Based on a talk given in London in 1986 to mark the centenary of the birth of Charles Williams, the theological writer and poet.

I knew Charles Williams off and on from 1938 (when we met at a party for contributors to a number of books in a series called I Believe, edited by Ellis Roberts) until he died—during the war, in 1945—in Oxford, where he had gone with the London branch of the Oxford University Press, for which he worked.

It is very odd that, in the case of someone for whom image and reality were so essentially related, I cannot accurately recall his physical presence. The curious quivering of his hands—also recorded by C.S. Lewis—yes. This reinforced the impression of a self like a bright candle flame flickering in still air. His Londoner’s voice, yes—and the vivid current of what it said, whether speaking in public, engaged in ordinary talk, or reciting large chunks of Paradise Lost over lunch in a Bloomsbury cafe. But the impact of someone moving about, standing, sitting, no—and hardly a visual memory except for one occasion when, after a metaphysical discussion over a meal, he rushed to help a woman get her baby in its pushcart down the stone steps of an Underground station.

What remains—and that most clearly—is recollection of his skilled, startling, and unpremeditated use of words, not only on paper, but in living speech. I cannot hope to emulate him but I hope to do justice to his memory.

Throughout the Catholic world there has been extensive discussion of the differences in tone, emphasis and sympathy between the two documents on the theology of liberation issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the cautionary Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation of 1984, which was primarily concerned with drawing attention to ‘deviations and risks of deviation damaging to the faith’, and the Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation of 1986. The concern of this article is not so much with the contents themselves of these two documents as with the different ecclesiologies which appear to have shaped those contents. The prime object is to discern what the differences between them have to say to us about the place of ecclesiology in the Church’s mission today.

The ecclesiology of the first Vatican Instruction is present more by inference than direct reference. The danger points in contemporary ecclesiology are identified as a dismissal of the hierarchical nature of the Church as the People of God, and an ecclesiology that has become too immanentist. The document admits that it is not really interested in giving a positive theology—it leaves that task to the later document. Nevertheless one can discern an emerging ecclesiology underlying the text.

At about the same time that the Instruction was released, the text of an interview given by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation, was also published. Many of the ideas in the Instruction are the same as those in the interview.

H.G. Barnes was baptised ‘Harry’ but usually known, in Oxford at least, as ‘Roger’. To simplify, I will call him Barnes from now on. He spent many years teaching German language and literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, becoming a Fellow of the College in 1957. He was my tutor from 1955—58. Although we stayed in touch and indeed became friends, he rarely spoke about his past life—or if he did, I missed the significance of it. This article is about the unknown Barnes who worked for the BBC’s German service during the war. At a time when the cliches of propaganda filled the air, Barnes insisted that German Catholicism was an important element in the national tradition, and therefore in the post-war reconstruction. He devoted his life to the teaching of German literature, but was always attentive to religious factors.

His main work as a literary critic was on Goethe’s enigmatic novel, Die Wahlverwandschaften. In 1958 he was invited to address the Tagung of the newly revived Gorresgesellschaft in Salzburg. The result was a paper on Catholic responses—mostly negative, it turned out—to Goethe’s novel. In Modern Language Review for 1963 he reviewed the Jahrbuch in which his Salzburg lecture had been published. He reported Romano Guardini’s suggestion that had Rainer Maria Rilke ever completed Kindheit, an elegiac fragment, it would have surpassed the Duineser Elegien. (Barnes was surprised to find a priest and theologian who could also be a good literary critic.)

What is the church? Who is the church? Today that question is difficult to answer. A real marvel of contemporary Catholicism has been its ability to maintain within one church differing and sometimes blatantly opposed groups of believers. Throughout the United States pockets of church offer a spectrum of church experiences. Among those pockets are some 116 local chapters of DIGNITY, Inc., a lay organization of lesbian and gay Catholics and their friends, founded in Los Angeles in 1969. To a growing number of American Catholics, Dignity offers an alternative experience of church. Indeed, for most of its members, Dignity offers the only possible experience; without Dignity they would simply forget about being Catholic.

Certainly Dignity is on the fringe of official Roman Catholicism. Some believe that the October 30, 1986, Vatican ‘Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons’ officially proscribes Dignity. But only consideration of what the Dignity chapters actually are would determine whether or not they provide an authentic Catholic experience of church. So here a priest who has ministered to various Dignity chapters for over ten years offers an inside picture so judgments to be made may be based on the evidence.