Any discussion of authority in the Church today must start from the fact that authority in the political sense has become a dirty word. To adapt a saying originally coined by Sir William Harcourt in 1889 and given wider currency by the future King Edward VII in 1895, we are all anarchists now. There was a time when authority was given the benefit of the doubt: unless there was glaring evidence to the contrary, it was assumed that those in authority knew what they were doing and thus commanded our obedience; and even if the matter was analysed further and it was admitted that authority could make mistakes, it was thought better that the wrong decision should be made and applied immediately than that any decision should be deferred until it might be too late. Today our assumptions tend to work the other way. We assume that those in authority will lurch from blunder to blunder, and we no longer see any great virtue in muddling through: it is apt to be a messy and expensive business.

This cannot be put down simply to a widespread cynicism alleged to exist as part of a supposed far-reaching malaise affecting the whole of our national life today. Indeed, there is some justification, if not for cynicism, at least for scepticism: our governments since the war seem to have been singularly unable to avoid leading us into one economic crisis after another, and when we are encouraged to swallow yet another dose of deflationary medicine we cannot help wondering if this cannot do more than alleviate the immediate symptoms of our economic ill-health.