During this uniquely turbulent decade, not all of my personal and professional preoccupations linked up in any direct fashion with matters collegiate. Two, in particular, stood to one side of such matters. One involved the micropolitics surrounding public infrastructure projects in the United States; the other concerned the international macropolitics unleashed by Pope John XXIII’s unexpected convocation of the Second Vatican Council.
So far as the first of these went, I became deeply involved towards the end of the decade with a local oppositional group whose goal it was to derail a putative and quite ham-fisted effort by the Massachusetts Department of Public Works (DPW) to construct (largely with federal funding) a monstrous four-lane bypass road designed to reroute long-distance traffic around Williamstown. Taking its departure from Five Corners in South Williamstown, it was designed to cut its way destructively across Stone Hill and to cross under Route 2 east of the town center before making its way north to rejoin Route 7 in Pownal, Vermont. As the only planned exit or crossing point was at the intersection with Route 2 (near the old Howard Johnson restaurant), Stone Hill (in particular) and the town (in general) would in effect have been cut into two parts. It was a case of gross overkill to remedy a not very clearly established traffic problem, and, in retrospect, it is hard to take the plan at all seriously. At the time, however, it all looked very threatening, and one didn’t have to be a property owner affected by the necessary land-taking to come out in vigorous opposition to the whole scheme. In the end, in part because the DPW had simply ignored recent changes in federal regulations governing the use of federal funds (on a 90–10 percent basis) for such highway projects, the plan fell by the wayside and it has never been revived. If, at the time, the battle was an interesting and hard-fought one, and one from which I learned a good deal about local and county politics, it was also one that was too intricate to dwell upon here.
Instead, I propose to focus upon the international upheaval caused by the convocation and proceedings of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), not simply because of the transformative impact upon any serious Catholic reasonably well informed on matters religious (and I would count myself as such), but also because it nudged me into developing another (more personal and religious) strand in my scholarly endeavors and brought home to me in the end just how deeply historical was the nature of my intellectual temperament. Unfortunately, in the attempt to convey what it was, exactly, that was at stake for me personally, I will be called upon to delineate at some length a stretch of history where the devil, alas, dwells in the details.
As we make our way now through the fiftieth anniversary of the great transformative decade that did so much to shape the late twentieth century imaginary, we hear a good deal from the commentators about the seismic political, social, and cultural shifts that distinguished that era. But large though they loomed at the time, especially in the realms of mysticism and spirituality, about the religious upheavals of the day we hear a good deal less. And about the mainstream religiosity of the 1960s the commentators tend to be silent. Allusions to the works of such as Norman O. Brown, Theodore Roszak, Allen Ginsberg, and Herbert Marcuse are commonplace enough, but, revolutionary though it was, we hear nothing about Dignitatis humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious liberty—or, for that matter, about the other fifteen constitutions, decrees, and declarations that together form the legislative legacy resulting from that great assembly’s labors between 1962 and 1965. Most people, I suspect, would find it incongruous to find such documents shelved cheek by jowl with Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture even though they are alike the products of the transformative sixties. But for Catholics of intellectual bent it would probably not seem all that odd. And for me, certainly, not odd at all. In my own life, the various transformative upheavals of the day seemed to intersect in so natural a fashion as to preclude the need to tease them apart.
As an historical event, the Second Vatican Council was an enormous and wholly extraordinary affair. It is credibly claimed to have been the most significant religious event of the twentieth century. Indeed, with the number of its voting participants peaking in the neighborhood of 2,600, it can arguably lay claim also to having been the largest formally constituted meeting in the history of humankind. As such, it understandably attracted at the time a great deal of attention. While it is difficult to gauge the seriousness of the interest in its doings evinced by the European and North American intelligentsia at large, the depths of its impact on the lives of the billion-plus Catholics worldwide is not to be gainsaid. And not least of all on those living in non-Western societies, where the changes and reforms embedded in Sacrosanctum concilium, its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, opened the way once more, and this time irreversibly, for the type of acculturation and de-Europeanization of Catholic worship earlier attempted in the seventeenth century by Jesuit missionaries in China. For there the Jesuits (if not their Dominican counterparts) had boldly substituted Chinese for Latin in the liturgy and had embraced the traditional Chinese rites for the veneration of ancestors as compatible with the Christian faith. That earlier attempt at religious acculturation had proved to be evanescent; it had foundered in the eighteenth century on the rocks of inter-order missionary rivalry. But its twentieth-century successor was destined rapidly to become a worldwide phenomenon and Catholicism itself was freed likewise to take on the lineaments of a genuinely global religion with its center of gravity steadily shifting away from the West.
