Shaun Blanchard on Jansenism, Pistoia, and Catholic Historiography

It's always a delight to talk to new authors about their works, but in the hands of Shaun Blanchard we have a new book (some fuller thoughts on which are here) that contains multiple delights for those interested, inter alia, in the papacy, Catholic reform, early-modern Italian history, Vatican II, synodality, the synod of Pistoia, historiography, and of course the various beliefs we group under the heading of "Jansenism." As is my custom, I e-mailed him some questions about The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and Catholic Reform. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your background

AB: I was born in a smallish town outside of Chapel Hill, NC. My parents are very devout Christians and always encouraged me to pursue my love of history. I had a great experience as an undergrad at UNC and spent a good bit of time in Ireland and England. That led me to pursue a masters in theology at Oxford, where the Sorting Hat fortuitously placed me at Blackfriars (the Dominican House). This was the most important time of my life – I really delved into Catholic history and theology (especially Vatican II and its reception), learned how to do a bit of research, and met my wife, a beautiful Australian literary scholar and creative writer.

After getting married, Ann-Marie and I both did PhDs in Milwaukee, where I worked under Ulrich Lehner and Fr. Joe Mueller SJ. After graduation, we were fortunate enough to both find faculty positions at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, LA (“FranU”, formerly Our Lady of the Lake College). So I’ve spent most of my life in the South and Midwest, with about three years overseas. I’m a rugby fan (former player) but my real love is college football – I’m a diehard UNC football fan, which has led to a deepened sensitivity to the problem of Theodicy. Since getting married I’ve become a weird cat person too.

AD: What led to the writing of The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform?

SB: I was initially going to write a dissertation on post-conciliar reception and debates about Vatican II. But after taking a couple of historical theology seminars – American Catholicism with Pat Carey and Enlightenment and Catholicism with Ulrich Lehner – I started reading as much as I could about the “roots” of Vatican II.

Lehner, an authority on the Catholic Enlightenment, was thrilled that I had heard of and cared about stuff like late Jansenism and Auctorem fidei. He really encouraged me and showed me such a project was not only possible but needed. Since I had virtually daily access to one of the leading scholars of early modern Catholicism and Catholic Enlightenment, I really felt I could do such a project and do it well.

Fr. Joe Mueller was always someone I looked up to, so I then approached him about an independent study on Vatican II and asked him if he would co-direct my dissertation, especially to guide me in reading Congar and Vatican II scholarship, with the aim of framing my discussion of “true and false reform.” It was in Fr. Joe’s independent study that I wrote an essay on “the Ghost of Pistoia” at Vatican II that Theological Studies published, so that gave me a sense I was onto something.

Thankfully, Lehner and Fr. Mueller were enthused about a bigger project along these lines. The basic starting point was that the common narratives of the roots of Vatican II are too simplistic, and they need to be pushed back beyond Newman or even the Tübingen School to include these internecine and sometimes unsavory eighteenth century debates. Once I realized how much I could do just on the Pistoians, I cut out some other planned material (more on Muratori circles, English “Cisalpinism”, John Carroll). Getting the Smith Family Fellowship allowed me to go to England, Trier, Florence, and the Vatican Archives. In Italy, I zeroed in so much on Ricci and his circle that the result is 135,000 words, but could easily have been 200,000 (that is, I am told, how a lot of these projects go).

AD: Am I right in thinking that “Jansenism” is one of those contemporary ciphers or bogeymen often invoked but rarely historically contextualized and understood? Do you despair that it now only ever functions as a “bizarrely resilient term of abuse in Catholic discourse” (p.304)? Is it more helpful, as you do (p.197), for us to speak of “Jansenisms” instead? 

To the first two questions: yes, absolutely. No early modernists speak this way about “Jansenism” – it’s always systematic theologians or clergy or historians whose expertise is in other periods. Probably the most persistent myth is this crazy idea that “Jansenism” ruined the Church in Ireland, or Quebec, or America, even though no historians of Irish or American Catholicism claim this (because there no facts that support this idea!). We Catholics seem to have the particular inclination to need to identify some sort of “ism” to blame for our problems (Jansenism, clericalism, modernism, etc.) rather than our own repeated personal and institutional sins and failures. It allows us to externalize our shame and our problems – kind of a “no true Scotsman” type reflex. We see this happening in the far more serious territory of the abuse crisis – “it’s really about progressives and their tolerance of homosexuality,” or “it’s really about conservatives and their clericalism.”

I have had so many amusing and frustrating conversations with people who just know what Jansenism is and really don’t want to hear anything to the contrary. One elderly progressive priest insisted to me that French and Irish “Jansenist” priests had imported maximalist Marian devotion (!) and a preoccupation with clerical authority and divine judgment to America. This “Jansenism” flourished in the 1950s, but thankfully Vatican II swept it away! Sometimes the more conservative Catholics will say – repeating some very poor online articles – that Cardinal Kasper or Pope Francis are bringing back “Jansenism” because they don’t think God “really grants grace to overcome sin” or some nonsense like that. Tom O’Connor at Maynooth – foremost expert on Irish Jansenism (as in, actual Jansenism of the seventeenth century) – warned me that the struggle was futile, so I really shouldn’t get bent out of shape about it.

While some people are open to hearing that the history is much more complicated, those who invoke the term polemically usually are not really interested in historical fact, just in slamming their opponents with a purportedly heretical “ism.” It allows them to bash some contemporary phenomena or explain it in a way that doesn’t challenge their preconceived notions. It’s lazy and also reveals a certain insecurity, even childishness. I guess if I’m being more understanding, the longevity of the term owes a lot to functioning as a stand-in for “rigorist” (kind of like the inexact use of “Puritan” in Protestant circles) and to some extent that is understandable.

So yes, we should speak of “Jansenisms” and we should distinguish between different stages of a pluriform / multivalent “movement” – if we can even call it that. Sometimes what the term is really describing, even in the early modern period, is just a tendency or a set of sympathies (Italian scholars are often careful to note a lot of “Jansenists” were really filogiansenisti who opposed the Jesuits and were Augustinians or moral rigorists). But more often than not people should just say “joylessness” or “rigorism” since that is almost always what they want to denounce, and no one group has ever had a monopoly on those things.

AD: Among certain French historians, of course, it is not uncommon to speak of the longue durée surrounding pivotal events, but you open your preface by really stretching that out, arguing that a work of Lodovico Muratori from 1747 is key to understanding the ressourcement movement and the Second Vatican Council. Give us a sense of Muratori and the significance of his work. 

Reading Muratori’s brilliant Della regolata devozione dei cristiani (1747) was a huge turning point for me. Here you have an eighteenth-century Italian priest – a massively influential intellectual who was close to the reigning pope – arguing for a liturgical and devotional reform that looks awfully close to what the twentieth century ressourcement circles wanted. Muratori’s works were translated into every major European language and were sometimes mandatory reading for parish priests in the eighteenth century. He was hugely influential especially in Vienna and in other Habsburg lands like Tuscany. English speakers knew him and appreciated him too. And Muratori was not the only one who thought like this. Cardinal Tomasi (1649–1713), liturgical scholar and Theatine, was recognized as a forerunner of Vatican II in the press release for his canonization by John Paul II.

