Going over the biographical essay in the draft for my book, adapting and expanding upon the work I did in the dissertation. I see that the question of the local church – the local church and the regional church – needed more attention than it received at Vatican II, according to Sullivan. Certainly a problem in the Catholic Church is excessive centralization and the need for a decentralization, at least in the way some things are actually conducted. It may be that Vatican II did not stress sufficiently the contribution that the local and regional churches should be making, and the extent to which they should actually be making decisions. In other words, Sullivan felt that we were here seeing a problem in the whole business of what might be called “inculturation” – recognizing that there are differences in the way that the Church has to be realized or actualized in different cultural situations.

Jotting down notes for a possible article here reflecting on the problem of mass media as a problem for inculturation because of mass media’s tendency to produce a single culture, philosophy and politics, and the resulting pressure on the Church to inculturate – or capitualte – solely to that culture’s terms.