Response to Paul Lakeland, Judith Gruber, and Jan Jans

Scott MacDougall Response to Panel on the “Hard Sayings” of Vatican II on Church–World Relations Paul Lakeland, Judith Gruber, and Jan Jans, panelists Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network Conference Vatican II—Remembering the Future: Ecumenical, Interfaith, and Secular Perspectives on the Council’s Impact and Promise Washington, D.C., May 22, 2015 Each of the three papers we’ve just heard clearly articulate crucial ecclesiological challenges posed to the church by the ways in which Vatican II characterizes various aspects of the church. Paul Lakeland reads LG as simultaneously indicating the council’s desire to affirm a “common priesthood” of the baptized on the one hand, but as also succumbing to a problematic dichotomy—or at least an unresolved tension—between this common priesthood of all baptized people and a ministerial priesthood of the ordained clergy on the other. This tension betrays the persistence of a stubborn, older ecclesiological view that asserts an ontological difference separating ministerial priesthood in an essential way from the common priesthood. As a result, Lakeland wonders whether Vatican II is better understood as investing only the laity with a vocation to carry out the missio Dei in the world or whether it is properly understood as envisioning the ministerial priesthood as sharing in that worldly vocation, a vocation that includes rather than contrasts with or sits alongside the clergy’s call to sacramental service. The council’s language around this is not entirely clear. But how the conundrum that this (for some) “hard saying” that Vatican II pronounces is resolved has tremendous implications for how we imagine and live out the church–world relationship. Judith Gruber reads GS 19 as another hard saying of the church to itself with respect to church–world relations. Here, Gruber argues, the council evidences a move away from a pre-conciliar isolationism in which the church held itself out as a societas perfecta over against a world that it condemned, acknowledging that this posture actually prevented the world from seeing the church correctly. Gruber observes that in making this acknowledgment, the church takes responsibility for the fact that the church’s self-occluding and judgmentalism contributed to people’s rejection of it and to the growth of atheism. Accepting these facts contributed to the council’s adoption of a view of the church as a sacramental mediator between, as she puts it, “God’s revelation and the world.” The church, looking to understand itself in light of both God’s self-revelation and the world, comes to understand the world, God’s self-revelation, and itself in new and fruitful ways, and in ways that continuously call the church to assess and reassess its views, structures, and modi operandi. It has been and continues to be challenging for the church to come to grips with its own contingency in this way and there have been and continue to be various attempts to avoid having to do so. This, too, obviously, carries huge implications for church–world relations. Jan Jans also points to an unresolved ecclesiological tension in another of Vatican II’s hard sayings to and about the church, and another that, depending on the way in which it is worked out, has important ramifications for church–world dynamics. Jans directs our attention to the treatment of moral conscience in GS 17 and to some of the reactions that it engendered to demonstrate this tension. GS 17 opens by stating that “only in freedom can [human beings] direct [themselves] toward goodness,” this freedom being the freedom to bring a well-formed moral conscience to bear in discerning a properly Christian way forward in the world. Jans argues that, in claiming that this conciliar formulation borders on being Pelagian, Joseph Ratzinger exemplifies an enduring strain of Catholic thinking that subordinates the free conscience invoked by GS 17 to the teaching of the Magisterium. John Paul II, as Jans makes clear, was adamant that this had to be so for (at least) crucial ecclesiological and soteriological reasons. And, of course, both maintained this view despite what appears to be a relatively straightforward desire on the part of the council to move the treatment of conscience away from a model in which, as Jans puts it, the Magisterium “possesses” the conscience of the Catholic faithful. In all three of these instances, we have clear demonstration of the dynamic that Hermann Pottmeyer illustrated by means of his famous and often-invoked construction-site image. Pottmeyer described Vatican II as laying the foundation for a new ecclesial edifice, for building a new kind of church from the ground up. However, he continued, the new church was being built adjacent to the previous one. The older building remained fully functional and its architectural forms and ornaments remained clearly in sight, casting a shadow on the new construction, and pulling the spectator’s eye back toward itself while the newer church, still quite skeletal and only partially habitable, was in its earliest stages of construction. Vatican II may