Russian Orthodox Images in the 19th-Century West

I have met the author of this forthcoming book several times at conferences over the years, and she is a lovely human being whose papers are always deeply fascinating, as this forthcoming book of hers very much also seems to be. I'm hoping we can arrange an interview about her forthcoming book: Heather Bailey, The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy: France and Russia, 1848–1870 (Northern Illinois University Press, June 2020,) 312pp.

About this new book the publisher tells us this:

Focusing on the period between the revolutions of 1848-1849 and the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy explores the circumstances under which westerners, concerned about the fate of the papacy, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Russian imperial power, began to conflate the Russian Orthodox Church with the state and to portray the Church as the political tool of despotic tsars.

As Heather L. Bailey demonstrates, in response to this reductionist view, Russian Orthodox publicists launched a public relations campaign in the West, especially in France, in the 1850s and 1860s. The linchpin of their campaign was the building of the impressive Saint Alexander Nevsky Church in Paris, consecrated in 1861. Bailey posits that, as the embodiment of the belief that Russia had a great historical purpose inextricably tied to Orthodoxy, the Paris church both reflected and contributed to the rise of religious nationalism in Russia that followed the Crimean War. At the same time, the confrontation with westerners' negative ideas about the Eastern Church fueled a reformist spirit in Russia while contributing to a better understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy in the West.

The Very Long History of Vatican II

When a glut of books was published starting seven years ago to commemorate the opening and then each session of Vatican II, I began quickly to feel rather surfeited. But that feeling has dwindled in the past year or so, giving me room to anticipate a forthcoming study by Shaun Blanchard, The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform (Oxford University Press, November 2019), 344pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

In this book, Shaun Blanchard argues that the roots of the Vatican II reforms must be pushed back beyond the widely acknowledged twentieth-century forerunners of the Council, beyond Newman and the Tübingen School in the nineteenth century, to the eighteenth century, when a variety of reform movements attempted ressourcement and aggiornamento. This close study of the Synod of Pistoia (1786) sheds surprising new light on the nature of church reform and the roots of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The high-water mark of the late Jansenist reform movement, this Tuscan diocesan synod was harshly condemned by Pope Pius VI in the Bull Auctorem fidei (1794), and in the increasingly ultramontane nineteenth-century Church the late Jansenist movement was totally discredited. Nevertheless, much of the Pistoian agenda--an exaltation of the role of the local bishop, an emphasis on infallibility as a gift to the entire believing community, religious liberty, a more comprehensible liturgy that incorporates the vernacular, and the encouragement of lay Bible reading and Christocentric devotions--would be officially promulgated at Vatican II.

Investigating the theological and historical context and nature of the reforms enacted by the Synod of Pistoia, he notes their parallels with the reforms of Vatican II, and argues that these connections are deeper than mere affinity. The tumultuous events surrounding the reception of the Synod explain why these reforms failed at the time. This book also offers a measured theological judgment on whether the Synod of Pistoia was "true or false reform." Although the Pistoians were completely rejected in their own day, the Second Vatican Council struggled with, and ultimately enacted, remarkably similar ideas.

I am even more looking forward to reading a just-published book by the great historian John O'Malley, whose other recent book on Vatican I was reviewed by me here.

When Bishops Meet: An Essay Comparing Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican II Hardcover by John W. O'Malley (Harvard UP, 2019), 240pp.

About this new essay the publisher tells us this:

Catholic councils are meetings of bishops. In this unprecedented comparison of the three most recent meetings, John O’Malley traverses more than 450 years of Catholic history and examines the councils’ most pressing and consistent concerns: questions of purpose, power, and relevance in a changing world. By offering new, sometimes radical, even troubling perspectives on these convocations, When Bishops Meet analyzes the evolution of the church itself.

The Catholic Church today is shaped by the historical arc starting from Trent in the sixteenth century to Vatican II. The roles of popes, the laity, theologians, and others have varied from the bishop-centered Trent, to Vatican I’s declaration of papal infallibility, to a new balance of power in the mid-twentieth century. At Trent, lay people had direct influence on proceedings. By Vatican II, their presence was token. At each gathering, fundamental issues recurred: the relationship between bishops and the papacy, the very purpose of a council, and doctrinal change. Can the teachings of the church, by definition a conservative institution, change over time?

Councils, being ecclesiastical as well as cultural institutions, have always reflected and profoundly influenced their times. Readers familiar with John O’Malley’s earlier work as well as those with no knowledge of councils will find this volume an indispensable guide for essential questions: Who is in charge of the church? What difference did the councils make, and will there be another?

John O'Malley on Vatican I

When it's published at Catholic World Report, I'll post a link to my review of John O'Malley's superlative new study, Vatican I: the Council and the Making of an Ultramontane Church (Harvard University Press, 2018). (Here's a link to my review there of John Quinn's last book on the same council.) In the meantime, let me most warmly recommend it to you.

Like O'Malley's previous books, especially on Trent and Vatican II, this one is superb. It treats a wide-ranging history of the one council in the West to give more trouble to Eastern Christians than any other. The First Vatican Council's treatment of papal pretensions to universal jurisdiction remain a considerable ecumenical problem, though my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy proposed one way around that.

In this endless season of sexual depravity and episcopal malfeasance, cowardice, and cover-up, O'Malley's new book will also be of great interest to Catholics looking to reform the Church. Perhaps the most encouraging feature of the long and wide-ranging history O'Malley tells is how much of the modern papacy is a creation (often not directly intended, but without doubt intentionally exploited by the papacy) of diverse populist movements. If populism made the pope into this international celebrity of endless volubility and catastrophic incompetence, then there is hope that what populism has wrought, populism can remove through relentless and ruthless demands for reform. Vive l'Eglise libre!

Ultramontanism and Vatican I

The relative neglect of Vatican I by modern anglophone scholars has long amazed me--though the fact this council is so overwhelmingly outnumbered by books on Vatican II surprises nobody. Nevertheless, Vatican I remains the most revolutionary council in modern history in many ways. Apart from Margaret O'Gara's 1988 book Triumph in Defeat: Infallibility, Vatican I, and the French Minority Bishops, and more recently Richard Costigan's important The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility: a Study in the Background of Vatican I, one finds very few serious studies (in English at least) on this most problematic of councils.

That gap, however, is soon to be happily filled by two books from very important and respected authors who are no strangers to the topic at all. The first comes from John Quinn, the retired Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco who, ten years ago now, authored a very useful and challenging book, The Reform of the Papacy: the Costly Call to Christian Unity.