But I need to be clear – when I say Muratori was a forerunner of Vatican II I am not saying that his work was used explicitly in the drafting of Sacrosanctum Concilium or anything like that. Muratori’s influence on Vatican II, I would argue, was very real, but it is also much more subtle and very different from saying Newman’s fingerprints are all over Dei verbum 8 (a fact that my friend Andrew Meszaros proved). While some of the council fathers, especially those interested in the Liturgical Movement, were certainly aware of Muratori’s groundbreaking liturgical scholarship, I point to Muratori first and foremost as someone doing liturgical, biblical, and patristic ressourcement over 200 years before Vatican II. When I say he is a forerunner of the Council I mean that his methodology and his conclusions anticipated Vatican II. However, it is additionally true that his liturgical scholarship was still in use and being cited in the twentieth century, so perhaps that fact is more direct.

AD: You note that your initial explorations into the Synod of Pistoia revealed how much it anticipated reforms at Vatican II. At the same time you note the fathers of Vatican II were haunted by a “ghost” connected to the condemnations of Pistoia. How in the end did the council negotiate this uncomfortable tension? 

Yes, this was really fascinating and I went through the Vatican II Acta very carefully trying to figure this out, because it was (by necessity) a very subtle undertaking, because no bishop in the 1960s wanted to point to these renegade Jansenists as a positive source for anything. I wrote an article about this (the “Ghost of Pistoia”) that was then expanded upon in chapter six of the book. I think in summation I would say that the “majority” council fathers negotiated this tension very deftly regarding ecclesiology. Certain members of the conciliar minority, especially Bishop Luigi Carli of Segni, evoked Auctorem fidei, the papal condemnation of Pistoia, a number of times to try to block ideas like episcopal collegiality, or weaken any notions they saw subtracting from or obscuring a strictly monarchical view of the papacy.

There were a couple interventions where council fathers pushed back against this that are worth looking at. One is by Bishop Enrico Nicodemo (whom I discuss on pages 276–80) and the other, which goes into great detail on Pistoia, is by the Chilean Cardinal Silva Henriquez (288–94). In every case, majority-position council fathers sought to uphold Vatican I while also trying to re-situate the pope-episcopate relationship as something collegial and, frankly, more biblical and patristic. Some did use quite charged language that could be seen as anti-ultramontane, like the Archbishop of Freiburg, Hermann Schäufele, who spoke of restoring “original rights” to the bishops. I find it profoundly unlikely that this learned German was unaware that this echoed language consistently used by Febronians, Jansenists, and Gallicans. I am confident his opponents noticed this as well.

Indeed, the conservative “minority” might have had the last laugh, since Congar reports that certain fathers privately raising “the spectre of Pistoia” to Pope Paul VI is what finally convinced him to approve the appendix to Lumen gentium, the Nota praevia explicativa, which frustrated so many in the majority, including young Josef Ratzinger.

AD: Is not the use made of Pistoia at Vatican II all the more remarkable given, as you document, that its ecclesiology in particular was so roundly condemned in 1870 at Vatican I? Given that condemnation, but also and equally given that Vatican II nonetheless makes use of Pistoia, are not the fathers of the council themselves offering us a proleptic model for interpretation? In drawing on Pistoia are they themselves illustrating for us, as you say, that “the council is neither in complete continuity with preconciliar Catholic thought and practice nor in essential discontinuity with it” (p.4)? If that is so, have we perhaps spent too much time arguing about continuity and discontinuity, when it is manifestly both? 

I think the council fathers do indeed offer a proleptic model for interpretation (a great phrase, by the way), especially the ones I cited in the answer to question #5. I hope the thesis of my book pushes such an interpretation further.

Of course, the council fathers were very careful to never explicitly “draw on Pistoia” as a positive source, but unmistakably the parallels were there and many of them knew it. John O’Malley rightly called the development of doctrine one of the most important “issues-under-the-issues” at the Council. With the guidance of periti like Congar and Ratzinger, the bishops were clearly starting to more confidently assert that development in arenas such as the liturgy, ecclesiology, and religious liberty was not only possible but desirable and even necessary.

To set up continuity and discontinuity as some kind of binary is, I agree, unhelpful and manifestly wrong. Sophisticated interpreters of Vatican II have always known this, but unfortunately I think certain progressive interpreters pushed a revolutionary narrative, while certain conservatives twisted Ratzinger’s words about continuity and rupture. The result of the latter was a kind of minimizing or even erasure of Vatican II in which nothing really happened. I think O’Malley and David Schultenover, among other people, were right to point this out and bemoan it.

Something did happen and some things did change. Much of the progressive revolutionary narrative seems to have died out (or rather attached itself to new hopes and new standards), but this erasure narrative is alive and well, at the highest levels, and we see it in certain clergy and theologians who pay lip service to “ambiguous” documents like Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae but in practice teach against them. To use a rather absurd example at the diocesan level (not my current diocese, by the way), a priest who told some young students that Muslims worship a demon and they could be possessed if they read portions of the Koran for their high school world religions class was confronted with Nostra Aetate. He replied simply that it was a pastoral document and thus not binding in any way, but only “advice.” So one needn’t wander into schismatic communities to get these “erasure” perspectives. The latent anti-Semitism exposed by recent discussion of the Mortara incident reveals many people have either rejected or not really received Nostra Aetate (or decades of postconciliar magisterial teaching and Catholic social thought, for that matter).

Soon after Ratzinger was elected pope, in Christmas 2005, he gave a fantastic address to the College of Cardinals in which he clarified and deepened his perspective on Vatican II, continuity, discontinuity, and the nature of reform. I talk about this at length in my book. Ratzinger does not insist on a rigid and static “hermeneutic of continuity” in which, for example, we should try to verbally square discrete theses in Dignitatis Humanae with the numerous relevant encyclicals of the past. This is to do what biblical fundamentalists do with scripture, and Ratzinger clearly doesn’t believe this is a valid way to think about Vatican II or reform.

What he proposes is a “hermeneutic of reform” which encompasses “continuity and discontinuity” but “on different levels.” Dignitatis humanae (and the last 55 years of magisterial teaching) is clearly, manifestly, and obviously discontinuous with some past teaching documents on some questions. And yet, Ratzinger argues, our new understanding of religious liberty is continuous with a deeper tradition of the early church and – although the “J” word is often conspicuously absent from such discussions – with the example and witness of Jesus Christ. The people who just can’t accept religious liberty and claim, ludicrously, that the true teaching of the Church still allows for violent coercion up to and including death for “heretics” (including, one presumes, Protestants!) really need to re-read this address.

AD: The Pistoian synod of 1786 is, you quote Luciano Tempestini as saying, one of the “most stimulating theological events between Trent and Vatican II.” At the same time, you note that the acts of the synod were “unmistakably Jansenistic in outlook.” Was it the perceived taint of Jansenism that led to their papal condemnation, or was the papal reaction made more neuralgic because some proposed reforms (“pseudo-democratic Richerist elements” [p.137]) touched on how the papacy and episcopacy were conceived and to be exercised? 

The funny thing about this is that the ultramontane movement, which was really born in this era (1780s and 90s) can, like the more radical Jansenists, look really unhinged and paranoid in their polemic. They perceived a vast conspiracy of forces allied against the Church and the papacy. While they were wrong about some major points (connection to Protestantism, connection to atheism) they were absolutely not wrong that there were multiple forces converging against the papacy (as it understood itself), the Jesuits, and many other things that ultramontane Catholics held dear. So when the opponents of the Pistoians saw a Gallican-Febronian-Jansenist-Richerist-Erastian hydra, they were actually right that all of these intellectual tendencies had found a home in Tuscany and in Ricci’s network of friends and collaborators, and that the Pistoian Synod was the most clear and dangerous institutional expression of this coalition of sorts.

