The Catholic Church is the only Church in England to have had in recent times any substantial following among working class people. Now, as the Church loses this following, it is worth asking what exactly the attraction was. Evidently at one time working class people found something in the Church, and now they do not.

For all practical purposes the Catholicism we have now dates from the later half of the nineteenth century. The situation at the time is well known. There were a few, mostly well off ‘old’ Catholics, some pockets of the country where Catholicism had never entirely disappeared, a trickle of converts and the vast number of Irish immigrants working in the new industrial centres. A kind of Catholicism prevailed that found its inspiration in the Counter-Reformation. In Ireland it had been imposed by the Irish hierarchy in the power vacuum which followed the loosing of the English hold on what had not been destroyed of Irish Catholicism. In England it had been adopted after the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850.

Certainly there were objections to this kind of Catholicism. The ‘old’ Catholics grumbled at the rococo devotions introduced by Italianate converts and joined their bishops in resisting the ultramontane extravagances of Manning and his friends. To the Irish immigrants, however, ‘Counter-Reformation’ Catholicism had from the beginning a great deal to offer.

It is not just that Catholicism was ‘their’ religion, something the English had tried, but failed, to crush. Counter-Reformation Catholicism had the added attraction of its essentially alien nature.

Both the technological and the organic in Solzhenitsyn’s organising imagery seem to propose structures and processes independent of human agency or control; and for Solzhenitsyn’s idea of history, control is a crucial question. The role of the individual within history, the extent to which he can be held responsible or can change his situation, is left unexplained. The imagery of the Great Machine perhaps presupposes a Great Mechanic who originally constructed the device, and indeed when Solzhenitsyn’s technocratic ideology issues into prescriptive injunctions its very substance is a belief in an individual or collective elite who should run society and its institutions; but the technological and structural images are not used in this way. Although one of the intentions of The Gulag Archipelago is to demonstrate a continuity between Lenin and Stalin, to prove the former an architect of later repression, the emphasis in the technological images of history is upon mechanical operations which take place over against the activity of individuals, including that of those people who apparently administer them. Yet the individual is for Solzhenitsyn the absolute subject of history:

The Universe has as many different centres as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a centre of the Universe . . . (G.A., p. 3).

The individual is consequently expected to have moral responsibility and, in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase, ‘civil valour’ (G.A., p. 462), a concept upon which he puts much emphasis although it is ill-defined. He assigns to each of the Russian people some share in blame for allowing the Stalinist crimes to take place.

Melveena McKendrick, in a work recently published on Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age, makes the point that there was during this period of the 16th and 17th centuries no change in the social position of the vast majority of women, that is, those of the rural peasantry, and she then adds:

Initially, I found the throw-away line about the prostitute and the nun quietly amusing, or rather, amusingly sardonic in a low pitch way. The juxtaposition seemed to be sufficiently slightly outrageous to underscore the delicate irony of the order of presentation—prostitute first, nun second, capping it all with the application of the term calling to both. Donnish humour at its best? But, on second thoughts, its clever, quiet and telling effectiveness seemed to me to betray a very bourgeois understanding or misunderstanding of the nature of professional sex, politics and religion. I don’t think Buñuel, Genet or Pasolini would have tried to be so neatly clever about such vital things as prostitution and the religious life. You see, deep down, what is wrong is not the question of coupling the two and regarding them both as vocations, the real trouble is to think for one moment that the lives of these practitioners of the most ancient of female professions run along fixed and prescribed lines. But let’s try and put the question into some sort of perspective.