F. Kerr - Rebels With a Cause. 20th Century Roman Catholic Theologians

7/23/2019 F. Kerr - Rebels With a Cause. 20th Century Roman Catholic Theologians

1/9

Theology Today62 (2005): 297-304

Theology TodayEDITORIAL

Rebels with a Cause:

Twentieth-Century Roman Catholic Theologians

As Edward Oakes notes in his essay in this special issue, thetwentieth century, in retrospect, looks like an era of theologicalcreativity as remarkable as any since the fourth and fifth centu

ries,when the Cappadocians, Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Cyril ofAlexandria were at work, or the thirteenth century, with Albert the Great,Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure.

On the Reformed side, Karl Barth stands alone, yet his work regeneratedProtestant theology for the rest ofthetwentieth century. Interest in Barth'swork seemed to wane, no doubt predictably, in the ten or twenty yearsafter his death; but, as the current wave of books about it indicates, as weenter the twenty-first century, Barth is clearly the theological giant ofmodern times.

On the Roman Catholic side, we have the generation represented in thiscollection: Jacques Maritain (the one lay man, no doubt unwilling toregard himself as a theologian, nevertheless a key figure in the constella

tion),Henri de Lubac, Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, KarlRahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Edward Schillebeeckx, and JosephRatzinger.

Perhaps we may not simplify too much if we ascribe the theologicalcreativity in these eras to the necessity to maintain the purity and integrityof the gospel in confrontation with the radical challenges of Hellenisticphilosophy, Islamicized Aristotelianism, and the Enlightenment, respectively. Karl Barth, for example, from the second version of his Commentary on Romans (1921) onward, set himself against the reigning liberal

Protestantism that he regarded as an unhealthy compromise with theEnlightenment and that undermined gospel truth. Of course, Barth wasopposed by many of his contemporaries: "Barthianism" was and is

sst


2/9

298 Theology Today

denounced as an authoritarian fideism by "liberals," who fear that hedowngrades the status of human reason, while his theology is dismissed asnothing more than "the higher humanism" by more radical Calvinists,such as Cornelius Van Til.

However controversial Barth's theology was in the twentieth century,and is today, and however acrimonious some of the exchanges over it inthe last century, the scene for Roman Catholic theologians was incomparably more turbulent. The pressures under which Catholic theologiansworked were, for them personally and for their publications, far moresevere than anything that affected Barth, at least after 1935, when he tookup the chair of theology at Basle. The orthodoxy of most of the Catholictheologians discussed here was considered suspect at one time or another.Some were subjected to sanctions by ecclesiastical authorities, as well as

to sustained abuse by colleagues in the discipline. Academic careers werederailed or even prevented, and planned books never written.

Jacques Maritain, as a lay man, of course never had his views subjectedto investigation by the Vatican. On the other hand, because of both hisopposition in the 1930s to the Franco regime in Spain (when he wasbranded a "Red") and his writings in the 1940s about liberty and thedignity of the human person, he was ferociously attacked by many of hisfellow Catholics as a "communist" and then as a "liberal." Few woulddeny thatDistinguer pourunir,ou Lesdegrsdu savoir(1932) is a classi

of modem philosophy, though little read these days. No doubt, withLePaysan de laGaronne(1966), Maritain articulated, more eloquently thanany of this great generation of theologians, the disillusionment that heexperienced in the aftermath of Vatican II. With Humanisme intgra(1936), perhaps also little read these days, Jacques Maritain laid down thefoundations of a Catholic Christian humanism that played a decisive partin the spiritual recovery of western Europe after 1945no mean achievement.

Henri de Lubac, as a priest and a Jesuit, had far more difficulty with the

ecclesiastical authorities. A number of Catholic theologians were anonymously censured in Pope Pius XIFs encyclicalHumani Generis(1950) foreffectively wanting to "destroy the gratuity ofthesupernatural order, sinceGod, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering andcalling them to the beatific vision."1De Lubac's Jesuit superiors in Rome,believing him to be among those censured, instructed him to resign fromteaching Jesuit students at their study house at Fourvire. In fact, as henoted wryly, he had not been doing so since 1940, which indicates howimperfectly informed and ramshackle the Vatican bureaucracy can some

times be. Since he was never summoned to defend his views in Rome (oranywhere else), de Lubac always denied being targeted in the encyclical.

h l h f k hi b k d f i


3/9

Editorial 299

libraries and withdrawn from sale. He was ostracized for a decade, hisviews frequently traduced by fellow Jesuit as well as (especially!) Dominican theologians. He continued to publish: Histoire et Esprit:

L'intelligence deVcritured'aprs Origene(1950), three books on Bud

dhist philosophy, andMditationsur l'Eglise(1953).The last ofthese,translated asTheSplendorof theChurch(1956), was

the finest account of the nature of the church for the immediately pre-Vatican II generation of seminarians and lay people, and very widely read.Though explicitly not offered as a complete de ecclesia, it contains nochapter on the papacy, a lacuna that deepened suspicions ofhisorthodoxyin certain influential quarters. In those days, a study of the nature of thechurch that did not start from, or at least highlight, the doctrine of papalprimacy was bound to seem to many commentators somewhat "unortho

dox." It did not help, of course, that de Lubac's references were to biblicaland patristic texts, rather than papal encyclicalsthen regarded, quitecommonly, as the most authoritative support for a theologian's views.

