That the question should protrude out of English Catholicism and start prodding about in German Catholicism seems like irreverence, biting the hand that fed, or just plain scandalmongery. The revival of theological interest amongst English Catholics owes, after all, much to the activity of German-speaking theologians like Rahner and Kung. Here, we have said, is a Catholicism that takes theology seriously. The German bishops brought this activity in their train to the Council in the form of theological advisers. They were very well advised theologically. The Council was for German Catholicism something like a Trade Fair; its stands were stocked with the latest models of German theology, and the bishops quite overreached themselves in attempting to express it.

Meanwhile back in Germany there was considerable surprise in many quarters that the German episcopate should be, as Simplicissimus put it in a front page cartoon, marching like a mitred army on Rome behind its two cardinals. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel rummaged through its considerable files and produced a number on Cardinal Frings setting out dialectically his record as a conservative churchman in Cologne, and his activity as leader of the progressives at the Council. How were the two conflicting images to be reconciled? Certainly the German Church can never be the same again. Things have been said by its leaders in Rome which will have to be said in Germany.