The Council of Basle and the Second Vatican Council

Abstract

Many will have noticed how the renewal of the Church in modern times has drawn together strands of thought and behaviour that were in the past considered discordant. Thus the Second Vatican Council, it seems, in continuing the work of the First, would be likely to draw on that part of the Church’s heritage which had previously been in apparent conflict with the doctrine of papal supremacy: namely, the notion of the supremacy of the Church as a body and of the council or the episcopate. In some ways there is a remarkable degree of continuity between the thought of the Council of Basle (1431–49) and of the Second Vatican Council.