Celebrating Religious Freedom, Remembering Those the Vatican Has Bullied and Silenced

Here's how Joseph O'Callaghan, an emeritus professor emeritus of medieval history at Fordham and former chair of the board of Voice of the Faithful in the diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, chose to celebrate the Catholic bishops' "Fortnight of Freedom":

People of Faith as Signs and Counter-Signs to the Gospel: Schillebeeckx, Pat Robertson, Benedict, Mary Daly

A number of valuable articles have come online in the past day or so, which connect to recent postings on this blog. In what follows, I’d like to share these resources with readers.

First, America has just published an editorial statement commemorating Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, who died in December. As do my reflections at Open Tabernacle (and here) (cross-posted to Bilgrimage), the America editorial emphasizes the notion of sacramentality running through all of Schillebeeckx’s thought, his influence at Vatican II, and the way in which his sacramental view of the church calls the church to be a sign of God’s salvific love in the world, and not a counter sign to this love:

This sacramental view of the world, and of the church’s role within the world, remained at the heart of Father Schillebeeckx’s writing, preaching and teaching for over seven decades. It was also central to the vision of the Second Vatican Council, which he helped to shape as an advisor to Cardinal Bernard Alfrink and the Dutch bishops.

In the decades following the council, Father Schillebeeckx was acutely aware of how difficult it had become for many to believe that God holds open a future full of hope amid a world of radical suffering, especially when the church’s own witness had been compromised. In the face of those real stumbling blocks, Father Schillebeeckx reminded his readers that “God is new each moment” and that in situations of injustice (whether in the world or in the church) the Spirit of God is actively at work, prompting resistance, hope, courage and change.

I posted yesterday about Rev. Pat Robertson’s abominable attempt to blame the people of Haiti for the disaster that has just befallen them. For a smorgasbord of valuable reflections on Robertson’s statement, please see Religion Dispatch’s round-up of responses to Robertson today. As Arianna Huffington noted yesterday in a discussion with former right-wing evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer, Robertson gives religion a bad name.

Several days ago, I noted that a persistent theme running through Catholic thought about gay people and gay relationships is that gay folks and our relationships are self-centered, narcissistic. My posting demonstrates that this contention has long been part and parcel of the current pope’s approach to gay people and relationships.

And Benedict continues the meme: yesterday, the pope met with young people from the Lazio region of Italy. His address to them focuses on “authentic” sex education, which, in Benedict’s view, recognizes that the church needs to say no to particular behaviors and “lifestyles” (code words for “gay”), because these behaviors and “lifestyles” are all about the narcissism of couples who do not procreate and therefore do not contribute in a generative way to society.

If readers believe I’m reading too much into these comments by Benedict, please do a google news search of the terms “pope” and “Lazio” and read the 385 news articles already linked to google’s search engine for Benedict’s remarks yesterday. If you do so, you’ll see that a persistent subtext running through these articles is the generous rightness of heterosexual relationships and the selfish wrongness of homosexual ones.

Finally, I’ve been touched by the powerful memorial pieces appearing online following the death of theologian Mary Daly. I’ve been collecting a number of these, and may do a synopsis of them down the road.

Meanwhile, I’m particularly taken with Francis X. Clooney’s eulogy for Mary Daly at America yesterday. I’m struck in particular by the following observation:

Mary Daly was by all accounts a radical thinker. I am not a scholar of her work, and cannot summarize it with any precision, but my sense that when she assessed the condition of women in the modern world, in religions, and in the Catholic Church, all taken in light of her own experience trying to make her way as a pioneering woman theologian – with multiple doctorates — in a 1960s Church not quite ready for women theologians, she came to the stark conclusion that there was no simple remedy to the bias, as if small changes would right the wrongs and make women equal to men. Rather, the biases and distortions so harmful to women permeated the entirety of human experience, and traditional religions were infected with pervasive bias, in ideas, language, practices, and social structures. Accordingly, women had to be radical in their critiques, taking apart of the whole structures and not just adjusting details. For this, women were better off outside the religions, Catholicism included, and for a time at least, better off nurturing their own conversations and ways of living, without the presence, help or hindrance of men, even well-meaning men. So Mary Daly was a Catholic intellectual who decided for theological reasons, and by personal imperative, that she could no longer be a Christian.

