Church Reform from Vatican II to Pope Francis

The theological and ecclesial work of countless theologian provided our generation with the most engaging examples of the contribution of systematic reflection to the attempt to reform the Catholic Church, its thinking and institutions. This is an ongoing attempt that finds itself in a situation that is, in many respects, quite different from the twentieth-century paradigms of “reform” in which Catholicism still operates both at the intellectual and institutional level.

Catholicism embodies a strange paradox. Many people still see the Catholic Church as the symbol of immutability, the inability to change and attachment to the status quo. But at the same time, very few Catholics—at least those with a voice in the public square—seem to have been happy with the status quo. This paradox is particularly visible today, as we do not have the two usual, competing narratives on the current state of Catholicism; that is, a conservative narrative that supports the institutional status quo versus a change-and-reform narrative. Instead, in the context of the epoch-making sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church we see both sides attacking the institutional status quo identified with the clerical system, from which Pope Francis distanced himself at the beginning of his pontificate.Footnote 1

On one side, the liberal-progressive, Vatican II narrative calls for the empowerment of the laity and women, decentralization, collegiality and synodality, dialogue and ecumenism, and inclusiveness. On the other side, the counter-reform or the “reform of the reform” narrative points to the dramatic shortage of priests and of vocations in religious orders, to loss of “identity” in Catholic schools, the rise of the “nones” and so forth—all supposedly the fault of a so-called “Catholic lite” that was allegedly the result of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar period. The tensions that marked the preparation and the celebration of the Bishops’ Synod for the Amazon region of October 2019, but also the reception of pope Francis’ post-synodal exhortation Querida Amazonia (published on February 12, 2020), are one more evidence of this particular Catholic moment.

One reason for this situation is the widening gap between the theology of reform elaborated at the time of Vatican II and certain characteristics of the post-conciliar Church—for the post-conciliar period of the twenty-first century. There is no question that the notion of “Church reform” is one of the key elements to understanding the pontificate of Pope Francis. Antonio Spadaro SJ, and Carlos Maria Galli have edited a large volume of essays that deal with this theme and provide a roadmap for reforms that see in the Franciscan era a precious window of opportunity.Footnote 2 But at the same time the idea of “reform” is also one of the theological ideas that has gone through significant transformations since Vatican II.

The most important theological contribution on Church reform in our times came in the period immediately before and after the council from the French Dominican Yves Congar (1905–1995), in his most important book, True and False Reform in the Church. Originally published in 1950, it was one of his writings that attracted the attention of the Holy Office and cost Congar, beginning in 1952, years of investigations, silence, and exile.Footnote 3 A newer edition from 1968 was translated into English only a few years ago.Footnote 4

Congar’s Four Conditions for Reform

Congar specified four conditions for reforming the Church “without provoking a schism”. The first condition is the primacy of charity and the pastoral dimension of the Church. He says that the pastoral ministry is a great school of truth and that prophetic reform takes place in the Church that already exists. It is not about creating another Church, but one that is different: “It should not result in an ecclesial novelty, but rather should renew the church as an existing reality. The church pre-exists the reform effort, and therefore it is not the object of discovery, retrieval, or creation”.Footnote 5

The second condition is remaining in communion with the “all of it” of the Church, the “total truth” of the Church. This is understood through a dialectic of center-peripheries, institution and life of the Church. One can break ranks on some issues without necessarily breaking away from the Church. The fact that the Church has a center is the guarantee of this freedom: “Only through communion with the whole body, which itself is subject to the guidance of the magisterium, can someone grasp a truth in its totality”.Footnote 6

The third condition is the need to be patient. Church reform does not work as an “all or nothing”. The Church does not like the fait accompli, except when it is clearly about remaining faithful to a principle: “The innovator, whose reform turns into a schism, lacks patience. He does not respect the slowness either of God or of the church, or the delays that come into everyone’s life”.Footnote 7

