This book is an eloquently written, passionate and scholarly account of the secularisation and desacralisation of the Roman Catholic liturgy from the 1960s, through the combination of an interdenominational body of liturgical experts, of the hierarchies of Germany, France and neighbouring countries, and of Roman authority under Paul VI, determined to 'modernise' the Church's worship at any costs. The impoverishment of the liturgy through the sacrifice of two thousand years of symbolism, and the loss of the dimension of mystery in the name of didacticism and man-centredness, are also strikingly described as rooted in a reaction against the defects and rigidities of an overcentralised and authoritarian pre-Vatican II Catholicism. The author gives a detailed and authoritative narrative of the destruction of traditions held in common by Latin Christians and the Eastern Orthodox and of the disgraceful persecution by Latin liberals of Eastern Rite Christians in communion with Rome. Far from being a simply reactionary work, appealing to an imaginary golden age before the 1960s, this book is an historically-informed challenge to restore the very God-centred character of the liturgy itself.

Sheridan Gilley, Durham University, UK.

There are some books whose breadth is so impressive, whose depth is so astonishing and whose lucidity is so sharp that writing a review of them seems as pointless as penning programme notes for a Wagner opera. Geoffrey Hull's The Banished Heart is just such a book.

Usus Antiquior

There are lessons here for Anglicans as well as Roman Catholics, important questions about culture and liturgy, and challenges to acts of uniformity of many kinds... a defence of traditional liturgy which is at the same time critical of an authoritarian papacy is an unusual challenge.

The Church Times

Reviewed in Commonweal Magazine

Hull's historical narrative convincingly demonstrates that well before the Second Vatican Council, the Vatican's growing theology of its own power led it to efforts to forcibly standardize liturgy across the Roman Communion in both the East and West...an important contribution to our historical understanding of liturgical change.

Aaron Klink, Duke University, Religious Studies Review