This is third of three essays responsive to the advocacy, by James Keane (America, 8/26/25), for Bernard Lonergan as next doctor of the Church.
Lonergan was one of a remarkable generation of brilliant Jesuit thinkers, all born around the turn of the century 1900, who peaked in mid-century, in the buildup to and during the Council. They all passed away in the following decades. Their lifetimes all coincided with the 20th century. All were immensely influential on the Church of our time. For our purposes, we will consider eight figures and distinguish two groups: progressive and conservative. (I do not shy away from those terms! I do not transcend them!) The progressives: Lonergan, Rahner, Courtney-Murray, Chardin. The conservatives: DeLubac, Danielou, Balthasar, Dulles. The last four were collaborators in the John Paul program, detailed in the previous essay. The first four offer an alternative Catholicism. Six of the eight were periti (theological counselors) at the Council; Chardin had passed away in 1955 and Balthasar was not in the good graces of the hierarchy at the time, but wielded immense influence then and later.
The progressive looks to the future, to overcome a past viewed negatively. The conservative looks trustfully to the past...Tradition and Revelation...for inspiration moving creatively into the future in an organic communion with what is received.
Vatican II was at once a return to our sources and an engagement with the contemporary world. Previous to the Council, all eight Jesuits were united in advocating for change in light of a new look at the past. Immediately after its conclusion in 1965, two contrasting streams emerged: the progressive looking for further change in accommodation to a now-rapidly changing world; the conservatives resistant to changes hostile to received Catholicism. The first group was largely guided and inspired by our first four; the second group by our second four.
Similarities
A doctor of the Church must first be a canonized saint. Our eight candidates are all (to my knowledge) roughly equal here. I am not aware that any are in the canonization process. No evidence of the miraculous or heroic. Each was a world-class, history-changing thinker. Each spent his years in the library and classroom; reading, lecturing, writing. This is a largely humdrum, arduous life, if well done. To my knowledge, all were men of fine character, men of prayer, men of the Church. Several were silenced in the 1950s and obeyed docilely. There is no scandal or gossip associated with them. They seemed to have lived lives of quiet, ordinary holiness.
Aside: The list of Jesuit saints of the 20th century would be extensive, mostly martyrs, like BlessedMiguel Pro, in Mexico, the Spanish Civil War, Nazi concentration camps, the Gulag (Fr. Walter Ciszek). Two (to my knowledge) are formally canonized: St. Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga (1901-52), Chilean who worked with poor and St. Modeste Andlauer (1886-1910), French missionary died at age of 24.
Aside: my Avery Dulles story. 1970, I am in front of him on the cafeteria line of the Interchurch Center, near Union Seminary. I had a delicious egg/tuna salad sandwich. We sat together. I think he invited me. I was very excited. I was a student in his class in 1969 as he accepted me (at my request) to audit his class in Fundamental Theology as a non-matriculated, non-Jesuit (against the rules at the time.) That morning I was reading the political theology of Moltmann/Metz, fashionable at the time, a radical, baptized version of Marx which declared "if your are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem." This particularly for theologians in the classroom. I found it convincing, but I was troubled. Well aware of his pedigree, son of John Foster Dulles, I knew that WASP-establishment-Presbyterian-Republican blood still flowed in his veins. In presenting the thesis, I was in one breath insulting his family and chosen profession. I waited eagerly for his response. What I got I did not expect. He sat calmly, quietly eating his sandwich. He hunched his shoulder self-effacingly and said: "All I can say is that I do what I can do; I do what I like to do; and that is study, teach, write. I would not be any good at activism or something like that." We both continued to eat. Humility, gentility, serenity, real class! My impression is that this is largely typical of all eight Jesuits.
As noted, prior to the Council all eight (with Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla) were progressive Catholic thinkers, advocating for the changes that were to come. All shared a tremendous command of the Tradition, Thomas, the fathers/doctors, the magisterium and the theological literature. In different areas, each was engaging contemporary thought.
1965
This year defines our Church history like similar dates: 1492, 1776, 1865, 1945, 1989. An era, a new epoch began.
The 400 year Catholic/Protestant War ended conclusively.
