Archer has written a timely sociological analysis of the present state of Catholicism in the United Kingdom. It is a ruthless, honest, almost clinical account of the ironic and paradoxical effects of the flabby liberal rhetoric that has shaped the practice of the post-Conciliar Church in Britain. It is unevenly written; some of its liturgical conclusions are a bit odd; and many will find it cynical and unconstructive. Yet it is a book that deserves debate.

My interpretation of his text suggests he is arguing as follows. A slow process of ecclesiastical embourgeoisement has been the main product of the theological hopes of the seventies, an ironic result for a rhetoric of egalitarianism that reached its most ludicrous level of cant amongst radical theologians, whose slant sent many out of the Church. One fringe developed another, and a ‘charismatic chicanery’ (to use Archer’s apt phrase) came to pass, apolitical and ecstatic, making natural friends with the house groups and other Evangelical sects beloved of sociological study. English Catholicism was caricatured, and the debates these fringes generated obscured the social conditions of religious practice of the silent majority. Archer’s book gives a sociological expression to their existence, and for that reason is of immense theological value.

He presents an image of a liberal Catholic Church developing Anglican traits and increasingly hopeful of slipping into the Establishment, a denomination amongst others in a safe part of the political landscape. A ‘safe’ set of house theologians are allowed to roam out, some producing a liberation theology that has inadvertently become an instrument of recruitment to Protestant Fundamentalism.