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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Archer has written a timely sociological analysis of the present state of Catholicism in the United Kingdom. It is a ruthless, honest, almost clinical account of the ironic and paradoxical effects of the flabby liberal rhetoric that has shaped the practice of the post-Conciliar Church in Britain. It is unevenly written; some of its liturgical conclusions are a bit odd; and many will find it cynical and unconstructive. Yet it is a book that deserves debate.
My interpretation of his text suggests he is arguing as follows. A slow process of ecclesiastical embourgeoisement has been the main product of the theological hopes of the seventies, an ironic result for a rhetoric of egalitarianism that reached its most ludicrous level of cant amongst radical theologians, whose slant sent many out of the Church. One fringe developed another, and a ‘charismatic chicanery’ (to use Archer’s apt phrase) came to pass, apolitical and ecstatic, making natural friends with the house groups and other Evangelical sects beloved of sociological study. English Catholicism was caricatured, and the debates these fringes generated obscured the social conditions of religious practice of the silent majority. Archer’s book gives a sociological expression to their existence, and for that reason is of immense theological value.
He presents an image of a liberal Catholic Church developing Anglican traits and increasingly hopeful of slipping into the Establishment, a denomination amongst others in a safe part of the political landscape. A ‘safe’ set of house theologians are allowed to roam out, some producing a liberation theology that has inadvertently become an instrument of recruitment to Protestant Fundamentalism.
1 Wills, Garry, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy and Radical Religion, New York, Delta Books, 1972Google Scholar. See also my essay ‘Competitive Assemblies of God: Lies and Mistakes in Liturgy’ in Research Bulletin, University of Birmingham, Institute for the Study of Worship and Religious Architecture, 1981, pp 20—69.
2 See Hitchcock, James, The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, New York, Image Books, 1972Google Scholar.
3 ibid., especially Chapter 7, pp. 151–186.
4 See my essay, ‘Ritual Form: Liturgy's Sociological Dimension’, Modern Theology, Vol. 2, No. 4, July 1986, pp. 341—361.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 ‘Ratzinger on the Faith: A British Theological Response’, New Blackfriars, Vol 66. No. 780, June 1985.Google Scholar
6 Ratzinger, Joseph, The Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1986Google Scholar, especially Part 1.
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9 This hostility is especially noticeable in the writings of Peter Berger, possibly the most influential and important contemporary writer on sociology of religion.
10 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, Ľ heure de ľ‘Eglise, Paris, Fayard, 1986, pp. 36—37Google Scholar. I am indebted to Michael Robertson for bringing this work to my attention and for also translating the relevant passages.
11 Newman, John Henry, Loss and Gain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 73Google Scholar. First published 1848.
12 Crichton, J.D., ‘A Theology of Worship’, in Jones, Cheslyn, Wainwright, Geoffrey, and Yarnold, Edward, eds., The Study of Liturgy, London, SPCK, 1978, p. 20Google Scholar.
13 Koenker, Ernest Benjamin, The Liturgical Renaissance in the Roman Catholic Church, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1954, pp. 132—135Google Scholar.
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19 Riches, John, ed., The Analogy of Beauty. The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark Ltd., 1986, p. 197Google Scholar.
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