The Russian Orthodox lay theologian Komiakov once said that the Pope of Rome was the first Protestant in the world, and this saying is generally taken to mean that, like the Protestants, the Pope proclaims doctrine as truth ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae.

Without going so far as this, Dr E. L. Mascall in The Recovery of Unity makes it the thesis of his two final chapters on the Papacy that its claim to universal jurisdiction has resulted in its becoming, in part at least, an excrescence on the life of the Church, impoverishing the function of the episcopate and setting itself, as a preponderantly juridical entity, above and apart from the inner life of grace and truth that it should exist to foster.

Such criticisms as these and others closely connected with them appear fairly constantly in ecumenical writing, and much patient elucidation is needed to meet them and set them in their true perspective. The purpose of this article is to point to certain considerations concerning the phrase ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae in the Vatican Definition which tend to show that it does not separate the Pope from the Church and set him above and apart from its true inner life, but on the contrary, integrates him into the Church’s teaching authority as the final and decisive step in its exercise.

Faith is a gift of God, the beginning in us of eternal life. It is given in baptism and comes to us as an encounter with Christ in his Church. The content of our faith is the saving truth of God,

For several years now one of the most frequently discussed topics in the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches has been the problem of Tradition. The kernel of this problem consists in the relations between Scripture and Tradition and between Scripture and the Church. Several important studies have been published on this theme, and it is undeniable that continental Protestantism has become sympathetic to some notion of tradition. At the same time it must be admitted that Protestant theologians today are no more able than was even so conciliating a figure as Melanchthon at the period of the Reformation to get over the notion of a separation between Scripture and Church, a separation which inevitably leads to the subordination of a purely human Church to a tradition regarded as divine, external and superior to this Church.

However, there have been some excellent studies in this field from the Catholic side which have helped to clear the ground of certain false problems and inadequate notions. Professor J. R. Geiselmann and E. Ortigues have put us all in their debt by their efforts to lay bare the precise meaning of the Tridentine decrees. The Acta of the Council of Trent remain indeed a useful and fascinating quarry for the theologian of today. It is, for example, of the greatest importance for the advance both of Catholic theology itself and of the ecumenical dialogue to learn that the Fathers of the Council deliberately omitted a proposed text according to which Revelation was to be found partly in Scripture and partly in unwritten apostolic traditions.

The liturgical congress, held at Uden near Nijmegen in Holland last September, was in a sense a successor to those which were held in recent years at Lugano and Assisi, and one may hope that it will be of no less importance in the history of the Church. By turning attention to the problems of the Liturgy in the missions its scope was in one sense more restricted, but in another sense it was much enlarged. There is, on the one hand, more scope and freedom for the development of the liturgy in the missions where the field is less trammelled by the past than in Europe, and on the other hand, the problems of the liturgy in the missions have an even greater urgency. This was brought out by Bishop Blomjous of Tanganyika in his opening address, when he showed how the Church has reached a moment of crisis in the missions. When we speak of the ‘missions’, we are speaking of the new world of Asia and Africa which is coming into being at the present time and which is undergoing a radical transformation year by year. The problem of the liturgy in the missions is nothing less than the problem of the Church in the face of this new world.

The Congress was admirably representative of this new world. It was presided over by Cardinal Gracias and included about thirty bishops and thirty priests from different parts of Asia and Africa, besides experts on the liturgy from all parts of Europe and America.

In the past few decades the Church in Italy has produced a number of remarkable priests, widely known and venerated as initiators of organized works of charity. A Don Orione, a Don Gnocchi, a Don Calabria—such men are the flower of the Italian clergy and in their presence anticlcricalism is simply disarmed. The ex-priest Carlo Falconi, in a bitterly critical survey of post-war Italian Catholicism, interrupted his polemic to salute the ‘courageous initiative’ of these ‘darlings of the Italian public’.

The case of Don Giovanni Rossi, our present subject, is very different. It is different, first of all, because the founder of the ‘Pro Civitate Cristiana’ association at Assisi is primarily concerned not with works of charity, in the usual sense of this term, but with the propagation of the faith. The expressed aim of Don Rossi’s association of lay ‘volunteers’ (men and women, who must all be university graduates and who all make a promise of celibacy) is to bring the knowledge of Christ to those sections of society that arc most estranged from the Catholic faith. This description covers workers and peasants as well as the more educated classes, though in its actual working the P.C.C. seems to be more concerned with the latter category. From its ‘Citadella’ at Assisi issues fortnightly the brilliantly edited and illustrated magazine La Rocca; here also take place the annual ‘Courses of Christian Studies’ and the frequent gatherings of artists and intellectuals, of workers and employers. The nearest English parallel is perhaps Spode House, but the Citadella is a larger affair and far more chic.