Many will have noticed how the renewal of the Church in modern times has drawn together strands of thought and behaviour that were in the past considered discordant. Thus the Second Vatican Council, it seems, in continuing the work of the First, would be likely to draw on that part of the Church's heritage which had previously been in apparent conflict with the doctrine of papal supremacy: namely, the notion of the supremacy of the Church as a body and of the council or the episcopate. In some ways there is a remarkable degree of continuity between the thought of the Council of Basle (1431–49) and of the Second Vatican Council.

One of the central ideas of the Council of Basle, an idea to which it consistently resorted as its final justification, was the corporate sovereignty of the church community taken as a whole. It used this as a basis for conciliar sovereignty, on the grounds that the council was this whole church community ‘taken collectively’, in the literal sense of being assembled in one place. (This somewhat arbitrary identification of the council with the Church was largely the result of exaggerating the analogy between the whole Church and a small college or corporation.) But it was on the idea of the ultimate sovereignty of the community as a whole that Basle frequently, and increasingly, fell back in justifying the sovereignty of the council over the pope. We find this in Panormitanus (citing Zabarella), in Andrew of Escobar, in several statements by universities, in particular by Cracow, and most persistently in John of Segovia: ‘supreme power…belongs to the Church continuously, permanently, invariably, and perpetually’.