Spiritual refreshment consists of two things: the gifts of God and his sweetness. With reference to the first, it says: “they shall be drunk with the abundance of your house.” The house is the Church (1 Tim 3:15: “so you may know how to behave in the house of God that is the church of the living God”). And this house, which is now on the earth, one day will be transferred to the heavens (Ps 121[122]:1: “Rejoicing we shall go into the house of the Lord”). In both houses there is an abundance of God’s gifts, but in this Church it is imperfect, while in the other there is an utterly perfect abundance of all good things, and by it spiritual people are filled (Ps 64[65]:5: “We shall be filled with the good things of your house”). And even more: “they shall be drunk” insofar as desires are fulfilled beyond all measure of merit, for drunkenness is a kind of excess (Is 64:4: “Eye has not seen, O God, what things you have prepared for those who wait for you”; Cant 5:1: “Eat, o friends, and drink, and get drunk, my dearly beloved”). People who are drunk are not inside but outside themselves. Thus those filled with spiritual gifts have all their attention on God (Ph 3:20: “Our conversation is in heaven”).
And they are refreshed not only by these gifts but also by love of God (Job 22:26: “Then shall you abound in delights in the Almighty and shall lift up your face to God”). And so it says, with regard to the second point: “And you shall make them drink of the torrent of your pleasure.” This is the love of the Holy Spirit which causes a force in the soul like a torrent (Is 59:19: “Like a violent stream which the spirit of the Lord drives on”). And it is a torrent of pleasure because it causes pleasure and sweetness in the soul (Wis 12:1: “O how good and sweet is your spirit, O Lord, in us”). And good people drink from it (1 Cor 10:4: “They drank the same spiritual drink”).
Or “the torrent of your pleasure” could mean God’s pleasure, which is called a torrent (Prov 18:4: “The fountain of wisdom is like an overflowing stream”), because his will is so efficacious that, like a torrent, it cannot be resisted (Rom 9:19: “For who resists his will?”)
Such refreshment is a matter of being joined to the source, and as those who keep their mouths at a source of wine will become drunk, so those who keep their mouths, that is, their desire, at the source of life and sweetness are made drunk (1 Cor 11:21: “Another is drunk”). (Thomas Aquinas on Ps 35[36]:9)

[JAK:  I post this, first, to show Aquinas' appreciation of the delights of life in God and, second, to illustrate his method of exegeting the Scriptures by the Scriptures.]

[JAK: God’s love for us is gratis, gracious, generous, not given because we earned it. Our love for God is supposed to be gratis [Gratis amandus Deus, he writes elsewhere], because it is not love for the sake of reward. It is hard with a single word to convey these meanings in English.]

In the first, he has been urging his people not to put off their conversion.

What’s that you say?
“God promised me forgiveness; he’ll give it when I turn back to him.”
Of course he’ll give it when you turn back to him, but why are you not turning back to him?
“Because whenever I turn back, he’ll give it.”
Yes, indeed, when you turn back, he will give it, but when is that “when” of yours? Why is it not today? Why not as you listen to me? Why not when you cry out? Why not when you praise? Let my shouting be a helper on your behalf; let your cry be a witness against you. Why not today? Why not now? (Augustine, Sermon 20, 4; PL 38, 140-41)

