Post conciliar Catholic teaching on Church politics : the teaching of the Bishops

Abstract

Vatican Council If was a landmark in the history of the Catholic Church. During the Council, the bishops had the difficult task of discovering the essentials of the Church's identity and its mission in a changing world. They tried to point towards a new way of "being Church" in circumstances which presented new challenges. It was the closing of the books on a past era but also an opening to the future. From the documents of the Council, "the world" emerges as the theological locus, the place where identity and mission meet and where they have constantly to be clarified.