| Summary: | A study of minority Catholicism in fourteen countries from England to Brazil. Some Catholic, considering comparative feebleness (in human terms) of the Chruch in our great secular age, look back nostalgically to "the good old ages of faith": a tidily-frontiered Christendom versus the infidels, secular enforcement of religious conformity, and the church happily ruling the roost. The editor points out that this atavistic hankering for a nice, safe Catholic society is a serious failure to understand what catholicism is: "The Church has more to fear from Consantine than from Nero". Today, as a minority almost everywhere, sweating out in their own lives the conflict of loving the world without idolizing it, Catholics are learning to accept gladly the disappearance of the "Offically Catholic" society and to embrace, not with reluctance but with joy, the role of the leaven. Sixteen studies of this dialectic between the Church and the world, in concrete examples, give an enouraging and inspiring picture of a Catholicism mercifully stripped by history of that wealth of secular power which can be an even more insidious temptation than material riches.
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