That judgment will come…, and you who in this life refused to set your heart right to the rightness of God and to prepare yourself for his right hand where “all the right of heart will be praised,” you will be on his left where you will hear: “Go into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mt 25: 34, 41). And will there be time then to set your heart right? Set it right now, then, brothers and sisters; set it right now. What is stopping you? The Psalm is sung, the Gospel is read, the reader has spoken, the preacher has spoken. The Lord is patient. You sin, and he forgives. You sin again, and he forgives again, and then you add another. How long must God be patient?
You know that God is also just. We frighten because we’re afraid. Teach us not to fear and we won’t frighten you. But God teaches us to fear better than anyone teaches not to fear. For “everyone has feared, and they proclaim the works of God” (Ps 63[64]:10). May God reckon us among those who feared and proclaimed. Because we fear, we are proclaiming to you, brothers and sisters. We see how eager you are to hear the word, how urgently you demand it, how much you love us. The rain is falling on the ground; let it yield grain and not thorns; there’s a barn for grain but fire for thorns. You know what to do with your field, and does God not know what to do with his servant? The rain that falls on the fertile field is welcome, and so is the rain that falls on the thorny field. Will the field that yielded thorns accuse the rain? Will not that rain be a witness at God’s judgement and say, “I fell sweetly on all the fields”? So look at what you’re yielding and consider what’s being prepared for you. If you’re yielding grain, expect the barn; if you’re yielding thorns, expect the fire. But the time for the barn and the time for the fire have not yet come. Prepare now, and you will not be afraid.
We who are speaking to you in Christ’s name are alive, and so are you to whom we are speaking. There is still space and time, is there not, for getting one’s plans right, for changing a wicked life into a good one. If you want it, can it not happen today? If you want it, can it not occur now? What must you buy in order to do it? What medicines do you have to search for? To what Indies must you sail? What ship must you get ready? Change your heart while I’m speaking, and that happens which you have cried for so often and so long, and if it does not happen, the result is eternal punishment. (Augustine, EnPs 63[64], 19; PL 36, 772)

As it turned out, Veterum sapientia quickly became a dead letter, and the Council dealt with liturgical languages and with clerical education in complete freedom.

For background to the document and larger questions about languages as they arose during the preparation of the Council, I have posted here the pages devoted to the issues in the first volume of the History of Vatican II. Languages and Veterum sapientia
In 1960 a rallying cry for Fidel Castro’s revolution was “Cuba si! Yanqui no!” Garry Wills was alluding to it when he made use of the first two words of Pope John XXIII’s first social encyclical to point up National Review’s critical take on the document: “Mater Si! Magistra No!”–a reaction that put the editors of America into a royal snit. A year later, the trope was utilized in Rome and elsewhere: “Veterum Si! Sapientia No!”

There is wisdom in the Church’s choice of today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah to prepare us for the Gospel we have just heard, in which the healing of a paralyzed man is presented as the proof that “the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins on earth.”
It is natural, and not really wrong, to emphasize the importance of that assurance for individual sinners. After all, Jesus was healing and forgiving that individual man, lowered down in front of him by the extraordinary efforts of his friends.

 
But the passage from Isaiah places this individual blessing in the context of a larger blessing that comes to Israel through the ministry of Jesus. The prophet was speaking during Israel’s exile in Babylon, which he and his predecessors had interpreted as punishment for Israel’s infidelity to God. In the chapter from which today’s reading is taken, God arises, the Holy One of Israel steps forward as Redeemer. The Exodus from Egypt is alluded to as his great act in the past, but hardly is that memory evoked, when the prophet rushes on with the word of the Lord: “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not: see I am doing something new!” That new thing will be the return of Israel from exile, her restoration in the Holy Land. This is what is meant when God promises: “I am he, I am he, who wipe out your offenses, for my own sake; your sins I remember no more.”

 
The claim of Jesus to have authority to forgive sins, seen against this background, is a claim to be the one in whom God is fulfilling that promise. Jesus came announcing the coming of the Reign of God, and here he repeats his Gospel in the form of the announcement of the restoration of Israel. It is God’s messianic forgiveness that Jesus announces and embodies.

 
It is within that broad context that the announcement of forgiveness comes to each individual, to each of us. The word of the Lord the prophet announces has application to us also: “Behold, I am doing something new! … I myself wipe out your offenses; your sins I remember no more.” It is a precise description of what is at stake when forgiveness is needed, as a moment’s reflection reveals. Consider what happens when one person wrongs another in a serious way, in a way that destroys a relationship because it destroys the trust on which it lies. Consider it as if you were yourself the person who has done the damage, betrayed the trust, undone the union. It is not something that you can reconstitute by yourself; you may wish to restore it, but whether that can happen depends almost entirely on the person you have injured. Whether there can be anything new, a new relationship, a restored trust, a recovered union, depends on whether the other person can forgive. Forgiveness, in a quite literal sense, is re-creative. Anyone who has been in a situation of needing to be forgiven knows what I am talking about.

