The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology by Christopher Ruddy (review)

490 BOOK REVIEWS alone. It should not have a privileged position in our liberal democracy simply because it appears at first glance to have a purely scientific provenance. MICHAEL G. LOUDIN and NICANORAUSTRIACO, 0.P. Providence College Providence, Rhode Island The Local Church: Ti/lard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology. By CHRISTOPHER RUDDY. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2006. Pp. vii-259. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8245-2347-3. One of the fruits of Vatican II was the renewed appreciation of the local church. Prior to the council and going back to the medieval Scholastics, Catholic ecclesiology had been largely cast in terms of the one universal Church, which had as its other discernible "marks" holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. The Church's visible structure, with the pope at its apex of juridical and magisterial authority, could be easily compared to secular governments even as it defined itself in service to an invisible communion of grace. According to a certain caricature, local churches were mere "outposts" of the church of Rome, and bishops mere delegates ofthe Roman pontiffwho acted as the "supreme bishop" over a "perfect society." With the council came a new awareness of the local church as an ecclesial subject in its own right. Perhaps more than any other theologian since Vatican II, the late Jean-Marie Tillard, O.P. (1927-2000) has provided a highly developed theology of the local church in the Catholic world. Christopher Ruddy, who had opportunities to interview Tillard in the years before the latter's death, is an approving and insightful interpreter of the Dominican scholar's work. The Local Church: Tillard and the Future ofCatholic Ecclesiology makes a compelling case for placing Tillard at the center of an ecumenically promising renewal of Catholic ecclesiology. Ruddy begins his study by locating Tillard on a trajectory of modern ecclesiologists from the Orthodox and Catholic worlds who helped pave the way to reclaiming the local-church perspective. On the Orthodox side, scholars like Alexei Khomiakov (1804-60) and Nikolai Afanasiev (1893-1966) reflected on the nature of the Church in terms of mystical communion and Eucharistic fellowship respectively. Developments among these Orthodox scholars resembled in certain respects those that took place in the context of German Romantic theology and French mouvelle theologie, two movements that helped shape the agenda of Vatican II. The most influential of these pre-Vatican II voices, Yves Congar, 0. P. (1904-95), held out the biblical-patristic concept of communion as the new basis of ecclesiology and anticipated through his vast BOOK REVIEWS 491 historical investigations many of the debates that would involve Pere Tillard. Because the Church's communion is rooted in the life of the Trinitarian persons, Congar argued, it demands not a uniformity of expression in doctrine and worship, but a unity in diversity that fosters a sharing of gifts. A similar, though more profound, grounding of ecclesial self-understanding in the very being of God characterizes the work of John Zizioulas (b. 1931), the Orthodox Metropolitan of Pergamon, whose writings have had a wide currency among Catholics. While demonstrating how each of these particular thinkers lays a foundation stone for the renewed edifice of local-church theology, Ruddy also recognizes the limits of their approaches. Afansiev, for example, deserves credit for identifying the Eucharist as the formative element of ecclesial existence, but he fails to acknowledge that Eucharisticfellowship also calls out for unity-enhancing structures between local churches. Likewise, in Ruddy's view Congar commits an error when he speaks of the universal Church as existing apart from and prior to the local churches that are its necessary embodiments. Tillard's forty years of scholarship builds on these prior achievements and, in important ways for Ruddy, corrects some of their fundamental notions. Always basing himself on firm historical and systematic grounds, Tillard must be taken seriously when he urges specific reforms of intra-church processes. In Ruddy's opinion the Dominican theologian makes an especially strong case for abolishing practices that privilege the universal Catholic Church, such as ordaining bishops (auxiliaries, diplomats, curial officials, etc.) who do not preside over local churches. The essential bond between the bishop and the local church...