Nota bene: precisely because the church is called to be a sacramental sign of God’s salvific, all-inclusive love in the world, it also has the potential to be a counter-sign to God’s love, when its own institutional life and behavior obscure everything that it exists to signify.

And Mary Daly’s experience of the church as counter-sign explains why she famously would not allow men in her classes to ask questions. As Clooney notes, he actually witnessed this teaching technique of Mary Daly’s at one of her lectures at Boston College—and when he did so, he cam to see and appreciation her point: “[U]nless we ourselves experience marginalization, the brute force of power imposed on us, we really won’t be able to get what it is like to be a perennially demeaned and oppressed person.”

Yes.

Edward Schillebeeckx (1914-2009): An Appreciation, Part 2

In the first part of my appreciation of theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, I noted that Schillebeeckx’s work in the areas of christology and ecclesiology has profoundly influenced the Catholic Church through his role at Vatican II. Schillebeeckx was one of the primary theological advisors of the Dutch bishops at Vatican II, and his work in the area of ecclesiology in particular has now become canonical for the entire church, as it were, through the documents of Vatican II.

In key respects, Schillebeeckx belongs to a movement strong in French, Belgian, and Dutch Catholicism of the early 20th century. This movement was known as a ressourcement movement, a movement seeking to return to the sources—specifically, to the biblical and patristic foundations—of Christian theology.

The ressourcement movement was, in significant ways, a reaction to what happened to the Catholic church in its period of reaction first to the Reformation and then to the rise of modernity. During the period of the Council of Trent, the church’s official response to the Reformation, and at Vatican I, which in many ways charted the church’s strong counter-push to modernity, the Catholic church opted for an ecclesiology that was not so much strongly grounded in either biblical or patristic sources as it was innovative. It was a contextual theology that had everything to do with the church’s reaction to movements it considered threatening, movements demanding a vehement and immediate push-back from the church.

In the Tridentine period, the period of the counter-Reformation, the ecclesiology that prevailed was what is called the “perfect society” model of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. This ecclesiology laid great stress on the need of the church to function as an institution complete in and of itself, parallel (and superior) to the state, whose structures the church mirrors but which does not have the perfection of the church.

This notion of church stressed the need for top-down, hierarchical, monarchical government in the church, akin to (but more perfect than) that of the state. Indeed, the perfect society model made being church synonymous with monarchy, with absolute control (perfect conrol) of the whole church exercised from the top down through a hierarchical chain of command. The model of church that Trent set into motion placed the church and its structures over against secular models, while at the same time incorporating their key features.

This ecclesiology was then, as I note above, contextual. It was an adaptive ecclesiology, one that reflected the circumstances in which the perfect society ecclesiology was developed. It was a reaction to the Reformation, which seemed to be fragmenting the perfect society of the church, and to the rise of the nation-state, which went hand in hand with the Reformation, and seemed to be competing with the church for power and control.

Bellarmine’s perfect society model prevailed from the Tridentine period of the church through the first Vatican Council and up to Vatican II. Vatican I endorsed the model, adding to it the new twist of papal infallibility. During this period of its history, the Catholic church appeared to be locked into a bitter battle against secular society—against the world. Only in the church, which was a fortress of truth and light in the midst of a surrounding culture of error and darkness, could one find salvation. Only in the Catholic church could one find the perfect society that guarantees salvation.

I’ve labored over this quick theological sketch of the ecclesiological backdrop to Vatican II because it is essential to understand what Vatican II thought it was correcting, when it moved back to the sources, back beyond the 16th-century ecclesiology of Trent and the 19th-century ecclesiology of Vatican I. Many of those who now combat Vatican II argue that this ecumenical council was a radical departure from the tradition, that it rejected the tradition and flung the doors of the church open to a contemporary secularism that represents a wholesale departure from longstanding tradition.

