Extra Ecclesiam:

Pluralism and Historical Consciousness at the Second Vatican Council

Steven P. Millies
Associate Professor of Political Science
Chair, Department of History, Political Science, and Philosophy
University of South Carolina Aiken
471 University Parkway
Aiken, South Carolina 29801-6389
803.641.3383 (direct) 803.641.3461 (fax) steven.millies@sc.edu












Prepared Text
Vatican II Reconsidered
Walsh University
May, 2012

1

Why did Blessed Pope John XXIII convene the Second Vatican Council? What did he
hope to accomplish?
It can be tempting to believe, as we ordinarily think about history, that knowing the
answer to that question could settle our arguments about the meaning of the Council. In the
same way that constitutional originalists attempt to discern the intentions of the authors of the
Constitution of the United States, some historical act of intellectual archaeology could tell us
what Good Pope John was thinking, and then we would really know what to think of the
Councils meaning in history and the theology of the Church. But the Council did not belong to
Pope John or Pope Paul.
To be an ecumenical council, any council of the Church must convene bishops from all
over the world and those Council Fathers are the authors of the conciliar documents. Their
intentions are what determines the shape of any council. It is the very ecumenismthe global
or, we might say, catholic characterof a council that places the teachings of ecumenical
councils among the extraordinary universal magisterium of the Church, a thing which, when
exercised in communion with the Bishop of Rome, is infallible. And yet, despite all of that, a
Council really does not belong to the Council Fathers, either.
For, indeed, any ecumenical council that claims infallible authority because of the
participation of bishops from all over the world in communion with the pope can claim that
authority only because of the presumption that such a convocation invokes the Holy Spirit in a
unique way to guide the whole Church. Most properly, then, our question should be, What did
the Holy Spirit hope to accomplish through the Second Vatican Council? But the Paraclete
could not be reached for comment, and can be notoriously difficult to pin down through
hermeneutical analysis. There is a difference of perspective that our best human efforts cannot
2

overcome, and so all of our attempts to know with finality the meaning of the Council ultimately
are frustrated in the same way that all great theological questions redound to the acceptance of
mystery. Knowing the nature of the Trinity or the mechanisms of the Incarnation, we must
believe, is possible. But such knowledge is unlikely to be gained in full by frail humans on this
side of the Eschaton. This is far from a Fideist retreat from the Anselmian fides quarens
intellectum which is our call and our duty as Catholics. It is, rather, a humble acknowledgement
of our limited capacities and of the perplexities with which we must live. Faith does not negate
the tasks of philosophy or theology. It deepens them. And, while that is as true fifty years after
the Second Vatican Council as it was for centuries before, my asking the question about the
intentions of those at the Council or the real purposes of the Holy Spirit points us toward
something that is new.
While Catholic minds have sought understanding through faith for centuries, faith always
has provided a boundary for certain kinds of questions. Some things always have been accepted
by Catholics through religious assent, even if they were not specifically related to settled
questions of faith and morals. There was no debate about a hermeneutic of interpretation
following the First Vatican Council, the Lateran Councils, the Council of Trent, or any other.
Prior to the Second Vatican Council, the acts of the ecumenical councils of the Church simply
were implementedoften not without controversy, but ultimately gaining assent because the
authority of the Church could quell objections to a point of gaining the acquiescence of
objectors. The half-century since the Second Vatican Council has not seen that happen. Hot
debates about the meaning of the Council were ignited almost the day the Council ended, and the
hermeneutical battle has been joined as much by so-called conservatives as by so-called
progressives. Virtually no one has appealed to a sort of ultramontane authority to silence the
3

debate about the Councils meaning and, instead, both sides have taken to the theological
journals and publishing houses to make their cases. A lively academic debate has followed the
Second Vatican Council, one as much acknowledged as a battle over interpretation on one side
as the other, and this is something quite new in our experience as Catholics.
Cottage industries have grown around both sides of this divide. We all know what is
implied by publishing a book with Ignatius Press or with Orbis Books, by attending a Jesuit or
Vincentian university instead of Franciscan in Steubenville or Ave Maria. Think of how much
depends on what the last initial abbreviates if I say that I read the NCR. The debate has become
part of being Catholic. Our Catholicity has become preoccupied by the interpretation of the
Council in extraordinary ways only because the Council, itself, admitted something new to the
Catholic tradition. In its engagement of the modern world, the Council inevitably admitted the
contestability of history to our Catholic world in a way that has placed all things now on the
ever-shifting foundation of historically-conditioned interpretation. Traditionalists and
progressives, we all are Hermeneutical Catholics today.
A good illustration can be found in the recent remarks of Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.
at the national meeting of the Pontifical Mission Societies two weeks ago. According to
Cardinal George, and despite its ground breaking documents asserting the Churchs support for
religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), defining the roles of bishops (Christus Dominus), priests
(Optatam Totius and Presbyterorum Ordinaris), and religious (Perfectae Caritatis), and despite
its documents reforming the liturgy (Sacrosantcum Concilium) and the interpretation of Scripture
(Dei Verbum), despite its definition of an apostolate of the laity (Apostolicam Actuositatem),
The Second Vatican Council was less about changing the Church than about changing the
4

