Hugh Somerville Knapman OSB
A Limerickal Commentary on the Second Vatican Council
Arouca Press 2020
Reviewed by Fr Nicholas Schofield
This slim, entertaining and somewhat eccentric volume is a good example of the literary fruits of last year’s lockdown. Just before our lives were turned upside down, Dom Hugh Somerville Knapman OSB, a member of the Douai Benedictine community, was trawling through the archives of Stanbrook Abbey when he came across an intriguing typescript. It formed part of the papers of Dame Felicitas Corrigan, a Benedictine author and musician, who had adapted the Latin chants of the Graduale into the vernacular and numbered among her friends the likes of Siegfried Sassoon, Alec Guinness and Patrick Dwyer, the then Archbishop of Birmingham.