The defensive, warlike stance of the Church to modernity was replaced by one of dialogue.
The Counter Reformation, Tridentine Catholic Church was reconfigured as the Vatican II Church.
Patient, arduous work of progressive Catholic theologians, including periods of obediently being silenced, received a conclusive expression with virtual unanimity of the world's bishops.
The Church looked back to reconnect with roots even as it engaged positively with contemporary culture, eager to receive what is best, with enthusiasm and confidence.
We could imagine these eight theological geniuses (although Teilhard had passed) gathered in 1965 over a good meal, with shared euphoria and excitement, lively discussion including heated but respectful disagreements. They would all strongly endorse the Council just completed. They had been for decades of one heart-and-mind, more or less, in their urgency for renewal through the dual-glace, backwards to retrieve riches forgotten, and to the present with hopes for the future. Disagreements would have been fairly minor. At that point in time one would not have distinguished a progressive from a conservative group. The Cultural Revolution was not yet evident; it was at that moment exploding across the West.
This period of euphoria, optimism, relative tranquility and unity would last...three years!
1968
Furiously, immediately after 1965, like a forest fire in a dry California August or a Tsunami out of the deep Pacific, the Cultural Revolution convulsed society. At the heart of this was contraception, the deliberate and effective technological sterilization of sex, the disconnect of the conjugal act from procreation, spousal union and family.
In late July 1968, Pope Paul VI, against the consensus of his advisory groups but encouraged by the young Polish Cardinal, proclaimed Humanae Vitae: intrinsically, the act of intercourse is an openness to life, it cannot be intentionally, technically frustrated from its purpose.
Cultural Progressivism carried with it far more than the sterilization of sexuality: suspicion of Church tradition and authority, deconstruction of gender, abortion rights, trust in a technological/scientific future, and the autonomy of the Sovereign Self.
War erupted: one side with, the other against Paul VI. The one side denied that contraception is intrinsically evil. It accommodated modernity, negotiating a Catholicism compatible with the new order. The other side upheld the moral prohibition. It defended tradition against a modernity not turned hostile to the Catholic ethos. Virtual if not formal schism. Civil War!
Our four conservative Jesuits stood with John Paul and Benedict against modernity. Our other four are more nuanced. Rahner and Lonergan both were critical of the encyclical. Murray and Chardin had already passed and so never addressed it. Lonergan and Rahner both passed in 1984. We cannot criticize them of being proponents of Cultural Liberalism within the Church. The problem is: principles of their theology were developed by their disciples to welcome, in large part, the new order.
Four Conservatives
Three of the four conservatives were founding members of the Communio journal which interpreted the Council, along with John Paul, in continuity with tradition and in dialogue with culture. All four were declared cardinals of the Church, although Balthasar died two days before his consecration. Each is distinctive.
DeLubac wrote a book fiercely defending the theology of his friend, fellow-Frenchman Chardin. This reflects a broad, open, appreciative mind on the part of the impeccably orthodox, expansive, generous scholar.
Danielou infamously died leaving the home of a prostitute. The rumor lingered, apparently with some complicity by ranking Jesuits hostile to his theology, that he was a customer. Evidence showed that he was charitably bringing her bail money for her husband. This was apparently consistent with his life style: direct assistance to the poor. An unusual form of persecution: attack upon reputation, after death, for doing a work of mercy.
Balthasar painfully left the Jesuits in 1950 to found a new community, a Secular Institute for lay people consecrated to service in the world, with Adrienne von Speyr. For some years he was excardinated, a priest without a diocese. He remained a priest and disciple of St. Ignatius. Adrienne herself reported experiences of apparitions from St. Ignatius (St. Joseph also) in her Protestant childhood.
Dulles was not a Communio theologian but has a singular place in the order and the Church. Quintessentially Jesuit, he is an individual, in the best sense. Tall, lanky, awkward, he looked liked Abe Lincoln and my uncles. He is Gary Cooper in High Noon, Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, John Wayne in most of his movies. Dulles stood alone, in the tumultuous post 1965 Church, with incomparable clarity of thought, moral integrity, dignity, courage, generosity of heart, and fidelity to the Church. He is the consummate ecumenist: receptive of what is best in all traditions and schools of thought. When he taught me in 1969, he was appreciative of Rahner; he dialogued with all mainstream thinkers; he maintained an intellectual independence, disciple of none but Christ and his Church. Later, he led the Evangelical/Catholic dialogue of Richard Neuhaus and First Things. He stood alone against the entire theological guild in defending the masculine priesthood. He was comparable in orthodoxy to the Communio School, but did not ascribe to their "spousal mysticism." In his Models of the Church, he failed to include mother and bride. But he strongly supported the papacy of John Paul. He stood virtually alone against the injustice to priests of the Dallas Charter. In large part his exceptional mission and theological style are carried on by Monsignor Tom Guarino of Seton Hall. We might apply to him the comment about Joseph Ratzinger by his brother George: "He does not look for a fight. But he does not walk away from one."
Four Progressives
Rahner and Lonergan, are considered "transcendental Thomists" in their effort to reconcile Kant with Thomas. This located them, with Kant, in subjectivism, as he himself built upon the systematic suspicion of Descartes. The legacy of Catholicism, which they knew so well, is reconfigured around the now-sovereign, very-modern Self.... the questioning, desiring, deciding, active Self. Faith becomes an exercise of the human spirit, first and foremost, rather than reception of a revelation from heaven. They remain in a form of the "modernism" so vigorously condemned by the Vatican throughout the entire century until then.
Chardin weds Catholicism to a meta-theory of evolution, Darwinian and possibly Hegelian, of inevitable progress. This lays the basis for a pure progressivism: belief in the "arc of history;" a Whig paradigm of interpretation; an assumption that change is improvement over a past viewed as impoverished. Tradition is no longer definitional, but itself subject to judgement by advances, especially in science and technology. His The Divine Milieu was, in my view, a masterpiece in spirituality. But his interest in eugenics was deeply troubling.
Courtney-Murray reigned as philosophical Prince of imperial American Catholicism in the Camelot of 1945-65. His face graced the cover of Time which honored him and Protestant counterpart Reinhold Niebuhr as intellectual titans of the ecumenical post-war Christian revival. In Rome he was silenced for a decade but then called to the Council to frame the decree on religious freedom. This document significantly shifted Catholic teaching on pluralism, religious freedom, and relationship of Church to State. It ranks as one of few real shifts (not reversals) in Catholic teaching. He advised JFK prior to his important speech to Protestants in Houston in 1960. Kennedy famously vowed that his Catholic faith would not interfere with his duties as President. That may have helped him win the election. But looking back now, after 65 years of Catholic Democrats, privately opposed but publicly supportive of legal abortion, it has a different look. He framed the thinking by which Catholic politicians opposed to contraception could support its legalization. That today is common sense, of course. He did not address the question of legal abortion. We will never know how he or JFK, whom he mentored, would have responded later to this issue. He passed just before Humanae Vitae, before Roe, as the sexual revolution was exploding. I personally suspect his strong Catholic roots would incline him to defend sacred, powerless human life. The problem is that his reasoning about private/public morality was used in the famous1964 Hyannis Port meeting of Jesuit moralists with the Kennedy family and other liberal Democrats to prepare a rationale to support the emergent abortion revolution with some pretense of Catholic reasoning. We can at least say that his theology did not prepare for the imminent assault from hell upon the unborn and Catholic views. His theology celebrated the love affair between the Catholic Church and American liberalism that reached a point of ecstasy in 1965, but dissolved in a vicious divorce precipitously, right at the time of his death. The Left fell in bed with Sexual Liberalism. The Right eventually found a partner in economic neo-liberalism, individualism, libertarianism even as it upheld values around life and family. With the decline of liberalism of left and right, Catholic thinking takes different "post-liberal" directions: integralism, the new "Catholic Right" of Compact, the highbrow metaphysics of "New Polity," the Catholic Worker, and other. Murray remains an admirable, world-changing thinker. But subsequent history clouds the radiance. The cloud over him is the work of those who followed him. If not explicitly in his own work, those who came later abandoned the public square to a camouflaged, militant atheism.
What Happened to These Two Schools of Thought? Concilium and Communio.
