The Reshaping of Catholicism

...and how, with unseemly speed, certain segments have rushed to pontificate upon "post-Vatican II models" (or the recently-in-vogue "paradigms...

...Dulles's fabled "balance" is everywhere in evidence...

...and the several essays on the council, included in this volume, exhibit complete commitment to its spirit as well as masterful familiarity with its letter...

...His best-known book, Models of the Church, set the terms for a decades-long debate...

...It is, after all, the church of Christ that we seek to reshape...

...It shows how relatively unprepared the church in the United States was for the council...

...It brings together essays written in the course of the past five years...

...As a result the book shows more coherence than many monographs: it reads like a finished product rather than a disjointed assemblage...

...Third, its principal content and norm is Jesus Christ...

...Moreover, this church, as a universal body, must exist in a variety of cultures, assuming legitimate new forms, yet retaining its own integral and distinctive identity...

...Dulles titles the collection: The Reshaping of Catholicism...

...And so the book offers instruction on Vatican II...

...Second, it points beyond itself to the God of mystery who both sustains and transcends the faith-relationship...

...Following Blondel, Dulles considers three characteristics of Catholic tradition...

...and several essays have been refashioned for their inclusion here...

...This irenic and ecumenical theologian has been a quiet disturber of the comfortable cliche...

...For Dulles's essays offer, in effect, carefully considered principles of discernment toward the delicate task of authentic reshaping...

...Our need is great...

...But I am convinced that unless its members allow themselves to be instructed by the council, the church will not be able to find the inner coherence and dynamism needed to deal constructively with the tensions and crises that lie ahead...

...He writes: "The source and center is not some abstract metaphysical principle or virtue but a concrete universal, Jesus of Nazareth...

...and only thus truly subserves the life of the world...

...Thus he deprecates the dissociation of church and kingdom, prevalent in some circles today, and insists that "the consummation of the kingdom will be the fulfillment, not the disappearance, of the church...

...Only a church with strong sacramental and hierarchical structures, resistant to individualism and sectarianism, can effectively oppose this threat...

...Pottmeyer contends that, though Vatican II juxtaposed continuity and newness, it did not itself fashion a synthesis...

...and, on the way of discipleship, we may discover that, in the process, we ourselves are gradually being reshaped...

...The Reshaping of Catholicism is unadulterated Dulles: historically learned, limpidly argued, unerring in its ability to hone in on the heart of an issue...

...So delicate and tensive an enterprise, Dulles maintains, requires a "conscious effort to preserve certain shared symbols and structures of unity and continuity...

...His persuasion is sounded in the "Preface": "Like every historical achievement, Vatican II had its shortcomings...

...To my mind this is an indispensable statement of "the state of the question" in Roman Catholic eccle-siology...

...but it has also witnessed the less happy spread of a promiscuous pluralism, which threatens the unity of the faith (whether this threat emanates from Lefebvrites of left or right...

...He reads Vatican II not as a radical new departure toward a "brave new church," but as being in "substantial continuity" with the deepest meaning of Catholicism's centuries-long tradition...

...REVEREND ROBERT IMBELLI is director of the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College...

...It alone evokes, shapes, and sustains discipleship...

...Yet the church is not itself Lumen gentium: the title rightfully pertains only to Christ who is Lord of the church...

...There is considerable deftness in the selection and organization of the collection...

...Here Dulles contrasts two antagonistic views of tradition, whose conflict, in some ways, has dominated the post-conciliar debate...

...In this via media the focus falls not primarily on the tradita (esteemed by traditionalists), nor on the traditio (extolled by modernists), but on the Traditus: the person of Christ who gives himself for our sake and is "given over" in the tradition...

...Such a church is alone congruent with the vision of Vatican II...

...It will be achieved, both Pottmeyer and Dulles insist, not by leaving Vatican II behind, but by exploring more fully not merely its critical correctives, but, most especially, its spiritual depth...

