Francis A. Sullivan says that the one Church of Christ continues to exist perfectly in the Catholic Church, and is present imperfectly in other churches and ecclesial communities. However, he thinks Lumen Gentium 8 also enables us to say that the many churches, non-Catholic and Catholic, are all in the one Church of Christ, since to say the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church means no more than “continues to exist in” the Catholic Church. In this way, he denies the identity of the one Church of Christ and the Catholic Church. We point out that magisterial documents since Vatican II have consistently refused this proposal, and have instead spoken only of the one Church being present or operative, according to degrees, in non-Catholic churches and communities. We argue that while it is true there is “ecclesial reality” outside the Catholic Church, in that there are elements of truth and sanctification outside of her, the one Church of Christ of which Vatican II expressly speaks is the Church with all the gifts of unity and instruments for salvation with which Christ endowed it. The Catholic Church is not contained in any larger divinely willed and dominically instituted ecclesial reality, and it is without qualification the one Church of Christ and the one Church of Christ is without qualification the Catholic Church.

In the first of four articles, I argue against Augustine's interpretation of Genesis chapter 3 and his account of the origin of the first sin and its consequences. In the remaining three articles, I offer an alternative interpretation of Genesis 3 within the context of Genesis 1–11, attempting to do more justice than Augustine to the data of scripture and, in particular, placing a strong emphasis on the speech of the Lord God at the end of Genesis 3. My argument is supported by reference to Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger. I do not minimise the amount of sin in the world but account for it on the basis of what I call the basic human situation rather than on the basis of a single cataclysmic act. I present my account as grounded in a more accurate understanding of scripture than Augustine's and in a richer and deeper version of salvation history. One conclusion is that the default setting of humanity is not damnation but that Man still stands in need of salvation.

In this paper I first survey several paradigms of liturgical renewal that respond to the mandate of the Second Vatican Council and I restate a suggestion made in 2007 for a new model of liturgical study, ‘Appreciating the Liturgy’. This new model encourages a deeper appreciation of the current liturgy and is offered that the Church may better discern the way forward in the renewal of the liturgy. Then, following a brief presentation of the liturgical hermeneutic taught at the Pontifical Institute of Liturgy and a practical example of analysing a prayer with this method, I conclude by showing how the ‘Appreciating the Liturgy’ model has helped to reveal a liturgical hermeneutic heretofore overlooked, that of Christian maturation by developmental steps.

The method which Daniel McCarthy and I have developed and used here can validly be applied to other liturgical sources, yet this paper's conclusions, based on the analysis of a newly-composed oration in one of the renewed texts (editiones typicae) resulting from the Second Vatican Council and the Constitution on the Liturgy, suggest that Christian maturation was a real concern of those taking part in the Council.

Thomas Aquinas argues that human choices are made by the will and reason working together. It is easy to misinterpret his argument and suppose that the reason alone works out what should be done while the will simply ratifies this. Instead Aquinas believes that in practical matters the reason is often undetermined since it arrives at many simultaneous conclusions. This is the often unacknowledged heart of Aquinas's account of freedom. All these simultaneous rational conclusions derive from the objective circumstances of the world; each one could give rise to a different rationally justified course of action; yet only one can be acted upon. The reason cannot decide between them. It is the will that accepts and affirms one of these conclusions and gives force to the reasonableness of one course of action. This is why a choice is always rational and personally willed – which is what makes it free. The indetermination of reason is what allows the future to be open-ended for the deliberating agent; it allows past and present to be interpreted in different ways, each of which has its own coherence and rationality. In this way Aquinas's account of human freedom avoids both an irrational voluntarism and a deterministic intellectualism

The essay addresses the complex cultural historical claim that with modernity the earlier unity of reason and sensibility underwent a dissociation that has important consequences for our current predicament and for our present understanding of the relationship between reason, faith and sensibility. Three case studies (Géza Ottlik, T. S. Eliot and Blaise Pascal) are examined in order to establish the nature of the divide and provide an archaeology (with the help of Pascal) of one of its first conceptualisations as well as of an early attempt to heal the growing fissure between what is termed by Pascal as reason and the heart. The second part examines current thought concerning the need to enlarge the narrow Enlightenment conception of reason and the recent call to re-envision its theological contours. The argument is then made that the same procedure should be applied to the theologically long-neglected domain of human sensibility. Theology is registered as also being accountable for internalising and perpetuating the cultural dissociation due to its failure to preserve the traditional theological contours of affectivity and its naivety in leaving the exploration of this domain entirely to the competence of secular philosophy.

This paper seeks to explore the impact that the Council had upon moral theology, and vice versa, along with some of the main debates and methodological questions that have preoccupied Catholic ethicists since. Seeking to chart both that, as well as how, moral theology was transformed, four key points arise. First, the emergence, even prior to the council of a more participatory approach to moral theology. Second, the retrieval of an understanding of the provisionality of much moral teaching. Third, an appreciation of the circular relationship between ethics and ecclesiology. Fourth, the ‘work to be done’ in relation to continuing disagreements over method and the ‘yearning for continuity’ that emerged in reaction to the transformations in moral theology and indeed the Council in general. We close with consideration of constructive proposals for the future concerning whether and how Catholics might live with difference and indeed with less certitude, reminding ourselves that morality is not a precise and exact science, as if any such thing exists.

What happened at Vatican II and the significance of its decisions is strongly contested in the Church today. There is a struggle over the memory of the Council. It is suggested that two hermeneutics are in use, continuity versus discontinuity. On the one hand, it is said that privileging the ‘event’ of the Council as the interpretative key for reading its documents leads to an ideological distortion and introduces discontinuity with tradition. On the other hand, it is held that the continuity thesis plays down the real changes the Council introduced and, while unexceptional as a theological principle, it is being deployed as a polemical ideology, restricting necessary change. This article distinguishes between theological principle and experience in relation to continuity/discontinuity. It argues that the event of the Council is to be found as much in its effects in the Church at large as what took place in Rome. It analyses the phenomenology of change at both levels and concludes that the tensions between the need for continuity and the impulses of discontinuity need to be recognised and worked with rather than repressed.