There is a trade of manners in the Church. The way one sacrament is celebrated influences, in time, the liturgy of others. This has been most evident in the recent history of the Eucharist and Penance.

Penance, in the days immediately before Pius X, had pretensions to be a private business between priest and penitent in a box. It was individual and it was frequent. When Pius X made Communion frequent a great many people set about making it individual. Often enough communion was taken from the community context, and men went daily to communion before or after Mass. Even when communion was received within the Mass, efforts were made to maintain privacy for the communicant. Everyone came up quietly (my seminary Rector made a huge fuss when some of us looked up open-eyed as he passed down the line) and, having been quietly given a host from yesterday’s ciborium, they went quietly back to make a little cave with their hands, opening them a little perhaps when the Leonine prayers warned them that a demon was wandering through the world for the ruin of souls, and quickly shutting them again.

All this is done with. The Eucharist has come out into the open again, and now in turn Penance is venturing forth.

Penance has become popular. And this in two senses of the phrase. More people are taking part in the ecclesial forgiveness of God, and they are more often doing so as members one of another rather than as single men.

Every genetic moment is a mystery. It is dawn, discovery, spring, new birth, coming to the light, awakening, transcendence, liberation, ecstasy, bridal consent, gift, forgiveness, reconciliation, revolution, faith, hope, love. It could be said that Christianity is the consecration of the genetic moment, the living centre from which it reviews and renews the indefinitely various and shifting perspectives of human experience in history. That, at least, is or ought to be its claim: that it is the power to transform and renew all things: ‘Behold, I make all things new’ (Rev. 21,5).

But, it will be said, even supposing your interpretation of Christianity is just, that at its centre is the genetic moment, the holiness of the new, could not the same claim be made for other traditions, for which, say, the experience of enlightenment is the heart? Either Christianity is merely an instance of a universal type of the humane, whether communicated by religious tradition or not, or your version of Christianity is merely parasitic on some generally available truth about human experience, which historical Christianity as a matter of fact has successfully smothered for centuries of institutionalized timidity, boredom and repression.

I want of course to argue that the Christian experience of the genetic moment is the critical instance, the touchstone of the new. But this is not to say that Christian self-understanding in theology does not allow of exploration of its crucial sense of the genetic moment in terms of other insights into genesis, birth from above and anew.

The evident concern of Pope Paul VI for the sufferings of mankind, his tireless labours for peace, and his willingness to adopt new initiatives have won him admiration and a respectful hearing far beyond the bounds of the Christian communion. The recent encyclical Humanae Vitae has attracted the attention of many scientists, partly because it is relevant to the population problem and partly because it contains a section specifically addressed to them. Many scientific periodicals concerned with science and human affairs have therefore devoted leading editorials to the encyclical, and many other scientists have commented on it in articles and letters.

Scientists are well aware that the population problem has arisen largely as a result of their work. Advances in medical science have decreased infant mortality, eliminated many killer diseases and increased the average life span, so that populations hitherto static or increasing slowly have begun to increase rapidly, thus outrunning available food supplies and leading to widespread poverty and malnutrition. This is an agonizing situation that cannot be ignored and indeed all those who struggle to solve it are following the command of Christ to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty and clothe the naked. Familiar with the properties of the exponential function, scientists know that the only way to solve the problem, and to avert catastrophic famines in the next decades, is to find some way of regulating births. To be effective, the method chosen must be usable by poor, simple and illiterate people.

Since the last of these chronicles (New Blackfriars June 1967), I should no doubt have been spending my time dutifully reading the Goncourt prize entries, or the latest offering of the nouveau roman, I have in fact been doing nothing of the kind. If I were to look for the two most interesting novels recently written in French I would plump unhesitatingly for two quite different books, both by established writers, one experimental in style, the other rigorously traditional. The first is a fascinating exercise in science-fiction by Robert Merle, Un animal doué de raison (Gallimard, 1967), the second is Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir (Gallimard, 1968).

I haven’t, either, been doing much in the reading of the fifty-odd books which have appeared on ‘the events of May’, having a suspicion that more of the ideologies, at any rate, were represented in the graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne, where plaintive practicalities (‘Baby-sitters wanted’) mingled with political exhortations and various kinds of contempt for the past (‘Dire qu’il y a toujours des chrétiens!’).

This is not because I feel there’s a good deal of I told you so’ about the student revolt in Paris and elsewhere, but rather because I believe there is a much more profound revolt going on in the comparatively unnoticed depths of society in the French provinces. The latter-day chouans of Brittany are no doubt the most spectacular of these rebels against a hyper-metropolitan government which knows little about their problems and cares less; but there have been manifestations of an aggressive provincial counter-attack in other quarters too, and two books by Robert Lafont give an interesting analysis of this: ‘Paris versus the provinces’ struggle in terms of colonialism.

