Kenneth Woodward
The Rev. Joseph Komonchak is widely acknowledged as the country's leading ecclesiologist. An emeritus professor of theology and religious studies at The Catholic University of America, where he taught for 32 years, he is the English language-language editor of the 5-book The History of Vatican Ii. But in the tradition of the luminous ecclesiologist John Henry Newman, Father Komonchak's preferred form of writing is the essay.
A priest of the Archdiocese of New York, Begetter Komonchak was educated at its seminaries and at the Gregorian University in Rome and received his doctorate from Union Theological Seminary in New York Metropolis. His focus on ecclesiology began by accident, not pattern. His first didactics consignment was to teach the subject to a class of outset-year seminarians. In 2015, the Catholic Theological Lodge of America presented him with its highest honour, the John Courtney Murray Laurels, for distinguished accomplishment in theology.
This interview took place at Father Komonchak'south dwelling house, a onetime chicken farm he shares with his brother, Andrew, and ii large and insistently affectionate dogs in Bloomingburg, N.Y., not far from where he was built-in 82 years ago. His personal library is likely the largest in the hamlet, which lacks a public library of its ain. His most treasured possession: a complete gear up of Cardinal Newman'southward essays, sermons and messages.
"In that location is no separate church called a universal church. There is a church which is Catholic and whose web of relationships—founded in organized religion, hope and charity—is worldwide."
•••
Kenneth Woodward: Someone once said that information technology takes 50 years to implement an ecumenical quango. Information technology has been 56 years since the close of the Second Vatican Council, yet it seems to me that Catholics are still fighting over how to translate what the quango did and meant.
Joseph Komonchak: Over the decades, we've had 3 basic interpretations. The progressive interpretation works inside a "earlier the council/after the council" framework that gives bad marks to everything earlier the council and wonderful marks to everything after the quango. Working with the same dichotomous framework, we've had traditionalists like [Archbishop Marcel] Lefebvre idealizing the church of Pius 9 through Pius XII, with its rejection of modernity, and deploring what happened at the council and afterwards.
Is in that location a synthesis?
Well, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [now Pope Emeritus Benedict Sixteen] wanted to settle the interpretation question past proposing that the council be understood every bit providing reform within continuity: "Yes, there were differences, but that was the fault of the progressives who went too far, and of the media"—that sort of affair. I don't concur with that either, considering he is making what the council was dependent upon the intentions of some of the protagonists. I don't think y'all can do that. And then I wound upwards not like-minded with whatsoever i of the three interpretations.
And so how practice you interpret Vatican Ii?
I use iii terms: experience, text and issue. The experience is the gear up of incidents, encounters, initiatives and decisions that took place between the twenty-four hours that Pope John XXIII announced the council until the day that Paul Half dozen brought it to an cease. So experience is basically "what happened" at Vatican Two.
I recall that the caput of the American Cosmic bureaucracy at the time was Fundamental John Dearden of Detroit—Atomic number 26 John, they called him when he was a seminary dean. A lot of the states noticed a very, very different John Dearden who came out of the quango from the John Dearden who went in. He himself said it was the greatest experience of his life. Are yous limiting "experience" to the experience of the participants in the council?
No. I would also say role of the experience of the quango was how information technology was observed, not just past the Protestant observers, but past how it was covered in The New York Times, Fourth dimension or Newsweek or wherever else. Plus, the reaction of Catholics back home and all around the world while the council was going on was transformative in some mode.
"How local churches and their bishops respond to Pope Francis' emphasis on synodality will give some indication of how gear up nosotros are for a Vatican Three."
Y'all bandage a wide net. And what do you mean past "text"?
Information technology'south simple. Text refers to the 16 documents that were produced in the class of those four sessions. They tin can be found in a moderately sized paperback book and provide a way, if somebody says to you lot that Vatican II taught such and such, that you tin say, "All right, bear witness me in the documents where information technology said that." So in a sense they have a fixed nature, although they need to be interpreted.
And "event"?
"Event" points to the impact of the quango, as seen in a large historical context. I don't recollect there were many bishops at Vatican 2 who might be called revolutionaries; they certainly weren't expecting revolution. They were in favor of some meaning reforms, just the impact of the council on the church at large went far beyond what they could have predicted—and often enough went far beyond what they would accept wanted to happen.
How and so?
Like the collapse of the Catholic subculture—the Catholicism that you and I knew growing upwardly. That disappeared very, very fast—within a decade and a half after Vatican Two.
Or became vestigial.
