Many of the impulses of the Second Vatican Council - such as
episcopal collegiality and the co-responsibility of the laity - have
"only been half-heartedly realised up till now", a senior cardinal has
said.Cardinal Walter Kasper, 79, who for nine years worked in the Vatican heading the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, warned that Roman centralism had increased since the Council.
In a lengthy article in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II, the cardinal said the Council still offered "riches" that had yet to be discovered by the Church.
The cardinal admitted that the departure from the Church of many priests and Religious in the first two decades after Vatican II was one of the Council's "darker sides".
But he added: "The Council triggered a dynamism which cannot be reversed."