Quinn returns to the topic in a new book, just released: Revered and Reviled: A Reexamination of Vatican Council I (Crossroad, 2017),128pp. I've just received it in the mail this month and, it being a short book covering much familiar territory, read it in a day. I will have more to say about it on here later.

About this newest book of his, the publisher tells us:

Revered and Reviled explores the ways that Vatican Council I influenced the important issues of papal primacy and the infallible teaching magisterium of the Pope. The book clarifies and corrects many misunderstood concepts and conclusions about the first Council. Although this is, first and foremost, a church history, it is written with the educated lay reader in mind. Vatican Council I laid the groundwork for critical issues relating to the Pope's power, especially the subjects of papal primacy and infallibility. The Council's conclusion remain important today, as Pope Francis looks toward synodality as the way of the Catholic Church. In essence, Revered and Reviled is hugely important because it is the first book to correct long-held misconceptions that have guided the philosophical position of the Catholic church for the last 145 years. With broad distribution, it should impact Catholic scholars, theologians and the faithful around the world.

The second book to treat Vatican I will be appearing from Harvard University Press next May, authored by the well-known and widely respected Jesuit historian John O'Malley:Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church.

O'Malley's book is greatly to be welcomed. We brought him to the University of Saint Francis about five years ago, and I had the happy task of picking him up from the airport in Indianapolis. I volunteered to do this so that I could have two uninterrupted hours with him talking about the papacy (about which I have had a few things to say), time which was greatly enjoyable and edifying, not least for our discussion of how 1940s Vatican bureaucrats cleaned up the columns of "anti-popes" in the Annuario Pontificio, which should surprise nobody who has read Francis Oakley's deeply disturbing book The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870.

O'Malley, a widely published and respected historian, has written books on, inter alia, the councils of Trent and Vatican II, both of which are fascinating.

And now, in the midst of heated debates over papal authority under Francis, we have his newest book forthcoming, about which the publisher tells us:

The enduring influence of the Catholic Church has many sources—its spiritual and intellectual appeal, missionary achievements, wealth, diplomatic effectiveness, and stable hierarchy. But in the first half of the nineteenth century, the foundations upon which the church had rested for centuries were shaken. In the eyes of many thoughtful people, liberalism in the guise of liberty, equality, and fraternity was the quintessence of the evils that shook those foundations. At the Vatican Council of 1869–1870, the church made a dramatic effort to set things right by defining the doctrine of papal infallibility.

In Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, John W. O’Malley draws us into the bitter controversies over papal infallibility that at one point seemed destined to rend the church in two. Archbishop Henry Manning was the principal driving force for the definition, and Lord Acton was his brilliant counterpart on the other side. But they shrink in significance alongside Pope Pius IX, whose zeal for the definition was so notable that it raised questions about the very legitimacy of the council. Entering the fray were politicians such as Gladstone and Bismarck. The growing tension in the council played out within the larger drama of the seizure of the Papal States by Italian forces and its seemingly inevitable consequence, the conquest of Rome itself.

Largely as a result of the council and its aftermath, the Catholic Church became more pope-centered than ever before. In the terminology of the period, it became ultramontane.

The Pope and the Professor (III)

As I noted in the previous post, this fascinating and deeply learned book acutely portrays the tensions of 19th-century Catholicism, not just between its titular figures of Pope Pius IX and Ignaz von Dollinger, but between academic history and theological dogma, between the German academic context and that of a Roman bishop squeezed in and about to lose his Papal States once and for all, and finally between different notions of papal authority, jurisdiction, and infallibility. On this latter point, many familiar characters show up, not least Cardinal Manning and John Henry Newman (whose life is told in Ker's magisterial biography). Finally, this book contains a good bit of history of relations between Orthodox and Catholics, who, under Dollinger's leadership, were already discussing issues--filioque, papal authority--that would have to await another century and more before being taken up again.

When we left off last, The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age had set up for us the central tension in the book and in the life of its titular characters: infallibility and Vatican I are undeniably products of their time, a ferocious reaction to the European revolutions of 1848 and before, a deliberate and crude poke in the eye of the French and Italians who had so harried (even to the point of kidnapping) previous popes and who now were in essence colluding in the campaign to unify the Italian peninsula and thereby deprive popes of their dubiously acquired, and appallingly run, territories once and for all. At the same time, however, it does not seem possible--all the ultramontanist machinations notwithstanding--that the decree of Vatican I, which led to Dollinger's excommunication, could have been pulled off had it not enjoyed earlier support from people, including theologians, who were not coming at the dogma like reactionaries ready to ram a hot poker through Italian politicians and the imperialists of the French Second Empire.

There was, in other words, something of a theological case, flawed and problematic though it was, that could be made for infallibility and jurisdiction going back well before the 19th century, as Brian Tierney was among the first to discuss decades ago.

Dollinger thought that case complete nonsense. In writings under a nom de plume and then more boldly under his own name, he argued that the notion of infallibility "represented a novum, 'altogether unknown in the Church for many centuries'" (137). It was a position from which he was never to budge for the rest of his life. Dollinger's problem, in short, was that any definition would result in the "'triumph of dogma over history'" (143).

Less diplomatically, he would denounce the doctrine as "moonshine based on 'forgeries and fictions'" and this doctrine would prove a "'millstone'" around the neck of the Church, an idea in the 21st century it is hard to disbelieve. And like all flawed heroes in the heat of battle, Dollinger would undermine himself by fatal overreach in some of his rhetorical claims, causing sympathetic near-allies to withdraw, and leaving him more isolated, especially when he indulged in such controversies as attacking the Council of Florence as not being really ecumenical, and therefore inadmissible as evidence of earlier widespread belief in infallibility and jurisdiction, as the Infallibilists were attempting to argue.

All councils have extra-conciliar and blatantly political factors that loom large, and Vatican I is no different, as Howard so skillfully makes clear. Consider just one brief bit of chronology:

18 July 1870: the final vote on Pastor Aeternus, with 533 voting placet and 2 voting non placet; the other fathers having left to avoid voting against the decree. (At its convocation the bishops numbered some 700.)

19 July 1870: the Franco-Prussian War broke out, causing Napoleon III to withdraw his troops from Italy, leading to the final collapse of the Papal States and the realization of the project of Italian unification.

