by Gerard Bogan

These days it is easy, faced with so many clerics who long for a past they never knew, to think that the Second Vatican Council has failed. However, those of us who know that the Council was one of the great moments in the history of the Church need to hold firm. I continue to be interested, not simply in the theologians of the Council, but in those for whom the Council was the next step in an already advancing search. I am thinking particularly of de Lubac, Rahner, Congar, and others.

Many bishops were not prepared for the discussions which were to take place at the Council. They had been educated according to the categorisations of Neo-scholasticism and Thomism, whereas the Council made a dramatic shift to Personalism: person rather than soul and body (1). Even today in Scotland, some young priests appear to have been educated in the same tired system. For the Council’s theologians, the deliberations of the Council were merely the next step in their continuing vocational search. Even before the second world war, Henri de Lubac was asking fresh questions (2).

In our own time, many bishops and priests engage in conversations about how to grow the Church; and yet, their understanding seems to be little more than increasing the numbers of people who turn up to Mass. Henri de Lubac was already asking ‘What is the Church for?’ As the Council beckoned, many bishops and priests might have said that the purpose of the Church was to give me (not even ‘us’) the means to ‘save my soul’. In the post-conciliar years the councils at Medellín and Puebla emphasised that Christians ought to unite themselves with everyone – Christian or not – in working to establish the Kingdom of God on earth (3). This concretises the concept of holiness presented by Lumen Gentium, saving it from being reduced to devotional piety. For Schillebeeckx it is not fleeing the world but fleeing with the world to the Kingdom of God (4).

Dr Gerard Bogan is parish priest of St Columba’s Church, Viewpark, Uddingston.

Notes

(1) Attilo Rossi, From Neo-Scholastic to Vatican II: the debate on Nature-Grace and Church-World. Lumen 5.2 (July 2017)

(2) Henri de Lubac, Catholicism (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1947).

(3 ) Conferencia Episcopal de Chile, La Evangelización en el presente y en el futuro de América Latina (Santiago: CELAM, 1979) 4.2, 852-54.

(4) Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus in our Western Culture, Mysticism, Ethics and Politics (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1987) 70.

(5) See ‘La Séparation du Monde dans le Monarchisme au Moyen Age’, Albert Plé (ed.) La Separation du Monde (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1961) 75-94.

(6) Jean Leclercq OSB, Contemplative Life, (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1978) 36

(7) Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super cantica canticorum 40. 5