I want, for my own satisfaction and perhaps others', to set down as clearly as I can some thoughts about the place of the priest in today's world. It wants some thinking about, I feel.

First of all there is very little written on the subject that comes my way. I remember a deliberately superficial and snap picture in the Observer recently of various clergymen, very sympathetic with the Catholic priest, though one wondered on the evidence just why; a strange novel, The Edge of Sadness, by Edwin O'Connor, which I found evasive and lacking in the decisiveness there must be in a priest, somewhere one hopes even in the vague, tired, washed-out priest that one does see often; and another book I have just got hold of, Priests and People, by Conor Ward: this an excellent sociological study so far as I can judge of a ‘typical’ Liverpool parish, though it leaves out deliberately the personal life of the priest.