The council, then, and deservedly so, received a good deal of attention in the press, and not only in religiously oriented publications. Newspapers like Le Monde in Paris or the Washington Post and the New York Times in the United States covered its proceedings attentively. And the meaty and highly readable “Letters from Vatican City” published in The New Yorker over the pseudonymous byline of “Xavier Rynne” (Fr. Francis Xavier Murphy) and republished during and after the council in four substantial volumes, were widely read. They did much, indeed, to shape the way in which its proceedings were understood by the wider literate public. It was easy enough, then, for interested Catholics to follow the exciting and turbulent unfolding of conciliar activity between 1962 and 1965, and it became all the easier after the National Catholic Reporter, an independent, lay-controlled weekly Catholic newspaper of unquestionably “progressive” bent was launched in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1964. Giving a blow-by-blow account of the conciliar debates and extra-conciliar maneuvering between the Majority (progressives) and Minority (conservative/traditionalist) factions that had emerged quite rapidly among the council fathers, and even publishing in English translation preliminary drafts of the documents still being debated and revised in council, it made for compelling reading. It is hard now, indeed, to convey the level of excitement and anticipation all of this generated among concerned Catholics of my generation. And especially so among those who, like me, were academics or people of intellectual bent, people committed to critical rationality who had long been restive with the attachment of the curial immobilisti at Rome to the maintenance of a narrow-minded, ghettoized form of Catholicism concerned above all to keep the modern world at bay even to the point of bracketing the familiar norms of rational judgment on which we ourselves relied in our chosen callings and daily living. We yearned to make our lives whole and, to that end, were keen to contribute whatever talents we possessed to the historic task of attaining the goal that John XXIII had labeled (somewhat loosely) as aggiornamento (“todaying”).
It was as if a lid had been taken off the Catholic cauldron and, given the mounting ferment at Rome, we were beginning dimly to perceive that some of the most prominent features of the Catholicism in which as children we had been reared, far from being hallowed by age and anointed with timelessness were, in fact, of quite recent provenance. It was becoming increasingly clear that they were very much the product in general of the religious backlash against the destructiveness of the French Revolution and, in particular, of the papal reaction to the early twentieth-century Modernist crisis. The domination of the universal church by the Roman center and an imperial papacy, the latter’s control over the appointment of bishops worldwide, its de facto (if not de jure) reduction of those bishops to the status of branch managers increasingly dependent upon the say-so of corporate headquarters at Rome, its monopolization of the church’s doctrinal teaching authority, its constant effort to maintain within Catholic intellectual circles the hegemony to which the ultramontane Roman theological school had attained in the late nineteenth century—such things we had taken (however restively) to be some sort of age-old Catholic norm. But it was being revealed that that was not the case at all. That we had thought otherwise is powerfully reflective of the remarkably presentist orientation of modern Roman Catholicism. It may well be a religion that places great emphasis on Tradition, but it is also one that pays dangerously little attention to history. Certainly, in the mid-twentieth century, the dispositions of the present, however recent in provenance, tended to cast a long shadow back across the past and to take on an aura of timelessness. This was partly the result of habit. Less attractively, it also reflected an unfortunate degree of self-censorship on the part of those clerics who knew better. And, more alarmingly, it reflected a conscious politics of oblivion, evocative of the Party’s motto in George Orwell’s 1984: “Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future.” Thus it was easy enough for most Catholics to assume that the popes had always appointed the bishops and had always been in the habit of issuing frequent encyclicals setting forth the acceptable doctrinal or moral stance on this or that issue, or even of defining doctrines like the Immaculate Conception (1854) or the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into Heaven (1950) that had little or no scriptural grounding. Though such things were largely the offspring of nineteenth-century papalist innovation, that fact had become all the harder to discern in the wake of the condemnation in 1907, first by the Holy Office in the decree Lamentabili sane and then by Pius X himself in the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, of an amorphous collection of alleged heterodoxies to which the collective label of “Modernism” was attached. These condemnations had been followed by an anti-Modernist witch hunt of McCarthyesque proportions which had a devastating effect upon the morale of the clergy and upon Catholic intellectual life. As late as the 1950s, there had been a quickening of anti-Modernist sentiment that had led to the peremptory silencing by Rome of such theological luminaries as Henri de Lubac, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and Yves Congar, all of them representatives of the French nouvelle théologie and all of them destined within a decade to rise, ironically, to great and influential prominence at Vatican II itself.
