Radical & Free: Musings on the Religious Life
by Brian O’Leary (Messenger Publications, €10.99)
With vocations seemingly in permanent decline, there is a need, some Catholics might feel, for a book of this kind by an experienced lecturer, to explain to a sceptical age where the sources of a religious vocation lie.
The answer to the vocations problem had traditionally been seen by many in structural definitions. But Fr O’Leary prefers to see the matter to be rooted in the matter of values. This makes his book of special interest, for though the world today may seem indifferent to religious life, there are many people who are deeply alive to the need for values in an age which sometimes seems without them.
He also shows how his insights apply to both the monastic life, which still has its advocates, and the forms of religious life which find their meaning in activities in the wider world, the world in which people actually live.
Though aimed at those in religious life who may wish to refresh their justification for what they are doing with their lives, this book will also interest lay people, especially those to whom the life that the consecrated religious live seems strangely separate from ‘real life’.
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Come into the Light: Church Interiors for the celebration of the Liturgy
by Daniel McCarthy OSB & James Leachman OSB (Canterbury Press, £18.99)
How often on a holiday trip are tourists inveigled into a church or cathedral which is part of the “heritage” of the place they are visiting. Many people simply do not understand the real purpose of the things they are seeing, as it was intended they be used. The building becomes merely an aspect of architectural history, deprived in many cases of any religious or spiritual meaning.
This reviewer can recall being at Mass in Notre Dame de Paris, during a visit by Japanese tourists who zealously photographed the small congregation gathered before the altar – doubtless “natives at their quaint religious rites”.
There is currently controversy in England over why at Canterbury Cathedral everyone is charged £21.00 – no provision being made for those who wish to pray. Even worse is the situation in St Mark’s in Venice, where many thousands of visitors a day from the cruise ships are seen simply as a seen an “a revenue” stream to be passed through as quickly as possible.
But the authors of this book, rich with examples taken from all ages, explain in straightforward and not-pietistic language exactly what the continuing purpose of every part of the church is there for.
This is a book to be highly recommended to everyone who has anything to do with churches in any way. While it will be invaluable for art historian to whom these building often seem to have nothing but an aesthetic value, it will also greatly interest those who wish to deepen their appreciation of what was done in churches in the past, what is done to-day, and, let it be said, what the evolving liturgy of the future will create.