One in Christ: Virgil Michel, Louis-Marie Chauvet, and Mystical Body Theology by Timothy R. Gabrielli (review)

One way to read Gabrielli’s newest book is as an intervention into scholarship on the twentieth-century American liturgical movement. A launching point for its inquiries is an insight from Keith Pecklers’s study of the movement’s integration of liturgical celebration and social consciousness. The insight, and invite, is that “perhaps a recovery of the theology of the mystical body of Christ would reignite this connection that Virgil Michel and others so passionately articulated” (xii). From this problematic, Gabrielli’s argument is threefold: (i) there were three main streams of thought on the mystical body in the twentieth century, (ii) Michel represents the stream that most successfully integrates social and ecclesial concerns, (iii) liturgical theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet also “swims” in this stream and shows promise for its revitalization.

Gabrielli’s project is productively difficult to categorize. On its path through twentieth century understandings of the mystical body, it attends to both ecclesiology and historical theology. Gabrielli delineates three primary streams, namely the Roman, German-Romantic, and the French socio-liturgical, which fed into varying understandings of the mystical body. Gabrielli deftly guides his readers through the historical intricacies and tensions within and between these streams, the introductions of which are a welcome contribution. We learn that as they flowed through the twentieth century, the streams of the mystical body at times rubbed elbows too closely with Nazi rhetoric (in the German-Romantic stream) while also informing efforts for solidarity among laborers in France. Methodologically, the author advances the language of streams because of its ability to address a flowing lineage of the mystical body, including its ebb and flow due to changing circumstances.

One of the key developments that the author advances is the way that the mystical body flows over any strict ecclesiological embankments, especially in the French stream. In Chapter 2, many threads of Gabrielli’s argument come together as he shows that Michel’s exposure to the leading figures of the French stream during his studies in Europe directly informed his appropriation of the mystical body for the American context. For Michel, the mystical body was not primarily an ecclesiology (as much Michel scholarship has contended), but a spiritual vision meant to animate the whole of Christians’ lives, especially in its potential to correct for pervasive individualism. Michel founded journals, institutes, and apostolates to infuse the United States with this lived understanding of the mystical body.

Due to many factors, the theology of the mystical body has ebbed lately, but Gabrielli points to Louis-Marie Chauvet (1942–) as a possible new ferryman in the French stream. For the author, Chauvet’s engagement with key figures in the stream (especially Henri de Lubac), his concern for making a theology of the sacraments intelligible today, and his focus on corporality make him a fitting heir to Michel and others. However, perhaps because of the emphasis on the social commitments of other figures in the French stream such as Emile Mersch and Michel and such engagements’ explicit influence on their understanding of the mystical body, the connection of Chauvet to this stream seems to take a step back from the grand social vision of Michel to more of a theological exercise, even if it is one that provides vital corrections to the French stream. While Chauvet, in his pastoral life, certainly exemplified the relationship between liturgy and ethics envisioned in the French stream, reviving the doctrine of the mystical body in the key of Michel may be more recognizable in figures who appeal to the mystical body as a concrete call for justice.

All told, this book provides a wealth of valuable insight into previously undeveloped connections in the theology of the mystical body and gives tools for tracing its history. It would be well suited for a graduate course on topics related to twentieth-century Catholicism. Together with works such as Katharine Harmon’s There Were Also Many...