Yes. Every bit the French sociologist Émile Poulat said, the Cosmic Church building inverse more in the 10 years later Vatican II than information technology had in the previous 100 years—which was truthful. Y'all see it in the internal life of the church, in the style we worship, in the decline of devotions, in the decline of vocations and in whatever number of other changes, both positive and negative, that have taken place. So, the consequence points to the question of, "Why did information technology happen that what was intended to be a reform within continuity became, in so many places and in then many respects, revolutionary?" Say what you will virtually modify within continuity, only that is manifestly not all that took place.
In a different vein, you have written this virtually Vatican II: "I think the council can be seen as the particular moment in which the Catholic Church became witting of its responsibleness for its own self-realization and eagerly accepted the challenge." What do you lot mean by "cocky-realization"?
When John XXIII called the council, he gave information technology a task of self-reflection: kickoff of all, for a spiritual renewal of the church; secondly, for the church to review its pastoral practices, its language, its relationships with others in society to be a more effective musical instrument of Christ in the world. On both accounts, yous have a self-examination going on, the sort of thing that an individual might exercise on a serious retreat, saying, "I need to take stock of my life, what I'thousand doing, etc." In event, John XXIII was calling the Cosmic Church to undertake at the quango responsibleness for who the church building is and what the church is and what the church building should be, what it should say, what it should exercise.
Well, that makes information technology sound less existential than the way it sounded to me when I read it.
The language gets some people nervous considering if yous read my ecclesiological essays, you lot will run into that I am constantly insisting that you practice non take a church building without people—without, that is, the religion, hope and charity of the church'due south members, who past God'due south grace brand the church come to be. In other words, there's a human being contribution. My accent is ever that the church exists only in concrete communities of believers. And that means that we enter into the cocky-realization of the church.
"As the French sociologist Émile Poulat said, the Cosmic Church changed more in the 10 years after Vatican Ii than it had in the previous 100 years."
In your essays, y'all work less with images or models of the church building than with theological descriptions like this one: "All that exists and could exist chosen the church, at to the lowest degree on earth, is a community of sinners gathered out of their breach and division by the Gospel and grace of reconciliation, struggling to exist faithful to those gifts." Nevertheless at Mass, Catholics recite a creed which says, "I believe in the i, holy, Cosmic and apostolic church building." In what sense tin can the church of sinners be called holy?
Information technology is holy past virtue of the gifts of God, the holy discussion of God, the holy grace of God, in religion, promise and charity. These are all gifts of God. It is holy also in holy people. You accept the Gospel, yous have the sacraments, you take the Eucharist, etc.; all of those are holy gifts. That wonderfully cryptic phrase, "the communion of saints," the "communio sanctorum," tin mean either a fellowship or community in the holy gifts of God, or information technology can mean fellowship with the holy people of God. Considering "sanctorum" tin can be either masculine plural [in Latin, significant "holy people"], or neuter plural [ "holy things"].
St. Augustine loved to quote two texts that are relevant here. One is from 1 John: "If nosotros say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in u.s.." And the other one is what the church prays every twenty-four hour period: "Forgive united states our debts." And then nosotros have debts to be forgiven every twenty-four hour period. The day that nosotros are going to be a church without spot or contraction, as Ephesians says, volition come only at the finish.
Well, how of import are churches and ecclesiastical structures and communities?
I certainly believe, as Vatican II stated, that there are non-Cosmic Christians who enjoy the grace of God—who are in the state of grace and holy people. The council stated that "the fullness of the means of salvation"—that is, behavior, sacraments, structures, ministries—tin can be constitute only in the Catholic Church. It's on the level of the aids to conservancy that the difference lies.
But on Judgment Day, what's going to be most important is whether nosotros are living in the grace of God, whether we are leading generous and holy lives. And the council said that Catholics volition be judged more than severely considering of the aids they were blessed with.
In another essay, you lot warn against twin dangers: abstracting the church building from history, as if information technology lived outside of fourth dimension, and reifying the church as if it were to be identified with the hierarchy, specially with the pope and his Curia in Rome. Are these still dangers, or have we muted them?
Oh, no, they're still dangerous. I wrote that only v years ago or so. The linguistic communication issue especially bothers me, using the word church to refer to the hierarchy or the clergy. The secular media regularly does, peculiarly when reporting on the sex abuse scandal. But you meet information technology in church media, also.
After on, yous propose thinking of the diverse forms that assemblies of Christians have—parishes, dioceses, synods and so forth—as "concrete universals." What do you mean past that term?
I mean this: I think the Cosmic Church as a totality exists concretely in local churches. At that place is no divide church called a universal church building. There is a church which is Catholic and whose web of relationships—founded in faith, hope and charity—is worldwide. And so in that respect it is universal, merely it is also very concrete. It consists of all of these people.
