It is fitting indeed and just, right and helpful unto salvation -- oh wait, not that kind of preface!
18 January is recently celebrated among some of us as "The Confession of St Peter". There really is no such thing. Rather, it is a revisionist version of a centuries-old feast called "The Chair of St Peter in Rome", "chair" being a symbol of the supposed continuation of the authority of St Peter, including his successors the "bishops" of Rome, expressed in the words written above the chair, O Pastor Ecclesiae, tu omnes Christi pascis agnos et oves (O pastor of the Church, you feed all Christ's lambs and sheep).
Indeed we do well to replace this idea with the correct idea that it is the confession of faith by St Peter and not an authority stemming from him that shows the Rock upon which the church is built. We don't do well to do it on this day. For one thing, the feast no longer exists, even for the Roman Church, and was combined during Vatican II with the other feast of a chair of St Peter, at Antioch, on 22 February. For another and more important thing, 22 February is the day on which tradition holds that St Peter spoke his confession of faith.
This blog posts at some length about the confession/chairs thing, and the sorry story of chairs that does along with it, on 22 February with "The Confession of St Peter. On Chairs Too." Our point here is, to take this day of a now-vacated feast of the "Petrine authority" of the papacy, from whose Babylonian Captivity we have been free for five hundred years, to see that in recent times the Roman Church has gone even further away from the ideals of the Lutheran Reformation than before Vatican II, even as on the surface it seems to have moderated.
What follows this preface is an article by Patrick Marrin of the National Catholic Reporter, with copyright given. It was also published online here. (If the link is still active.) I am posting the text typos and all. It is in two parts. First, an account of an encounter with Godfrey Diekmann, OSB, one of the leading lights of the "liturgical movement" leading up to Vatican II and of Vatican II itself, at which he was a peritus (theological expert consultant). Second, an address given by Godfrey in 1997.
Both absolutely typify Vatican II; its aim to reverse 1,600 years of church history stand in stark contrast with our aim to not revolutionise, not reverse, but reform the church in continuity with all its history. It is no wonder that Vatican II style changes have been made in many churches beyond the Roman one, but as it proceeds from a basis foreign to ours, we need to understand and reject it.
Father Godfrey was born into eternity (aka died, his dies natalis) on 22 February 2002, ironic on Catholic grounds in that 22 February is now in the post-Vatican II novus ordo calendar the Feast of the Chair of St Peter, ironic on catholic grounds in that 22 February is the traditional date on which St Peter made his confession.
On a personal note, it was my inestimable privilege to have known him. He was a stunning accomplishment of the human spirit even if he was, IMHO, wrong about damn near everything, and was a professor and Benedictine unmatched except, again IMHO, by his much lesser known brother Father Conrad, whose World Lit (Homer, the Greek tragedians, Virgil, Dante and Cervantes, I suppose to-day we would say Western Lit) and haiku classes were among the singular experiences of my life.
Diekmann says hold fast to hope - Vatican II figure Godfrey Diekmann
With at least one notable exception.
Even at 90, Benedictine Fr. Godfrey Diekmann carries his 6-foot-3-inch frame straight and tall behind the aluminum walker he is pushing swiftly down the long monastic corridor at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. His face -- large, sculpted and serene -- glows above his black turtleneck.
He is a man on a final mission, made all the more urgent by a doctor's verdict last August that he could die or be incapacitated at any moment by a, host of heart troubles that have left him too fragile for any further medical remedy.
Diekmann, regarded by many as one of the giants of the American church and a key participant in the work of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), has been using his borrowed time since Benedict August to reassert that the most important goal of the Second Vatican Council was to recover for everyone full and confident access to an intimate life with God through Jesus Christ. The key to opening up the institutional church to this life was to restore an understanding of the church as the body of Christ. This single reform held revolutionary implications for every aspect of the church's governance, worship, spirituality and mission. (See accompanying story.)
In his 63 years teaching patristics -- the rich treasury of writings from the first centuries of the church -- Diekmann has struggled to convey to his students the meaning of the patristic adage: "He became human that we might become divine."
"My main point in teaching was to make my students realize what Christianity is -- that it's not just being good with the grace of God helping us, but it means real transformation, that you are sharing the divine nature. This must be taken seriously.
