Religion: Council of Renewal

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of the Pope. Even to Protestants it might seem somewhat less arrogant than unmitigated papal infallibility.

∙ STRUCTURE OF DIOCESES. Some of the bitterest infighting of the council may well come over the problem of remapping diocesan boundaries. Italy, with 48 million Catholics, has 260 bishops, some with only a handful of priests serving them; West Germany, with 23 million Catholics, has only 21 dioceses. The council is expected to approve in principle procedures for suppressing small sees and gradually dividing up such cumbersome jurisdictions as Mexico City (the world's largest diocese, with 4,800,000 Catholics) and New York, where Francis Cardinal Spellman needs ten auxiliary bishops to help govern his 1,672,000 communicants.

∙ PRIESTS & RELIGIOUS. The Council of Trent set up the principle of incardination, which binds most parish priests to serve permanently in the diocese in which they are ordained. Many churchmen feel that the rule is too rigid for the world of today. To equalize the distribution of priests—the U.S. has one for every 800 Catholics, Latin America one for every 10,000—the council may approve procedures that would let the Pope transfer clergy to areas where they are most needed. Thanks to a plethora of papal charters and privileges, most of the church's religious orders are largely exempt from the jurisdiction of bishops. Dominicans and Jesuits, who are proud of their status as the Pope's spiritual elite guard, will object strongly, but the council may give bishops more authority over personnel of religious orders within their dioceses.

∙ LITURGY. The council will not abolish Latin as the liturgical language of Western-rite Catholics, but will probably let regional or national councils of bishops make vernacular translations for the parts of the Mass specifically addressed to the congregation—the Epistle and Gospel, for instance. At the request of their priests, some bishops will push for a drastic shortening of the breviary, the collections of psalms, verses and readings that ordained clerics must recite every day. Missionaries may get more authority to incorporate native customs and religious practices into baptism, marriage and funeral rites.

∙ THE CHURCH & NON-CATHOLICS. One of the sternest of Catholic beliefs is the old dictum that "outside the church there is no salvation." In practice, this hard-boiled doctrine has been broadly interpreted in recent centuries: the last theologian to teach that non-Catholics cannot be saved —Boston's ex-Jesuit Leonard Feeney—was excommunicated in 1953 for so arguing. The council may make a doctrinal statement on the church as the mystical body of Christ that would emphasize the nonjuridical aspects of Catholicism, and spell out the type of relationship that all Christians, and nonbaptized persons in good faith, have to the visible church of Rome. A related council possibility: generous new ground rules for participation by clergy and laymen in ecumenical dialogues with men of other faiths.

∙ MARRIAGE. The council will almost certainly issue a strong denunciation of divorce and of artificial contraception—but may also point out that some Catholic couples may limit the size of their families. German bishops are pressing hard for some modification of the canon law on mixed marriages, which