Pope Francis has finally overturned the Roman apple cart. He has unveiled far-reaching reforms to the way the Catholic Church is run – which is what he was elected to do in 2013, when a near consensus emerged among the cardinals in conclave that it was high time the Roman Curia, the Church’s civil service, had its wings clipped. The successors of the apostles around the world had had enough of being told what to do by bureaucrats.

Two key ideas that emerged from the Second Vatican Council were that baptism is the basic sacrament that defines a Christian, and that the definitive metaphor for the Church is “The People of God”. In the first case, what was being abandoned was the idea that lay people were mere delegates of the ordained hierarchy, to whom they owed obedience, with no theological standing in their own right. And in the second case, the model of the Church being superseded was the “Mystical Body of Christ”, a “perfect society”, a supernatural entity governed by its head, Christ himself, with the Pope as his representative or “vicar”. But in the years since the Council, church structures continued to reflect the old pattern of thinking, with the Church run from the top down, and with the key office holders priests and bishops whose authority also flowed down from the top.