Dale Van Kley’s most recent book calls this “Reform Catholicism” and it was a fairly cogent phenomenon in the final third of the eighteenth century. It had triumphed, resoundingly, in forcing the pope to suppress the Jesuits in 1773. Had the events set in motion by the French Revolution not paradoxically strengthened the papacy and destroyed “Reform Catholicism” by rewriting the map of Europe and the balance of power in the Church, Catholicism would probably be very, very different today.

That being said, reading through the committee reports in the Vatican archives made it clear that the drafters of Auctorem fidei were mostly concerned with Jansenism, which they saw as by definition infected with Richerism and Protestantism. The political component also loomed large – this was seen as pseudo-democratic, as levelling, as republicanism, and as part of why things had gone so wrong in France. So you are right to suggest a kind of panicked, neuralgic response was the result (the vibe of the committee meetings was “hey, we condemned this already in Huss, Luther, Jansen, Quesne, etc. etc. and one need only look to France to see what an emergency this is!”).

AD: I still insist to my students every semester that we break out the atlases and look at maps for understanding all sorts of religious movements and changes and conflicts as driven in part by “location, location, location.” You allude p.16 to the role of geography, and so I’m wondering: is there a link, in your mind, between the strength of the papal denunciation of Pistoia and the fact this synod was just up the road, as it were, from the Papal States—and not more safely distant in, say, German lands, or across the English Channel, or even the Atlantic? 

You are right to do so with your students, and I really need to incorporate more maps into my church history class. Yes, location as well as personnel made the Pistoia situation particularly dicey. Pius VI and his team of authors make this clear in the preface to Auctorem fidei. The enemy was at the gates. In fact, a lot of the intellectual and theological groundwork for Ricci had been laid at the Archetto meetings in Rome, which was an anti-Jesuit, Augustinian, and philo-Jansenist circle that included some really big names.

Now, popes would certainly have wanted to condemn these tendencies wherever they could find them, but it was one thing to have “French fanatics” spouting off about Gallican liberties (to quote an irritated Cardinal investigating Pistoia) or cold-hearted Anglo-Saxons and Teutons citing the Council of Constance – these things were commonplace. Even though there was a tradition of anti-curialism and “jurisdictionalism” indigenous to Italy that acted as a check on papal power, it was mostly pragmatic. The pope and his friends knew that what was happening in Tuscany was different. Home-grown Italian ideas were being combined with imported Jansenism, Gallicanism, and Febronianism, and to make matters worse, the sovereign protecting and encouraging all this was a bright and energetic young Habsburg. So they were really limited in what they could do. Peter Leopold, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, had already made sweeping changes to religious life, expelled the Inquisition, and totally ignored the Index. He kept Jansenist books by his bedside and backed and promoted the Pistoian circle.

As to personnel, Scipione de’Ricci was not some eccentric intellectual in Utrecht; he was scion of an aristocratic Florentine family (the same family as the Dominican counter-reformation saint, Caterina de’Ricci), educated partly in Rome, and the great-nephew of the last Jesuit Superior General, Lorenzo de’Ricci. So this was really embarrassing for the papacy, but condemning the Synod right away in 1786 would have potentially backfired politically. Once Peter Leopold left Tuscany to become Holy Roman Emperor there was a bit more breathing room, and when the French Revolution really began to spread, the papacy decided the risk was worth it and published a condemnation, at least partly to try to stem the spread of Pistoian ideas to Spain. Even then, almost every Catholic government blocked publication of Auctorem fidei initially. So while the papacy was especially threatened locally, they were still thinking transnationally about the problem, because it really was a transnational (and, later, transcontinental) problem.

AD: You note various strands of Jansenism and diverse movements for reform often grouped together and condemned under one heading even though they differed very considerably. To my mind there seems to be at work here the same dynamic one encounters with the Council of Constance and subsequent condemnations of “conciliarism” (treated so fascinatingly by Francis Oakley’s haunting The Conciliarist Tradition, which you cite). Is that a fair historical analogy? Do condemnations of diverse movements—whether conciliarism, ultramontanism, or Jansenism—ultimately prove unhelpfully over-broad? 

Yes absolutely. I started to think of Jansenism, conciliarism, and Gallicanism as similar umbrella terms. The rehabilitation of conciliarism and Gallicanism began many decades ago, and I think one has to be a very narrow and triumphalistic ultramontane to not see what is good and sound in many conciliarist-Gallican ideas and tendencies, and not just ecclesiologically.

Congar spoke of the neo-Gallican bishops at Vatican I as “the vanguard of Vatican II” and I think, historically, that is indisputable. This is not to say they were right about everything, but it is to recognize they brought a lot of good to the table (healing the Great Western Schism, for one!). I roll my eyes when systematicians talk about “the Gallican heresy” and “the conciliarist heresy.” It’s just way too simplistic. I’m sorry, but Bossuet was not a heretic. The fathers at the ecumenical Council of Constance, which asserted strongly conciliarist theses, were not heretics. They were saving the Church during one of our deepest crises, and to speak anachronistically like that is at best misinformed.

I try to follow the same process with Jansenism, putting out the many good and true things they defended, often very courageously and at great personal loss. But I also acknowledge there were crazy Jansenists (maybe literally – some of them seemed sick in the head!). They spiraled into polemic and burned out in bitterness, writing books about the truth being crucified and Jesus Christ under anathema and excommunication to describe their own plight. It is important to recognize that Jansenists had debilitating problems and the Church was right to condemn some of their ideas. Most of all I think they are just a cautionary tale about what happens when one gets isolated, sectarian, and bitter. That tale has some obvious importance for our current ecclesial situation.

Oakley’s book was extremely influential, by the way. It is a masterful narrative. I disagree on a couple details, but I am really indebted to him for having a treatment like that available in English. I considered using his image of an “ideological relay station” but when my project changed it didn’t really fit anymore. But I love that image for conciliarism.

AD: Following on from that, as you examined the papal condemnation, and then the many sources and personages at Pistoia and involved in Jansenism, were there difficulties for you in reconciling the former with the latter? Were the papal condemnations precise, fair-minded, and accurate, or did they tend towards the vague, the abstract, or even the grotesque? 

It’s definitely a challenge. The authors of Auctorem fidei attempted, and succeeded in, presenting a highly authoritarian and papalist view of the Church. Their attitude towards the laity – made clear in the proceedings minutes I read in the Vatican Archives – was often paternalistic and sexist. Of course women will misinterpret scripture and the liturgy, said one cardinal, so the Synod’s plan to encourage Bible reading and translate the Mass was crazy. Women and most lay men should just read prayer books and listen to sermons. On these matters, there’s wiggle room in the condemnations themselves, but it’s hard to square this attitude with our current teaching and practice, which seems much more edifying and evangelical, and much closer to scriptural and patristic attitudes.

That being said, the more enlightened ultramontanes like Cardinal Gerdil made sure Auctorem fidei didn’t suffer from the genuine confusion resulting from the in globo approach of Unigenitus (in which all the condemnations were listed at once and not attached to specific propositions). The most serious condemnations are qualified, thanks to Gerdil, with quatenus innuit (insofar as it intimates) and sic intellecta (thus understood), and this allowed people to subscribe who otherwise wouldn’t have (like Ricci himself), but also genuinely allowed a range of interpretations. I’ll subscribe to almost anything sic intellecta. So a bishop as reform-minded as John Carroll in Baltimore appeared to not have a problem with Auctorem fidei – he uses it a number of times in ecclesiastical controversies – and he clearly believed in de iure religious liberty and the wisdom of a vernacular liturgy. Was he being disingenuous? Maybe. But he was also being a good Jesuit and reading the condemnations with a great deal of elasticity (which, ironically, Ricci the Jansenist was forced ultimately to also do).