20 September 1870: Victor Emmanuel's Italian troops breached the walls of Rome at Porta Pia, and the city was now to become the capital of a new nation-state. From here until after the Lateran Accords of 1929, all popes considered themselves "prisoners" and would not leave the Vatican. Rather than quietly, let alone gracefully, accept this, Pius IX redoubled his rhetoric about the temporal states being necessary for the preservation of the Church's spiritual power, an argument I confess to finding absurd. He promoted, and allowed others to promote, a new cult around his person as though he were a proto-martyr about to be sacrificed at any moment. It is not an edifying spectacle to behold. If ever we needed a re-reading of Freud's Future of an Illusion about infantilizing father-figures and neurotic transferences, this is it.

The pressure on the Papal States in the late 1860s, and their impending demise, provoked in Pius and his courtiers and defenders a skillful counter-propaganda campaign that portrayed the pope as a harried, persecuted fellow, a "prisoner of the Vatican." This was enormously influential in arousing sympathy for the pope, and that sympathy softened up a lot of people to the claims of infallibility and jurisdiction that were being bandied about, giving the pro-infallibility crowd an initial advantage the minority found hard to overcome. Rather than directly and openly resist the move for a definition, which would seem in bad taste and unsympathetic to the pope, the minority adopted what Howard suggests was a strategic mistake: that of arguing that the time for a definition was "inopportune." The problem here, says Howard, is that "it appeared to cede the high ground of theological principle to the Infallibilists" (140). It was a mistake they would never recover from.

In the end, a "moderate" form of infallibility and jurisdiction was accepted by the council, the more "maximalist" position having been curtailed in part by the efforts of the minority, whose day, Margaret O'Gara first argued, would come at the Second Vatican Council. But this was still a bridge too far for Dollinger, who refused to knuckle under to pressure from his German bishop and was therefore excommunicated, a devastating blow to him which would never be lifted.

In addition to rejecting the ideas on historical grounds, Dollinger was, Eastern Christians will want to note, an early proto-ecumenist, who spent a lot of time organizing conferences with Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox in an attempt to heal the divisions of the Church. These conferences, held in Bonn, involved Orthodox participants from St. Petersburg, from the University of Athens, Romania, Syria, and elsewhere in the Orthodox and Anglican worlds. They discussed such issues as the filioque, noting in one of their decree that the filioque (so well treated in The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy by A. Edward Siecienski, whom I interviewed here) was inserted via an "illegal" method and that the whole Church, East and West, should consider removing it.

Echoing words of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, words which I have myself made much use of in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, Dollinger argued that "'the great stumbling block and real hindrance to any understanding in the eyes of the Easterners...is the papacy, in the form which it has assumed'" (194).

These conferences were discussing issues that would then fade for nearly a century until the modern Orthodox-Catholic dialogue would take them up again, coming in some cases to a near-identical position as that of the Bonn conferences Dollinger organized and led. But as with us now, so with them then: hyper-Orthodox converts began to derail matters. In this case, "the joker in the pack," as Howard aptly names him, is some pest called Julian Joseph Overbeck who veered from Anglicanism into Lutheranism, then ordination as a Catholic priest who attempted to confect a marriage, after which he left and became an Orthodox layman in the Russian Church. He ginned up a letter-writing campaign to Orthodox hierarchs to derail the Bonn efforts, and to proclaim that Orthodoxy was the one true faith, all others hopeless heretics with whom no congress should be had. La plus ça change...

In the end, Dollinger died disappointed all around: by the decree of Vatican I, by his resulting excommunication, and by the failure of the Bonn conferences to resolve Christian division.

But did he die a failure? Howard ends by raising "a delicate question for Catholics today: to what degree was this excommunicated scholar an intellectual architect, or at least a significant harbinger, of the Second Vatican Council"? To which I would add another question: to what degree do we still need to learn from Dollinger about conflicts in the Church over papal authority, conflicts never so much in evidence after 1870 as they are today?

Concluded.

The Pope and the Professor (II)

As I noted here, this new book, The Pope and the Professor:Pius IX, Ignaz von Dollinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age, is a splendid and deeply fascinating one both on its own merits but also as a useful text to consider amidst ongoing challenges to and about papal authority in this Franciscan era.

Howard begins from the premise that the "modern age" really begins with the very long 19th century, a century he and others see as running from 1789 to 1914, that is from the Bastille in France to the trenches of France and Flanders during the Great War. This was a period marked, inter alia, by the return of "religion" after many were predicting its demise, not least because of the massively bloody and utterly shattering attack on the Catholic Church unleashed by the French Revolution.

Those predicting secularization during this period because of the collapse of Catholic life and faith gave short shrift to examining actual Catholic practices, then and since. And thus much history of the period is written from a perspective that presupposes the good of ongoing secularization and consequently does not bother to inquire into the details of Catholic debates. This is one of the tasks Howard sets out for himself, remedying the lack of detailed examination of how Catholics themselves actually viewed the world of this long century, and whether they were united in either pro-secularization narratives, or narratives of reaction and revanchism. He attempts to take Catholic arguments seriously on their own terms, refusing to dismiss theological claims merely because they are theological. In so doing he has written an immeasurably stronger book.

It is, in fact, on debates about history, historiography, and "historical mindedness" that so much of this story turns. Much of the conflict between Ignaz von Döllinger, on the one hand, and Pope Pius IX (and his erstwhile court and followers) on the other comes down to the relationship between theology and history and the relativizing the latter was thought to do of the truth-claims of the former. Any such relativizing was heavily disdained by the papal court and hangers-on. Döllinger, by contrast, refused to see how historical evidence could be treated so disdainfully and dismissively, and stood by it (or at least his perception of it) even when it resulted in his excommunication.

Virtually alone of all the controversial Catholic figures of the long 19th century, Döllinger remains excommunicated and unrehabilitated. It is the burden--but only one of several--of Howard's book to examine why this is so, and to show us the uncomfortable challenges of conscience and authority that the German scholar's life still poses for Catholics today. These challenges are especially brought to the fore in chapter 3, treating the immediate ante-conciliar period as well as the First Vatican Council itself and its immediate aftermath. Döllinger refused to submit to its decree on papal primacy and infallibility, and was as a result excommunicated. He refused because as an historian he saw--quite rightly--that the evidence for anyone believing in papal jurisdiction and infallibility as was debated in 1869-70 was virtually non-existent for the entire first millennium and most of the second. He refused, moreover, because he was an ecumenist avant la lettre, and saw that infallibility and universal jurisdiction were not just impossible to ground historically but impossible to justify ecumenically.

