In a chapter on Yves Congar, Fergus Kerr (in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians ) says that the question of religious freedom had to be on the agenda for Vatican II because “it was a major issue inherited from the First Vatican Council.  It was even the major issue: the point of Vatican I’s doctrine of papal supremacy was, in its own way, equivalent to the Oxford Movement’s resistance to erastianism in the Church of England, and to the Disruption of 1843 in the Church of Scotland, and parallel movements elsewhere.  Certainly, the Roman university theologians who (mostly) drafted the document wanted a clear statement, asserting the right of the Church to exercise her mission, free of civil interference, including practical matters like freedom to run schools, own property, and so on, preferable in harmony with, and indeed with the support of, the state.”

Maybe we can manage another half cheer, or a quarter, because Kerr also notes that “the idea of the Apostles as a college, in parallel with the bishops as an order, was already to be found in the draft constitution de ecclesia prepared for discussion in 1870.  Few knew these texts [in the 1960s], in which it was noted, for example, that the ancient practice shows it to be a dogma of faith that the bishops share in governing and teaching the universal Church.”

What might have been: Vatican I, the vindication of conciliarism!

In the end, Kerr says, not even Vatican II accomplished this.  Though the Council voted in favor of collegiality of bishops - the notion that “supreme authority in the Church lay with the bishops as a whole, of course including the pope” - there was a sizable intransigent minority.  Besides, “more than four decades on, while [the powerful opponents of collegiality] are no doubt all dead, the fact remains that there has not been anything like the decentralization, the return of authority to local bishops, that the text promulgated in 1964 envisages.  The power of the papal Curia that the majority of bishops expected to be balanced by new or revitalized instruments of collective episcopal authority seems, if anything, only to have become more secure, as we enter the twenty-first century.”