Attesting to the continuing strength of the attack on Modernism is the fact that a very explicit anti-Modernist oath was imposed on all clerics for almost half a century (1920–67). Revelatory of what lay at the root of Roman fears was the fact that the oath required, of all those on whom it was imposed, that they affirm “the absolute and unchangeable truth presented by the apostles from the beginning,” that they reject “the heretical invention of the evolution of dogmas to the effect that these would change their meaning from that previously held by the Church,” and that they deny that “it would be lawful for the historian to hold views which are in contradiction with the faith of the believer.” What was reflected here is, in effect, what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has referred to as “the blind historical panic of much of the hierarchy” in the wake of the French Revolution. It was history, with its critical foregrounding of the reality of change, that had clearly come to be seen as the subversive science. One should not be surprised, then, that Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, one of the leaders of the traditionalist Minority at Vatican II, head of the Holy Office during the conciliar years and, as such, the official guardian of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, should have chosen as the motto for his coat of arms Semper idem—“always the same.” A joke circulating at Rome during the conciliar era well captured the feel of his well-attested doctrinal stance. It related the story of his emerging one morning from his apartment and, getting into his official car, saying “To the Council.” Whereupon the driver set off promptly for Trent.
Recognizing, however, the centrality of change to the new, historically oriented theological currents that had begun to flow so powerfully at the time, the American theologian John Courtney Murray was to conclude that “development of doctrine” was “the issue underlying all issues at Vatican II.” And the terminal gloom that that fact generated among the stubborn leaders of the traditionalist Minority reflected at its extreme the unyielding posture exemplified already in the late nineteenth century by the American Catholic Orestes Brownson when, denouncing Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine as revealing him to be “no Catholic,” dismissed the work as being “utterly repugnant to her [the church’s] claims to be the authoritative and infallible Church of God.” For it was the view of that church that “there has been no progress, no increase, no variation in faith, that what she believes and teaches now is precisely what she always and everywhere taught and believed from the first.”
If the horror generated by the threat of change was perhaps the dominant strand in the thoughts and feelings of the Minority at Vatican II, the course of events at the council reveals it to have been most profoundly felt when the waves of change threatened to break over the ultramontane or high papalist understanding of the papal primacy. And it also found at such moments a powerful resonance in the thinking of Pope Paul VI himself. John XXIII had died in 1963 when the council was already in midstream, and Paul had succeeded him. Though he was often portrayed as indecisive (John XXIII had dubbed him amusingly as amletico, or “Hamlet-like”), he had chosen not to terminate the council but to see it through to its conclusion. At the same time, however, he seemed to have become increasingly worried about the potentially radical nature of the changes the council fathers were proving themselves willing to entertain and of the degree to which they might come to threaten the papal teaching authority and papal primacy of jurisdiction. During the summer prior to the council’s fourth and final session in 1965, he had begun in various allocutions to fret that the church was being threatened by a “crisis of obedience” or “crisis of authority,” in that “truths that stand outside time because they are divine are being subjected to a historicism that strips them of their content and unchangeable character.” And that concern, which led him to intervene repeatedly in matters conciliar during the last session, seemed always to peak when he saw the high papalist understanding of the papal primacy coming under threat. Ironically enough, on such occasions and in such matters it seems that he was ultimately skeptical about the likelihood that the thinking of the council fathers could reliably be assumed to reflect the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Thus the four issues which, by an exercise of his own supreme authority, he continued to prevent from becoming agenda items at the council—birth control, clerical celibacy, reform of the Roman Curia (or central administrative cadre), and the mechanism that could make episcopal collegiality an institutional reality—all touched intimately upon the papal authority. The last issue is a particularly revealing one. It concerns the relationship of the bishops as a whole when acting as a “College” (that is, collectively to the papal primate) and pivots upon the nature of the authority they exercised over the universal church when acting as such a collectivity. That issue was one that was hard-fought both in the discussions of the preparatory commission and in the debates of the council itself. So far as episcopal collegiality was concerned, the intuition involved was an ancient one. It was far older, certainly, than the high papalist, monarchical understanding of the papal primacy, though one that had come in the modern era to be increasingly marginalized. But Lumen gentium, Vatican II’s great Constitution on the Church, emphasized in its crucial third chapter the collective or “collegial responsibility” of bishops worldwide (by “divine institution” successors to the original “apostolic college”) for the mission and well-being of the whole church. “United with its head, the Roman pontiff, and never without its head,” the Constitution declared, “the order of bishops is the subject [i.e., the bearer] of supreme and full power” over that universal Church, and that “supreme power is . . . solemnly exercised in an ecumenical council.” To the conservatives of the Minority, this was an alarming claim. They saw it as being at odds with the monarchical primacy of the pope. It was a dangerous novelty, one that smacked of “conciliarism”—the late medieval view, so often condemned by the papacy, to the effect that the general council, acting apart from the pope, possessed in certain critical cases an authority over the universal Church superior to his. Paul VI himself appears to have shared that fear. During the course of debate and during the difficult “black” week—it was dubbed at the time as “la settimana nera”—he sent to the council via the Doctrinal Commission, and as the authentic norm governing the interpretation of Lumen gentium’s third chapter, a startling “Preliminary Explanatory Note” (Nota explicativa praevia). Both there, and in the final text of Lumen gentium itself, it was now made clear that the “solicitude” that the bishops are called upon to exercise for the whole Church is merely a pastoral solicitude, not one “exercised by an act of jurisdiction.” At every point, indeed, the jurisdictional or juridical power would appear to be assigned to the episcopal college’s head alone. Only in “hierarchical communion” with that head of the college and its members “can bishops exercise their various offices, governance included.” Only through papal convocation and confirmation can a council be ecumenical. Only with papal approbation can conciliar acts become valid. Further than that, as head of the college, the pope “alone can perform certain acts which are in no way within the competence” of the bishops, can proceed, “taking into consideration the good of the Church” and “according to his own discretion” in “setting up, encouraging and approving collegial activity,” and, “as supreme pastor of the Church, can exercise his power at all times as he thinks best” (italics mine).
