HISTORY, THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION, AND THEOLOGY
James Hennesey, S.J. Canisius College, Buffalo, New York
Archbishop Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University, October 4, 1990
For the many ways of doing theology in the Christian tradition,
historical study is totally unimportant. Or at best they pay it
lip-service. Writing in The Tablet Of London, Richard Price was blunt
about that. He asked:
Does church history matter? Is the study of Christianity in the early
centuries more than an antiquarian pursuit? The answer given by the
theologians is a verbal 'yes' that thinly veils a mental 'no.'
Price goes on to explain that liberal theologians like to appeal to the
primitive past for ammunition against current Roman norms, but only in
support of views independently formulated, while conservatives assert a
type of development of doctrine that makes present belief normative and
early belief embryonic.1 Neither side gives history its due.
Opponents of history as an element in the theological enterprise are
many. There are the presentists, for whom the past is irrelevant and the
future will be essentially different. Back in 1909 a Protestant
modernist, Episcopal Bishop Charles D. Williams of Michigan, advocated
that approach when he declared:
The only question that concerns us today is, what is the character of
the stream that reaches us ... ? Is the water of life today as it was of
old? Can it quench the thirst of our souls? Can it invigorate our moral
and ethical life? If it can do these things, we will accept it as valid
for today. If it cannot, we must reject it, no matter how authentic its
origin and traditions.2
In an instruction early in 1990 on increased study of the fathers of the
church, the Congregation for Catholic Education addressed an approach
not unlike that of Bishop Williams and urged Catholics to avoid a
theology "limited to confronting fundamental biblical ideas with the
social reality and concrete problems of modern life, analyzed with the
help of human science." That is not adequate for theology done in the
Catholic tradition, and the congregation reminds us of the "fresh breath
of true wisdom and Christian authenticity" that comes from patristic -
and, I would add - historical studies in general.3
There are other approaches hostile to the historical. That, for example,
of the medieval canonists, who shaped the church to which the 16111-
century reformers objected. Stephan Kuttner, perhaps the most prominent
historian of canon law in the United States, summed up what he saw as
their accomplishment when he wrote that they brought harmony out of
dissonance by "indulging in a sublime disregard of history" in shaping
their discipline and, incidentally, in shaping much of official church
structure and thought in the centuries to come. Yves Congar has another
perspective on that. Singling out the "False Decretals" of the ninth
century, which fabricated texts and attributed them falsely to earlier
bishops of Rome, he wrote of these bases on which the later Corpus of
Canon Law was built that they not only ruined the chances of historical
development, they gave credence to the notion that all the determination
of the church's life flowed from the papacy as their source.
The net result was a papacy strongly juridical in character, exercising
an authority that tended to be more juridical than spiritual and
charismatic.4 History was reduced to the role of providing proof-texts,
or exempla, adduced selectively in support of conclusions already
arrived at by other means. The approach was that recommended by a
contemporary American canonist when he outlined a sure-fire method for
giving a talk on a Catholic topic:
Take a clear Catholic on just about anything, develop it with
philosophical precision, and illustrate the development with citations
from the fathers, the classic theologians, and the encyclicals of the
popes.5
Stephan Kuttner's longtime colleague in the canonical collections at
Berkeley John Noonan, pointed to the difficulties inherent in this
approach when he described the way the question of contraception was
handled in Pope Pius XI's encyclical, Casti Connubii:
As a distillation of past doctrinal statements, the encyclical was a
masterpiece. At the same time, its composers were indifferent to the
historical contexts from which their citations came and uninterested in
the environmental changes which differentiated the present context. The
encyclical was a synthesis; it was not history.6
There is no question that the approach I have described was common in
Catholic theological circles in what may be called the "manual" period,
the 70 or so years that followed promulgation in 1879 of Pope Leo XIII's
encyclical letter, Aeterni Patris. It is an approach more difficult to
reconcile with the thought of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger when he speaks
of "the historicity of a church which is still under way and will first
become itself when the ways of time have been traveled"7 or with the
assertion of Bishop Christopher Butler, an active and thoughtful
participant in the second Vatican Council, that the council moved
Catholic thought from an almost exclusively conceptual approach (that of
the aforementioned manuals) to an approach mainly historical and
biblical.8 Christianity is a historical religion. There is about it, as
Rosemary Ruether has commented, "always this past dimension."9 It makes
Christianity different from other religious systems preoccupied with
what they understand as "nature," or perceive as "personal experience."
