From the Editor's Desk
Regular readers of this journal will have noticed a number of articles on Vatican II in recent issues. The present issue leads off with another one. We have regretfully declined to publish several more submissions on the council only in order to maintain a balance among the subjects of articles we publish. All the articles received on Vatican II—and more are under consideration—have been by eminent scholars who have lived through the era of the council and have specialized in its history and interpretation.
Readers might be interested to know that the three recently published articles—John O’Malley’s, “Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?”; Stephen Schloesser’s, “Against Forgetting: Memory, History, Vatican II”; and Neil Ormerod’s “‘The Times They Are A-Changin’: A Response to O’Malley and Schloesser”—appear in a new book from Continuum titled after O’Malley’s article. The three are bundled with Joseph Komonchak’s “Vatican II as an ‘Event,’” first delivered as St. Louis University’s Henri de Lubac Lecture in Historical Theology and published in Theology Digest (1999). After a discussion with Continuum’s venerable and just-retired editor, Frank Oveis, we agreed to lead off this small collection with Komonchak’s article because it first opened the question about what it means for something to be considered a historical “event,” whether Vatican II must be so considered and how one should answer the question, “What really happened at Vatican II?”
Why this collection? It has become clear to theological educators, especially as Vatican II recedes in time, that teaching the conciliar documents has become increasingly difficult, because most people can no longer intelligently read them without an expert to guide them. The ideas treated, the reasons behind the treatments, and even the language itself are foreign to most new readers. So the idea behind the Continuum collection is to provide teachers and students a propaedeutic to the council’s documents: no text without a context. O’Malley’s superb introductory narrative sizes each of the conciliar documents against la longue durée that moves from the Constantinian church constitution through the Reformation, the Council of Trent, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the massive changes they triggered during the past two centuries; Komonchak discusses the council’s significance as a historical “event”; O’Malley returns to focus on what happened at the council more generally; Schloesser discusses why the council happened at this particular moment in history; finally Ormerod replies to O’Malley and Schloesser with a consideration of the church’s long-standing resistance to change in the face of the imposing, external forces that the council now “released into the life of the Church,” “Where are we going, and are we simply moving too fast?” Ormerod asks, in a nod to Bob Dylan’s signature “song of protest against those who wanted to tie the world to the past.” Ormerod goes on to describe (with help from Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran) what all that Komonchak, O’Malley, and Schloesser have presented about the changes means in terms of a new “style of ecclesiology”—in other words, what effect history has had on the theology of the church itself.
Why this collection now? People meet change differently for all sorts of reasons— personal, cultural, religious, theological, ideological, etc. The authors of this collection observe that, when Vatican II released forces of change that the church had kept at bay, the church was bound to face pushes and pulls from multiple directions, especially by those concerned that, in changing, the church might lose something essential to its identity. In his Theologie im Aufbruch (1987; Theology for the Third Millennium, 1988) Hans Küng pointed out that the Catholic Church was in the midst of a paradigm shift. At the time, however, the shift was in its early stages, at least as far as most Catholics’ awareness was concerned. In fact, the roots of the shift run deep in history, certainly as far back as the Reformation, but more immediately to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and the secularizing and democratizing pressures unleashed by them—provoking other kinds of revolution: social, scientific, technological, economic (the rapid growth of laissez-faire capitalism), and, yes, religious (note the remarkable growth of religious congregations and sects during the 19th century).
Today, many of those same pressures have picked up steam against the old paradigm of church constitution, the Constantinian-Medieval paradigm that excessively privileges clergy and religious. Vatican II, dubbed by some as “the council of the laity,” was just the beginning of the church’s effort to address what it means to be church in and for the new world that was aborning and being thrust upon it. The council fathers, responding to John XXIII’s call for the council, found themselves, at the beginning of the council, poring over documents clearly written within and for the old church paradigm. (The underlying and legitimate worry was that, if a constitutional paradigm yields to a new one, would the church itself pass away?) Impelled by the Holy Spirit, a virtual revolution occurred on the council floor itself when the preliminary document on the church was rejected and sent back to committee. There followed a complete recasting not only of that document but of all subsequent documents. The result was an ecumenical council the likes of which the church had never seen, a council whose astonishing substance was couched not in the age-old forms of doctrinal pronunciamentos and anathemas but, as O’Malley points out, in the epideictic style of exhortation to expressed ideals, and addressed not only to the Catholic Church but also to “the whole human family.”
As a bridge to the book, Thomas Hughson’s article in this issue of Theological Studies considers deeply the long-term effects of Blessed John XXIII’s prayer opening the council: “Renew Your wonders in our time, as though by a new Pentecost.”
David G. Schultenover, S.J.
Editor in Chief