Introduction

Despite pockets of resistance, the magisterial authorities of the Roman Catholic Church can no longer maintain that the faithful – and that largely means lay people – have yet to come of age and cannot be trusted to form their own minds (after due consultation and reflection) on the truth of the teaching of the church. This is especially true of matters of morality and worship, but it is also true of doctrine because the study of theology is no longer the preserve of the clergy and certainly not of the bishops. This situation was officially recognised when Pope Francis created a mechanism for consulting the faithful about the state of marriage and the family in the world, though it turned out to be a not very expert consultation because of Rome's inexperience in such things. So it was timely that the Catholic Theological Association should choose to reflect theologically on the idea of consultation and the sensus fidelium, particularly after the publication in 2014 of Sensus Fidei in the Light of the Church by the International Theological Commission.

That document is the fruit of a series of meeting of an ITC sub‐committee – made up largely of clerical theologians – before being published by the CDF. It seems to have been written in a generous spirit, covering the development of the idea of sensus fidelium from scripture through the centuries, giving particular prominence to the work of Newman, Congar and the Second Vatican Council. Its prime aim seems to have been to dismantle the hard division between the teaching church (ecclesia docens) and the taught church (ecclesia discens) that became embedded in the nineteenth‐century: the magisterium speaks and the rest, priests and laity, hear and obey. Nonetheless, it is a committee document and the reader can sense tensions between different tendencies within the committee, so no reader is likely to be completely satisfied with all its detail. While, as I say, it has been written in a generous spirit that works hard to give a positive role to the laity, there remain occasional references to a magisterium (defined as the pope and bishops) that guides and that should in the end be followed and obeyed. Defined like that, one can see why many clerics in Rome who are hardly more that bureaucrats or civil servants are made bishops: not for pastorals reasons but so that they can be incorporated into an apostolic tradition that speaks ‘magisterially’. As for theologians, Rome still isn't sure what to do with them, especially lay theologians and, above all, lay women theologians. Here, in a document written by theologians, their role is said to be ‘to provide…objective precision’ to the sensus fidelium [para 81]. But in reality, instead of narrowing down what the faith might be about, theologians are better occupied by bringing out its complexities and ambiguities and multidimensionality.

As for the conference itself, three presentations by Orm Rush, Paul Murray and Gabriel Flynn were unfortunately not available for publication. So we begin with Newman. The idea that the faithful might be consulted on doctrine came to the fore with Newman's paper to the Duke of Norfolk in 1859, after Pius IX's limited consultation prior to defining the Immaculate Conception. Roderick Strange explores the historical context round the publication of Newman's provocative but also conservative paper in The Rambler. Stuart Blanchard gave a short paper at the conference, here expanded a little, that considers the retrospective theological importance of what were minority positions at Trent on scripture and tradition, and at Vatican I on papalism. It is easy to be sympathetic to them, but Blanchard also invites us to consider the possible relevance of minority views at Vatican II from Ottaviani and others.

One might think that the laity would be well advised to keep out of canon law and leave it to the experts, but Helen Costigane considers that the Code of Canon Law (1983) is all too relevant to the lives of ordinary Catholics and that its use must be sensitive to their needs and desires. She is particularly concerned with areas where there has been a lack of reception of the Code by the laity and she focuses on issues of finance, failed marriages and dealing with death.

The instinct of the faithful works on (at least) two levels. The first and more high‐minded level concerns theology and morality and involves using the expertise, scholarship, experience and general understanding of life of the laity, as with marriage and family, for example. But, second, it can also work at the less sophisticated level of what we might call folk religion, which may or may not be theologically legitimate and which may or may not be allowed/approved by church authorities, who are rightly cautious about local devotions. Here we have two papers. Dorian Llywelyn focuses on popular devotion and the difficulties it can pose for theological legitimation. He thinks that Christian Spirituality as an academic discipline can provide a multidimensional approach that can incorporate the range and variety of human experience and practice. Sarah Boss is concerned with popular devotion to the Virgin Mary, where she considers that Mariology is in effect a form of Christology. Using Maximus the Confessor and Eriugena, she explains how devotion to Mary is concerned with deification (theosis), becoming perfect like one's heavenly Father. She illustrates this with texts about Mary's in partu virginity and practices at Lourdes.

A motif that ran through the conference was the distinction between the teaching‐church and the taught‐church. Martin Poulsom turns to Edward Schillebeeckx as a resource for overcoming such a separation that ought to be something complementary. He uses the idea of ‘integral ecclesiology’ and turns to pneumatology to produce harmony in the church (a deliberately musical metaphor).

The CTA has initiated an essay prize for postgraduate students and we are able to publish the winning essay by Verena Suchhart, who brings Baruch in the OT to a reflection on sensus fidelium. Verena was at Durham University but has now returned to Münster to continue her postgraduate studies.

Finally, while not a paper at the conference, the CTA's new President, Tom O'Loughlin, takes issue with the ITC 2014 document in one respect. He objects – and argues with considerable scholarship, focusing on the Letter to the Hebrews – to the ITC reference to bishops as ‘high priests’. One might add that the ITC is also wrong to say that the laity exert their priesthood ‘principally at the Eucharist’ [para 75]. This looks like a stereotypical Catholic response to introduce the Eucharist as often as possible, for a careful reading of Hebrews shows that insofar as the laity are priests (this idea is from 1 Peter 2.9), they demonstrate it by mediating God to the world (which is what priests do according to Hebrews) in the way that they live their daily lives. It is in the way that all the baptised live their lives that they show their ‘instinct for the faith’.