A Council That Will Never End

Paul Lakeland is the Aloysius P. Kelley, SJ, Professor of Catholic Studies and founding director of the Center for Catholic Studies at Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution in Connecticut. Educated at Heythrop Pontifical Athenaeum, Oxford University, the University of London, and Vanderbilt University, he has taught at Fairfield since 1981. He is the author of nine previous books, the most recent of which is A Council That Will Never End: Lumen Gentium and the Church Today (Liturgical Press, 2013). Lakeland is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the American Theological Society, the College Theology Society, and the Catholic Theological Society of America. He blogs occasionally and reviews fiction for Commonweal, a Catholic journal of opinion.

Lumen Gentium, Vatican IIs Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, changed how we think about the laity, holiness, baptism, and even the nature and purpose of the church itself. In A Council That Will Never End, the highly regarded ecclesiologist Paul Lakeland marks the fiftieth anniversary of this documents promulgation by taking up three major themes of the constitution, analyzing the text and identifying some of the questions with which it leaves us. These themes are: the role of the bishop in the church and the ways Lumen Gentiums teaching relates to various tensions in todays church; the laity and in particular the mixed blessing of describing them in the category of secularity; the relationships between the church and the People of God and what they tell us about the ways in which all people are offered salvation. Lakeland is convinced that Lumen Gentium leaves much unfinished business (as any historical document must), that attending to it will take us beyond much of the now sterile ecclesial divisions, and that the ecclesiology of humility it implies marks the way that theology must guide the church in the years ahead.