A New Short History of the Catholic Church (review)

This is a useful book of reference by the master of the history of the councils of the Church. It treats its subject in a straightforward chronological manner, dividing the narrative into five chapters, taking the Church from Pentecost to the fourth century; through the early Middle Ages, 400–1054; the central and late Middle Ages; early-modern Catholicism, 1500–1800; and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This brings sharply into prominence the fact that, as Tanner points out, the Middle Ages span half the period of the Church’s existence.

This account allows the characters to spin the plot, although it would be instructive to hear more from them in their own words; some close-ups of the honest wrestling with question and challenge down the centuries would add vividness. The main omission is a substantial discussion of “Church” and “Catholic Church.” The key passages of arms, outlined one by one; Cyprian and the rigorists; the Donatist challenge in St. Augustine’s North Africa; the discomfort as Eastern and Western Christendom drew apart and the schism of 1054; the implications of the ecclesiological challenges of the Reformation and after; and modern ecumenism all threw up in different ways the questions “What is the Church?” and “What does it mean to call it ‘Catholic’”?

The book slips almost without comment from the assumption that to begin with there was one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church; to the assumption that after 1054 that became the co-terminous with the Church in the West; and to the assumption that from the sixteenth century, it became the Roman Catholic Church with the Protestants dropping away from the Catholic Church. This may be so, but it needs to be argued, and the book would be the richer for a frank grappling with these shifts and their implications as ecclesiologically challenging. “Catholicism” cannot be used in quite the same way of the present-day Church and the Church of the fourth century, because it means, since the Reformation, taking a position in what many Christians would regard as a divided Church. The Second Vatican Council’s Unitatis redintegratio is discussed briefly in the context of its immediate aftermath and the wider questions of interfaith dialogue, but not as a prompter for a concluding discussion of catholicity as it appears at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

There is enormous value in a short, reliable, and careful study of a sequence of events that may have unfamiliar joinings and passageways to modern believers. But this tends to take for granted the answer to the key question, “What is the Catholic Church?”.