In the mid-1950s I recall hearing Joseph Fichter, the prominent American sociologist and Jesuit, say off the cuff at a large gathering of Catholic sociologists in Belgium that there was no such thing as Catholicism. He substantiated his remark with words something like: ‘There’s American Catholicism, there’s French Catholicism, Italian Catholicism, and so on, but there’s no Catholicism.’

Until very recently the Catholic Church presented, to the outsider at least, a totally different picture. It was one of the Church being a monolithic structure, the biggest international organization of the world, the most uniform in policy and ideology, and the most efficient to run. Doubtless this image was deliberately encouraged by the hierarchy and by those of an Ultramontane outlook so that the world should see the Church in such terms. And if the image emerged by accident, the hierarchy made no effort to modify it. Emile Durkheim saw it in this fashion but for him it was not a glorious achievement but un monstre sociologique.’ A debating opponent, Abbé Hemmer, replied to Durkheim’s comment, which was also made off the cuff in an academic group, that the assertion proved the divine nature of the Church. It was divine because it was able to transcend sociological laws. The Church was thus a miracle or mystery as much in theological terms as in social reality. Durkheim’s judgment was hardly value-free. From the viewpoint of his unwavering commitment to something which approximated to humanism, the Catholic Church was a sociological monstrosity, in part due to its enormous size, but more importantly because it exerted controls over independent nations and tried to weld together diverse and perhaps hostile groups.

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.

I find it hard to comment on Flanagan’s contribution. He is exemplifying an attitude rather more than he is conducting an argument, and I do not have a clear-cut alternative to so confidently display.

Some portions of Archer’s book and the structure of feeling which informs it are, perhaps, highlighted by Flanagan’s endorsement of it, but the latter seems to write as if there was a single obvious case or as if Archer would endorse his own position. I simply cannot see this. There is something powerful and disturbing that Archer has touched upon which has this quality precisely because it does not issue from a somewhat intégriste version of the short-comings or failures of Conciliar reforms.

Flanagan certainly writes with panache but the telling and amusing swipes at some contemporary liturgies have to be disentangled from the rather less amusing idea of ‘the present failure of the Church to keep the working classes in practice.’ It is a matter of common experience that there are, at least for some people, severe problems of a sense of loss of transcendence and sacrality in much contemporary liturgy. The problems here are part of the question of the distinctiveness of Catholicism in the latter part of the century, and more particularly in Britain. It is, however, hard to come at these issues when a core part of the article rests upon appeals to ‘the sociological’, taken as crucial and probably rather a good thing, as against ‘the cultural’, which is variable and generally dangerous, if not just bad.

The sociology of religion is unevenly developed. If you want to read a good book on one of the sectarian forms of religion, such as the Moonies, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Hare Krishna movement, you can generally find what you are looking for. But on Catholicism there is a dearth of good sociological literature: a paradoxical state of affairs when one considers the enormous scope the subject offers for analysis informed by sociological insight rather than by theological or administrative concerns. For this reason, the publication of such an excellent study as The Two Catholic Churches is to be warmly welcomed.

Our concern here is with the issues Archer has raised rather than with the book itself. So, in writing about the portrait he presents of present-day English Catholicism, I shall be concentrating on the interpretation which he offers rather than on the descriptive element. But his description and his interpretation are so closely dovetailed that commenting primarily on the latter is a rather artificial procedure. In doing so, moreover, I may seem not to give this highly readable and stimulating book the praise it merits, since the interpretative framework strikes me as being more vulnerable to criticism than Archer’s account of what it was like to be a Catholic in Newcastle before the Second Vatican Council. Yet it is in the nature of interpretations to be open to question; thus, if in what follows I do question some parts of the analysis, that in no way lessens my admiration for Archer’s skill in conveying to nonCatholic readers something of the social reality of Catholicism in England.

There is a growing literature on the sociology of the Catholic Church which attempts to explain that institution’s present condition in terms of tension between an official church and an unofficial one, both of which now exist inside what was once monolithic Catholicism. The work of Vallier on Latin American Catholicism and of Coleman on the Roman Catholic Church in Holland uses ‘two-church’ models, though their theoretical framework is integrationist, in a Durkheimian sense. More explicitly, and on the specific issue of the respective roles of hierarchy and theologians, Dulles argues in the chapter, ‘The two magisteria; an interim reflection’ of his recent book on ecclesiology, that there is need for ‘two kinds of teacher—the official teacher, whose task it is to establish the official doctrine of the Church; and the theologians, whose function is to investigate the questions about faith with the tools of scholarship’. The law which should rule the relationship of these two elements is a dialectical one of ‘relative autonomy within mutual acceptance’, (p. 127). Using the two-church model in a more general way, Peter McCaffery, in his excellent thesis, ‘Catholic radicalism and counter-radicalism’, has analysed one tension between official and unofficial mind-sets within Catholicism. With the help of surveys of the literature, opinions and activities of ten groups in the Catholic Church in England and nine in Holland he probes the mediating role played by more or less loyal Catholic opinion in these national churches. He concludes that an unofficial presence has occupied a space inside the Church between the official Church and its external critics.

As a non-Catholic I cannot judge whether Archer’s thesis is substantially sound or not. What I can say, however, is that I hear the authentic sounds of the North East Church in his very stimulating and thought-provoking book. In much of what he says he is speaking for the entire Christian community in that area as it struggles to fulfil its ministry in a depressed region where high unemployment affects the quality of life.

What I have to write here I base not only on my own experience— my own working-class upbringing, my seven years as Vicar of St Nicholas, Durham, and as Prison Chaplain at Durham, and my general knowledge of working-class culture in the North-East—but also on the results of a special questionnaire. I sent this to twenty Anglican incumbents in working-class parishes in Newcastle and Durham, asking them for observations on decline, liturgy and styles of ministry, and for their reflections on church growth.

Although Archer was not concerned with the decline of an Anglican working class the evidence is clearly there. Let us take the churches of Benwell, which cluster together on the north of the Tyne. Thirty or so years ago there were ten churches in existence in South Benwell of various denominations, including at least two Anglican parishes. Today, there are none in the same area apart from one very small evangelical independent church which cannot afford to pay its own minister’s salary. As well as the closure of churches, signalling their bleak failure to maintain a ministry among a solidly working-class populace, the service registers of churches in West Benwell indicate the same trend.