Church Historian Says When it Comes to Governance, the Catholic Church May Have Mislaid Its Own Rich History.

(From AScribe)

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- Historian Francis Oakley argues that "the future of the Catholic Church may lie in its willingness to pay renewed attention to missing, overlooked or repressed pieces of its own history."

The papacy as we know it, he says, is "the achievement of the past 200 years at most." The principals of papal sovereignty and infallibility gradually gained ground and were given dogmatic formulation in 1870 at the First Vatican Council.

Two recent books by Oakley, the Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of the History of Ideas, Emeritus, and President, Emeritus, of Williams College, focus on the Catholic Church, past and present.

Oakley is co-editor with Bruce Russett, the Dean Acheson Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Yale, of "Governance, Accountability, and the Future of the Catholic Church" (Continuum).

The book is a collection of addresses from a conference called to explore theological and canonical perspectives; legal, political, and finance aspects of the Church at large.

Oakley is also the author of "The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870" (Oxford), a revised and extended version of the Berlin Lectures, which he gave at Oxford in 1999 when he held the Sir Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in the History of Ideas.