Vatican II: A Liturgical Restoration

True Reform: Liturgy and Ecclesiology in Sacrosanctum Concilium. Massimo Faggioli. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012.

Eric Voegelin took at best a passing interest in institutional Catholicism.  Thomas Hollweck once noted that Voegelin “followed the developments in the Catholic Church with detached interest,” and probably that gets it just about right.  In fact, Voegelin’s treatment of the Catholic Church in Hitler and the Germans reflects more an unsentimental willingness to address the Church as a human institution than as Bellarmine’s societas perfecta or the communio of Vatican II. But the allure with which Voegelin’s work has tantalized now several generations of Catholic scholars must suggest to us that some very specifically Catholic questions are worth exploring in a Voegelinian light.

In the present case, though Roman Catholic ecclesiology poses questions quite distantly removed from Voegelin’s more vital interests, the principles according to which that ecclesiology develops in history directly evoke questions about the divine-human interplay and the quest for an ordered engagement with history that are recognizably Voegelinian.  As this book’s author evocatively suggests, the Second Vatican Council meant (among other things) “the recovery of the notion of ‘history’ for the theological disciplines”(27).

Alberigo and the ‘Bologna School’ are known for an authoritative, five-volume History of Vatican II produced under Alberigo’s editorship (in English, that history is available from Orbis Books under the editorship of Joseph A. Komonchak).  Faggioli was an Alberigo student at Bologna, maintaining a two-decade association with the Bologna School. These linkages all signify why we must begin by underscoring unusual reasons why True Reform commands our attention.  As the Roman Catholic Church observes the fiftieth anniversary of the Council, the relatively youthful Faggioli emerges as the leading theologian and historian of the Council in a rising, post conciliar generation.

The central claim of True Reform is as simple as it is original.  Liturgical renewal is the hermeneutical key that unlocks the correct interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. Since something little short of a war has unfolded during last five decades over how to interpret the Council, Faggioli’s claim that we can find such a key seems facile, almost too cute.  Careful history offers a reply to those charges.  Faggioli points to the fact that the earliest session of the Council, where the liturgy document was debated, was not dominated by “the fight about continuity with Vatican I,” which “began in the second session” (72).  That first session also was the lone session over which Pope John, who convoked the Council, presided.

Much against the wishes of the Council Fathers (who would rather have just gotten down to business), John began each day of the first session with liturgy, frequently substituting a rite of one of the Eastern churches for the Roman Rite and celebrating the Mass personally in the Greek Rite.  These celebrations “displayed the inner diversity within the Catholic Church,” and opened a path toward accepting diversity among the Fathers (34).  In no small measure, “The contribution to the ecumenical dialogue and to the rediscovery of plurality within the Church, made possible through a ressourcement based concept of liturgy, was clear from the very beginning” (34).

The Council session that debated the liturgy document, in other words, was not limited by an implicit debt to the unfinished work of Vatican I or much yet troubled by the directions that aggiornamento might take.  The most pregnant possibilities of the Council were entertained in that first session and woven as a thread through a tapestry into the documents produced by subsequent sessions.

Those words ressourcement and aggiornamento begin to suggest some possibilities of Voegelinian interest in the Council even as they also introduce the more traditional hermeneutic used to interpret what the Council produced.  Ressourcement grew out of the nouvelle théologie movement that, after Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, sought to escape the hardened dogma of scholasticism by returning to the original sources and practices of the early Church.

Aggiornamento simply means ‘bringing-up-to-date.’  Together, as the usual readings of the Council present them, these two methods provided the means to update the Church and address it to the modern world by returning to those original sources for inspiration.  To phrase the matter only a little differently, the Council proposed to seek out the original sources of order present in the Church—itself, a symbol of transcendent order—by recovering the immediacy of the experience of order in the lives of those who experienced its outburst centuries ago as much as in the lives of women and men living today.

Faggioli’s contribution is to enshrine liturgy at the center of that effort.  Ressourcement in particular is the source both of the continuity with “sound tradition” that the Council sought and with the development of an ecclesiology so old it only could seem new.  Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Liturgy, recognized the authority of local bishops in national groups to approve translations of the Mass into vernacular languages.  In this way and in others, this first constitution produced by the Council Fathers imprinted ecclesiological renewal on the subsequent meetings of the Council and the documents they produced.

“Ressourcement here,” in Sacrosanctum Concilium, “meant the end of four hundred years of centralization of liturgical law making in the Roman Catholic Church and a definitive overcoming of the Code of Canon Law of 1917”(77).  Ecclesiology was de-centered from its exclusively Roman orientation by the Constitution on the Liturgy, which cleared the way for the later Dogmatic Constitution on the Church to assert in an ancient voice that, “This Church of Christ is really present in all legitimately organized local groups of the faithful, which, in so far as they are united to their pastors, are also quite appropriately called Churches in the New Testament”(Lumen Gentium, 26). Faggioli observes that “it is evident from the state of the conversation going on in the Catholic Church today” that we cannot be certain “the liturgical reform has been beneficial for the life of the Catholic Church” (161).

The meaning of the Council remains a hard fought argument, and Faggioli bemusedly points to the “Belligerent Catholic bloggers” whose avid participation in the Council’s reception never could have been foreseen fifty years ago.  The most bitter struggles over the Council’s meaning concern the liturgy.  At least, Faggioli’s book demonstrates why that should not surprise.  But as True Reform assembles its argument for theologians that liturgy and ecclesiology cannot be distinguished in the work of the Council, a not inconsiderable by-product can be found in Faggioli’s rather profound reflection on philosophy of history as a force at work during Council as a consequence of the liturgical reform. The meaning of history is so much a question that is asked in the rarefied atmosphere of academic discussion.  Here in the Second Vatican Council, we have a rare opportunity to examine how the consciousness of history interacts with real and current events in unusually tangible ways.  If only for its lively awareness of these issues in something so immanent as a case study, the book must be recommended.

Though Eric Voegelin was at the height of his philosophic reflection during the years of the Second Vatican Council (the Council met squarely amidst the hiatus between volumes 3 and 4 of Order and History), we have little hint to tell us what he may have thought about it.  He was, to be sure, otherwise preoccupied.  But it may not be unreasonable to wonder how this effort to recover something from original experiences of transcendence may have seemed to Voegelin, who wrote about the dangers of “the deformation of It-reality into thing-reality, of luminosity into intentionality, of symbols into definitional concepts” about the gradual separation of “the symbol of noetic exegesis…from its underlying experience.” Would Voegelin have failed to recognize an allied enterprise in the work of the Council Fathers?  Certainly, Faggioli leaves us with reason to wonder.

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