world.
1
Says Cardinal George, the real goals of the Council were not internal reform, but
missionary in characterdespite the fact that the Council issued only one document (Ad Gentes)
on the missionary role of the Church. It is true, unquestionably, that the Council did stress the
missionary and pastoral role of the Church in the modern world. As Cardinal George said
rightly, Pope John XXIIIsaw the Churchs role as reminding humanity of its common
brotherhood, its true freedom under God.
2
These emphases can be found throughout the several
documents produced by the Council and should be neither overlooked nor undervalued when we
appraise its meaning. Yet neither can those emphases be disentangled honestly from the internal
reforms in the life of the Church that the Council did, widely and meaningfully, undertake. The
fact that, today, a prominent cardinal-archbishop would disentangle those emphases to re-cast the
Council as a whole to have been something it was only in part gives strong evidence of the
interpretive challenge that has grown up around the Council. Then again, the contestability of
the Councils historical meaning that Cardinal George highlights for us validates, in an ironic
way, the necessity of dealing with historical consciousness. Cardinal George asserts not the
meaning of the Council, but what it means to him.
Our question here is the role of the historical consciousness in the Council, and our
approach is first to look to a case study of sorts: the American experience of religious pluralism
and its influence on the teaching of the Church. That accomplished, we will turn to the question
of the historical consciousness more generally to get a picture of what the Second Vatican
Council did, absorbing not only the experience of Catholics in the United States to influence its
teaching but also absorbing the assumptions of German Romantic philosophers to reshape the
Catholic view of history. In sum, our goal is to look to how the Second Vatican Councilin a

1
Ana Rodriguez-Soto, Churchs Mission: Change the World, Florida Catholic (26 April 2012), accessed
at: http://www.miamiarch.org/ip.asp?op=Article_12426163241755 on 27 April 2012.
2
Ibid.
5

way perhaps unlike anything since St. Thomas Aquinas absorbed the classical learning of
Aristotlelooked to sources outside the Churchs tradition to renew and revitalize that tradition.

A CASE: PLURALISM AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
John T. Noonan, Jr. has explored the American mark upon the teaching of the Roman
Catholic Church in his book, The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious
Freedom.
3
Judge Noonan brings a jurists eye to his analysis of the Second Vatican Council,
describing it as a legislature in action, one with a right, center, and left that was surrounded
by lobbyists on every issue.
4
Little wonder, therefore, can be found at Noonans conclusion that
the Church had learned from human experience, specifically from the American contribution
and the experiment that began with Madison.
5
Noonan goes further to say that However
characterized, this act of a world assembly of the bishops of the Catholic Church has set a new
course, finding that The demand of human nature for [religious freedom] had been affirmed.
6

That affirmation only could be characterized as a product of the experience of Catholics in the
United States. If Noonan is correct, then Dignitatis Humanae presents the world with the
absorption by the Roman Catholic Church of an influence from outside the Church on a central
and defining teaching, the relationship of the Church to the state and the juridical status of
nonbelievers.
There is wide acceptance today of Dignitatis Humanae in virtually every sector of the
Church, but the novelty of Noonans proposition assures that the acceptance cannot be
uncomplicated. Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. wrote in 2001 that, Such discontinuity with the

