America (americamagazine.org), Vol. 188 No. 11, March 31, 2003
Vatican II: Substantive Teaching
By Avery Dulles
I appreciate the invitation of the editors of America to respond to the
article in this issue by John W. O’Malley, S.J., “Vatican II: Official Norms,”
and to the very substantive letters published on March 17 commenting on my own
article “Vatican II: The Myth and the Reality,” which was published on Feb. 24.
Father O’Malley is quite correct in what he says about the style of the Second
Vatican Council. Pope John XXIII sensed that Catholics had spent too long
lamenting the errors of the modern world and had failed to take sufficient
account of the good things going on outside their own community. They were in
danger of isolating themselves, to the detriment of the church’s mission.
Following the pope’s wise counsel, Vatican II made every effort to avoid the
tone of condemnation in speaking of other Christian churches, of non-Christian
religions and of secular science and ideologies—even though the council did
condemn a few things, such as Marxist atheism, abortion and obliteration
bombing.
The benefits reaped from the council’s change of course have been enormous. We
need cordial dialogue with those whose convictions differ from our own. But such
dialogue should never mean a retreat from the fullness of the Catholic faith, of
which we are the heirs and the trustees.
Here, precisely, is the rub. The council did, as Father O’Malley perceives,
adopt a rhetoric of consensus, service, openness to change and inclusiveness.
But that rhetoric did little to prepare people for cases in which consensus
could not be reached, or in which people did not want to hear what the church
was to obliged to preach, or in which ecclesiastical institutions are not
subject to change, or in which inclusion would destroy the necessary unity of
the flock of Christ. By their tone, if not their content, the council documents
exuded optimism and perhaps raised unrealistic expectations. The calls for
submission and compliance were so muted that readers could easily overlook them.
The difficulty was increased by the condition of Western culture in the years
when the council was being received. In the Western world the dominant
liberalism impelled the interpreters to fit the council’s teaching into the
prevailing democratic and egalitarian categories. Publicists of the council,
moved by the spirit of the times, often gave tendentious readings to the
documents. When they could not successfully twist the texts to suit their own
purposes, they appealed to the spirit (or the style) and ignored the letter.
They simply assumed that the council could not have meant to say anything
offensive to non-Catholic Christians, to members of other faiths or to people
raised in a liberal democratic culture. As a result, everything came to be
placed on the same level: Christianity and other religions, the Catholic Church
and other Christian communities, the hierarchy and the laity, the sacred and the
secular. Everything had to give way to what Father O’Malley identifies as the
criteria of “liberty, equality and fraternity.”
I have no difficulty in speaking of the spirit of the council, nor did the Synod
of Bishops in 1985. But the spirit should not be driven against the letter;
style should not eclipse substance. As most of the letters to the editor
recognize, the council fathers were not starry-eyed liberals. The council
documents did affirm the need to preserve the apostolic heritage of faith,
sacraments and ministry. To a degree that seems surprising in view of the
popular impressions of the council, the council fathers affirmed continuity with
the past, including the Council of Trent, the First Vatican Council and the
teaching of Pope Pius XII.
Since the council, the popes and the synods of bishops have been laudably
conscious of their responsibility to guard the deposit that has been entrusted
to them (1 Tm 1:14). They have found the council documents very helpful for that
purpose, when those documents are read for their substance rather than their
style. At times the Roman authorities have found it necessary to speak more
plainly and less diplomatically for the sake of truth and fidelity. Dominus
Iesus did precisely that in its treatment of the uniqueness of Christ and of the
Catholic Church. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seems to have
learned from hard experience that when you couch unpopular teachings in “polite”
language, people easily conclude that you didn’t really mean what you said.
Several of the letters to the editor reflect a misunderstanding of what is meant
by the “hermeneutics of continuity.” When the Synod of Bishops in 1985
recommended this approach to the council documents, it had no intention of
denying change. No serious student of Vatican II would wish to say that it
changed nothing—the view that the Rev. Charles Miller, in his letter to the
editor, attributes to Cardinal McIntyre. But the council was careful to avoid
disruptive change.
In his Essay on the Development of Chistian Doctrine (1845), Cardinal John Henry
Newman gives a full and lengthy defense of change as a sign of vitality in the
church. But he insists on what he calls “preservation of type,” “continuity of
principles” and “conservative action on the past.” Right from the beginning of
his book he excludes the possibility of doctrinal reversals. Those who think
that Christianity accommodates itself to times and seasons, he says, usually end
up by abandoning the supernatural claims of Christianity—a phenomenon that is no
less common today than it was in Newman’s day.
