Fr. Conrad Pepler, sometime editor of Blackfriars and Life of the Spirit, the ancestral pair from which New Blackfriars springs, was an outstanding spiritual theologian among a uniquely gifted generation of the English Dominicans. In a period when ‘ascetical and mystical theology’ was generally separated from the theology of the Liturgy (to the disadvantage of both), he was keen to see the journey of the soul to God within the landscape of the Church’s worship. His exploration of the meaning of the Lenten season is a case in point.

Fr. Conrad’s Lent, his first published book, takes the form, as its subtitle tells us, of a ‘Liturgical Commentary on the Lessons and Gospels’. Obviously, the Lectionary which Fr. Conrad used was that of the preConciliar Roman liturgy, more specifically the Lectionary of St. Pius V, the Dominican pope who, in the wake of the Council of Trent, had reformed the liturgical books of the Western rite. In 1969, in response to the appeal of the Council fathers of Vatican II that ‘a more representative portion of the Scriptures be read to the people over a set cycle of years’, Pope Paul VI replaced the Pian Lectionary with another of his own, or rather his experts’, devising. Although there are continuities between these two scriptural anthologies there are also discontinuities which, clearly enough, reduce the value of Fr. Conrad’s book as a Lenten companion. Really, it is only utilisable by those congregations of the faithful or religious communities which still cling to the earlier liturgical pattern, thanks to Pope John Paul II’s clement interventions to assist them.