3
John T. Noonan, Jr., The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Los
Angeles: The Regents of the University of California, 1998), 331.
4
Noonan, 338.
5
Noonan, 353.
6
Noonan, 352.
6

past, as we find in Dignitatis Humanae, does not require reversals unless the Church at an
earlier time ruled out precisely the development that was to occur under changed
circumstances.
7
For Cardinal Dulles, the modern freedoms of worship, speech, and
conscience were not a development of Catholic teaching that emerged from a contact with the
American political tradition, but a separate phenomenon that was theologically grounded in the
fact that God, respecting the dignity of the human person, invites a voluntary and uncoerced
adherence to religious truth.
8
Even so, the new developments that make peace with American
understandings do not negate earlier Catholic teaching on the duties of the State toward the
faith.
9
Those earlier Catholic teaching[s], of course, include Pope Leo XIIIs finding that, it
would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the
most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State
and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.
10
So, while certainly it is true that
Pope Leo never expressly condemned pluralism, certainly it appears puzzling that we are to
believe the Church teaches at the same time that the right to [religious liberty] continues to exist
even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truthand the exercise of this
right is not to be impeded, and that it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in
America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church.
11
Those
propositions do not exactly contradict one another. But they are difficult to hold together. And,
even Dulless invocation of the changed circumstances that might bring about the development
of doctrine, itself, argues for the historical contingency of events and ideas.

7
Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Religious Freedom: Innovation and Development, First Things (December
2001), 35.
8
Dulles, 37, 35.
9
Dulles, 37.
10
Leo XIII, Longinqua 6.
11
Dignitatis Humanae 2; Longinqua 6.
7

The tension produced by Dulless unwillingness to follow that thread of changed
circumstances so far as to accept Noonans account of how the Church accepted religious
liberty recalls the problems John Courtney Murray, S.J. faced over the space of two decades in
the mid-twentieth century. Father Murray began to write about religious freedom during the
1940s, but found himself rather quickly in conflict with the Rome. The matter came to a head
when the Holy Office suppressed Murrays 1954 article, Leo XIII and Pius XII: Government
and the Order of Religion. Having received the notice of suppression with a note admonishing
him that the article was a mistake, Murray observed that the notice, for all its courtesy, was a
delicate way of saying, Youre through.
12

Perhaps what drew fire from the Holy See was where Father Murray found that Pope Pius
XII taught in perfect continuity with Pope Leo, but, in that continuity, made a certain progress
within the tradition.
13
Indeed, this progress was occasioned and made necessary by the march
of mankind's political history. This has always been the case when it is a matter of the Church's
tradition with regard to the Church-State relationship.
14
That estimation, that Pius had made
progress in perfect continuity with Pope Leo, did not grant Father Murray any reprieve from
Vatican censure, of course. Talk of progress in the tradition that owed to the march of
mankinds political history, a secular history outside the Church, was enough to have Father
Murray silenced. If that is true, it is because what we see here being silenced was the emergence

12
Noonan, 332.
13
John Courtney Murray, S.J., Leo XIII and Pius XII, Works by John Courtney Murray, S.J.: Woodstock
Theological Center Library, 1955, 102. Accessed at: http://woodstock.georgetown.edu/library/Murray/1955c.htm
(accessed March 2009). Pius had spoken to a meeting of Italian jurists about "the practical living together of
Catholic and non-Catholic communities" within some sort of juridical community. Murray explains that, the
question explicitly discussed was that of a well-defined statute that would be valid for the entire territory of the
individual sovereign states which are members of such a community of nations, a statute that would regulate the
relations between government and the order of religion and morality(102). Pius had preserved the distinction
between the sacral and temporal realms while creating an opening to toleration, tearing Pope Leos teaching loose
from the medieval preoccupations with establishment.
14
Murray, 102.
8

of historical consciousness as an interpretive hermeneutic that contrasted with a classicism that
emphasized the continuity of unchanging teaching abstracted from historical conditions.
Many commentators agree that John Courtney Murray was doing something not unlike
threading a needle in his attempt to bring the doctrine forward, develop a theological foundation
for religious freedom. The editors of his online works at the Woodstock Theological Center
Library gloss his 1954 essay on Leo XIII and Pius XII (the one which was suppressed),
observing that it was the last of six distinct articles, written between 1952 and 1955, throughout
which Murray tackled the problem of Leo XIII, and that throughout those essays the reader sees
Murray probing, testing, exploring, rejecting, deepening, so that the first articles set out in
directions that were eventually rejected. His effort was difficult precisely because what he was
doing was, largely, something newintegrating the historical consciousness nurtured outside the
Church during the nineteenth century into the tradition of the Church.
What seems inescapable is that Judge Noonan has put his finger on it, precisely: there is
an American mark upon the teaching of the Church. Father Murray could identify the
potential for the Church in the American experience because he was an American who saw for
himself that the American style of religious liberty did permit the Church, in Cardinal Gibbonss
lovely phrase, to blossom like a rose. His own historical experience revealed to him how
necessary it was to amend the teaching of the Church. Yet, he could not simply announce a
break with the pastthe Holy Office had made that clear. Yet two conclusions seem
inescapable. The Church did absorb something new from the experience of American Catholics.
And, there is some discontinuity between what Pope Leo said and what the Second Vatican
Council taught: some rupture occurred, and we must account for how that happened.

