Bench mark, revolutionary, pioneering: one needs all these adjectives to denote the importance of this work by a world leader in serious writing on Vatican affairs. Paul Collins has published since 1986 some dozen weighty books on ‘Rome’ focused on modern times, not to mention his magnum opus, The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century (PublicAffairs, 2013). This indefatigable researcher and lucid communicator has now added another study of prophetic significance for the history and future of Christianity.

Paul Collins is a Melbourne-born former MSC priest who perceives himself as a faithful Catholic with both the ability and the vocation to contribute his gifts for the reformation/renewal of his Church. Conservatives who identify the Church with the Papacy will vehemently disapprove but the ecumenically minded as well as Anglicans who prioritize healing the breach with Rome will welcome this treatise which strongly recommends the restoration of the conciliar mode of Church polity as the way to the future. The centralized government of an authoritarian Romanized Church has long since passed its use-by date. And here one must take care to distinguish between papal primacy and infallibility. The latter is, as Collins shows, a distracting accretion engineered by a series of Bishops of Rome since Napoleonic times who at times evinced symptoms of megalomania. In short, we observe a process of ‘clawing back’ power throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries that had been severely eroded by the Bonapartism of the Corsican artillery officer who had himself crowned Emperor of France in Notre Dame Cathedral on 2 December 1804.

Collins’ book is riveting reading for not only Church historians; both clergy and laity will be both startled and edified simultaneously. For example, Collins demonstrates how successive popes had engineered ‘centralized microcontrol’ and of turning the Roman Curia into the ‘court of an ecclesiastical dictator’ that had evolved out of the administrative apparatus left over after the dissolution of the Papal States by 1870. Since then a succession of long-serving popes have, by what Collins calls the exercise of both ‘hard’ (diplomatic) and ‘soft’ (pastoral) power, cemented domination over the world-wide Church to the detriment of the essential Gospel message of love and tolerance as demonstrated in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

The strict centralized administrative control exerted by the Pope through the Curia over the entire Church allows for no exercise of the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ which means in effect allowing bishops the autonomy to run their dioceses taking into account the special needs of their regions. Collins argues energetically for a radical revision of the system that has grown up to the detriment of the far-flung faithful. But more than that Collins decries the centralized control of the Papacy over the freedom of thought among its scholars. In short, through a succession of departments renamed over the passage of time, the papacy has exercised a kind of ‘thought control’ over the faithful by censoring the publications of scholars from anywhere whose ideas might be interpreted as inimical to the faith and morals of ‘Catholics’.

The notorious Index was finally abolished by Pope Paul VI in 1966 but it had caused untold damage in the past by denigrating major thinkers who have turned out to be forerunners and precursors of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) under Pope John XXIII (1958–63). These include such eminent thinkers as Lord Acton (his cautions ignored) and Ignaz Döllinger (excommunicated). And as Collins ruefully observes, ‘If the papacy had listened to them instead of rejecting what they had to say, Catholicism might well be in a better position today’ (p. 88).

So, what Collins has outlined here is a blueprint for ‘Catholic’ renewal more in accordance with the spirit of the New Testament from which it had so often most notoriously under a series of ‘neo-ultramontane Popes’ diverged. The ball is now in the court of a ‘gentle’ pope, the Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergolio, Francis I who acceded to the See of Peter on 28 February 2013. Collins places cautious hope in this Pontifex Maximus that he might be able to overcome the crippling centralism and ideological bullying stance of ‘Rome’ and recover the genuine ecumenical spirit of the Gospel for the good of the entire world. This entails essentially more autonomy for bishops in their own dioceses and a greater input from the ‘local’ Church in the selection of their chief pastors. Certainly, as well it stresses the abandonment of anything remotely resembling papal infallibility or authoritarianism that overrules bishops in their provinces and dioceses.

Finally, it is noteworthy that much of what Collins advocates now had already been well thought out by forerunners such as the German Jesuit, Heinrich Pesch (1854–1926) for his work on Solidarism, his remarkable successor, Oswald Nell-Breuning (1890–1991) on modern social policy, and such Anglican Christian socialists as F.D. Maurice (1805–72) and theologians like John Macquarrie (1919–2007). None of these scholars is, of course, mentioned, but Macquarrie in his work, Principles of Christian Theology (2nd edition, 1977) advanced the long-held Anglo-Catholic idea that the Papacy should be recognized as the symbol of unity of all Christians while it is not an additional structure required for the one holy catholic and apostolic Church alongside those of Scripture, sacraments, creeds, and episcopate. ‘We can think of it’, wrote Macquarrie, ‘as included within the structure of the episcopate, and having within the episcopate a primacy which many persons outside the Roman communion would be willing to acknowledge’ (pp. 415-16, emphasis added). This, it seems to the present reviewer, would be a view quite in accordance with the ideas of the vigorously forthright Paul Collins whose book should be regarded as a cri de coeur for timely ‘Roman’ renewal that would advance the cause of the Gospel with the support of many of the ‘separated brethren’.