In fact, the opposite is the case. The ecclesiology of Vatican II returns to more ancient, more venerable understandings of the church found in the texts of the New Testament and in patristic theology. It corrects what was in itself an innovation on the tradition—the ecclesiology of Trent-Vatican I—by reminding the church that the perfect society model and the fortress church model that developed in the Counter-Reformation and modern periods are themselves innovative ecclesiologies—new developments in the tradition not conspicuously rooted in scripture and patristic theology.

And so enter Schillebeeckx: as the bishops assembled at Vatican II began to recognize the need to re-emphasize images and theologies of the church that would correct the historically conditioned fortress church ecclesiology of Trent-Vatican I, they turned to the exhaustive theological work done by theologians of the ressourcement movement like Yves Congar (a mentor of Schillebeeckx’s) and Schillebeeckx, which delved into the biblical and patristic roots of Catholic ecclesiology.

Schillebeeckx was particularly brilliant in his ability to re-focus contemporary Catholic theology on the most fundamental meaning of sacramentality, which runs beneath the sacramental system of the church and provides meaning to that system, and which had been obscured by the theology of Trent-Vatican I. During the period of reaction of these two councils, the sacraments came to be viewed almost as “things,” as holy objects owned and dispensed by the rulers of the perfect society to their loyal subjects, insofar as those subjects were faithful and performed proper obeisance.

What this view of the sacramental life significantly overlooks is the way in which the sacraments are manifestations of the primary sacrament—the sacrament of Christ himself. The sacraments signify and effect grace because Christ himself signifies and effects grace in the world, as the primary, central sign of God’s salvific self-offering to the world. The church is sacramental—it is itself a sign of Christ’s sacramental presence in the world—because it is united with Christ. It mirrors Christ’s salvific presence in the world.

Schillebeeck’s pre-Vatican II work on Christ as the sacrament of the encounter with God (particularly in Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God) and on the church as the sacramental sign of Christ helped those gathered at Vatican II to refocus Catholic ecclesiology and sacramental life on biblical and patristic roots that connect the church’s life, its role as a salvific presence in the world, to the primary sacrament from which the church’s sacramental life and salvific work flow—to Christ. At one level, this ecclesiology reorients the church to something that should never be lost sight of in Christian theology and Christian spirituality: to Jesus as the model, the center, of theological reflection and of the spiritual journey.

This is a strand of the theology of Vatican II that Schillebeeckx would deepen significantly in his two post-Vatican II works Jesus: An Experiment in Christology and Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World. These provide a rich treasure trove of biblical scholarship that sets Catholic theology back on a strong, vibrant biblical foundation—a project that reflects the particular concerns of Catholic theologians in countries like the Netherlands, where Catholics and Protestants coexist and seek to recognize the important theological contributions made by the traditions of each other. Schillebeeckx’s theology is especially strong in the area of biblical scholarship. In contrast to many Catholic theologians of the latter half of the 20th century (including Benedict XVI, whose biblical scholarship has often been criticized by theological colleagues as notably deficient), Schillebeeckx grounds his theology in painstaking, well-researched exegesis.

Note what this return to the sources—above all, to the central, perduring focus of Christian theology and spirituality on Jesus as the primary sacrament, and on the church’s role as a sacramental presence in the world through its fidelity to Jesus—does, as we begin to look at how the church lives in the world and interacts with the world. In the perfect society and fortress church models, the church’s primary obligation vis-a-vis the world is to combat the world, to correct the world. The church has it all. The world is deficient. The church offers to the world what the world lacks—in particular, dogmatic truth, perfect hierarchical rule, and the sacraments. And the world, if it is wise, will respond humbly and receptively to the offer.

The sacramental notion of the church—the idea that the church mirrors Jesus as the sacramental sign of God’s presence in the world—dislodges the certainties of the perfect society and fortress church models. It does so in two ways. First, if the church is a sacramental sign of God’s salvific presence in the world, it can hardly claim to have exclusive ownership of that salvific presence. To do so would limit God. It would imply that God’s salvific intent and “reach” in the world are limited, that they do not intend and encompass the entire world.

