It might seem excessive to claim that a Belgian diocesan congress, held fifty years ago, could mark a decisive date in the history of the Church. But it was the Congress called at Liege in 1909 to further an interest in the Liturgy, inspired by a young monk of Mont Cesar, Dom Lambert Beauduin, that was the true beginning of the modern liturgical revival, and the radical changes of recent years have their root in his prophetic understanding of the authentic place of the liturgy in the life of the Church. He freed the Liturgy from all that was antiquarian or derived: he saw it as the Piété de I’Eglise (the title of his first and fundamental book) and St Pius X found in him the most faithful interpreter of his intention to restore the Liturgy to the Church as its ‘most authentic form of Christian piety’.

It was small wonder that the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique, and the vigorous pastoral-liturgical movement that grew up in France after 1945, found in Dom Beauduin its patron and principal inspiration. He was in fact by then, and had been for some years, living in virtual exile from his native Belgium. For Dom Beauduin had an even greater claim to the gratitude of the Church as the Benedictine monk who had responded to Pope Pius XI’s appeal to the Order to undertake the cause of Christian unity. He was the founder of the monastery of Amay (since established at Chevetogne) in which Eastern and Western traditions were equally honoured, a place of reconciliation where the divisions of Christendom could, if not altogether be healed, at least be considered in the context of charity.

In the past few decades the Church in Italy has produced a number of remarkable priests, widely known and venerated as initiators of organized works of charity. A Don Orione, a Don Gnocchi, a Don Calabria—such men are the flower of the Italian clergy and in their presence anticlcricalism is simply disarmed. The ex-priest Carlo Falconi, in a bitterly critical survey of post-war Italian Catholicism, interrupted his polemic to salute the ‘courageous initiative’ of these ‘darlings of the Italian public’.

The case of Don Giovanni Rossi, our present subject, is very different. It is different, first of all, because the founder of the ‘Pro Civitate Cristiana’ association at Assisi is primarily concerned not with works of charity, in the usual sense of this term, but with the propagation of the faith. The expressed aim of Don Rossi’s association of lay ‘volunteers’ (men and women, who must all be university graduates and who all make a promise of celibacy) is to bring the knowledge of Christ to those sections of society that arc most estranged from the Catholic faith. This description covers workers and peasants as well as the more educated classes, though in its actual working the P.C.C. seems to be more concerned with the latter category. From its ‘Citadella’ at Assisi issues fortnightly the brilliantly edited and illustrated magazine La Rocca; here also take place the annual ‘Courses of Christian Studies’ and the frequent gatherings of artists and intellectuals, of workers and employers. The nearest English parallel is perhaps Spode House, but the Citadella is a larger affair and far more chic.

There are the old ideas and there are the new ideas, and there are the adherents of each, between whom there exist relations ranging from strife to mutual tolerance. Out of all this there arises an ill-defined problem for the Catholic, whose faith commits him to all truth, however, whenever, and by whomever it is found. Because the problem is seldom adequately posed, few Catholic thinkers really tackle it, so that one has come to expect a Catholic thinker to bear, predominantly, either the modern or the antique stamp. He is either taking into a modern system ‘all that is of permanent value’ in the thought of the ancient world or he is finding a modest niche in ‘thomism’ for the findings of modern science. But compared to what can be done, all this is in the dark. What can be done is to understand the old ideas. And once we are fairly launched on this enterprise we discover that what we are really doing is trying to understand simpliciter, to become more intelligent. The wrestle with Aquinas is a wrestle with one’s own stupidity. And then ‘the problem’ is radically transformed, from a worry to a well-defined and formidable programme of work. This is Lonergan’s approach, and it is the reason for something about him that is immediately striking, his refusal to be given a role in the drama of Ancients versus Modems. To a recent critic who thought he found dangerous tendencies in his Christology he replied with a few tags from Aristotle which the would-be traditional critic was, in effect though not consciously, contradicting.