Monsignor Alexander Jones, Scripture scholar
The man who had the most influence on my life was my maternal uncle, Alec Jones. I did not meet him, however, until my third year. At the time of my birth he was a 25-year-old student for the priesthood at the Venerable English College in Rome, attached to the Pontifical Gregorian University. Such a student was not allowed home, and so in order to see him I had to be taken to Rome. My mother and grandmother attended his ordination as a priest, while I was parked with another seminarian in the college. During this visit, Alec took us to see Pope Pius XI in a private audience. My conversation with the pontiff was restricted to telling him, when asked, that I was two-and-a-half years old. (In later childhood I wondered why he needed to be told – wouldn’t he have known already, being infallible?)
The Venerable English College had, at this period, two notable characteristics: loyalty to the Holy See, combined with English exceptionalism. Centuries of persecution – so the staff and students believed – gave the heirs of English recusants an insight into the essence of the Catholic Church unshared by Catholics in other countries. The college gloried in the martyrdoms suffered by many of its graduates in penal times, and saw as its ultimate aim to convert England, so that all English men and women would become Roman Catholics and accept the authority of the pope. In one letter home, Alec wrote: ‘If Protestant England knew what a spirit there is here for the conversion of the country, it would shake in its shoes.’
In 1935, Alec returned from Rome to teach in the seminary of the Liverpool archdiocese, a handsome sandstone college called Upholland, standing in substantial grounds in a rural part of Lancashire. From then onwards, he would spend every Saturday with his mother and sister and me. My parents had separated soon after I was born, and my father was killed in the Battle of the Atlantic. It was Alec who took the place of a father in my life. He lived with us during holidays, and he and I spent much time cycling in the Lancashire lanes (then, during wartime petrol rationing, almost free of motor cars). A high point was a cycling trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to see a week of Shakespeare plays at the Memorial Theatre (for which Alec had to get a special dispensation from the archbishop, since priests were not allowed to visit theatres). He became a great fan of the actress Margaretta Scott, who played Portia and Lady Macbeth. I can still hear the disappointment in his voice when he looked at the programme for Hamlet and whispered, ‘Margaretta Scott’s not in!’
At the age of 12 I decided that I wanted to become a priest, and joined the junior seminary at Upholland. My decision was, above all, an expression of admiration for my uncle. He was a person who, throughout his life, charmed everyone who met him, and it surprised no one when I decided that I wanted to follow in his footsteps. At Upholland, his main job was to teach Scripture in the senior seminary, to the divines in their early twenties. I was in the junior school, learning Latin, Greek and history, so it was many years before I actually sat at his feet in a classroom. But he would invite me up to his study at weekends and spoil me with various sweetmeats.
One paternal role which Alec declined to fulfil was that of imparting instruction about sex. Indeed, he sent me out of the room when, during our Stratford week, the guide to Shakespeare’s birthplace offered to explain how it was that Anne Hathaway had a baby a few months after she married him. I remained ignorant of the nature of human reproduction until I was about 15. Then, one day during the vacation, I confessed to my Benedictine parish priest that I had sinned by reading a book on the Virgin Birth for an unworthy motive – namely, to discover the mechanics of birth and conception. The priest was not as shocked as I expected, and told me that since I had no father I should ask my mother to let me visit him outside confession and receive appropriate instruction. When I went to see him he began by saying, ‘You will have noticed that when you see a pretty girl, the thing between your legs stands up.’ This took me by surprise: that was not at all what I had come to talk about. But he went on to say, ‘It is a key that fits a lock, and I will tell you what the lock is like and what it is for’ – and then proceeded to explain the operation of sex in a concrete, but not at all prurient, manner.
As a teacher of Scripture, Alec was lively and, by the standards of the time, liberal. In collaboration with a Jesuit from the Biblical Institute in Rome, he wrote a solid textbook for schools entitled The Kingdom of Promise. He went on to write a series of articles on the Old Testament for the Catholic Gazette, concealing his learning under a light and sometimes knockabout style. The first article begins, ‘Adam’s apple has stuck in many a throat and wits have observed that it needs a pillar of salt to digest the “Whale” story.’ The articles were eventually collected in a book entitled Unless Some Man Show Me, in allusion to Acts 8.27–31. The book sold well and led to invitations to lecture in three continents.
