The Council Fathers avoided voting on the schema at this point, and simply ordered that the schema be merged with the other two documents on Christian unity. Schema on the Church On December 1, discussion began on the schema everyone was waiting for, that on the Church. There was only one week left before the scheduled end of the First Session. The schema embodied the legalistic view of the Church to be found in current theology manuals. Some important claims: the Church of Christ is identical with the Roman Catholic Church; bishops have no authority over the universal Church except by participation in the universal authority of the pope; talk of a priesthood of the faithful is metaphorical since only clerics are priests “properly so called”. The criticism of the reformers was unrelenting. Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx wrote detailed criticisms that were circulated among the Council Fathers. Given the renewal tendency manifested in the votes on earlier schemas, the schema on the Church was quite possibly headed for defeat. The day before the scheduled vote on acceptance in principle, Pope John intervened to say there were 2 problems with the schemas so far: too much material and not enough aggiornamento. So he was appointing a special commission to supervise the rewriting of all the schemas in order to reduce the amount of material and to better reflect the vision he had outlined in his opening address. End of the First Period So the First Session ended on 8 December, having made little progress with the schemas: only 5 of the 22 had been examined and none had received final approval. But something important had happened: it had become clear, to most people's surprise, that a majority of Council participants were in favour of some degree of renewal. The prediction of curialists that the bishops would readily approve all of the schemas and that the Council would be over in a matter of weeks was quite mistaken. And as a result, the work of the preparatory commissions would have to be redone in order to better reflect the spirit of renewal the pope had been expecting. Interval between first and second periods The Coordinating Commission and the Revision of the Schemas At the end of the First Session, Pope John created a Coordinating Commission to supervise the conciliar commissions in the task of revising all the schemas in order to