And the fourth condition is that true renewal and reform must be a return to the principle of the tradition. In this sense, Congar says, the liturgical reform has been important for the totality of the Catholic Church and not just its liturgy: “to tell the truth, all big problems facing contemporary Catholicism are such that solving them with quick and mechanical adaptations would lead to catastrophe. Such problems require a lifelong effort and the collaboration of all the people for a long time”.Footnote 8

Confines of Congar’s Theology of Reform in the Church of Today

These four conditions set a much higher bar for today’s Church than the one that existed in 1950 or in 1968. For example, a theological critique of Pope Francis’ emphasis on mercy does not accept “pastorality” as a criterion for reforming ecclesial praxis (especially on the issues surrounding divorced and remarried Catholics). Remaining within the “communion of the Church” today is much more complicated given that it is a more complex, fragmented and diverse communion geographically and culturally.

The call to be patient is also much harder to accept at a time when a large number of believers have a strong impression that many promises made by Vatican II have never been implemented these last fifty years. As for “tradition”, today it is often like a no man’s land between the rock of traditionalism and the hard place of a largely de-traditionalized intellectual and social environment.

But there are three other features of the present ecclesial landscape that reframe Congar’s theology of reform.

The first is related to the new, post-modern proclivity to imagine Church reform (or counter-reform) in terms of sub-churches with idiosyncratic “obediences” (to this or that pope, to this or that Church leader) guided by a mentality that is shaped by the culture of branding. This is the capitulation of both progressives and traditionalists to the “identities”, which entails limits to the ability to imagine Church reform theologically and ecclesially. The sense of fundamental unity in a Church that is able to embrace all identities (ideological, ethnic-racial, gender) is not the same as the Church of Congar’s time. This is also related to the virtualization of ecclesial identities, where a given Catholic identity is shaped less by what the People of God experience in the Church and more by what is heard or seen distant from the lived experience with other Catholics.

The second feature is the disconnect between the institutions to be reformed and academic theology and its ability to propose Church reform. Congar advised all priest-theologians to remain in pastoral ministry. But today academic theology is much more in the hands of lay people, for whom it is difficult to be an integral part of the pastoral ministry in their local Churches or communities. This is one of the factors in the complicated relationship between Pope Francis’ Congarian theology of reform and academic theologians, as he expressed in his speech to the 2015 international theological congress held at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina:

Not infrequently a kind of opposition is constructed between theology and pastoral care, as though they were two opposing, separate realities, which have nothing to do with one another […]. We create a false opposition between theology and pastoral care; between the believer’s reflection and the believer’s life; life, then, has no space for reflection and reflection finds no space in life. The great Fathers of the Church, Irenaeus, Augustine, Basil, Ambrose, to name a few, were great theologians because they were great pastors.Footnote 9

Congar’s theology of reform finds an obstacle today in some aspects of the professionalization of academic theology and in the re-clericalization of the institutional Church. In some contexts where the Catholic Church is politically and theologically polarized, some priests and bishops are uncomfortable with having lay people who are academic theologians visibly involved in the pastoral ministry of parishes and dioceses. Even Catholic school administrators, and probably some of the colleagues in other departments, are also nervous, but for different reasons. Most obvious is the demands parishes would make on these lay theologians and the pressure such involvement would put on their families. Thus the democratization of professional theology in terms of more laity and fewer clerics has deep implications on the idea and praxis of Church reform.