"What does it mean to say that we are members of the body of Christ?" Diekmann asked. "It means that in some absolute, almost contradictory way, we are sons and daughters of God, and not just as a figure of speech. The very fact that we casually keep on talking about being adopted children of God is proof that obviously we don't have the faintest idea what this is about, because adopted, by itself, in present usage, can only mean a matter of the law.
"We acknowledge that Christ, of course, is the tree Son of God. But we are now also tree sons and daughters of God, but by a gift -- by adoption -- and this is actually sharing the life of God. That is a staggering thing, and for many Catholics it is completely new."
For Diekmann, these "glad tidings" so exceed the claims of ordinary religion, are so stunning in their implications, even theologians fail to comprehend them. The language of Western philosophy has never been able to adequately express what the Eastern church has always celebrated through symbol, music and ritual in its liturgy, Diekmann said.
For all the controversy that swirled about Vatican II, this is what it was basically about -- to re-animate the church and its members as the body of Christ.
Diekmann believes that we cannot overstate the importance of this restored ecclesiology and must not allow it to languish. It was the soul of the 40-year pastoral liturgical movement that helped prepare the church for the Vatican Council, and it is the one image of the church that has the power, lacking in other images, to inspire us to embrace the gospel's call to become participants in the life of God.
The pre-Vatican II church most older Catholics remember, enshrined by the Council of Trent in 1563 and bolstered by Vatican I in 1870, was a proud if isolated medieval cathedral/fortress at the height of its triumphalist stature. The Catholic church was the oldest, largest, wealthiest, authoritarian institutional religion on earth. For many, it was also divinely ordained, infallible and changeless.
Diekmann shares the view held by many church historians that such a structure was rooted not in the New Testament but in Emperor Constantine's decision in 313 to advance Christianity as the state religion. The church went from being a countercultural force and catalyst to being guardian of the status quo. Bishops became territorial, or diocesan, governors, a corruption of their original servant roles and a blow to collegiality, or shared authority among all bishops. "From the time of Constantine until Vatican II, you had an uninterrupted development of clericalism and centralization," Diekmann said. By unplugging this ecclesiology, the Catholic church set a bold precedent for institutional change worldwide.
The laity, the Catholic church's now nearly 1 billion adherents, had the most to gain by the council's recognition that baptism entitles every member of the church to "conscious, full and active participation" in the worship and life of the church. Every Christian shares in the risen life and redemptive activity of Christ -- priest, prophet and king -- through the use of his or her own charisms.
Diekmann recalls the speech given by Cardinal Leo Suenens during the council on the charisms flowing from baptism: "Each one by baptism has his own charism and contributes something to the church, first of all to the local church, or ecclesia, to which you belong, and then to the entire church. In God's plan you are indispensable. This is terribly important -- the importance of laity of themselves."
The idea of lay charisms was little understood at the time of Suenens' speech in the 1960s, even as the idea of the body of Christ was rejected by some in the 1920s as too dangerous, too much like the Protestant idea of the "priesthood of the faithful."
While many council reforms are coming more slowly than supporters had hoped, Diekmann the historian believes in taking the long view. What the council adopted in principle still needs to be fully implemented: "But the momentum of 1,600 years cannot be reversed in a mere generation," Diekmann cautioned. "The doctrinal foundations have been firmly placed by Vatican II, and, contrary to increasingly pessimistic evaluations, the substructures of renewal are being placed, often by trial and error if not by official initiative."
Even apparent crisis and controversy can be interpreted positively. The shortage of ordained clergy, for example, has opened the way for non-ordained men and women to serve as parish administrators and has prompted creative extensions of the sacramental work of Christ through lay leadership and outreach. Diekmann said he is joyful in the freedom of the Spirit evident in such adaptive situations. He points to early church writings as an untapped treasury of solutions and models for today's needs. The revolution will continue; there is no turning back. The full application of Vatican II's vital ecclesiology will come because it is the will of the Holy Spirit.
One Protestant observer and close friend of Diekmann, the late Albert Outlet of Southern Methodist University, expressed amazement at the council's dramatic reversal of 1,600 years of church history: "My conviction is that never before in the entire history of Christianity has there been such an obvious intervention of the Holy Spirit as there has been here," Outlet said.
There were setbacks as well. The one Diekmann regards as doing the most damage to the intended impact of the council was the misapplied emphasis given to the phrase "the people of God" in the aftermath of the council.