...For Dulles does not shy away from offering and arguing a distinctive perspective: one whose watchwords are continuity, catholicity, and Christocen-trism...

...The church, in her living tradition, celebrates, communicates, and serves the Light who is Christ...

...This living relation to Christ is the very heart of tradition...

...Dulles's Reshaping of Catholicism sets forth the ingredients of a new ecclesiological synthesis...

...Perhaps the book's pivotal chapter is the one entitled: "Vatican II and the Recovery of Tradition" (originally a contribution to a festschrift for Karl Rahner...

...The twenty-odd years since the council have, indeed, seen the development of a salutary pluralism, which Vatican II initiated and promoted...

...In contrast to some who claim to "reinterpret" or "reconstruct" Catholicism, Dulles's endeavor appears at once more modest and more faithful...

...This is the theological task the council has bequeathed the post-conciliar church...

...One of the most knowledgeable commentators upon Vatican II, Hermann-Joseph Pottmeyer, has warned of the danger, in the aftermath of the council, that a previous inadequate vision was being opposed by an equally inadequate counter-vision...

...In times of transition and confusion, affirming the seemingly obvious can be the greatest service...

...Most hopeful and promising in his sketch is the clarity of its Christie center, the fixed point of every authentic re-configuration...

...Without apologies he endorses the Second Vatican Council...

...Hence, the matrix of tradition is the entire community of disciples which is church...

...a church to believe in and in which to believe...

...One may pray, therefore, that the present book of essays is but prelude to a vaster undertaking: a new de Ecclesia Christi, profoundly rooted in the old, discerningly open to the new...

...After Yves Congar, Dulles has probably been the most influential eccle-siologist of our day...

...Robert Imbelli Through a long and distinguished career, Avery Dulles has been teacher extraordinaire to the Catholic church in English-speaking nations...

...His critique of the narrow ecclesiastical vision of a uniquely institutional and hierarchical model of church provoked the wrath of the right...

...This reserved, respectful man has taught the church to the church, because he has been in love with the church Catholic: a church at once resilient and rooted, charismatic and institutional...

...With clarity, grace, and understated wit, he has helped theologians and ministers alike to rediscover our Catholic heritage, converse sympathetically yet critically with our contemporary world, and envision how faithfulness and creativity might be wed in the life of the church...

...For in the absence of such a synthesis, as Lawrence Cunningham has recently indicated in these pages, we risk "to dissipate our energies on in-house squabbles...

...The other is the "modernist" view, in which process is so stressed that content and continuity appear secondary concerns...

...One is an "objec-tivist" view, whose authoritarian "traditionalism" rejects any hint of development or change...

...Perhaps an (admittedly more unwieldy) alternative would have been: True and False Reshaping in the Church (playing upon Congar's famous work on True and False Reform...

...First, its carrier is not so much the explicit pronouncement as the "tacit" environment of faith...

...Yet this does not reduce to a bland "on the one hand...on the other...

...It identifies the characteristic features of Vatican II's ecclesial vision, stressing the call to ongoing reform under the Word of God, the recovery of collegiality as ingredient to the reality of church, the active and rightful participation of the laity in the church's life, and the new prominence given the church's social mission as a requirement of the Gospel itself...

...In his attempt to sketch a via media, Dulles draws upon the pioneering reflection of Maurice Blondel who, at the turn of the century, sought a path between a Procrustean "dogmatism" and a protean "historicism...

...If a new synthesis in ecclesiology is, indeed, a desideratum, who better than Dulles to accomplish the task...

...For twenty years Dulles has pursued his path, less mindful of the shoals on either side than of the Gospel of eternal life, whose proclamation and celebration, he contends, is the church's primary purpose...

...while his advocacy of the "Hartford Appeal" of 1975, which cautioned against "the in-strumentalization of the Gospel and the tendency to equate the kingdom of God with the results of human efforts to build a just society," elicited the obloquy of the left...