ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the socio-ethnic environment within which the reform was implemented in Liverpool. The concerted attempt at the start of the twentieth century on the part of Church authorities to mould the lives of Catholics could be effective only so far as they engaged with the reality of people's life experiences within their social environment. The first communion celebrations of 1911 offered to the public gaze a spectacle that appeared to guarantee the continuity of the Catholic community as newly reconstituted. The marriage debate suggested not only a level of dissent from the formal discourses of the Church, but also the illusionary nature of any supposition that a circumscribing wall of ecclesiastical legislation could render the Catholic community immune from external contacts and influences. The 1910 formal instruction Sacrorum Antistitum aimed to root out once and for all any clandestine Modernist societies within the Church.