An Old Testament designation, the phrase was used as the title of Chapter Two of the "Constitution on the Church," and there only to indicate that the whole church is more important than any one part, including the pope or the bishops. Unfortunately, it was later received widely as the operative image for the church, supplanting the body of Christ.
This led to de-emphasis of the most important message flowing from the council. The bold assertion of divine life through baptism, real incorporation into God's own nature, was conveyed as only a special closeness to God within the fellowship of the church. What the council had powerfully proclaimed it failed to effectively teach.
For now, Diekmann is less interested in arguing than in appealing for an openness to the life that is meant to flow freely through the church to each member of the body of Christ. Any structure that blocks that life limits ministry within the church and blocks the urgent mission of the church to proclaim the gospel to the whole world.
As Diekmann anticipates his own face-to-face encounter with God, he has seized every opportunity to alert others to his concern that the gospel of divine life is not reaching the church or the larger world clearly and fully.
When Cardinal Joseph Bernardin attended graduation ceremonies at St. John's University in June of 1996, just months before his death, he asked to see Godfrey Diekmann.
"Before Mass he called for me. He said, `You know I'm sick and I'm not sure I can finish with the Mass. I don't want to just make conversation, but I asked for you so you could tell me what is closest to your heart.' And for 35 minutes I talked about being sons and daughters of God, how that is the essence of Christianity, how that is the glad tidings. He took all of that it in, he listened. Then he said, `You are perfectly correct that we haven't done enough to make that clear.'"
In recent interviews and letters to his many friends, Diekmann's long story of the miracle of the council is being distilled to a kind of mantra he seems intent on proclaiming until the time silence, claims him:
"Baptized Christian, remember of whose body you are a member."
By PATRICK MARRIN Special to the National Catholic Reporter Collegeville, Minn.
2. Collegiality: Bishops are not vicars of the pope. They, too, are vicars of Christ. The diocese is not just a geographical division of the universal church; it is the local church, united to all other churches, and in a most special way to Rome, the church of the pope. The bishop's leadership is made manifest above all in the celebration of the Eucharist.
3. The presences of Christ: Not only in the eucharistic bread and cup but "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them." This involved a long overdue rethinking of sacraments. Sacraments are not just external signs to confer grace, that terribly mechanistic, automatic understanding of the sacraments that created rightful scandal among our Protestant friends. Sacraments are not things, they are acts. They are acts of Christ. Christ is in our midst, continuing to send the Holy Spirit for the upbuilding of the church.
4. The recovery of the resurrection of Christ as redemptive: We in the West for some 500 years at least had put almost exclusive emphasis on Christ's passion and death as effecting our redemption. How bad the situation was is clear from the fact that [F.X.] Durrwell's book on the resurrection as redemptive, published in 1960, just a few years before the council, created heated controversy. But the apostle Paul said, "Christ died for our sins and rose for our justification," that is, that we might have life, Christ's life.
No wonder Augustine could cry out, "We are sons and daughters of the resurrection, and Alleluia is our song?
5. And what is that life of Christ? It is the life of the risen Christ. It is divine life. We are sons and daughters of God, not by nature but by gift. This is the essence of the Christian glad tidings. To quote a patristic cliche, "God became human that we might become divine." Or, as St. Leo the Great tells us, "Christian, remember your dignity." And that thought, I submit, constitutes the one and only school of Christian spirituality of the biblical and patristic period. There are dozens of schools of spirituality at the present time. This is the only one that I could recognize in the writings of the early church: "Christian, remember who you are," or equivalently, "Christian, remember your baptism."
I should, by right, add a sixth point. Since Vatican II, a new situation has arisen, a rightful demand to achieve and to put into effect the equality of male and female. In this question, also, the doctrine of the body of Christ, as expressed, for example, in Galatians 3, or 1 Corinthians 12, the body of Christ concept gives us the strongest and clearest biblical warrant for urging the radical equality of men and women. You all know the famous passage: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).
In conclusion, therefore, let me say, the topic of our discussion is the renewal of the church. Those of us who are old enough will remember what an exhilarating and enriching period of spiritual renewal were the several decades of the pre-Vatican II liturgical movement, a movement inspired by the doctrine of the body of Christ. It was a voyage of ever new discoveries. When all is said and done, Vatican II was a church-wide effort to effect spiritual and structural renewal by that same doctrine.
