In his memoir, A Crown of Thorns, Cardinal John Heenan of Westminster called the crisis that overtook global Catholicism in the summer of 1968 "the greatest shock the Church has suffered since the Reformation". He was referring of course to the publication of the papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae, at the end of July in that tumultuous year, and its painful and divisive aftermath. Forty years on, the most striking feature of his statement is not the exaggeration - the French Revolution surely counts as a greater political earthquake, the Holocaust as a greater moral catastrophe - but the implication that the crisis came as a surprise. The foundations for what happened next were buried in the faultlines of the text itself. Cardinal Heenan - co-chairman of the papal Commission on Birth Control - was in a good position to foresee trouble ahead.

He could have foreseen, for instance, that Tom Burns, then editor of The Tablet, would fulminate in his immediate post-Humanae Vitae editorial: "We who are of the household and can think of no other have the right to question, complain and protest, when conscience impels. We have the right and we have the duty - out of love for the brethren." Thinking Catholics who knew what had happened in Rome before the encyclical, who had absorbed all that Vatican II had to say about the Church as the People of God, had assumed that their concerns would be listened to and change in the Church's stance on birth control was inevitable. Even the Cardinal seemed to think so.

The Commission began with the assumption that the immorality of artificial birth control was easily proved by natural law, and was astonished to find that it could not be. Pope Paul VI did not heed the implied warning that merely to repeat these natural law arguments would be to guarantee a strong reaction; to buttress those arguments by invoking papal authority would broaden that reaction into a challenge to that authority. It was a strategic miscalculation ...

Bishops of the Anglican Communion have gathered for the Lambeth Conference, which has begun with a retreat. But the calm atmosphere of prayer and contemplation evoked by the word seems to be in strong contrast with the rancorous character of the preliminaries so far. There does not seem to be much grace about the place, and with grace comes respect. Perhaps the retreat will go some way towards repairing that, although ...

The Church of England is groping towards a harmonious solution of its internal crisis over the ordination of women bishops, but with no guarantee that such a solution exists. The crisis reveals much about the nature of Anglicanism itself. The Anglican claim to be both Catholic and Reformed is a challenging one, for it sets up a tension at the heart of the Church between two tendencies which sometimes point in opposite ...

Forward in Faith, which represents traditionalist Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England, has written to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York warning them that many of its members could "defect" if women bishops were introduced without adequate safeguards. The letter was signed by 1,333 clergy, and the issue comes before the General Synod later this month. ...

A new Government in Zimbabwe was the necessary but not sufficient condition for rescuing it from the appalling state into which Robert Mugabe has allowed it to sink. He has now blocked regime change by terrorising his opponents, the Movement for Democratic Change, into withdrawing from the rerun of the presidential election that it was probably about to win. So the economy remains in ruins and human-rights violations ...