The way in which the first phase of the second Vatican Council developed has surpassed the most optimistic expectations. It is undoubtedly true that constitutionally nothing has been decided, nor has a single conciliar document been definitively approved. Denzinger is as yet unable to adopt anything from this Council. And yet I feel that it has already passed the turning-point.

You are a cosmopolitan citizen of the Mediterranean world (winter apartment in Alexandria) during the middle of the first century B.C. Your interests go as far as religion—scientifically considered, of course—and philosophy. Last year, in partial fulfillment of your curiosity's requirement, you walked down Crocodile Street to the Temple Beth-El bazaar and bought a handsome copy of The Wisdom of Solomon. It is there on your shelf now, but you haven't read it. Only the reviews. You had to confess that they left you—uncorseted, shall we say. For one thing, you didn't understand what Riphath ben Gomer meant by ‘midrash’ (though you had been reading midrashic pieces all through your Hebrew Great Books course). Secondly, the last thing you needed was a kosher potpourri.

Mgr George Talbot thought, in the last century, that the role of the layman was to hunt, fish and shoot and leave the running of the Church to the ecclesiastics. For better or for worse the laity are no longer fully occupied with these agreeable pursuits on their way to heaven and they have had to turn to more worldly affairs, acquiring on the way a variety of skills much needed in the service of the Church. At the same time, the laity have been able to measure the competence of ecclesiastics to manage worldly affairs and they have not invariably been impressed.

In the introduction to his admirable translation of Karl Rahner's Schriften zur Theologie, I, Fr Cornelius Ernst begins by pointing out that Rahner is a theologian totally competent in the study of the past. Editor of Denzinger's Enchiridion Symbolorum, and co-editor of the Lexicon fur Theologie und Kirche, Rahner has obvious qualifications in the presentation of what has so far been achieved in theology. But he is more than an historian. He works in the present, the studies collected here are concerned with matters of moment, not with past disputes. He works in the present for the future when we shall know all that has already been revealed.

It is necessary nowadays for Christians to re-think all manner of things that were formerly taken for granted. ’Our world is a world in a continuous state of becoming, a state in which everything is questioned’, writes Cardinal Suenens in a book bulging with new insights and ideas. ‘We no longer live in an age where daily lives were solidly framed in tradition, and institutions were there to safeguard values that were never called in question’.

In attempting to understand what has happened and what the happenings mean for us, one historical fact takes on importance for all concerned with Christian education. In the disintegration of traditional ideas the way people lived Christian ideas and the forms in which these ideas were expressed fell apart.