Resacralising Reaction

Extract

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.