Eamon Duffy on "The Stripping of the Altars" after 30 Years

In March 22, 2022 issue of The Catholic Herald-UK, historian Eamon Duffy offers some background on the publication of his seminal work, The Stripping of the Altars, especially the influence of Mary Douglas:

. . . I absorbed a brilliant anthropological work, which drew some of its most telling material from the recent upheavals in the English Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. Dame Mary Douglas, herself the product of a Catholic convent education, was also one of the most original cultural anthropologists of the mid-20th century. Douglas’s work was much concerned with the relative claims of form versus formlessness as values in the ordering of human society. In Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, she deployed this analysis to argue for the vital importance of ritual for social life. Written against the background of the sexual revolution, the social and political unrest of the 1960s and the transformation of the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Douglas’s book was an attack on what she saw as a disastrous and culturally and socially naïve abandonment of vital symbolic and ritual structures which made for orderly communal life, both secular and religious. . . . 

Please read the rest there. As the Holy Triduum begins tomorrow on Holy Thursday, when "the stripping of the altars" still occurs after Mass (but without much of the symbolism Duffy highlights) when the Blessed Sacrament is processed to an Altar of Repose for the night as we share in prayer the time of Our Lord's Agony in the Garden, this will be my last post until after Easter. 

Duffy indeed mentions the choice of the title in his piece:

The title, borrowed from one of the now-suppressed but most eloquent ceremonies of the old Latin liturgy for Holy Week, was a manifesto in itself, summarising the overall argument of the book. On Maundy Thursday, after the Mass of the Last Supper and procession with the Host to the Altar of Repose, the other altars in the church were ritually stripped of their altar cloths and ornaments in preparation for the stark liturgy of Good Friday, while the ministers and choir recited Psalm 21, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, with its anticipation of the incidents of the Passion. The altar here becomes a surrogate for the stripped and scourged Christ – resonances which would of course not have been lost on religious conservatives during the iconoclastic destruction of altars and imagery in the reign of Edward VI.

Please read the rest there. And if you haven't read The Stripping of the Altars, I highly recommend it. This article is abridged from Duffy's introduction to the 2022 edition of the book. I admit that I'm rather tempted to buy the new edition, partially because my old paperback copy is rather worn and the price of the new edition is most favorable!

Best wishes for a Blessed Holy Triduum and a Happy Easter!