The other challenge which Döllinger refused to look away from was that of the motives behind the conciliar definition, a problem I have myself addressed elsewhere. As Howard notes, "to understand how the teaching on infallibility came bursting to the forefront of theological conversations in the late 1860s, one must take into consideration the severe threat that the papacy experienced by forces of Italian unification" (118)--to say nothing of earlier, but still potent, threats from the French Second Empire and the various European revolutions of 1848. In the face of all these threats, "infallibility became not only the desired instrument of a counter-offensive, but also simply the right and proper theological thing to do" (119).

At the same time, however, one must not be so reductive and simplistic as to see this decree as solely the result of and reaction to external threats. As Howard goes on very rightly to insist, "papal infallibility, it merits reiterating, could hardly have succeeded if it did not enjoy broad international support from the lay faithful."  One must, therefore, resist the temptation to see "that infallibility was...cooked up by ultramontane polemicists of the Pope in a time of political crisis; it possessed much deeper sanction in the Catholic intellectual tradition" (122).

Continues. 

The Pope and the Professor (I)

T.A. Howard's newest book is a magnificent study: The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Dollinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford UP, 2017), 312pp.

I'm about half-way through it, and will have more to say about it later. But it is church history at its best: sustained focus on two key figures--Döllinger and Pius IX--through whom much larger issues are sifted and assessed, not least the massive problems of the Papal States, European revolutions of 1848, and of course the First Vatican Council. In all these areas and more, the book is a fascinating study into the longstanding problem of the relationship between history and theology.

Students of the papacy, of ecclesiology more generally, and of 19th-century intellectual history will not want to miss this book.

Cyril Hovorun on the Church's Consciousness

I am eagerly looking forward to teaching my ecclesiology class again next year so that I can make use of Cyril Hovorun's splendid new book, Meta-Ecclesiology: Chronicles on Church Awareness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 242pp. It is an excellent survey of ecclesiology from the New Testament through the Fathers and into the modern period, treating the Syriac, Byzantine, Latin, and Protestant traditions. A vast amount of material covering an enormous terrain is handled skillfully and lightly, making this an excellent introductory text for students.

I first met the author at the 2012 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago, where I was on a panel about the question of married priests in the Catholic Church. That evening I met up with the incomparable Peter Galadza who introduced me to Fr. Cyril and several of us had a fascinating conversation over drinks and then dinner that night about what Putin was up to in Russia and Ukraine, about relations between Orthodox in Ukraine, and Orthodox-Catholic relations--among other things. Fr. Cyril is a first-rate scholar with a fascinating history, and I asked him about that in the context of an interview about his latest book, which I warmly recommend. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your background. 

CH: I am an Orthodox priest from Ukraine. I am happy to having had many opportunities to study and work in different contexts, and to encounter many other religious traditions. I began my studies in nuclear physics and then shifted to theology. I did my undergraduate theological studies in Kyiv and Athens, then wrote my PhD thesis at Durham University under the supervision of Andrew Louth.

While studying at Durham, I began working at the Department of external church relations of the Moscow Patriarchate. From 2007 to 2009 I chaired a similar department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. After that, I moved back to Moscow, where my responsibility was to reform the system of theological education of the Russian Orthodox Church. At the same time, I never abandoned teaching and research. My initial field was patristics, and recently I moved to ecclesiology and public theology. I spent several years at Yale working on my ecclesiological project, which led to publishing this book. Now I teach at Sankt Ignatios Theological Academy in Sweden. I am often invited to lecture and present at other Universities in the US, Canada, and Europe. I do regular teaching tours to China. I have been heavily involved in various dialogues, including the one between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

AD:What led to this book Meta-Ecclesiology: Chronicles on Church Awareness, particularly its focus on the Church's self-awareness?

For over 10 years I have been a part of the church bureaucratic machinery, and had plenty of opportunities to observe how the church functions on the level of its administrative apparatus and hierarchy, how its different structures and strata interrelate with each other, and how this affects the way in which the church becomes perceived on its different levels. I realized that the church is often understood in the way it is governed. In other words, church bureaucracy defines what the church is. This is certainly wrong, because the right way should be the other way around: the church should define what is its bureaucracy. 

To sort out and critically assess my experiences in the church administration, I undertook an ecclesiological inquiry. An opportunity to do this was provided by Yale University, which invited me to its fellowship program. Through the systematic study of the ecclesiological doctrines, I realized that ecclesiology, as the self-awareness of the church, was never a constant. It changed all the time, under the influence of various circumstances, including political and social ones. In other words, the circumstances and structures of the church, including administrative ones, always defined what the church is. And the church, as the body of Christ and the vessel of the Holy Spirit, always resisted the reductionisms implied or incurred by its structures. It is a permanent dialectical struggle, and my personal experience of the church administration reflected this struggle at a tiny spot on the ecclesial timeline.

AD:You review(p. 10) a number of metaphors used to describe the Church and then note that the list is not closed.Which metaphors today seem especially popular or apt?

The metaphors of the body and of the ship are still most popular, I believe. They are good, but they continue serving the church divisions. Even the metaphor of the body, which is most often employed by eucharistic ecclesiology, is reductionist, as eucharistic ecclesiology is, even though they certainly try to broaden our perception of the church. I think the metaphor of the Kingdom of God is less reductionist than others, and this is the one which was favored most by the early Church.

AD: Your discussion of Photius (p.17) notes that since his time the East has been unable to agree on a definition of primacy--except that it doesn't want primacy as Rome exercises it. Are we not closer today to a consensus on this question? Has the international Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, from the Ravenna statement onwards, not helped the East come closer to consensus on primacy?  

CH: To be honest, I do not see that now we are closer to the Orthodox consensus on primacy than in the times of Photios. The Orthodox-Catholic dialogue and the process of preparation to the Pan-Orthodox council made more obvious our disagreements and helped us to realize better their nature, but they did not bring us much closer to the solution of the issue of primacy. Nevertheless, even the fact that we are now more aware and better understand our disagreements, is positive. This awareness makes us less mislead and better equipped in solving the quest of primacy from the Orthodox perspective.

AD:You note the possibility of looking at ecclesiology from the perspectives of phenomenology and analytic philosophy. What do you see as the promises and prospects of such perspectives? Why would they be important to consider?

Both analytic philosophy and phenomenology are the most advanced modern lines of thought that analyze how we perceive the world and ourselves. I believe that they are relevant to ecclesiology, which is also an epistemological discipline that deals with the ways of perception and self-perception of the Church. If we take classical theology, it has been articulated in the language borrowed from philosophy. In the same vein, when we speak today about new theological reflections on the Church, then modern epistemologies are very appropriate places where to go and borrow their ideas for new ecclesiological syntheses. Such syntheses are not just desirable, they are needed for the renewal of our perception of the Church, to make the church better understood by the people familiar with the modern intellectual culture, and finally to demonstrate that the Church is not an archeological artifact, but an alive reality capable of engaging with, and changing the modern world.

