It is necessary nowadays for Christians to re-think all manner of things that were formerly taken for granted. ’Our world is a world in a continuous state of becoming, a state in which everything is questioned’, writes Cardinal Suenens in a book bulging with new insights and ideas. ‘We no longer live in an age where daily lives were solidly framed in tradition, and institutions were there to safeguard values that were never called in question’.

In attempting to understand what has happened and what the happenings mean for us, one historical fact takes on importance for all concerned with Christian education. In the disintegration of traditional ideas the way people lived Christian ideas and the forms in which these ideas were expressed fell apart.

We all know that the mass is the centre of our lives, that it is the most important thing in the life of the Church; but often we have to make a real effort to see this. It is not the obvious proposition it ought to be. We even have to make an effort to show that the Church really thinks this, rather than simply saying it for effect. What began as a common meal, feeding the people of God both with physical food and with the food of scripture, has become a largely silent ritual performed by one man with his back to the people in a dead foreign language. The bread which we eat has been carefully manufactured to look as little like bread as possible, and there has grown up a tradition that one should, out of reverance, avoid chewing it. Clearly there are reasons why all this should be so, some of them better than others, but looking at our modern liturgy from a distance shows why it is so hard to believe the truth about it.

William was born into a noble family about 1105. His uncle was abbot Hugh IV of St Germain des Pres in Paris, and the boy was sent to the abbey to be educated. Here the young William noted the life of the monks, how they sang and prayed and sat reading in the cloister, but he remained undecided about a monastic vocation. He made no objections when his family obtained for him a prebend in the collegiate church of Sts Peter and Paul and St Genevieve, though he soon found that the worldliness of his fellow canons contrasted unfavourably with the regular life. The canons returned his dislike. An unsuccessful attempt was made to trick him into entering a monastery. In the end, however, William remained a secular canon until he was forty-three, by Mediaeval standards an advanced age.

Some years ago I spent several days in the surgical ward of a provincial hospital. My coming had, I learnt later, wrought a subtle change in the patients’ general behaviour, but I was accepted as one of them, and was pleased to find a camaraderie of quite a remarkable kind among the men, who were of all ages. There were two exceptions to this, but each of these unfriendly characters was eventually won over by the whole ward. There was officially no other Catholic patient, and this perhaps made it easier for each of the men to look on the monk as ‘belonging’ to him.

It was an enriching experience in many ways. Among much else I learnt something of the complex problem provided by the injunction to visit the sick, which the catechism calls one of the corporal works of mercy.