In one of the original articles, Alec had written that it was no part of Catholic doctrine that the whole human race was descended from a single pair. While we were on a family holiday we learned that Pius XII had just issued an encyclical, Humani Generis, in which this single descent was emphasized as an indispensable element of the creation story. Frantic efforts had to be made to recall the proofs to add a footnote to bring the text into accord with the papal directive.
When the time came for my own ordination, in 1955, Alec persuaded the Archbishop of Liverpool, the future Cardinal Godfrey, to go to Rome to ordain me and a colleague in a private ceremony in the villa of the English College on Lake Albano. Alec brought my mother out from England, and at my celebration of the Mass with the archbishop they led the queue up the altar steps to kiss my newly anointed hands.
In 1956, there appeared La Bible de Jérusalem, an annotated French version of the Bible produced by the École Biblique de Jérusalem. Alec was excited by its solid and open-minded scholarship, and decided to assemble a group of translators to render the text and the notes into English. Most of the contributors were seminary professors, but the team included J. R. R. Tolkien. Many of the collaborators fell by the wayside, and Alec himself had to take their place, ending up as the sole translator of 18 of the books, as well as editor of the entire enterprise. The Jerusalem Bible was eventually published in 1966. The task had stretched over ten years, far beyond the time he had estimated, or the £1,000 he had been paid by the publishers.
When the work began, Alec was still Prefect of Studies at Upholland. In 1961, Archbishop Heenan of Liverpool moved him to become chaplain of the Diocesan School for the Blind. The duties were light, and left more time for work on the Bible, but Alec felt cut off from the academic community that had been his home for 25 years. He suspected that the new archbishop had been glad to remove from the seminary a Scripture professor he regarded as too liberal.
Alec spent day after day alone in his study, surrounded by a dozen versions of the Bible stacked on an enormous semicircular bookrest he had had specially constructed. The structure formed a kind of pen around the desk, within which he huddled over a typewriter, wrapped in an ancient Roman cloak or zimarra.
By the time the Jerusalem Bible was published, I had left the priesthood and married. Alec was saddened by my defection, but was always sympathetic and particularly helpful in soothing my mother’s discontents. He helped to officiate at my wedding in Swarthmore Pennsylvania, and became immensely devoted to my wife, Nancy. When, in the year after our marriage, I took a sabbatical leave at the University of Chicago, he stayed in our apartment while on a tour of the USA for the launch of the American edition of the Jerusalem Bible.
Shortly after he returned from his tour he was diagnosed with cancer, but after the removal of a kidney he was able to resume academic life at Christ’s College, Liverpool. This, his last teaching post, was a happy environment for him, and a building there has been named after him. In 1969, his cancer returned, with secondary tumours on the brain. After a period as a difficult invalid he became calmer and bore with dignity, and even serenity, the loss of his strength and the fading of his wit. My wife’s family as well as my own mourned his loss, and her father painted a posthumous portrait of him which captured wonderfully the sparkle of his smile. To this day it hangs over the table where we eat most of our meals.
Monsignor Jack Kennedy, Rector of the English College in Rome
The longest friendship of my life was with Jack Kennedy. It lasted from the day in 1943 when I joined him in Low Figures (the second lowest class) in the junior seminary at Upholland, until the day of his death in 2016. We were brought together, initially, by inverted snobbery. I was the son of a school secretary; he had parents who managed and owned a prosperous fish and chip shop. This put us at the top of the social strata among the young Liverpool seminarians. We were both regarded as having posh accents. Jack, indeed, was alleged to have introduced himself on arrival as ‘I am an Emmanuel man.’ What that meant, or if it ever occurred, I have never known. But the nickname ‘Manny’ stuck to Jack for seven years.
