Welsh Journals

studies of the 18th century church and of the London diocese in particular by Professor Curien-Barrie, but perhaps the author doesn't read French. Such very minor blemishes, do not, however, devalue a very useful book. JRG Ron Howells, A Tale of Two Grandmothers. Memoirs of an Ecumenist 1965-85. [Swansea, John Penri Press, 1994]. pbk. 140pp. No price quoted. ISBN 0-9511616-3-6. This is a remarkable book. It is an insider's account of his efforts to involve the Roman Catholic Church in Wales in ecumenism over two decades. Ron Howells is a lay Catholic from Swansea who describes himself as the product of what today we would call an inter-church family. "One of my earliest memories," he recalls, "is of the rosary beads in my Irish grandmother's house and the large family Bible in that of my Welsh grandmother's." Howells's story starts in his home parish of St David's, Swansea, and moves on to recount his experiences as a member, first of the Diocesan Ecumenical Commission, and then of the Catholic Conference's Ecumenical Commission for England and Wales. There are additional chapters on the Council of Churches for Central Swansea [of which he was president], and of the Joint Working Group between the former Council of Churches for Wales and the Roman Catholic Church in Wales, on which he served; with a final chapter devoted to the 1980 National Pastoral Congress. All these experiences, including attendance at the service in Canterbury Cathedral to welcome Pope John Paul II in 1982 [at which I was also present], brought him into contact with some of the most eminent and influential people in his own and in other churches. the descriptions he gives of these are often revealing and shrewd, but also invariably kind. A book of this sort, therefore, needs a bibliography, and its omission is a drawback. Ron Howells clearly loves his church, but he is also extremely frustrated by the slow rate of ecumenical process on this side of Offa's Dyke compared with England! "The ecumenical problems are different in Wales", he concludes, "and the whole movement should have been tackled separately from the English dioceses from the beginning." But his principal message is that without the sympathetic support of the parish priest, ecumenism is an up hill struggle; and without the active commitment of the hierarchy this