Curiously enough, the most dramatic doctrinal innovations of Vatican II would
seem to run directly against the spirit of egalitarianism. No previous council
explained at such length the role of Christ as the author of every grace and as
the center and goal of all human history. The council affirmed the necessary
role of the church as the instrument used by Christ for his entire work of
redemption. It repeated the strongest claims of Vatican I for papal primacy and
infallibility and supplemented them with a strong insistence on the hierarchical
authority of bishops. The council went far beyond earlier magisterial
pronouncements in teaching that episcopal ordination is a sacrament that places
bishops in a distinct order, and that bishops have, together with the pope,
complete authority over the church, under Christ the Lord, to whom they must
render an account of their ministry.
Did the council’s teaching on the common priesthood give the laity new powers?
Some tried to use the spirit of the council, and even some phrases in its texts,
to argue that it gave lay persons a kind of veto power over magisterial
teaching. Avant-garde theologians have argued that the common priesthood,
recognized by Vatican II, confers the right to perform certain priestly
functions, including that of consecrating the Eucharist. But the council
excluded these aberrations. It taught that the common priesthood of the faithful
and the ministerial priesthood of the ordained differ in kind and not only in
degree.
Do I, as John F. Long, S.J., in his letter alleges, take a purely juridical view
of the laity? That is far from my intention. Even in the brief compass of my
article, I used the opportunity to mention the importance of consulting the
laity and the value of cooperation between clergy and laity. The contribution of
the lay auditors at Vatican II, to which Father Long and Dennis Haugh allude, is
exactly the kind of collaboration I had in mind. In addition, I took notice of
the specific vocation of the laity to refashion secular society according to the
Gospel. I only cautioned that the council kept the ministry of pastoral
governance firmly in the hands of the hierarchy. After listening to the advice
of the laity, the pastors still have the duty to exercise their own judgment,
which is decisive. Am I being narrowly juridical?
Many of the letters raise questions about my position, or that of Cardinal
Ratzinger, on the term subsistit in (Long, Sullivan, Andy Galligan, Haugh). For
my part, I have never understood the council as teaching, or intending to teach,
or in any way suggesting, that the church of Christ subsists anywhere except in
Roman Catholicism. By “subsisting,” the council apparently meant not only
existing in some minimal sense, but continuing to exist in substantial
completeness, with all the institutional elements that Christ bestowed upon his
church. This, I think, is the meaning of subsistence that Cardinal Ratzinger has
set forth in many documents, including the two cited by Father Sullivan.
Father Sullivan accuses me of giving the impression that Vatican II did not say
anything really new about the relationship between the church of Christ and the
Catholic Church. Let me then clarify. The council brought a new and deeper
theology of catholicity to bear on the ecumenical question. The church of
Christ, it taught, is essentially one and catholic. Everything authentically
Christian, therefore, must have a catholic character and tend toward catholic
unity. Christ’s church is not a large tent housing a variety of denominational
churches, of which the Catholic Church would be one. Nor is it a genus
containing multiple species. Catholicity is not something added on to
Christianity from the outside.
Churches that lack full communion with Rome are imperfectly Catholic and by that
token imperfectly Christian. But because they have authentic Christian
endowments, they can grow in sanctity by devoutly using these means of grace.
Father Long is correct in saying that the Eucharist, celebrated in Orthodox
churches, may contribute to the building up of the church of God. In the words
of Vatican II, “the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them [these
churches] as means of salvation, whose efficacy comes from that fullness of
grace and truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church” (UR, No. 3).
Every grace-filled event in these separated churches augments the partial
communion they already have with the Catholic Church.
In reply to Father Kobler, I must point out that my article was only a
corrective of some misreadings of the council. For my positive views on the
contributions of Vatican II to ecclesiology I can refer to several books I have
written on the subject. The theme of my recent article required a concentration
on the doctrinal teaching of the council. That teaching is hardly unimportant.
In the speech to which Father Kobler refers, Pope John XXIII asserted: “The
greatest concern of the Ecumenical Council is this: that the sacred deposit of
Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously.”
Nathan Kollar chides me for not having relied on autobiographies and memoirs for
the interpretation of the council documents. I have actually read quite a number
of such accounts, but I would be cautious in drawing on them. Where the
documents are ambiguous, different fathers presumably had different views. What
one or another of them had in mind is of little importance if they did not
succeed in getting their views written into the text. The principles of
interpretation proposed by the Synod of Bishops in 1985 are on the whole more
reliable.
Professor Joseph Kelly, whose letter concludes the mailbag to which I am
responding, is certainly correct in saying that dissent has abounded since
Vatican II. This development is regrettable in a community that heeds Paul’s
exhortation “that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you,
but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Cor 1:10).
Why is dissent so rampant among younger Catholics? An important contributing
cause, I suggest, is the reluctance of their elders, both lay and clerical, to
challenge them with the hard truths of the Gospel. Misled by a false spirit of
accommodation, parents and teachers take the easy path and advise people to
follow their own conscience, as though conscience did not have to be formed in
light of the teaching of Christ, which continues to resound through the church.
In giving this advice they may think they are obedient to the spirit or style of
Vatican II, but they are unfaithful to its substantive teaching.
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Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., is the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion
and Society at Fordham University, New York City.