Y'all've been concerned with developing a theology of the local church. You contend that catholicity— lower case —is non just variety or variety—James Joyce's "Here comes everybody"—but "a whole that interrelates and integrates": 2 verbs. Then yous go on to observe that "particular cultures make a customs a local church, but it is the word and grace of God, received in faith, hope and love, that brand a community a local church." I similar that, just how does that differ from the ecclesiology of, say, the congregationalist churches?
The congregationalist churches, at least in the American experience, tend to exist jealously independent.
Baptist congregations even more so.
Whereas our congregations have a powerful sense of their communion with other congregations in a worldwide fellowship. And this includes structures of ministry: a ministry building of unity inside a local community, and and then a ministry of unity among the communities of communities—the bishop—and so there is a universal minister of unity, the bishop of Rome.
"In some respects 'Gaudium et Spes' is dated. If yous look at the kinds of problems it addresses, the perspectives of, allow's say, Latin America, hardly enter into it."
I was thinking just of the papacy, Rome as a ministry of unity. But you lot're saying that on every level of the church building, there's a ministry of unity. That might have also been what the great Methodist theologian Albert Outler was pointing to when at the close of Vatican 2, where he was an observer, he said: "Ken, deep downwardly, nosotros Protestants distrust the structures nosotros've created, whereas for Catholics, Holy Female parent the Church is always, dammit , Holy-Female parent-the-Church building." Meaning, however much Catholics might criticize church structures—"This diocese is inactive, the bishops are all wrong, the pope and the curia are evil"—at that place is still a basic trust that the structures are valid and volition always exist there.
And that they always accept been at that place, yep. But I remember we Catholics could apply a good dose of congregationalism! [The French Cosmic theologian] Louis Bouyer said that later the Resurrection and the Ascension and Pentecost, St. Peter didn't blitz off to Rome to establish a bureaucracy. And that the church was, in fact, local communities replicating themselves when people went out from them and founded new communities. Bouyer used the metaphor of "cutting and grafting" to draw it.
Didn't Vatican 2 address the relationship betwixt the local church and the church universal ?
Yes. In "Lumen Gentium," information technology says the Catholic Church building exists "in and from local churches." So the so-called universal church exists—and I would say also functions—simply in and from local churches, past which the quango fathers meant dioceses. Then the universal church building is a communion of diocesan communities. And you could argue that a diocese is a communion of parochial communities, parishes.
In all these definitions and conversations so far about the local church, you haven't included the sharing of the Eucharistic meal.
That is interesting, considering 30 years agone somebody else pointed that out to me and I idea I had repaired information technology. I hold with a statement attributed to the dandy Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac: "The church makes the Eucharist, and the Eucharist makes the church building."
Vatican II inspired the development of indigenous liturgies as a manner of anchoring the church more deeply in the local church building and its culture, especially in Africa and Asia. How well has that worked out, in your judgment?
When I offset started working on the theology of the local church, I tended to make local culture the chief feature that would define the local graphic symbol of a local church. Simply then a couple of experiences fabricated me rethink that assumption. The first one occurred when I was brought in as an outside skilful to the theological informational committee of the Asian Bishops' Briefing. We were talking about local cultures when a priest from Singapore spoke up and said: "I tin can't relate to all of this because Singapore does non have a unmarried civilisation. Singapore has several cultures, some of them existing side past side, some of them in diverse kinds of interrelationships. Then what y'all are saying here is that there is a single culture in which the church would embody itself. Only in Singapore, that doesn't work."
And the second?
The other experience was seeing a photograph of a bishop blessing bodies during the horrors of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. If there's one thing that that poor land did non need, it was a church that was more Hutu or more Tutsi. It needed a church in which the differences between those two cultural traditions were transcended—transcended in the knowledge of the blessings brought to u.s.a. by Christ.
Then I moved from thinking that local civilization is what makes a church local to realizing that the primal that determines a church'due south local character is historical. What is the historical moment? And what is the challenge that needs to exist met by these people who are existing right here and at present? In the midst of what historical challenge are people making the decision of faith?
That'due south a major change.
You can't abstract the local church from the historical moment. So if you are asked today, "What is the slap-up challenge of the contemporary moment that the church building has to address?," your first question must exist: "Where are you lot talking most? Who are you lot talking well-nigh?" Considering we accept i set of challenges here in the United States, and the people in Mali have others.
How tin can the local church play an integrative function, as you lot say it should, in this overheated political moment in our history? It seems the only option for pastors is not to mention political issues at all.
Or to preach on it, and to preach on the divisiveness, and to call people to start listening to ane another and talking to one some other. That would exist a responsibleness on the role of a pastor.
