Humility, Ecumenism and the Hermeneutic of Continuity. A talk given by Sr Ann Catherine Swailes o.

The Century of the Church: the context of Lumen Gentium

In 1959 the recently elected Pope John XXIII caused general amazement by summoning a council of the world’s Catholic bishops and further astonishment by asking the participants for help in drawing up the agenda. Suggested topics ranged from the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God, to the appropriate Catholic stance on the salvation of extra-terrestrials. But concern focussed above all on the Church’s own nature and identity.

There were good reasons for this. There was, first, the rudely interrupted business of 1870. When the bishops of the world-wide Catholic Church had last met in Rome – recently enough for the oldest participant at Vatican II to have been present as an altar boy at Vatican I, but in a dramatically different cultural landscape – there was barely time to debate and vote on the question of papal infallibility before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war brought Pius IX’s Council to a premature conclusion. Discussion of the remaining ten chapters of the draft document on the Church, in which the material on the papacy was set, was unceremoniously abandoned. Understandably, by the early 1960s, many felt there was more to be said.

The century between the two Councils meanwhile saw burgeoning interest in more purely theological Catholic ecclesiology, largely centred on the concept of the Mystical Body of Christ. Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi, published in 1943, rescued this phrase from various misleading interpretations and proposed it as the most appropriate way of speaking of the Church. But this raised almost as many questions as it answered, and several bishops who were asked to contribute agenda items for Vatican II requested further elucidation of the term “Mystical Body” itself.

It is significant, too, that theological concentration on questions concerning the nature and identity of the Church was by no means confined, in this period, to Catholics. The Lutheran New Testament scholar and pioneer of form criticism, Martin Dibelius famously remarked in the 1920s that his contemporaries were living “in the century of the Church”, whilst the significance of the title of Karl Barth’s die kirchliche Dogmatik, has frequently been noted. The Second Vatican Council met, moreover, in the still relatively recent aftermath of World War II, and thus when memories of both a shared complicity of silence in the face of genocidal atrocity, and, more positively, of collaboration across confessional lines in resistance to the Third Reich were still vivid and potent. At the most profound, and doubtless sometimes the most viscerally felt level, therefore, the ecclesiological concerns of the conciliar fathers were inevitably, at least implicitly, ecumenical concerns.

In this atmosphere and amid such expectations, it is not surprising, perhaps, that the commission entrusted with drafting a discussion document on the Church initially produced a somewhat piecemeal text, in an effort to address as many as possible of the issues raised by the bishops during the consultation period. It was no easy task to craft material on themes as varied as evangelization, ecumenism, religious toleration, and the Magisterium into one cohesive work. Indeed, several of these topics were eventually to be dealt with in separate decrees and declarations, and in Gaudium et Spes, the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

But it was in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium that the Vatican II bishops wrestled most profoundly with their own ecclesiological concerns and, after a sometimes acrimonious two year gestation, produced the Council’s most significant contribution to the theology of the Church. Both within and beyond the bounds of the Roman communion, the nature of that contribution has, of course been highly contested. At the outset, then, it is necessary to sketch the hermeneutical tenets that underlie the reading offered here. I will contrast this with an alternative approach to the conciliar corpus which, though in at least one manifestation apparently more friendly to the concerns of ecumenical dialogue, finally promise more, in my opinion than it can deliver. I will then provide a brief summary of Constitution’s textual history, and finally suggest one way in which the text of Lumen Gentium read in the wider context of 20th century magisterial Catholic theology of the Church ,has abiding significance as a springboard for ecumenical ecclesiological reflection.