For the general reader, I suppose, and probably for most Catholics even, this necessary but unhappily extended prolegomenon to my own involvement in the religious issues of the day is likely to seem pretty recondite stuff. But given the sort of research I had been doing, though it pertained directly, not to ecclesiology but to the history of political thought, much of it rang a bell. And that bell began to ring all the more imperatively after I began, in the mid-1960s, to acquaint myself with the new literature on general councils stimulated by John XXIII’s unexpected convocation in 1959 of a new council. At Étienne Gilson’s suggestion, I had begun my research on late medieval political thinking by focusing on the French philosopher/theologian Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420), a prominent churchman whose political thinking overlapped with ecclesiological themes. And the unfolding events at Vatican II led me now to focus, in a way that I had not done previously, on the more purely ecclesiological aspect of his thinking.
Like the English philosopher William of Ockham, whose work he much admired, d’Ailly spoke of the natural right “which belongs to all those over whom any authority, either secular or ecclesiastical is placed—that is, the right to elect their rulers.” But it was in relation to the Church, which he referred to as the “ecclesiastical polity,” that he developed the theory of consent that this implied. And he did so in an attempt to arrive at a solution to the great crisis that had overtaken the Church in his own lifetime. The crisis in question was the Great Schism of the West, which, after the confused and disputed election of 1378, had seen two lines of claimants, Roman and Avignonese, vying destructively for the papal office. And then, still worse, after the failed attempt of the Council of Pisa to end the schism in 1409 by deposing the rival claimants and electing Pope Alexander V, it had seen the addition of a third (Pisan) line of claimants of which (the first) John XXIII was the second. Although at the time the Pisan line was widely accepted as the legitimate one, it did not quite succeed in carrying the day. John XXIII, as a result, was nudged by the emperor Sigismund into convoking the Council of Constance (1414–18) with the goal of bringing the schism to a definitive end. In the attempt to achieve that happy outcome, the churchmen whom we are accustomed to labeling as “conciliarists” (d’Ailly prominently among them) were led to argue that the general council, because it represented the universal Church or “congregation of the faithful,” was possessed of the requisite authority to restore unity, even if that were to entail the judgment and formal deposition of the several papal claimants on the grounds that their obdurate clinging to office meant that they were acting not to build up the Church but to destroy it.
In 1415, then, confronted by the obduracy of John XXIII (who had fled the council and left it effectually headless), the council fathers formally promulgated the celebrated superiority decree Haec sancta synodus, an historic expression of the moderate version of what has come to be called conciliarism or conciliar theory. The decree declared that the Council of Constance was a legitimate general council representing the Catholic church militant, that it derived its authority immediately from Christ, and that all Christians—the pope included—were bound on pain of punishment to obey it and all future general councils on certain matters pertaining to the faith, to the ending of schism, and to the reform of the Church in head and members. The following month, even though they viewed him as the true pope, the council fathers acted on the provisions of that decree by trying and deposing John XXIII, who had been taken prisoner and returned to Constance. Shortly thereafter, though he had been deposed by the Council of Pisa, they moved pragmatically to negotiate the resignation of the Roman claimant Gregory XII. And, after failing to secure a similarly negotiated settlement with the Avignonese claimant, Benedict XIII, they proceeded in 1417 to try him in absentia, find him guilty, and declare him deposed. That done, and having first in the decree Frequens attempted to give constitutional teeth to Haec sancta by mandating, for the future, the regular and automatic assembly of general councils, they proceeded in November 1417 to elect as pope Martin V. He was originally one of the cardinals of the Roman obedience but, like many another churchman, had switched his allegiance to the Pisan line and, therefore, to John XXIII. Surrounded still by a tiny coterie of adamant supporters, Benedict XIII persisted right down to his death in 1423 in his forlorn claim to be the true pope. But, that notwithstanding, it has been customary to regard the Great Schism as having come to an end with the election of Martin V.
