This article discusses the significance of the extensive data-gathering procedures incorporated into recent synodal preparations and how they advance Pope Francis’s commitment to forging a church informed by a dialogue between theological ideas and empirical realities. Drawing on my prior case analysis of the Synod on the Family, I argue that despite the limits in place then on lay participation in the formal synod discussions, the diversity of the laity’s self-reported experiences penetrated the bishops’ deliberations. This achievement is in part a function of the synod communication structure whereby participants are allocated to shared-language groups, thus avoiding self-selection based on a priori doctrinal or country-specific biases; the resulting (forced) dialogue with difference helps foster the gradual development of more inclusive doctrinal framings as seen in the post-synodal Amoris Laetitia. In a historic expansion, the Synod on Synodality formally includes lay voting participants and therefore lay perspectives will directly shape the synod proposal outcomes. Like the bishops, lay Catholics do not speak with one voice, and thus the task of finding moral consensus will still necessarily require respectful mutual listening and reciprocal dialogue.

This article examines how Jews and Judaism are envisioned in the Catholic imagination, through a critical reading of contemporary Catholic discourse on Judaism. It identifies three problematic areas. The first concerns the tendency of Catholic discourse to project a specifically Christian vision of salvation history onto the Jewish people, which reflects Christian rather than Jewish self-understanding. Second, this article analyzes patterns in language and imagery in Vatican documents about Judaism, alert to troubling allusions implicit in the texts. The third area concerns a hermeneutical obstacle to deep interreligious understanding, one which may be ultimately insurmountable: namely, the challenges of understanding the religious other according to its own self-understanding. This article reaches an ambivalent conclusion, conceding that the goal of recognizing the self-understanding of another religious tradition may ultimately be impossible.

This article explores the limitations of theological reasoning that have attempted to reconcile the claim of faith that the church is holy with the experience of a broken and sinful church. A recent case study from an Easter Vigil celebration shows how attention to liturgical practice can challenge assumptions that scholars have made about the church's liturgies and reframe the fundamental theological question at stake in this conversation in such a way that the declaration that the church is sinful does not necessarily negate or preclude the declaration that the church is also holy.

The French priest Paul Gauthier (1914–2002) was a former theology professor who, after a short period as a prêtre-ouvrier (worker-priest) in Marseille, decided in 1956 to settle in Nazareth and practice his working apostolate there. For the next eleven years, and until his abrupt departure shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel became Gauthier’s home. Some years after his arrival, Gauthier was invited to the Second Vatican Council by the archbishop of Galilee. There, Gauthier led the group the “Church of the Poor,” which aimed to bring the issue of poverty and pastoral service to the forefront of Council discussions. Gauthier spent his years in Israel between two physically close but culturally and politically distant worlds. On the one hand, he lived and worked with the vulnerable Arab population of Nazareth. On the other, he was in close contact with Israel’s new Jewish society, which greatly aroused his curiosity. In addition to his friendly contact with the Israeli civilian and military authorities, who would help him foster his cooperative for Arab housing, he was attracted by the kibbutz lifestyle and was especially moved by the philosophy of the Zionist thinker and pioneer Aaron David Gordon. Gauthier believed that his experience in Nazareth and Israel, where he saw an interchange of many worlds, could shed light on the worker-priest apostolate and provide a model for priestly spirituality in a working-class environment, in its various aspects. This article analyzes the influence of the “Israel experience” on Paul Gauthier’s thought.

My The Second Vatican Council on Other Religions (Oxford University Press) appeared in 2012. In 2014 it went into a paperback edition, which allowed me to list some reviews and promise to enter into dialogue with all the reviewers. This article takes up such dialogue and discusses what came from nine reviewers. Glenn Siniscalchi wrote two reviews. Eduardo Echeverria went much further by writing two long essays on the book.

In comparing the works of two major Catholic thinkers, John Courtney Murray (1904–1967) and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019), one finds an example of the divergences between European-continental Catholic and US Catholic concepts of the state and society. This divergence has become more evident in the context of the rise of American Catholics in politics and in the context of the crisis of the post–World War II liberal political order, but they have been at the heart of different Catholic intellectual traditions for quite some time. A comparative analysis of Murray and Böckenförde helps to explain the role of US Catholicism in the crisis of American democracy and the complexity of the reception of Vatican II in political theology in different Catholic Churches around the world.

In “its deepest intuitions,” Vatican II was a missionary council whose stated purpose was to renew the church spiritually and institutionally and so prepare the Catholic community to evangelize a changed, more complex world. Church leaders’ subsequent failure to correctly understand the council's biblically sourced, trinitarian view of mission's object, its method and agency, led to a failure to implement Vatican II's practical pastoral aims. Although the conciliar vision was committed to and embedded in the reformed liturgical rites where it continues to nourish and inspire Catholic life today, the absence of the institutional, ministerial supports needed to complete what the liturgy instills forever blocks achievement of the council's aims. The experience of the US church provides a ready example of how Vatican II's pastoral vision was waylaid and goes unrealized yet today.

This article offers a critical discussion of Ian Ker's book Newman on Vatican II (2014).

The Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium (1963), envisaged an extensive episcopal liturgical governance role. With the local episcopal conference, the bishop was to regulate the use of language in the liturgy and prepare and translate liturgical prayers into ‘living languages’ and oversee the implementation of liturgical change. These were key conciliar expressions of episcopal governance, which represented a deeper theology of the episcopacy. In subsequent years, the Council's reform agenda was challenged and resisted by the Roman Curia and others. The Curia aimed at protecting its pre-Vatican II position of governance and was not inclined to receive the Council's collegial and synodal ecclesiology. The most recent development, Magnum principium (2017), may be viewed as an opportunity yet to be grasped.

How has Pastor Aeternus stood the test of time in the face of Vatican II, the great social leveling brought about by democracy and the mass media, and the severe erosion of confidence in hierarchical institutions, including the Catholic Church?