Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2006

In its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World the Second Vatican Council put behind it the rejection of modernity that characterised the Roman Catholic Church’s relationship with the world in the previous 150 years. Forty years after the publication of Gaudium et Spes, this article seeks to articulate the theological understanding of the church-world relationship contained in the final text of the document by examining the sequence of schemas which led to it.