Catholic ecclesiology has shown remarkable vibrancy over the past several decades, due in large part to the impact of New Testament studies, especially as they pertain to the origins of the Church, and, second, the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

The new Vatican document, "Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine of the Church," which was released in mid-summer by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), refers to this phenomenon as a "renewal of Catholic ecclesiology" and "a flowering of writing in this field."

At the same time, the document expresses a concern that, among "the many new contributions to the field," some are marked by "erroneous interpretation" which, in turn, gives rise to "confusion and doubt." It is to clarify "the authentic meaning of some ecclesiological expressions used by the magisterium" that this document has been issued.

The CDF presents its teaching in question-and-answer form. The first asks whether the Second Vatican Council changed the Catholic doctrine of the Church. Its answer is given without any qualifications: "The Second Vatican Council neither changed nor intended to change this doctrine...."

But surely something was changed at the council. Otherwise, why were there such spirited and sometimes acrimonious debates about issues like collegiality and religious freedom? For many bishops collegiality had become, theologically, almost a life-and-death issue.

In their minds, any recognition of the pastoral and teaching authority of the bishops dispersed throughout the world would necessarily undermine the unique authority of the pope. So bitter was the opposition to collegiality that Pope Paul VI offered a gesture of reassurance to the defeated minority by approving an appendix to the council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church which reinforced the primacy of the pope.

Before Vatican II, to cite another example, Protestants and Anglicans were regarded as "heretics," completely outside the Church and on par with non-Christians, agnostics and atheists. But because of Vatican II, the Catholic Church came to recognize Protestants and Anglicans as an integral part of the Body of Christ, although in "varying degrees" of communion with one another and with the Catholic Church.

Before Vatican II, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, then-Prefect of the Holy Office (the forerunner of the CDF), held that "error has no rights." His view was simply taken for granted as the doctrine of the Church. Those who disagreed were punished by silencing and removal from their teaching positions.

Thanks to the efforts of Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray, one of those who had been silenced over the issue, Vatican II changed the teaching and a new principle of religious liberty was enshrined in its Declaration on Religious Freedom.

There are other examples, of course. The point is that it is an over-simplification to assert that the council changed nothing regarding the doctrine of the Church.

The second and third questions in the CDF document pertain to one of the most controversial passages in the 16 conciliar documents: article 8 of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.

The pertinent sentence reads: "This church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him."

At first glance, the sentence seems like a mere re-statement of the common teaching prior to Vatican II, as expressed in Pope Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, namely, that the Catholic Church and the Body of Christ are "one and the same." (Actually, Pius XII had limited the Catholic Church to the "Roman" Catholic Church, in effect de-churchifying millions of non-Roman, Eastern-rite Catholics.)

Every major commentary on the Dogmatic Constitution --- including one by the German theologian Alois Grillmeier, later named a cardinal by John Paul II --- refers in some detail to the heated debate over the replacement of the copulative verb "is" in the above sentence by the verb-form "subsists in."

Was this simply a stylistic change, having no real significance? Not according to Grillmeier and most other commentators. Indeed, when the view that is represented in the recent CDF document began circulating several years after the council, another cardinal, Johannes Willebrands, then head of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, openly challenged it in a major address given in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. in 1987.

With the change of verbs, he pointed out, the council went from equating the Body of Christ with the Catholic Church alone to acknowledging that the one Church of Christ transcends the visible limits of the Catholic Church.

The CDF document, however, indicates that high-level resistance to this common understanding persists even to this day.

Fr. Richard McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.