have broken ground for the erection of a new kind of church, but, as Rick Gaillardetz and many others have pointed out, the church’s extant form remained an imposing figure on the ecclesial skyline, a powerful presence in the ecclesiological “eyes” and imagination of the Roman Catholic Church. The simultaneous existence of the old and new during and following the promulgation of the Vatican II reforms lies at the heart of the tensions each of the three papers that we’ve heard today examines. The “hard saying” in each instance can be understood as a hard saying posed to the existing church by the envisioned church. Being the product of conciliar processes, representing hundreds of voices from all points on the spectrum of ecclesiological views, LG and GS, even while pointing the church in new directions, are themselves marked by this tension. Moreover, the very real and important ambivalences that Lakeland, Gruber, and Jans interrogate facilitated the diverse and sometimes contradictory interpretations those documents received and continue to receive. While it is relatively commonplace and not at all inaccurate to claim that Vatican II was a watershed moment for the church’s understanding of itself, the ambivalence attendant on it prohibits it from being the ecclesial revolution that some characterize it as having been. Put differently, the hard sayings of the council do not seem to have thrown the church doors wide open but only to have budged them ajar. Some tried at the time and have been trying ever since to slam those doors shut again. Some others were able to thrust a foot into the opening. The question now, of course, is which way those doors will be moved from this point. After all, as more than one post-conciliar pontificate has demonstrated, it is not a forgone conclusion that the doors will continue on an outward trajectory. What is clear, however, is that what lies on the other side of those doors is the world. Will the church shut itself off from the world once again? Or will it fulfill what seems to be the Vatican II imperative by throwing its doors wide open to the world, definitively and exuberantly, or, as Pope Francis might have us put it, mercifully and joyfully? In reality, this is the fundamental question that lies beneath all three of the hard sayings that the papers of our panelists have explored. Will we have a church with a common priesthood in and to the world with diverse functional roles and vocations within it or will we have one that maintains an old-style clericalist model that distinguishes between a worldly (and therefore lower) lay priesthood in the world and a sacramental–ecclesial (and therefore higher) priesthood in the church? Will we have a church that sacramentally mediates God’s self-revelation and the world God loves to one another through its continually revisable and historically contingent structures and practices, or will we return to the balkanized church that considers itself a godly outpost in an ungodly world that it judges and condemns—and, in so doing, alienates from itself? Will we have a church that seeks to shape the healthy formation and development of Christian moral agents with robust faculties of conscience that, aided by the good offices of the church, allow Christians to navigate the complex conundrums of postmodern life, or will we return to a church “in possession” of the consciences of its members, that neither trusts that the faithful are capable of contending well with the vicissitudes of existence nor believes that it has much to learn from them or their “worldly” experiences? In short, will a world torn by violence, hardship, and injustice find the doors of the church open or closed to it? This is the question put to the church by many of the hard sayings of Vatican II. The reason why these sayings are hard is two-fold. First, they are hard because they are difficult for the church to pronounce and to hear. Judith Gruber does an excellent job of showing how the church struggled to come to terms with its pre-conciliar condemnatory posture and with its own complicity in the growth of atheism that stemmed from that ecclesial hardness of heart. We can all think of multiple occasions, however, where an opportunity to tell a hard truth about ourselves was not so robustly taken up. It requires strength and courage to articulate loyal and loving criticism of the body that is most visibly and clearly associated with carrying out God’s own purposes in the world. It takes no less strength and courage to listen to such critique with open minds and hearts, without falling into the deafness of defensiveness. This is one reason why these sayings are hard. Another is that they deliver a message with practical implications that are hard. They threaten the ecclesial status quo, longstanding traditions, power structures, comfortable and reliable hierarchies, theological positions, and practices, ritual and moral. They are hard sayings because they are demanding sayings. However, as Paul Lakeland’s paper makes abundantly clear, what is at stake in not doing this is the very pursuit of God’s mission in and for the world. Is the church’s priesthood