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.

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.

In the course of his article ‘The Encyclical Abstraction’ last month, Fr Thomas Gilby, O.P., touched on the distinction between the notions of conscience and ‘prudence’. He suggested that we should conduct our discussions of the moral issues raised by Humanae Vitae with greater precision and usefulness if we resorted to the suppler and ampler notion of ‘prudence’ rather than to that of conscience. ‘Prudence’ is something of a misnomer, carrying with it unfortunate associations for us today. Yet in much of our present discussion we seem to want to make ‘conscience’ do a great deal of the work that was formerly done by the finely analysed and thereby quasi-technical notion of ‘prudence’. It seems sensible, therefore, to take another look at this classical conception, and we do so by publishing here a translation of an extract from the extended Appendix to the French edition of the Summa of St Thomas Aquinas, dealing with Prudence. This piece thus takes its place as one of a series of contributions to a deeper consideration of the encyclical. We intend to publish further reflections in coming months from Mr Michael Dummett, Fellow of All Souls, and from Frs Timothy McDermott and Cornelius Ernst, O.P.

The important place occupied by ‘prudence’, in doctrine as in moral life, in the teaching of Aquinas can be seen clearly enough in his treatise on ‘Prudence’ in the Summa Theologica, 2a 2ae, 47-56. It is only too evident, however, that it has not subsequently kept pride of place in theology, for reasons which are not far to seek.

Montevideo still has old buses of 1890 vintage, ‘made in England’ and lovingly maintained. When Europe expanded in the nineteenth century, Latin America quickly caught the imagination of businessmen, whilst Christians were looking towards the new mission fields of Africa, Asia, Oceania. Did they really need to worry about this ‘Christian continent’ which had been baptized when it was colonized in the sixteenth century? But suddenly the spell broke: Latin America was in peril. Communism threatened, there were too few priests, sects menaced the integrity of the churches: all this impinged brusquely about twelve years ago. With the result that Latin America came to the forefront of pre-occupation. New organizations appeared: C.E.L.A.M. (Bishops’ Council for Latin America, 1955) and the pontifical commission for Latin America at Rome in 1960. (We might note in passing that it was also in 1960 that the Alliance for Progress was launched, designed to show that ‘free men, working within the framework of democratic institutions, are better able to satisfy human aspirations than regimes like that of Cuba’: so spoke the Charter of Punto del Este, a year after Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in the January of 1959.) A new channel was opened, with its source in Europe (one need think only of such West German organizations as Adveniat, Misereor, Caritas) and the U.S.A.: money and men, priests, lay people and religious. The Council insisted on the necessary sharing between rich and poor churches, each bishop being responsible for the whole of the Church in virtue of the principle of collegiality.

It has often occurred to me that if all the books which have been written in the recent past about ‘modern Ireland’ were laid end to end, it would be a very good thing. Certainly the Irish cannot complain of under-exposure. Constantly looked upon as something rather strange and yet attractive, this island has, especially in the past five years or so, been the subject of a considerable number of critiques, both external and internal, which are frequently united by nothing more substantial than the deliberate desire to misunderstand what it is the Irish are up to, and why. In addition, the illusion—created partly by the country’s useful geographical isolation, and partly by the mistaken belief that we speak the English language—that Ireland is a subject which can be rapidly and conveniently assimilated, encourages superficiality. It is difficult to know which is the more offensive: the kind of book which portrays Ireland as a country ruled by the expertly-wielded clerical black thornstick, straining to escape from its thraldom to alcohol and internecine warfare, or its alternative, the book about the brave new Ireland striding manfully into the twentieth century and in the process of escaping the various forms of thraldom already mentioned because it has at long last learned to embrace liberal, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon virtues.