I have been reading what will probably prove to be a controversial book by the (conservative) Dominican theologian Fr. Aidan Nichols called "Looking at the Liturgy". Essentially Fr. Nichols doesn’t like much of what he sees.

His argument (too complex to reproduce here, though well documented) is that the great liturgical reform movement in our Church in the '60s was actually the indirect brainchild of the so-called 'Enlightenment', which in its original form, i.e. prior to the French Revolution, extolled the freedom and rights of man over against duties to God. He shows how in many subtle ways our present liturgy has removed the sense of dependence on God in favour of an unjustified sense of self-sufficiency. This has been achieved partly by faulty translation of texts (now fortunately being revised) but also, he says, by the universal acceptance of the priest-facing-people rather than the Eastward priest-leading-people-in-sacrifice which is still the practice of all the other 'ancient' Christian churches. This change was made because, it was argued, it was the practice of the early Church. Now, scholars admit, the opposite was true.

His other main charge is that we were too quick to swallow sociological 'evidence' that rites should be simple. But a new wave of researches into rituals and customs has shown that traditional rites succeed through being complicated! Peoples the world over, from 'simple' tribesmen to Jewish boys at bar-mitzvahs, etc., have learnt their way into rituals, and these then stick. In other words, have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater?

This is of course a sweeping argument. It is true that many 'reformed' liturgies can be and are performed in an edifying way. But it is also true that they lend themselves to banality or to lapses into 'circuses' or 'ego-trips'. They can also encourage restless types to suggest - as they have done - that our Church rituals should all be abolished in Favour of on-the-spot invention: presumably the triumph of the bossiest!

Christian Unity Week reminds us that to be ecumenical we must firstly be clear about who we ourselves are. Catholicism depends principally on its members gathering around a unified core of worship. But if there is no unity of form, what do we have left? We have been warned! DS.