AD: Several times throughout the book you draw on Syriac sources and note that they differ from Latin and Byzantine sources. What, in your view, does the Syriac tradition give us that the Latin and  Byzantine might not?

The Syriac tradition is among the greatest in the Church of the first millennium. It was dynamic and open, and reached as far as India and China because of its extraordinary flexibility. Therefore, it would be an unforgivable omission to ignore it when describing ecclesiological doctrines of the past. Its characteristic feature was the language in which it expressed itself. It was the language of poetry and images. The Syrians were particularly fond of the metaphors, and not much fancy about sophisticated and abstract concepts. They could use Greek language, but still their theological language was Syriac, inasmuch as it employed images and metaphors.

AD: Your treatment of Photius notes his complaints about "ritual" questions--how Latin rituals differed from those of the East. Are these still important or valid complaints today? Or have most Christians generally decided that liturgical diversity is not a seriously Church-dividing issue? 

I argue that diversity of the Church practices, including liturgical ones, was a norm in the early Christianity. Photios witnessed a shift in the attitude to the diversity, when unity of the Church became understood as uniformity. Photios himself was a man of his time, and emphasized ritual differentiations as a Church dividing issue. I tried to demonstrate in the book that this was a weak point shared not just by Photios, but by many in his time, including his western counterparts. It does not fit the perennial idea of the Church and today, Photios's judgements regarding the role of rite in the Church should be taken with a grain of criticism.

AD: Your treatment of Vatican I (p.90) notes that nothing in its prior history--not Islam, nor the Reformation, nor the collapse of the Roman Empire--called forth such a radical ecclesial reaction in the Latin West as Vatican I did in confronting modernity. Tell us a bit more about this, for it seems to me a crucial point for "re-interpreting" the council--as Walter Kasper and others have argued. 

The western Church waged several ecclesiological wars in the past. I call these wars ecclesiological, because they were about redefining what the Church is. In what we now call "culture war", which is a polemic between conservatives and liberals, Vatican I clearly identified the Church with only one side and thus reduced what the Church really is. Instead of engaging with modernity, Vatican I led to building an alternative to it. This alternative, "a perfect Christian society", failed and was to a great extent deconstructed by Vatican II. With much regret I observe similar processes in some Orthodox Churches. They choose to be partisan in the culture wars of our time and instead of engaging in the meaningful dialogue with modernity try to reconstruct primordial models of relations with the society and the state. These models are destined to fail. The Church, however, will suffer and already suffers from their failure.
 

AD: This summer I published an article* on Joseph de Maistre's influence on ecclesiology. So I looked for him in your treatment of the First Vatican Council, especially the years leading up to it, but did not find a lot of engagement here with ultramontanist thought, including Joseph de Maistre.Why not? 

Certainly, Joseph de Maistre was an important figure in the ultramontanist movement, which I explore a bit when I talk about the evolution of ecclesiology during the nineteenth century. He had close connections with the Russian court in the beginning of that century. However, his influence on theology per se was not as noticeable as the one of Johann Adam Möller, for instance. For this reason I pay more attention to Möller and his influence on the father of the Russian ecclesiology, Alexey Khomiakov, even though Khomiakov did not recognize such influence. I give more credit to de Maistre in my second book, where I demonstrate how his political ideas about sovereignty echoed in the renewed concept of Orthodox autocephaly in the same period.  

AD: Your appendix on the St. Irenaeus Working Group was fascinating. I suspect few people know much about them. Tell us a bit more about the group and your involvement with it. What are their hopes, and projects? 

We call it an unofficial Orthodox-Catholic dialogue. The group began its work in 2000, when the official dialogue was suspended after the unfortunate meeting in Baltimore. It consists of the theologians from both sides of the dialogue. However, unlike in the official dialogue, they are not appointed by Churches, but invited by their colleagues on the basis of their academic merits. The group therefore is meritocratic. I think this is a productive format, which allows to openly tackle difficult issues. In the official dialogue, such issues are discussed with the official positions of the Churches in mind, which often leads the discussions to deadlock. The group enjoys its academic freedom, which facilitates our search for the solution to the burning issues from the agenda of the official dialogue.

AD: Having finished Meta-Ecclesiology: Chronicles on Church Awareness, what are you at work on now? What other projects are in the works? 

I am about to finish a second book, which continues the "Meta-ecclesiology." While the first book from my ecclesiological series deals with the epistemological aspect of the Church, in the second book, whose working title is "The Scaffolds of the Church", I take a structuralist approach. I analyze the evolution of the structures of the Church and argue that they don't belong to its nature. They are rather scaffolding that facilitate building and maintaining the edifice of the church. Like in my first book, I continue applying to the Church the traditional language of the Aristotelian/Porphyrian dialectics, and experiment with new philosophical languages, in this case the language of structuralism/post-structuralism.

_________________
* "Sovereignty, Politics, and the Church: Joseph de Maistre's Legacy for Catholic and Orthodox Ecclesiology," Pro Ecclesia 24 (Summer 2015): 366-389. 

No Turning Back

I recently completed a chapter for an exciting collection being put together under the editorship of the Orthodox scholar and Archdeacon of the Ecumenical Throne, John Chryssavgis, who has corralled an impressive group of scholars both Catholic and Orthodox to write essays in advance of next year's great and holy synod of global Orthodoxy. If all goes well, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press will have this in print early in 2016. I can't wait to see it.

The book will, of course, give the usual suspects fresh reason to start hyperventilating about how the Ecumenical Patriarchate has once again swallowed the poison of the "pan-heresy of ecumenism" by "cozying up" to the "papists," but with such fanatics there is little one can do apart from re-stating that if Catholics and Orthodox really behaved as they fear we do, then we would have stitched up some sort of sordid unity scheme years ago and not remain divided today. One must equally remind them that unity is not an option: the Lord gives no wiggle room here, and sitting back denouncing one another on Facebook is as equally unhelpful as is the demand that unity be attained solely by one side simply "returning" to the other.

This forthcoming collection is, to my mind, an example of something the late Canadian scholar Margaret O'Gara referred to as The Ecumenical Gift Exchange. O'Gara is perhaps best known for her landmark book on the controverted First Vatican Council, Triumph in Defeat: Infallibility, Vatican I, and the French Minority Bishops. That book remains important, and I drew on it in my chapter which dealt in part with the political conditions in Europe (especially from the twin crises of Gallicanism and the French Revolution) behind Vatican I, a council which, as I said, was conceived, convoked, and conducted in an atmosphere of enormous anxiety.

