From Vatican II to Pope Francis: Charting a Catholic Future ed. by Paul Crowley, S.J. (review)

The papers in Crowley’s edited book were given in a ten week class at Stanford University, originally planned for a two day symposium marking the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. But just as they began preparing to publicize the course, Pope Benedict XVI resigned and Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as Pope Francis. The first pope ordained after the council concluded, his language from the time he assumed the Chair of Peter led many to hope that the vision that marked Vatican II would be experienced again in the church. How might that vision be reclaimed? This is the concern of Crowley’s book.

Three chapters put the council’s documents in a contemporary context, five apply them to contemporary issues, and the final three attempt to imagine some future directions. While all are thoughtful, some are particularly noteworthy. Thus, Stephen Schloesser argues that the council responded successfully to the centuries of change that preceded it, but its response to what he calls the “biopolitics” of the twentieth century – contraception, abortion, gay rights, and stem cell research as well as “companionate” marriage and the nuclear family as an emotional rather than an economic unity – was woefully inadequate. He comments that much of the church’s energies since the controversy over Humanae vitae has been spent trying to reconcile the lives of the non-celibate laity with a magisterial authority reserved to celibate males.

Sally Vance-Trembath argues that the genius of the council lies more in its methods than in its texts. Its theological anthropology is ready to be forged into new ways of being church, while the church itself cannot seem to let go of a preconciliar anthropology that defined women in terms of their capacity for motherhood. Jerome Baggett suggests that the council’s very openness to other faiths accounts at least in part for so many Catholics leaving the church. Similarly, many are reluctant to make judgments about religious matters; they are unsure about fundamental doctrines and their belonging or not is based on subjective reasons such as “feel comfortable with.” Archbishop John Quinn suggests that the council’s doctrine of collegiality means a decentralization that has not been realized, using the new translation of the English Sacramentary as an example.

Kristin Heyer and Bryan Massingale note how Gaudium et spes challenged the church’s defensive stance towards the world and called Catholics to identify with the poor and the marginalized. But where the constitution stressed the limited competence of church leaders in church and society, such humility is lacking in the more recent church, where authority does not hesitate to teach moral truths on difficult subjects virtually in isolation from the laity. In reviewing issues like abortion, contraception, the treatment of divorced and remarried, and pastoral care of same-sex parented families, they quote Pope Francis that “Thinking with the Church does not mean thinking with the hierarchy of the Church.” In a particularly wise chapter, Catherine Cornille argues that Nostra aetate left open the question of the salvific efficacy of other religions. While she rejects the popular idea that there are equal ways to salvation, a popular approach that avoids the problem of conflicting truth claims and practices, she notes that the later church documents such as the Vatican’s Dialogue and Proclamation (1990) recognize the possibility of learning from other religions.

Looking ahead, Paul Lakeland joins Pope Francis in viewing baptism as a call to mission; it cannot reduce church membership to liturgical celebration and an ethical life. In an Epilogue, Albert Gelpi and Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi reflect on Pope Francis’s efforts to extend the infallibility of the church to embrace the sensus fidelium, asking what kind of institutional structures might be needed to include the opinions of the laity. The ignoring of the laity is a theme running though the book. It will be helpful...