A democratic Church? Last month, in the first part of this article, I discussed certain studies on attitudes to authority and the psychological components of such responses. My point was that awareness of the psychological mechanisms which may underly some of the antagonisms in the Church can perhaps help to ameliorate them. There is however a further and more fundamental question to be raised concerning the structure of the institutional Church. On the one hand its hierarchical organization has the advantages of apparent historical continuity, the visible demonstration of unity and the fact that it is congenial to a considerable proportion of its membership, on the other hand its very attractiveness to people of authoritarian personality has its dangers. People so attracted may try to mould it in their own image, as indeed seems so have happened from time to time in history, so that their preoccupations almost reverse the emphasis of Christ’s teaching on the spontaneous exchange of love.

At this point it is worth recalling the outcome of Lewin, Lippitt and White’s experiment, where spontaneous and mature behaviour was a feature of the democratic group rather than the autocratic group. It may seem facile to draw comparisons between the behaviour of groups of small boys and behaviour within vast and complex organizations like the Church. Furthermore, evidence has been cited that the cultural predispositions of some nations and the personality characteristics of some people mean that they may actively prefer the autocratic situation.

However, a lot of evidence has been accumulating in a variety of disciplines to show that in large organizations as well as small,

On the face of it, the liturgical movement is one of the big religious success stories of the twentieth century, a paradigm case of the movement of the Holy Spirit in the Churches. From small beginnings, Pius X’s encouragement of frequent communion, his reform of the breviary and his interest in Church music on the one hand and the renewed scholarly concern with ancient liturgical texts, manifested by men like Edmund Bishop, on the other, sprang up in Benedictine monasteries like Mont-César and Maria Laach a movement to rediscover and revive the principles embodied in the great liturgies of the patristic period. These principles have gained wider and wider acceptance and the official seal of approval was placed on them, first of all in a rather grudging manner by Pius XII in his encyclical Mediator Dei (1947) and then wholeheartedly in the Liturgical Constitution of the Second Vatican Council promulgated in 1963. Parallel movements in the Church of England and among the Lutherans only confirm the authentic character of liturgical developments.

Yet, despite the evident signs of the movement of the Spirit, there are some disquieting features in the present situation. A substantial minority on the right remains stubbornly unreconciled to any change, while on the left there are some who are preoccupied with ‘underground’ or domestic liturgies and others who question any special concern with liturgical forms as, in effect, a gigantic irrelevance and a distraction from the Christian’s primarily political role. Consequently, it is worth the effort to distance ourselves from the liturgical movement and its principles and enquire if, among the many sound intuitions into the nature of worship which it has promoted, there are some attitudes and approaches which are of more doubtful value.

There is a story about two monks who lived long ago and who had taken a vow never to touch a woman. One day they were walking together through the forest, when they came to a clearing. Through the middle of the clearing ran a stream, rather wide and deep, and at this season rather turbulent. By the banks of the stream stood a pretty girl, obviously in some distress because she wanted to cross the stream but was afraid to. Hardly pausing in his stride, the elder and taller of the two monks picked her up in his arms, waded through the water, set her down safely on the further side, and walked on without waiting for her thanks. The younger monk was astounded. He crossed the stream—with some difficulty, because he was smaller—and then bounced along behind his companion, seething with suppressed criticism. At last he could stand it no longer. Catching up with the other, he said, in a voice that showed how deeply scandalized he was, ‘Brother—your vow!’ The elder monk looked round at him in surprise, and then said, rather sharply, ‘What! Are you still carrying that girl?’

Of our Lady above all people it can be said that her spirituality consisted in eating when hungry, sleeping when tired.

When a Benedictine monastery reaches a point in its course where ‘renewal’ or re-orientating becomes important, what way will it take? There are two courses. Both ways have been tried in the last seventy years in this country, and comparison between them shows up some interesting features in more or less modern Christian life. I would like to discuss these two courses with a view to introducing the Worth Abbey Peru Foundation. To do so, however, I must summarize the features of Benedictine Christianity which are reckoned essential to it, and therefore at once beyond ‘renewal’, and also the guiding principles of any particular renewal.

A monastery is not Benedictine unless it is a charitable spiritual ‘family’ living more or less permanently together in one place under an Abbot, having common work and prayer as its main activities. The vows: obedience to the local abbot, stability in one Abbey and ‘conversio morum’ (monastic behaviour) underlie this arrangement. It is obvious that such principles lead to team work as against personal ventures or successes. The most obvious evidence of this is that you seldom hear of particular monks becoming great scientists or writers, but you often hear of particular monasteries, like Montserrat or Ampleforth. The democratic election of the Abbot (in this country for only the statutory period of eight years) and his physical proximity to the other monks also encourage corporate activity and unity. Although monasteries often have many different activities, it is of the essence that the effect is unitive, not diversifying.