After much thought and prayer I have come to the decision that I am free as a Catholic priest to marry. I have come to this after long years of wrestling with myself and of pondering both the pastoral and missionary needs of the Church and the basic nature of the Christian priesthood, marriage and freedom. I have for years argued persistently for a major change in the Church’s position in this regard, a change which I see as absolutely crucial for the wider effectiveness and coherence of the aggiornamento set in motion by Pope John. It is only recently that I have come to the conclusion that in this matter as in others one cannot go on indefinitely simply affirming in print and in speech a point of view completely at odds with the structured ordering of one’s own life. There comes a moment when it is morally necessary to pin oneself to the truth and importance of what one has affirmed to be true and important.

I have been a priest for twenty-two years. I accepted the obligation of celibacy at ordination without questioning because I wished to be a priest and this was the law of the Church, and I have kept it. In the cheerful, zealous, withdrawn atmosphere of a seminary it did not seem much of a problem. I was even convinced for a time that I did not want to marry, but for many years now I have wanted to very much. So this decision is first of all a response to an honest sense of my own need. Yet at present I am living happily with my mother; I have many dear friends, and I am extremely busy as a university lecturer and writer. I have certainly not come to this decision out of loneliness or depression or because I have lost interest in the Church or the Catholic priesthood. Quite the contrary.

I’ve married a cupboard of rubbish.
I bed in a fish puddle.
Down here the sky is always falling....
I housekeep in Time’s gut-end Among emmets and molluscs,
Duchess of Nothing,
Hairtusk’s bride.

Sylvia Plath’s ‘Poem for a Birthday’ (The Colossus) is a complex dramatic monologue, a seven-part narrative in which a psyche struggles towards birth, in ‘the city of spare parts’ which is the world. It draws for its imagery on that teenage suicide attempt fictionalised in The Bell Jar and on the experience of actual childbirth, so that at times the speaker is mother, at times child, and frequently both. Its main literary sources are the Brothers Grimm and Theodore Roethke’s early poetry, particularly Praise to the End (1951). Its heroine is a Cinderella or Snow-White princess in nightmare exile among incomprehensible and uncomprehending powers. The second chapter of David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence offers an extended commentary on this poem, ‘trying to foster the reader’s possession of poetic meaning, while endeavouring to discuss universal truths about the dynamics of human personality as seen by “philosophical anthropology”.’ For this enterprise he asks the reader’s patience, ‘ignoring for the moment certain problems of the concepts and theories I shall be using’.

In fostering our possession of poetic meaning he glosses the above lines (from section 4, ‘The Beast’) as follows: ‘For “marry” here, I believe, we may read “identify”. Her concept of marrying belongs to the infant’s primitive belief that Mummy and Daddy virtually eat one another in marriage’; ‘a cupboard full of fragments of impingement—memories of her father and fragments of the mother’s “male element”;’ ‘Hairtusk is maleness, again, her father’s penis.’

So the British public is not going to be able to see Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom. Perhaps some mature reflections by one who saw the film as long ago as July 1976 at the quaint Pagoda cinema in Paris, might be of interest to the readers of New Blackfriars.

At the outset it appears that Pasolini is using a device we find in his film Pigsty where he tries to tell two related stories at the same time and keeps cutting from one to the other. There is first the story from de Sade of the four, rich, degenerate men who, looking for some new stimulus for their jaded appetites plan a monumental orgy. They seek out beautiful and innocent boys and girls, take them to a remote castle and there indulge in all manner of depravities for 120 days at the end of which they torture and kill their victims. Then there is the story of the short lived fascist republic that was established at Salo in North Italy in 1943-4 and the enforced recruitment of young peasant boys to serve the Nazis in the war against the allies and their own countrymen. But it soon becomes apparent that the fascism that Pasolini is interested in is not so much Salo as the ‘nonfascist’ fascism of present day Italy under the capitalist system. The historic Salo is soon forgotten and the four men are shown as pillars of Italian society : Il Duca, Monsignore, Excellenza and Presidente. It is these contemporary figures who become the protagonists of the de Sade story. The orgies take place in three stages or gironi. A word chosen perhaps to remind us of the Dantean circles in hell. Each of them is introduced by a female character who recites the scene that is enacted before us.

Because of the prominent role of individual Christians in South Africa who have opposed apartheid and exposed its brutalities, we are accustomed today to think of the South African Church as one of the most unrelenting opponents of racial oppression in that country. From the gadfly missionary Dr. John Philip of the 1820’s to Dr. Beyers Naude of our own time, there stretches a tradition of bold prophetic speaking. However, a closer look at the role of the Church, especially from the viewpoint of some Latin American theologians, raises some disturbing questions about the South African Church’s past history and present situation, the more so when the comments of those who are speaking prophetically today are taken into account.

There are interesting parallels between the development in society of the Churches of Latin America and South Africa. Argentinian theologian Jose Miguez Bonino writes that regarding his subcontinent:

Protestantism was a late arrival in Latin America, entering between 1870-1890. Its arrival helped undermine the overwhelming predominance of Roman Catholicism, but in a way that far from liberating the poor, instead subtly imprisoned them further.

The argument / have with Barker is by now played out, at any rate over “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” (New Blackfriars, June 1975). From the start I knew that that article had its shortcomings. But it is, essentially, corrigible. I think I know what I wanted to say in it, though I acknowledge that what I wrote did not always say it. Barker, however, has a habit of regarding what I write as just a very extended parapraxis, all the surface deficiencies being but symptoms of the fact that what I want to say is, literally, unspeakable. The very fact that I should want to put down these deficiencies of formulation to subjective conditions of production would itself be symptomatic of the degree to which I am held in thrall by the ideology which is the true author of what I wrote— the ideology according to which “subjects” (e.g. Denys Turner) are the authors of, among other things, texts. All this would be by the way were it not that, in Barker’s view, it is its captivation by the ideology of “the subject” which is the chief ideological element in Christianity and the chief reason why Marxist science cannot debate Christianity. For the ideological nature of Christianity makes it the (potential) object of Marxist science, not a discourse it can debate with on equal but different terms.

I have no objection in principle to this apparently high-handed procedure, analogous as it is to the Freudian habit of giving Freudian explanations of the critics of Freudian theory. After all I myself argued (“Marxism, Christianity and Morality”, New Blackfriars, April 1977, p. 191), that the mark of any science is its capacity not merely to explain what ideology fails to explain but also to explain why ideology cannot explain what it fails to explain.