Henri de Lubac's most significant booksCatholicisme (1938),CorpusMysticum(1944), andSurnaturel(1946)were assembled from articlescomposed over the years. He never attempted anything on the scale ofHans Urs von Balthasare trilogy, let alone Karl Barth'sChurchDogmatics.In the early 1950s, when he might have been regarded as coming intohis maturity as a theologian, de Lubac felt so harassed by his critics that

he quite deliberately abandoned an ambitious project to publish a series ofbooks.

Of the theologians discussed here, Bernard Lonergan was never theobject of successful delation to the Holy Officeas he quipped, becausemost of his writings were in a language unknown at the time in the widerRoman Catholic theological community (English). Nor was he ever harassed by fellow theologians. Though he was one of the experts at VaticanII nominated by the Canadian bishops, Lonergan played very little part indrafting any of the Council's texts. On the other hand, through his

lecturing at the Gregorian University in Rome from 1953 until 1965, heinfluenced hundreds of students from every continent and, in particular,the generation of talented young American priests who were to make theirmark in the later decades of the twentieth century.

John Courtney Murray, in the end the most significant American theologian at the Council, was silenced in the mid-1950s by his Jesuit superiors, no doubt at the behest of the Vatican. His position on religiousliberty, much indebted to the First Amendment to the United StatesConstitution, was anathema in the Vatican at the time and, indeed, at the

Catholic University in Washington, where the theologian Joseph Fentonpersistently challenged Murray's Catholic orthodoxy. Murray's legacy,Dignitatis Humanae the Declaration on Religious Liberty was the most


4/9

300 Theology Today

drafting of the text on religious liberty. Murray said that he was taking theillness as his cross and that he was perhaps doing more for the ultimatesuccess of the text from his sickbed than from further participation inargument with its opponents. Congar, himself already suffering a great

deal from the muscular dystrophy that would eventually almost paralyzehim, clearly understood what Murray meant. They belonged to a generation of Catholic theologians who believed that there would be no new lifein the Christian body without participation in the Passion of Christ.Amazing as this may seem to us now, theologians like Murray and Congarregarded their suffering, both physical and intellectual (inflicted by churchauthorities), as a necessary element in their vocation. Learning and argument would never be enough; their service of the truth would have toinclude this (of course unsought!) dimension of "witness"(martyria), the

grace of personal sacrifice.Karl Rahner submitted whatever he wanted to publish to anonymous

peer judgment, as Jesuit rules required. An article he published in 1949questioning, among other things, the point of multiplying the number ofeucharistie celebrations and raising the possibility of concelebrated Eucharists, was attacked in 1954 by Pope Pius XII (without naming Rahner).He was forbidden by the Holy Office ever again to discuss the issue ofconcelebration. An essay on the doctrine of the perpetual virginity ofMary, published in 1960, triggered such alarm in Rome that in 1962 the

Holy Office required everything that Rahner wanted to publish to besubmitted to Rome for censorship.

Later that year, in October, despite all of these suspicions of his"soundness," Rahner was nominated as aperitus (expert) at the VaticanCouncil. In May of1963,he was at last informed that he no longer neededany censorship beyond the normal Jesuit practice. By this time, of course,Rahner was among the most influential theologians at the Council. In anamicable conversation with Cardinal Ottaviani, then Prefect of the HolyOffice, Rahner was told that it was to protect him from those who

misunderstood him that he had enjoyed the privilege of extra censorship.It may be noted that, for all these difficulties about publishing his work,

Rahner was never manoeuvred out of any of the academic chairs that heoccupied in his long career. True, he resigned from his prestigious chair atthe University of Munich, but this was because he was not allowed tosupervise doctoral candidates in theology because the chair was notformally in the theology faculty. Some colleagues may have been glad tosee him go elsewhere (Mnster); he was no doubt too much ofa"star." Butthe problem lay with faculty regulations, not in any suspicions of Rahner's

theological orthodoxy.Thus, we could go through the whole list, and nearly all of these

t ti th t th l i f ll d i i t ti th


5/9

Editorial 301

mysticwidely regarded at the time as a "bad influence" on himheremained under a cloud for many years. His basically sympathetic study ofKarl Barth, published in 1951, did not endear him to most Catholictheologians at the time. The first recognition of his contribution to theol

ogy was the doctorate conferred upon him in 1965 by the University ofEdinburgh (then a distinctively Presbyterian faculty), no doubt mainly forhis book on Barth, and, in the same year, the award by the EcumenicalPatriarch, Athenagoras of Constantinople, for his studies of Greek patristicwriters.