We were also, intellectually, at the top of the class together. But there was a huge difference between us: I was hopeless at any kind of sport, whereas Jack was the best footballer and the best cricketer of the year. Only at tennis could I compete with him in any way, and the rare occasions when I beat him manifested his magnanimity rather than any skill of mine.
Throughout his life, Jack loved a bet. During one summer term he suggested that we should both read the novel Ben-Hur. He bet that he would finish first; the loser was to give up playing cricket for the term. The bet caused consternation among the sportsmen, since Jack was captain of the team and I was, at best, twelfth man. Cheered on by our classmates, Jack won by a chapter or two, and I was banned from the pitch. Jack relented after a while and allowed me to fumble my way through the last couple of matches of the term.
It was during our last two years at Upholland that Jack and I were closest. After we had passed School Certificate examinations in Latin and Greek, he and I, and one other, were exempted from classwork and left to study alone, apart from weekly composition tutorials in Greek and Latin prose. We were encouraged to draw up our own reading lists among the classical authors, and once the list had been approved we were on our honour not to make undue use of translations. All we had to do was to make notes on our reading and, in due course, discuss it in a tutorial. In this way, by the time we left Upholland, we had read together, sitting alone in the vast and empty study hall, many of the greatest works of Greek and Latin literature.
At the end of our years at Upholland, Jack and I were selected from among the sixth-formers to continue our studies at the English College in Rome. We travelled out together, taking our time, and sharing our first glimpses of the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre, the tragic Lion of Lucerne, the roof of Milan cathedral, and the mosaics of San Marco in Venice.
Once arrived in the Eternal City, Jack adapted to Italian cuisine faster than I did, and he introduced me to a Neapolitan delicacy that was then quite rare in Rome – the pizza. During our seven years in the college we were less close than we had been at Upholland. Jack was a winger in the games against Rugby Roma, and captained the cricket team which regularly played against the British Embassy at Palazzola. I became addicted to rock climbing and would take my vacations in the Apennines, the Alps or the Dolomites, while Jack preferred urban vacations. I cannot recall us ever taking a holiday together during our Roman years.
At the English College, we were fortunate to have the opportunity of viewing the latest films shortly after release, using copies that had been sent to Rome for dubbing into Italian. Jack was given the job of censoring the films for seminary use. Thus, for instance, many of the most exciting appearances of Sophia Loren fell to the cutting floor under Jack’s scissors. But he was left with a lifelong admiration for her and, late in life, loved to tell the story of how, travelling on a first-class flight through the good offices of his brother (by then a director of British Airways), he found himself sitting next to the diva herself.
In 1955, Jack and I were both ordained priests, and a year later we completed our seven-year training. Once we graduated, Jack returned to England to serve as a curate in Wigan, while I returned to Rome for a year’s further studies, followed by a period in Oxford. When I was laicized, Jack was much distressed, but it made no breach in our friendship, which continued until his death in 2016.
After serving in three different parishes, Jack was appointed to teach at Christ’s College, Liverpool, where Alec had ended his days. He remained there happily from 1968 to 1984. In 1979 he took a sabbatical and enrolled on an MPhil programme in Oxford. After living for a while with the Jesuits at Campion Hall he came to live in The King’s Mound, our Balliol residence. His charm quickly bewitched our young boys, whom he teased unmercifully. One day he asked our young son Charles, ‘What was the worst name your daddy has ever called your mummy?’ Charles found it difficult to recall any genuine memory of abuse, and had to take refuge in creative imagination. His eventual response was ‘piggy-wiggy’.
In 1984, Jack became Rector of the English College. He was, inevitably, popular with the students, but did not have a trouble-free rectorship: at one time he had to cope with the problems of a homosexual coterie among the students. Moreover, his frank and candid manner in discussion made him at least one enemy in the Roman Curia. The upshot was that when his rectorship came to an end he did not go on to become a bishop, as most of his predecessors had done. Jack ended his clerical career as a parish priest in Southport.
