I am heartened to see that the Church is at last beginning, however tentatively, to accept the necessity for real consultation between the Pope, the bishops and the rest of us. I am reminded of a day in the 1960s when I was a student at the Beda College in Rome; I was attending a gathering of English-speaking journalists to whom Christopher Butler (then the abbot of Downside, later an auxiliary bishop in the Westminster archdiocese) was presenting the latest document to emerge from the second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, with its inspiring teaching on the Church. During question time, one of the journalists put a question to Butler along these lines: Did he think that the traditional distinction between the teaching Church and the learning Church still applied in the light of the new d