At Vatican II, the council fathers were forced to confront the ecclesiological condemnations since they touched on the episcopate, and they were the only censures of “heresy” in Auctorem fidei (8 out of 85 condemnations). They didn’t really go there with liturgy or religious liberty, because with the latter they really had bigger (and more recent) fish to fry.

AD: Tell us a bit more about Pistoia’s bishop, Scipione de’Ricci. It seems his vision and hope for the synod extended beyond Tuscany to cover most of the Italian peninsula and much of the wider church. Was he the Cardinal Marx of his day, if you would—leader of a synodal movement loved and loathed by others around the world? 

Oh my! I could go on and on about Ricci, but I will try to restrain myself. I read thousands of his letters and virtually all of his pamphlets and surviving homilies. My wife, who revels in Baroque piety, was getting worried because she thought he sounded really lame. I hope to write a biography someday. To be really provocative I could call it Scipione de’Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia: A Catholic Luther (a title Ricci would’ve hated but his enemies would’ve loved). Or perhaps subtitle it Portrait of a Fanatic. That would make more sense. Ricci admired Savonarola so much, because both men were, above all, fanatics.

I think the first thing to say is that when we look into the past honestly we see that all of these people are a mixed bag, because we are all a battleground of sin and grace. I greatly admire John Carroll, our first American bishop. He was right on religious liberty and had great liturgical sensibilities. And yet he owned slaves. I admire and read St. Thomas Aquinas, yet it was this gentle man’s lines in the Summa on executing heretics that were so often cited to support such a horrific practice. If we can contextualize their faults (and I think we can and should) we should also contextualize and seek to understand both the good and the bad in a figure like Ricci.

Ricci was a serious, devout Christian who deeply loved his people and really wanted them to experience Jesus in the scriptures and sacraments and go to heaven. His tenderness and his genuine pastoral heart comes across in many letters and homilies. Unfortunately, he was extremely arrogant and totally ruined by polemic. He could be harsh and polarizing man. His fundamental flaw, highlighted by S. J. Miller, was “an utter unwillingness to see any good in those who opposed him.”

Ricci’s story is so tragic. There was a window there were he could have collaborated with good, holy prelates who were open to reform like Cardinal Gioanetti in Bologna and Archbishop Martini in Florence, but he alienated them with his intransigence. He still could have capitalized on a lot of goodwill amongst the priests in his twin diocese, but he confused and angered most of the laity with his abrupt changes and met those who protested him with aloof haughtiness. His pattern of behavior when he was opposed was not one of listening or dialoguing – he tried to silence, bully, or marginalize anyone who disagreed with him. Ricci’s story alone, as a kind of photo negative of the Congarian “true reformer” makes the history of the Synod of Pistoia applicable to our own day in the Church. Congar gets some stuff wrong about Jansenism but I think he is right when he said that Jansenists were wrong not necessarily in believing they had the truth, but in believing no one else had it.

Your reference to Cardinal Marx is really interesting. Yes, in the sense that Ricci really was planning for a Europe-wide (I suppose eventually worldwide) reform of Catholicism through diocesan and then national synods (and in this he was in step with broader Jansenist networks in Utrecht and France), there are parallels with Marx and the current talk of a Synodal Way. Certainly one’s opinion of both men is a fairly reliable litmus test of what one thinks about a variety of issues. But I will resist the temptation to say any more, and to say whether I think Ricci is more like Marx or Burke, Kasper or Schneider!

AD: Your long footnote on p.9 traces out some of the contemporary invocations by so-called traditionalists positing a link between Pistoia and Vatican II, especially with regards to liturgical reform. I confess that I’ve grown extremely tired of these “armchair genealogists” as MacIntyre might call them. They think they have accomplished something significant, perhaps even interesting, by asserting links between two events or personages—but have they? Is their whole point simply to suggest that the condemnation of Pistoian reforms by Pius VI should somehow still apply to comparable reforms at and after Vatican II? 

Evocations of the kind you describe are definitely done to try to discredit Vatican II or at least its implementation. These sloppy geneaologies are almost never done by people who are acquainted with the actual history. Most have just read Denzinger, or seen it cited on Twitter or a blog. I have even seen anti-Francis people who think it is Pius VI condemning the synod of a previous pope, which gives them hope that a future Pope Pius XIII will come and save them from Amoris Laetitia and the Synod on the Amazon!

And yet, the similarities are there and they are undeniable. Someone like Bernard Fellay of SSPX seeing in Lumen Gentium the ghost of early modern opponents of ultramontanism (he traces collegiality to Jansenism and calls it a “timebomb”) is not completely wrong. The council fathers were aware of this, as I show in the book. This is why only looking at discrete theses is not enough – one must have a hermeneutic of change and reform. Ironically, the fact the some so-called “traditionalists” lack this makes them susceptible to the same mistakes their hated “Jansenists” made.

AD: You refer (p. 201, fn. 17) to “the antiquarianism of many late Jansenist appeals to primitive church order and synodality.” Can you clarify what is meant by antiquarianism, both as you use it, and as it shows up as a term of reprobation in papal documents (e.g., Mediator Dei 63-64)? 

Yes, this is an important point. Pius XII slammed the Pistoians for this in Mediator Dei. His words in the passage you cite were a little over the top, and typical of papal polemic against Jansenism, but he had a real point. The Jansenists had vast historical learning but little “sense of history” (if you will) – they lacked the kind of historical consciousness that people like Muratori and, later, Newman, were figuring out. They of course instinctively understood a kind of pragmatic change and development, but they could be rigidly “fixiste” and die on a hill about stupid things. I say on page 254 (note 278) “any theological, disciplinary, or pastoral differences between the past and the present that the Jansenists encountered in their books were simply deficiencies on the part of the present Church.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration but not far off. They would select certain authors (of course Augustine first and foremost) or times and events in church history and then use those loci to too sweepingly discredit the contemporary church.

In True and False Reform Congar got some stuff wrong, in my opinion, about eighteenth-century Catholicism. But on this point about the relationship between past and present he was totally right on, and he wanted to make sure that ressourcement figures in his day and age got this right and didn’t shipwreck their reforms as late Jansenists, Josephinists, and radical Gallicans did. You can’t go back. He was right about this.

Circling around to Pius XII, I think he was preemptively fending off any idea that his own liturgical renewal – which involved restoring old things that had lapsed into disuse, like elements of the Triduum liturgies – was not mistaken for a kind of liturgical archaeology or primitivism. Anyone interested in cautious, sane reform should look into Pius XII. His positive legacy is, I think, underestimated by theologians. Ulrich Lehner has pointed out he is the most frequently cited non-biblical source at Vatican II!

AD: Sum up your hopes for the book, and tell us who especially would benefit from reading it.

I hope the book is read and enjoyed by anyone interested in early modern Catholicism, Vatican II, Jansenism, or the issues of continuity-discontinuity and true and false reform. I think certain ecclesiological issues that are very much still with us – you highlighted most or all of them in your questions – have an important history that people could learn something about from the book. My fear for the book was that it would suffer from “Goldilocks syndrome”; that is, that it would be perceived as too historical for theology folks, and too theological for historians. But initial feedback has been that this is not the case. I hope that continues.