O'Gara died too young of cancer in 2012, but a recent collection of her works under Michael Vertin's editorship has come out to honour her memory: No Turning Back: The Future of Ecumenism (Michael Glazier, 2014), 280pp.

About this book we are told:

Jesus' prayer on behalf of his of followers is "that all may be one. As you, Father are in me and I am in you, may they also be one in us" (John 17:21). No Turning Back illustrates significant developments in ecumenism during the thirty-plus years of ecumenical theologian Margaret O'Gara's own engagement in ecumenical dialogue.

This collection of selected papers from the final fifteen years of O'Gara's work before her untimely death in 2012 aims to illustrate the broad lines of ecumenism for general readers to share concrete details of recent ecumenical developments with specialist readers to encourage both groups of readers in their commitment to the pursuit of full communion among the Christian churches. An invaluable resource for academic and ecclesial specialists in ecumenism, teachers and students of theology and religious studies, Christian ministers, and all educated Christian adults who take seriously Jesus' prayer "that all may be one."

The Fantasy of Reunion?

Three years ago, when angels wept with joy and mortal flesh kept silent at the appearance of my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, a few people suggested--including those who helpfully didn't bother to read it--that my book was simply promoting a "fantasy" and that Orthodox-Catholic unity would never happen, or at least not in my lifetime nor several generations after me. This language of fantasy is not new, as a book to be published next month makes clear: Mark D. Chapman, The Fantasy of Reunion: Anglicans, Catholics, and Ecumenism, 1833-1882 (OUP, 2014), 316pp.

About this book we are told:

This book discusses the different understandings of 'catholicity' that emerged in the interactions between the Church of England and other churches - particularly the Roman Catholic Church and later the Old Catholic Churches - from the early 1830s to the early 1880s. It presents a pre-history of ecumenism, which isolates some of the most distinctive features of the ecclesiological positions of the different churches as these developed through the turmoil of the nineteenth century. It explores the historical imagination of a range of churchmen and theologians, who sought to reconstruct their churches through an encounter with the past whose relevance for the construction of identity in the present went unquestioned. The past was no foreign country but instead provided solutions to the perceived dangers facing the church of the present. Key protagonists are John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey, the leaders of the Oxford Movement, as well as a number of other less well-known figures who made their distinctive mark on the relations between the churches. The key event in reshaping the terms of the debates between the churches was the Vatican Council of 1870, which put an end to serious dialogue for a very long period, but which opened up new avenues for the Church of England and other non-Roman European churches including the Orthodox. In the end, however, ecumenism was halted in the 1880s by an increasingly complex European situation and an energetic expansion of the British Empire, which saw the rise of Pan-Anglicanism at the expense of ecumenism.

Papacy and Primacy

As I have had many occasions to note, Northern Illinois University Press has been rather unique among academic presses in taking a very good, sustained, and commendable interest in Orthodoxy, especially, but not exclusively, Russian Orthodox history. Set for October release is another book from them, this one with a more clearly "theological" note than in some of their past works, which have often tended to be strongly historical in focus.

I am very pleased to see that this book is going to be in print. I was one of the manuscript reviewers commissioned by the editors to determine suitability for publication and I very warmly recommended that they do so. At once faithful to Orthodox ecclesiology and to Catholic realities, this is a cogently written, carefully thought out work that deserves a wide audience among Orthodox and Catholics alike: Maximos Vgenopoulos (with a foreword from the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew), Primacy in the Church from Vatican I to Vatican II: An Orthodox Perspective (NIL Press, 2013), 220pp.

About this book we are told:

In this timely and comprehensive work, Maximos Vgenopoulos analyzes the response of major Orthodox thinkers to the Catholic understanding of the primacy of the pope over the last two centuries. Here Vgenopoulos brings together writings by Greek and Russian Orthodox theologians and systematically compares them to demonstrate the emergence of a concordance between the canons of the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church. Primacy in the Church from Vatican I to Vatican II is an invaluable resource on the official dialogue taking place between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church today. This important book will be of broad interest to historians, theologians, seminarians, and all those interested in Orthodox-Catholic relations.

Liturgy and Ecclesiology

The great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre opened a 1976 essay on the bicentennial of the American Revolution with the amusing quip that surely everyone in that year had had quite enough of the commemorations, and the next author to utter "just one more platitude, one last cliché" will see "perhaps the population of the United States...run screaming into the oceans and the Great Lakes." A similar sentiment perhaps overtakes those familiar with the parade of books still emerging to celebrate the opening of Vatican II more than 50 years ago now. There is on the part of some an understandable, and likely increasing, sense that we have been sated with such books; but as the most important Christian event of the last century, whose effects continue to be felt and whose legacy is still far from settled, the council remains a topic of keen interest on the part of many. (For those feeling fatigued by all the turgid analysis of the council, I recommend taking a break with the hugely entertaining diaries of Yves Congar about the council, discussed here and especially here.) While we have seen many histories of the council written, including those by John O'Malley, there is still a need for an analysis of the unfinished and, in some ways, incoherent, liturgical and ecclesiological visions (and all their ecumenical implications, perforce) of the council. A recent book attempts to look critically at the connections between the liturgy and ecclesiology by analyzing Sacrosanctum Concilium and its aftermath (including the 2007 Summorum Pontificio): Massimo Faggioli, True Reform: Liturgy and Ecclesiology in Sacrosanctum Concilium (Liturgical Press, 2012), xi+188pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

For Massimo Faggioli, the debate about the meaning of Vatican II too often misses the profound significance of that council's first and perhaps most consequential document, Sacrosanctum Concilium. The result is a misunderstanding of both the council as a whole and the liturgical reform that followed from it. In True Reform, Faggioli takes Sacrosanctum Concilium as a hermeneutical key of the council. He offers a thorough reflection on the relationship between the liturgical constitution and the whole achievement of Vatican II and argues that the interconnections between the two must emerge if we want to understand the impact of the council on global Catholicism.