This is clearly a tangled story susceptible of successive rewritings. Martin V himself and his successor Eugenius IV, both of them acutely conscious of the fact that the legitimacy of their own papal titles depended on the validity of Haec sancta and the legitimacy of the actions that Constance had grounded in its provisions, abided by the stipulations of Frequens and convoked in succession the general councils of Pavia-Siena (1423) and Basel (1431–49). But during the bitter and protracted strife that broke out at the latter assembly, Eugenius IV changed course and initiated the papal policy of challenging the validity of Haec sancta and, with it, the overriding authority claimed in the Church by the general council. Hence the papal commitment to rewriting the pertinent history and the gradual emergence of a high papalist constitutive narrative that rose to prominence at Rome during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Eventually, in its fully elaborated form and in the aftermath of Vatican I, it carried the day, dispatching into the outer darkness of heterodoxy the rival conciliarist narrative that had been entrenched for centuries at the University of Paris and taken for granted across the greater part of northern Europe. According to the now-dominant high papalist narrative, the whole conciliar episode was portrayed as emerging, once the ideological dust was allowed to settle, as nothing more than a stutter, hiccup, or interruption in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church. That it was an unfortunate, dangerous, and revolutionary episode was not to be gainsaid. But if it was radical in its origins, it was also rapid in its demise. The victory of Eugenius IV over the Council of Basel in the late 1440s marked the demise of the conciliar movement. And if conciliar theory survived a little longer, it was destined to end up as no more than a minor perturbation on the outermost orbit of the ecclesiological consciousness.
Such was the accepted narrative that had become embedded in the standard historical accounts, non-Catholic as well as Catholic, by the time I first became interested in d’Ailly and the Council of Constance. And I myself had taken that narrative simply for granted, not realizing that it was a piece of ultramontane historiography. My own interests being focused on political thinking rather than ecclesiology, I simply assumed that, so far as the constitution of the Church was concerned, conciliarism was a dead issue, something of interest only to the archaeologist of defunct ideologies.
In that casual assumption I proved to be utterly mistaken. With the dramatic unfolding of the early sessions of Vatican II, I was led, somewhat to my surprise, to call it sharply into question. The second John XXIII’s unexpected convocation in 1959 of Vatican II had the effect of stimulating an enormous outburst of writing on general councils and their history, and I was naturally drawn to focus on what all this new work had to say about the Council of Constance and the question of the status of the decree Haec sancta. Three authors in particular caught my attention. The first was Karl August Fink of the University of Vienna, who had long since established himself as the reigning expert on the lead-in to Constance as well as on the doings of the council itself, and who had come to challenge at multiple points the traditional constitutive narrative. The second was the Benedictine church historian Paul de Vooght, a Belgian scholar with whose work on Jan Hus (the Czech reformer and national hero) I was already acquainted. The third was the young Swiss theologian Hans Küng. Already by 1960, de Vooght had come to argue for the validity of Haec sancta. At the time he drew no inferences from that fact to the contemporary ecclesiological situation. But he did portray Haec sancta as not merely an emergency measure relevant only to the activity of the Council of Constance but as a doctrinal decision concerning the competence of all general councils in matters pertaining to the faith and the unity and reform of the Church. And it was his conclusion that “there is no longer today any motive for maintaining the [traditional] ostracism of a dogmatic decree which clarifies and confirms a point of doctrine always admitted in the Church and always taught in the schools.”
De Vooght’s argument, clearly and forcefully presented, evoked an immediate and equally forceful response, positive as well as negative. And the clearest and most vigorous of the positive reactions came from Hans Küng in 1962 in his Structures of the Church, the first of several important ecclesiological works of his. There he went beyond de Vooght, pointing out that “the (traditionally understood) legitimacy of Martin V and all subsequent popes up to the present day depends on the legitimacy of the Council of Constance and its procedure in the question of the popes.” At the same time he noted that modern Catholic theologians, nevertheless, “have not shrunk from pointing out the non-binding character of the Constance decrees, often with quite extraordinary, ostensibly historical arguments.” Küng then goes on to summarize the findings of the most recent historical research on the subject and insists that “the binding character of the decrees of Constance [Haec sancta and Frequens] is not to be evaded.” What they stipulated was that “an ecumenical council has the function of a ‘control authority,’ not only in connection with the emergency situation at that time, but also for the future on the premise that a possible future pope might again lapse into heresy, schism or the like.” The Church, indeed, he added, “might have been able to avoid many misfortunes after the Council of Constance had the fundamental position . . . [of that council] papal primacy and a definite ‘conciliar control’ been upheld.”
