The church of the future

For the first time in its two thousand-year history the Catholic Church can now truly claim to be a 'universal' church. No longer the church of the Latin West, it has become the church 'of six continents', a World Church in which the peoples of theThird world predominate. Such a fundamental shift in the church'e awareness of itself is perhaps more radical in its implications than the Second Vatican Council - yet this seismic shift has hardly registered within the Church of the First World.