I belong to the Catholic tribe and have in earlier years hoped to have the courage of solidarity. At the road block, the question was a tribal one, Catholic or Protestant? and 'atheist' is the wrong answer. I learnt this sense of solidarity from an Indian Muslim friend. He used to be an atheist, but even then, he said, he hoped that if he were cornered by a Hindu mob he would declare himself a Muslim and stand with his companions.

But belonging to this tribe ... is a difficult life sentence, without parole. I always come back to it. Sometimes it feels as though I am an agnostic/Buddhist/humanist trapped inside a Catholic's body and that reassignment is not available. I say trapped, because it affects the whole of my intellectual life and I cannot move on, though maybe the truth is not to be expressed in this linear way, but rather the circle widens (imperceptibly) and that is a better image. Once a Catholic, you see. A certain set of questions, round and arduously round is how it seems in the bad times, my intellectual life dominated by the attempt to understand and resolve them, a set of questions that defines my life, and maybe that is the point of the idea of a 'world', whose derivation seems to be the idea of the 'life of a man', that its construction or dismantling is the work of a human lifetime. In my case the work seems to be to express the experience of its dismantling, and then to sift through the remains.

But the tribal thing: when we were kids we always knew who the Catholics were, in parliament, in the unions, on the stage, in the literary world, in broadcasting. But that was about us and who we could, should, identify with, take pride in. 'You know he's a Catholic?': rather different in intonation from that perplexing knowledge some people of a certain class tend to have: 'of course, he's Jewish, you know'. For me, nowadays, it takes the form of noticing the news when it turns to matters Catholic, a papal gaffe, a new Archbishop, another embarrassed episcopal interview, the tense, brittle, unyielding and defensive, slightly puzzled voice, about gays or contraception or child abuse, or abortion or embryo research. I am distant enough to note the intellectual disaster zone, close enough to feel their pain and want to shake them, longing for one of them to break out, break free and say what they really think, except, I realise, in many cases this is what they really think. But what is it, really to think something? These guys are loyal sons of the Church, reasonably decent men (of course notice the gender), dedicated to, even infused by the ideal of Love, seeking in their lives to be 'another Christ': but spare me that love when the ideal is mediated by life-destroying theory and ideology, precise and petty regulation, so that, confusing loyalty to Christ with loyalty to the official Church, they help to maim and cripple souls, without noticing, and all in a spirit of love, and to that extent they are victims also, of self-harm, though, again, they do not notice, where to notice is to go deeper into self-knowledge than the maintenance of their world can contain. They are loyal sons of the Church and the Church has a position on many things and one needs to know what it is in order to stand up for it, and the education of priests is a training in its articulation. But, note to self, it is dangerous to charge others with lack of self-knowledge, it tempts the gods ... except that once the world came tumbling down, and after many years I have heard again the ancestral voices in those of my contemporaries, who talk unselfconsciously about Almighty God and what he wills. inhabiting what, in my case, came tumbling down. But the faith and the loss of faith, is a high anxiety area: 'the fool hath said in his heart ...' expresses such anxiety.

In which connection, the other day the Cardinal, at the enthronement of his successor, said things which caused vulgar secularists to hug themselves in a delicious glee of affront. The problem is that the delicious glee, the affront, the outrage, also express a state of the soul, one that passes unnoticed because subjectivity is not so much not thought to matter, as never referred to. One looks out, as it were, and not in, so all unknowing of what determines what one can see. Anyway, the Cardinal. I suppose my complaint about the hierarchy is that its members are compelled to appear orthodox even if their private thoughts are not, like politicians or cabinet ministers, they must defend the line, the position, the policy, even if they are against it, this on pain of expulsion. There are not many rogue bishops, so I assume that for most of them there is no such dissonance between private thought and public utterance, but that their minds are shaped by the official teaching. But to come to particulars, the Cardinal said that in the absence of faith we were left with 'an impoverished understanding of what it is to be human', that people were 'not totally human if they leave out the transcendent'. This is what caused the vulgar secularists to hug themselves in a tabloid glee: 'he says we are less than human!' as though 'less than human' implied 'sub-human'. The trouble is that these people are incurious and do not help the cause of secular humanism, they lack charity, do not seek to see what the man is trying to say, which I take to be that in the absence of faith we are not fully human, that a dimension of what makes us human beings is absent. I offer these brief clarifications not because I agree with him but because they are thoughts that belong to generations of clergy trained in theology and philosophy.

We have, therefore, to turn to one of the eminent catholic theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner ...