Theology Today 62 (2005): 297-304

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EDITORIAL
Rebels with a Cause:
Twentieth-Century Roman Catholic Theologians

s Edward Oakes notes in his essay in this special issue, the

twentieth century, in retrospect, looks like an era of theological
creativity as remarkable as any since the fourth and fifth centuries, when the Cappadocians, Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Cyril of
Alexandria were at work, or the thirteenth century, with Albert the Great,
Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure.
On the Reformed side, Karl Barth stands alone, yet his work regenerated
Protestant theology for the rest of the twentieth century. Interest in Barth's
work seemed to wane, no doubt predictably, in the ten or twenty years
after his death; but, as the current wave of books about it indicates, as we
enter the twenty-first century, Barth is clearly the theological giant of
modern times.
On the Roman Catholic side, we have the generation represented in this
collection: Jacques Maritain (the one lay man, no doubt unwilling to
regard himself as a theologian, nevertheless a key figure in the constellation), Henri de Lubac, Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, Karl
Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Joseph
Ratzinger.
Perhaps we may not simplify too much if we ascribe the theological
creativity in these eras to the necessity to maintain the purity and integrity
of the gospel in confrontation with the radical challenges of Hellenistic
philosophy, Islamicized Aristotelianism, and the Enlightenment, respectively. Karl Barth, for example, from the second version of his Commentary on Romans (1921) onward, set himself against the reigning liberal
Protestantism that he regarded as an unhealthy compromise with the
Enlightenment and that undermined gospel truth. Of course, Barth was
opposed by many of his contemporaries: "Barthianism" was, and is,

Fergus Kerr, OP FRSE, is a member of the Dominican community in Edinburgh, where he

teaches theology. He is the editor of New Blackfriars, the monthly journal of the English
Dominicans, and his most recent book is After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (2002).

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denounced as an authoritarian fideism by "liberals," who fear that he
downgrades the status of human reason, while his theology is dismissed as
nothing more than "the higher humanism" by more radical Calvinists,
such as Cornelius Van Til.
However controversial Barth's theology was in the twentieth century,
and is today, and however acrimonious some of the exchanges over it in
the last century, the scene for Roman Catholic theologians was incomparably more turbulent. The pressures under which Catholic theologians
worked were, for them personally and for their publications, far more
severe than anything that affected Barth, at least after 1935, when he took
up the chair of theology at Basle. The orthodoxy of most of the Catholic
theologians discussed here was considered suspect at one time or another.
Some were subjected to sanctions by ecclesiastical authorities, as well as
to sustained abuse by colleagues in the discipline. Academic careers were
derailed or even prevented, and planned books never written.
Jacques Maritain, as a lay man, of course never had his views subjected
to investigation by the Vatican. On the other hand, because of both his
opposition in the 1930s to the Franco regime in Spain (when he was
branded a "Red") and his writings in the 1940s about liberty and the
dignity of the human person, he was ferociously attacked by many of his
fellow Catholics as a "communist" and then as a "liberal." Few would
deny that Distinguer pour unir, ou Les degrs du savoir (1932) is a classic
of modem philosophy, though little read these days. No doubt, with Le
Paysan de la Garonne (1966), Maritain articulated, more eloquently than
any of this great generation of theologians, the disillusionment that he
experienced in the aftermath of Vatican II. With Humanisme intgral
(1936), perhaps also little read these days, Jacques Maritain laid down the
foundations of a Catholic Christian humanism that played a decisive part
in the spiritual recovery of western Europe after 1945no mean achievement.
Henri de Lubac, as a priest and a Jesuit, had far more difficulty with the
ecclesiastical authorities. A number of Catholic theologians were anonymously censured in Pope Pius XIFs encyclical Humani Generis (1950) for
effectively wanting to "destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since
God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and
calling them to the beatific vision."1 De Lubac's Jesuit superiors in Rome,
believing him to be among those censured, instructed him to resign from
teaching Jesuit students at their study house at Fourvire. In fact, as he
noted wryly, he had not been doing so since 1940, which indicates how
imperfectly informed and ramshackle the Vatican bureaucracy can sometimes be. Since he was never summoned to defend his views in Rome (or
anywhere else), de Lubac always denied being targeted in the encyclical.
Nevertheless, as he of course knew, his books were removed from Jesuit

^ius XII, Humani generis, 26. http://www.vatican.va^ioly_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/

(19 July 2005).

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libraries and withdrawn from sale. He was ostracized for a decade, his
views frequently traduced by fellow Jesuit as well as (especially!) Dominican theologians. He continued to publish: Histoire et Esprit:
L'intelligence de Vcriture d'aprs Origene (1950), three books on Buddhist philosophy, and Mditation sur l'Eglise (1953).
The last of these, translated as The Splendor of the Church (1956), was
the finest account of the nature of the church for the immediately preVatican II generation of seminarians and lay people, and very widely read.
Though explicitly not offered as a complete de ecclesia, it contains no
chapter on the papacy, a lacuna that deepened suspicions of his orthodoxy
in certain influential quarters. In those days, a study of the nature of the
church that did not start from, or at least highlight, the doctrine of papal
primacy was bound to seem to many commentators somewhat "unorthodox." It did not help, of course, that de Lubac's references were to biblical
and patristic texts, rather than papal encyclicalsthen regarded, quite
commonly, as the most authoritative support for a theologian's views.
Henri de Lubac's most significant booksCatholicisme (1938), Corpus
Mysticum (1944), and Surnaturel (1946)were assembled from articles
composed over the years. He never attempted anything on the scale of
Hans Urs von Balthasare trilogy, let alone Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. In the early 1950s, when he might have been regarded as coming into
his maturity as a theologian, de Lubac felt so harassed by his critics that
he quite deliberately abandoned an ambitious project to publish a series of
books.
Of the theologians discussed here, Bernard Lonergan was never the
object of successful delation to the Holy Officeas he quipped, because
most of his writings were in a language unknown at the time in the wider
Roman Catholic theological community (English). Nor was he ever harassed by fellow theologians. Though he was one of the experts at Vatican
II nominated by the Canadian bishops, Lonergan played very little part in
drafting any of the Council's texts. On the other hand, through his
lecturing at the Gregorian University in Rome from 1953 until 1965, he
influenced hundreds of students from every continent and, in particular,
the generation of talented young American priests who were to make their
mark in the later decades of the twentieth century.
John Courtney Murray, in the end the most significant American theologian at the Council, was silenced in the mid-1950s by his Jesuit superiors, no doubt at the behest of the Vatican. His position on religious
liberty, much indebted to the First Amendment to the United States
Constitution, was anathema in the Vatican at the time and, indeed, at the
Catholic University in Washington, where the theologian Joseph Fenton
persistently challenged Murray's Catholic orthodoxy. Murray's legacy,
Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Liberty, was the most
hard-fought text at the Council, resisted to the end by a significant
minority, and considerably watered down to placate them.
Gravely ill with a collapsed lung, Murray was visited in hospital at
Rome in October 1965 by Yves Congar at the most difficult stage in the

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drafting of the text on religious liberty. Murray said that he was taking the
illness as his cross and that he was perhaps doing more for the ultimate
success of the text from his sickbed than from further participation in
argument with its opponents. Congar, himself already suffering a great
deal from the muscular dystrophy that would eventually almost paralyze
him, clearly understood what Murray meant. They belonged to a generation of Catholic theologians who believed that there would be no new life
in the Christian body without participation in the Passion of Christ.
Amazing as this may seem to us now, theologians like Murray and Congar
regarded their suffering, both physical and intellectual (inflicted by church
authorities), as a necessary element in their vocation. Learning and argument would never be enough; their service of the truth would have to
include this (of course unsought!) dimension of "witness" (martyria), the
grace of personal sacrifice.
Karl Rahner submitted whatever he wanted to publish to anonymous
peer judgment, as Jesuit rules required. An article he published in 1949
questioning, among other things, the point of multiplying the number of
eucharistie celebrations and raising the possibility of concelebrated Eucharists, was attacked in 1954 by Pope Pius XII (without naming Rahner).
He was forbidden by the Holy Office ever again to discuss the issue of
concelebration. An essay on the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of
Mary, published in 1960, triggered such alarm in Rome that in 1962 the
Holy Office required everything that Rahner wanted to publish to be
submitted to Rome for censorship.
Later that year, in October, despite all of these suspicions of his
"soundness," Rahner was nominated as a peritus (expert) at the Vatican
Council. In May of 1963, he was at last informed that he no longer needed
any censorship beyond the normal Jesuit practice. By this time, of course,
Rahner was among the most influential theologians at the Council. In an
amicable conversation with Cardinal Ottaviani, then Prefect of the Holy
Office, Rahner was told that it was to protect him from those who
misunderstood him that he had enjoyed the privilege of extra censorship.
It may be noted that, for all these difficulties about publishing his work,
Rahner was never manoeuvred out of any of the academic chairs that he
occupied in his long career. True, he resigned from his prestigious chair at
the University of Munich, but this was because he was not allowed to
supervise doctoral candidates in theology because the chair was not
formally in the theology faculty. Some colleagues may have been glad to
see him go elsewhere (Mnster); he was no doubt too much of a "star." But
the problem lay with faculty regulations, not in any suspicions of Rahner's
theological orthodoxy.
Thus, we could go through the whole list, and nearly all of these
twentieth-century theologians fell under suspicion at one time or another.
Hans Urs von Balthasar never raised any suspicion about his orthodoxy,
but he never held an academic post or taught at any university or seminary.
However, having left the Jesuits in 1950 to set up a secular institute under
the inspiration of his friend Adrienne von Speyr, a Swiss physician and

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mysticwidely regarded at the time as a "bad influence" on himhe

remained under a cloud for many years. His basically sympathetic study of
Karl Barth, published in 1951, did not endear him to most Catholic
theologians at the time. The first recognition of his contribution to theology was the doctorate conferred upon him in 1965 by the University of
Edinburgh (then a distinctively Presbyterian faculty), no doubt mainly for
his book on Barth, and, in the same year, the award by the Ecumenical
Patriarch, Athenagoras of Constantinople, for his studies of Greek patristic
writers.
Not invited to take part in the Vatican Council, by either the pope or any
of the Swiss bishops, Balthasar was at last recognized as a reputable
Catholic theologian in 1969, when Pope Paul VI appointed him to the
International Theological Commission. It was only in the 1970s, and
particularly during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, though, that von
Balthasar has come to be judged by many commentators as by far the
greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. Admittedly, the final
volume of his great trilogy came very late, only a year or two before his
death; it is only in the last ten years or so that theologians have been in a
position to judge his magnum opus as a whole. But in the immediate
aftermath of his death, his reputation has not gone into eclipse; on the
contrary, his status has steadily risen. He would, however, have been the
first to recall the chequered, often threatened course of his theological
activity.
Henri de Lubac, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner were never
summoned to the Vatican to explain their views to the authorities. Edward
Schillebeeckx, however, though never forced out of teaching or forbidden
to publish, had several colloquies with officials at the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith as a result of his book, Jesus: An Experiment in
Christology (1974; ET 1979).2 There is no doubt that influential figures in
the Vatican had been angered for some years, especially by Schillebeeckx's influence at the Council. Everyone knew that the brochure
published by the Dutch bishops in 1961"The Bishops of the Netherlands
on the Council"was in fact written largely by Schillebeeckx. The text
speaks, most unsettlingly, of "papal infallibility [as] also involved in the
ministerial infallibility of the world episcopate" (bad enough!), then goes
on to maintain that "the ministerial infallibility of the world episcopate" in
its turn is "also borne up by the infallible faith of the whole of the
community of faith." Each of the bishops was going to the Council as "the
voice of the whole community of faith for which he is responsible." This,
to those with long memories, sounded exactly like the "heresy" of "Gallicanism" supposedly eliminated in 1870. This, and much else in the
brochure, looked like an attempt to revise the dogma of papal infallibility
by locating infallibility in the faith of the whole community. At the
2
See The Schillebeeckx Case: Official Exchange of Letters and Documents in the Investigation of Fr Edward Schillebeeckx, OP by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith 1976-1980, ed. Ted Schoof, OP (New York: Paulist, 1984).

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Council itself, Schillebeeckx was never an officially appointed peritus

which, since he was not bound by the oath of confidentiality required of
the "experts," meant that he was free to discuss all the draft documents that
came his way and thus to exert a great deal of influence on the thinking of
many of the bishops.
Soon after the appearance of his Jesus bookimmediately translated
into German and soon after into EnglishSchillebeeckx seems to have
been delated to Rome by Dutch theologians who believed he was much
too close to the Dutch bishops for any of them to take steps locally to curb
his work. There was, of course, a problem about the book. Hitherto, all
Catholic expositions of Christology began from the doctrines defined at
the Council of Chalcedon in 451 ("two natures in one person"). As he
made clear at the outset, Schillebeeckx sought to reconstruct Christology
beginning with the apparently diverse Christologies to be found in the
three Synoptic Gospels (and taking Mark as the first written, already a
controversial decision in the eyes of most traditional Catholic theologians), and, even more alarmingly, in the so-called "Q" document. It was
obvious from the start that he planned to move to the Christologies
developed in the Fourth Gospel, in the letters of the apostle Paul, and in
the rest of the New Testament. This is, of course, what he did in the second
volume, published in Dutch in 1977, and in the United States in 1980 as
Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord. By this time, however, so much
anxiety had been raised that Schillebeeckx responded in 1978 with the
short book, Interim Report on the Books Jesus and Christ (ET 1980),
explaining and to some extent modifying the claims that seemed so
contentious.
In 1980, as a result of his ministry in Catholic renewal groups and base
communities in the Netherlands, Edward Schillebeeckx brought out the
book that became Ministry: A Case for Change (in Britain) and Ministry:
Leadership in the Community of Jesus Christ (in the U.S.). It is not
difficult to guess what the book was saying. In effect, Schillebeeckx was
setting out the reforms within church structures that, in his view, the
Vatican Council intended to inaugurate. This book, delated to Rome, was
the subject of another investigation by the officials of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, and Schillebeeckx was summoned to explain his
views again. The result was a revised version, The Church with a Human
Face (ET 1985), still calling for radical changes in the Roman Catholic
theology of ministry, on the basis of the pattern of the first millennium and
modern needs.
None of Schillebeeckx's books was ever "condemned" by the Vatican or
withdrawn from sale under pressure. Rather, he was able to explain
himself at greater length and, by and large, succeeded in establishing his
"orthodoxy." On the other hand, these proceedings overshadowed the last
volume of his planned trilogy on Christology, The Church: The Human
Story of God (1990). This book offers a vision of the future influenced by
liberation theology and interfaith dialogue, darkened by actual experience
of the existing Roman Catholic Church. Much shorter than the two

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preceding volumes, it seems comparatively perfunctory, nothing like the

hoped-for completion of his magnum opuslittle more than a stop-gap by
a theologian disillusioned and weary of harassment.
Bizarrely enough, when one considers his subsequent career as Prefect
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and now as Pope
Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger's Habilitationsschrift on Bonaventure's
theology of history and revelation, the product of research undertaken in
1953 at the University of Munich, was rejected by his examiners. It was
passed by his supervisor, Gottlieb Shngen, a much underestimated theologian (who appears in Barth's Church Dogmatics, incidentallyone of
the very few Catholic theologians of whom Barth approves). However,
Michael Schmaus, one of the most distinguished theologians of the day,
objected that young Ratzinger's dissertation was defective from a scholarly point of view and, much worse, betrayed a "dangerous modernism"
leading to the "subjectivization of the concept of revelation."3 Revised and
abridged, it was eventually accepted, enabling Ratzinger to pursue an
academic career.
Cardinal Ratzinger notes how much he owed to the teaching of
Friedrich Wilhelm Maier (1883-1957), the New Testament professor at
Munich. Decades previously, Maier was one of the first Catholic scholars
to accept the "Q" hypothesis in Synoptic Gospels studies, which led to
intervention by the Vatican to force him out of his post. Though reinstated
in 1924, Maier "never quite got over the trauma," Ratzinger tells us:
Indeed, "he harboured a certain bitterness against Rome."4
The Prefect of the CDF must have appreciated the irony, in his memoirs,
in recording his gratitude to a revered professor who never recovered from
an attack on his scholarship by the Vatican; and, moreover, in revealing
that his own dissertation was initially rejected because of its supposed
modernist tendencies.5
One way or another, then, the most remarkable figures in twentiethcentury Catholic theology suffered a good deal of harassment from their
co-religionists, who suspected them of unorthodox and, indeed, heretical
interpretations of Catholic Christian doctrine. In various ways, they were
vindicated at the Second Vatican Council, though they were often saddened by some of the results (as were Balthasar, de Lubac, and Maritain,
especially). We should remember how much their work and dedication to
what they viewed as the truth ultimately cost some of them, personally and
academically. Ironically, Yves Congar did more than anyone to set out
"Catholic principles of ecumenism." He introduced "a theology of the
laity," reintroduced the possibility of "true and false reform of the
Church," and distinguished between "tradition and traditions" (to cite the
titles of his best-known books). These collectively amount to the principal
3

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977 (San Francisco: Ignatius,

1998), 106-13.
Ibid., 50-2.
5
Ibid., 106-13, 50-2.

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agenda at Vatican II, yet he suffered more severely than any of his
contemporariesindeed, as noted already, he even regarded the progressive muscular disability afflicting him as a graced element of the cost.6
If the resurrection of Catholic theological creativity in the middle of the
twentieth century was an unexpected moment of grace, to be celebrated,
we should not forget the ordeals that so many of the significantfigureshad
to undergo. For reasons too complicated to explore now, the Roman
Catholic Church was so distant from Protestantism, the Enlightenment,
"progress," "liberalism," "modernism," and so on, in the opening decades
of the twentieth century that the engagement with "modernity," no doubt
made inevitable by the two World Wars, could not be other than traumatic.
For decades, the pastors and most of the theologians sought to maintain the
Church in splendid isolation. By the 1950s, however, a handful of theologians, some very influentially placed in the Vatican, saw that the longstanding unity and homogeneity of Catholicism, which they treasured,
were threatened from within by a new generation. To what extent their
fears were justified, or at least intelligible, is another complicated question
that awaits another day.
Fergus Kerr, OP FRSE

Yves Congar, Journal d'un thologien (1946-1956), ed. Etienne Fouilloux et al. (Paris:
Cerf, 2001) and Mon journal du Concile, 2 vols., ed. Eric Mahieu (Paris: Cerf, 2002).

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