The third feature is probably the most difficult to deal with. At the beginning of True and False Reform, Congar showed confidence that the Catholic Church was able to begin reforming itself because the old problem of corruption and abuses had been solved. Congar wrote that during the crisis triggered by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century the Church was lacking “a purity of spirit, resources and pastors” – assets that, in fact, the Church restored at the Second Vatican Council. Congar showed a fundamental optimism about Church reform in the twentieth century, compared to the reform movements of the twelfth (St. Francis and St. Dominic) and sixteenth centuries (Erasmus, Cardinal Ximenes): “Some reforms were accomplished or at least advocated in the name of a return to sources higher than church canons, canons whose holiness was not in question but that needed to be transcended by the stimulus of reform. […] This is also the case without any doubt with respect to the current spirit of reform. It is not a question of reforming abuses – there are hardly any to reform. It is rather a question of renewing structures”.Footnote 10 The stories of clerical sex abuse and financial misconduct in our “transparency society”Footnote 11 paint a different picture of the institutional church than the one from Congar’s time and have an impact on a Catholic theology of reform.

Congar’s Theology of Reform and the Sexual Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church

The sexual abuse crisis has put into serious question the paradigms of Church reform of the twentieth century and of the ecclesiology of Vatican II: this also affects our reading of Congar today.

One key paradigm that was typical of the ecclesiology in the period leading up to Vatican II, of Vatican II itself, and of the first post-conciliar period was that Church reform now is about structure, not corruption. As Yves Congar put it in his True and False Reform, reform is needed for two areas: “the area of sins” (the Church as such does not sin; the individual members do) and “the area of social-historical mistakes” (received ideas and attitudes; need of purification from Christendom).Footnote 12 If the need for structural renewal is still there, certainly the sexual abuse crisis cast a different light on Congar’s assumption (and not only Congar’s) that the problem of corruption in the Church had been solved during the Counter-Reformation period. In light of the systemic pattern of cover-up of sexual abuses committed by clergy, no less in need of re-examination is the ecclesiological notion that the Church as such does not sin, only the individual members do.

A second paradigm of Church reform now in crisis is the episcopalist paradigm. There is not only an issue of the institutional culture of Church structures dealing with abuse crisis (e.g. the Roman Curia and the papacy, the national bishops’ conferences, the religious orders),Footnote 13 but also and more fundamentally a question about the theology of the episcopate and the role of the episcopate in the government of the Church. The abuse crisis pushes the Church to take a new look at great ecclesiological achievements of Vatican II such as the collegiality and sacramentality of the episcopacy. Congar’s major contribution to the preparation of the ecclesiological debate on episcopacy at Vatican II must be re-read in the present context of the failure of episcopal leadership in dealing with the ecclesial crisis.Footnote 14

Another paradigm of Church reform that is in crisis is reform as a process in communion and in trust. The abuse crisis is also an ecclesiological crisis that goes beyond the collapse of authority embodied by certain Church leaders: it signals a collapse of the authority of the magisterium in a way that is comparable to the effects of the encyclical Humanae Vitae in terms of tension between the moral agency of the conscience of the individual and the necessary ecclesial and ecclesiastical dimensions of Christian life. Congar edited the second version of True and False Reform in the early post-Vatican II years, taking into account in the new edition the students’ movements in the spring of 1968, but before the effects of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (July 1968) for the relations between Church and theology.

Finally, the paradigm of reform regarding more lay involvement is also in crisis. It is impossible to rethink church governance and clericalism today without considering a certain crisis of the paradigm of the “theology of the laity” that spans from the 1950s to the post-Vatican II period until a few years ago. Congar’s theology of the laity in his 1953 Jalons already looked old-aged at Vatican II.Footnote 15

Conclusions

Congar’s theology of reform represents a fundamental step on the Catholic Church’s path towards a new relationship with history and modernity. There is no possible path forward that does not begin with that step, denies that moment of development, or dreams to go back to a pre-Vatican II Church. On other hand, in order to be faithful to Vatican II, at almost sixty years from the beginning of the council, theology must acknowledge the inevitable limits and the unintended consequences of an intellectual tradition shaped by the first half of the twentieth century in a Europe-dominated Catholic Church. The sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church represents the loudest call to Church reform in our times, and also a call to re-examine the contribution of Vatican II and its theological fathers, of whom the most important of all was probably Yves Congar.