Christianity is in history. It lives, grows and develops in time.
Pope John Paul H has been very clear about this. Speaking in the
apostolic letter Ecclesiam Dei about the schismatic Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre, he declared that the archbishop's schism was rooted in:
an incomplete and contradictory notion of tradition, incomplete because
it does not take sufficiently into account the living character of
tradition which, as the second Vatican Council clearly taught, comes
from the apostles and progresses in the church with the of the Holy
Spirit. There is a growth in insight into the realities and words that
are being passed on.10
Again, the Pope, in a letter to Cardinal Ratzinger, took issue with what
he called "conservatism," or "integrism,"
which stops at the past itself, without taking into account the correct
aspiration toward the future that manifested itself precisely in the
work of Vatican II.
That approach "sees correctioness only in what is 'ancient,' considering
it synonymous with tradition." But, the pope continued:
it is not what is 'ancient' as such, or what is "new' per se, which
corresponds to the correct idea of tradition in the life of the church.
Rather, the idea means the church's remaining faithful to the truth
received from God, throughout the changing circumstances of history.11
The second Vatican Council, in its constitution on divine revelation,
addressed headon the problem of concept of tradition, which had
bedeviled theologians for generations, but which Catholics say is so
important to the question of where they confront the self-revelation of
God.
Tradition is understood to be a sense, arising from and discerned in the
historical life of the church, as well as in its ongoing life, thought
and worship.12 Joseph Ratzinger tells us that it is to be found "not
only in the explicitly traditional statements of church doctrine, but in
the unstated and often unstatable elements of the whole service of the
worship of God and the life of the church." According to the cardinal,
"the final comprehensive formulation of tradition is the perpetuation,
the constant continuation and making present of everything that the
church is, of everything that it believes." Finally, he says that
tradition "is identified and thus defined with the being and the faith
of the church.13
The constitution on divine revelation deals with tradition in chapter
eight, where it is declared to be found in "the teaching, life and
worship" of the church. The constitution declares that tradition
"develops in the church with the help of the Holy Spirit...through
contemplation and study made by believers ... through the intimate
understanding of spiritual things they experience ... and through the
preaching of those who have received through episcopal succession the
sure gift of truth." And, in a science added to the constitution by the
express wish of Pope Paul VI it goes on to say that "it is not from
sacred scripture alone that the church draws her certainty about
everything that is revealed.14 The scriptures are a part, a special part
indeed, of what has been handed on, of tradition.
And the magisterium? It "is not above the word of God, but serves it,
teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly,
guarding it scrupulously, and explaining it faithfully."15 The late and
great historian of the council of Trent, Hubert Jedin, was dead wrong
when he claimed that "tradition is the living teaching office of the
church, which authoritatively interprets and complements scripture."16
Pius is reputed to have silenced Cardinal Guidi of Bologna, who
protested that the doctrine of papal infallibility was not to be found
in the tradition with the riposte, "Tradition? I am tradition."17 The
bon mot does not make good theology. There is a distinction between the
interpreter and what the interpreter interprets; between tradition,
including its essential component, scripture, and the authoritative
interpreter.
What does this say to the church historian? What does it say to the
historian's role, or lack of role, in the overall theological
enterprise? Very simply that as a result of the historical-biblical
approach renewed in the church by the second Vatican Council, the church
historian has a new function to fulfill, or rather must resume an old
one, discounted for some centuries. For the historian, chapter eight of
Dei Verbum is magna carta. If the living tradition of the church is to
be found, and must be looked for by simple Christian and authoritative
interpreter alike, in the totality of the Christian community's life,
thought and worship down the centuries and across the world, then the
study of the life of the community, its thought and its worship, must be
one of the ways in which accurate knowledge of that tradition is sought.
It is not the only way. The theological enterprise is complex. But the
part that history must play in recalling what has been authentically
handed down can be only at one's grave peril.
Christianity is a historical religion. It declares that God entered into
history. God did so in the peculiar relationship he had with the people
of Israel and when, in the fullness of time, he sent his only son, who
was born and died and rose and who brought the church to birth in time.
Down the centuries Christians have found other ways of translating their
faith, philosophical ways. And often those philosophical ways have
eclipsed the basic historical nature of the Christian message. We are
aware of what is called the "hellenization of Christianity," which
introduced a prioristic philosophizing from what was understood as the
"nature" of this or that phenomenon. It is familiar to us from the days
of Augustine. There were the enormous syntheses made in the high middle
ages, the summae of St. Thomas and others. But I want to concentrate on
what happened in the course of the 19th century.