I submit that it is a complete misunderstanding of the council to think that the concept "people of God" was meant to replace that of the "body of Christ," as largely happened after the Vatican Council II. The chosen people of the Old Testament, the Jews, were already spoken of as the people of God. The new dispensation offers something gloriously new, the people of God have become the family of God, true sons and daughters of God.
The term "people of God" was used as the heading of Chapter Two of the document on the church chiefly to pick out, to give prominence to, one important aspect of the body of Christ, namely, that the entire body is more important than any of its members, even pope and bishop, and that applies also to the teaching of infallibility. The total body is greater than its parts.
In a word, renewal of the church according to the council demands of necessity the recovery in the popular minds and perhaps in that of theologians the biblical and patristic understanding of the church as the body of Christ. "Baptized Christian, remember of whose body you are a member."
Diekmann says hold fast to hope - Vatican II figure Godfrey Diekmann
Vatican II participant appeals for restored priorities, transformed lives
Vatican II, regarded by some as one of the most revolutionary councils in church history, is now the subject of video retrospectives and historical overviews that pronounce who won, or where the pendulum has come to rest. If anyone is watching or reading, the easiest verdict is that the council is fading in both time and influence, its prophets either gone or all but silent.With at least one notable exception.
Even at 90, Benedictine Fr. Godfrey Diekmann carries his 6-foot-3-inch frame straight and tall behind the aluminum walker he is pushing swiftly down the long monastic corridor at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. His face -- large, sculpted and serene -- glows above his black turtleneck.
He is a man on a final mission, made all the more urgent by a doctor's verdict last August that he could die or be incapacitated at any moment by a, host of heart troubles that have left him too fragile for any further medical remedy.
Diekmann, regarded by many as one of the giants of the American church and a key participant in the work of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), has been using his borrowed time since Benedict August to reassert that the most important goal of the Second Vatican Council was to recover for everyone full and confident access to an intimate life with God through Jesus Christ. The key to opening up the institutional church to this life was to restore an understanding of the church as the body of Christ. This single reform held revolutionary implications for every aspect of the church's governance, worship, spirituality and mission. (See accompanying story.)
The body of Christ
For Diekmann this is no worn cliche but Christianity's best-kept secret, a startling revelation conveyed in the prayer offered daily during the preparation of the wine at Mass: "By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity."In his 63 years teaching patristics -- the rich treasury of writings from the first centuries of the church -- Diekmann has struggled to convey to his students the meaning of the patristic adage: "He became human that we might become divine."
"My main point in teaching was to make my students realize what Christianity is -- that it's not just being good with the grace of God helping us, but it means real transformation, that you are sharing the divine nature. This must be taken seriously.
"What does it mean to say that we are members of the body of Christ?" Diekmann asked. "It means that in some absolute, almost contradictory way, we are sons and daughters of God, and not just as a figure of speech. The very fact that we casually keep on talking about being adopted children of God is proof that obviously we don't have the faintest idea what this is about, because adopted, by itself, in present usage, can only mean a matter of the law.
"We acknowledge that Christ, of course, is the tree Son of God. But we are now also tree sons and daughters of God, but by a gift -- by adoption -- and this is actually sharing the life of God. That is a staggering thing, and for many Catholics it is completely new."
For Diekmann, these "glad tidings" so exceed the claims of ordinary religion, are so stunning in their implications, even theologians fail to comprehend them. The language of Western philosophy has never been able to adequately express what the Eastern church has always celebrated through symbol, music and ritual in its liturgy, Diekmann said.
For all the controversy that swirled about Vatican II, this is what it was basically about -- to re-animate the church and its members as the body of Christ.
Diekmann believes that we cannot overstate the importance of this restored ecclesiology and must not allow it to languish. It was the soul of the 40-year pastoral liturgical movement that helped prepare the church for the Vatican Council, and it is the one image of the church that has the power, lacking in other images, to inspire us to embrace the gospel's call to become participants in the life of God.
Resistance to the council
The main source of conflict during and after Vatican II was that the ecclesiology being displaced, a highly centralized and hierarchical model based on Robert Bellarmine's image of the church as a "perfect society," was well entrenched in 1959 when Pope John XXIII surprised everyone by convening the council.The pre-Vatican II church most older Catholics remember, enshrined by the Council of Trent in 1563 and bolstered by Vatican I in 1870, was a proud if isolated medieval cathedral/fortress at the height of its triumphalist stature. The Catholic church was the oldest, largest, wealthiest, authoritarian institutional religion on earth. For many, it was also divinely ordained, infallible and changeless.