 
That is what Jesus was talking about, what he was announcing: that he, the Son of Man, has authority to forgive sins on earth. His whole ministry, all he said and did, all he was, was, as St. Paul says in today’s second reading, God’s Yes to all his promises. This is a passage particularly dear to me: I chose it as the text on one of the prayer cards printed on the occasion of my ordination to the priesthood. I used it in the version in the New English Bible: “Jesus Christ is the Yes pronounced upon all God’s promises. That is why, when we give glory to God, it is through Jesus Christ that we say Amen.”

 
The passage is wonderfully realized in this liturgy. The Word of God once again expresses God’s Yes to his promises, and we respond with the Amen of our Credo. The death and resurrection that embody that Yes become present here among us in the eucharistic sacrifice, and we respond with the great Amen: It is through him, with him, and in him that we give all glory and honor to God.

 
Lent begins this Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, and it is time to be thinking of the great opportunity it represents for us to remind ourselves of the great grace in which we stand, the knowledge that God’s forgiveness is available to us in Christ and through his sacraments. It is perhaps time, too, to be thinking also of any of our fractured relationships, and of doing what we can to heal them, of praying that we may hear the words of forgiveness from another, of having the courage, and love, of saying them ourselves: our echo of the great words we all rejoice to hear today: “Behold, I am doing something new!” “Your sins are forgiven!”

Our second reading has one of those statements that briefly sum up the essential Christian message. In a slightly different translation than the one we heard, it says: “Jesus Christ is the ‘Yes’ pronounced upon all God’s promises; that is why, when we give glory to God, it is through Christ Jesus that we say ‘Amen!’” Jesus Christ is God’s Yes to his promises and the Amen of our thanksgiving. A message echoed each Mass at the end of our great prayer, when we say: “Through him you give us all that is good, and through him, with him, and in him all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever. Amen.”

 
Every blessing we receive comes from Christ. And the great blessing emphasized in today’s readings is the forgiveness of our sins. In the first reading the prophet, preaching during Israel’s exile, urges her not to remember ancient deeds, but to look forward to the new thing that God is about to do. We are then told what that is: “I am the one, I am the one, who will wipe out your offenses for my own sake; your sins I remember no more.” Christians, of course, read this in the light of Christ. We are not to remember the Exodus from Egypt or Israel’s return from Exile except as figures of the new thing God did in Christ who came, as today’s Gospel shows, with “authority on earth to forgive sins.”

Both Covenants are full of this promise that God will forget our sins. Ezekiel has this word of the Lord: “If a wicked person turns away from the wickedness he has been committing and keeps all my statutes and does what is lawful and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die. I will not remember the transgressions he has been committing.” And the reason for this, the prophet says, in another word of the Lord: “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way, and live” (Ez 18:21-23). Then there is the Psalmist: “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love…. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor requite us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Ps 103:8-12). And there is that of Christ himself: “ There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who have no need of repentance. Rejoice with me: I have found the sheep that was lost; I have found the coin that was lost; I have found the son who was lost” (Lk 15).

It is a nice coincidence–or an act of Providence!–that these readings come before us a few days before Lent begins–Ash Wednesday is this week. It is a time set apart from the rest of the year for us to do some reflecting on how seriously we are taking our Christian lives; and for that reason it is a time for acknowledging the respects in which we have something to repent. St. Augustine in his time faced the problem of people who kept postponing their baptism because they were not ready to give up ways of living that Christians could not follow. In one of his sermons he imagined a dialogue with a person who kept putting off conversion, confident that when he does, the Lord will forgive him. “Yes, indeed,” Augustine replied, “when you turn back, he will forgive you, but when is that ‘when’ of yours? Why is it not today? Why not as you listen to me? … Why not today? Why not now?”

But Augustine was also concerned about people who suffered from the opposite temptation, not presumption, but despair. And this time he spoke of the Lord knocking on the door and shouting Ezekiel’s promise: “‘On whatever day a person turns back, I will forget all his iniquities.’ Hearing and believing his voice, people are re-created out of their despair, and they emerge from that deep, deepest whirlpool in which they had been drowning.”

We can surely take these double exhortations and apply them to ourselves as we enter upon Lent. We may find ourselves in either one of these situations. We may be coasting, more or less vaguely knowing that there are things we ought to change in our behavior, sins to repent of, and presuming that we will have time to repent, perhaps even making our own the supremely dishonest prayer Augustine was honest enough to admit he had once prayed: “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!” When is the “when” of your conversion going to come? Augustine asks. Why not today? Why not now?

