The Order of Preachers, which has such a clear individuality in the Church, has nevertheless among its gifted sons many different shades of character and fields of achievement. To the outside world it is the order of the great theologians, the order of strict orthodoxy, the order of St Thomas, of Cajetan, of Bariez, of John of St Thomas, and in our own time of P?re Gardei! and P?re Garrigou-Lagrange. The historian thinks also of the great inquisitors, of Jacob Sprenger and his Malleus Ma/eficarum, of Torquemada and the formidable Melchior Cano. By contrast with these there has always been a strain of the revolutionary, of the liberal and of the avant-garde, Savonarola, Las Casas, Lacordaire Vincent McNabb and Yves Congar. And finally, there is the recurrent type of the dedicated scholar, William of Moerbeke, Heinrich Denifle, Pierre Mandonnet and P?re Vicaire. And where shall we fit in Eckhardt, Tauler and Suso ? Into which of these groups shall we place Fr Daniel ?

His curriculum vitae is a varied one. Angelo Callus was born in 1888 in Malta, of Maltese parents but ultimately of Greek ancestry, and I am told the first Callus in the island was Greek physician to the Grand Master De La Vallette, the hero of the first siege of the island. He became a friar sixty years ago at the age of seventeen, and studied at Florence and Rome with a brilliant record, becoming Master of Sacred Theology at the unusually early age of thirty-six in 1924.

The other day, as I was signing the register in a West Country hotel, the proprietress observed to me: ‘Didn't there use to be an actor called Robert Speaight?’ The remark had no importance except to flavour an autobiography or enliven a dinner table; but it had, I think, a certain significance. It signified that a day comes when we must all brace ourselves to realize that other people regard us as fuddyduddies. Jacques Maritain is the antonym of a fuddyduddy, but he is 82 years old. Since the death of his wife, Raissa, he has lived with the Petits Frères de Charles de Foucauld at their headquarters just outside Toulouse. The fine new Dominican church and scholasticate are close at hand, and here the Petits Frères follow certain courses and receive a solid theological formation before dispersing, in their groups of two or three, to the uttermost ends of the earth. They live in huts – purposely provisional, one supposes – and take their meals in ‘messes’ of six or eight. Maritain has his own little hut, partitioned to form a bedroom and a tiny study. Fie is not a canonical member of the community, but he shares its life in so far as he is able to; gives an occasional conference or seminar; and is at hand for advice. Twice a year he leaves Toulouse to visit the house which still belongs to him at Princeton – at present occupied by Arthur Lourié and his wife – or to stay with friends at Kolbsheim in Alsace.

Nothing is more important than that Catholics should continually ask themselves: how bad a state is the Church in? We are all aware of the possibility that the Church may appear to be corrupt, and of the actualization of this possibility at various times in the past. But we tend, I think, to assume that such corruption will always be glaringly obvious, a matter of simony at the papal court, or pluralist bishops, or priests with concubines and children : we therefore conclude that, to the extent that things seem all right, so they must be all right. Whereas in fact, I suspect, corruption is seldom easily recognized at the time. Perhaps even the examples I have just mentioned, which seem to us so scandalous, were not felt at the time as symptoms of deep-seated disease: after all, we know that the Church is composed, not of angels, but of men, and that we have no right to expect perfection from Christians, bishops included; so probably these things were usually put down as instances of the kind of human weakness that we know that we have to reckon with. Thus we must be prepared, at any time, to find that the Church can be deeply corrupted, a corruption for which we shall be sternly judged but to which we have long been blind.

When we have recognized that the Church can be corrupt, we have to enquire what could make it possible for this corruption to take place: and this is the most serious theological enquiry that can be made, for it concerns our understanding of the nature of the Church.

An approach to this theme must be very tentative. Enormous shifts in emphasis and sense of direction are taking place in the Church today and it is not easy to see the effect they can have in fields of thought and action which have of late been less explored. It is strange that one of these should be the missionary field, but it seems true. The Council's preoccupations hitherto have been elsewhere. The outright rejection of the schema on the Missions in the third session was evidence not only of its own inadequacy but also of a possible general consciousness among the Fathers that this crucial subject had not yet been considered by them with requisite seriousness. The great project on The Church in the Modern World’ will obviously also be of the deepest significance for missionary thinking. To attempt any sort of a rounded statement on the subject at the moment would seem then to be out of the question. All one can do is to present some of the intellectual problems behind mission work today and also to gather together what new insights into the meaning and strategy of our work already published conciliar decrees and current theology can offer us.

Certainly mission thinking today must undergo a thorough renewal; our work cannot continue to be carried on with the attitudes and methods that have prevailed with relatively slight changes over the last century. Doubtless the need for this renovation has not been recognized as yet sufficiently or at a deep enough level by those engaged in the work.

Consciences are neither born nor made, they develop. Development in living beings is the outcome of interaction between the individual and the environment; specifically, in the case of moral development, between the individual person and the culture. The child is born with the potential ability to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in terms other than those of immediate personal satisfaction to which the infant is limited, but the growing child can make assessments only in terms of the values which he is taught. He has. as part of his human make-up, the tendency to pursue the perceived good and to shun the perceived bad. What he actually perceives as good and bad depends largely on what the society into which he is born teaches him so to perceive. This is not to say that the individual's capacity for moral judgment is wholly dependent on the influence of external agents; the ultimate structure of conscience is unique because no two environments are entirely alike and no two individuals are entirely alike.

Though it has been said that moral development is the result of interaction between the individual and the culture one must be yet more precise. The child receives his values not from ‘the culture’ or from ‘ ‘society’ in a large and undefined sense but from a fairly circumscribed group of persons: parents and siblings, other adults in the family circle, school teachers and companions. This means that values are never transmitted to the child in a ‘pure’ state, they are always, in some way. modified by the person who mediates them.

But this Samaritan did not have the leisure to live a long time on the earth; he had to return to the place from which he had come down. And so ‘On the next day’ – which is the next day? Surely it is the day of the Lord's resurrection about which it is said. This is the day which the Lord has made?’ – ‘he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said, take care of him’. What are these two denarii except the two testaments which have impressed on them the image of the eternal Father? By the price of these our wounds are healed. We have been redeemed by the price of blood to avoid the pains of eternal death. These two denarii, though it is not out of place to understand their faces as the four gospels, the innkeeper took.