When Don King the vertically haired boxing promoter was in England recently a reporter from

When Don King, the vertically haired boxing promoter, was in England recently, a reporter from Radio 5 Live challenged him about the Mike Tyson return against Pete "knock me down with a feather" McNeeley. It is heroic in its own fashion, but it is not acknowledged everywhere as authentically Christian. It can't be doing with pairs of plaster saints; that mould has to be broken. We do not yet know whether a manageable civilisation can be founded on mutuality. But the enterprise is under way, inflicting many casualties and much pain.

All this is laid out rather prosaically in the recent Anglican report on marriage today, Something To Celebrate It is very constructive. But it has provoked outrage in showing honestly how the British, including Anglicans, blunder through intimate life.The problem is that intimate life is not expressed through heroic sacrifice, but through mutual sharing - and sharing is more difficult and demanding than saintly giving. Wesley's experience helps, of course; it's always good to know that somebody is worse off than yourself. So maybe we have a kind of a start in treating the wilder side of conjugality in a loving and honest way. They damage their own and other people's lives.Perhaps all this lies more openly on the surface in the Methodist Church, where divorce and remarriage have been grieved over and celebrated for a generation now. His call to heroic virtue gets four inches in the Tablet, whereas the Karl and Luise story rates four columns.

Of course it is true that most Christian people enjoy making marriage work. But too many find themselves taking their own walk on the wild side They take the joy and the grief as they come. But there was certainly a great deal of pain in all this for Rahner, and it is tempting to read into his theology a more fully lived life. His experience recalls the words of his compatriot Martin Luther, on theology; that it is not got by study and speculation but "by living, dying and being damned".So Mgr Moll is on a hiding to nothing.