Newman Studies Journal

Yet again, John O'Malley has delivered a scholarly and eminently accessible work on the twists and turns of the early modern and modern Catholic Church. When Bishops Meet is unencumbered by footnotes. Its arguments instead are drawn from the deep dives O'Malley makes into the conciliar Acta (official proceedings) and many other sources for his trilogy on the ecumenical councils of Trent (1545–1563), Vatican I (1869–1870), and Vatican II (1962–1965).¹ While [End Page 107] readers of those books will recognize a number of themes and anecdotes in When Bishops Meet, O'Malley "breaks new ground methodologically" by "synchronically" (4) examining these three momentous events in church (and world) history. Indeed, while comparisons between ecumenical councils is occasionally done, this is the first "systematic and sustained analysis" in a comparative mode (4). As such, it yields surprisingly fresh insights, and underscores the continuity and discontinuity of contemporary Catholic thought and practice with the past in thought-provoking ways.

O'Malley calls this work "an essay." It is a short book—one that would function well as the centerpiece of a week's discussion in a graduate seminar, for several sessions of an undergraduate course, or for a group of interested non-specialists with a background in church history. While useful to academics, the tone and substance of When Bishops Meet is ideal for challenging and provoking discussion in undergraduate or adult education courses on church history, ecclesiology, or modern Catholicism (for example, I will certainly use the book with theology majors, continuing education students, and candidates for the diaconate who have already been exposed to the principal themes and documents of these councils).

The book is made up of nine chapters that compare the three councils according to a certain topic or question. These chapters are divided into three thematic sections. The first section, titled "Three Great Issues," addresses: 1) What Do Councils Do?, 2) Does Church Teaching Change?, and 3) Who Is in Charge? The first chapter could stand alone as a good introduction to ecumenical councils as a central institution in the Catholic Church for a non-specialist. The second chapter, on change and continuity in church teaching (published online as a Commonweal article),² summarizes well O'Malley's work on the nature of reform. This work can be fruitfully compared with recent contributions like Benedict XVI's famous 2005 Christmas address. Resting on the church's duty to proclaim a divine revelation it has received, O'Malley also rightly insists that the church, and the councils it convenes, occur in history, and as such, are subject to changes, improvement, and decay. The third chapter includes a number of interesting insights about authority, especially the fraught history of relationships between popes and councils and the Roman "center" and local church "peripheries." O'Malley points out that Vatican II is itself an interpretation of Vatican I (78), and that controversial doctrines like episcopal collegiality can be read as putting a name to a reality in which the council fathers were already engaging (79). [End Page 108]

The second section, "Participants," examines a number of fascinating continuities and discontinuities in the roles played by certain groups and offices in the three councils. Chapter four examines the pope and the Curia (that is, the Roman bureaucracies and the pope's cabinet, so to speak), and highlights changing roles from the papal legates of Trent to the mixed commissions of Vatican II. The next two chapters, on theologians and the laity, might surprise some readers. While prelates have of course always played major roles in church councils, Vatican II's emphasis on the importance of bishops, consulting theologians, and the laity was not an innovation per se, but was in certain ways a return to the practice of Trent (notwithstanding the enormous societal and contextual differences). In chapter seven, O'Malley...