9

A PRINCIPLE: THE HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Is the Gospel in continuity with the Hebrew Bible or a rupture from it?
The answer must be neither, and both. As much as it surely is true that Jesus told us, I
have come not to abolish but to fulfill,(Mt. 5:17) the law and the prophets, it remains the case
that the ministry of Christ and the Sacrifice of Calvary were historically necessary developments
that broke from the previous Jewish traditions in order to achieve salvation. Of course, neither
could those developments have been possible without the history of the law or the prophets
that we find in the Hebrew Bible. To speak of the Gospel as continuity or rupture is to
misrepresent it because continuity and rupture are symbols that serve only to obscure by
simplification the rich and complex reality of how Scripture reveals the importance of history to
us in its own account of salvation history.
History always has been a problem and a preoccupation for Christianity. Since the time
when it became clear that Christ would not return within the lifetimes of those who knew Him,
Christians have needed to find ways to account for the relevance of Christian faith in a fallen
world whose sinfulness can seem, the more we are in the world, sometimes more durable than
the eternal truths of revealed faith.
15

John W. OMalley, S.J. has surveyed three Christian account of history that have
appeared throughout the centuries, and demonstrates that all were present to one degree or
another in the documents produced by the Council. Substantialism, a belief that the Church is
immune to process or to change in doctrine or discipline, so as to move through history

15
St. Augustine described two distinct histories at work in human reality, and his work in chief depends on
distinguishing between a classical view of history that already was much attested and described in the work of pagan
writers, and a redemptive history that linked human events to the salvation of all humanity. Augustine, of course,
wished to privilege that sacred history. Therefore, we can say that, for Augustine, history was not a series of past
events, but statements about the past, recording events, in the words of R.A. Markus(1970, 14). That is a helpful
perspective to bear in mind if we survey the succession of frameworks in which the Church has understood
historical development throughout her history.
10

unaffected by history, is characteristic of classical, Greco-Roman historiography.
16
This
substantialism tended to promote a providentialistic view of history wherein the Christian faith
enjoyed the protection of a patron God as it progressed as an instrument of salvation moving
through human history. That providentialist history was characteristic of the Church of the
medieval period. By the time of the Renaissance, the Church absorbed just enough humanism to
adopt an old Roman ideahistory as an exhortatory and ethical force intended to guide its eager
student toward a philosophically reflective life. Common to all of these historical perspectives is
the conviction that change or rupture is not, properly speaking, possible.
17
The Church was a
stable presence in human history, and even when it appeared to change or develop its doctrine,
that change is never by way of reversal, but only by way of further development of the already
existing.
18
(This is consistent with the understanding of the development of doctrine articulated
above by Avery Dulles respecting Dignitatis Humanae.)
Mark S. Massa, S.J. has followed OMalleys appraisals in a more recent book to find
that a rather different historical perspective was at work in the Council as well, one with roots
not in the classical world, the middle ages, or the Renaissance. Massa suggests that the Church
absorbed the influence of German Romanticism, whose awareness of historical consciousness
found that life and reality [are] synonymous with history, and, all notions of truth [must] be
examined and explained as realities forged within the historical process.
19
OMalley certainly
allowed that the reality of what the Council accomplished was a transformation rather than a

16
John W. OMalley, S.J., Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II (Wilmington, DE:
Michael Glazier, 1989), 67. OMalley credits the description of substantialism to R.G. Collingwood, who
described it as the chief defect of Greco-Roman historiography(67) at: R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 42-45.
17
The scheme of three distinct historical perspectives at work in the Council draws quite directly from
OMalley (66-73).
18
OMalley, 72. See also: Jaroslav Pelikan, Development of Christian Doctrine: Some Historical
Prolegomena (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 145.
19
Mark S. Massa, S.J, The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 154.
11