Does Joe Komonchak do that on Sundays?
I take done it, but it's difficult because you exercise take people for whom political commitments are more than of import than their faith delivery. When I preached on biblical texts on welcoming the stranger and the immigrant, I was berated for bringing politics into the pulpit by speaking confronting Trump.
The challenge is to go people talking to one another. Y'all take to inquire them to do a self-test, to ask: "Do y'all even listen to the other side? Can you listen to the other side without disdain?" And I personally find it very hard to practise that myself.
This is an appropriate moment to go back to "Gaudium et Spes" [the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern Globe"]. What did that highly consequential certificate mean by "the modern world," and what were the primary characteristics of that world? It seems to me that beginning with the events of 1968, here and in Europe, the modern world as the council fathers imagined it changed speedily and dramatically, at least in the West. Do these changes make "Gaudium et Spes" outdated in that regard?
Well, I would say that the modern globe in the horizon of the chief protagonists at Vatican Ii largely meant the globe of the industrialized democracies of the Due north Atlantic—Western Europe and the United States—and outposts like Australia. The futurity John Paul II [Archbishop Karol Wojtyla] at a certain point in the quango pointed out that there were at least two modern worlds, the world of the North Atlantic and the world of Eastern Europe, the world under Communist domination. And so other people began saying, "No, there'south a third world," located basically in the Southern Hemisphere.
Yeah, merely those views all seem very dated.
In some respects "Gaudium et Spes" is dated. If you look at the kinds of issues it addresses, the perspectives of, let'south say, Latin America, inappreciably enter into it. So that was an important bespeak that Wojtyla wanted to make, but information technology didn't accept a tremendous corporeality of influence on "Gaudium et Spes." Still, that certificate is a serious assay of modernity, and I don't believe in post-modernity. I call back we are still in the middle of modernity.
"The first stage of the synodal path is for the bishops to do a kind of sounding out of their people. But I don't know of many bishops who have taken that seriously."
How so?
I think of modernity equally the consequence of a fix of transformations, embedded in the social, political, economic and technological revolutions that have occurred since the French Revolution—including the cultural 1 that relativizes everything and then that at that place is no master narrative. We may accept that there is no main narrative; simply if I look at the engines that transformed traditional guild into modern club, about of them are still powerful, specially in science and technology. That's why I don't think the reign of modernity is over.
Throughout your ecclesiology, you emphasize the importance of the laity. Yous write that "lay Christians in particular cannot be solely passive beneficiaries only are protagonists of the church'due south social doctrines at the vital moment of its implementation." If that is so, what defense can be made of Cosmic politicians who support and advance abortion rights, which is so clearly contrary to the social teachings of the church building since at to the lowest degree the 2nd century? (Editor's note: An essay in America on this topic by Kenneth Woodward is available here.)
The people who are threatening Catholic politicians with denying them Communion are frequently ignoring the complexity of political existence and ignoring what St. Thomas Aquinas taught, that the closer you lot come to the concrete moral situation, the less certain y'all tin be.
Can you spell that out?
I would say that a Catholic ought to believe that ballgame, at least at a certain stage, is the taking of a human life. That'south one moral judgment. Another is whether that moral judgment should be implemented in secular law. The third is: Is this the secular police that should exist implemented?
Also, it's ane affair to ask those questions when a majority of people are Catholic, some other when Catholics are a minority. So all of those questions come up in, and the farther downwardly you come to the actual question of "this bill in Congress," the more than room in that location is for disagreement. And so I don't think that that judgment is clear enough to be imposing canonical sanctions.
Pope Francis has called for a church-wide process called synodality. What practise yous understand by that word?
It'south a term that has come up to the fore in the last x years or so. Right later the council, the equivalent term would have been "co-responsibility."
Co-responsibility—I oasis't heard that term in half a century.
It means that nosotros are all responsible together for what the church is or becomes. All the members of the church have a role to play in determining what the church is and what the church says and what the church does. Right after the council there was some effort to create institutional forms of co-responsibility, like parish and diocesan councils, but they take been allowed to atrophy.
How many parishes in the United States take parish councils? And do they have anything to exercise? How many diocesan councils take ever been asked to consider anything really serious? Even the bishops' conferences have had their competencies restricted.
"I recollect one of the important things is to give more than competencies to local episcopal conferences to brand decisions."
Only we have had several synods of bishops—I covered some of them in Rome.