While at the time I was certainly intrigued by these startling findings and was beginning to realize that the work that I had been doing on conciliar theory was of more than historical interest and had an immediate relevance to contemporary ecclesiological tensions within Catholicism, I was also caught up in other historical work. And, so far as contemporary religious matters were concerned, I was still filled with great (and, alas, unrealistic) optimism about what Vatican II seemed on the brink of achieving. In the three years after the end of that council, however, things took a turn that, in retrospect, can be seen to have been signaled by Paul VI’s increasingly nervous intrusion into the concluding work of the council. And, so far as I was concerned, it was very much a turn for the worse. In many parts of the United States, it is true, as in many other parts of the world, local ecclesiastical life presented to the casual observer a quite placid surface. And that was certainly true of New England. In such areas, while ecclesiastical feathers may often have been ruffled while Vatican II was in session, the apocalyptic winds of change seemed, since then, to have dwindled to the gentlest of institutional breezes. The traditional patterns of thought and the old ways of doing things appeared to be remarkably resilient. But for anyone who, like me, was willing to make the effort to track the drift of public opinion in the Church at large or who had struggled to keep his footing amid the astonishing surge of theological speculation then flooding from the presses, and despite the disconcerting undertow of papal and episcopal alarm that it helped generate, it was becoming clear that beneath the placid surface something was radically wrong. The Church, it seemed, was slipping into a state of quasi-revolutionary turmoil. Former loyalties were being shaken, familiar memories dimmed, old friendships threatened, and we were beginning to witness the startling exodus from religious practice of once-stalwart Catholics that has continued down to the present, creating a cadre of former Catholics in the United States (one third of the original total) that dwarfs in size most of the established Protestant denominations. Around that time, Hans Küng remarked that, while for all Christians “the problem of God is more important than the problem of the Church,” it remains true that for most Catholics “the latter often . . . [stood] in the way of the former.” And the problem of the Church that was now emerging was, in its most obviously practical dimensions, the problem of the nature and locus of ecclesiastical authority—the traditional jurisdictional pretensions and the magisterial (that is, doctrinal teaching claims) of the clerical hierarchy. More precisely, it was becoming increasingly clear that at the heart of the growing crisis confronting the Church stood the papal primacy as officially conceived and currently exercised. It was that, more than any other single factor, that was serving for many a troubled Catholic to erode the very credibility of the Roman Catholic Church itself. And despite the strenuous efforts of Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI to turn the clock back in one way or another to the comforting ultramontane certainties of the preconciliar era, that has remained the case for the better part of fifty years down to the present.
By 1967, all of this had begun to weigh heavily on my mind and, having protected the summer of 1968 for research and writing, I was so disturbed by the Thermidorian reaction that was setting in at Rome that I decided to put my other work to one side and to devote whatever time I had to attempting an historically conditioned approach to the growing ecclesiastical crisis. What eventuated was a little book entitled Council over Pope? Towards a Provisional Ecclesiology (1969). It was a highly personal religious work, written with passion and at white heat. And, though pivoting on an historical base about which I felt quite confident, it reached also across the line that separated theology from history and eventuated in a passionately felt exercise by a non-theologian in a species of do-it-yourself theology.
The book was written across summer months punctuated dramatically by disturbing events in Rome. First, Paul VI’s highly traditionalist “New Credo” (Solemni hac liturgia or Credo of the People of God) written, it seems, in response to the “New Catechism,” endorsed by the Dutch bishops but characterized by an alarmed committee of cardinals as “substituting one orthodoxy for another in the Church, a modern orthodoxy for the traditional orthodoxy.” And then, no more than a month later, his catastrophic encyclical Humanae vitae on birth control. Traumatized, it seems, by the call to make a change in the Church’s teaching on contraception and family limitation and by the possibility that such a dramatic change might undermine papal authority, and despite the majority recommendation of the commission he had appointed to review the issue, Paul VI rejected the commission’s recommendations and, in the encyclical Humanae vitae, affirmed the standard teaching that went back to Pius XI’s Casti connubii (1930). But it turned out to be Humanae vitae itself, which the vast majority of Catholics have simply declined to “receive,” that turned out to call that papal teaching authority harshly into question and also helped to precipitate, it seems, the subsequent virtual collapse among the laity of the practice of sacramental confession. A stunning development. The encyclical, in effect, transformed the problem of papal authority from a dark cloud on the horizon of ecumenism to a question of conscience for vast numbers of faithful Catholics and a matter of immediate concern for those economists and politicians whose task it is to juggle the bleak equations of rising populations and deepening poverty in the developing world.
