ABSTRACT
The dominant impression which the Catholic Church in the United States has made upon the secular public is that of a power bloc, Victorian in its conceptions and ruthless in the pursuit of its own interests. Few outside the Church, howsoever good-willed and unprejudiced, see in her the communion of the faithful grouped around the eucharist and manifesting the life of the Gospels. The Church is the communion of those who share the life of God. For reasons not clear to men, God wished to share His life with others, whom He created, with whom He speaks in history. The Church is a community in which individuals try to know more and love better. The document was, a long way from the exclusivism or integralism of non-historical orthodoxy. The document was an attempt to break from the defensive Romanism of the Counter-Reformation; it abandoned a polemic now dead.