What matters here is not the precise thought of these thinkers, but the influence it had after the Council and their passing. Dulles, younger and later, remained active for several decades. For the others, their work led up to and shaped the Council and its immediate reception. In 1965, Balthasar and DeLubac joined with Rahner and others (Kung, Schillebeeckx, Congar) in founding Concilium to continue the reform. Almost immediately, Balthasar/DeLubac left the journal to found with Ratzinger in 1972 Communio, the conservative alternative.
And so, immediately with the close of the Council, this alliance for change broke into two competing schools. "Concilium," Latin for council suggests the continuance of a gathering to further reform. It seems to be echoed in Pope Francis use of "synod" and "synodality" as a listening and decision-making process in a democratic mode. "Communio," Latin for "communion" suggests, by contrast, a deeper union in the sacred, as in the Eucharist, in the very inner life of the Trinity, shared with us from heaven by the visitation of Christ, continued in sacrament and tradition. Two different directions: to simplify, one more horizontal, the other vertical.
A decade later, the Communio school triumphed with the pontificate of John Paul and then Benedict. The work of our four Communio Jesuits converged with other streams to create the organically-conservative-but-creative gestalt of Catholicism of the dual-pontificate. As noted earlier, these streams included: personalist Thomism, devotions to Mary and the Divine Mercy, corporal works of mercy (Mother Theresa), Theology of the Body, the lay renewal movements of the Holy Spirit, alliance with Evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity against the modernism of sexual liberation and destruction of powerless human life.
The competing ecclesiology, Concilium, drawing from our four liberal Jesuits, found institutional expression in Catholic universities (particularly Jesuit ones) as well as progressive journals including Commonweal, America, and National Catholic Reporter.
We wonder: what happened to the Jesuit order? Presented with two competing theological schools, of equivalent gravitas, erudition and sophistication, why did it systemically prefer the progressive to the conservative, in violation (at least in spirit) of the vow of loyalty to the Pope. Three foundations of the order inclined it to embrace cultural progressivism, even as it had been the Church's premier combatant over four centuries against Protestantism and in heroic mission work including armies of martyrs.
First, in contrast to most Catholic consecrated life (monks, friars, cloistered, etc.) Jesuit spirituality is highly individualistic. It centers not in communal liturgy, but in the Spiritual Exercises. This is a solitary encounter of the isolated Jesuit with Christ. It is low on community. Imagine St. Francis Xavier, travelling across Asia; or Miguel Pro being executed; or the fingerless St.Issac Jogues returning to frigid Canada. In this the Jesuit is not alone: diocesan priests and Maryknollers share the same model: they surrender family but do not receive a surrogate community of intimacy. Their pathway is one of "spiritual bachelorhood." They compensate with wholesome clerical friendships, deepened prayer life, and good relationships with the laity including their own families. But a solitariness hangs over their lives. This individualism made them vulnerable to the Cult of the Sovereign Self which is at the heart of modernity and progressivism.
Secondly, a defining principle from Ignatius was "to find God in all things." This is, of course, sound. But it assumes already a deep, clear communion with Christ. If that solid prayer life is weak or compromised, the temptation will be to surrender to temptations of the world.
Thirdly, Jesuits are highly educated and erudite. Therefore, at the time of the Council, the Church was welcoming the broader culture, credulously, just as that world was turning secular, especially at the highest levels of academia. A friend who came up in the Jesuit system at that time noted that he was privileged to go to Germany for theological studies (circa 1960) because the brightest were now choosing the American Ivy schools while previously the German schools enjoyed higher prestige. So young Jesuit scholars were drinking voraciously from the springs of progressive thought which were at that moment taking over American higher education.
A perfect storm: elite Jesuit scholars, surging with the naive optimism of the Council, surrendered themselves, with their predisposition to individualism and desire to find "God in all things," to an intellectual world going deeply Godless. They went on to emulate what they learned at Princeton/Duke/Yale at Georgetown, Boston College and America.
Contrast: Concilium and Communio
Consider fundamentals of the John Paul/Benedict Catholic gestalt with those that inform Jesuit higher education today.
1. Personal Intimacy with the Person-Event of Jesus Christ is replaced by generic spiritual sensibility, a vague theism-or-pantheism, a moralism of kindness and social justice.
