Abstract
As Andrew Meszaros helpfully reminds us in the introduction to The Prophetic Church, the American Jesuit conciliar peritus, John Courtney Murray, observed that the issue of the development of doctrine was ‘the issue underlying all issues’ at the Second Vatican Council. (J.C. Murray, ‘This Matter of Religious Freedom,’ America, 9 January 1965, pp. 40–43, here p. 43). Murray was writing in response to the decision of Pope Paul VI to defer the Council’s vote on the schema on religious liberty. Murray had collaborated in drafting this schema, which went substantially further than existing Catholic doctrine on religious liberty. In the America article, Murray was setting out his case for this particular development of doctrine. The manifestation of disquiet, which attended Paul VI’s decision to defer consideration of the schema, was a foretaste of the lasting theological controversy that was to surround the eventually approved Declaration on Religious Liberty Dignitatis Humanae (‘Declaratio de Libertate Religiosa’, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, (‘AAS’), 58 (1966), Rome: Typis Vaticanis Polyglotis, 1966, pp. 929–41). The assumed implications of the declaration were to be amongst the root causes of the 1988 schism with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers, and the debate regarding the limits of this doctrine and the extent of the development it entailed continues to the present. The current debate between Professor Thomas Pink and Martin Ronheimer is a scholarly example (see T. Pink, ‘What is the Catholic Doctrine of Religous Liberty’, at http://www.academia.edu/639061/What_is_the_Catholic_doctrine_of_religious_liberty [accessed 24 July 2017]; Ronheimer’s reply at M. Ronheimer, ‘Benedict XVI’s “Hermeneutic of Reform” and Religious Freedom,’ in Nova et Vetera, 9 (2011), pp.1029–54; and Pink’s response ‘The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae: A Response to Martin Ronheimer,’ at http://www.academia.edu/2911284/The_Interpretation_of_Dignitatis_Humanae_A_Reply_to_Martin_Rhonheimer [accessed 24 July 2017]).
Pink undoubtedly has had the better of these exchanges, due—in no small measure—to his familiarity with (and Ronnheimer’s seeming ignorance of) the relationes given to the Council Fathers at the insistence of Paul VI, in order to secure their placets: explanations which expressly state that the text of the declaration is to be understood in continuity with the foregoing magisterium and, in particular, with the teaching of Pope Leo XIII.
The question of the extent to which the conciliar changes can be reconciled with previous Catholic doctrine and the post-conciliar changes can be justified by appeal to conciliar authority has become an acute one. Speaking to the members of the Roman Curia in December 2005, Pope Benedict XVI made the issue central to an analysis of the appropriate theological hermeneutic which should be adopted in considering the Council itself, its teaching and post-conciliar developments. (‘Da una parte esiste un’interpretazione che vorrei chiamare “ermeneutica della discontinuità e della rottura”; essa non di rado si è potuta avvalere della simpatia dei mass-media, e anche di una parte della teologia moderna. Dall’altra parte c’è l’“ermeneutica della riforma”, del rinnovamento nella continuità dell’unico soggetto-Chiesa.’ Pope Benedict XVI, Ad Romanam Curia mob Omnia natalicia, 22 December 2005, in AAS, 98 [2006], Rome: Typis Vaticanis, pp. 40–53, here p. 45. The expression ‘hermeneutic of discontinuity’ was coined, in this context, in Avery Cardinal Dulles’s article ‘Vatican II: The Myth and the Reality’, America, 24 February 2003.)
His proposed ‘hermeneutic of reform in continuity with the one subject Church’ was offered as a tertium quid between two radically opposed expressions of what he termed the ‘hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.’ On the one hand, this rupture has been used to deny the legitimacy of the teachings of the Council, post-conciliar magisterium and, at its most extreme, the institutional identity of the post-conciliar Roman Catholic Church with the pre-conciliar body. On the other hand, this same claim—that the Council marked a decisive rupture with the immediately foregoing period—has been used, so Pope Benedict seemed to suggest, to justify radically novel interpretations of the teachings of the Council and even going well beyond the conciliar teachings in fidelity to a soi-disant ‘Spirit of Vatican II.’
In seeking to propose his hermeneutic of reform in continuity, Pope Benedict confirmed the continuing centrality of the issue of development that Murray had identified 40 years earlier. The problem of this centrality has hardly diminished with his successor’s Post-synodal Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. The questions raised by those concerned to understand what Pope Francis is seeking to teach in the eighth chapter of that document suggests that this question can not be deferred much longer without harming not only the doctrinal unity of the Church but her affective communion. What is clear is that neither explanations curiously devoid of theological detail and grounded only in almost W.G. Ward-like ultramontane positivism nor ad hominem insinuations of ideological and political counter-positional intrigue will provide what is needful. In his intriguing and compelling argument for the notion of a Doctrinal Economy, Meszaros might well have found a serviceable answer and for this reason alone his book repays close attention.
If there is a better introduction to a recently published theological monograph than that in The Prophetic Church, I have yet to read it. Not only is it free of the kind of self-regarding, throat clearing archness that so often marks the publication of works that began life as doctoral dissertations but it does what the best introductions do: it lays out clearly and thoroughly what is to follow and why. In this introduction, Meszaros establishes the importance of the matter in hand, defines the field of enquiry, surveys the current learning, poses the questions to be addressed, lays out his methodology, and, perhaps most importantly of all, introduces the reader to the hypotheses that he seeks to prove. But better than all that, in the remainder of the book, he does what so often others do not: he delivers on the prospectus.
The survey, in the second, third, fourth, and fifth chapters of this book are serviceable enough: worthy even. Meszaros captures Newman’s notion of development, its appeal and influence on Congar, the claim of the turn to the subject, and the interaction between history and doctrinal development well enough but it is in the sixth chapter that this work comes into its own. Here the book grapples with the truly knotty issue of the truth of the doctrinal principle and the contingency of history. Proposing an economy, sometimes parallel, frequently intersecting with the unfolding of the actus verbisque Christi that Newman, Congar, and Vatican II place at the heart of both Divine Revelation and its doctrinal expression, Meszaros articulates both the conceptual framework and the dynamic reality of a hermeneutic of reform in continuity with the one subject church. In a conclusion that more than adequately equals the introduction to The Prophetic Church, Meszaros draws together the threads of his argument, arguing that the unfolding of Catholic Truth is pregnant with ambiguity and struggle but that these are only to be accepted both against an horizon of eschatological hope and within the certain faith that the subject, ‘ the Pilgrim and Prophetic Church … can expect not only to attain the Kingdom but also to be provided with the means … to attain it as promised.’ For those of us intellectually engaged by the questions so succinctly posed by Benedict XVI in 2005 and so troubled by dubia arising from Francis in 2016, Andrew Meszaros has written a book offering both hope and consolation.