Alana Harris has surveyed popular Catholic belief and piety in the North of England during the period 1945 to 1982, revealing the extent of change and continuity among churchgoers. She portrays a widening gap between practice and official teaching in consequence of the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet she records a qualified continuity in the expression of specific Catholic devotions – for example, attachment to the Virgin, to St Thérèse of Lisieux and to the eucharist. Within these surviving devotions, however, she sees crucial shifts: in the case of the eucharist, less emphasis on the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle and Corpus Christi processions, and yet greater participation in the eucharist at mass. Her principal sources are a selection of nineteen members from two parishes in Salford. These ‘primary’ oral sources were backed up with an extensive array of published sources, including articles from the Catholic press. The differing editorial stances of weekly Catholic papers – for example, The Tablet and The Universe – contrasting the liberalism of the former, and the conservatism of the latter, reveal both the importance of the Catholic media as catalysts and records of change, continuity and tensions between ‘progressives’ and ‘traditionalists’. Alana Harris's study is a ‘take’ on Catholicism within a particular working-class location in the Manchester city area. Her principal informants are self-selecting parish activists. A more complex, and perhaps more accurate, picture of transition might have been gained by interviewing a wider constituency of non-active, occasional church attendees, as well as those who have lapsed. At the same time, the reports of just a handful of pastors and women religious would have been welcome. More than thirty years, and two subsequent popes, have passed since the end of the period that she has selected, indicating that her findings are principally of historical interest. Published during a year in which a series of synods are being held in Rome to discuss Catholicism and the family, her book nevertheless has significance in terms of a comparative trajectory that continues to this day. The current Roman initiatives, decreed by Pope Francis, have followed a worldwide survey of lay views on Catholic beliefs, practices and the family. Harris's study records, albeit in micro-perspective, crucial issues of concern into the twenty-first century. Not least for Catholics is the unresolved gap between Rome's teaching on artificial contraception and actual practice. Equally contentious, now and during the period of her study, is the official teaching on divorce and remarriage – and actual practice at a time when Catholics currently divorce at the same rate as non-Catholics, about 40 per cent in developed countries. Unlike many surveys in the sociology of religion, she emphasises the importance, from a phenomenological point of view, of popular Catholic spirituality. In contrast to the wide abandonment of official teaching on sexual morality, she sees, in the four decades of her survey, a resilience and enthusiasm for popular piety manifested in ‘a broad continuity of expression, vision and performance’.