reform in the classical sense, even if in the context of the philosophies of history upon which
[The Councils historical understanding] seems to have rested, [that transformation it fostered] is
an inadequate expression of what isactually happening today, in the aftermath of the
Council.
20
Even allowing that rupture and transformation have been characteristic of the
reality that have followed the Council, OMalley is reluctant to see the influence of the historical
consciousness at work in the Council, itself.
Which Jesuit is correct, OMalley or Massa? Did the Council absorb the influence of
German Romanticism, or did the competing, classicist philosophies of history present in the
Council documents open the way to cultural influences that overwhelmed the Church once the
aggiornamento of the Council was unleashed upon the world. Perhaps again the answer is
something like both, and neither.
There can be no knowing for certain in any event. Certainly none of the conciliar
documents footnoted Wilhelm Dilthey or helpfully cited Friedrich Schliermacher as an influence.
Hoping to prove the affirmative case conclusively would be folly. But to craft the question
somewhat differently can yield more useable results: Was the Council wholly untouched by the
influences of German Romanticism and its historical consciousness? There OMalley and Massa
appear to agree that, even if only in the effects of the Council, we cannot find Vatican II to have
been unaffected entirely by the historical consciousness of the world surrounding it. Certainly,
the historicist perspective was not wholly alien to influential Catholic theologians of the
twentieth century, even before the Council.

20
OMalley, 80-81. Even as OMalley recognized that reality of what is actually happening, and allowed
that, It is difficult to study the history of the Christian tradition without admitting that [cultural] developments have
had more profound influence on the Church than most self-conscious decisions taken within the Church, he did not
go so far as Massa to find the fingerprints of the German Romantics on the work of the Council (185-186).
12

The official representatives of the Churchhave immersed themselves in lengthy
studies in their tradition, wrote Hans Urs von Balthasar in his programmatic little book of
1952, Razing the Bastions.
21
von Balthasar went on to describe a typical confusion of the
theological principle of tradition with a more general Catholic preference for handing on what
already exists, and, more provocatively, wrote that,
the changed historical situation offers the theology of the Church new access-roads which
lead unexpectedly into the deepest areas. It was not only the undeveloped concept of
history that prevented a development of ecclesiology during the middle ages but also the
position of the Church vis--vis the world surrounding her at that time.The time is ripe
to pose questions that the few generations separating us from Christ had not found the
time yet to see and think about.Thus one can adopt not only the correctness of findings
and formulas but alsounconditionally, and as the more important element in the truth
the immediate relationship to the event [emphasis added].
22


New access-roads that lead to the deepest areas, an undeveloped concept of history during
the middle ages, and accepting unconditionally as an element in the truth more important
than the findings and formulas of tradition the immediate relationship of contingent human
experience to the eventthose sentences are redolent of the contemporary historical
consciousness.
In 1964 Karl Rahner, S.J. wrote of about the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius as a
subject of tomorrows theology, a theology he described two years later in relation to the
Council when he discussed the new tasks the Council has presented to Catholic theology.
23

As Rahner has it, Ignatius presumes in his Spiritual Exercises that Gods will is not simply what
can be known by the rational reflection of a believing mind employing general maxims of reason
and faith on the one hand and their application to a definite situation that has been analysed in a

21
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 19.
22
Ibid., 30-31, 33.
23
Karl Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 87. Also: Karl
Rahner, The Church After the Council (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 77.
13

similar discursively rational way, on the other.
24
We see that Rahner privileged experiential
claims so uniquely personal that they cannot be communicated in a rational way, and linked
those uniquely personal experiences to the demands of a new theology inaugurated by the
Council. In a 1979 lecture, Rahner referred to three epochs of Christian history (Jewish
Christianity, European culture and civilization, and the more recent sphere of the Churchs life
inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council) as divided by a transition, or as a caesura or
break between each.
25
Rahners 1979 Dictionary of Theology (authored with Herbert
Vorgrimler) informs us that,
The findings of the theology of history [yet need] to be developedas data of a genuine
pastoral theology.Catholic theology, to be sure, has not yet addressed itself to this task.
So far as it thinks in terms of the theology of history at all, it clings to those patterns
which were worked out in the first four centuries (by St. Irenaeus, Eusebius, and St.
Augustine), whereas Protestant theology has a whole series of important theologians of
history which it can count to its credit (Karl Barth and Oscar Cullmann among others).
26


Rahner no more gives credit to German Romanticism as an inspiration than von Balthasar did.
He does cite favorably to Protestant theologians linked with the German Romantics, just as he
discusses history as interrupted by ruptures (caesuras) and highlights the role of contingent
experience in the new theology of the Council. He urges something like a break from
Irenaeus, Eusebius, and Augustine. Those ideas were in the air as both he and von Balthasar
were writing, both who exerted so much influence on the Church during the conciliar period.
And they were not unique.
27
(Perhaps it is no coincidence either that both were cultural