Reform or rupture: conciliar hermeneutics and ecumenical dialogue

In a 2012 essay,[1] Joseph Komenchak offers a tripartite division of styles of conciliar interpretation. In the first place, he suggests, there is the progressive account of Vatican II, according to which decisions taken at the council overturned, de jure if not always de facto, centuries of ossified obscurantism and oppression, allowing the Church to return to the glorious liberty of the children of God from which it had become more and more profoundly exiled from the time of Constantine onwards. Vatican II changes everything on this account, at least in theory, and very definitely for the better. The second approach he delineates is the mirror image of this one, which he calls traditionalist. On this analysis, Vatican II does indeed change everything, but for the worse. What the progressives regard as at best a defensive, at worst an arrogant, and in any case a self-defeating, isolation from the contemporary world, from which the conciliar fathers rightly sought to rescue the Church, is for the traditionalist necessary in order to protect the historic patrimony of Christianity – doctrinal, liturgical and social – from the acids of modernity which threaten to dissolve it. In addition to these two positions, however, there is a third, which is distinguished from both of them by its downplaying of the notion of any such radical distinction between the pre- and post-conciliar Catholic Church. Komenchak describes this as the reformist approach, which he associates above all with Joseph Ratzinger both before and during his pontificate as Benedict XVI.

In a 1985 interview, the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith remarked:

There is no “pre” or “post” conciliar Church; there is but one unique Church, that walks the path toward the Lord, ever deepening and ever better understanding the treasure of faith that he himself has entrusted to her. There are no leaps in this history, there are no fractures, and there is no break in continuity.[2]

For Ratzinger, moreover, it is of vital importance that this interpretation of the event of Vatican II can be read off from the stated intentions of John XXIII in convening the Council, and of Paul VI in mandating its continuation after the death of his predecessor. He goes on:

In no way was it the intention of the Pope who took the initiative for Vatican II...or of the Pope who continued it faithfully…to bring up for discussion a depositum fidei which was undisputed by them and already assured…I should like to say that Vatican II surely did not want to change the faith, but to represent it in a more effective way”.[3]

In his first Christmas address as pontiff to the Roman Curia in 2005, Benedict XVI distinguished this, his preferred style of conciliar interpretation from another, more dichotomous one, referring to these as respectively the hermeneutic of reform and the hermeneutic of discontinuity, or rupture. This analysis thereby implicitly collapses Komonchak’s threefold typology into a dichotomy: one either accepts the radical, fundamental novelty of Vatican II, whether in celebration or despair, or one denies it. This has the effect, initially disorientating, but perhaps ultimately illuminating, of reconfiguring strikingly the dramatis personae of some of the more celebrated episodes in the later 20th century history of the Catholic Church: Marcel Lefebvre, Hans Küng and Leonardo Boff are, to put it mildly, unexpected allies, but, on this account all three would indeed stand for a decidedly discontinuous interpretation of the event of Vatican II and its aftermath.

In fact, though elsewhere he calls in question both “progressive” and “traditionalist” approaches to the Council, in the 2005 address, Benedict is chiefly concerned to challenge those who wield the hermeneutic of discontinuity in the interests of what Komenchak refers to as the progressive position:

The hermeneutic of discontinuity asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts. Precisely because the texts would only imperfectly reflect the true spirit of the Council and its newness, it would be necessary to go courageously beyond the texts and make room for the newness in which the Council's deepest intention would be expressed, even if it were still vague. [4]

Benedict would here seem implicitly to recognise the internal consistency of this approach, but he goes on to deny its coherence with what we might call (for want of a much better word) the classical Catholic stance on conciliar authority:

The nature of a Council as such is therefore basically misunderstood. In this way, it is considered as a sort of constituent assembly that eliminates an old constitution and creates a new one. However, the Constituent Assembly needs a mandator and then confirmation by the mandator, in other words, the people the constitution must serve. The Fathers had no such mandate and no one had ever given them one; nor could anyone have given them one because the essential constitution of the Church comes from the Lord and was given to us so that we might attain eternal life and, starting from this perspective, be able to illuminate life in time and time itself. [5]

