Over the past two years eight people—all of them in one way or another concerned with social justice or peace issues—have written in New Blackfriars about how one very old and in many ways unique Catholic religious order has responded to justice and peace issues in the course of 784 years: the 784 years from its foundation to the end of the Second Millennium. The authors have not set out to write a comprehensive history, but to focus in each article on one individual or group of individuals, placing them in the context of the world they belonged to. Let us start this epilogue by asking ourselves whether we can see in the achievements of these Dominicans any kind of consistent pattern, any recognisable stance—in other words, a distinctively “Dominican” way of reacting to what is going on in society.

This, though, is a question much easier to ask than to answer. Some of you think our choice of subjects has been too esoteric to make an assessment of this kind possible. Of the personalities we have written about, neither Eckhart, Antoninus, Vitoria, Las Casas, nor even McNabb could be called “typical” 14th, 15th, 16th or 20th century Dominicans by any stretch of the imagination. Eckhart’s contemporary, William Humbert, the Inquisitor who in 1310 sent the Beguine mystic Marguerite Porete to the stake, was much more a “typical” 14th-century Dominican than Eckhart, who shared some of his most original thoughts with a throng of Beguine women. One or two of you have also criticised us for not devoting an article to St Thomas Aquinas, surely the Dominican who most profoundly shaped the Dominican way of seeing the world.

Thirty years ago the very idea of including the Rhineland mystics in a series of articles on the role of the Dominicans in the promotion of peace and social justice would have been seen as intolerably bizarre. At that time it was still widely taken for granted that mysticism and dedication to the promotion of social justice were irreconcilable: that they belonged to profoundly different ways of understanding the world and understanding the teaching of Jesus Christ. There were, of course, some remarkable people who seemed to be able to keep a foot in both the camps, but lesser mortals who attempted this were in danger of not being taken seriously by the occupants of either.

In spite of the massive changes which have taken place since then in politics, the culture and the Church, even today the presence of the Dominican Rhineland mystics in this series demands some explanation. By ‘the Dominican Rhineland mystics’ we mean, first and foremost, three friars of the Dominican Province of Teutonia: the brilliant but controversial Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1328) and two of his disciples, Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) and Henry Suso (1295-1366). At first sight the only things which these men seem to share in common with, for instance, the French Dominican worker-priests of the 1950s or the Brazilian Dominican liberation theologians of the 1970s are membership of the same religious order and considerable strength of character.

After all, Frank Tobin has said that Eckhart’s sermons ‘center so exclusively on what is within and are so utterly devoid of any comments that might be used as references to time and place that they might just as well have been delivered on the moon as in turbulent fourteenth-century Strasburg or Cologne.’

‘Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last.’

According to St Luke, the Lord dies fully conscious, quoting this line from the 31st psalm: ‘Into thy hands I commit my spirit!’ And, later on, in St Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, we hear St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, saying as he is dying: ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And in the 1st epistle of Peter Christians suffering severe hardship are told to ‘entrust their souls to a faithful Creator’.

Trusting ourselves to God, letting go, putting ourselves in the hands of God. Down through the ages numerous holy men and women have urged us to do this, but it is not quite as easy as it sounds. There are all sorts of obstacles—our sins, hang-ups deep down inside us—that stop nearly all of us, right until the end, right until death, from letting go completely.

As we have already explained, what is printed here is based substantially on the German abridged version of Vittorio Massori’s interview. This first appeared in the Catholic newspaper Deutsche Tagespost on 7/8 and 14/15 December 1984.

At the beginning of June appeared the long-awaited book (in Italian): Rapporto sulla fede, published by Edizioni Paoline, Turin (pp. 216, 14,000 lire). A German edition is appearing, and a French edition has already appeared (Entretien sur la foi, published by Fayard).

Next November the Extraordinary Synod assembles to evaluate how far the Church has succeeded in faithfully implementing the decisions of the Second Vatican Council. It is for this reason that we are here presenting, for the consideration of you, the bishops of England and Wales, a response written by a group of British Catholic theologians to what the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had to say about contemporary Catholicism in his famous Jesus interview. This is an unusual thing to do. Isn’t it rather an impertinence? A possible affront to the Cardinal Prefect? A possible embarrassment to the bishops?

We are convinced it is not. With his wonderful sense of ‘Catholic wholeness’, Cardinal Newman believed that an essential feature of authentic Church life is internal dialogue—in other words, continuous interrelating between three facets of the life of the Christian community: theology, worship and government. (Professor Lash says a little more about this in these pages). The Church only remains properly Catholic, in the truth, in so far as the dialogue continues. Catholics still often often feel that it is disloyal in any way to question what comes from ‘on high’. The Catholic who in any way dissents is identified as not properly ‘orthodox’. But orthodoxy requires us to believe that the Holy Spirit is poured upon the whole Church. And that Church remains Catholic because the conversation between the theologians and the bishops and the laity carries on.