In the first and more purely historical section of my book, I set forth, in counterpoint to the traditionally dominant ultramontane narrative, a revised narrative of the Great Schism, its outbreak and course, the doings of the Council of Constance, and its aftermath which reflected the accumulated historical research findings of the previous half century and more. In so doing, I aligned myself with de Vooght’s and Küng’s endorsement of the legitimacy of Constance as a general council from the very time of its convocation and of the validity of its superiority decree Haec sancta synodus. I arrived at this latter conclusion in the teeth of traditionalist counterclaims. And as I did so, I was taken very much aback by the willingness of Catholic theologians and church historians—even scholars of the caliber of Hubert Jedin, the great historian of the Council of Trent—to introduce anachronistic theological and canonistic criteria into what was properly an historical issue. Most of them clerics, they were permitting themselves to indulge in exercises of hermeneutical gymnastics or maneuvers of exegetical desperation in a frantic attempt to avoid the damaging conclusion that a legitimate general council had solemnly promulgated a fundamental teaching clearly at odds with the First Vatican Council’s definitions of the papal primacy of jurisdiction and magisterial infallibility. For that was the neuralgic point at issue, just as it had been for the traditionalist Minority at Vatican II itself. But my own historical sensibilities, it turned out, were altogether too astringent to be compromised by such ideological maneuvers. If I didn’t resonate to Lord Acton’s Romantic propensity for discerning the validating finger of God in the stupefying scramble of events that we call history, I was altogether at one with him in the rock-hard conviction that “no ecclesiastical exigency can alter a fact.” The celebrated words put in the mouth of Martin Luther as he grasped his destiny at the Diet of Worms in 1521 may conceivably be apocryphal. But I sensed now that they well caught an important conviction. Declaring himself to be captive to the Word of God, he is said to have blurted out before the emperor “Ich kann nicht anderes”—“I can do no other.” And, without wishing to overdramatize the moment, the latter words spoke loudly to me now, confronted as I was by my own moment of truth. I was captive to the historical evidence; I could do no other. I had to forge ahead, my traditional Catholic loyalties notwithstanding, to tease out and identify the conclusions that would follow for the present from the recognition of the fact that Haec sancta synodus embodied the valid teaching of a legitimate general council.
This proved to be an uneasy and troubling task. I couldn’t help being struck by the extreme caution with which even a Hans Küng had sidled up to the issues involved. In his later masterly ecclesiological treatise, The Church, Küng was to lay out what amounted to an almost-agnostic appraisal of the whole matter of a scripturally validated papal primacy. But in his earlier Structures of the Church (1962), what one gets is no more than a delicately diplomatic insistence on the continuing validity of the Constance decrees. Across the line of his argument falls the long shadow cast by the definitions of Vatican I. As a result, he seemed in that book content to subordinate the ecclesiology of Constance to that of Vatican I, to understand Haec sancta anachronistically in terms of the teaching of that later council, or, more precisely, to understand it in terms of the room left by Vatican I’s teaching and by the prescriptions of the 1917 Code of Canon Law for the existence of limitations upon the exercise of the papal authority. Those limitations were so minimal as to lead me to accuse Küng of succumbing to a species of “deductive timidity.” A bit brash, I suppose, and, though he didn’t respond to that charge, he did make a point later on—tongue possibly in cheek—of sending me a copy of his far more radical Infallible?: An Inquiry.
Meanwhile, I had proceeded to draw my own conclusions about the ecclesiological implications flowing from a recognition of the validity of Haec sancta. At one level, of course, they were encouraging and relatively benign and no doubt in harmony with what Cardinal Koenig of Vienna had had in mind when, in 1964 and while Vatican II was still in session, he advocated (rather vaguely) a synthetizing of the disparate ecclesiological traditions stemming from Constance and Vatican I. Clearly, if Haec sancta and its essentially constitutionalist provisions were accepted as valid, then some modification of the current, absolutist understanding of papal monarchical power would necessarily be called for. The limitations on papal authority would have to be recognized as being far more extensive than those conceded by the standard modern theological and canonistic manuals. And the Roman Catholic ecclesiological tradition at large would have to be acknowledged to be richer and more pluralistic than commonly assumed—more polyphonic, if you wish, than the insistently high papalist melodic line of the past couple of centuries.