Benedict XVI’s refusal to countenance the hermeneutic of discontinuity, then, rests on properly theological foundations: ultimately on a particular understanding of the relationship between Christology and ecclesiology. His position cannot authentically be reduced simply to nostalgia for an era of apparently greater doctrinal certitude or liturgical stability, or an authoritatarian desire to run the Barque of Peter as an excessively tight ship, though it could obviously be evoked to such ends. His approach stresses, rather, the responsive nature of ecclesial authority and enables an interplay between ressourcement and aggiornomento : the fundamental constitution of the Church is something supernaturally given in virtue of the Church’s identity as the Body of Christ, not something to be manufactured anew in each generation, whilst it is the role of the magisterium, in both its conciliar and papal dimensions, to discern and articulate ever more clearly that constitution and its implications for the life of the Church. It is for this reason, incidentally, that the tag “hermeneutic of reform”, consistently preferred by Ratzinger himself, is a more accurate descriptor of the position than that frequently deployed in polemical contexts by both its defenders and critics, namely the “hermeneutic of continuity”. There is no contradiction between saying, on the one hand, that the Church has indeed received a changeless “essential constitution” from the Lord, and, on the other, that, in its human concreteness, the Church stands in need of constant penitence, or that new formulations of this “essential constitution” can and must be found as a matter of apologetic necessity, in dialogue not only with the Church’s secular interlocutors but also with the riches of the tradition.

In this, it does seem that Benedict can justifiably claim to be at one with his two predecessors who presided over the Second Vatican Council. John XXIII, famously, in his opening address to the assembled bishops, emphasised precisely the distinction between the “substance of the ancient doctrine of the faith” and the “way in which it is presented”, declaring that “the greatest concern of the Ecumenical Council is that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously”. Paul VI, meanwhile, in his first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, promulgated between sessions of the Council, stressed the interdependence of two distinct, but only apparently contradictory concerns of the conciliar Fathers:

Obviously there can be no question of reforming the nature of the Church or its basic structure[6]…the purpose of this exhortation is not to lend weight to the belief that perfection consists in rigidly adhering to the methods adopted by the Church in the past and refusing to countenance the practical measures commonly thought to be in accord with the character of our time.[7]

It is fundamentally on the grounds of this consonance with what I have called the classical Catholic understanding of conciliar authority that the hermeneutic of reform seems to me to be the more theologically fruitful way of understanding the legacy of Vatican II. This is, of course, an assertion with which a non-Catholic ecclesiologist might quite reasonably take issue. Underlying this claim, moreover, there is a certain more general hermeneutical stance about the range of meanings that can be legitimately ascribed to texts – though I think the very status of the conciliar corpus within the life of the Catholic Church rescues this from being simply a one-dimensional identification of authorial intention with meaning. Unfortunately, the constraints of time and space do not allow for the full exploration of any of these presuppositions here, though they would be welcome topics for discussion. What is perhaps of more immediate concern in any case is my, possibly counter-intuitive, assertion that the so-called hermeneutic of reform might prove to be more fertile for ecumenical dialogue than its rival. At first sight, after all, it might seem that the kind of open-ended interpretative stance characterised by Benedict as the hermeneutic of discontinuity might allow for a genuinely less constrained and more humble, and thus more creative conversation between Christians of differing traditions.

This can, however, be questioned on at least two grounds. In the first place, as Ratzinger remarks in the 1984 interview, “dialogue is only possible on the foundation of a clear identity”:[8] a certain doctrinal stability (which, at least on the Catholic understanding of dogmatic development is not to be identified with a sterile, atemporal uniformity of expression of doctrine) on the part of participants in conversation across confessional divides is surely the sine qua non of any communication taking place at all, at least on the basis of shared and complementary appropriations of Christian patrimony. But secondly, and more concretely, some of the potentially most ecumenically fertile insights of, for example, Lumen Gentium, are precisely those with the deepest roots in pre-conciliar Catholic ecclesiology. Too great a stress on the radical novelty of the theology of Vatican II, especially with regard to the Catholic Church’s self-understanding, risks obscuring something of potentially great ecumenical significance. To this, I will return in the final section of this paper, where I intend to concentrate not on the best known potential ecclesiological flashpoints in the text of Lumen Gentium[9] but on some perhaps slightly less obvious, but I believe rich, resources for inter-confessional conversation.

