The little alpine city of Trent is not a very important place today, nor was it in the sixteenth century, apart from its position on a fairly busy line of communication connecting Italy with Germany over the Brenner Pass; and it may well be asked how it came to be the site of an important General Council of the Church. The answer lies in the circumstance that still brings Trent and the Trentino into the news today, their mixed racial character. In the sixteenth century Trent, with an Italian majority and a German minority, was ruled by its Prince-Bishop, usually a prelate of mixed German and Italian connections. It was the capital of a Prince-Bishopric (one of so many in Germany) that formed a constituent principality of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the boundary of which curious organization with the free and sovereign Italian State of Venice lay not far to the south on the road to Verona.

In our day the Church is present, as it were, only on the margin of politics. Even in those countries, such as Ireland and Spain, where the Church is in one sense an obvious power in politics, the action of the Church is still marginal; for the substance of politics, however it may be constituted and whatever analysis of it we may offer, is what it is by reason of those secular forces which determine the character of politics in other states where the Church institutionally is of little or no account; and the fundamental decisions of the political authorities are always in the last resort swayed by secular considerations of precisely the same kind as those operative in non-Catholic societies. There is, outside the Soviet Union, the popular democracies, and China, a common social pattern, diversified in appearance and in its degree of maturity and in the political superstructure it bears, but still a common pattern: that of the capitalism of the mid-twentieth century.

It is probably true to say that there is no form of intellectual life more unfamiliar to the educated English Catholic than theology. If he were asked to name some topics which he supposed were discussed by theologians he would probably refer to the proofs of the existence of God, transubstantiation, the sacraments-the first of these in the context of ‘Thomism’, the second of apologetics, in school and pulpit, the third in the context of ‘liturgy’. The reference to the pulpit is a considered one; for if lay Catholics are open to the charge of naivety, the responsibility is by no means wholly theirs; can the clergy, and even the professional theologians among them (with some embarrassment I include myself, if only as a theological columnist, in this sub-category) , really claim to be practising theology with energy, fertility, learning and insight?