24
Rahner, Dynamic Element, 94.
25
Karl Rahner, Towards a Fundamental Theological Interpretation of Vatican II, Theological Studies 40
(1979) 721, 722, 723, 727.
26
Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Dictonary of Theology 2
nd
ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 211
(s.v. History, Theology of). The entry also refers to new epochs of saving history that spring from Gods action
and mans response across time, traced by the theology of history.
27
Congar, in fact, rejected the modernist historical consciousness of Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell, and
Edouard Le Roy. On the other hand, Congar has never directly exposed or attackeda post-Kantian critique of
meta-knowledge, at: William Henn, The Hierarchy of Truths According to Yves Congar, O.P. (Rome: Editrice
Pontificia Universit Gregoriana, 1987), 144. Indeed, while a bit careful about it, there are clear signals that Congar
14

Germans, reared in a culture shaped by nineteenth century Romanticism.) But, as Mark Massa
put it, Whatever the intentions of the pope and the good bishops gathered in Rome in 1962-
1965, the very vibrancy and size of Catholicism made dealing with historical consciousness
necessary.
28
Much as John Courtney Murray highlighted the march of mankind's political
history as an instigator of reform in the Church, both Rahner and von Balthasar verify that, as
the world had grown so complex as to reveal new perspectives on history to philosophy and
politics, a Church thrown open to that wide world no longer could escape it.
Of course, these are influences, merely. No more than they gave credit to Schelling or
Novalis did any of these Catholic theologians embrace the modernism of Loisy or Tyrrell.
Rather, living in the time when they lived, they could not fail to experience for themselves the
ways that daily life verified the need to take historical consciousness seriously and, whether
purposefully as Massa would have it or accidentally as OMalley describes, that was enough to
bring the historical consciousness irretrievably over the threshold and into the Catholic tradition
from sources very much outside that tradition.

CONCLUSION
Thinking back to Judge Noonans description of the Second Vatican Council as a
legislature[with] a right, center, and left, we get in our minds a picture of the Church as
governed by mere human beings, each applying his own historically-contingent understanding to
problems. This is the essence of historicism, of course. And it need not stoke controversy.
Asked in a 1997 German television interview whether the Church can depend on the guidance of

found important overtures toward historicity in the work of Aquinas.While Congar affirmed this development of
modern historical consciousness, he also believed that our sense of historicity must remain grounded in its ancient
biblical roots, at: Elizabeth Teresa Groppe, Yves Congarss Theology of the Holy Spirit (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 90.
28
Massa, 156.
15

the Holy Spirit in a papal conclave, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger replied that, ''I would not say so in
the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope, because there are too many contrary instances
of popes the Holy Spirit would obviously not have picked.''
29
Then-Cardinal Ratzinger went on
to describe the role of the Holy Spirit in a papal conclave:
I would say that the Holy Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like
a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely
abandoning us. Thus the Spirits role should be understood in a much more elastic sense,
not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance
he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.
30


Cardinal Ratzingers interviewer, John Allen, went on to characterize what the cardinal described
as an eminently political process, the lifeblood of which is debate, one where the cardinals
hear the Spirit, or they do not, and not a place where a divinely-ordained process of history
unfolds without obstacle. Certainly this corresponds with how OMalley and Massa describe the
historical process at the Council, as much as it echoes Rahner and von Balthasar. Indeed, it
confirms our own experience of life in and out of the Church. However, it is rather difficult to
imagine as having come from Pope Leo or his predecessors.
Whether we think of Cardinal Ratzingers remarks, those Catholic theologians, Judge
Noonan, or even Cardinal George, it seems clear the Church through the Second Vatican Council
has absorbed from outside the Churchextra ecclesiamthe influences of modernism, and our
present controversies reflect only the emerging and ongoing need for a way to engage the
discussion of the tradition within the scope of the historical consciousness.
The Council itself can provide some help here. Did the Council reach back to the past
with resourcement, or did it look to the future with aggiornamento? Again, both and neither.

29
Quoted in: John L. Allen, Conclave: The Politics, Processes, and Personalities of the Next Papal Election
(New York: DoubleDay, 2002), PAGE #.
30
Ibid. PAGE #.
16

And the meaning of that reply is one, within our historical consciousness, we will continue to
debate with Cardinal George and all the others for many years to come.