Lumen Gentium: the textual history

The definitive version of Lumen Gentium was arrived at only after three more or less substantial revisions. As we have seen, the first schema de ecclesia to be discussed at Vatican II was produced by the pre-conciliar doctrinal commission, and was something of a catch-all for the various ecclesiological concerns that had been raised in response to the preparatory questionnaire. The draft thus included chapters on the nature of the Church militant, the members of the Church and the necessity of membership for salvation, the episcopate as the highest degree of the sacrament of order and priesthood, residential bishops, religious life as a state of perfection, the laity, the magisterium, authority and obedience in the Church, relations between Church and state and religious tolerance, the necessity of a universal proclamation of the gospel, and ecumenism. From the very outset of debate on the floor of the council, dissatisfaction was expressed at its higjly juridical character, and a series of speakers suggested supplementing this approach with an exposition of more basically theological concerns about ecclesial identity, including the concept of Church as communion, and, on the first day of the debate, the concept of Church as people of God. Towards the end of the first session, John XXIII appointed a new commission, charged with revising the draft schema; in fact, there was a much more radical overhaul undertaken.

The second draft schema contained four chapters, dramatically reduced from the eleven of the pre-conciliar version, and their titles strikingly reflected the desire to balance the juridical with the theological and spiritual. Thus the draft begins with the Church as mystery, and proceeds to consider the hierarchy, the People of God and the laity, and the universal vocation to holiness and religious life. The text was overwhelmingly accepted as a working document, but three especially significant points were made in the discussion prior to the vote, all of which shaped decisively the third and fourth drafts of the constitution.

In the first place, it was suggested that a chapter should be added on the Church’s eschatological destiny. More controversially, there was a call for the third chapter of the second draft to be divided in two, with the section on the Church as People of God placed before the chapter on the hierarchy and that on the laity remaining after it. The suggestion which generated the most heated, even painful, discussion, however, was that the constitution should have a final chapter on the Mother of God, thus eliminating the necessity for the council to produce a separate Mariological document.

Taking all this into account, the third draft thus had seven chapters, on the Church as Mystery, the Church as People of God, the Hierarchy, the Laity, the vocation to holiness as both a universal feature of the Church and as manifested in religious life, the eschatological consummation of holiness and Mary in the mystery of Christ and the Church. The final draft differed only in separating the consideration of religious life from that of the vocation of all the baptised to holiness, giving the 8 chapters to be found in the text as it was finally promulgated on November 21st 1964.

Church as Mystery; Church as Body: Lumen Gentium and Mystici Corporis Christi

As is frequently remarked, Lumen Gentium shares with the other 15 conciliar documents of Vatican II a literary style almost unprecedented in magisterial texts. In line with John XXIII’s hope, expressed in the opening allocution to the Council, the tone is notably irenic, lacking the apparatus of canon and anathema commonplace in earlier conciliar documents; it is also densely allusive and at times even lyrical. The purpose of the Constitution, according to its opening paragraph, is to set forth “as clearly as possible, and in the tradition laid down by earlier councils” the Church’s “own nature and universal mission” to be the locus from which the light of Christ, the “light of the nations” shines forth over all humanity.[10] But this proves to be a new kind of setting forth, in the service of a new kind of clarity, in which a tapestry of scriptural and patristic citations allows a kind of contemplative gazing on the Church to take precedence over any discussion of juridical structure. This is not because such structure is unimportant, but its importance is strictly ancillary: we need to know what, or better who, the Church is, before we can usefully discuss how the Church’s life should be organised. The decision not merely to include a chapter on the Church as mystery, but to place it at the head of the Constitution is thus a highly significant one.