This was far from being an unattractive line of march and the arguments in its favor were not lightly to be dismissed. Unfortunately, they rested on the assumption that it was both possible and legitimate to affirm the validity of Haec sancta while somehow sidestepping the provisions of Vatican I’s Pastor aeternus with its twin solemn definitions of papal infallibility and papal primacy of jurisdiction. But on what conceivable grounds could that be done? After all, Vatican II’s Lumen gentium had itself made an explicit point of reaffirming both of those definitions. Clearly, I had to address the difficult question of their seemingly obvious incompatibility with the teaching of Constance. So I set about studying both Pastor aeternus and Haec sancta in historical context and in the light of the conciliar debates that helped produce them, taking into account also the changes they underwent in their various drafts and the commentaries that followed in the wake of their promulgation. Having done that, while I could perceive a certain narrowing in the gap or radical discontinuity between the thinking of the two councils, I could still see no way to bridge it. I concluded, therefore, and not without considerable discomfort as a traditionally brought up Catholic, that Constance’s Haec sancta and Vatican I’s Pastor aeternus confronted us with an instance in which two legitimate councils of the Latin Church were genuinely in contradiction with one another and on a truly fundamental doctrinal issue concerning the very locus of ultimate authority in the Church. In terms of long-standing ecclesiastical tradition, that was, of course, to think the unthinkable. In the early seventeenth century, indeed, Cardinal Bellarmine, that great “administrator of doctrine,” when crossing dialectical swords with the acerbic Venetian theologian, Paolo Sarpi, had bluntly insisted as a matter of principle that legitimate general councils simply could not contradict one another. To suggest otherwise, he trumpeted, smacked of “the reasoning of heretics.” For “that [council] alone is legitimate which asserts the authority of the pope to be superior to all councils.” Q. E. D.!
Though many of our Catholic theologians remained (and remain?) under the spell of that essentially circular mode of reasoning, it was simply unacceptable to me. Stepping across the line dividing the theological from the historical and embarking somewhat impetuously on an exercise in amateur theologizing, I was led, however uneasily, to grasp the nettle, to abandon the anxious preoccupation with certitude that is so deeply rooted in the Catholic temperament, and to argue in radical fashion for the historically conditioned, reformable, and essentially provisional nature of all doctrinal formulations, ecclesiologies, and church structures—all ecclesiologies, conciliarist no less than ultramontane.
That, of course, did not go down well with mainstream Catholic commentators. When Herder and Herder, the American wing of Herder (the German religious publisher), released my book in 1969, it was received, it is true, with some enthusiasm in the Netherlands, at that time a stronghold of a liberal form of Catholicism. It also elicited from Paul de Vooght in Belgium a warmly supportive letter. But things were otherwise in the Anglophone world. Where it was not simply ignored (the politics of oblivion tactic), the tendency was to praise its historical section but to condescend to the ecclesiological conclusions drawn from the historical realities. Clearly, the book was not destined to make much of an impact on the thinking of our Catholic theologians, though the most negative response, oddly enough, was of Protestant rather than Catholic provenance. It came in a review written by the distinguished Methodist church historian, Albert Outler, who had served as an observer at the Second Vatican Council and may perhaps have become a little too cozy with Romanità and the Vatican establishment. Whatever the case, his review was an oddly angry and disheveled one, at more than one point sloppily misrepresenting the book’s central argument. Moreover, while calling me “a brilliant historian,” he accused me, nonetheless, of writing “pre-ecumenical church history” (whatever that might mean), and (really a bit cheeky for a Methodist) dismissed me condescendingly as a “professedly loyal Catholic.” For one who had had to struggle hard with his traditional loyalties, this last, I must confess, hurt a bit.
It was all quite odd and really quite discouraging, coming as it did in the wake of what had been for me an emotionally draining intellectual journey. That journey had left me as a Catholic in a somewhat isolated position inhabiting the gloomy hinterlands of heterodoxy, unable fully to affirm or freely to let go. And there I was to remain in the years that followed, cast now in the role of a mere observer of the tide of reaction now gathering force and cresting during the distinguished but in many ways destructive pontificate of John Paul II. So far as Catholicism goes, I was then and have since remained no more than one of the vast grey horde of spiritual walking wounded, shuffling forward, more in hope than expectation, in the presumed direction of the Heavenly Jerusalem. That said, however, throughout my life I have never ceased to be acutely (and gratefully) conscious of the deep impress, no less on my temperament than on the ways of thinking natural to me, made by the sheer richness of the Catholic tradition and by the type of Christian humanism that I was fortunate enough to have imbibed at school.
Meanwhile, so far as the Church’s leadership and the theological establishment at large went, the politics of oblivion seemed destined to prevail. The head-on collision between the ecclesiologies of Constance and Vatican I was somehow bracketed. But it was to linger on as what amounted to an historico-theological time bomb embedded in the Catholic consciousness, its presence ignored but its lethal fuse still intact. And that, too, has remained the case down to the present. But, as it was clear that my point of view was unlikely to gain any traction in the Catholic world, I turned back, so far as writing was concerned, to my more purely historical interests. I was not to return to the religious wars until my retirement years, and then only after being invited to co-edit and contribute to two volumes concerned with what by then had become a deepening and acute crisis of authority in Catholic modernity. And, so far as institutional engagement went, it was henceforth to focus more exclusively on the college, where I felt that I had at least a reasonable chance of being able to contribute something positive to its development.