Sunday, 1/25/15
(In place of a
homily I will here print an article I am just finished writing.)
Thirty years ago when Pope John Paul II visited Manila there
were four million at the gathering to greet him. He had an impact on people
that one theologian at Vatican II described: “Wojtyla makes a great impression.
He has an imposing personality that radiates power. He has a prophetic force
that is both calm and incontestable.”
John Paul’s personality made him a tough act to follow, but
now, Francis, while totally different from John Paul II, is keeping pace with
him. On his visit to Manila last weekend, six million people crowded in to see
him.
Here in America, we hear people saying things like, “I just
like him.” And when pushed for a reason, they might say, “Well, that other one
had those scarlet papal slippers, but Francis, he just wears shoes.”
Let’s go all the way back to Pope John XXIII. In 1959,
feeling that the Roman Catholic Church had become very Roman, but not very
catholic, he tried making it catholic by calling in twenty-four hundred bishops
from a hundred different countries. Asking them to give time to prayerful
deliberations, he asked them to bring the church into line with what it would
be if Jesus were in charge.
The last of the sixteen documents was to be on the
Church’s proper relationship to the modern world, and when the draft document
was circulated in the summer of 1965, the bishops from Latin America, Africa
and Asia favored it, while most of the European bishops did not.
The future popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, each
published articles objecting to it on the grounds that it departed from the
Council of Trent’s teaching that we are initially estranged from God by our
being born with Original Sin on our souls. The new document’s difference from
Trent was clearly the case with a sentence in its paragraph 19.
“The dignity of man
rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God, and this
invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into
being.”
Now, although most of the European churchmen shared the
objections of the two future popes, it was three Europeans theologians who had
most clearly differed from Trent on the matter of Original Sin. The three had
the very French first names of Maurice, Henri, and Yves. Let me first introduce
Maurice Blondel.
At nineteen, in 1880, Maurice was accepted for graduate work
at the Sorbonne where he did research in the Philosophy of Action. (That is the
field that tries to identify the impulses that move one from inertia to
action.) Publishing his “L’Action” in 1890, Maurice successively defended its
contention that every human action is initiated by one's automatically reaching
for the Creator. However, the Sorbonne’s faculty, while granting him the top
grade for scholarship, denied him a teaching certificate on the grounds that
his thesis was “too Catholic.”
That left Maurice and his young wife Rose close to
starvation for four years before the small college at Aix, north of Marseilles,
gave him a teaching position. He was there in 1910 when by a sad quirk the
Church he had stood up for came to judge his scholarly books to be guilty of
Modernism. Pope Pius X put them on the Index.
We turn next to Henri de Lubac. Born in 1896, he was just
finishing college in 1914, when he was inducted into the infantry. There, in
1917, he had a German bullet graze his skull, leaving him with recurrent pains
until his death in 1991.
In 1919 Henri was accepted at the Jesuit seminary that a
secular France had caused to be relocated to England. There, he came upon a
hand-written copy of “L’Action,” Maurice Blondel’s thesis about humans
automatically reaching up for God.
Then, when his head pains interrupted his third year of
studies, and his superiors sent him to Marseilles for a rest cure, Henri took a
day trip up to Aix, where the seventy-year-old Maurice Blondel had recently
completed a survey of early Christian writings.
The two scholars hit it off immediately, discovering that no
writings from the time of the Apostles spoke of us as being born in sin. From
his collaboration with Blondel, Henri de Lubac began theorizing that while
humans from the beginning of their existence reach up to God, it was actually
in response to God reaching down to them.
We turn now to Yves Congar, the third of our Frenchmen. Yves
was born in the Ardennes in 1904. Then, in 1914 when troops of the Kaiser
carried off his father, his mother set a ten-year-old Yves to writing a daily
account of life under the German occupation. The journal he completed at the
Armistice in 1918 set the pattern for the thousand-page Vatican II journal he
would write between 1960 and 1965.
Yves, ordained a Dominican priest in 1930, and set to
teaching Theology, took every opportunity to attend group meetings with
Protestants, and that led to his publishing “Divided Christendom, a Catholic
Study.” As well, independently of Blondel and Lubac, Congar took to writing
French translations of early Christian writings; and that led to his
questioning the importance Trent gave to Original Sin.
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Yves, serving as a
chaplain, was taken to a Nazi prison camp from which he led four dramatic, but
unsuccessful escape attempts. His bravery won him France’s Cross de Guerre.
(Henri de Lubac, who published an underground newspaper during the Nazi
occupation, received the same decoration.)
