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While taught by Vatican II, the “sense of the faith” (sensus fidei) has had little official impact in the Catholic Church. What would the church look like if it took this conciliar teaching to heart? To address this neglect, John Burkhard locates the historical roots of the teaching and its emergence at Vatican II. It attempts to better understand the “sense of the faith” in the light of other fundamental teachings of the council and challenges the hierarchical church to invite all the faithful to rightfully participate in the prophetic ministry of the whole church, closely allied with Pope Francis’s call for a more synodal church.
John J. Burkhard, OFM Conv, PhD, taught systematics at the former Washington Theological Union; at Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota; and in Ghana, West Africa. In 2004 he published Apostolicity Then and Now: An Ecumenical Church in a Postmodern World. He writes primarily on ecclesiology and continues to translate theological works from French and German.
