The 167 reports which Bernard Pawley sent to London between 1962 and 1964 present an editor with a sum of almost 240,000 words. This length lies beyond the scope of the present series. Accordingly, fairly extensive cutting has been necessary and the criteria which have been applied by the editors should be clearly stated at the outset.

Sections of the text which simply present material available to the scholar in other printed editions have been excised. There are obscurities which lead nowhere in particular and which amount to digressions in the overall argument at work across the reports. There are also repetitions: views which, once set down, need not reappear. A good deal has been removed from the reports of the Council in session, particularly speeches which concern intricacies in the draft documents, rather than broad (and recognizable) matters of substance, voting statistics, and the like. Pawley's interest in Greek Orthodoxy also receives lighter attention here. It must be acknowledged that a modest amount of material is workaday or simply dull. Pawley knew this himself and was prepared to give some of the speeches short shrift and disregard others altogether. Freed from his obligations to report at great length to church authorities at home, the editors have held in mind a different audience and simply extended his own principles.

To present these debates without the reader having recourse to the actual schemata which the Council debated in turn represents an obvious liability. How well do the reports stand up without them? The brief commentaries at the beginning of each section offer a broad picture of the substance of these debates. But for Pawley himself the arguments at stake were often clearly visible to the informed, but unfurnished, outsider. In this edition the editors have chosen the contributions which define and illuminate the terms of the debates at large and which are not dependent upon a close parallel reading of the schemata themselves.

The editors have sought to achieve a balance between a minimal apparatus and a cluttering of the text with unnecessary footnotes. The dramatis personae offers biographical information about those who become the leading, or recurrent, figures in the reports; significant others receive briefer attention in footnotes. The official position of many of those speaking at the Council is given in the text and we have often deemed that to be sufficient.

The presentation of the text varies little from the original and any editorial changes have been for the sake of consistency and to make the whole text more readable. Each document originally bore the title ‘Rome Reports’ and was marked confidential. The sections of the reports were numbered; in this edition, however, the numbers have been deleted because excisions have rendered them meaningless. Pawley was fortunate in the services of an excellent typist, leaving the editors with very little tidying up to do. Simple inconsistencies of style (for example, the use of upper-case letters) or typographical variations (the spelling of a word such as ‘Secretariat’) have been made consistent. Double inverted commas have been turned into single ones, and quotations within quotations have received double inverted commas. In the original reports the paragraphs were separated by a line and the first line of each paragraph was indented; here the separation of paragraphs has made the retention of the latter convention unnecessary. Words underlined in the original documents have been italicized. The spelling of names has been made consistent: an English typewriter had limited ways of handling continental spellings, so in this text diacritics of various kinds have been introduced (for example, ‘Koenig’ becomes ‘König’). Occasional spelling errors, often of names, have been rectified.