In an age when science, technology and social and political revolution
led to universal reassessment of human and religious values, all
Christian theology was challenged, as the Anglican historian Bernard
Reardon has remarked, either to adapt to the radically changed
circumstances or to "fall back on the stronghold of absolute
authority.""18 Liberal Protestantism took the former path; Catholicism
the latter. Roman theologians of the 19th century rejected historical
imagination and procedures and took their stand on an essentialist
metaphysics which accompanied and supported a renewed insistence on
church authority.
British historian Owen Chadwick has traced the history of this
theological tradition, and Howland Sank completed it. 19They wrote of
theologians who saw as their task explication by logical inference of
what was already implicit in an immutable revelation. At its apogee with
the Jesuit "prince of theologians," Louis Billot, the notion "tradition"
came to be identified with the voice of living authority, that is the
pope. For thinkers like Billot, history had no part in theological
enterprise. Edgar Hocedez, the historian of 19th-century Catholic
theology, remarked simply of Billot, "history and its methods were
beyond his horizons."20 He was not alone in that. It was a widespread
malaise.
Stephen Tonsor long ago noted the consequences for Catholic theology
when he wrote: "In a remarkably short time theological system came to
replace historical facts, and clever system builders to replace patient
historians.""21 No longer did apologists build their arguments carefully
from the scriptures and from reflection on the past practice of
Christians living their faith, from the thought of theologians ancient
and modern and from the Christian community's habits of prayer and
liturgical observance. In other words from tradition. Abandonment of
historical study, so Lord Acton reminded us, made
the teaching of the church the sole foundation and test Of certain
knowledge, a criterion alike of the records of history and the arguments
of unbelief. It recognized no means of ascertaining the truth of facts,
or the authenticity of documents, sufficiently trustworthy to interfere
with theological opinions.22
No longer the Catholic theologians argue as had our later first bishop,
John Carroll, back in 1784. His Address that year to the Roman Catholics
of the United States was the product of personal research in an
Annapolis library, where he gathered evidence from the scriptures,
church fathers and later theologians and from the history of the church
and of the religious practice of its people. It was a classic exercise
in inductive, that is, historical theology.23
But a half-century after John Carroll's death, historical appeal to the
Great Tradition had gone out of Catholic style. Deductive reasoning held
the field, the explicitation by logical inference of which Owen Chadwick
wrote. Historical data were used, if at all, for illustrative purpose
only, not as central to the argument. H. Richard Niebuhr has pictured
the Catholic mind set that resulted, One had a sense
of being part of an established order of things, member of an enduring
and fundamentally unchanging church, recipient of a truth once and for
all revealed, believer in a well-defined and articulated 'true
religion,' subject of constant and known laws, follower of leaders who
stood in a unchanging office and successions 24
Something obviously has happened in the church of Rome since Niebuhr
penned those words. In 1987 the Catholic bishops of England and Wales
produced a document picturing the church not "as an army marching in
formation, but more like a group of travelers in a desert," a "pilgrim
people," as the second Vatican Council put it, a community in which lay
people as well as church professionals were expected to "take proper
initiatives," and to "shoulder their responsibilities."25 What had
happened to the once highly predictable Roman church? What of the dictum
of that fifth-century stalwart, Vincent of Lerins, that "what is
Catholic is that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all?"
What of the proud motto of the redoubtable Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani,
longtime chief executive officer of the Holy Office? That motto was
"Semper Idem ... .. Always the Same."
What has happened is that there has been a revolution in the ways we
perceive and evaluate reality. There has been an acceptance of
historicization. It began boldly in the early years of this century in
the thinking of those condemned by Pope Pius X in 1907 as modernists.
There were indeed serious problems at that time on the part both of the
official church and on the part of those they called modernists. In the
case of the historians among them, there was a tendency to make their
discipline the final theological word. Thanks to the patient work of
many, for example, those involved in the "Sources chretiennes"
publications at Lyons and to the great French Dominican Yves Congar and
his colleagues, we have come a long way from those stumbling
modernist/integrist days. We understand that historical study - or
biblical study, for that matter - are not the final word in a
theological inquiry that is far more complex.