Diekmann shares the view held by many church historians that such a structure was rooted not in the New Testament but in Emperor Constantine's decision in 313 to advance Christianity as the state religion. The church went from being a countercultural force and catalyst to being guardian of the status quo. Bishops became territorial, or diocesan, governors, a corruption of their original servant roles and a blow to collegiality, or shared authority among all bishops. "From the time of Constantine until Vatican II, you had an uninterrupted development of clericalism and centralization," Diekmann said. By unplugging this ecclesiology, the Catholic church set a bold precedent for institutional change worldwide.
The laity, the Catholic church's now nearly 1 billion adherents, had the most to gain by the council's recognition that baptism entitles every member of the church to "conscious, full and active participation" in the worship and life of the church. Every Christian shares in the risen life and redemptive activity of Christ -- priest, prophet and king -- through the use of his or her own charisms.
Diekmann recalls the speech given by Cardinal Leo Suenens during the council on the charisms flowing from baptism: "Each one by baptism has his own charism and contributes something to the church, first of all to the local church, or ecclesia, to which you belong, and then to the entire church. In God's plan you are indispensable. This is terribly important -- the importance of laity of themselves."
The idea of lay charisms was little understood at the time of Suenens' speech in the 1960s, even as the idea of the body of Christ was rejected by some in the 1920s as too dangerous, too much like the Protestant idea of the "priesthood of the faithful."
While many council reforms are coming more slowly than supporters had hoped, Diekmann the historian believes in taking the long view. What the council adopted in principle still needs to be fully implemented: "But the momentum of 1,600 years cannot be reversed in a mere generation," Diekmann cautioned. "The doctrinal foundations have been firmly placed by Vatican II, and, contrary to increasingly pessimistic evaluations, the substructures of renewal are being placed, often by trial and error if not by official initiative."
Even apparent crisis and controversy can be interpreted positively. The shortage of ordained clergy, for example, has opened the way for non-ordained men and women to serve as parish administrators and has prompted creative extensions of the sacramental work of Christ through lay leadership and outreach. Diekmann said he is joyful in the freedom of the Spirit evident in such adaptive situations. He points to early church writings as an untapped treasury of solutions and models for today's needs. The revolution will continue; there is no turning back. The full application of Vatican II's vital ecclesiology will come because it is the will of the Holy Spirit.
Astonishing series of miracles
Diekmann's confidence is rooted in his own experience at Vatican II, where he served as a member of the preparatory commission for the document on the liturgy. The council was for him and many other witnesses an astonishing series of miracles -- unforeseen events, opportune moments, dramatic interventions and come-from-behind victories that advanced the daring new ecclesiology, first in the liturgy document, then into the debate on the nature of the church itself.One Protestant observer and close friend of Diekmann, the late Albert Outlet of Southern Methodist University, expressed amazement at the council's dramatic reversal of 1,600 years of church history: "My conviction is that never before in the entire history of Christianity has there been such an obvious intervention of the Holy Spirit as there has been here," Outlet said.
There were setbacks as well. The one Diekmann regards as doing the most damage to the intended impact of the council was the misapplied emphasis given to the phrase "the people of God" in the aftermath of the council.
An Old Testament designation, the phrase was used as the title of Chapter Two of the "Constitution on the Church," and there only to indicate that the whole church is more important than any one part, including the pope or the bishops. Unfortunately, it was later received widely as the operative image for the church, supplanting the body of Christ.
This led to de-emphasis of the most important message flowing from the council. The bold assertion of divine life through baptism, real incorporation into God's own nature, was conveyed as only a special closeness to God within the fellowship of the church. What the council had powerfully proclaimed it failed to effectively teach.
Liturgical buzzword
The idea of fellowship, or koinonia, became the buzzword of many liturgical reformers eager to replace the formal, vertical, divine worship in the old liturgy with the new, theologically horizontal and less formal celebration of a meal with the human Jesus in community. The result was a false evaluation of the transcendent and immanent dimensions of the liturgy. The former emphasis on transcendence became a one-sided stress on immanence -- we become pals with God. Both dimensions are essential. This misunderstanding created divisions within the reform effort and became a source of untold confusion and criticism in the wake of the council, and this has continued to distract and delay implementation of its deeper purposes.For now, Diekmann is less interested in arguing than in appealing for an openness to the life that is meant to flow freely through the church to each member of the body of Christ. Any structure that blocks that life limits ministry within the church and blocks the urgent mission of the church to proclaim the gospel to the whole world.