When ecclesiology grants that God wishes and intends the salvation of the entire cosmos through Christ, then the church pursues its sacramental task in the world in part by watching for signs of the Spirit’s presence anywhere those signs are to be found in the world—inside the church, certainly, but also outside its boundaries, since God is there, too, working salvation. The sacramental church of Vatican II (and of scripture and the patristic period) is a more chastened church than that of Trent and Vatican I, which purported to have it all, almost to own God and God’s salvific work in the world, through the sacraments. The church that seeks to be a faithful sign of salvation in the world both offers salvation to the world, and receives that salvation from areas outside the boundaries of the church, as the Spirit moves through the world fanning the flames of divine love everywhere.

The sacramental notion of the church developed so brilliantly by Schillebeeckx also dislodges the certainties of Tridentine and Vatican I ecclesiology in another key way. This notion of the church, focused as it is on Jesus as the initial, the Ur-sacrament, constantly calls the church back to reflection on how, precisely, it signifies the salvific presence of Christ in the world. If the church is a sign, and, specifically, a sign of Christ and of Christ’s salvation, in the world, then everything the church does, how it behaves, how it structures itself, how it regards the rights of its own members as it exercises governance, how its pastors engage in pastoral leadership—all becomes part and parcel of the sacramental sign of salvation of Christ in the world.

Or perhaps the church’s behavior, how its pastors exercise pastoral leadership, how the church deals with the human rights of its own members as it exercises governance, how it treats the least among us, becomes a counter-sign to Christ’s salfivic presence in the world. If the church can reveal Christ’s face to the world, it can also obscure that face. It can fail to be a patent sacramental sign of salvific love in the world.

As a Dominican theologian, a member of a religious community whose charism is all about engaging and dialoguing with those living in urban centers with strong intellectual movements (Dominic began his ministry as cities began to develop in the Middle Ages, many of them with large universities), Schillebeeckx had a strong concern to see the church respond dialogically, creatively, and above all, redemptively, to the cultures in which it found itself. As with Dominicans in general, Schillebeeckx was a preacher, someone concerned to proclaim the good news of Christ in ever-changing cultural contexts.

Schillebeeckx’s vision of Christian faith was inspired by a deep, profound, and broad grasp of who Jesus was in his humanity. In his work, he was able to articulate this vision across the whole spectrum of Catholic theology from Christology and ecclesiology to ecumenism and social justice concerns. Anyone who tries to understand the Catholic tradition following Vatican II cannot do so adequately without paying attention to the monumental contributions of Edward Schillebeeckx to that tradition.

(Crossposted from The Open Tabernacle, 10 Jan. 2010)

Edward Schillebeeckx (1914-2009): An Appreciation, Part 1

Shortly before Christmas, the Catholic church lost one its most eminent 20th-century theologians. Belgian-born Edward Schillebeeckx, OP, a leading theologian of the Second Vatican Council, died on 23 December. Schillebeeckx’s long and distinguished career as a theologian resulted in the publication of numerous studies in the fields of christology and ecclesiology that have already become classics. These include Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (1959; English translation, 1963); Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (1974; English translation, 1979); Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World (1977; English translation, 1980); The Church with a Human Face (1985); and Church: The Human Story of God (1989; English translation, 1990).

As I’ve been thinking of Schillebeeckx’s influence on me—and I do want to write this brief memoir as a personal appreciation of his work—I keep returning to the latter part of the 1960s, when I made a life-altering decision to leave my childhood Southern Baptist church and become Catholic. I’ve shared aspects of that journey on my Bilgrimage blog.

As I’ve noted there, two primary factors motivated my decision (two discernible historical factors, that is, in addition to the grace running hidden underneath the experience). The first was the struggle of my family’s church to come to terms with the Civil Rights movement and the integration process of the 1960s.

