commentators on Vatican II said that if the church took a collegial approach to all of its decisions, it would begin to look more and more like a democracy. . But the church is not a democracy, is it? The church has been governed in different ways through the centuries. For the first eight centuries, popes were elected by a vote of the people of Rome. That was a kind of democracy. The first bishop in U.S. history, John Carroll of Baltimore, was elected by a vote of all the priests in the thirteen