This is in some ways an enjoyable book precisely because it is so maddeningly confused, transparently tendentious, and on some crucial matters passionately wrong-headed. In other respects, however, Faggioli has advanced crucial, unique arguments that very much need and definitely merit a wider hearing. There are many gems buried in this book, but one must do a lot of spade-work to extract them. Since I shall criticize this book rather forcefully, let me begin by laying out where I think the author is correct:

• Faggioli is correct in his overall thesis that Sacrosanctum Concilium contains an ecclesiological vision, and that such a vision is a welcome correction to the vision coming out of Vatican I in 1870; 
• He is, further, correct that subsequent liturgical legislation, above all Summorum Pontificum, also has an ecclesiological vision--though, as we shall see, most certainly not the one Faggioli thinks it has;
• He is correct, albeit in a much narrower sense than he realizes, that some--but only some--of the opponents of the liturgical reforms of the council are motivated by nostalgic hankering for a romanticized past that never truly was;
• He is correct that some of the critics of the council criticize it above all for its moving away from an ultramontane, centralized, papalist vision of the Church, and that such critics are wrongheaded and must be resisted;
• He is, finally, correct that to return to such a papalist vision would be a disaster for ecumenical relations and, indeed, for the entire Catholic Church as such.

Now let us consider some of the weaknesses. He begins with the bald claim that "the liturgical debate at Vatican II was the first and most radical effort of modern Catholicism to cope with the dawn of the 'secular age'" (4). If this is so, then, following as I do Catherine Pickstock (whom Faggioli never cites), the liturgical constitution must be counted a failure. It remains a source of amazement to me that (so far as I have been able to discover to date) there has been almost no serious scholarly engagement in English of Pickstock's arguments in After Writing: On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy, where she argues (cf. pp. 171-76 especially; but see also her essays "Asyndeton: Syntax and Insanity. A Study of the Revision of the Nicene Creed," Modern Theology 10 [1994]; "Liturgy and Modernity," Telos 113 [1998]; and more recently "The Ritual Birth of Sense," Telos 162 [Spring 2013]) that the Vatican II reforms were not, contrary to their usual portrayal, radical reforms. Rather, they “participated in an entirely more sinister conservatism. For they failed to challenge those structures of the modern secular world which are wholly inimical to liturgical purpose: those structures, indeed, which perpetuate a separation of everyday life from liturgical enactment.” The particular aspects of anti-ritual modernity that need challenging, according to Pickstock, include “such anachronistic structural concepts as ‘argument,’ ‘linear order,’ ‘segmentation,’ ‘discrete stages,’ and the notion of ‘new information’ outside ‘linguistic redundancy’ or repetition.”   For Pickstock the reformed Mass, in eliminating repetition and patterning itself on the ideas of modern communications, has lost its “apophatic liturgical ‘stammer,’ and oral spontaneity and ‘confusion’.”

Now, as I am aware (from having published an article on Pickstock and Byzantine liturgy more than a decade ago), there have been numerous reviews of her book and critical discussions of it, but I have not (yet) been able to find anybody who has seriously engaged her central points about the elimination of repetition, the substitution of linear order and segmentation, and the use of asyndeton rather than hypotactic and paratactic syntax in modern English liturgical translations (including Lutheran, Anglican, and RC translations). In failing to take up these arguments, liturgists have, it seems to me, irresponsibly overlooked what I regard as the most destructive legacy of the council, and the most critical part of her book. The book has been out for nearly fifteen years, but I cannot find people to have picked this argument up--either to reject or embrace it. And if that is the case, then I'm of the old school: qui tacet consentire videtur. 
 

Faggioli has no time for such arguments--or many others one could enumerate--it seems plain after reading this book: time and again he refuses to acknowledge that critics of the council even have arguments. (In this regard he clearly reminds one of Lionel Trilling's famously arch dismissal of political conservatives as not having ideas but "just irritable mental gestures."). In this spirit Faggioli  hurls what he seems (amusingly) to regard as a thunderous epithet at all critics of Vatican II: they are just indulging in "nostalgia" and nothing more. That word and its cognates appears dozens of times in the volume and is made unthinkingly and lazily to bear an enormous weight it could not, and does not, sustain. It becomes very silly after the second or third instance, rather like the child who cannot think of anything more cutting or original to say and so resorts repeatedly to deriding his enemy on the other side of the sandbox as a "dummy." Whatever you think of Pickstock's arguments--or dozens of others one could cite (e.g., Aidan Nichols' Looking at the Liturgy; Jonathan Robinson's The Mass and Modernity: Walking to Heaven Backward, or Joseph Ratzinger in his Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977, inter alia) but certainly not find, at least by name, in Faggioli--she is not engaged in "nostalgia" but in very high-level textual criticism worthy of a serious scholarly response.

Shortly after this, Faggioli makes a point that I wish he had spent more time developing: the real purpose of Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) was ecclesiology, and the real purpose of its ecclesiology was "to give 'completion and equilibrium' to the bishop, to the local Church, and to the overall theology of the Church that became prevalent after Vatican I." In other words, if I understand him correctly, SC was supposed to be a corrective to Pastor Aeternus. This is a novel argument very much worth exploring, which he does a little later (p.22) in noting that SC "is the...least dependent on recent papal teaching for its inner balance and core concepts." SC, in other words, was not the product of straitened Latin theologizing (whether neo-Scholastic or whatever) or papal magisterial thought: it was, Faggioli shows, the fruit of the ressourcement movement, including, he briefly acknowledges, certain figures of the Christian East (though not including Alexander Schmemann, one of many names one searches for in vain in this book). One discovery of the ressourcement movement was that of the role of the bishop in the early Church: "the ecclesiology of the liturgical constitution embodies the rediscovery of the ecclesiology of the monarchic episcopate in accordance with the model of the fathers of the Church" (51).

There are other bon mots Faggioli drops along the way, including this: "liturgical ressourcement at Vatican II meant the ripening of the ecumenical language of Catholicism and a powerful blow to every nostalgia [!] of 'Uniatism'" (36). He quickly drops this and never engages it again in the rest of the book--though he does cite, in somewhat truncated fashion, the influence of the Melkites at the council, which Robert Taft has of course discussed elsewhere. And he rightly notes in a variety of places the fact that more than Roman-rite liturgies were offered at the council had a major, if perhaps underappreciated, impact: "the liturgies (in rites different from the Roman) celebrated in St. Peter's contributed greatly to the development of a truly cathoilc, that is, 'universal,' ecclesiology in the council fathers" (63). I think this is sound, but such a sanguine assessment of these liturgies should be set alongside the rather weary comments on them recorded (rather astonishingly, I would add, given Congar's famous graciousness towards the Christian East, and his long, irenic, intelligent study of it) by Congar, which I note here.