He rendered valuable service to the national Church, however. At the height of the scandal over paedophile priests, he was a member of the committee – set up under Lord Nolan – to provide remedies and safeguards for the future. Jack’s bluff common sense and ability to see through cant was a great asset to the committee.
Reluctant to leave his parish when he reached retirement age, Jack offered to let his curate take over as parish priest, and remain himself as a curate. Neither his bishop nor any of his friends thought this would be a credible arrangement, and he entered a clerical retirement community until, after a stroke, he needed permanent care.
In his last years he took several holidays in Italy with our family and charmed our granddaughters as he had charmed our sons. One of my fondest memories of Jack is of the two of us watching the sun go down over the Tuscan hills as we took turns in reading Dante to each other.
At Jack’s funeral in Southport I was asked to speak, and since I was following two senior clergymen I took it that my role was to stress the lighter side of his life. I found that all my best lines – about his relationships with bookmakers, for instance – had been stolen by the earlier speakers. That was sad, because the funeral orations, collectively, did not do justice to the down-to-earth piety and pastoral concern that had been the centre of his life.
Herbert McCabe, Dominican theologian
When I went to Oxford in 1957 as a graduate student – still a priest – Jack Kennedy gave me an introduction to a Dominican at Blackfriars, Herbert McCabe, who had been a university friend of his elder brother Frank. I soon found that Herbert was one of the most interesting people to discuss philosophy with, not only by comparison with other Catholics but by comparison with anyone in the university. He was a man of extremely sharp intelligence, and there is no doubt that if he had chosen to pursue an academic career he could have become one of the most distinguished philosophers in the country.
Born to a Catholic family in Middlesbrough in 1926, and baptized John Ignatius, McCabe studied philosophy at Manchester in the 1940s. He was taught by Dorothy Emmet, and was one of a group of student friends who went on to distinction in various fields – Robert Bolt as a dramatist, Frank Kennedy as a diplomat, Robert Markus as a historian, Alasdair MacIntyre as a philosopher. Instead of pursuing a secular career, in 1949 he joined the Dominican Order of Preachers, taking, as a friar, the new name Herbert, by which he was known for the rest of his life.
It is hard, indeed, to imagine Herbert as a conventional faculty member, and had he not become a Dominican his career might well have been bohemian rather than academic. But he was not a conventional friar, either, even if to some of his friends he came to embody the ideal of what a twentieth-century Dominican should be. He always acknowledged a great debt to the Dominicans, who taught him theology prior to his ordination in 1955. From them he acquired a close familiarity with the works of Thomas Aquinas, a rare and precious thing in a period when most Catholic students of philosophy and theology were fed on second-hand manuals of Thomism.
Besides a love of Aquinas, membership of the Order of Preachers gave much to Herbert to which only his fellow Dominicans are in a position to testify. So loyal was he that he was willing to defend some of the less popular features of the Order’s history. He once wrote that in the Europe of its time, ‘the Spanish Inquisition seems to have been a shining light of rationality, gentleness, and sanity’ in respect of the use of torture. He was very fond of hitch-hiking, saying that it was the most appropriate form of transport for a mendicant (i.e. begging) friar.
Despite his lifelong passion for the thought of St Thomas, McCabe hated to be called a Thomist, and his own spoken and written presentations of the saint’s teaching bore a highly personal mark. He only rarely provided textual documentation for the ideas that he credited to Aquinas, yet his exposition has a ring of authenticity often lacking in commentators of a more scholarly bent.
Apart from the Bible and Aquinas, the greatest influence on McCabe’s thought was that of the later Wittgenstein. He sought to graft the insights of the twentieth-century thinker on to those of the thirteenth-century thinker, not out of a desire to appear up to date – he showed no inclination to endorse any of the trendy intellectual fashions of the age – but because he recognized a genuine affinity between the two masters. The two philosophers present a vision of human beings as intelligent bodily agents that is far removed from the dualisms or physicalisms characteristic of the ages that separate them in time. Herbert brought out that Aquinas and Wittgenstein shared a conviction that it is through an unconstrained attention to the operation of language that we achieve philosophical understanding. But his own Aquinas is, as he admits, in a sense more linguistic than the historical Aquinas was. Whereas Aquinas himself undoubtedly believed that every thought we have can, in principle, be expressed in language, he did not, McCabe says, fully grasp that human thought just is the capacity to use language: ‘We analyse understanding and thinking in terms of human communication, whereas Aquinas analyses communication in terms of understanding and thinking.’