To speak of the Church as mystery is not, of course, to invoke the categories of the unheimlich or the merely puzzling, but nor is it even simply to say that the Church is a reality too great to comprehend. This theological usage is certainly part of what is intended: again, the conciliar fathers are here emphasising that the Church cannot be reduced to its juridical structure, any more than a human being can be exhaustively defined, at any rate from the perspective of Christian theological anthropology, in terms of biochemical composition. But, more specifically - there are similar uses of the word “mystery” in the liturgy and in the theology of the liturgy – to describe the Church as mystery is to signal the Church’s sacramental quality. In a careful formulation, “the Church of Christ” is said to be “in the nature of a sacrament”:[11] it is not, in other words, that the traditional list of 7 sacraments has now been expanded to 8: rather, the Church has the same kind of twofold purpose, efficacious and illustrative, that Catholic sacramental theology ascribes to those 7. As the sacraments use physical realities – water, bread, wine, oil, and so on – both to symbolise God’s power and presence and to convey it to us, so the Church which we can see and interact with is the means by which God has ordained to unite all humanity with himself. This, incidentally, is the rationale for the great stress, in the Constitution as a whole, on holiness. As, in Catholic Eucharistic theology as classically expressed, for instance, by St Thomas Aquinas, the bread and wine of the Mass not only become the body and blood of Christ but simultaneously give us a kind of picture of the nourishment and joy to be found in our relationship with him, so the world will only recognise Christ’s summons to unity in God through the Church if the Church’s members resemble Christ.

To talk explicitly of the Church as mystery, or as sacramental in character, though novel, in the context of Catholic magisterial ecclesiology at least, shows, I suggest, the profound organic connection between Lumen Gentium and its immediate magisterial predecessors, especially Mystici Corporis Christi, Pius XII’s wartime ecclesiological encyclical with which the Vatican II Constitution is rather often misleadingly contrasted. Exploring the nature of the connection between these two milestones of 20th century Catholic ecclesiology may help us to arrive at the ecumenical significance of speaking of the Church as mystery.

There is a common presupposition that Pius XII’s emphasis on the Church as Mystical Body was exclusively in the service of a juridical account of ecclesiology aligned to a somewhat narrowly triumphalist understanding of both Catholic identity and magisterial authority, as though the phrase was simply a pious sounding way of legitimizing ecclesiolatry by radically identifying the Church, and especially the Church’s leaders, with Christ. Against this backdrop, Lumen Gentium with its relative paucity of references to the Mystical Body and its apparently more democratic contrasting stress on the Church as People of God, is seen as representing a volte-face on the part of the conciliar fathers. Similarly, it is frequently assumed that the very concept of the Church as Mystical Body is inimical to the ecumenical enterprise since, as it is often put, if it is a body that is in question, one either is a member or one is not, and that here, too, Lumen Gentium, with its stress on the presence of ecclesial elements outside the Church, is a revolutionary text.

It must be admitted that the context in which Pius XII initially invokes the phrase “Mystical Body of Christ” as an ecclesiological title in the Encyclical at first sight does little to contradict the impression of triumphalism , and nor is it prima facie especially favourable to ecumenical development. The formulation is stark: the title Mystical Body of Christ is an incomparably appropriate name for the true Church of Christ, and, moreover, this Church is identical with the “Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Roman Church” [12]

In the first place, however, and specifically on the linked though distinct questions of the boundaries of the Church founded by Christ, and of salvation beyond those boundaries, Pius XII’s position is a little more nuanced, and indeed positive, than is sometimes allowed. In the appeal to non-Catholics which he places near the end of the Encyclical, the pontiff urges Christians of other traditions to extricate themselves not from a position of utter hopelessness, nor from one with no connection to the Church of Christ, but from one in which “they cannot be secure of their own eternal salvation”, allowing that “they may be related to the mystical Body of the Redeemer by some unconscious yearning and desire” whilst also stressing that they are “deprived of those many great gifts and aids which can be enjoyed only in the Catholic Church”. Finally, though it may have to later ears a somewhat paternalist, even imperialistic ring, this is perhaps a somewhat anachronistic way of reading the conclusion of Pius’ exhortation to those who “do not belong to the visible structure of the Catholic Church”, (an interesting, and presumably deliberate qualification, incidentally). This is his assurance that “We await them, not as strangers, but as those who are coming to their own Father’s house”. [13] The insistence in Lumen Gentium on the elements of the “many elements of sanctification and truth found outside the visible confines” of the Catholic Church[14] is, so to speak, a transposition of ecumenical hope from a minor to a major key, and the altered tonality makes, inevitably, a very different impact on the listener. Nevertheless, it is a transfiguration and a development of what is already there in the earlier document.