Or we may be in that whirlpool of despair, drowning because we do not believe that we can be forgiven, unable ourselves to forget what we have done, sure that God cannot forget it either. Yet that is what he has promised us as the “new thing” he does in Christ: “I am the one, I am the one, who wipe out your offenses for my own sake; your sins I remember no more.” As Augustine said in another sermon, we can at least cry out: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my prayer!” “Those who cry out from the depths,” he said,” are not completely in the depths; their very cry lifts them. Others are more deeply in the depths because they do not even know they are in the depths.” At least we can cry out, “Lord, hear my prayer!”

One final note, again from Augustine. Commenting on today’s Gospel, he spoke of people suffering from an “inner paralysis,” unable to bring themselves to Christ. He said that preachers who announce the mystery of God’s forgiveness are like the men who broke through the roof and lowered the paralytic and placed him before Christ. I find it a wonderful image of the ministry of preaching, or of reconciliation, which is to bring Christ to people and to bring people to Christ, confident that his first word to them will always be: “Child, your sins are forgiven.”

 
Much in the brief story we have just heard may appear foreign to us. Leprosy is very rare among us, and appears to be disappearing elsewhere. We know that it is a disease, what causes it, and how to treat it and prevent it. None of that was known in the time of Jesus. Because of that ignorance, the only way to prevent its spread was to forbid lepers to live in the towns and cities, to isolate them apart in leper colonies or in leprosaria, as is still done even today in some parts of the world. (St. Peter Damien went to the island of Molokai to work among the lepers there.) In ancient Israel leprosy was also considered to render people ritually unclean, and to touch them was to make oneself unclean, too. The passage was easy to the conclusion that the disease was the result of sin and the work of the evil one. Lepers were among the most outcast of people at the time, doomed to wander muffled in a cloak, crying out in warning: “Unclean, unclean!” There was a rabbinic saying that it was harder to heal lepers than to raise the dead.+

Hence the drama of this little incident which comes at the end of the first section of Mark’s Gospel, which began with Jesus’s announcement of the coming Kingdom of God and here reaches a climax with this demonstration of the power of God at work in and through Jesus. The healing of the leper becomes what in the Fourth Gospel will be called a “sign,” a dramatic symbol of what the words of Jesus announce and he brings. The leper’s cry for cleansing becomes a symbol of the human need to be cleansed from sin. Jesus’s shocking breaking of the taboo against touching a leper becomes a symbol of God’s breaking of barriers, and the man’s healing a symbol of the reconciliation to God and the restoration of community that Jesus effects. The Kingdom of God has come: repent and believe the Gospel.

There is perhaps another source of alienation that we may experience. St. Mark, and the Church in this liturgy, clearly intend us to see ourselves in the leper. But surely not many of us ever think of ourselves in such dramatic terms–as outcast lepers, unclean, alienated from God and from others. We live in a culture that does not like to make such judgments about others or even about ourselves: “I’m O.K. You’re O.K.,” the saying goes–or as a classmate of mine who couldn’t get out of the 1960′s once put it, “I’m not O.K., and you’re not O.K., and that’s O.K.” We don’t like to use a word like sin–not of others and not of ourselves–it is more comforting to speak of psychological complexes or, even more reassuring, of chemical imbalances. We tend to feel guilty about using the word “guilty” either of others or of ourselves. A couple of decades back the famous psychologist Karl Menninger wrote a book entitled Whatever Became of Sin? A Lutheran theologian, hearing a sweetened version of “Amazing Grace” that changed the words “a wretch like me,” exclaimed: “If I’m not a wretch, then grace isn’t amazing.”

There are such things as chemical imbalances, of course, as also psychological complexes. But it is rare that these are so severe that we entirely lose our effective freedom, our ability to take responsibility for our lives, to direct them, to give them purpose; and this is an ability that can lead us to make our lives something beautiful and valuable and even holy, or to make unholy messes of our lives and of the lives of others. It is to that drama of sin and grace, not simply known as words theologians use, but experienced as the issue at stake in our use of freedom–it is to that drama of sin and grace that the Gospel is addressed. Notice I said that it is the Gospel that addresses it, the good news, “tidings of great joy,” as we call it at Christmas. The Christian Gospel does not end with the word “sin”; it does not even begin with it. It begins with the announcement of grace, and in fact it is grace that first reveals by contrast the depth and range of sin and then overwhelms it. “Where sin abounded,” St. Paul said, “grace has super-abounded.”

