Rome, sweet Rome

MARTIN JARRETT-KERR

The Church Hans Ming (Burns and Oates 84s) These two books might have been written ex- pressly to illustrate the clerihew: Can anyone mould the Vatican?

Indeed, if he has a red hat he can— For the concept of Infallibility Has considerable malleability.

Mr Nichols has been the Rome correspondent of The Times since 1957. He is not a Roman Catholic but has been fascinated by the elusive, resilient, sometimes magnetic, often repellent phenomenon : the papacy. Occasional slips re- veal him as the outsider looking in, but this only makes his sympathy and his knowledge the more impressive. Only once does he use a loaded phrase—Pius XII's grotesque promul- gation of the Bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary.' Otherwise he is a model of objectivity.

Trying to understand the nature of papal

diplomacy, he traces it back to the Constan- tinian era and beyond. He shows astutely how,

later, the Carolingian theory led to the unfor- tunate result that the state gradually became more clerical and the Church more secular. But he also suggests that by the mid-thirteenth cen- tury the Church had its finest political per- formances behind it: as it declined, 'it had no body of men outside it, as the Romans had

the Christians, to whom it could turn for a renewal of its strength.' So, through all the

ambiguities of history we reach the modern period where the well-nigh impossible balance is attempted between a calculated political neutralism and a lofty independence of all 'tem- poral powers' achieved through possession of a firm geographical and financial base.

Mr Nichols appreciates the delicacy of this position—is the Holy Father's Cardinal-Secre- tary, he asks, dealing with the Vatican's affairs because of the Pope's temporal sovereignty or because of his spiritual authority? Pius XII found the answer so difficult that latterly he dispensed with a Cardinal-Secretary. But this did not solve his problems; and Mr Nichols tells us in fascinating detail about the slightly sordid backstairs interference by the Vatican in 1952 when De Gasperi with his centre coalition

was standing for the municipal elections in Rome. Nevertheless, Mr Nichols resists the temptation to play Pius XII (or Paul VI, for

that matter) against John XXIII to the detri- ment of the former. On the whole he is re- markably fair. He might, it is true, have added that even at the worst moments in the last 300

years the papacy at the centre has sometimes stood for a kind of 'freedom and progress'

against 'reaction' at the circumference—as Lacordaire believed. And, though the Congre- gation for the Propagation of the Faith does get a mention, Mr Nichols does not point out its important role in checking the ultra- `colonialism' of the Portuguese Padroado (Patronage) in the mission field. On the other hand, he should have made clear that as the Church spread through the world, the papacy became more and more dependent on its own 'cia'—which was often as woefully misinformed as its American counterpart : 250 years of mis- sionary failure in the Far East was directly due to wrong briefing.

Mr Nichols has been, like many, astonished that Vatican II became 'news' in the way it did. Fr Kiing starts his massive re-examina- tion of the theology of the Church by citing another similar astonishment : Macaulay's famous passage predicting that the papacy will still exist when a traveller from New Zealand comes to sketch the ruins of St Paul's. But,

he says, 'this kind of admiration is basically directed towards a façade.' Would he say the same of Mr Nichols's admiration?—`Macaulay and many others have admired the Catholic Church without wishing to be part of it.'

At any rate, this long and learned book is devoted to demolishing the façade. Fr Kung sweeps away many of the old controversial dis-

tinctions, such as that between a 'visible' and an 'invisible' Church. His examination of the origins of the Church in the New Testament is wonderfully fresh and undoctrinaire; he will have nothing of the traditional reliance on proof texts (such as the usual Petrine deriva-

tions from 'on this rock I will build my church'

etc), and goes a long way with modern Biblical scholars in their doubts of the authenticity of

many 'sayings of Christ.' Forget who the author is, and for long passages you will believe you are reading the work of a 'protestant evangeli- cal'; and yet the book remains firmly and loyally Catholic; indeed, 'Roman' Catholic. The fact that it is dedicated to Dr Michael Ramsey, in `humble hope that there lies within the pages of this book a theological basis for a rapproche- ment between the Churches of Rome and Canterbury,' has not prevented it obtaining the imprimatur of Westminster.

Is this astonishing change simply—as critics will say—because when the ship founders the survivors must cling together on their raft? Fr Kiing would say: No, rather because we are all learning a new humility. Certainly Peter's barque can no longer be a ship of state: even the three Petrine texts in the New Testament are, Ming points out, immedi- ately followed by three of St Peter's failures. And that is why John XXIII, with his human simplicity, captured the world's imagination. And in the end Mr Nichols too, for all his attempts to be fair to Pius XII, has to say that it is John who stays in the mind.