Since the Second Vatican Council many developments have taken place which the Council itself did not and could not have anticipated. The Council did not foresee, for example, that the reform of the liturgy would cause the disintegration of popular Catholic piety and leave a fearful vacuum, providing nothing to put in its place. Neither did the Council anticipate that an increasingly educated Catholic laity would, in some way, radically alter its attitude to the clergy and to their ascendancy in the Church, demanding for themselves a place and authority of their own as ‘the People of God’. ‘From piety to criticism and back’ literally means looking back; it is a very difficult exercise. There are many reasons for this. We often absorb and integrate change in a semiconscious way and, once we have integrated it, there is a tendency to look back at the past in a hypercritical way through the lens of contemporary experience. Thus, we sometimes reach a distorted evaluation riddled with anachronisms, because we now live, move and breath in the air of a different world. However, despite the dangers, it is useful to look back, to engage in a process of recapitulation of the past, just as we do in old age, so that we can better understand the present.

What is piety? A working definition might be: the dutiful observance of religious practice. Within the Catholic Church that I knew, 1 consider it to have been a concentration of devotional worship at the expense of systematic theology and the study of scripture. However, this understanding of piety needs to placed in a particular context. Such a contextualisation can only be the Catholic Church of my youth, that is of the Irish/Lancashire variety.