As Diekmann anticipates his own face-to-face encounter with God, he has seized every opportunity to alert others to his concern that the gospel of divine life is not reaching the church or the larger world clearly and fully.
When Cardinal Joseph Bernardin attended graduation ceremonies at St. John's University in June of 1996, just months before his death, he asked to see Godfrey Diekmann.
"Before Mass he called for me. He said, `You know I'm sick and I'm not sure I can finish with the Mass. I don't want to just make conversation, but I asked for you so you could tell me what is closest to your heart.' And for 35 minutes I talked about being sons and daughters of God, how that is the essence of Christianity, how that is the glad tidings. He took all of that it in, he listened. Then he said, `You are perfectly correct that we haven't done enough to make that clear.'"
In recent interviews and letters to his many friends, Diekmann's long story of the miracle of the council is being distilled to a kind of mantra he seems intent on proclaiming until the time silence, claims him:
"Baptized Christian, remember of whose body you are a member."
By PATRICK MARRIN Special to the National Catholic Reporter Collegeville, Minn.
COPYRIGHT 1999 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
[Here is the "accompanying story". It is also online here.]
"Christian, remember your baptism" - 1997 address from Fr Godfrey Diekmann
These remarks were delivered by Fr. Godfrey Diekmann as part of a panel discussion at St. John's School of Theology, Collegeville, Minn., on April 17, 1997. Panelists were asked to speak about the meaning and purpose of the Second Vatican Council and on the state of the reform and renewal in today's church.
Cardinal [Leo] Suenens [of Belgium] stated that Vatican Council II was a council about ecclesiology, about the nature and activities of the church. I believe most theologians would agree. So I suppose the first question that comes to mind is what is the church?
It may come as a surprise to many to discover that Vatican Council I in 1870 and Vatican Council II have given radically different answers to that question. For more than three centuries before Vatican II, the accepted answer would have been that of Robert Bellarmine: The church is a society. There are two perfect societies, that of the church and of the state. That's not a very spiritually inspiring definition, is it? It is a definition in fact which a priori excludes the very possibility of collegiality. It was only in the 1920s that a new, or rather, the biblical, Pauline and patristic understanding of the church, began to surface again in the Western church. And it became the leitmotif of the pastoral liturgical movement, namely, the church as the body of Christ.
The body of Christ. Too bad it was called mystical body of Christ. At that time many were put off by the word mystical: What has that got to do with me? Perhaps at the present time the term would be welcomed.
The concept of church, or body of Christ, only gradually gained acceptance. It was a very sensitive subject. We had to be very careful in speaking of it, or printing an article about it in Orate Fratres or Worship [magazine], principally because, I suppose, of our post-Reformation nervousness about the priesthood of the laity, of the faithful. Only with Pius XII's encyclical on the mystical body in 1943 did it gain respectability. Let me quickly enumerate five of its most inspiring and revolutionary implications.
1. Every baptized Christian is an active, co-responsible member of the body having a distinctive contribution to make. This became the Magna Carta of the laity, the basis of active participation in the liturgy and the great movements of the time; the Jocists, the Family Life Movement, the Catholic Worker.[Here is the "accompanying story". It is also online here.]
"Christian, remember your baptism" - 1997 address from Fr Godfrey Diekmann
These remarks were delivered by Fr. Godfrey Diekmann as part of a panel discussion at St. John's School of Theology, Collegeville, Minn., on April 17, 1997. Panelists were asked to speak about the meaning and purpose of the Second Vatican Council and on the state of the reform and renewal in today's church.
Cardinal [Leo] Suenens [of Belgium] stated that Vatican Council II was a council about ecclesiology, about the nature and activities of the church. I believe most theologians would agree. So I suppose the first question that comes to mind is what is the church?
