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Hello and welcome to the University of Nottingham and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies.
Theology is very much a science of conversations.
It’s conversations between theologians
and conversations between theologians and faithful.
And here today, I have a French theologian, Dr. Henri Gagey
who is the Professor of Fundamental Theology in the Institut Catholique de Paris
and here am I, Tom O’Loughlin, the Professor of Historical Theology, here in Nottingham.
And we have been chatting during Henri’s visit to Nottingham
about the legacy of the second Vatican Council.
And… Second Vatican council - 1965 it finished, I am trying to work out that is nearly 50 years ago.
How do you see its legacy?
Something great, something not totally accomplished
and probably a great opportunity for the church in the 20th century
to face the challenges that occurred to her.
Henri, you said the incompleteness of Vatican II
but many people today see Vatican II as an interruption in a continuum.
Can you tease out a little bit more of what you mean by the incompleteness of Vatican II?
First of all, every important concept needs time to be, say, accomplished in the church.
It is a question of decades or perhaps of centuries.
So, it is totally normal that it took time for the church to appropriate what happened in Vatican I.
Second, Vatican II was a break with what was called neo-scholastic theology.
That is probably the most important event in Vatican II.
This break with the neo-scholastic theology
who had been created during the 19th century, in order to face the challenge of modernity.
But the way neo-scholastic faced the challenge of modernity was quite defensive and narrow-minded.
It was really a battle-position, with no desire to really understand
what has happened outside the church in the culture
since the birth of democracy, the birth of natural sciences and so on.
So the church was on its defensive
and so the concept of Vatican II made a break with this position
and tried to retrieve a more open-minded position.
So in a way, you see Vatican II as going back to a more authentic past?
Yeah, that is what I mean, yeah.
I think the crisis of facing modernity in the church become more ‘tighter’?
You can say that?
And so we went back to a more authentic, a more alive, a more relaxed Catholicism, yes that is true.
That is interesting because, for many people
the most obvious aspect of Vatican II was of course the changes in the liturgy
and many did not even realise there was a new liturgy
they just thought it was a new language.
They thought we had abandoned Latin in favour of living languages.
But I’ve noticed… I’ve been talking in the last few years to people
young people who don’t remember the liturgy in Latin.
I, as a young boy was there at the very last years of the Latin liturgy.
That they imagined, number one, that it was magnificent.
Number two, they imagined that it was always the same and that was the way it had been done for centuries.
And of course the fact is that for the first 1000 years all over Western Europe
most people, even though the words were Latin, they heard it in the local dialect
which it was going to become French in France, it was going to become Spanish in Spain
it was going to become Catalan in Catalonia.
So it’s interesting that the neo-scholastics thought of highly uniform
unchanging church and of course when you look at the history the liturgy was constantly changing
every couple of years new rules were coming out, new rubrics, they just were not observed by people.
So in a way, the artificiality of the neo-scholastic period can be seen in the myth
that the liturgy was always and everywhere the same.
Absolutely.
And of course the other interesting thing about that
if you look even back to the time before the council of Trent
there were umpteen liturgies around the church and Trent merely said
‘you have to show a 200 year length of usage’
so you had the right in Milan, the right in Spain
and of course the rights of the different religious orders.
So it is interesting that the neo-scholastics loved this idea of utter unity.
Absolutely and, you know, one of the Fathers of Vatican II to consider in as theologian
as a theologian was Henri du Lubac and another one was Eve Congar, both were French.
Both by the way, I think they both taught in your institute, didn’t they?
Not really for Henri du Lubac, he taught in Leon.
But Eve Congar did? Yeah. Ok so, carry on.
And so both described Vatican II as the possibility opened by the church
and to the church to recover its first millennium.
What is really impressive, if you consider theology and liturgy
it is the fact that the second millennium developed almost
as if it ignored the first millennium years of the church
and people like Henri du Lubac or Eve Congar and others
took a long time to read the tradition of the church,
during the first millennium, with its own probabilism
and so we discovered that the Catholic, it is internal to the Catholic Church to be probabilistic.
You know, we almost forget that there are people speaking Syriac, Arab, Greek, Russian
and, you know, we have many languages within the church.
And we had them for long
not only since the last reform and it is this kind of internal pluralism of the church
that belongs to its own traditions that Vatican II allowed us to recover.
There is an interesting comment by an American scholar
who was asked to write an encyclopaedia article on Catholicism
and he began it with a phrase that has stuck in my memory.
He said
‘Catholicism must be the opposite of a sect’.
Yeah.
And it has often struck me that the sect defines itself by
who cannot join, whereas Catholicism in a sense, has to be all-embracing.
Its history is that it has been engaging with cultures
engaged with the Greek culture, engaged with Roman culture, engaged with Ethiopian, Coptic
all these cultures, and today, it has to engage in the culture of today, with that openness
that somehow the spirit is already at work there.
We never enter a void; we never enter a tabula rasa.
Whenever we engage with a culture, we engage with something that the spirit is already animating.
Absolutely, but at the present time, there is something new
we are not only engaging with foreign cultures, in order to discover them finally, we are engaging with a culture
which is renewing itself from itself.
We are attending now a huge crisis and change within the Western Culture as it becomes a worldwide culture.
And so it is a mutation and we have to attend this mutation and to be part of it
which is something very new
because usually the great cultural transformation came from abroad
and now it is from the inside that our culture is experiencing this mutation.
Can I ask you a question?
Vatican II produced a very large body of documents.
Yeah
I remember once counting up that the… that if you put all the other councils together
that it would probably be less words than were produced at Vatican II.
Yeah
A big book, I have my favourite section in Vatican II and I’ll tell you mine, what’s yours?
Personally, I tend to refuse to make a choice!
Ok. I mean the intention within the documentations that not all of them are not totally, totally coherent, ok?
We have to accept to work in this field of tensions.
Ok, well my favourite is the opening chapters of Sacrosanctum Concilium.
Yeah.
Because it produces a vision of liturgy as a community engaged in encounter.
So anyway I would have liked to have been able to tease you into picking one, but ok you have got mine.
[Laughter]
Henri, it’s been - your presence here for this short period,
you have been meeting all the members of the department.
I think we have all been benefiting from the different perspective you bring from Paris
and it’s been lovely to have you here in conversation.
And I hope that we will welcome you in Paris one day.
Oh I am always welcome… anxious for invitations to Paris.
I hope that you have enjoyed this short conversation between myself and Henri.
Theology is dialogue, it develops by dialogue
it develops by my sharing my half insights and hoping to pick up from the insights of others.
And I hope that you have found this an interesting insight into the situation in the Catholic Church
as it looks back on the legacy of the second Vatican Council.
Good bye from the University of Nottingham, and thank you, Henri.
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