Concilium v. Communio

CWR Dispatch: Joseph Ratzinger, Theological Reformer by George Weigel
(Also published at First Things.)

As I wrote in The Irony of Modern Catholic History, a fissure in the ranks of the reformist theologians at Vatican II began to open up during the Council’s third session, held in the fall of 1964. A new theological journal, Concilium, was being planned by some of the Council’s influential theological advisers (many of whom had been heavily censored in the pre-Vatican II years). A towering figure among them, the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, began to worry that Concilium would take the reformist project in a deconstructive direction: one that would do serious damage to what John XXIII, in his opening address to the Council, called “the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine,” which Pope John urged “be more effectively defended and presented.”
  
The first several issues of the new journal intensified de Lubac’s concerns. So in May 1965 the most venerable member of its editorial committee quietly withdrew from the Concilium project while continuing his work at the Council itself. As Vatican II drew to a close, others would join him in expressing serious reservations about the tack being taken by their onetime theological allies. And those concerns did not lessen over time.  

The result was what I call in my book “The War of the Conciliar Succession”: the war to define what Vatican II was and what Vatican II intended for the Catholic future. This war was not a struggle between “traditionalists” and “progressives.” It was a bitterly fought contest within the camp of Vatican II theological reformers. It continues to this day. And the question that so concerned Henri de Lubac remains entirely pertinent, 56 years later: Would an interpretation of the Council that effectively set the Catholic Church against “the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine” end up betraying the gospel and emptying it of its power?  

Joseph Ratzinger joined de Lubac and other dissident conciliar reformers in launching another theological journal, Communio, which he and his colleagues hoped would advance an interpretation of Vatican II that was in continuity with the Church’s settled doctrine even as it developed the Church’s understanding of that doctrine. Communio, now published in 14 language editions, has been a creative force in Catholic intellectual life for decades. Like Ratzinger, Communio is not against Vatican II; it has challenged what its authors contend is a wrongheaded interpretation of Vatican II.

Only one group was engaged in true reform, though in a wrong-headed way by employing the council to do it. Would  it be accurate to say the progressives were leaning towards heresy or had embraced it? Or were they guilty of an archaeologistic thinking that reflected a historical reality that existed only in their imagination? (Simplicity, the Eucharist as Last Supper, and all that?)

As recent events in the Church have illustrated, the bottom line in the War of the Conciliar Succession is the reality of divine revelation: Does God’s revelation in Scripture and Tradition include truths that are binding over the centuries, irrespective of cultural circumstances? Or do history and culture judge revelation, which the Church is then authorized to improve, so to speak, in light of “the signs of the times”? Those who stand with the reality of revelation (which was robustly affirmed by Vatican II) are by no means “fundamentalists,” despite what their opponents charge. They are creative theologians who believe in the development of doctrine, but who also understand, with Chesterton, that “an open mind, like an open mouth, should close on something.” 

Was Ressourcement concerned with "development of doctrine" or explaining the Kerygma in a way different from neo-scholasticism? Ay synod is not the place to try to replace one school of theology with another, especially a synod representing a jurisdiction with the size and diversity of the patriarchate of Rome.

P. Kwasniewski leaves this comment:

It's amusing, but in a somewhat sad way, to see George still hanging on to Vatican II as if it's the key question. It isn't. The Concilium/Communio debate at this point is more like arguing over which chairs on the Titanic's deck are to be rearranged first.

Meanwhile, the true symbol of what has happened and what is at center stage can be summed up in two unforgettable images: the Chartres pilgrimage of tradition, where almost 20,000 young people gather for a solemn pontifical traditional Latin Mass, and the Amazon Synod with its Pachamama worship.

The future of the Church will be played out between tradition and modernism, not between this or that school of Vatican II periti.

• The future of the patriarchate of Rome may play out between tradition and modernism, but most likely the patriarchate will muddle along with no substantial ecclesial reforms touching upon current institutions, and if collapse accelerates all will be unprepared for it.