To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best Man is a ritual animal. This insight by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966) led me to a new understanding of Catholic sacramental liturgy.Mary Douglas (1921-2007), perhaps the foremost English- speaking anthropologist of the past half century and more, had already gained attention by her analysis of the “abominations” of Leviticus. She showed that it concerned the holy and the unholy, the clean and the dirty, as a pattern of God’s chosen people, for whom anomalous creatures (which had cloven hooves, say, but did not chew the cud) were unclean.In one chapter of Purity and Danger