Romans.

In 1221 St. Dominic died at Bologna, having seen his Order approved by the Holy See and established in Provence, Paris, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary and England. One of the ambitions of his life remained unfulfilled, however: he had always wanted to go to the East to convert the Saracens. Innocent III encouraged him instead to devote his attention to the Albigensian heretics in the South of France and to similar sects in Lombardy. It was left to his spiritual descendants to fulfill his dream of evangelising the East.

The first approach of the Dominicans to the Holy Land came in 1226 when Alice of Champagne, widow of King Hugh I of Cyprus, founded the monastery of St. Dominic at Nicosia in Cyprus, later to become the burial place of the Kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem after the loss of the mainland.