After 1945, Maurice Blondel, Congar and de Lubac got
together, and they coined the word “ressourcement.” By it they stipulated that for any teaching to be truly Christian, it had
to be rooted in Christianity’s Apostolic times. With their historical research
leading them to challenge the belief that all humans are born with Adam’s sin,
trouble lay ahead for them. Then, in 1946 Henri de Lubac challenged the accepted teaching on Sanctifying Grace
with the publication of his “Supernaturale.”
The Catholic Church from the time of Pope Leo XIII, had
demanded that Philosophy faculties in Catholic institutions should follow the
teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. And, although Aquinas had not specifically
taught that we are born with Original Sin, the professors of Aquinas’s
Dominican Order maintained that it was clearly implied in his teachings. Such
scholars were known as “Neo-Thomists,” and their theory was called Neo-Thomism.
(In my seminary course in 1950 we followed Neo-Thomism in
philosophy and theology; and our professors spoke with awe when they mentioned
its chief exponent, the Reverend
Garrigou-lagrange, Rector of Rome’s Angelicum.)
Maurice Blondel died in 1949, escaping Rome’s formal
rejection of the theories of their “Ressourcement Trio.” That rejection came in
1950 when Pope Pius XII had Father Garrigou-Langange ghostwrite the encyclical
“Humani Generis.” Here is some of what it said.
“Some are
presumptive enough to question seriously whether theology and theological
methods, such as with the approval of ecclesiastical authority and are found in
our schools, should not only be perfected, but also completely reformed.
Disregarding
the Council of Trent, some pervert the very concept of original sin.
We
charge the Bishops and the Superiors General of Religious Orders, binding them
most seriously in conscience, to take most diligent care that such opinions be
not advanced.”
The Holy Office instructed Rome’s Apostolic Delegate in
France to have Congar and de Lubac’s superiors remove them from their
teaching posts, while removing their offending books from the shelves. That
sent Congar studying abroad, while de Lubac found a quiet room where he spent
ten years doing research. When a friend asked him if he were bitter, this is
what he wrote in reply.
“While these
shocks trouble my soul to its depths, they are powerless against the
great and essential things that make up every moment of our lives. The
Church is always there, in a motherly way, with her Sacraments and her prayers,
with the Gospel that she hands down to us intact, with her Saints who surround
us; in short, with Jesus Christ, present among us, whom she gives us ever more
fully when we suffer.
Then, after the death of Pope Pius XII in October 1958, the
new pope whom the cardinals elected was none other than Giuseppi Roncalli, the
former Apostolic Delegate to France, the one who had delivered the ban on
Congar and Lubac. This left the two of them wondering about how they stood now
that Cardinal Giuseppe Roncalli was elected pope as John XXII.
Two months into his pontificate, John XXIII called for the
opening of Vatican II. That set
Congar and Lubac to exchanging letters chasing down rumors about what
was to come next. Then, out of the blue, each of them received an invitation to
serve as a special theology consultant to the council.
Roncalli, in his years in Paris, had secretly admired the
writings of Lubac and Congar, but he had felt bound to obey Rome’s Curia. Now,
though, his sense of obedience went into reverse, binding him to do what God
wanted.
Henri de Lubac, having a bad time with his old head wound,
asked Congar to make a full exposition of the theological views they shared.
Then, after Yves had submitted his paper, Ottaviani invited him for a private
talk. Congar described them sitting “knee to knee” expressing their views.
Ottaviani praised Congar for his theological acumen, while adding that there
were three heresies on every page Congar wrote.
Coming out from that interview, feeling thoroughly
chastised, Congar had a chance meeting with a bishop from Chile. The man
assured him that most Latin American bishops, ignoring the ban of Lubac and
Congar’s books, were sharing their views.
That welcome assurance was a foretaste of four years of
council sessions at which the views of the Curia were to be swamped by those of
the world’s bishops. It ended with their demanding that both Congar and Lubac
being named cardinals.
More than Maurice Blondel or Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar always had deep respect for
Protestants, and even for those with no clear belief in God. For that reason he
was uncomfortable with Catholics who felt that humans could only be close to
God after a good Confession. During the Vatican II sessions, he met daily to
solicit the views of the Observers.
Sadly, after Vatican II’s bishops were scattered, the Curia
was free to again make our church more Roman than catholic. We saw that in 2011
when the beautiful English of our four Eucharistic Prayers was pushed aside,
replaced by clumsy word-by-word translations of the texts used in Rome.
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