Finally, I hope it can be comforting to people who feel exhausted and beaten down by all the controversy and mean-spiritedness on display in the Church today. I never thought of the book like this, but a couple Catholic friends who read it said they felt relieved to see that past generations have suffered from polarization, misunderstandings, and genuine crises but the Church and the faith have always endured. I was really touched to hear this.

AD: Having finished The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II, what projects are you at work on now? 

Ulrich Lehner and I are co-editing an anthology of Catholic Enlightenment texts. This is a really exciting project which will bring Polish, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Mexican, Brazilian, and Italian texts into English for the first time. With the assistance of Glauco Schettini, I translated a 5000-word portion from Muratori’s Della regolata. We also have an amazing selection from a Mexican intellectual arguing in favor of indigenous use of marijuana. So it should be an intriguing selection of texts for undergrad classrooms and for academics interested in Catholic Enlightenment.

Next, my friend Stephen Bullivant and I are co-authoring a book on Vatican II’s for Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introduction series. This is a good chance for me to get out of the 1700s and return to the rapidly growing literature on Vatican II, and I love any chance to work with Stephen, preferably over multiple espressos, fried chicken burgers, and pints of ale.

I also have a number of smaller projects I’m excited about, like chapters in the forthcoming Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism and the new Cambridge History of the Papacy. This summer I spend time in Ireland, England, Austria, and Italy and will have a chance to do some research and give talks on the book and on the Catholic Enlightenment and Jansenism.

Finally, I must thank you so much for this very stimulating dialogue! The questions really made me think. You highlighted some issues that I hadn’t fully thought through.

Jansenism and Other Bogeymen

I've sent some questions for an interview to Shaun Blanchard, author of the new and utterly fascinating book The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform (Oxford University Press, 2019), 370pp. I will post that interview once I have it.

In reading the book preparatory to our interview, I could not put it down. It is cogently and crisply written and covers such wide swaths of Catholic history and so many controverted areas and ideas with great care and innumerable insights. At the same time, however, like all excellent history, it is aware of its limits, and sets forth what things cannot be covered in one volume but must await further treatment.

In the meantime, however, let me urge you to get this book at once, not least if you have any interest in any of the four main ideas in his title: Pistoia, Vatican II, Jansenism, and Catholic reform movements. There is a lot in here for those of us interested in ecclesiology, synodality, and the papacy as an agent of both reaction and reform. Ecumenism also shows up regularly, both in a Protestant direction but also with regard to Armenian Christians among others. There is also much here to consider when dealing with questions of Catholic historiography over the last two centuries and more. The book clearly takes the French annalist approach here, arguing that there is indeed a very longue durée from Pistoia to Vatican II in unexpected ways.

In addition the book will be an invaluable corrective for those--including some poor right-wing fantasist on Twitter imagining that his perch at some law school named after a dish of beets my mother used to make when I was a child--who feel entitled to tell the rest of us what Jansenism is and was while having no background in this complex history. Such creatures always put me in mind of this sketch of the boorish Jim Hacker complaining about "left-wing" corruption of education while revealing how little he had:

Catholic Abuse, Trauma, and Cover-Up

As someone who has recently written a book about the Catholic sex abuse crisis, and the necessary structural reforms to move past it, and as someone with a long-standing interest in psychoanalysis and trauma psychology, I am of course keenly awaiting my review copy of Abuse and Cover-up: Refounding the Catholic Church in Trauma by Gerald A. Arbuckle (Orbis, 2019), 248pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Here is a timely book on the sex abuse crisis by a scholar who is adept at weaving insights from the social sciences into a framework of practical theology.

Written for readers deeply concerned for the future of the church, this book addresses two questions: Why does the culture of the Catholic Church, despite Vatican II’s emphasis on collegiality and transparency, still cover up abuses of power? How can this culture change in order to end abuse and heal the wounds it inflicts on the Body of Christ?

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?

Stephen Bullivant on the Mass Exodus of Catholics: UPDATED

I've been reading and enjoying the many insights in Stephen Bullivant's new book, Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and American Since Vatican II (Oxford University Press, 2019), 336pp. It is the kind of book that should be read by everybody in the Catholic Church, but also anyone interested in the sociology of religion. I have an interview with the author to be published soon, and will essay more thoughts on the book later. About it the publisher tells us this:

In 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council with the prophecy that 'a new day is dawning on the Church, bathing her in radiant splendour'. Desiring 'to impart an ever increasing vigour to the Christian life of the faithful', the Council Fathers devoted particular attention to the laity, and set in motion a series of sweeping reforms. The most significant of these centred on refashioning the Church's liturgy--'the source and summit of the Christian life'--in order to make 'it pastorally efficacious to the fullest degree'.

Over fifty years on, however, the statistics speak for themselves. In America, only 15% of cradle Catholics say that they attend Mass on a weekly basis; meanwhile, 35% no longer even tick the 'Catholic box' on surveys. In Britain, the signs are direr still. Of those raised Catholic, just 13% still attend Mass weekly, and 37% say they have 'no religion'. But is this all the fault of Vatican II, and its runaway reforms? Or are wider social, cultural, and moral forces primarily to blame? Catholicism is not the only Christian group to have suffered serious declines since the 1960s. If anything Catholics exhibit higher church attendance, and better retention, than most Protestant churches do. If Vatican II is not the cause of Catholicism's crisis, might it instead be the secret to its comparative success? 

Mass Exodus is the first serious historical and sociological study of Catholic lapsation and disaffiliation. Drawing on a wide range of theological, historical, and sociological sources, Stephen Bullivant offers a comparative study of secularization across two famously contrasting religious cultures: Britain and the USA.

UPDATE: Here is the interview I did with Stephen for Catholic World Report.

Once More on Vatican II

When, in the fall of 2012, the commemorative events on the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II began in such profusion, continuing through each of the three successive years marking the half-century of each session, I very quickly grew very weary of all this anniversary-making, not least because it was of course bound up with myth-making of the most dubious sort.

After a bit of a respite, however, I could again contemplate the council without suffering uncontrollably from the desire to rush into the nearest sea and be carried off, never to have to hear of it again. So I was able happily to accept Matthew Levering's commission in the summer of 2015 to write a chapter for the collection he edited with Matthew Lamb, The Reception of Vatican II.  That welcome collection appeared in print earlier this year. My chapter is on Orientalium Ecclesiarum.

I saw Matthew just over a month ago, and he told me sales were a bit slow, so if you have held off on ordering the book, now is as good a time as any to do so! Or if you want to ensure you get a copy in time to leave under the Christmas tree four months from today for your favourite Catholic family member, by all means follow this link to do so!

By the way, I saw Matthew at a splendid conference at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, organized so superbly by Paul Gavrilyuk, author of, inter alia, the very widely praised Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, and co-editor with Sarah Coakley, of The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Paul had invited Sarah to be respondent to my paper, and I am very glad of her gracious and useful comments, which I have taken to heart in continuing to revise the paper for publication, I hope, sometime late next year.

Vatican II and the Christian East

The indefatigable Matthew Levering, a good friend, prolific author, and great editor, e-mails all contributors last night to remind us that, the Kindle version of The Reception of Vatican II having been published in mid-February, this week marks the release of the paperback and hardback versions of that book, to which I contributed a chapter.