Not invited to take part in the Vatican Council, by either the pope or anyof the Swiss bishops, Balthasar was at last recognized as a reputableCatholic theologian in 1969, when Pope Paul VI appointed him to theInternational Theological Commission. It was only in the 1970s, and

particularly during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, though, that vonBalthasar has come to be judged by many commentators as by far thegreatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. Admittedly, the finalvolume of his great trilogy came very late, only a year or two before hisdeath; it is only in the last ten years or so that theologians have been in aposition to judge hismagnum opus as a whole. But in the immediateaftermath of his death, his reputation has not gone into eclipse; on thecontrary, his status has steadily risen. He would, however, have been thefirst to recall the chequered, often threatened course of his theological

activity.Henri de Lubac, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner were never

summoned to the Vatican to explain their views to the authorities. EdwardSchillebeeckx, however, though never forced out of teaching or forbiddento publish, had several colloquies with officials at the Congregation for theDoctrine of the Faith as a result of his book,Jesus: An Experiment inChristology(1974; ET 1979).2There is no doubt that influential figures inthe Vatican had been angered for some years, especially by Schill-ebeeckx's influence at the Council. Everyone knew that the brochure

published by the Dutch bishops in 1961"The Bishops ofthe

Netherlandson the Council"was in fact written largely by Schillebeeckx. The textspeaks, most unsettlingly, of "papal infallibility [as] also involved in theministerial infallibility of the world episcopate" (bad enough!), then goeson to maintain that "the ministerial infallibility oftheworld episcopate" inits turn is "also borne up by the infallible faith of the whole of thecommunity of faith." Each ofthebishops was going to the Council as "thevoice of the whole community of faith for which he is responsible." This,to those with long memories, sounded exactly like the "heresy" of "Gal-

licanism" supposedly eliminated in 1870. This, and much else in thebrochure, looked like an attempt to revise the dogma of papal infallibilityby locating infallibility in the faith of the whole community At the


6/9

Theology Today

Council itself, Schillebeeckx was never an officially appointed peritus

which, since he was not bound by the oath of confidentiality required of

the "experts," meant that he was free to discuss all the draft documents that

came his way and thus to exert a great deal of influence on the thinking of

many of the bishops.

Soon after the appearance of his Jesus bookimmediately translated

into German and soon after into EnglishSchillebeeckx seems to have

been delated to Rome by Dutch theologians who believed he was much

too close to the Dutch bishops for any of them to take steps locally to curb

his work. There was, of course, a problem about the book. Hitherto, all

Catholic expositions of Christology began from the doctrines defined at

the Council of Chalcedon in 451 ("two natures in one person"). As he

made clear at the outset, Schillebeeckx sought to reconstruct Christology

beginning with the apparently diverse Christologies to be found in thethree Synoptic Gospels (and taking Mark as the first written, already a

controversial decision in the eyes of most traditional Catholic theolo

gians), and, even more alarmingly, in the so-called "Q" document. It was

obvious from the start that he planned to move to the Christologies

developed in the Fourth Gospel, in the letters of the apostle Paul, and in

the rest of the New Testament. This is, of course, what he did in the second

volume, published in Dutch in 1977, and in the United States in 1980 as

Christ: The Experience of Jesus asLord.By this time, however, so much

anxiety had been raised that Schillebeeckx responded in 1978 with theshort book, Interim Report on the Books Jesus and Christ (ET 1980),

explaining and to some extent modifying the claims that seemed so

contentious.

In 1980, as a result of his ministry in Catholic renewal groups and base

communities in the Netherlands, Edward Schillebeeckx brought out the

book that becameMinistry: A Case for Change (in Britain) and Ministry:

Leadership in the Community of Jesus Christ (in the U.S.). It is not

difficult to guess what the book was saying. In effect, Schillebeeckx was

setting out the reforms within church structures that, in his view, theVatican Council intended to inaugurate. This book, delated to Rome, was

the subject of another investigation by the officials of the Congregation for

the Doctrine of the Faith, and Schillebeeckx was summoned to explain his

views again. The result was a revised version, The Church with a Human

Face (ET 1985), still calling for radical changes in the Roman Catholic

theology of ministry, on the basis of the pattern of the first millennium and

modern needs.