If there may be, even among us, some so crushed by an awareness of their misuse of freedom that all they can utter is a kind of secret, self-directed cry of “Unclean, unclean!”, there is this story of the Gospel, of one who reaches across the widest gulf of alienation and dares to touch us and to declare us and to make us clean. “I said, ‘I confess my faults to the Lord,’” the Psalmist sings today, “and you took away the guilt of my sin.” This is no small gift, no small confession to be able to make, the confession of one’s sin and the confession of God’s mercy in Christ. It may not, then, be so hard after all to insert ourselves into today’s Gospel story.

Our first reading today was taken from the Book of Job and might almost be taken as a classic description of depression: life a drudgery, months of misery, troubled nights, restless sleep, day after day flies by like the wind: “I shall not see happiness again.” The Psalm of response, of course, hastens to reassure us: “The Lord heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds. He tells the number of the stars and calls each by name”–and if the individual stars, then surely he has a care for you, the Psalmist tells the depressed.

But the real counterweight to Job’s complaint is found in our Gospel reading, which is part of the first chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel that we have been listening to for the last three weeks. It tells the story in summary, encapsulated form of the messianic impact that Jesus makes: his call is enough to make men leave their occupations and follow him, we heard two weeks ago; he teaches with authority, we heard the crowds exclaim last week; many people with various ailments are healed by him, we have just heard today. All of this is designed to illustrate for the reader, or hearer, the Good News of the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God in the teaching and works of Jesus of Nazareth.

Some of you are old enough to remember the film of Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Gospel according to St. Matthew.” It was not at all like a Hollywood portrait of Jesus. Jesus is not a blond and blue-eyed Adonis; his and other parts are played by non-professional actors, most of them southern Italian peasants. The scenery is not lovely green fields, softly focused by the camera, through which Polyanna might gaily run; it’s stark, stony, barren, hard–it was filmed in a poor undeveloped part of Italy. The message has not been prettied-up either; all the dialogue in the movie is taken from the Gospel itself.

Scene after scene shows Jesus marching across the landscape, speaking his message. As he walks determinedly along the road, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is near, ordinary people encounter him, perhaps stop for a moment to look at this odd man, and then accompany him or go their own way. The film conveys well the fact that at one point in human history it was possible, while going about one’s daily business, to run into Jesus of Nazareth on the road, to hear his voice, to be struck and challenged by his words, to have the chance to choose whether to stop and hear more or to go on one’s usual way, unaffected by the odd man and his even odder message.

I don’t know of another movie that better conveys the humble beginnings of Christianity and the sense that its basic message is the intrusion of the extraordinary into the ordinary and by means of the ordinary. Into everyday lives something unusual intrudes, but intrudes in the figure of a man like the other people in the story. Jesus doesn’t wear a halo, and angels don’t hum in the background as he speaks. But consider what we believe: that the Word of God became flesh, as the fourth Gospel puts it: took flesh in a particular man, born of a particular people, living in a particular time and place. Flesh–the ordinary–embodying the extraordinary, the Word through whom and for whom all things were made.

Living two thousand years and six thousand miles from that time and place, we may wonder how we and others can still encounter Jesus, run into him? One of the main ways we can encounter him is precisely in such moments as this one: when his words and deeds are not only recalled in the Scriptures and the homily but are also re-presented–made present again–in the memorial of his death and resurrection around this altar. We did not come here today to engage in an archeological excursion into the distant past, but to experience for our comfort or for our challenge–or for both–the words that were once heard on the dusty roads of Palestine. What could happen then can happen today. The Mass–this Mass–is supposed to be an encounter with Jesus Christ.