As to the question of what is meant by calling the Church the Mystical Body of Christ, and of why, if it is indeed the case that there is no ecclesiological title “more noble, more excellent, more divine” it should be paid such relatively scant attention in Lumen Gentium, here too, the evidence is more complex, and more ecumenically positive, perhaps, than is sometimes allowed by proponents of a discontinuous reading of Encyclical and Constitution.

When Pius XII promulgated Mystici Corporis Christi, in 1943 he had two explicit, and interlinked reasons for doing so. In the first place, writing in the darkest days of the Second World War, he intended to produce a message of consolation by stressing Christian solidarity with Christ in his passion and thus the human dignity of those undergoing the trials of war, urging members of his flock to “glory in a head crowned with thorns”. Secondly, whilst he is convinced that the notion of offertory participation in the redemptive suffering of Christ which is implicit in the ecclesiology of the Mystical Body is a message profoundly applicable to his times, it can only function thus if the true understanding of the Church as Mystical Body is carefully distinguished from two distortions, both widely canvassed during the 30s and 40s of the last century.

On the one hand, there were those who understood the phrase “Mystical Body of Christ” in a merely juridical way, so that the adjective is seen as more or less synonymous with “metaphorical”. On this reading, talking of the Church as body is not so very different from speaking of a nation in similar terms, or from referring to the governing body of an educational establishment or political party. Clearly such a reductionist account could never do justice to the rich scriptural and patristic patrimony behind the title. In Pius’ wartime context, moreover, it risked seriously undermining the Church’s moral authority in a way that many people of goodwill might well have agreed to be potentially disastrous: it could at least be read as suggesting that the Church is, fundamentally nothing but a human organisation whose sociology can be helpfully described in biological terms, in which case, why, finally, should one pay any more attention to pronouncements from Rome than to those from Berlin or Moscow?

The second “error” Pius XII detects amongst those who are most enthusiastic in speaking of the Church as the Mystical Body is that of “a false mysticism “which attempts to “obliterate the inviolable frontiers between things created and their Creator”, a veiled reference to certain theologians, especially in Germany, who were arguing that the unity of Christian with Christ was so profound that it rendered Christians personally sinless. Indeed, a still more extreme version of the position existed, which suggested that, in virtue of the hypostatic union, this might be true of all humanity. Amongst other obviously undesirable consequences, this had the effect of discouraging reception of the sacraments, especially penance and the Eucharist, since on this account the conformity to Christ they are designed to bring about has already been decisively achieved, at the very time when the faithful stood in especially evident need of their consolation.

Against all of this, the Encyclical sees the concept of the Mystical Body of Christ as having a profoundly different, and, fundamentally, sacramental significance. The ultimate warrant for speaking of the Church as the Mystical Body is scriptural: such an understanding is implicit in Acts 9:4, and explicit in Corinthians 12:12. The description of the Church as the body of Christ in the Corinthian correspondence is real, not metaphorical: the voice that knocked Saul sideways on the Damascus Road meant what it said: it is Jesus whom Saul is persecuting in his zeal against the Church. But this does not mean that all the faithful are hypostatically united to God as is the human nature of Christ. Rather, the grace poured out onto the human nature of Christ in the Incarnation is flows out from the head of the Church to be shared with all his members, and the normal means by which this grace is appropriated is through the sacraments, through the mysteries of the Church, thus constituted as the Mystical Body of Christ. Thus, we are brought into the body of Christ through baptism, and conformed ever more closely to his likeness through being nourished by him eucharistically. It is because this is so that all our sufferings can become incorporated into Christ’s own sacrifice and thus bestow extraordinary dignity on the human subject.[15] In this account, although the language of sacrament is not applied directly to the Church, even in the cautious manner adopted by the conciliar fathers at Vatican II, we can see an implicit prefiguration of that language, which, moreover, far from being an innovation in 1943, has antecedents in Aquinas’ theology of capital grace, Augustine’s Eucharistic ecclesiology and, embryonically, the Pauline canon. The relative (not total) absence of reference to the Mystical Body of Christ in Lumen Gentium is not best explained by its having been superseded by some alternative model of the Church with allegedly more contemporary resonance, but, rather, by its translation into the language of mystery and sacrament which has been, so to speak, its natural linguistic habitat from the beginning.

