The image of the Church was already a complex one in the years leading up to Vatican II, whether one thinks of the picture portrayed in theological writing or of the meaning glimpsed, and perhaps apprehended, in day-to-day living, in personal prayer and in worship. But within the complexity there was in Catholic theology and practice a special stress upon the priesthood in the Church, and therefore upon the Church as a sacral, hierarchical institution, endowed with a fullness of priestly powers : of order (magisterium) and jurisdiction. This sacral-bureaucratic view came to fullest expression in Journet’s The Church of the Word Incarnate, in which order precariously maintained a primacy of honour over jurisdiction. Bishop De Smedt took a fresh and critical look at the same image when he denounced triumphalism, clericalism and juridicism in a speech he made at the Council. Freedom and fraternity were not the only fundamental Christian values to come into their own again; the stress on the living Word of God and his coming into expression in the scriptural word, and the shift towards existential modes of thinking in response to the demand of faith seeking knowledge in us and for us, in and for our time, called into question a static, clerical-priestly and authoritarian Church.

The ten years after the Council have been a testing time for us all, and not least for the priests of the Church. There has been a spate of theological writing about ministry and priesthood, verging indeed, at popular levels, on the narcissistic and obsessional. Too little of it has seen that behind the question of the ministry there stands a more fundamental, christological question about the meaning of Christ’s priesthood. The more welcome, therefore, to Fr Sabourin’s study of Christ’s priesthood and the history that led up to it.