Joseph Ratzinger is clear on this. Vincent of Lerins, he assures us, "no
longer appears as an authentic representative of the Catholic idea of
tradition, but outlines a canon of tradition based on a semi-Peligian
idea." His "static semper no longer seems the right way of expressing
the nature of historical reality and continuity."26 Another conservative
German theologian, Walter Kasper, now Bishop of Mainz, acknowledged "the
radical historicization of all reality," and pointed out that
theologians in the 19th century discovered metamorphoses and
developments in the church's pattern of faith which had not only taken
place in accordance with the laws of regular organic growth, but which
also proceeded by leaps and bounds, shifts, anticipations and
retardation.27
Obviously, Bishop Kasper is not talking about the Roman theologians to
whom we have referred, but of the Tubingen school and others! John
O'Malley is another who sees the same patterns. He has written of the
need to recognize "discontinuities" in the church's history."28
Twenty years ago, Yves Congar talked of two understandings of "Church
History as a Branch of Theology." One meaning saw "development," a
progressive revelation of what had heretofore been implicit. Radical
only to the defender of complete stasis, this position is acceptable to
many. The second understanding is that posited by Ratzinger, Kasper and
O'Malley. Congar described it as seeing "a series of formulations of the
one content of faith diversifying and finding expression in different
cultural contexts."29 In Robin Collingwood's phrase, we have become
"historically conscious," able to think of theological formulations in
terms of their culturebound and historically contingent character,
interpreting previous traditions in terms of present
self-understanding."30 History is no longer "frozen solid" the term is
Collingwood's and we realize that when we deal with the church, we are
dealing with a dynamic phenomenon. The church is pilgrim, not yet at the
goal. We underline its historicity. It is, in Ratzinger's phrase, "still
under way, and will become itself only when the ways of time have been
traveled."31
A sense for the dynamic, for change, action and life has replaced the
static classicism so long the norm. What does this say to the church
historian? What does it have to do with his/her role or non-role in the
theological enterprise? To review a bit, for a good part of the
Christian era, and especially in the Catholic intellectual world that
reached its high point in the later 1911, and earlier 20th century, a
"classicist" or "substantialist" mentality prevailed. It allowed at best
for only accidental external changes as the church passed through time.
Its favorite protasis was, "For the past 1900 or 2000 years, the church
has..." That has usually been a good sign that a false apodosis will
follow. The mind set produced an image of the church that emphasized
order and unchangeableness. It was the church of Vincent of Lerins,
whose obituary Joseph Ratzinger wrote. Tradition in this understanding
was an arcane, illdefined treasuretrove of proportional statements
waiting the proper moment for enunciation.
Two factors changed all that. One was the emergence of the
historical-critical method, applied not only to the scripture, but to
the church's other memories and documents. Is everything then relative?
Is there nothing absolute? Of course there is. But we must be careful of
identifying contingencies with the Absolute, who, as Karl Rahner
reminded us, is only God.32
In this light the historian's task is to assist in discerning and
distinguishing, in a phrase that should be recalled to service, the
"Great Tradition," from traditions with a final "s." We contribute by
establishing the facts to our best ability, always aware that we
inevitably see things as our own personal prisms. The myths that abound
in church history, as in all history, we try to evaluate for what they
are. We are cautious about the demands made on our historical judgment
by pleas for "prudence" or "piety," even as we acknowledge that God
dealing with his people is not bound by rules and may work through what
is mythical as well as what is rational.33 That is a process not
amenable to our historical discipline, although we sometimes observe its
effects.
Our partnership in the theological enterprise consists in offering the
results of our historical-critical research in testifying to the
pervasive change in human affairs that is the lot of a church which is
incarnate in human being. What is the relationship of history to the
Great Tradition? Robert Taft addressed that in an essay he did several
years ago on the frequency of the eucharist in Christian practice. After
marshalling the evidence, he concluded with a statement that may stand
for us all.
Final judgment is not the historian's for history shows the past to be
always instructive, but never normative. What is normative is tradition.
But tradition, unlike the past, is a living force whose contingent
expressions ... can change.34
History's instruction, however, is needed. The historian studies the
contingent expressions of the Christian community's life, its thought
and its worship. He/She puts the results of that study at the service of
the larger body of theologians. It is a co-operative venture, in which
none should be a monologuist.
What practically does all this mean? Does the historical, or inductive,
method of doing theology make any difference in how we apprehend the
Great Tradition, or even lesser tradition?