The assertion that the Mystical Body of Christ was marginalised by Vatican II as the central ecclesiological title in Catholic theology is frequently paralleled with the assumption that the term People of God has taken over this role. There is certainly some evidence in support of this thesis in post conciliar hymnody, homiletics and popular spirituality. There is certainly at least a connection in many minds between this terminological volte-face and an ideological one: the Church most naturally conceived as “the Mystical Body” is presumed, on this account to be a rigidly authoritarian institution, whilst the People of God evokes a more democratic, perhaps less dogmatic fellowship But, whatever the de facto situation with regard to the pastoral deployment of the two titles, it is at least arguable that none of this perfectly reflects the mind of either the Popes of the Council or the Council fathers as this was expressed in Lumen Gentium. Paul VI, in Ecclesiam Suam makes it quite clear that the ecclesiological reflection at the heart of Vatican II is in no way a departure from the profoundly Christological and sacramental vision of the Church enshrined in Mystici Corporis Christi, and that it is precisely here that the centre of gravity of the encyclical lies. [16] Meanwhile the phrase People of God does not bear quite the weight, either in Lumen Gentium itself, or, intriguingly in earlier 20th century Catholic ecclesiological reflection that some of its most enthusiastic proponents since the Council would suggest.

Although Lumen Gentium marks the first usage of the term in a magisterial text, the bishops who suggested its inclusion on the opening day of the Council’s debate of the preparatory schema de ecclesia in 1962 were drawing on a limited but significant heritage. In the 1930s and 40s, the term had been proposed as a corrective to certain understandings of the concept of the Church as Mystical Body prior to the definitive setting forth of the magisterially approved interpretation in Mystici Corporis Christi. In particular, the German-born Abbot of Buckfast, Anscar Vonier, OSB, urged its usage in order to stress the visible, institutional and theocratic status of the Catholic Church. Precisely because the Church is “a people”, the Church has externally observable boundaries and a juridical structure; because this people is “the people of God” that structure is no more democratic or self-governing than was the community constituted on Mount Sinai by the donation of the divine law. [17]

The purpose of the chapter on the Church as People of God in Lumen Gentium, and indeed the significance of its place in the document has been frequently debated. The assumption that its location prior to the chapter on the hierarchy legitimates a downplaying of the latter is ingenious, but hard to sustain. It is predicated on the assumption that the phrase refers not to the totality of the Church’s members, but to a subset, the “people” as opposed to the hierarchy, the ruled, so to speak, as opposed to the rulers. The phrase “People of God” has thus in some quarters since the council been taken as a kind of charter for empowering the laity vis-à-vis an allegedly alienating hierarchy. But this is contrary to the plain sense of the Constitution itself, where it is stated unequivocally: “everything that has been said of the People of God is addressed equally to laity, religious and clergy”.[18] Setting the chapters on the hierarchy and the laity in immediate succession to that on the Church as People of God enshrines this dictum structurally.

In fact, what is primarily in the sights of the Council Fathers is not so much an excessively rigid and hierarchical ecclesiology, as an excessively atomistic understanding of Christian anthropology and thus of soteriology. God wills to save human beings “not as individuals without any bond or link between them, but rather to make them into a people who might acknowledge and serve him in holiness”. [19] Further, the covenant with Israel is both a prefiguration of and a preparation for “that new and perfect covenant which was to be ratified in Christ, and the fuller revelation which was to be given through the Word of God made flesh”:[20] God has not, so to speak, at the Incarnation had a brilliant new idea. The Constitution stresses, indeed, in the strongest possible terms the aspect of continuity between the Covenants. On the one hand “Israel according to the flesh which wandered in the desert was already called the Church of God”[21] On the other, the new Israel is not, so to speak a finished product in a state of perfection, but still in via, in process and in progress in pilgrimage towards the promised land of heaven.