Edited by Levering and Matthew Lamb, and published by Oxford University Press, this wide-ranging collection treats each of the documents of the Second Vatican Council to scholarly scrutiny in light of the last half-century's developments within and without the Catholic Church. My own contribution comes in the chapter devoted to the decree on the Catholic Eastern Churches.

About this not-to-be-missed collection, the publisher tells us:

From 1962 to 1965, in perhaps the most important religious event of the twentieth century, the Second Vatican Council met to plot a course for the future of the Roman Catholic Church. After thousands of speeches, resolutions, and votes, the Council issued sixteen official documents on topics ranging from divine revelation to relations with non-Christians. But the meaning of the Second Vatican Council has been fiercely contested since before it was even over, and the years since its completion have seen a battle for the soul of the Church waged through the interpretation of Council documents. The Reception of Vatican II looks at the sixteen conciliar documents through the lens of those battles. Paying close attention to reforms and new developments, the essays in this volume show how the Council has been received and interpreted over the course of the more than fifty years since it concluded.

The contributors to this volume represent various schools of thought but are united by a commitment to restoring the view that Vatican II should be interpreted and implemented in line with Church Tradition. The central problem facing Catholic theology today, these essays argue, is a misreading of the Council that posits a sharp break with previous Church teaching. In order to combat this reductive way of interpreting the Council, these essays provide a thorough, instructive overview of the debates it inspired.

Vatican II and the Christian East

It was a delight and privilege to be asked, about 18 months ago, by my friend Matthew Levering, to write the chapter on Vatican II and the Christian East, commenting on the former's document about the latter, Orientalium Ecclesiarum. My essay, along with an abundance of other riches, is set to appear next year in Matthew Levering and Matthew Lamb, eds., The Reception of Vatican II (Oxford UP, 2017), 480pp. Consider this a foretaste. I shall have more to say once the book is in print.

Oxford gives us the following details about the book:

This volume is a sequel to Matthew Lamb and Matthew Levering's Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition (OUP 2008). That volume led readers on a guided tour of the Second Vatican Council's sixteen conciliar documents, examining each document in light of Church Tradition. But that is only half the story. The meaning of the Second Vatican Council has been fiercely contested since before it was even over, and since its completion has seen a battle for the soul of the Church waged through the interpretation of Council documents. The Reception of Vatican II looks at those same sixteen conciliar documents from the opposite perspective. Paying close attention to reforms and new developments, the essays in this volume show how the Council has been received and interpreted over the course of the more than fifty years since it concluded.

The contributors to this volume represent various schools of thought but are united by a commitment to restoring the view that Vatican II documents should be interpreted and implemented in line with Church Tradition. The central problem facing Catholic theology today, these essays argue, is a misreading of the Council that posits a sharp break with previous Church teaching and calls for a wholesale overhaul of Catholic doctrine. In order to combat this reductive way of interpreting Vatican II, these essays provides a thorough, instructive overview of the debates inspired by the Council and offer a way forward for its ongoing reception of the Council.

The Reception of Vatican II will shed new light on the ongoing legacy of one of the most important religious events of the twentieth century.

We are also given the table of contents:

Part One: The Constitutions
1. Sacrosanctum Concilium (The Sacred Liturgy) - Jeremy Driscoll, O.S.B.
2. Lumen Gentium (The Church) - Guy Mansini, O.S.B.
3. Dei Verbum (Divine Revelation) - William M. Wright IV
4. Gaudium et Spes (The Church in the Modern World) - Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

Part Two: The Decrees
5. Christus Dominus (The Pastoral Office of the Bishops in the Church) - Matthew Levering
6. Presbyterorum Ordinis (The Ministry and Life of Priests) - David Vincent Meconi, S.J.
7. Optatam Totius (The Training of Priests) - Bishop Robert Barron
8. Perfectae Caritatis (The Up-to-Date Renewal of Religious Life) - Sara Butler, M.S.B.T.
9. Apostolicam Actuositatem (The Apostolate of Lay People) - Michele M. Schumacher
10. Ad Gentes (The Church's Missionary Life) - Ralph Martin
11. Unitatis Redintegratio (Ecumenism) - Matthew J. Ramage
12. Orientalium Ecclesiarum (The Eastern Catholic Churches) -Adam A. J. DeVille
13. Inter Mirifica (The Means of Social Communication) - Daniella Zsupan-Jerome

Part Three: The Declarations
14. Dignitatis Humanae (Freedom of Religion) - Nicholas J. Healy, Jr.
15. Gravissimum Educationis (Christian Education) - Paige E. Hochschild
16. Nostra Aetate (The Relations of the Church to Non-Christian Religions) - Gavin D'Costa

Index

Will Cohen on Sister Churches

I was delighted to see the appearance of my friend Will Cohen's new book, The Concept of "Sister Churches" in Catholic-Orthodox Relations since Vatican II. He truly is a gentleman and a scholar, and I'm glad to see this important book in print since it offers vital clarifications to both Catholics and Orthodox alike. I sent him some questions for an interview about this book, and here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your background

WTC: I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis in a secular Jewish family, studied literature and political science at Brown and lived in New York after college, where in my late twenties I underwent a religious conversion.  Some of the works of Kierkegaard played a key role, but things culminated when I was preparing to teach English at a prep school in northern New Jersey and read Genesis, Exodus, and Matthew’s Gospel for the first time.  After that I began attending a Lutheran (ELCA) Church on the Upper West Side and was baptized.

Within a couple of years, I felt the need of a stiffer drink, so to speak, and wound up in an Anglican Catholic context through a former professor of mine whose husband was a bishop in that communion.  He invited me to study for holy orders and would have sent me to an Anglican Catholic seminary, but as it had recently closed and he had a high regard for Orthodoxy and St. Vladimir’s Seminary, I ended up going there.  I lived and worshipped at St. Vladimir’s for three years as an Anglican Catholic, with no end of ecclesiological questions on my mind from the day I set foot on campus to the day I graduated.

That summer I married my wife, Julie, with ordination plans on hold, and two years later, when I started a doctoral program at Catholic U. in Washington, DC, we entered the Orthodox Church.  After finishing at Catholic U., I joined the Theology and Religious Studies department at the University of Scranton where I have been teaching theology since 2009. We live in Scranton’s Hill Section with our three children Ella, Matthew, and Jonathan.  

AD: What led you to write this book?

WTC: From the beginning of my encounter with Orthodoxy, I have wondered about the nature and depth of the divisions between the Orthodox Church and other Christian communions.  First I wondered if Orthodoxy and Anglo-Catholicism were really so different; then I wrote my Master’s thesis on the division between the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox families of churches.  But inevitably I became interested in the relationship between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.  In a doctoral seminar paper, I had a little section on the phrase “sister churches”, and Fr. Joseph Komonchak, who taught the seminar, said almost in passing that I might consider doing a dissertation on that topic.

I did some research and proposed the idea to Fr. (now Msgr.) Paul McPartlan, my natural choice to direct my dissertation because of his extensive work in ecumenism and sympathetic knowledge of Orthodoxy, and he had some initial and quite reasonable reservations – he worried that the topic might be too diffuse.  However, he agreed, something he perhaps came partly to regret given how much time he wound up devoting to the project to keep it humming along!  The dissertation on sister churches, at any rate, turned into the book Aschendorff has just published, thanks to the interest that Barbara Hallensleben, editor of the Studia Oecumenica Friburgensia monograph series, took in it when she heard of its existence from Fr. John Erickson, my former teacher at St. Vladimir’s and a writer on ecclesiological topics from whom I have learned a great deal.