Perhaps the recent history of Ireland can start us off. The rigidity in
Irish religion that some observers have noted has often and without
further ado been attributed to a Jansenistic spirit learned by Irish
priests trained in French seminaries. A contemporary Irish historian has
another explanation. He concludes that
the Irish Catholic's life was governed by the God of justice and not by
the God of love and mercy ... not in fact 6y the God of Catholic
tradition in Ireland, but instead by the God of Victorianism, a British
and Protestant God.
He explains:
the social norms of 19th Century Britain became entangled with a fervent
and essentially non-intellectual form of Catholicism. The resultant mix
became the religion of the Catholic Irish, who imagined it to be the
faith of Patrick, Brigid and Columkille.35
On a more theological note, historians are looking carefully at the
sacrament of reconciliation. Studies have made us aware of the
difference between the older "Mediterranean" and the later "Irish" forms
of the sacrament. In the earlier form, reconciliation was infrequent,
sometimes possible only once in a lifetime, and practiced when there was
question of major sins like murder, apostasy and adultery. Confession,
contrition and forgiveness took place in the face of the community.
Penance was public. There was no secrecy, no seal of confession. There
is no evidence in the early centuries of one-on-one auricular confession
of sins. Canon 11 of the third council of Toledo in the year 589
prohibited frequent confession. There were other similar decrees. Then,
under the influence of the Irish monks who in the sixth and seventh
centuries recovered for Christianity so much of Europe, new forms came
in. They promoted frequent and secret confession, combining it with
spiritual direction. The theory of the seal of confession was developed.
Penitentials were written to assist the priest in calculating and
assigning penances for the wide varieties of faults that were now
confessed.
What is the conclusion? Addressing the drop off in confessional practice
of recent decades, Ladislas Orsy has put in this way:
Perhaps people are rightly longing for other ways of receiving
forgiveness for their ordinary weaknesses. After all, the biblical
tradition does not tell us more than Christ has given to the apostles
the power to forgive sins ..... As far as we can tell, he left it to the
wishes of the church to determine how pardon should be granted. Since
the church has known different ways of doing it in the past, there is no
reason why new ways could not be found today.36
Another area in which interesting conclusion can be drawn is that of
church government. Most people today will not dispute that the form of
government in the Roman Catholic church, even after Vatican H, is highly
centralized. We have a monarchical structure. Has it always been that
way? How essential are the details of the structure?
Early in the present century, the great church historian Louis Duchesne
pointed to church government in later apostolic times by councils of
elders and not by a single bishop. He found that bishops were clearly
assisted by colleges of priests, "who shared the rule of the Christian
community." The bishop did not "always stand out very prominently ...
nor were the clergy always differentiated from the rest of the
congregation ..... All that was said or done was the affair of the whole
body, rather than of the leaders." Duchesne followed this with an appeal
for greater collegiality and less authoritarianism in the church of his
own day. Unfortunately for the distinguished historian, the church of
his day was caught up in the great modernist scare, and he found his
work on the Index.37
The choice of the church's leaders is another area in which historical
research has lately been making some contributions. "In the third
century in the west," Philip Kaufman has written, "not only did the
people elect their bishops, but it was considered important that they do
so." He cites the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus and also St.
Cyprian in support of the position, then narrates how election of
bishops passed to the clergy, was pre-emptied in places by the
metropolitan bishops, then reverted to cathedral canons, who again had
to cope with the interference of neigh- boring bishops and then finally
lost out, in great part, to civil authorities.38
It is interesting to note that when John Carroll became our first bishop
200 years ago, strictly papal anointment of bishops was obtained only in
the Papal States and in mission countries. Much of Carroll's seemingly
anti-Rome rhetoric is explained by his insistence that the church in the
new United States was not a "mission," but "an ordinary national
church," with the inherent right to choose its own bishops and present
their names to Rome for confirmation.39
These historical facts, and there is ample confirmatory evidence
available, throw some light on recent developments around the Catholic
world as in our day Rome, more and more, asserts to name bishops
everywhere. In any case, at least the veteran missionary was in error
who, apropos of protests about the way in which some appointments lately
have been made, wrote to a clerical magazine that "for two thousand
years the pope has named bishops."40 It just did not happen that way.
Pope John Paul II is well aware of the fact. He explains the present
situation as the logical consequence of historical development, as he
forcefully informed the bishops of Austria.41 But development is not
always rectilinear.