There are other areas where the author does not develop his arguments in sufficient depth and detail to be convincing: e.g., he tries to suggest that SC's call for "noble simplicity" (no.34) was much more ecclesiological than "aesthetic" in nature. That is an intriguing line of argumentation that I wanted to hear more of, not least because I think--and have argued elsewhere--that that phrase was the single-most destructive thing in the entire document, and the cause of a renewed iconoclasm in the Roman Church over the last half-century--an argument made by others, including Joseph Ratzinger's The Spirit of the Liturgy.

But let us turn finally to the central thrust of the book: the ecclesiological implications of SC for the life and structure of the Church today. In this Eastern Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and many others have a considerable stake. The author starts off encouragingly by saying that "Lumen Gentium is silent on the practical application of episcopal collegiality whereas Sacrosanctum Concilium is not, and, as a matter of fact, it opened the door to the most important practical implementation of episcopal collegiality in modern Catholicism: national bishops conferences" (73). I have argued elsewhere at length that we need far more such practices in the Catholic Church today--not some anemic "collegiality" but a very robust synodality, and the fact we have seen less and less of it in some areas since Vatican II is very alarming. But the one area where, since 2007, we have not (pace Faggioli) seen more centralization is precisely the liturgy. The one area where we have seen greater freedom at the local level has been precisely the liturgy, thanks to Pope Benedict.

It is at this point that the author gets matters completely backwards. Faggioli is adamant that "questioning the liturgical reform of Vatican II means undoing also the ecclesiology of the liturgical reform and the ecclesiology of Vatican II. Benedict XVI's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (July 7, 2007), which reintroduced the pre-Vatican II missal, entailed extraordinary consequences from an ecclesiological point of view" (86). And what are those consequences, lest we have misunderstood the author's tender sensibilities to this point? "A rejection of the liturgical reform of Vatican II would mean a premature death of the ecclesiology of the local Church in Catholic theology and its ecclesial praxis" (89); and "a great number of criticisms against the liturgical reform and its application come from a misunderstanding or from a refusal of a renewed ecclesiology" (91). Faggioli seems to think that merely repeating something enough times makes it so.

To this I can only respond, as the late Baroness Thatcher did in her fatal speech in Westminster in October 1990 discussing European federal institutions: no, no, no! I am staggered at just how backwards this argument is, at how impervious it is to actual evidence. (What's the old slogan? Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts?) The whole point of Summorum Pontificum (SP) is to take liturgy out of the hands of curial officials (whether at the Roman-universal or episcopal-local levels) and leave it in the hands of the priests and people in local communities. If there are ecclesiological implications to this decision, and there are, then they are the exact opposite of what Faggioli claims to fear: SP genuinely returns liturgy to the people, a decision I can only wholly welcome for that reason and many others (including the possibility of the "extraordinary" form influencing the ordinary form so that the manifold and manifest defects in the latter may, one hopes, be at least partially healed). This is, surely, the most radical decision not merely since the gross and unjust centralization begun after Pastor Aeternus but indeed since the Council of Trent. This is, surely, a profound ecclesiological blow to the forces of curial control and disastrous papal micromanaging of the liturgy, which should never have been allowed to run riot in the first place. This is, surely, the plain meaning of Article 2 of Summorum (my emphasis):

Art. 2. In Masses celebrated without the people, each Catholic priest of the Latin rite, whether secular or regular, may use the Roman Missal published by Bl. Pope John XXIII in 1962, or the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970, and may do so on any day with the exception of the Easter Triduum. For such celebrations, with either one Missal or the other, the priest has no need for permission from the Apostolic See or from his Ordinary.

How a Mass celebrated in private (a theologically suspect Latin practice, but that is another matter) could possibly deal a "death"-blow to an ecclesiology of the local Church is impossible to fathom.

Consider the other relevant provisions: Article 4 goes on to say that "Celebrations of Mass as mentioned above in art. 2 may - observing all the norms of law - also be attended by faithful who, of their own free will, ask to be admitted." And Article 5 (§ 1) notes that "In parishes, where there is a stable group of faithful who adhere to the earlier liturgical tradition, the pastor should willingly accept their requests to celebrate the Mass according to the rite of the Roman Missal published in 1962." Thus the law provides in at least three places that the priest and people do not need to grovel to the local bishop, still less to the bishop of Rome, in sorting out their liturgical life. I fail to see why this is a bad thing. He is right that there are ecclesiological consequences here, but any fair-minded analysis could (for lack of a better word) only call them "congregationalist" in nature--in other words, the exact opposite of what Faggioli alleges. Thus Faggioli's fearful claim that even criticizing Vatican II's liturgical reform is of a package with the "death" of a local-Church ecclesiology is simply absurd on its face. (The only plausibility this argument could have, which I readily grant, is in the hands of certain members of the SSPX, whose ecclesiology tends towards the most  risibly ultramontane and whose history is indeed bogus and the product of nostalgia for a past that never was. But Faggioli does not sufficiently differentiate between SSPX cranks, a tiny number, and other legitimate and more numerous critics.) Summorum is, if anything, a liturgical charter born precisely out of a solicitude for the local Church above all.

Remember SP's author: Pope Benedict saw, and denounced in his Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977, the fact that the liturgical life of local churches had been so rudely up-ended by the destructive interference of international committees of specialists enforcing their will by papal fiat, a process he rightly derided as an unprecedented and unjustified papal power-grab. He was also aware of how many curialists in Rome and bishops and their own curialists in dioceses around the world thwarted the desires of people to access the extraordinary form through the somewhat restricted provisions of Ecclesia Dei Adflicta so he cut this whole lot out of the chain of command, which was a brilliant tactical move and a rightful attempt to check the excesses of papal power (and curial meddling) in matters liturgical.

Finally, it does not seem to have occurred to Faggioli that one can hold multiple positions at the same time which are perfectly congruent and coherent. By that I mean that there are many critics of the reform who have no desire to return to any kind of yet more centralized ecclesiology of the pre-Vatican II variety. I am myself--and can easily think of many others--one such critic: I think the liturgical reforms were good in some ways, but hugely disastrous in most others and as a consequence I think that the extraordinary form should be used as widely as possible; at the same time I think the ecclesiological reforms were good in some ways though they did not even begin to go far enough. I want very much to see the liturgical and ecclesiological problems fixed, but I want at least as much to see that the council's eccelesiological and ecumenical gains are preserved and not rolled back. Why one cannot hold both sets of desires simultaneously is a mystery to Faggioli but not to me. It is a pity that his ham-fisted defense of one vision of Vatican II and his love of papal centralization (as long as it is used to enforce the favored causes) blinds him to this reality, and that his de haute en bas attitude would never condescend to engage such arguments, which are more complicated than the simplistic tale on offer in this little book.