AD: You secured prefaces from two venerable and important figures. Tell us a bit about that process and why their voices matter.

WTC: Dr. Hallensleben surprised me when she told me she was going to ask Cardinal Kurt Koch to write a preface; I was further surprised when she said he had agreed, though I shouldn’t have been, since she commands such respect and is very persuasive!  I did not communicate with Cardinal Koch directly, though I am very grateful to him for the time he gave to reading and commenting on the book given his immense responsibilities. The focus of the book being what it is – Catholic-Orthodox dialogue – it was obviously of great importance to have a Catholic as well as an Orthodox endorsement if possible, and short of the pope I suppose, there could be no one whose voice resounds with more significance in global Catholicism, and in ecumenical circles generally, than Cardinal Koch.

Ironically perhaps, the preface from Metropolitan Kallistos was the one I had a harder time securing. At a meeting of the Orthodox Theological Society in America (OTSA) in summer 2015, where Metropolitan Kallistos had given the keynote address, I got word that there was need for someone to take His Eminence to dinner.  The other officers all had planes to catch, and the responsibility fell to me.  As I sat across from Met. Kallistos during the meal, I gathered my courage and told him I felt I had a certain responsibility given that Providence had brought me to be sitting there with him to ask if he would be willing to read a book I had written on Catholic-Orthodox relations and consider writing a preface for it.  He said I should send him the manuscript, which I did, but from a friend close to him I heard that His Eminence was just too swamped.  He and my friend recommended another Orthodox scholar to approach.  But that scholar couldn't do it either, and for reasons that were so complicated that Met. Kallistos, hearing of it, somehow felt sorry and agreed to write at least a dust-jacket blurb based on selections of the book I had specified he might read.  However, once he started, he didn't stop, he later told me, but read the book straight through and went ahead and wrote a proper preface after all.  I think this was because the topics the book deals with are very close to his heart.  

AD: Ecclesiology and ecumenism were both much controverted at Vatican II, and of course at the recently concluded Gt. and Holy Synod in Crete. I've noted some thoughts on that council elsewhere, but wanted to know what your thoughts were on that council? 

Among the many important emphases of Vatican II, the notion of degrees of unity and communion was certainly one of the most fruitful.  It managed to avoid two ecclesiological dangers -- on the one hand a relativism that makes no distinction between lesser and greater degrees of real unity, and on the other a facile triumphalism that sees unity as simply all or nothing.  According to Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio, the Church of Christ is truly present and operative outside the Catholic Church, yet not fully -- this is the paradox that the Council's phrase "subsists in" sought to express. Exactly what it means for a communion to be truly but not fully church, as Vatican II said of the Orthodox communion, obviously requires a lot of unpacking.  But as a starting point for reflection it is a very promising and dynamic way of construing the Great Schism -- as having terribly damaged, but not altogether destroyed, relations among the local churches of East and West.

A vocal contingent within Orthodoxy has wished to draw from the doctrine of the oneness of the Church the conclusion that there can be no reciprocal or mutual relations of ecclesial significance between the Orthodox Church and any other, including the Catholic Church.  There were analogous Roman Catholic ecclesiological hardliners at Vatican II, of course, whose unsubtle vision lost out to the more profound and paradoxical vision that Vatican II finally promulgated.

At the Orthodox Council in Crete this past June, a battle was waged over the word "church" and whether it can be applied by the Orthodox to non-Orthodox communions.  His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, among others, refused to relinquish this term, and the official text on "Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World" retains it in reference to non-Orthodox.  In fact, Orthodox tradition is replete with instances in which other, separated communions are named "churches" -- the term is applied to non-Orthodox bodies in all kinds of writings by Orthodox theologians and official ecclesiastical texts -- so the hardliners who were wanting to get rid of the term would have been innovating, quite remarkably, had they gotten their way. It's unfortunate that they have managed to convince many of their followers that denying all ecclesial reality to every communion outside of Orthodoxy is somehow the traditional thing. I'm hopeful, though, that the authority of the recent council can serve as a bulwark against their misguided efforts.  

AD: You note at the outset that the term "sister churches" came roaring onto the scene in the early 60s, and enjoyed prominent and frequent usage until the turn of the century when it seems to have, as Waclaw Hryniewicz put it, to have fallen into disgrace. What led to such a fate?

On the Catholic side, there were some pendulum swings going on.  What Catholic advocates of the term "sister churches" were saying in the 60s and 70s was the Catholic Church should be able to affirm the ecclesial reality and value of the Orthodox Church even though the latter exists outside of full communion with the bishop of Rome. This was a needed corrective of an earlier Catholic ecclesiology that had generally confined itself to designating the Orthodox as schismatics, and had closed itself off in some measure from the rich inheritance of the Eastern Christian tradition.  As part of the same trajectory, "sister churches" advocates spoke of the importance of the local church, in order that a more conciliar, less centralized ecclesiological vision might be rediscovered in Catholicism.

Then in the 80s and 90s, there was some push-back from more conservative Catholic ecclesiologists who worried that Catholic advocates of "sister churches" language and conciliarity were losing sight of the significance of Roman primacy and were making the universal church secondary to the local. In pushing back, these conservative Catholic ecclesiologists -- Adriano Garuti was the most influential -- pushed too far, in my view, and seemed merely to revert to the earlier imbalance that "sister churches" advocates had wanted to redress.  Garuti even wished to question in what sense the Orthodox could really be called "church", and hence "sister church".

But he and others like him were correct, I believe, in at least reintroducing the principle of primacy as one of essential ecclesiological importance.  Some of Garuti's less than balanced vision found its way into the "Note on the Expression 'Sister Churches'" issued by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in 2000 -- after which official Catholic usage of the term "sister churches" virtually disappeared -- but in general, documents of the CDF have resolutely affirmed the true ecclesial reality of Orthodoxy. Today, I think it is possible to hold primacy and conciliarity together, the unicity of the church and the reality of "sister churches".  Pope Francis has used the expression "sister churches" again in relation to the Orthodox, and so have other Catholic officials.

In the Orthodox world, the situation has been different.  On an official level, the term has never fallen out of favor.  We should recall that historically and traditionally, Orthodox have always wanted Rome to be and behave as a sister church, rather than only the mater et magistra of all the others, and that Rome's coming to be able to learn and receive from others in reciprocal relationship in the course of the 20th century -- as reflected in such a text as Orientale Lumen by John Paul II, but also in Rome's very willingness to speak of herself as a sister church -- has been reason to rejoice from a traditional Orthodox point of view.  However, reactionary Orthodox hardliners, losing sight of all this, have merely expressed outrage that Orthodox officials would ever use the term "church" to speak of the "papist heretics," etc.  These are the same people who object to the text promulgated at the Council in Crete because it affirms Orthodoxy's ecumenical involvement and the use of the word "church" to speak of non-Orthodox.
 
AD: You argue that the term needs to continue to be used so as to avoid "certain ecclesiological imbalances" towards which both Catholicism and Orthodoxy each incline in different ways. Unpack that phrase a bit for us--which imbalances?

The imbalance to which Catholic ecclesiology is prone is toward what Hermann Pottmeyer has aptly described as a "two-tiered" ecclesiology rather than a "three-tiered".  In a two-tiered ecclesiology, the only churches of which one ever speaks are the universal church and the local church (i.e. the diocese) -- there is nothing of any ecclesial significance in between. Hence there is only the pope and all the bishops as representatives of their local dioceses.