We were not merely slow to come to terms with integration. As a white church whose roots ran back to the slave period, when we had separated from Northern Baptists over the question of the morality of slavery, we actively resisted integration.

So when my church finally integrated reluctantly and after a bitter, divisive debate about this step, and when my pastor defended that reluctance to me by saying that churches have to be slow to respond to such movements of dramatic social change, I looked around for churches that provided an alternative (and prophetic) witness re: racial issues. In my small Deep South town, that happened to be the Catholic church, which had long since integrated its black and white parishes without any fanfare.

My decision to become Catholic was also influenced by my reading of John Henry Newman’s Apologia. I’m sure that at the tender (and callow) age of 16, I understood little of Newman. What I did glimpse in his work, however, and what compelled me towards the Catholic church, was an argument about the deep historical roots of the Christian movement and the institutions it spawned. In Newman, I found an alluring narrative about an “idea” of Christianity that necessarily adapts itself to ever-shifting cultural contexts, but which nonetheless remains rooted in an originating event and originating narratives that norm and correct this necessary process of development.

And so my choice to become Catholic and my initial encounter with Schillebeeckx—or, I should say more precisely, with some key themes he was developing in Dutch theology, which were, just at the moment of my conversion, taking center stage in global Catholicism through Vatican II.

I have long since forgotten the title of the catechism my local parish priest used to instruct me in the Catholic faith. It wasn’t a particularly catchy title—perhaps something as pedantic as Our Catholic Faith. I suspect that the book was an updated version of the Baltimore catechism, with pictures galore, many of them in lurid, eye-catching colors designed to appeal to a child’s eye.

I loved the catechism. I memorized it avidly, religiously. At the drop of a hat, I could recite lists of saints, of corporal and spiritual works of mercy, of capital sins. And prayers aplenty: to guardian angels, the Mother of God, prayers in Latin, prayers in English, prayers for morning, midday, and night.

And then along came a curious book my pastor didn’t recommend, but which I ordered through the mail, because it was being featured in publications I had begun to admire, like America and Commonweal. It was an alternative catechism, popularly called the Dutch catechism. It came out in the year in which I was taking instruction in Catholicism.

I hated it. And I didn't understand it. It was the antithesis of the detailed, fetchingly illustrated answer book—answers for everything!—that I had been memorizing. It purported not to deliver the Truth, in easily digested doses, but to introduce its readers to something much more difficult: it claimed to lead those being catechized into a lifelong process of dialogic pursuit of a truth that can never be perfectly formulated (those lists! those prayers in Latin and English!), but which is sought after by believers united in their communal journey towards an eschatological truth transcending any one of us. And transcending (and norming and critiquing) the church itself.

I preferred the Truth. I preferred my lists. I preferred memorizing to thinking. Memorizing was, after all, easier, as was the kind of thinking—narrow, deductive logic towards predetermined “truths”—encouraged by my picture-laden catechism.

The Dutch catechism required thinking. It required hard thought, the kind that engages mind, soul, and even body (since religious ideas have to issue in real-life commitments, if they are true). It required the humility to admit I didn’t and would never own the Truth. It required the humility to link my faith journey to that of others who were on a similar journey. It talked about reading the signs of the times, relating an ancient faith to a contemporary cultural context, using conscience and making discernment. Using conscience and discerning in union with others in the Body of Christ, it goes without saying. But also all on my own, since conscience is the deepest core of oneself, a shrine in which God speaks uniquely to one’s depths.

I didn’t want this. I wanted authority figures to tell me the Truth. I wanted right and wrong, black and white, clear-cut answers. I had, after all, just left a church whose inability to confront a profound cultural crisis with clear-cut answers perturbed me.

It would take many years of study of theology, and life experience, to show me why the church had taken the necessary turn of Vatican II during the period in which I became Catholic, and why Schillebeeckx—whose ideas were everywhere in the Dutch catechism that I hated—was well worth reading. In fact, necessary to read, if I wanted to understand what was happening in the church in the latter decades of the 20th century.

(Crossposted from The Open Tabernacle, 8 Jan. 2010).