Nine days' wonder
DESMOND FISHER
A Question of Conscience Charles Davis (Hodder and Stoughton 30s)
A New Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults (Burns and Oates/Herder and Herder 35s)
In his final interview with Cardinal Heenan, Charles Davis was told his defection from the Roman Catholic Church would be a nine days' wonder. Instead, the Davis affair has attracted continuing interest and concern. But all the analyses and controversy of the past year have not produced answers to the questions which Davis posed the Church. His opponents rationalised them away, blaming his departure on overwork, conflict with authority, human weakness. The-arguments he advanced at the time in his famous Observer article have never been satisfactorily answered.
He now restates them in a more detailed and less emotional way and challenges Roman Catholic theologians to refute them. They will have a difficult task. For Davis, with implac- able logic and clear exposition, anticipates all the arguments he feels might be used against him and, to his own satisfaction at least, de- molishes them completely. His thesis is double- barrelled. One barrel is loaded with charges directed against the workings of the institutional Church. It is not concerned with truth, pre- ferring to remove faith from all questioning and, regardless of man's increasing knowledge and The mind's compulsion to develop its understanding, to fossilise it in unalterable propositions.
Nor is it concerned with people because it subordinates their rights and their feelings to the system, a charge which Davis supports by reference to the Pope's attitude on the birth control controversy. In his earlier article, Davis had accused Pope Paul of callous dis- honesty on this point: here he explains that this is not an attack on the Pope's personal character. Now he blames the social structures of the Church which force the Pope to take decisions for all Catholics and lead him 'to issue a statement which evaded the truth with a diplomatic lie.' For these reasons, Davis finds, the Church is not a credible witness to Christ.
His second barrel is loaded with the charge that the Church's claims are not supported by biblical and historical data. In this context Davis attacks particularly the Church's claims about Papal primacy and infallibility. Here his arguments seem to be less securely founded, though it will take the scholars to assess them. Davis's book impresses by its lack of sensa- tionalism and its clinical calm; even when it deals with highly personal events and feelings. At the same time, it depresses by its un- relieved monotone of objection: there is. no
indication here of the sense of joy and libera- tion which is also to be found in the Church.
Many of Charles Davis's friends felt that had he lived in Holland he would not _have found it necessary to leave the Church. Instead, they thought, he would have remained to reform it from within as many Dutch theolo- gians, who feel like him, have done. Much of their thinking informs the approach of the new Dutch catechism for adults, which gets away altogether from the traditional question-and-answer formula and presents the faith not as a series of propositions to be learned by rote but as a reflection on and explanation of the Bible. This is not a book which can be easily reviewed. But personal experimentation with it among family and friends testifies to its revolutionary nature. Catholics worried by the charges rightly brought against their Church by Charles Davis will find here much to console and reassure them.
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