2. Catholic devotional life (Eucharistic Adoration, rosary, Divine Mercy, stations, sacramentals, pilgrimages) is replaced by dialogue with world religions a la Joseph Campbell.
3. Traditions of prayer (saints, mysticism, fasting) are replaced by new age syncretism and the therapeutic.
4. Conjugal mysticism with filiality, paternity, maternity and spousality as iconic of the Divine is replaced by a naked, androgynous individualism; a configuration of patriarchy as destructive; a feminism that prefers abortion rights and bourgeois affluence/achievement to motherhood.
5. Spousal reality of sex/romance as unitive/procreative is replaced by contraceptive, sterile, purposeless sex and an idolization of romance.
6. Intimacy with the poor, concretely (Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day), in the economy of Mercy is replaced by ideological critiques of systemic justice in racism, heteronormativity, transphobia, imperialism, capitalism: "limousine liberalism" safely detached from poverty in affluent areas/schools but self-righteous in advocacy of identity politics.
7. Robust lay leadership of the renewal movements is replaced by status envy of the laity and women for clerical powers and privilege.
8. Alliance with Evangelical/Pentecostals is replaced by collaboration with secular liberation movements of the Left (LGBTQ coalition, etc.)
The above is simplified and exaggerated for clarity. Few Jesuits, even at the higher tiers, and certainly none of our four scholars would accept them so baldly. But the contours of the two schools are sharply contrasting in the ways mentioned.
Going Forward with Pope Leo
Pope Francis was not a theologian. He was eager to show the Mercy of Christ to those alienated from the Church. He demonstrably did not continue the theological legacy of John Paul. He destabilized the institution, inflamed confusion, ambiguity and polarization. He was a thorn for us conservatives. His pastoral practice pleased progressives but at the end of the day he was a theological disappointment as he made no clear changes to theology and practice.
Pope Leo is not a theologian; not a cultural warrior. He is a practical man; a man of deeds, not theories. He is an institutionalist, a canon lawyer, a seasoned manager. He will stabilize things. He is a reconciler, a man of peace, eager to reach out in charity to all. He is a missionary, with a heart for those who suffer.
The outlines of his papacy can be perceived more clearly after recent events. He allowed the LGBTQ event for the Jubilee in the Vatican; and then the Latin mass with Cardinal Burke. He will invoke a cease fire in the culture war. He lacks the conviction and determination to resolve it either way. He will leave the theological legacy intact. He will emulate Francis in gestures of kindness. He will foster a "synodality" of listening and empathy that does not threaten the episcopal structure of the Church.
He will in many ways continue the basic trajectory of the Church since the Council: clarity and stability in doctrine; considerable tolerance and flexibility in practice. The emphasis here is charity for all and unity. Those of us who value fidelity to tradition and clarity in truth will have to be patient. The Catholic/Protestant war after the Reformation lasted four centuries, ending finally with the Council in 1965. Immediately, with peace established there, the new de facto schism, of progressives and conservatives, erupted, Concilium vs. Communio. This path of peace already evident in Pope Leo has a Catholic wisdom and promise to it.
A Happy Thought to Conclude
Imagine, again, our eight Jesuit theologians, at the time of the Council, in a good restaurant in Rome, arguing vigorously about some topic of Catholic teaching or practice. Laughter, fine wine, delicious cuisine, mutuality in respect and affection, shared euphoria about the Council, passionate dedication to scholarship and truth, profound love for Christ and the Church. (At the time I was myself in Seton Hall Prep, following from a distant the Council in America, NY Times, and from our priests.)
We have come a long way in 60 years. Specifically, we are desperately divided in our Church as in society. That period, 1960-5, was admittedly a Camelot, the honeymoon period for American Catholicism. Is it too much to hope that under our new American, very Catholic pope we might retrieve some of that joy, enthusiasm, mutuality in tenderness and reverence, even in our disagreements?
Perhaps none of our eight Jesuit scholars will make "doctor of the Church." But we can informally honor them as such, as we imagine the energy, love, intelligence at that Roman restaurant. A bit of heaven here on earth.
