Two years ago over 2000 delegates from all the dioceses and Catholic national organisations, including 42 bishops, 255 clergy and 150 religious men and women and 36 ecumenical observers attended the National Pastoral Congress in Liverpool. For those of us who were there it was a remarkable experience of an open, sharing, participating, listening, celebrating Church, a veritable conversion experience. Back in our local patches it is difficult to retain the sense of exhilaration and commitment with which we left Liverpool two years ago. Was it, then, all a load of froth, an irrelevant, euphoric interlude to cheer us up? Was it, as I asked before the Congress ‘a damp squib or pentecostal fire’? (New Life, Winter 1980). Did it represent a new Spring or was it a false dawn? The official report of the Congress provides us with the opportunity to recall the expectations aroused by the Congress and reflect on some of its outcomes. In this article I propose to attempt three tasks: firstly, to review Liverpool 1980; secondly, to consider the place of the National Pastoral Congress in the long process of renewal in the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales since the Second Vatican Council; and thirdly, to reflect on the contemporary situation in the light of the Congress, the message from the bishops to the local Church in the light of the Congress (The Easter People), and developments which have been stimulated by it since.

It is a foolish thing to make promises about what you intend to do in a year’s time, but at the chapter meeting last year I promised the Provincial that I would give a talk on celibacy this year, hoping to provoke some discussion on a topic that is too rarely discussed. I have had plenty of time to regret it. But I have kept to my original proposal because the reasons I had for making it have not gone away.

The first reason was a sense of irritation at the way some of the brethren speak about the problems of celibacy entirely by way of anecdotes: how Father A was nearly seduced in the parlour, how troublesome women plagued the life of Father B, about Father C and his “cousin”, about the real reason for Brother D leaving the Order. When I thought about it, I realised that there are two things about this kind of talk that I find unsatisfactory:

1. its privatisation of the vows: that celibacy is mostly a matter of an individual keeping his vow of chastity, like a precious object to be kept intact under threats, especially threats from certain women; and that the available collective wisdom on the matter consists in anecdotal knowledge of how to do this.

2. the failure to take seriously the lives of the women whose attentions cause so much difficulty when it gets out of hand and — it must be added — so much satisfaction when it is under proper ministerial control. It is a failure to look very deeply into what happens and ask why it happens in such predictable ways and what this tells us about the injured relationships between men and women,which we celibates have to live out as much as anyone else. Men and women in the life of the Church get caught up in processes of interaction which few people understand and which cause humiliation and frustration on all sides.

Lonergan sometimes calls his epistemology the fully critical position on account of its total rejection of the naive realist notion that reality is an-already-out-there-now and that objectivity consists in sensory extroversion to this already-out-there-now. The residue of the naive realist notion is found in the empiricist assumption of a world of bodies ‘out there’ and in the Kantian assumption of things in themselves, or noumena, with the debilitating consequence for both that the real becomes unknowable since knowledge is confined either to sense data or sensible phenomena, i.e. appearances. By its rejection of naive realism the fully critical position denies the intelligibility of any mere matter of fact that is simply given in experience. It affirms that the real is what is understood on the basis of experience and affirmed in rationally grounded judgments. Besides the real there is nothing. But the real is, in its very constitution, intelligible. Therefore, besides the intelligible there is nothing. The universe is intelligible.

In a scientific age many would be willing to grant this much, since science itself seems to assume and support the notion of the universe’s intelligibility, without seeing any reason for proceeding from this to an affirmation of God’s existence. But the fully critical position demands an answer in terms of itself to the question of the universe’s intelligibility. Science is unable to supply such an answer since science is methodologically restricted to investigating the intelligibility of the data of sense by erecting explanatory hypotheses that stand or fall by appeal to the data of sense. Science has its own autonomous realm — the explanation of sensible data. The question of God does not arise from the questioning of sensible data but from questioning our questioning, that is, when we take a global look at the process of coming to know and ask what are the implications of the mind’s demand for explanation at the level of understanding and of the mind’s demand for the unconditioned in its movement towards judgment.

“They began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance . . . and their hearers were bewildered because each one heard them speaking in his own language.”

We are the “Friars Preachers”, the preaching brethren, a community that specialises in talk. This is the mystery to which we have all been summoned. I say this community is a mystery in the sense in which a sacrament or a work of art is a mystery; there is a depth of meaning in it that is by no means obvious on the surface at first sight, a depth that reveals itself only gradually and in hints and glimpses as we enact and re-enact the mystery. Macbeth is a good thriller; but as we grow familiar with it, it yields profound secrets about man and nature and time, secrets that can only be revealed in this way, indirectly, as symbolised, as half hidden. Again, the Eucharist is a commonplace symbolic meal, a token of hospitality and friendship, but as we enter into it, it reveals the depth of love which is God, the love enacted on the cross. And so it is with us; we are a commonplace gathering of men meeting to make decisions about our work, men partly anxious, mainly bored, hoping to get a few things cleared up as well and as quickly as possible so that we can get away: but there is a depth here too.

The depth is not something alongside, added on to, associated with the surface significance; the deep meaning of Macbeth is not additional to the story of murder and intrigue; the grace of the Eucharist is not something associated with, linked with, the sacrament; the mystery of our community is not something alongside, additional to, our day to day life and work and difficulties: it is just the depth within them. We do not have a professional job together with a spiritual life, the depth and the spirituality are just in the living together and the doing of the work.