focused inward or outward? Is it oriented toward God’s mission or the church’s own? Is it focused on itself or on the world? Ultimately, to answer the fundamental hard question of how the church and the world are related is to make a theological claim about what the church is and is for, at the most profound level of its being. Here, again, Vatican II offers guidance. And, as might be expected, once again that guidance is marked by the same ambivalence—the same tension between the old and new architecture situated on the same construction site—that marks the hard sayings that Lakeland, Gruber, and Jans have brought to our attention. One place to look for this (to my mind) hardest of Vatican II sayings, is LG chapter 7. Here, the council presents the church as God’s “pilgrim people.” Through the church, Christ is calling the entire world to himself. Christ is truly present to the world sacramentally through eucharistic practice. Christ is also present to the world in the lives of believers by the power of the Holy Spirit, who makes the gathered church into Christ’s body on earth, a body journeying forward together—again, as a pilgrim people—into God’s promised future. While this formulation is certainly not utterly foreign to the mystical body ecclesiology that greatly characterized pre-conciliar views, its emphases and dynamism, and its somewhat tentative accent on the world as the site for the church to participate in God’s redemptive work of love and reconciliation, suggest a new way of imagining the church in a more holistic, organic, and lively manner, one that seems to comport better with the gospel, and one that is more fully woven in to the tapestry of the world. Instead of drawing out the “hard” implications of such a construal of church, however, chapter seven backs off from this initial position and takes up a more traditional treatment of eschatology. Instead of issuing additional hard sayings about the eschatological character of the church as the corporate body of disciples undertaking the risk of service in and to the world as it discerns a way toward the kingdom of God—an eschatological view of church that, at the time of Vatican II was gaining significant traction—the bulk of LG’s treatment of the eschatological character of the church falls back into speculations about the destiny of individual believers after their death. Lumen Gentium’s eschatological imagination is essentially reduced to the four last things—death, judgment, heaven, and hell—along with a treatment of the communion of the saints. Yet, the opening paragraphs of chapter seven, offering the idea of the church as being on an eschatological pilgrimage, had signaled a potential key shift in the church’s fundamental self-understanding. Once again, new and old appear side-by-side, in tension with one another, in the Vatican II documents. And, once again, how this notion was subsequently received reflected this ambiguity. Some interpretations of the council’s use of this idea attempted to capitalize on the opening that LG chapter 7 provided to think of the church–world relationship in light of the eschatological missio Dei in new ways. Others favored an older understanding of the church as the gateway to personal heavenly salvation away from and out of a sinful and fallen world. All of the ecclesiological hard sayings of Vatican II stem from and point to contests over the essential character and purpose of the church. They reflect unfinished and ongoing struggles to arrive at normative theological construals of who the church is and who the church is for, what the world is and what its value to God in the ultimate sense is. As products of that struggle, the Vatican II documents alone do not provide a sufficient means of resolving these tensions. They are too thoroughly saturated by them to allow this. The legacy left by the council is, therefore, the legacy of the hard sayings themselves. The council perceived the fundamental questions that required raising at that time, even if the council itself was not quite in a position to answer them. If these questions have not been decisively answered—and Lakeland, Gruber, and Jans have certainly shown they have not been—perhaps it falls to us, as heirs of the council, to bring the unfinished construction project that is Vatican II closer to completion. Perhaps, the Vatican II legacy serves as a voice urging us, as if we were a corporate St. Francis, to build the church, the eschatological pilgrim church glimpsed by the council. We always need to leave room for those who come after to make renovations and build additions and even to radically redesign the building, as conditions warrant. But, build we must. And not, as the overall thrust of the council 50 years ago made so clear, in order to erect a fortress against the world but in order to be the active presence of God in loving service to and for the world that God created, loves, and will bring to fulfillment. Of all the hard sayings with which Vatican II challenges us, that may be the hardest—and most wonderful—of them all. ORAL PRESENTATION: NOT FOR QUOTATION OR CITATION ORAL PRESENTATION: NOT FOR QUOTATION OR CITATION