The common ground trodden by Father John Morris of the Society of Jesus and members of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary was at first a shared interest in the acts of the English martyrs. This widened to a study of the history of the Institute and Father Morris’s involvement in its current problems—the removal of the Church’s three-century old ban, the vexed question of Mary Ward’s title of foundress, the desirability of union of all the members, and the drawing up of the constitutions acceptable to all. These intellectual explorations and their practical application led him to the Bar Convent in York, to Haverstock Hill and Ascot in the south, and to Nymphenburg, Altötting and Augsburg in Germany.

In the haphazard circumstances of the English mission, the Society of Jesus offered the virtues of discipline and organisation, the methodical self-programming of the Spiritual Exercises, and a record of missionary success from China to Peru’. The healthy survival of Catholicism in Lancashire through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries owed a great deal to the active ministry of the Jesuits and by the 1770s they were running fifteen missions in the county. After the suppression of the Society in 1773 they continued to run these as ex-Jesuits but the years of the suppression became increasingly difficult. One important issue concerned the ownership of the Society’s funds and property: the Vicars Apostolic believed these should continue to be applied to the purposes for which they had originally been entrusted to the Society, that is the good of religion in the various Districts; some of the ex-Jesuits, however, believed they were the obvious inheritors and should control and benefit from the accumulated funds.

Contemporary Roman Catholics have realized in the last thirty-five years that when an ecumenical council has concluded, it is far from over. The interpretation of the decrees of the Second Vatican Council has become today as critical and controverted as the formulation of the decrees was during the Council itself. The present controversies centre on ecclesiology—the nature of the Church—and questions at issue concern continuity and innovation. Did Vatican II, and especially the Decree on the Church in the Modern World, reform the structure and the governance of the Church toward a greater degree of consultation, subsidiarity, decentralization—‘collegiality’, to use the expression of the Council itself? Or was the vision of the Council for the Church in basic continuity with the centralized, papal-monarchial Church of the First Vatican Council? Around these questions centres most of the contention that engages the Church today: debates having to do with the rôle of bishops’ conferences, the operation of the Roman curia, the relationship of the magisterium or teaching authority to theologians.