From time to time, Herbert and I gave joint seminars on the philosophy of religion, he arguing for theism and I for agnosticism. Many of our most fertile encounters took place in the public bar of the King’s Arms, Oxford, where Herbert was a regular visitor. He was a brilliant preacher and lecturer, but was in no rush to publish, and most of his work has been published posthumously. In 1987, however, he did offer a collection of lectures, papers and sermons under the title God Matters. It treated Catholic doctrines in a highly individual style. His regular practice, when expounding a doctrine, was first to state it in a way that would seem familiar to both to those who accept it and those who reject it, then to deny that the doctrine – stated in those familiar terms – is true, and finally to urge that such a denial is not only compatible with, but essential to, the underlying Christian tradition.
Take, for example, the thesis that the Trinity is the mystery of three persons in one God. In his essay ‘Aquinas on the Trinity’, McCabe maintained that for Aquinas, the Trinity is hardly more mysterious than the plain existence of God. When we talk of God at all we do not know what we are talking about; we do not have even a rough idea what God is. Moreover, if we use ‘person’ in its modern English sense, we have no warrant for saying there are three persons in God – because in the Trinity there are not three distinct centres of consciousness. Instead of speaking of ‘God the Father’ we could as well speak of ‘God the parents’: the plural ‘parents’ would be no more misleading than the gender connotation of ‘Father’.
Or consider the essay in which Herbert discussed petitionary prayer: ‘Here is God just about to make it rain for the sake of the farmers and their crops in the fields around Clyst Honiton when he overhears the urgent prayer of the vicar who is running his garden party that afternoon and changes his mind.’ Of course God cannot be manipulated in this way, so what is the point of asking for things in prayer? Aquinas’ answer, he says, is that we should not say, ‘In accordance with my prayer, God wills that it should be a fine day’, but rather, ‘God wills that it should be a fine day in accordance with my prayer.’ God brings about my prayer just as much as he brings about the fine day. Prayer is not a means of getting anything done: it is, he said, a real absolute waste of time. But that does not mean we should not pray: it is a form of spiritual play.
Herbert’s account of central Christian doctrines seemed surprising, perhaps even shocking, to some believers. At one point in his book he makes ironic reference to the possible presence of heresy hunters in his audience. In fact, he always took great pains to avoid heresy (more so than is obvious on the surface). Whether or not these efforts were always successful I do not pretend to judge.
Some saw Herbert as being in the tradition of the Catholic writers of the early twentieth century. In his admiration for St Thomas, and in his constant employment of paradox, he resembled G. K. Chesterton, though his Aquinas was very different from G. K.’s. Just as Hilaire Belloc revelled in the celebration of wine, Herbert liked to evoke the beauty of Guinness and Irish whiskey. He always loved to point out that when, after Pentecost, the Apostles were accused of being drunk, St Peter instead of saying ‘we are teetotallers’, said, ‘Nonsense, it’s only nine o’clock in the morning.’
If you went to a sermon by Herbert, you knew you were in no danger of falling asleep: his style as a preacher was at the furthest possible remove from the bland truisms one hears so often from the pulpit. One of his favourite devices was to take some ecclesiastical commonplace – such as ‘the Church welcomes sinners’ – and spell out what it meant, freed of cant: ‘People who are really welcome to the Catholic Church are the murderers, rapists, torturers, sadistic child molesters, and even those who evict old people from their homes.’ It was for such people, he said from the pulpit, that the Church existed: but he went on to admit, with a certain show of reluctance, that many of his congregation, perhaps even a majority, did not come into any of these categories.