Since the last of these chronicles (New Blackfriars June 1967), I should no doubt have been spending my time dutifully reading the Goncourt prize entries, or the latest offering of the nouveau roman, I have in fact been doing nothing of the kind. If I were to look for the two most interesting novels recently written in French I would plump unhesitatingly for two quite different books, both by established writers, one experimental in style, the other rigorously traditional. The first is a fascinating exercise in science-fiction by Robert Merle, Un animal doué de raison (Gallimard, 1967), the second is Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir (Gallimard, 1968).

I haven’t, either, been doing much in the reading of the fifty-odd books which have appeared on ‘the events of May’, having a suspicion that more of the ideologies, at any rate, were represented in the graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne, where plaintive practicalities (‘Baby-sitters wanted’) mingled with political exhortations and various kinds of contempt for the past (‘Dire qu’il y a toujours des chrétiens!’).

This is not because I feel there’s a good deal of I told you so’ about the student revolt in Paris and elsewhere, but rather because I believe there is a much more profound revolt going on in the comparatively unnoticed depths of society in the French provinces. The latter-day chouans of Brittany are no doubt the most spectacular of these rebels against a hyper-metropolitan government which knows little about their problems and cares less; but there have been manifestations of an aggressive provincial counter-attack in other quarters too, and two books by Robert Lafont give an interesting analysis of this: ‘Paris versus the provinces’ struggle in terms of colonialism.

Just over a hundred years ago, the case of Governor Eyre split English society into fiercely opposing factions: one led by Carlyle and Ruskin included Dickens and Tennyson; in the other J. S. Mill was supported by Darwin and Huxley.

The slave-based prosperity of Jamaica in the eighteenth-century had given place by the early 1860s to an economic decline, the white sugar-planters easily outdistanced by foreign competitors, the negroes now mostly working their own land, but discontented and seeking more. Droughts, disease and the American Civil War had brought the latter’s discontent to a head. The national Assembly was unrepresentative, venal and inefficient. In this delicate situation the task of ruling as Governor was one which called for very exceptional qualities. To this assignment Edward John Eyre was appointed in 1862; Eyre had been an emigrant and explorer in Australia, where he had done much to protect the aborigines. He had been seven years Lieutenant-Governor of New Zealand, six years Lieutenant- Governor of St Vincent, and then Governor of the Leeward Islands. Able and humane, Eyre was obstinate and tactless, and he soon became unpopular in Jamaica.

On 9th October, 1865, a rebellion broke out at Morant Bay, led by a negro demagogue called Bogle. His men killed the German custos and about twenty others, mostly Volunteers, wounding thirty-odd as well. In the next few days sporadic outbreaks took place in neighbouring parishes. Eyre promptly declared martial law in the troubled district, and sent troops there. They found the rebels dispersed or hidden, and there was no organized resistance.

It is a truism—and one repeated so often that it is starting to become tedious—that the issue of Humanae Vitae has precipitated a crisis of authority and obedience in the Church. Indeed the Roman authorities have been talking in these terms for several years now.

What, of course, is tedious about the phrase is the indiscriminate way in which it is employed. It may be helpful just to look at what the term ‘crisis’ basically means. It means, of course, simply ‘judgment’, ‘testing’, ‘questioning’. So, if we talk about a crisis of authority and obedience, we mean that authority and obedience are under question. But many jump immediately to the conclusion that this means that an attempt is being made to overthrow all authority and obedience in the Church. This seems to me a peculiarly obtuse misreading of the situation. There is undoubtedly a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction within the Church at the current theory and practice of ecclesiastical authority, but this is something quite different from wishing to throw overboard all authority in the Church, lock, stock and barrel. I do not see why this dissatisfaction in the Church should not be as much a ‘sign of the times’ for the Church as was the dissatisfaction with, say, the Church’s attitude to other Churches, or with the sclerosed ecclesiology that dominated in post-Tridentine times till our own days. These dissatisfactions had a fruitful result: the spirit and theology behind Vatican II. Why should we weep and be fearful regarding the dissatisfaction about authority?

The title of this paper expresses a certain wilful, or at least studied, ambiguity. What Catholic crisis? you may ask; or, more realistically, which Catholic crisis? Upon the publication of the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in July last year, there was a single point of agreement between those Catholics who welcomed the papal letter as a major contribution, in Mr Malcolm Muggeridge’s memorable phrase, for stemming ‘the Gadarene slide into American morality’, and those other Catholics who recognized it at once as yet another offering for that ever-growing catena of documentary embarrassment which the Holy See, in a kind of reverse Peter’s Pence, has generously provided in the course of the last 150 years. The nearly unanimous response—one of the notable exceptions being the author himself, if we are to believe some observers—was that we were now on the threshold of a new crisis, of faith, of authority, what you will, which would reduce the dimensions of the Modernist crisis, 1894-1910, to something resembling a parochial squabble between the vicar and the mothers’ union.

There are others, on both the ecclesiastical right and left, who would hold that the present crisis in the Church is simply chapter two, or the logical outcome of that earlier one, that the problems at the heart of the modernist controversy have re-appeared, sometimes in rather new garb, and that we must once again face them and come to terms with them.

John Noonan’s long history of contraceptive practice and prohibition demands and merits a second reading—a cautious one. For all the intelligence and careful research that has obviously gone into it, still it has its gaps and misreadings, some of them by no means peripheral to the author’s overall picture of an ‘evolving’, ‘developing’ ecclesiastical doctrine of love and marriage and the Church’s consequent attitudes toward contraception. One of the wider gaps is the failure to consider a man named Nicole Oresme; and one of the more serious misreadings is of St Thomas Aquinas.

Noonan proposes that Martin le Maistre—a late fifteenth-century layman of considerable standing and reputation in the University of Paris—was the first theologian to make the ‘modern’ breakthrough. Prior to him the Augustinian insistence, found also in St Thomas, on procreative purpose as the only justifying motive for conjugal intercourse held all but exclusive sway. Marriage was rarely or only secondarily thought of in terms of love, and where love happened to be encouraged it was not the kind that had to do with sex. Sex as a biological function productive of the child, well and good (for the most part); but as an expression of love, as an experience of joy and pleasure, no—on pain of at least venial sin. But with le Maistre we have ‘the beginning of a new stage in the Catholic approach to marriage’. His ethics offer reasons justifying conjugal intercourse other than procreation and even suggests (though hesitantly) venereal pleasure as a licit motive.