In this article I wish to show first, how the laity is involved in the Council and secondly, how the entire life of the Church is marked by what is called her ‘collegiality’, the co-operation of all in the acts of a few.

In preparation for the Second Vatican Council a great number of theologians and other specialists are examining the problems of the Church’s life in the areas of doctrine and discipline. This work is not confined to the relatively few bishops and priests who have been appointed to the preparatory commissions at Rome. Theologians in general, in many parts of the world, are concentrating on matters dealing with the council and studying the problems that are likely to be discussed during the sessions.

This work is of utmost importance. It must not be forgotten, however, that the ecumenical council itself is the business of the apostolic hierarchy. Theologians may propose themes and elaborate plans for a council, but during the actual sessions responsibility lies entirely with the bishops acting as judges of faith and rulers of the Church.

At a moment when all the discordant voices of modern society attempt to exorcize the vertigo of man with scientific clichés or prophetic curses I come to share with you reflections that are neither tragic nor, I hope, fatuous. They are simply the thoughts of one civilized man to another, dictated by a spirit of sobriety and concern, and with no pretensions to exorcize anything. The vertigo of the twentieth century needs no permission of yours or mine to continue. The tornado has not consulted any of us, and will not do so. This does not mean that we are helpless. It only means that our salvation lies in understanding our exact position, not in flattering ourselves that we have brought the whirlwind into being by ourselves, or that we can calm it with a wave of the hand.

It is certainly true that the storm of history has arisen out of our own hearts. It has sprung unbidden out of the emptiness of technological man. It is the genii he has summoned out of the depths of his own confusion, this complacent sorcerer’s apprentice who spends billions on weapons of destruction and space rockets when he cannot provide decent meals, shelter and clothing for two thirds of the human race. Is it improper to doubt the intelligence and sincerity of modern man? I know it is not accepted as a sign of progressive thinking to question the enlightenment of the twentieth century barbarian.

It has been said that the ‘political prisoner’ is the symbol of this second half of the twentieth century. In a sense this is correct, but it is probably truer to say that political imprisonment is the most important social evil which civilization has as yet failed to tackle. In the thirties the predominant social evil was that of unemployment, in the forties it was hunger and in the fifties the immense problem of the homeless refugee. In each case public opinion coalesced to oblige governments to work together for a solution. It is now a recognized part of the obligations of a government to provide employment for its citizens. Through the United Nations and other inter-governmental agencies the world has assumed the obligation to provide food for the hungry. More recently, through the organization of World Refugee Year, a great effort was made to find homes for the human jetsam left over from the last war. Although the problem of the refugee remains, it has now become generally accepted that each country should feel it a moral obligation to provide shelter and work for those without any country of their own.

The figures of course are formidable. And the European enquirer can be mesmerized by the catalogue of Catholic achievement in the United States: a population now of forty-five million, with 55,000 priests, 170,000 religious sisters (of whom nearly 100,000 teach in schools), 267 universities and colleges with more than 300,000 students, 10,000 elementary schools with over four million pupils, 850 hospitals of every sort in which more than fourteen million patients were treated in 1960. In the same year nearly 132,000 converts were received into the Church.

The statistics matter, if only because they are the staring facts that declare the vitality of the Church in the only way it can be externally measured. They indicate something too, of the astounding generosity of American Catholics, who, with no help from public funds, have built up a system of churches and schools unparalleled in the Church’s history. But the Church is not merely a corporation to be surveyed in terms of its efficiency or of the successful image it presents to the world. It is easy for the visitor from an older and more casual society to wonder a little at the signs of a high-powered organization—the discreet hum of the electric typewriters in the carpeted rooms of the chancery offices, the multitude of monsignori bearing their hide brief-cases, the jet black Chryslers—and to see in it all the ecclesiastical equivalent of the sort of business set-up commended by Fortune magazine.