In a three-tiered ecclesiology, though, there are also regional structures of authority, e.g. patriarchates. As Pottmeyer and others, such as Hervé Legrand, have pointed out, the latter ecclesiology is much more in accord with Orthodoxy.  In fact the expression "sister churches" as it has been used over the centuries in the Christian East has almost always referred to relations among or between patriarchal churches. So in one of its most important and characteristic meanings, the phrase "sister churches" might help Catholic ecclesiology retrieve the middle tier, the patriarchal structure.  This of course is something you have eloquently advocated for in your own book, Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy.

But as Pottmeyer and many others have also observed, Orthodoxy, in the second millennium, has also been prone to a two-tiered ecclesiology, only with the missing tier in Orthodoxy's case being the one at the top that could serve as a locus of unity for all the patriarchates. We have seen what a struggle there continues to be in Orthodoxy over this question of a universal primate in the efforts to convene the global council that has just taken place and in the ongoing questions about its legitimacy and authority given the absence at Crete of some of the patriarchal or autocephalous churches.  The most perceptive and historically attuned Orthodox theologians have, I believe, always recognized the legitimate place of primacy -- not just at the local and patriarchal levels but also at the universal level in the life of the Church.

Yet the arch-opponents of the use of "sister church" language by Orthodox to refer to Rome object to its usage in this way because they believe that Rome can never be understood by Orthodox to be church at all until Rome gives up her "pretensions" to universal primacy.  So they see authentic "sister churches" as antithetical to Roman primacy.  This is not, as I've been saying, a monolithic Orthodox view -- Metropolitan John Zizioulas and others argue strongly against it -- but it is a powerful temptation in Orthodox ecclesiology.  At any rate, Orthodox recognition of Rome as a "sister church" is indirectly, I would say, a recognition that Rome's self-understanding of her own primacy is not all wrong and all bad, as Orthodox opponents of "sister churches" language applied to Rome believe that it is.

AD: You also note that in a situation where Orthodoxy and Catholicism are not in full communion the term "sister churches" has a certain "paradoxical character" which cannot be maintained indefinitely. Tell us a bit more about what you meant by that.

Sister churches are meant to be in full sacramental communion. Something I try to get at in my book is that the East-West schism wasn't so much something that happened as something that was and still is in process of happening, so that how we think about it and act in regard to it today contributes to the historically unfolding meaning of what the schism will finally have turned out to be:  perhaps, in the end, a full break between what were once two portions of the one undivided church, but perhaps, instead, a temporary and less than complete break between two portions whose communion and unity, although long obscured, was never totally lost after all.

When I suggest in the book that Orthodox and Catholic churches can't comfortably go on and on calling each other sister churches forever, what I mean is that they can't do that unless there is a dynamic movement toward unity in truth and love, which would culminate in full sacramental unity.  The ongoing schism is what makes "sister churches" between Catholics and Orthodox paradoxical.  But the less than complete nature of that ongoing schism, and in fact the possibility and real hope of its healing, is what makes "sister churches" between them meaningful.  Still, it will retain a certain paradoxical character until the moment when unity is reestablished on a sound, true basis.    

AD: Your fifth chapter quotes Orthodox voices critical of the term "sister churches." Those criticisms seemed to pick up steam this year surrounding the council on Crete. Is there a central concern or principle to these criticisms or are they largely motivated by fear of the other?

I believe that critics of the term have been troubled by legitimate concerns. Metropolitan Kallistos, in the preface to my book, acknowledges his own hesitancy to use "sister churches" to speak of relations between Orthodox and non-Orthodox.  The principle at stake is the unity of the Church.  However, I try to show that divisions between parties or local churches have broken out at any number of times in history and then been overcome, without either side being seen in retrospect as having ceased, during the temporary separation, to be church.  Right now, the Patriarchate of Antioch is not in communion with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem.  Is one or the other of these Patriarchates necessarily no longer church?  Or is it that we anticipate that their being in less than full communion today will prove to have been a temporary matter.  With regard to the Great Schism, a thousand years is a longer stretch of time, no question, but perhaps the principle is still not essentially different:  one can choose whether to see a given separation, of however long, as either an irreversible fait accompli or as still susceptible to healing.

AD: As you know, the Catholic world has just come through an extended period of commemorating the 50th anniversary of Vatican II, which did so much to advance not just the concept of "sister churches" but also to deepen Orthodox-Catholic relations. Over the next half-century, what work remains to be done in your estimation so that these sisters can indeed be one around the Lord's table?

WTC: We started hearing some years ago that we had entered an "ecumenical winter", and it's true that by the 80s and 90s some of the early hopes of the post-conciliar era had faded.  But there are many hopeful signs today with regard to Catholic-Orthodox relations.  One of them that stands out to me is that increasing numbers of serious, ecclesially grounded Orthodox scholars are interested in overcoming a defensive anti-Western mentality and are confident enough in their Orthodox faith that they can affirm, more freely than many Orthodox theologians of a generation or two ago, whatever is true, honorable, right, pure, and lovely in the writings and witness of non-Orthodox Christians, perhaps especially Catholics.

More can be done, I think, to tell the story of how the Catholic Church came in the course of the twentieth century to open itself courageously and humbly to the gifts of the Christian East, and thereby to encourage the Orthodox Church also to adopt an increasingly receptive posture, which is always marked by discernment.  The Orthodox still doubt whether it is possible to learn and receive from the Catholic West without losing themselves and their authentic faith, without falling into a "western captivity," but this is slowly changing.    



AD: Sum up your hopes for the book and tell us who especially would benefit from reading it.

I like how Metropolitan Kallistos puts it in his preface when, after quoting Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras who said that the "miracle of reunion" between Catholics and Orthodox would be a miracle within history, His Eminence suggests that "[o]ur task is to remove the human obstacles that hinder the working of this divine miracle."  I hope that my book will be among those that truly help clear away the kinds of misconceptions that have hindered progress toward the miracle of the schism's genuine healing.

As to the question of readership, ecclesiologists and participants in ecumenical dialogue will probably be most apt to find the book's material directly relevant to their own work.  But with globalism and pluralism being such prevalent features of today's world, virtually every thinking Christian is effectively involved in ecumenical dialogue in some sense, merely by virtue of being frequently in contact with Christians of communions separated from his or her own.  When professing belief in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, it must occur to him or her that there is a question of what this means in view of the divisions among churches.  Anyone who has wondered about such a basic question as this might find the book to be of interest.    

AD: Having finished the book, what projects are you at work on now?

I am plugging away at another monograph, with the working title of Communion in an Age of Controversy.  It explores how the church throughout her history has perennially confronted new questions and undergone a process of discernment to make up her mind about them in light of what she has already had revealed to her.  The basic thesis is that a church that already has all the answers, that can never find herself in a condition of not knowing, is not a church alive in history.  Truth is temporal, takes time.  I look at ancient controversies like Arianism and iconoclasm as examples of this.  But the corollary of the thesis is that a church that only has questions, none of which she can ever definitively answer, not even at a ripe moment and after immense reflection and dialogue, is a merely human church and incapable of that unity in faith that is given by God.  So part of what I'm trying to do in the book is to meditate on the trouble we can get into both when we deny the real questions that arise in the life of communion and when we deny the authentic answers to them that do come -- not easily or quickly, but in time.