Attitudes towards sociology displayed by some leading authorities in the Catholic church today are, to put it mildly, ambivalent. They vary from suspicion and sometimes overt hostility to feelings of relative pleasure depending on whether or not the findings of sociological research can be used to support their pastoral intuitions. Pope Paul, for instance, has been reported as claiming that the turbulence and dissent in the Roman Catholic church today ‘tends to be produced with a new method, that of the sociological survey’. At the same time that he made this remark he was sponsoring one of the largest socio-religious surveys to date within his own diocese of Rome. In England, in his address to the Church Leaders’ Conference in 1972, Cardinal Heenan viewed with alarm the number of university students now opting for courses in sociology and what he saw as the almost certain consequence of requests for fresh surveys. He continued by doubting the value in planning future pastoral strategy of such surveys as that recently completed for the Church in West Germany. In the same year he was accepting one of the ‘findings’ of an extremely unrepresentative survey carried out by the Laity Commission on behalf of the hierarchy, that priests working in parishes should make themselves more available to their parishioners. Yet he was not reported as welcoming another ‘finding’ in the same survey that the laity accepted the principle of optional celibacy for priests. Thus it would appear that some church leaders are selective in their acceptance of sociological findings.

We would now like to suggest there are at least four reasons for the suspicion of sociology. In the first place it is quite possible that sociology is connected in the minds of many with revolutionary social change. The student unrest of the late 1960s which was thought to be seeking such change occurred in universities such as Berkeley, Nanterre and tlw London School of Economics, all with strong faculties of sociology.

Robert Lowell was born in Boston in 1917. He was descended from early New England colonists, and after a childhood on Beacon Hll, he went to St. Mark’s School and then on to Harvard, where he matriculated, but transferred after a year to Kenyon College. There he majored in classics and became a pupil of John Crowe Ransom. In 1940 he became a Catholic convert. Although Lowell attempted to enlist in the navy after the beginning of World War II he later protested against the Allied bombing of the civilian population of European cities and as a result of his failure to obey the Selective Service Act he was sentenced to a year and a day in a Federal prison. He was released after five months and in the following year, 1944, there appeared his first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness.

Since that time Lowell’s status as a poet and a public spokesman (the two became undistinguishable) has never ceased to grow. Lowell has acquired an extraordinary power as the private man made public, the tormented citizen whose personal struggles and griefs seem fatally enmeshed with the course of twentieth century history. When the poet turned down L. B. Johnson’s White House invitation as a protest against American policy in S.E. Asia it was not only the President who expressed concern. Lowell has made himself into an archetype, living through the contradictions inherent in his society, tom between the need for a domestic and artistic privacy, and the forces that impel him to a public commitment.

In the early days of anthropology, it was not quite clear whether the new arrival was an infant prodigy, or simply a know-all adolescent. If the claims of the first generations of anthropologists were correct, marvellous keys had been discovered for tracing the prehistory of the family and the origins of religion; but the development of the subject brought about their rejection, though Morgan’s scheme of the evolution of the family was absorbed into the ossified dogmas of Soviet Communism (from which it has by now been quietly dislodged), while Sir James Frazer’s mythology of corn spirits and dying gods not only impressed Freud but gave English-speaking intellectuals their abiding image of traditional religion.

Professional social anthropology meanwhile followed the path of academic respectability, the elaboration of its own methodology and, more particularly, its own academic language, which admirably fulfilled the related functions of revealing its mysteries by successive degrees to the initiated while concealing them from outsiders. Respectability once attained, however, has a way of losing its charm, and we now seem to be on the verge of a new wave of anthropologists as prophets. Dr Roy Willis presents himself as one of the first of the band, with his revelations contained in Man and Beast, the first of a new series, entitled Approaches to Anthropology, under the general editorship of Professor Mary Douglas.

Let it be said at once that Dr Willis is a singularly urbane prophet and his kerygma contains little that menaces doom, though much that stirs up thought.

Just before nine o’clock I dragged my tired frame in through the school doors and on towards the staff room.

Like that frustrated character Billy Liar I would like to machine-gun down that irritating cheerful face in the comer. I pour out my tea and sip it quietly, consulting my timetable. On the wall across the road a painted slogan reinforces the image of my first class, 4F.

At the first piercing sound of the bell Mr. C. rises sharply and makes off in the direction of the Technical rooms. I would like to bomb that bell for ever but instead make my way wearily upstairs to room 5, open the door, and walk over to the desk. I am soon followed by a few lads who make towards the desks at the window.

I pick up a book, Your Life of Our Lord, and try to think of 2c’s R.K. lesson while a few more boys come trickling in the door. I acknowledge them with a casual look and they join their mates. I have given up struggling with these lads. They resist all efforts to get them to read or to write.

In itself this collection of articles, letters, jokes, editorials and poems from New Christian (1965-1970) has nothing particularly to recommend it to readers five years later. Everything here was written for its own time and place rather than for export. But seen as a reminder of what New Christian stood for, as evidence to draw on should there be any other serious Christian reviews in being or possibility, it seems to me of very great value.

However we regard New Christian, praise or blame for it belongs mostly to Trevor Beeson, its permanent editor. I think he achieved remarkable success. He aimed high, and hit a lot of marks, missing only the crucial one—circulation. His short account in the Reader of what he tried for and where he failed is a model for any editor of a Christian journal. I propose to summarise it under eight heads, following each with my own comment, and drawing where necessary on the evidence of the collection.

Men and women martyred for their faith form a coherent and distinctive group—from Socrates and Stephen, through Joan of Arc, Savonarola and Thomas More, down to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in our own day. Violent death came to each in such a way that we can classify them all with Jesus.

Particular circumstances may allow us to match their martyrdoms with his passion and crucifixion. At times betrayal by former friends or similar forms of treachery led to arrest and imprisonment. The trials which preceded the death penalty frequently centred on some fatal question. Did Thomas More wish to deprive Henry VIII of the title which Parliament had granted him? How would Jesus answer when the high priest asked him : ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ (Mark 14:61). Finally, many martyrs shared the same geography of death with Jesus—public execution. Some were, of course, butchered in their prison cells, or like Bonhoeffer led away to the sinister secrecy of a Nazi hanging. But Joan of Arc died in the Rouen market-place, Savonarola outside the old Palace in Florence, and Thomas More on Tower Hill.

Granted these and other similarities, we need, nevertheless, to be sensitive to much that gives Jesus’ passion and death its own particular profile. The differences go beyond the obvious and massive fact that no one even alleges that the other martyrs have reconciled the entire human race with God. We must not let other notable contrasts slip out of sight. Let me examine one of these.