The Theological Priority of Lumen Gentium and Dei Verbum for the Interpretation of the Second Vatican Council

107 The Thomist 78 (2014): 107-34 THE THEOLOGICAL PRIORITY OF LUMEN GENTIUM AND DEI VERBUM FOR THE INTERPRETATION OF THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL CHRISTIAN D. WASHBURN Saint Paul Seminary Saint Paul, Minnesota N 1985, ON THE TWENTIETH anniversary of the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, an Extraordinary Synod of Bishops proposed six norms for the interpretation of the council.1 Among these norms were the propositions that each council document must be interpreted in the context of all the other council documents2 and that the four constitutions of the council are the “hermeneutical key” to the other twelve documents.3 Unfortunately, the synod did not provide any clues about the relative authority of one constitution to another. Theologians have proposed a number of different combinations of the constitutions as having theological priority over the other constitutions. The difficulty with much of the discussion surrounding the issue of the relative importance of one constitution to another is that scholars have often been imprecise in identifying the exact way in which a particular constitution 1 For the 1985 Synod of Bishops, see Xavier Rynne, John Paul's Extraordinary Synod: A Collegial Achievement (Wilmington, Del: M. Glazier, 1986); Giuseppe Alberigo, James H. Provost, and Marcus Lefébure, Synod 1985, An Evaluation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986); Peter Hebblethwaite, Synod Extraordinary: The Inside Story of the Rome Synod, November-December 1985 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986); Johannes Baptist Metz, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Philip Hillyer, World Catechism or Inculturation? (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989). 2 “The Final Report: Synod of Bishops,” Origins 15 (19 Dec. 1985): 444-50; Avery Dulles, “Vatican II: The Myth and the Reality,” America 188, no. 6 (24 Feb. 2003): 711 . 3 Dulles, “Vatican II: The Myth and the Reality,” 9. I 108 CHRISTIAN D. WASHBURN takes precedence over another.4 In this article, I will propose that while all the council documents should be read as a whole, the council intended that the two dogmatic constitutions, Lumen gentium and Dei verbum, would have a theological priority for understanding the other documents of the council, including the two other constitutions. I will argue that neither 4 For five decades theologians have been proposing one or more of the constitutions as the hermeneutical key for the interpretation of the council. In the immediate aftermath of the council, a theory arose which placed Gaudium et spes as the center of the council. “An interpretation of the Council that understands its dogmatic texts as mere preludes to a still unattained conciliar spirit, that regards the whole as just a preparation for Gaudium et spes and that looks upon the latter text as just the beginning of an unswerving course toward an ever greater union with what is called progress— such an interpretation is not only contrary to what the Council Fathers intended and meant, it has been reduced ad absurdum by the course of events. Where the spirit of the Council is turned against the word of the Council and is vaguely regarded as a distillation from the development that evolved from the ‘Pastoral Constitution,’ this spirit becomes a specter and leads to meaninglessness” (Joseph Ratzinger, “Church and World: An Inquiry into the Reception of Vatican Council II,” in Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987], 393). On Gaudium et spes as the “Schlüsseldokument für die Konzilsinterpretation ,” see Joachim Schmiedl, “Visionäerer Anfang oder Betriebsunfall der Geschichte? Tendenzen der Forschung zum Zweiten Vaticanischen Konzil,” Theologische Revue 108 (2012): 3-18, at 15-18. For the theological priority of Gaudium et spes at least in the field of moral theology, see R. Gallagher, “The Significance of a Note: The Implications of Gaudium et spes for Fundamental Moral Theology,” Studia Moralia 41 (2004): 451-62, at 457. Francis Sullivan has consistently upheld the theological priority of Lumen gentium and Dei verbum. See Francis A. Sullivan, Creative Fidelity: Weighing and Interpreting Documents of the Magisterium (New York: Paulist, 1996); idem, “Evaluation and Interpretation of the Documents of Vatican II,” in Contemporary Catholic Theology--A Reader, ed. Michael A. Hayes and Liam Gearon (New York: Continuum, 1999), 335-48. Sullivan is not alone in this; the same...