For the first 15 or and then years later on the council, the Synod of Bishops appeared to exist a genuine instrument for exercising co-responsibility. For case, the Synod of Bishops in 1971 put out an important statement, "Justice in the Earth," and later at that place was a good 1 on evangelization. But eventually the synods changed graphic symbol, and the choice of theme was always fabricated past Rome. Perhaps there was some consultation with some bishops, but if and so, nosotros never heard about information technology.
Secondly, in that location really was no debate among members. You wrote your spoken communication, I wrote my spoken language; I gave mine, you gave yours. My speech didn't necessarily have annihilation to do with your spoken communication. So there was no real conversation. The merely chat happened when the bishops broke into smaller groups.
Merely they reported dorsum from those small groups.
Yeah. But finally they were told what they could and could not recommend to the pope. It was understood going in that it was an informational body, but sure topics were only taken off the agenda: "You cannot discuss that, yous cannot recommend this." What value does an advisory body have if it is told what information technology may and may not propose?
Why was this done?
Because they didn't want to put the pope in the position of having to say "no" to a synod. They didn't desire to embarrass him. To make a recommendation to the pope publicly is to force per unit area him, and you can't exist seen as pressuring the pope—he should be absolutely costless. Somewhen the Synod of Bishops became a kind of privy council, so it likewise has atrophied. And so all of those instruments for a 18-carat co-responsibility on the level of the entire church building—of the parish, of the diocese, etc.—have been immune to disappear.
What about the regional conferences of bishops? Africa? Asia? These seem to be more substantive.
Yes, they seem to take retained a certain amount of independence and authority. Just I can't speak very confidently virtually that. I take to say that nether Pope Francis, despite all the talk near synodality, I haven't seen noticeable improvements in the structure and functioning of the synods. After all, there are bureaucracies in Rome on the left as well as the right wanting to perpetuate themselves.
From what I've read of the German feel, the "Synodal Path" gives me pause. That is partly because I don't encounter in information technology any way to sound out lay Catholics apart from those securely committed to one cause or another. Recent polls show that two-thirds of American Catholics were unaware that Pope Francis had further concise the commemoration of the Tridentine Mass—a reflection of the fact that near Catholics have little idea of what's going on inside the church. So who is going to exist selected to represent "the church building"? Movement types? Special involvement groups? The same two dozen people in every parish who are really involved in information technology?
The commencement stage of the synodal path is for the bishops to practise a kind of sounding out of their people. But I don't know of many bishops who have taken that seriously. But let's say the local bishop were to send out a questionnaire on 25 topics, asking what you lot think the church building should do or say most this or that or these things. You lot're going to have the splits: Y'all're going to have EWTN Catholics and yous're going to take The National Catholic Reporter Catholics. And so whom and what do y'all choose?
Just apart from a survey, how do you audio out the laity?
Y'all might exist able to practice it if you divided your diocese into deaneries and asked each parish to elect some people to get to a larger meeting and then hash out it and have opportunities for input. But that needs to be prepared in advance. Every bit long as it gives people the opportunity to speak upward, you tin say, "Well, you lot didn't have advantage of it."
Any other recommendations?
I also think one of the of import things is to requite more competencies to local episcopal conferences to brand decisions. You don't need to take a worldwide regulation on everything, and you should give more than opportunities for local bishops to make decisions. And that too has been very much restricted. Information technology took something like eight years for 2 or three Roman dicasteries to decide whether or not girls could be altar servers. And then they passed a regulation that is supposed to apply everywhere from Alaska to Zululand!
Pope Francis has said this synodal procedure is not a democracy, this is not vox populi. He wants to listen for the will of the Holy Spirit in these things. I recollect covering two conferences once in the same week. 1 was a adult female-church building meeting in Canada, with liturgies for the onset of menopause and after an ballgame, etc. The other was a Pentecostal group, Women Aglow. You could non find ii more different groups; they both invoked the Holy Spirit, only the Holy Spirit gave two totally dissimilar responses. So I don't know of a pedagogy by which a grouping tin can discern the will of the Holy Spirit—do you?
I think rather often the Holy Spirit is invoked as an excuse for a lack of reasons for, or a refusal to provide reasons for your position.
Terminal question. At the High german synod, nosotros heard, every bit we've often heard in the past, a telephone call for a Third Vatican Council. Given all the work you lot've washed on Vatican II, do yous recollect the church is ready for Vatican III?
Councils don't just autumn down from heaven. They accept to be prepared, theologically and spiritually—not to mention that a hereafter quango would be meeting in a world, or worlds, quite different from the i Vatican Ii addressed. How local churches and their bishops respond to Pope Francis' accent on synodality will give some indication of how ready we are for a Vatican III.
Source: https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2022/03/31/komonchak-woodward-vatican-council-interview-242658
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