It has been only been three years since Mgr Paul Cremona's consecration as Archbishop. But it seems such a long time ago that he was thought of - as he often was then - as "charismatic", someone whose leadership would be based on extraordinary personal gifts, rather than a mix of traditional and bureaucratic authority tempered by striking gifts of sympathy and empathy.

His actual style would have surprised no one who had actually bothered to read what he had written on doctrine and culture. But what about his judgment, expressed early in his episcopate and repeated since then, that the Church today finds itself in a situation that most resembles its early period (50-300 AD) of hostile or patronising Roman reception?

This would be the period which, in his recent, widely praised, 1,000-page A History of Christianity (Allen Lane), Diarmaid MacCulloch characterises as a time where Christians were often seen to be harmless but also a bit creepy: keeping to themselves, aloof, especially from those fleshpots of gossip and sociality, the public baths, and sometimes driving sons and daughters to take hard stands of principle against their anguished pagan parents, as new ways of living were discovered.

However, Christians also practised a charity with no firm boundaries between insider and outsider. As many observed, during the plagues (and there were a few during that period), while the pagans fled, the Christians tended the sick (who survived at greater rates) and buried their dead.

To such an ethos and contrast does the neo-Darwinian sociologist, W.G. Runciman, attribute Christianity's early expansion. The meek did not inherit the earth; the Christians were real toughs for that environment.

And perhaps it is such an idea of toughness, thinking it right for today's environment, that is shaping Mgr Cremona's leadership of the Church: his readiness to institutionalise Ecclesial aloofness from popular culture (as with the "restoration" of feasts) and readiness to settle into being a dissident minority on civil rights as long as doctrinal purity on proper social order is maintained and policed.

The problem is how far to take the comparison if one is basing a pastoral strategy on it. As MacCulloch shows, the same period was also one of extraordinary doctrinal ferment and debate while Church leadership was hardly as centralised as it is today. For Christians to keep to themselves and argue about virginity, their doctrines and their interpretation had to be promiscuous.

Nor was this a coincidence. MacCulloch begins his history 1,000 years before the birth of Christ, arguing that Christianity is born of a fertile but unstable vision of God, or, rather, two incompatible visions of divinity, the Greek and the Jewish, which became intertwined in a manner that is still yielding fresh truths to humanity till this day.

MacCulloch belongs to no Christian Church but can still see it has a long future, as far as present trends grow. The number of Christians in China and India alone would constitute the world's fifth largest religion. And in every continent - except arguably that Asian sub-continent called Europe - its adherents find their religion's freshness in its ability to circulate ideas in unexpected ways.

MacCulloch's argument swirls with such examples. He shows how unlikely is the current twinning of Pentecostalism with Evangelism and how affluent South Koreans are adapting the social activism of Latin American liberation theology.

Indeed, in his account, it is the drive for doctrinal purity that often leads to the greatest distortions. The Spanish Inquisition, which led to the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Muslims almost exactly 500 years before the cleansing of the Balkans, did not get rid of Muslim and Jewish influence, whose mysticism lived on in that of men such as John of the Cross and women like Teresa of Avila and various movements that circulated in Italy and elsewhere before settling in Holland.

But its simplifications, like those of the Protestant reformations, wiped out certain Christian possibilities and, by insisting on purified identities, made unity unthinkable.

Pure Protestantism, argues MacCulloch (on good evidence), did not even lead to the world of modern capitalism. It was the culturally more hybrid countries of Holland and England, hosts to the Sephardic Jews and other religious refugees (including from Catholic Italy), who took the lead.

A 3,000-year history is bound to ripple with apparent similarities for a Church contemplating its identity. The trick is perhaps to be wedded to no single one.

The late John Paul II seems to have recognised this well. He often seemed to be driving a 20th-century counter-Reformation. But then he could show genuine respect for popular religious syncretism; most notably on his visit to Brazil in 1980, where he submitted himself to a ritual cleansing by a Candomblé priest (some of whose practices might suggest a resemblance to European witchcraft).

Was this plain inconsistency? Or did his belief in "the splendour of truth" go hand in hand with a conviction that Christianity had yet to yield all its secrets to humanity?

On this view, what seemed like intellectual inconsistency would really be a clear-eyed recognition of instability at Christianity's heart, with its notion of truth as at once eternal and unfolding, its witnesses at once elected and disenfranchised, wise and foolish.

ranierfsadni@europe.com