In the West the word ‘liturgy’ is used to cover a considerable number of acts addressed ideally to God, but the very multiplicity of forms which it subsumes tends to obscure what might seem a fact too obvious to comment on. Sometimes the question is put in a rather naive way: Who is the object of our worship as Christians: God or Jesus Christ? (distinction of persons); Has Jesus Christ, in whom is certainly the fulness of the godhead, ‘taken over’ from the God of the Old Testament as the centre of our liturgy? Before dismissing such a naive formulation too hastily we might remember that exegetes are not always unanimous on who the kyrios, addressed here and there in the prayer of early Christians as recorded in the Acts, really is—whether Yahweh (as in the Septuagint translation) or Jesus raised to the right hand of the Father.

It soon, emerges from any discussion about freedom of thought, with for example one's university colleagues, that the very idea of Catholics thinking freely still strikes many people as essentially funny. One quickly realises that many non-Christian intellectuals hold the view that Catholics are forbidden to think on pain of sin, heresy, excommunication and the whole apparatus of the Inquisition. But before discussing the peculiar difficulties of Catholics in this matter, I must say something in general about the meaning of freedom to think, asking the reader always to keep in mind its bearing on the particular problem of Catholic thought.

In order to consider whether we make the best use of the capacity for thought which we have (to which there are obvious limits set by native endowment both in the individual and in the species) it may be useful to establish the conditions in which thinking can occur at all.

In this antiphon is to be found what is probably one of the most perfect expressions—being both precise and comprehensive—of the nature and function of the mass or eucharist. It comes from the liturgical office of the feast of Corpus Christi and is also used on other occasions connected with the eucharist. It is of the mass as a whole however that it is descriptive, as its opening words show: O sacrum convivium—the sacred feast in which Christ is preached, made present and then eaten.

To translate it into English is not easy for each original word contains overtones, depth of meaning and openness to further interpretation, the exact equivalent of which cannot all be captured in translation. Thus as well as translating and considering each phrase in turn it will be well to comment almost word by word, bringing out the meaning of each within its overall context.

It's all right for you monks. You live in a monastery, where it's easy to pray. Things are arranged to make it so. But if you live a busy life in the world it's impossible. You're on the go from morning till night. How does anybody think one can pray in those circumstances?’ Such is the complaint and one is tempted, as a monk, to point out its false assumptions. That even in a monastery it is not necessarily easy to pray; that it is possible to be very busy even in a monastery; that even in those monasteries in which the pressure of work is less or the conditions more secluded it appears that there is no guarantee that praying will be easy. Whatever the way of life a person leads there would seem to be a strong likelihood that there will be no effective praying unless he is prepared to take vigorous steps to foster it.

William was born into a noble family about 1105. His uncle was abbot Hugh IV of St Germain des Pres in Paris, and the boy was sent to the abbey to be educated. Here the young William noted the life of the monks, how they sang and prayed and sat reading in the cloister, but he remained undecided about a monastic vocation. He made no objections when his family obtained for him a prebend in the collegiate church of Sts Peter and Paul and St Genevieve, though he soon found that the worldliness of his fellow canons contrasted unfavourably with the regular life. The canons returned his dislike. An unsuccessful attempt was made to trick him into entering a monastery. In the end, however, William remained a secular canon until he was forty-three, by Mediaeval standards an advanced age.

Some years ago I spent several days in the surgical ward of a provincial hospital. My coming had, I learnt later, wrought a subtle change in the patients’ general behaviour, but I was accepted as one of them, and was pleased to find a camaraderie of quite a remarkable kind among the men, who were of all ages. There were two exceptions to this, but each of these unfriendly characters was eventually won over by the whole ward. There was officially no other Catholic patient, and this perhaps made it easier for each of the men to look on the monk as ‘belonging’ to him.

It was an enriching experience in many ways. Among much else I learnt something of the complex problem provided by the injunction to visit the sick, which the catechism calls one of the corporal works of mercy.