There are many other areas for exploration. Richard McBrien thinks that
the "primary and most immediate experience of church is at the parish
level. For most of us, the parish is the church.42 I do not quarrel with
that. But McBrien's Notre Dame colleague, John Van Engen, has written
that organization of the parish was a relatively late medieval
phenomenon, while Giuseppe Alberigo pointed out that, even when they did
begin to function, parish churches had come to compete for people's
custom with a plethora of monastic and conventual churches, oratories,
sanctuaries, chapels of nuns and lay confraternities and the like. It
was, he remarks, "a context that lacked uniformity."43 And perhaps one
not without instructive value today.
The history of Christian marriage is another fascinating topic.
"Marriage," wrote Van Engen, "was not brought literally into the church
until the end of the middle ages, through Christian guidelines began to
transform the institution in the ninth century and its sacramentality
was established in the 12th.""44 I What no earlier centuries? We know
that Ignatious of Antioch at the end of the first century declared that
"when men and women marry, it is desirable to have the bishop's
consent."45 Little was said in subsequent centuries about the form of
marriage, although Pope Siricius did in the 415 insist that the
marriages of priests and deacons should be solemnized before a priest.
It seems that it was not until the 11th or 12th century that church
marriage as we know it became common.46
We could go on and on. But enough. There is indeed an authentic
tradition. There are norms that define the Catholic church. But there
are supposed absolutes that can profit from a skeptical eye. Some we
will want to maintain because they are helpful in building up the Body
of Christ. Others are better consigned with respect to the museum of
antiquities. A discriminating and critical intelligence is needed to
determine which is which.
Jan Timmerman, writing in The Way, suggested that contemporary
theologians, having turned to historical consciousness, now think of
theology's formulations " in terms of their culture-bound and
historically contingent character." In a change from the classical point
of view, interpretation is now considered essential. This shift has had
major consequences:
The church, in its reflection upon its knowledge regarding the
compatibility with the gospel of human practices like slavery, usury and
freedom of conscience, made this shift toward historic consciousness
when it interpreted its previous traditions regarding those questions in
term of its present self-understanding.47
Where else the church's reflection will lead it, remains to be seen. I
close with some words from Etienne Gilson:
... the substance of Christian faith is not immobile, but eternal. ...
in the eternal there is no beginning. God has no history, and neither
has faith .... Nevertheless, people of faith and the world in which they
dwell have one. They are history in their very essence.
The historian studies the life, the thought and the worship of those
people of faith and the world in which they dwell, and from that study
makes a contribution to our understanding of the Great Tradition, the
continuing presence of Christ in his church.
Footnotes
Richard Price, review of W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity, The
Tablet (London; 15 December 1984) 1267.
Herbert W. Schneider, Religion in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge
MA 1952) 132.
Origins 19 (25 January 1990) 549-561. See 552. Also in The Tablet (20
January 1990) 91.
Stephan Kuttner, Harmony from Dissonance: An Interpretation of Medieval
Canon Law (Latrobe PA 1960) 35; Yves Congar, O.P., L'Eglise de saint
Augustin a 1'epoque moderne (Paris 1970) 63.
Edward M. Egan, "Trends in American Spirituality," Origins 16 (30
October 1986) 35.
John Noonan Jr., Contraception: A Study of Its Treatment by the Catholic
Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge MA 1966) 427.
Joseph Rantzinger, "The Ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council,"
Communio 13 (1986) 249.
Christopher Butler, O.S.B., The Theology of Vatican II (Westminster MD
1981) 39.
Daphne Hampson and Rosemary Ruether, "Is There a Place for a Feminist in
a Christian Church?" New Blackfriars 68 (1987) 10.
Acta Apostolicae Sedis 80 (15 November 1988) 1495-1498, especially
1496-1497; Origins 18 (4 August 1988) 149-152.
Acta Apostolicae Sedis 8O (22 August l988) 1121-1125, especially 1123;
Origins 7 (28 April 1988) 803-804.
"Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation," The Documents of Vatican
II (ed. Walter M. Abbott, S.J.; New York 1966) 114-118.
Joseph Ratzinger, "Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,"
Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (ed. Herbert Vorgrimler; New
York 1969) 3:184-185.
Documents of Vatican II 116;117,n.21.
Ibid. 118.
Hubertjedin,"The Second Vatican Council," in History of the Church
(eds.Hubert Jedin et al New York 1989) 141.
Michele Maccarrone, II Concilio Vaticano I e il "Giornale" di mons.
Arrigoni (Padua 1966) 1: 428429, n. 4.
Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century (ed. Bernard M. G. Reardon;
Cambridge 1966) 3.
Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea o 'f Doctrinal
Development (Cambridge 1957); T. Howland Sanks, S.J., Authority in the
Church: A Study in Changing Paradigms (Missoula MT 1974) 21-102.
EdgarHocedez,S.J., Histoire de la theologie au XIXe
siecle(Brussels/Parish l947-1952) 3: 370.
Stephen Tonsor, "Lord Acton on Dollinger's Historical Theology," Journal
of the History of Ideas 20 (1959) 329.
John Lord Acton, "Ultramontanism," in Essays on Church and State (ed.
Douglas Woodruff; London 1952) 49.
John Carroll, "Address to the Roman Catholics of the United States of
America," The John Carroll Papers (ed. Thomas O'Brien Hanley, S.J.;
Notre Dame 1976) 1: 82-144.
H. Richard Niebuhr, "The Protestant Movement and Democracy in the United
States," The Shaping of American Religion eds. James W. Smith and A.
Leland Jamison; (Princeton 1961) 22-23.
The Tablet (London; 24 May 1986) 249.
Joseph Ratzinger, "Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation" (n. 13
supra) 187.
Walter Kasper, "Are Church and Theology Subject to Historical Law?" The
Crisis of Change (Chicago 1969) 7,9.
John W. O'Malley, S.J., "Reform, Historical Consciousness, and Vatican
II's Aggiornamento," Theological Studies 32 (1971) 589-598.
Yves Congar, O.P., "Church History as a Branch of Theology," Concilium
57 (1970) 87.
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York/Oxford 1956) 43.
Joseph Ratzinger, "The Ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council," n.
supra 249.
Karl Rahner,S.J.,"And What Do You Think?"The Jesuits: Yearbook of the
Society of Jesus (Rome 1974) 32.
Robert Rouquette, S.J., "L'Actualite religieuse," Etudes 327 (1967) 79.
Robert Taft, S.J., The Frequency of the Eucharist throughout History,"
Concilium 152 (1982) 21.
Louis McRedmond, "Me Church in Ireland," The Church Now: An Inquiry into
the Present Status of the Church in Britain and Ireland (Dublin 1980)
39.
Ladislas Orsy, S.J., "Three Questions for the Synod," America (17
September 1983) 127; id., The Evolving Church and the Sacrament of
Penance (Denville, NJ 1978).
Glenn F. Chesnut, "A Century of Patristic Studies," A Century of Church
History: The Legacy of Philip Schaff (ed. Henry W. Bowden; Carbondale/
Edwardsville, IL 1988) 48-51.
Philip S. Kaufman, O.S.B., 'Autocracy Isn't the Catholic Style,'
Commonweal (24 February 1989) 112-113. See the Lateran Council of 1059,
in its decree on papal elections, under Pope Nicholas 11, quoting St.
Leo the Great: "No argument will permit them to be considered bishops
who have not been elected by the clergy, nor demanded by the people, nor
consecrated by the bishops of the province with the approval of the
metropolitan." (Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson
(2nd ed; Oxford/New York 1963) 101.
James Hennesey, S.J., "Rome and the Origins of the United States
Hierarchy," The Papacy and the Church in the United States (ed. Bernard
Cooke; New York/ Mahwah 1989) 79-97.
Anthony Zimmerman, S.V.D., letter to the editor, Homiletic and Pastoral
Review 86 (1986) 4.
The Tablet (London: 4 July 1987) 727.
Richard P. McBrien, "The Ecclesiology of the Local Church," a paper
given at Fordham University, September 16,1988.
John Van Engen, "The Christian Middle Ages as a Historical Problem,"
American Historical Review 91 (1986) 542-542; Giuseppe Alberigo, "The
Local Church in the West (1500-1945)," The Heythrop Journal 28 (1987)
127.
Van Engen (N. 43 supra) 543.
Ignatius of Antioch, "Letter to Polycarp," Early Christian Writings (ed.
Maxwell Staniforth; Harmondsworth 1968) 129.
Joseph Martos, Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to
Sacraments in the Catholic Church (Carden City 1982) 407-435. For Pope
Siricius 415-416.
Joan H. Timmerman, "Sexuality and Social justice, the State of the
Question," The Way 28 (1988) 208.
Etienne Gilson, "La Sagesse et le temps," Lumiere et vie 6 (1951) 79-80.