None of Schillebeeckx's books was ever "condemned" by the Vatican or

withdrawn from sale under pressure. Rather, he was able to explainhimself at greater length and, by and large, succeeded in establishing his

" th d " O th th h d th di h d d th l t


7/9

Editorial 303

preceding volumes, it seems comparatively perfunctory, nothing like thehoped-for completion of hismagnum opuslittlemore than a stop-gap bya theologian disillusioned and weary of harassment.

Bizarrely enough, when one considers his subsequent career as Prefect

of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and now as PopeBenedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger's Habilitationsschrift on Bonaventure'stheology of history and revelation, the product of research undertaken in1953 at the University of Munich, was rejected by his examiners. It waspassed by his supervisor, Gottlieb Shngen, a much underestimated theologian (who appears in Barth's ChurchDogmatics,incidentallyone ofthe very few Catholic theologians of whom Barth approves). However,Michael Schmaus, one of the most distinguished theologians of the day,objected that young Ratzinger's dissertation was defective from a schol

arly point of view and, much worse, betrayed a "dangerous modernism"leading to the "subjectivization oftheconcept of revelation."

3Revised andabridged, it was eventually accepted, enabling Ratzinger to pursue anacademic career.

Cardinal Ratzinger notes how much he owed to the teaching ofFriedrich Wilhelm Maier (1883-1957), the New Testament professor atMunich. Decades previously, Maier was one of the first Catholic scholarsto accept the "Q" hypothesis in Synoptic Gospels studies, which led tointervention by the Vatican to force him out of his post. Though reinstated

in 1924, Maier "never quite got over the trauma," Ratzinger tells us:Indeed, "he harboured a certain bitterness against Rome."4

The Prefect oftheCDF must have appreciated the irony, in his memoirs,in recording his gratitude to a revered professor who never recovered froman attack on his scholarship by the Vatican; and, moreover, in revealingthat his own dissertation was initially rejected because of its supposedmodernist tendencies.5

One way or another, then, the most remarkable figures in twentieth-century Catholic theology suffered a good deal of harassment from their

co-religionists, who suspected them of unorthodox and, indeed, hereticalinterpretations of Catholic Christian doctrine. In various ways, they werevindicated at the Second Vatican Council, though they were often saddened by some of the results (as were Balthasar, de Lubac, and Maritain,especially). We should remember how much their work and dedication towhat they viewed as the truth ultimately cost some of them, personally andacademically. Ironically, Yves Congar did more than anyone to set out"Catholic principles of ecumenism." He introduced "a theology of thelaity," reintroduced the possibility of "true and false reform of the

Church," and distinguished between "tradition and traditions" (to cite thetitles of his best-known books). These collectively amount to the principal


8/9

304 Theology Today

agenda at Vatican II, yet he suffered more severely than any of hiscontemporariesindeed, asnoted already,heeven regardedtheprogressive muscular disability afflicting him as agraced elementof thecost.

6

If the resurrectionofCatholic theological creativityinthe middleofthetwentieth centurywas anunexpected momentofgrace,to becelebratedwe should not forget the ordeals that so manyofthesignificantfigureshadto undergo. For reasons too complicated to explore now, the RomanCatholic Churchwas so distant from Protestantism, theEnlightenment"progress," "liberalism," "modernism,"and soon,in theopening decadesof the twentieth century thattheengagement with "modernity,"nodoubtmade inevitable by the two WorldWars,could not be other than traumaticFor decades, the pastors and mostofthetheologians sought to maintain theChurch insplendid isolation.By the1950s, however,ahandful oftheo

logians, some very influentially placedin theVatican,sawthatthelongstanding unity andhomogeneity of Catholicism, which they treasuredwere threatened from withinby a newgeneration.Towhat extent theirfearswerejustified,or atleast intelligible,isanother complicated questionthat awaits anotherday.

Fergus Kerr, OP FRSE


9/9

^ s

Copyright and Use:

Asan ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use

according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as

otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement.

No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the

copyright holder(s)' express written permission. Any use, decompiling,

reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a

violation of copyright law.

This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s). The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journal

typically is the journal owner, who also may own the copyright in each article. However,

for certain articles, the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the article.

Please contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or covered

by your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. For information regarding the

copyright holder(s), please refer to the copyright information in the journal, if available,or contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s).

About ATLAS:

The ATLA Serials (ATLAS) collection contains electronic versions of previously

published religion and theology journals reproduced with permission. The ATLAS

collection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.

The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association.

Documents

F. Kerr - Rebels With a Cause. 20th Century Roman Catholic Theologians