The transformation of the liturgy of the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was, by any standard, a landmark event. It represented the unfreezing of a liturgical tradition which had seemed to many to be sacrosanct and immemorial, beyond question or change. Almost a century ago the greatest of all English liturgists, Edmund Bishop, could write without a hint of irony that “With the Missal and Breviary of St Pius V ...the history of the Roman liturgy may be said to be closed”.

Bishop himself was too good an historian to harbour romantic illusions about the timelessness or changelessness of liturgy. He had a highly developed sense of the historical evolution of worship and in fact he was a strong sympathiser and fellow-traveller with the Modernist movement, and its attempt to demythologise the doctrinaire nonhistorical orthodoxy of post-Tridentine Catholicism. But neither Bishop nor the two generations of liturgists who laboured after him to reclaim for the present the forgotten riches of the Latin liturgical tradition could have dreamed of the cultural and theological revolution which would come upon the Church in the late 1960s and 1970s, a revolution which swept away not only many of the accretions of medieval and baroque liturgical and para-liturgical practice which they so deplored, but many of their own most treasured convictions about the nature of liturgy and liturgical theology. They hoped that the liturgy, duly cleansed of accretion and distortion, would become, in Joseph Jungmann’s words, “a school of faith”. In the ancient prayers and ceremonies of the Church, Jungmann believed, would be found an endless resource, a great well of wisdom and truth.

Any attempt to understand the various influences which have shaped the thinking of Pope John Paul II on the fiftieth anniversary of his priestly ordination must reckon with the 32 years of Karol Wojtyla's priesthood prior to his papal election in 1978. Indeed, in total honesty, one must also probe the 26 years of Wojtyla's youth and early adulthood prior to his ordination November 1, 1946. Someone with even a basic knowledge of the thought of Karol Wojtyla has to acknowledge the profound degree of continuity between the prepapal thought of Karol Wojtyla and the papal thought of John Paul II. Unfortunately, Karol Wojtyla's prepapal thought remains a neglected field of study, less so among philosophers than among theologians in the United States, but still a field worthy of more attention than it has received. In this essay I want to discuss some of the influences of Wojtyla's thought during those Polish years, influences which in my judgment have left lasting marks on his thought. I identify seven such factors, though I would not claim that this list is exhaustive. These seven factors are rather convenient points around which to arrange the prepapal influences on John Paul Il's thought. These seven are: (1) the interwar Polish ethos; (2) Polish literature; (3) Carmelite mysticism; (4) Neoscholastic Thomism; (5) Lublin Thomism and phenomenology; (6) interwar and postwar Catholic thought in Poland; and (7) the Second Vatican Council.

To read Donald MacKinnon’s theology with the presupposition that he was a systematic theologian must be a great disappointment. Reading MacKinnon leaves one with the impression that his work is rather unfinished, yet this is its quality. Embodied in his work is the belief that any system cannot in the end do justice to the realm of irreducible fact. There is a sustained rigour in his writing which is so deep as to give the reader the sense that MacKinnon is involved in an interrogation so penetrating as to be at times harrowing in its execution. George Steiner, quite rightly, speaks the word ‘sombre’ of MacKinnon’s work, but I think ‘interrogative’, with the accent on the restless even painful questioning of MacKinnon’s genius to be the better description. If MacKinnon can be said to have a method it is Baconian. The question rather than the thesis is the cutting edge of his theology. There is a Barthian insistence about his thought which wants to put all understanding, all subjectivity to the question in order to disclose a deeper level: the subjective must give way to the ontological. Implicit in his writings is the belief that to be a theologian is to be a realist: to be sensitive to the limits of understanding, to let God be God.