ABSTRACT
Much of what has been written by the various contributors to this book seems to indicate a need for some kind of reform within the Roman Catholic Church in regard to matters of authority and governance. The exact shape and degree of the reform that should come about remain a matter for ongoing debate, but it is to be hoped that participants in such debate will find much useful material for their deliberations in this volume. One imagines that, in the present climate, some people will find any calls for reform disturbing. They, however, should bare in mind the fact that change and development are hardly foreign to the Church. As Archbishop John Quinn recently noted: History …. shows that far from being an idea foreign or inimical to the Church, reform has been a constant and recurring theme, from the eleventh-century Popes Leo IX and Gregory VII through John Paul II. The failures of the Church in the second millennium – the loss of whole peoples to Catholic unity in the sixteenth century, the loss of the workers in the nineteenth, the alienation of the intellectuals in the twentieth – have been due not so much to reform within the Church as to the lack of timely reform, the failure to weigh carefully enough the signs of the times, and the failure to act in time.1
