One often hears it said, and it is even more often accepted, that it is right to despise the masses. The majority of mankind, it is argued, are subject to a basic shortness of vision and a fundamental inertia which make it necessary for someone else—a dictator, a power elite, a superior—to administer their affairs. On this view the passivity of the mass of people has to be offset, if man is to advance, by being manipulated by the competent, talented few. Progress in history and the growth of civilisation are the work of an oligarchy, while the people constitute merely the raw material out of which history is made.

On the other side a number of thinkers have espoused the cause of the polloi. History is the vicissitudes of common folk, and nothing nobler can be contemplated than the numberless multitudes who shape the world’s destiny.

It would seem difficult for a Christian to adopt either of these views for his understanding of the Church. If, on the one hand, the Church is thought to consist primarily in the clerical elite, it is hard to see why Christ took such pains to identify himself with the unspectacular masses. If, on the other hand, the Church’s history is seen as the development of the sensus omnium fidelium, it is not easy to explain the cult of exceptional members who are thought to have advanced the spread of Christianity more significantly than any others, and it is even less easy to explain the emphasis placed on the role of the hierarchy in the preservation of God’s truth.