Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: VIII‐Slant, Marxism and the English Dominicans

Abstract

Dialogue between European Catholics and Marxists became significant in the 1960s and the English Province of the Dominicans had a major hand in its promotion. My personal memories of that episode focus upon three members of the Province in particular: Conrad Pepler, Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe. Each had a distinctive contribution to make to the dialogue. But all shared one particular gift. They were enablers. In other words, each of them helped to make things happen, by encouraging others more directly involved than themselves to have their say. Conrad Pepler’s contribution was as the Warden of Spode House, the Dominican conference centre where much of the dialogue took place. He gave house room to the variegated groups who wanted to take part; and by standing back from the in-fighting he made the dialogue ‘fizz’. Laurence Bright was the organiser at the centre of the network, and it was he who brought people into contact with each other at the beginning, and saw to it that what they said got into print, in various books as well as in the pages of Slant. In the later phases of the dialogue Herbert McCabe, as editor of New Blackfriars, opened the pages of the periodical to the participants in such a way that they were able to conduct their dialogue at leisure and at suitable (sometimes excessive!) length in between the conference gatherings at Spode. He also made lapidary observations of his own in editorial comments.Conrad Pepler was a child of the Eric Gill ‘Ditchling’ circle. As such he was familiar with the early Catholic peace movement. The Catholic PAX society had been started on 8th May 1936 by a small group including a recent Catholic convert from Wales, J. Alban Evans, who had experienced difficulties over the concept of ‘just war’ in Catholic thought until he read a book by the German Dominican, Franziskus Stratmann (a leader of the anti-war movement in Germany) called The Church and War. By June of that year, Eric Gill himself had taken an interest in the new group—and he of course was a Dominican Tertiary, as was Conrad’s father Hilary. So the Dominican influence on Catholic thinking about peace, and conscientious objection, was profound from the beginning.