It is also of some significance that the new People of God, on the authority of the New Testament itself,[22] is to be a priestly people. This is so, not in a way that would collapse the distinction between the ordained and the lay state, but in a way that stresses profoundly their mutual dependence:

The common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless ordered one to another; each in its own proper way shares in the one priesthood of Christ. [23]

The ministerial priesthood turns out to have more or less the functions we would expect – the spiritual guidance and formation of the members of the community and, centrally, the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice. The “royal priesthood” of the baptized is exercised not only in the co-offering of the Eucharist, but also in the oblation of lives totally dedicated to God in “the reception of the sacraments, prayer and thanksgiving, the witness of a holy life, abnegation and active charity”.

At this point, Lumen Gentium sounds very reminiscent indeed of Mystici Corporis Christi, and it is surely not without significance that it is here, precisely (though implicitly) that the Constitution invokes the concept of Church as Mystical Body, saying that “the sacred nature and organic structure of the priestly community is brought into operation through the sacraments and exercise of virtues”. [24]

There is little warrant, then, for a dichotomous reading of the ecclesiologies[25] of Mystici Corporis Christi and Lumen Gentium. But what, finally, of the promised ecumenical significance of all this? Most fundamentally, I suggest, reading Lumen Gentium through the lens of what I have called the hermeneutic of reform, thereby rehabilitating the language of the Mystical Body, has the straightforwardly desirable effect of throwing light on the scriptural heritage shared by all parties to ecumenical ecclesiologising. This is so most obviously because the Pauline provenance of the image of the Church as body of Christ would allow a clearly biblical entrance point to a potentially profoundly exciting conversation, especially between Protestant and Catholic Christians, about sacramental theology and its relevance to ecclesiology. A secondary advantage is that, when it no longer has to bear the weight of a somewhat dubiously democratized interpretation set in opposition to a “model of the Church” as Mystical Body, Lumen Gentium’s stress on the Church as pilgrim People of God, with its own profoundly rich scriptural resonances in both Testaments, can be set free to do the job intended by the conciliar fathers. This is, in the first place, a matter of underlining God’s changeless graciousness – what happens in the Christ-event is not abandonment but expansion of the expression of the divine will in creation and in the covenants prior to the Incarnation; secondly it is a matter of emphasising the uniformly partial nature, vitiated by weakness and disfigured by sin, of all human response to divine vocation. Surely these two convictions, taken together, constitute an absolute prerequisite of the humility necessary for any ecumenical conversation.

[1] In J Heft, ed, After Vatican II, Grand Rapids, 2012, pp 164-5

[2] J Ratzinger with V Messori, The Ratzinger Report, San Francisco 1985, p 35

[3] ibid, p 35

[4] 2005 Christmas Address to the Roman Curia, www.vatican.va

[5] ibid

[6] Ecclesiam Suam 46

[7] Ecclesiam Suam 50

[8] Ratzinger with Messori, pg 35

[9] For example, I shall not deal with the question of the meaning of “subsist” in LG 8,

[10] Lumen Gentium 1

[11] Lumen Gentium 1

[12] Mystici Corporis Christi 13

[13] Mystici Corporis Christi 102

[14] Lumen Gentium 8

[15] Mystici Corporis Christi 106-7

[16] Ecclesiam Suam 35ff

[17] Mutatis mutandis, something similar could be said about Mannes Koster, OP’s, ecclesiology of the Church as People of God, in his 1940 Ekklesiologie im werden Koster does not especially stress the OT background of the phrase; rather, for him, the advantage lies in the title’s reference to what is visible in the Church, and is thus of perennial signifance, whereas, he considers, the term “Body of Christ” made its entrance into ecclesiology in the New Testament as an early, and strictly occasional example of nculturation. It suited Paul to speak of the Church as the body of Christ because this was apologetically useful when dialoguing with Hellenistic thinkers who were used to employing corporeal analogies in socio-political contexts, but in other cultural contexts it is limitedly useful at best.

[18] Lumen Gentium 30

[19] Lumen Gentium 9

[20] ibid

[21] The LXX translation of Qahal is, of course, routinely έκκλησια

[22] Rev 1;6; 1 Pet 2: 4-10)

[23] Lumen Gentium 10

[24] Lumen Gentium 11

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