‘The proposition that is closest to the very centre of our common faith is that he who loses his life shall save it. It applies not only to the material dispositions of our egoism, but to the spiritual universe we construct to secure ourselves against uncertainty.’ I am an inveterate optimist, and one of my current optimisms is the thought that, just because it is now being forced to embrace the truth of that proposition, English Catholicism may be on the verge of an exhilarating breakthrough. We English catholics are apt to envy more favoured countries than our own, where bishops, priests and people were better prepared for that burgeoning of new life in the Church to which the Vatican Council stands as mid-wife. In many places ecclesiastical structures were already more flexible, liturgical and ecumenical sensitivity was already awakened, pastoral practice was less heavily complacent. And yet—is there not a danger (I am ridiculously overgeneralizing in order to try to focus the point I want to make) that, because of these things, the aggiornamento in such countries might entail little more than an envigorating rearrangement of the ecclesiastical furniture? In our own country, where structures were so rigid, where clergy and devout laity tended to live (with the ‘catholic half’ of their minds) in unruffled isolation from so many of the real issues that rack humanity and the Church of Christ, where theology hardly existed until recently, where ‘pastorale’ is significantly untranslatable, where liturgical immobility made Pius XII’s application of the brakes in 1958 look like dangerous novelty—in this country we are certain to be spared a superficial renewal.