specialist than non-specialist reader, but all will find it rewarding to make the effort to stay with him. The relevance of all this to Ireland, with ongoing debates about abortion and our educational system, ought to be clear. The church needs to learn to avoid scapegoating the state or civil society for all that is wrong, to support the rights of conscience in a liberal democratic state and to engage in conversation and debate, including displaying the courage of being prophetic and counter-cultural in opposing reductive versions of what it means to be human, without slipping into an overly paternalistic or authoritarian attitude. This means walking a very fine tight-rope, which few of us find easy. We are having to learn to find a new voice in this new situation. We will be helped to do so if our church can find ways of encouraging listening and open discussion and debate within our own ranks, and with critically sympathetic outsiders, and avoid the dominant assumption that clerical leaders are in a position, without adequate consultation, to represent the views of all the People of God. Faggioli has correctly identified the papacy of Francis as a crucial moment in the retrieval of the church’s role in the public square as envisaged by the Second Vatican Council: the opportunity that this papacy represents will be realised in so far as rank and file Catholics and Christians find ways of listening to his call to realise their baptismal dignity, and church leadership enables this to happen. Dr Gerry O’Hanlon SJ is a theologian who has lectured and written extensively on the post-Second Vatican Council Irish Catholic church. Ireland and Vatican II – Essays Theological, Pastoral and Educational, Niall Coll (ed.), (Dublin: Columba Press, 2015), 354 pages. This fine book is expressly written, the editor says, for ‘the interested general reader’. Presumably one who is not necessarily a specialist, professional theologian or academic, with the writing and ideas accessible to those who have some acquaintance with the topics under discussion. It is, he adds, ‘best considered as a response to the new impetus that Pope Francis is giving to the church’s pastoral application of the Council’ (1). The book is written with a strong sense of urgency, calling readers to commitment in a time of crisis and concerned with contributing actively to Studies • volume 107 • number 425 113 Spring 2018: Book Reviews the resolution of that crisis. Despite the editor’s assurance in the introduction that, ‘[t]o the extent that this volume encourages us to study, ponder and implement the Council, then it will have been worthwhile’ (10), the writers want us to do more when we put it down. ‘Implement’ is the key word. For each of them, faith is their centre of existence, they each write from the heart and they have put before us ways in which we can be encouraged to ‘do’ our faith. This, they make clear, is the time for action. I find myself thinking in this connection of an experience the American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor narrated in a letter in 1955. It concerned a conversation at a dinner she was at in the house of her fellow-writer, Mary McCarthy: ‘Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, he being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it”. That was all the defense I was capable of but I realise now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable’. The pertinence of such a story to the present situation of the Irish church will be apparent. Perhaps we have need of a number of Flannery O’Connors...