Paul Lakeland - A Council That Will Never End: Lumen Gentium and the Church Today

Lumen Gentium
and the Church Today

Paul Lakeland

LITURGICAL PRESS

Collegeville, Minnesota

www.litpress.org

A Michael Glazier Book published by Liturgical Press

Cover design by Jodi Hendrickson. Image: Wikimedia Commons: License CC-BY-SA 3.0/ Author: Lothar Wolleh.

Excerpts from documents of the Second Vatican Council are from Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents, by Austin Flannery, OP, 1996 (Costello Publishing Company, Inc.). Used with permission.

Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

2013 by Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, microfilm, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any other means, known or yet unknown, for any purpose except brief quotations in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint Johns Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lakeland, Paul, 1946

A council that will never end: Lumen gentium and the church today / Paul Lakeland.

pages cm

A Michael Glazier book.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8146-8066-7 ISBN 978-0-8146-8091-9 (ebook)

1. Vatican Council (2nd: 19621965). Constitutio dogmatica de Ecclesia. 2. Church. 3. Catholic ChurchDoctrines. I. Title.

BX1746.L285 2013

262.02dc23

2013018428

This book is dedicated to two of my greatest teachers, Winifred Livesey and Arthur Malone, in gratitude.

It was for a mystical reason that I decided to go to St. Peters this morning: to participate in the grace and the occasion of the Council at its most decisive moment.

Yves Congar, November 21, 1964, the date of the promulgation of Lumen Gentium

T he problem with anniversaries is that they often focus on the past event rather than the present reality. This is less likely to be the case if the anniversary commemorates the beginning of something still very much alive. It is the difference between toasting the hundredth birthday of a favorite aunt and recognizing the anniversary of the end of the First World War. In the first case we focus on the person present in the room, in the second on an event that happened long ago. So as we begin to think about the fifty years that have elapsed since the Second Vatican Councils Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, was ratified by the Council fathers, we need to ask ourselves if it feels more like Aunt Millies birthday party or the bittersweet reverence for a significant but long-past moment in world history. Is Lumen Gentium still with us?

In the chapters that follow we will take for granted that Lumen Gentium is indeed still with us in a variety of ways. As a document, it will always be part of the ecclesial tradition. A thousand years from now it will still be there, and maybe still read. More important, it is still with us in the shape of the changed Church that its teachings led to. How we understand the role of the bishops in the Church, relative to one another, to the bishop of Rome, and to the people they serve, was given new clarity in the document. So too, Lumen Gentium changed how we think about the roles of the laity in the Church and how we think about holiness relative to all sections of the Church. It led directly to a renewed sense of the importance of baptism and it introduced the important idea of the pilgrim Church. Most of all, however, it is still with us in the particular struggles and challenges of our present moment in the history of the Church. It is this presence that will occupy us in this book.

The phrase unfinished business, which I will use frequently in this book, refers to the complex relationship between Lumen Gentium and the tensions in todays Church. The clearest way in which Lumen Gentium remains a living presence in our Church is its implication in the various ecclesial challenges of our day. Lumen Gentium was not always clear and certainly did not always dot every i and cross every t. The ambiguities and the occasional lack of clarity in the text connect directly to many questions in todays Church: the authority of bishops relative to the role of the laity, the degree to which Church authority should or should not be as centralized in Rome as is currently the case, the nuances of an ecclesiology of the People of God and an ecclesiology of communion, and the relationship between the Church and the other great world religions. These and other issues are in play in the tensions in Roman Catholicism today, and it is the relationship between these concerns and the text of Lumen Gentium that we will explore in the pages that follow. It is my conviction that much of the malaise of Roman Catholicism today is to be attributed to ambiguities and lack of clarity in the texts of the Council documents in general and in Lumen Gentium in particular.

In consequence, this recognition of Lumen Gentium is at least as much about the present-day Church

I would like to thank a number of individuals for the help and inspiration they have given me in the present task. My colleagues in the religious studies department at Fairfield University continue to provide the supportive and collegial academic community that makes all our work easier. Among them I have, as always, to single out John Thiel, without whose keen editorial eye over the years I would have been guilty of many infelicities of expression. His invitation to deliver a plenary address at the 2011 annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America was the instigation of much that is to be found in the third and final part of this book. My department chair Nancy Dallavalle, who works closely with me in the field of Catholic studies, has also been very helpfulmore, I am sure, than she realizes. And I must thank in a special way Michael Fahey, SJ, currently scholar-in-residence at Fairfield University, who has carefully read my manuscript and given me the benefit of his enormous erudition with unstinting generosity. Further afield, the members of the New York area theological reading group that spun off from the Nashville-based Workgroup for Constructive Theology have been a remarkable and congenial collection of friends and scholars who model the best kind of academic companionship: Teresa Delgado, Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Elena Procario Foley, Roger Haight, SJ, Brad Hinze, Michele Saracino, and John Thiel. I am also grateful to the leadership of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain who invited me to give the plenary address on Lumen Gentium that led me to start thinking about a council as an open-ended event, even as a council that will never end. Obviously, none of these people can be blamed for the conclusions I have come to or the errors I have stubbornly insisted on retaining.