Both New Testament readings emphasize the preaching of the Gospel. St. Paul speaks of his ministry as an obligation placed upon him, which he exercises without claiming the right to live by the effort, doing so in order for him to be able to share in its blessings. That insistence on the duty to preach is heard also in the Gospel where Jesus himself says that this is why he has come: “For this purpose have I come”: to preach the Gospel.
That Gospel, of course, is the good news St. Mark had already summarized as the message of Jesus: “The time has come. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news.” It is what St. Mark was himself doing by writing his book. Preaching the Gospel for him meant telling the story of the one who announced and brought the Gospel.

This is also what is happening at this and at every liturgy. What began with Jesus of Nazareth and was carried forward by the apostle and the evangelist continues now, through the scripture-readings proclaimed to us, through this sermon, through this celebration. The Church was sent for this. The Church has gathered here for this. The Church will be sent from here for this.

And “the Church” here does not mean something apart from you and me. We are the Church here gathered. I once heard a member of an African-American congregation say, “We had good Church today.” The phrase struck me: “having Church”–not a typical Catholic phrase. It conveys the sense of the Church as something that happens, something that occurs, is created, becomes real, when the Word of God is proclaimed again, preached again, heard again, believed again, celebrated again. Church is what we are at this moment, what we are doing, what occurs because of what we are doing.

And, of course, we are not supposed to be Church only here. The Church is the creature of the Gospel, here reminded again of what it is–what we are–, here becoming again what it is–what we are. But it becomes–we become–the community of the Gospel here, in this building and through this liturgy, only in order to be the sign and instrument of the Gospel when it leaves here–when we leave here. This is why recent popes place such emphasis on a “new evangelization,” a new telling of the good news of Jesus Christ, in face of a tendency especially in the oldest parts of the Church, Europe and North America, where something like a dechristianizing of culture has taken place, meaning the Gospel is less widely and less deeply lived, has less of an impact on individuals, society, and culture. They are trying to inspire a zeal similar to that of St. Paul, eagerness to tell the good news of what God has done in Christ.

To bring home to us what this means and to recognize the ways in which it occurs, we might individually think of how it is that we have all come here today. Who was it who told us of the God in whom we believed, of Christ, of the Holy Spirit? Was it a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a neighbor, a friend? What words or deeds or example was it that led us to take what we heard seriously, to devote ourselves to it, to define the way we live our lives by it? Who evangelized us, brought us the good news? Who convinced us of its truth and value? Have we ever thanked them for it, in person or at least in grateful acknowledgment and prayer?

Such reflection would be a useful exercise, one we cannot undertake without feeling immediately our own obligation to bring the gift we have been given to our own generation, to our children and grandchildren, to the wider society and culture. Are we doing for others what others did for us? Are we giving them the opportunity that others gave us, to know God and ourselves and our world? Creatures of the Gospel, daughters and sons of the previous generation, we are supposed now to be the mothers and fathers of a new generation, by our example, by our deeds and words, bringing the same good news that Jesus began and embodied, that Paul carried forward, that generation after generation after generation passed on, until it was brought down to us who gather here today. If we gather in thanksgiving here and now, we cannot genuinely do so without committing ourselves to keeping the Gospel alive, alive for us, alive for others. For this have we come: to preach the Gospel.

The Preparatory Theological Commission (PTC) in particular resisted the idea that it had to collaborate with other commissions, particularly not with the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity (SPCU) which the PTC dismissed as a mere “information-bureau” for non-Catholic bodies. The PTC reserved all doctrinal matters to its exclusive competence and pledged, in turn, not to involve itself in practical matters. Only the preparatory Liturgical Commission and the SPCU refused this separation and did not hesitate to engage the doctrinal issues that underlay their work. As the commissions began their work in November 1960, certain documents reveal already different visions of the Council.

The following documents illustrate some of these differences:

The plan for the Council drawn up by the Holy Office;Holy Office Plan for Vatican II

The questions proposed to the preparatory commissions; Questions for the Preparatory Commissions

Four brief outlines of documents to be prepared by the PTC; Brief Outlines 1960

Fr. Yves Congar’s counter-proposal for a conciliar agenda; Congar’s plan for the Council

An unpublished paper of mine on the initial work of the PTC;  Preparatory Theological Commission

An essay of mine originally published as “The Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and the Preparation of Vatican II,” Centro pro Unione Semi-annual Bulletin, 50 (Fall 1996) 11-17. SPCU amd Preparation of Vatican II