“This Volume Offers a Perceptive Reading of One of Vatican II's Most
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“This volume offers a perceptive reading of one of Vatican II’s most important documents, Lumen Gentium, balancing an appreciation for the document’s enduring contributions with an acknowledgment of its inevitable inconsistencies. Combining fresh theological perspectives with a dry wit and a perceptive reading of the state of the Catholic Church today, Lakeland uses Vatican II as a springboard for diagnosing what ails the church today. He concludes with a bracing call for a more humble church focused on its mission in the world.” — Richard Gaillardetz Joseph McCarthy Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology Boston College “This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the challenges of being Catholic today. In this concise, engaging, and delightfully readable volume, Lakeland provides a commentary on Lumen Gentium that sheds light not only on the Second Vatican Council but also on the current situation and the contemporary issues facing the Catholic Church. Even while probing some of Catholicism’s most neuralgic debates with his characteristically honest and insightful judgment, Lakeland’s tone of patient hope and good humor inspires rather than polarizes. I know of no better answer to the question of whether the Second Vatican Council still matters than A Council That Will Never End.” — Mary Doak Associate Professor of Systematic Theology University of San Diego “Paul Lakeland has produced another groundbreaking study which will inspire and energize so many throughout the church and academy alike. In this period of significant anniversaries concerning Vatican II, The Council That Will Never End is a self-consciously forward-looking book that draws on the inspirations of the past in order to serve the church of the future. The focus on Lumen Gentium is intended to bring alive a vision of what the church truly is, can be, and must be. It wrestles with the unfinished business of that document and of the council in general in a refreshingly honest and constructive fashion. This book should be required reading in all courses exploring ecclesiology, recent church history, and ecumenism.” — Gerard Mannion Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies Georgetown University A Council That Will Never End Lumen Gentium and the Church Today Paul Lakeland A Michael Glazier Book 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 re- served. 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 Li- turgical Press, Saint John’s Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America. 123456789 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 and index. ISBN 978-0-8146-8066-7 — ISBN 978-0-8146-8091-9 (ebook) 1. Vatican Council (2nd : 1962–1965). Constitutio dogmatica de Ecclesia. 2. Church. 3. Catholic Church—Doctrines. I. Title. BX1746.L285 2013 262'.02—dc23 2013018428 Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Unfinished Business ofLumen Gentium xiii Part 1: The Ministry of Bishops 1 Chapter 1: The Roles of Bishops in Lumen Gentium 3 Chapter 2: The Fate of Collegiality in the Postconciliar Church 17 Chapter 3: Episcopal Leadership in the American Church Today 34 Part 2: The Ministry of the Laity 59 Chapter 4: The Laity in Lumen Gentium 61 Chapter 5: Vocation in the Church 74 Chapter 6: Lay Ecclesial Ministers: Are They Theological Monsters? 88 Part 3: In Search of a Humbler Church 101 Chapter 7: Salvation and the Religious Other 103 Chapter 8: Who Is My Neighbor? 118 Chapter 9: An Ecclesiology of Humility 134 Afterword: In the Age of Pope Francis 155 Index 156 v 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. Peter’s 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 Preface and Acknowledgments he problem with anniversaries is that they often focus on the past event rather than the present reality. This is less likely to Tbe the case if the anniversary commemorates the beginning of something still very much alive. It is the difference between toast- ing 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 Council’s Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, was ratified by the Council fathers, we need to ask ourselves if it feels more like Aunt Millie’s 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.1 1 I take the title of this book from the appeal of Bishop Wilhelmus Bekkers of the Dutch Diocese of ’s-Hertogenbusch during the third session of the Council in 1964 ix x A Council That Will Never End The phrase “unfinished business,” which I will use frequently in this book, refers to the complex relationship between Lumen Gentium and the tensions in today’s 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 con- nect directly to many questions in today’s 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 cur- rently 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 docu- ments in general and in Lumen Gentium in particular. In consequence, this recognition of Lumen Gentium is at least as much about the present-day Church2 as it is about Vatican II, and the structure of the book will confirm it. Each of the three parts takes up a major theme of the Constitution, first analyzing the text and identifying some of the questions with which it leaves us. The first three chapters of the book look closely at how Lumen Gentium treats the role of the bishop in the Church and relates the less-than-entirely satisfactory presentation to various tensions in today’s Church be- tween the global and the local levels. In the second part of the book it will be the turn of the laity, in particular the mixed blessing of describing them in the category of “secularity.” How has this helped or hindered the evident emergence of the laity from the condition of passivity, if not infantilization, to which they had become inured through many previous centuries? Part 3 will focus more closely on for ongoing commitment to religious freedom, ecumenism, and freedom within the Church, as well as Curial reform and an episcopal senate.