It may come as a surprise to many to discover that Vatican Council I in 1870 and Vatican Council II have given radically different answers to that question. For more than three centuries before Vatican II, the accepted answer would have been that of Robert Bellarmine: The church is a society. There are two perfect societies, that of the church and of the state. That's not a very spiritually inspiring definition, is it? It is a definition in fact which a priori excludes the very possibility of collegiality. It was only in the 1920s that a new, or rather, the biblical, Pauline and patristic understanding of the church, began to surface again in the Western church. And it became the leitmotif of the pastoral liturgical movement, namely, the church as the body of Christ.
The body of Christ. Too bad it was called mystical body of Christ. At that time many were put off by the word mystical: What has that got to do with me? Perhaps at the present time the term would be welcomed.
The concept of church, or body of Christ, only gradually gained acceptance. It was a very sensitive subject. We had to be very careful in speaking of it, or printing an article about it in Orate Fratres or Worship [magazine], principally because, I suppose, of our post-Reformation nervousness about the priesthood of the laity, of the faithful. Only with Pius XII's encyclical on the mystical body in 1943 did it gain respectability. Let me quickly enumerate five of its most inspiring and revolutionary implications.
2. Collegiality: Bishops are not vicars of the pope. They, too, are vicars of Christ. The diocese is not just a geographical division of the universal church; it is the local church, united to all other churches, and in a most special way to Rome, the church of the pope. The bishop's leadership is made manifest above all in the celebration of the Eucharist.
3. The presences of Christ: Not only in the eucharistic bread and cup but "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them." This involved a long overdue rethinking of sacraments. Sacraments are not just external signs to confer grace, that terribly mechanistic, automatic understanding of the sacraments that created rightful scandal among our Protestant friends. Sacraments are not things, they are acts. They are acts of Christ. Christ is in our midst, continuing to send the Holy Spirit for the upbuilding of the church.
4. The recovery of the resurrection of Christ as redemptive: We in the West for some 500 years at least had put almost exclusive emphasis on Christ's passion and death as effecting our redemption. How bad the situation was is clear from the fact that [F.X.] Durrwell's book on the resurrection as redemptive, published in 1960, just a few years before the council, created heated controversy. But the apostle Paul said, "Christ died for our sins and rose for our justification," that is, that we might have life, Christ's life.
No wonder Augustine could cry out, "We are sons and daughters of the resurrection, and Alleluia is our song?
5. And what is that life of Christ? It is the life of the risen Christ. It is divine life. We are sons and daughters of God, not by nature but by gift. This is the essence of the Christian glad tidings. To quote a patristic cliche, "God became human that we might become divine." Or, as St. Leo the Great tells us, "Christian, remember your dignity." And that thought, I submit, constitutes the one and only school of Christian spirituality of the biblical and patristic period. There are dozens of schools of spirituality at the present time. This is the only one that I could recognize in the writings of the early church: "Christian, remember who you are," or equivalently, "Christian, remember your baptism."
I should, by right, add a sixth point. Since Vatican II, a new situation has arisen, a rightful demand to achieve and to put into effect the equality of male and female. In this question, also, the doctrine of the body of Christ, as expressed, for example, in Galatians 3, or 1 Corinthians 12, the body of Christ concept gives us the strongest and clearest biblical warrant for urging the radical equality of men and women. You all know the famous passage: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).
In conclusion, therefore, let me say, the topic of our discussion is the renewal of the church. Those of us who are old enough will remember what an exhilarating and enriching period of spiritual renewal were the several decades of the pre-Vatican II liturgical movement, a movement inspired by the doctrine of the body of Christ. It was a voyage of ever new discoveries. When all is said and done, Vatican II was a church-wide effort to effect spiritual and structural renewal by that same doctrine.
I submit that it is a complete misunderstanding of the council to think that the concept "people of God" was meant to replace that of the "body of Christ," as largely happened after the Vatican Council II. The chosen people of the Old Testament, the Jews, were already spoken of as the people of God. The new dispensation offers something gloriously new, the people of God have become the family of God, true sons and daughters of God.
The term "people of God" was used as the heading of Chapter Two of the document on the church chiefly to pick out, to give prominence to, one important aspect of the body of Christ, namely, that the entire body is more important than any of its members, even pope and bishop, and that applies also to the teaching of infallibility. The total body is greater than its parts.
In a word, renewal of the church according to the council demands of necessity the recovery in the popular minds and perhaps in that of theologians the biblical and patristic understanding of the church as the body of Christ. "Baptized Christian, remember of whose body you are a member."
COPYRIGHT 1999 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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