¹ Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils edited by Norman P. Tanner SJ (1990), volume 2, page 810.

² A.M. Farrer, Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials (1964): 15–16.

³ Born in Ireland in 1870 where he died in 1945, Michael Sheehan was Co-adjutor Archbishop of Sydney from 1922 to 1937: educated at Oxford and in Germany before going to Maynooth; wrote books on Irish language and botany as well as in theology. His Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, published in the 1890s, was revised and republished, with the 1952 edition being widely used on the eve of Vatican II.

⁴ This is a translation by Alexander Dru of Sur les chemins de Dieu (1956), itself a revision of De la connaissance de Dieu (1945).

⁵ See The Letters and Diaries, volume XI (1961): pages 260 and 263.

⁶ In 1860, after theological studies at Tübingen, Granderath entered the Society of Jesus; from 1874 until 1887 he taught at Ditton Hall, Cheshire, home of the Stapleton-Bretherton family, placed at the disposal of exiled Jesuit students during the Kulturkampf; then drafted into preparing the Acta of Vatican I for publication.

⁷ The ‘lake’ for which the volumes were named is the Laacher See, near Andernach, where the great Romanesque abbey, secularised in 1802, was occupied from 1820 by Jesuits, who named it Maria-Laach, until they too were obliged to leave in the 1870s: the Benedictines returned in the 1890s.

⁸ There is a vast scholarly literature on this subject but nowhere better to start than Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (1980).

⁹ The translators have no problem with exclusive language, or perhaps had to do as some Roman dicastery decreed.

¹⁰ Since he died in 1991 aged 95 Henri de Lubac did not have a hand in the Catechism but his influence is unmistakable.

¹¹ This paper is substantially as presented at the Katholische Akademie in Münster on 14 March 2009 and as the Gonzaga Lecture in Glasgow on 9 March 2010.