Apud barbaros. With this acid phrase Julien Green began his diary when a student at an American university some forty years ago. Feeling himself to be an embittered exile from Europe, a cultured man among philistines, his alienation was completed by the onset of sexual torments which, in a world of evasive hints and implications, gradually led him to realize he was much more radically different from his society than he had suspected. He was a homosexual. Riding on a country buggy to one of the splendid Southern homes owned by members of the American branch of his family, he turned towards the young driver and found his heart gripped as if in a vice: ‘Why do we suffer so when we look upon a human face? We can look and look, suffer and suffer more, but there is in that suffering a cruel happiness which ravages the heart. I did not know what to think, I almost wanted to die. No doubt that will seem exaggerated, but you must have gone through what I went through to understand what I mean.’ The ‘jeunesse merveilleuse’ of the American South of those days captivated him, and inevitably made him think of the Greek statuary the college authorities had disturbingly and unwittingly placed at frequent intervals along the corridors. All the more aware of this misery and unhappiness because he was, as his sister stormily told him, in a society where you had to do as everyone else did, he could not resist the revelation of himself that came through Greek poetry and Virgil.

It was time, evidently, that someone should make a thorough study of marriage as an institution in the twentieth century, and do so from a Christian point of view. It was time to look at the way people actually think and live their marriages and consider those of others. It was time to be unsatisfied with the Christian or Catholic label as sufficient indication of what the labelled ones think and feel. It was time to do all this in a way that would make clear to priests (priests both at work and in the process of education) the real nature of the problems they have to cope with in their parishes, and help them to do so with compassion but also with understanding. It is important that this should be done because the state of the institution of marriage in a particular community, and the attitudes and situations that attend it, dictate the structure and growth of that society, form its behaviour in other departments of life, and decide its future for good or ill.

Father Haring is nothing if not thorough. His 488 pages examine every conceivable aspect of marriage and family life from the sociological, theological and practical points of view, and every point he makes is supported by statistics of public-opinion polls (mostly from Germany, Holland and Belgium). And since my final, depressing conclusion at the end of all this hard work is that the book is a monumental disaster I had better begin by saying all the nice things I can find to say, and there are plenty.

It has been generally accepted in recent years by strategists that the possession by each of the two Great Powers of nuclear weapons, of sufficient destructive power to cause unacceptable destruction to the opposing side, has constituted a deterrent to either side against the use of these weapons – and a deterrent also against aggression generally, whenever there was a fear that this might lead to the use of nuclear weapons. As long as the cold war seemed to be forming the world into two blocs of opposing nations grouped round the major nuclear powers, some calculation of the risk of nuclear war entered into the strategic calculations in most areas of conflict, thus restraining the use of violence and the spread of war.

For a time, there seemed to be some hope of stability in this situation. Of course there was always the risk of war by accident, and the danger of a technical breakthrough in the arms race which would destroy the symmetry of the balance; but if only these dangers could be overcome, there seemed to be some prospect of a stable bi-polar world. Consequently, all the attention of the politically involved peacemakers focussed on means of slowing down or stabilising the arms race between the major powers, and of improving safeguards against the risk of war by accident.

The formula ‘lex orandi, lex credendi’ expresses the long-acknowledged belief that the liturgy is didactic. One major concern of the present liturgical renewal is to make the liturgy more expressive of the gospel message which it proclaims. This problem is one of communication, authenticity, and meaningfulness. But another fundamental problem also warrants serious attention. What should the expressed message be? What truths ought the liturgy to communicate? The effectiveness of liturgical teaching is one problem; the propriety and value of the content of that teaching is another. It is precisely at this point that theology reverently and respectfully asks permission to judge the liturgy. Theology urges the need of an inverted formula, ‘lex credendi, lex orandi.’

Liturgy, as rite, is a pattern of sacred behaviour, and as such evolves more slowly than theology. The latter is constantly pushed onward by man’s desire to know, while liturgy is sedentary, conservative. Not that liturgy never reflects the changes in theological thinking. Just as theology has developed, so liturgy has gradually evolved. The really primitive residues in the mass, for instance, are few and short. In fact, liturgy can at times even seem to outrun theology. The unpreparedness on the part of a few professional theologians and bookish bishops at Vatican II for changes demanded by missionaries and pastors is ample proof of it. Nevertheless, liturgy ordinarily prefers calm repetitiveness, while theology at its best continually longs for new discovery and readjustment.