A publication of Sacred Heart University. All opinions are solely those of the authors.
Dare We Hope?
How, Indeed?

“Catholicism” for Our Time

The great French Jesuit Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) is a theologian whose writings I have dipped into with the episodic passion of the autodidact and the prowling eye of the journalist on the hunt for the mot juste to toss into an article with ostentatious ease. The rigor and depth of the academic? Not me. Which explains why I had never read de Lubac’s foundational first book, Catholicisme, now translated as Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. Its length seemed to reflect the breadth of its topic, and the footnotes alone! Where to start?

But in chatting with a Jesuit friend about the state of the Church in these days of polarization and schism he recommended de Lubac’s Catholicism as a form of spiritual reading. It was a work, he said, to digest in small bites, for inspiration more than research. I heeded his advice, at least initially. The problem is that I found Catholicism so engaging and relevant that I ploughed through it. I failed the marshmallow test (again) yet found both solace and knowledge so apt for an age that could use de Lubac’s unitary vision more than ever.

The volume is an ambitious work of ressourcement that relies on patristic and early medieval writings to elucidate the fundamentals of the Church’s nature that have been obscured over time, especially by a constrained notion of “tradition.” Despite the sweep of such an undertaking de Lubac regularly delivers epigrammatic insights that frame the central themes and fix themselves in the mind.

The one that stood out for this first-time reader is also the book’s most consistent and powerfully argued theme, namely the effort to “bring out the singular unitive power of Catholic Christianity and its capacity to transcend all human divisions,” as Avery Dulles wrote in his appreciation of de Lubac at his confrere’s death in 1991. The Church, de Lubac writes near the end of Catholicism, “is the very opposite of a ‘closed society’” and “the very opposite of the harsh exclusiveness which characterizes the sectarian spirit … The Church is at home everywhere, and everyone should be able to feel himself at home in the Church.” 

At the heart of this vision is a Christian humanism, one that echoes the famous line of the second-century B.C. Roman playwright Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Or, as de Lubac adapts it, “Nothing authentically human, whatever its origin, can be alien to [the Church].” That will find a later echo, thanks to de Lubac, in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Such an orientation means engaging with people rather than abstractions—all people, believers or atheists. “Catholicism is essentially social,” he declares at the outset. “It is social in the deepest sense of the word: not merely in its applications in the field of natural institutions but first and foremost in itself, in the heart of its mystery, in the essence of its dogma.”

Undergirding this essence is a generosity of spirit which is the gift of the Holy Spirit: issue anathemas all you want, Catholics. Even if you score points against your foe or find vindication in a passage of canon law or a paragraph in the catechism, if you lack charity, you are already guilty of a much graver sin. “Charity is the unity of the Church,” Hugh of Saint Victor says in one citation. “Whether we call it charity or unity it is all the same, because unity is charity and charity is unity.” In de Lubac’s gloss: “The charity that depreciates unity is never authentic, there is only a seeming unity where charity does not reign.”

In other words, the excuse that, “I’m doing this mean thing to you out of Christian love because you broke a rule” doesn’t hold up. For de Lubac, “the poison of dissension is as baneful as that of false doctrine.” And he blames the overemphasis on “ecclesiastical authority”—what today we just call clericalism—for undermining the spirit of unity by turning Catholicism into “a system of limitations.”

De Lubac’s work is so “Catholic” that he can inspire popes as diverse as Benedict XVI and Francis. But he can also be cherry-picked to support a range of views, and conservatives have often done so with great relish and some justification. That’s because de Lubac was so dismayed by many trends in the aftermath of the council that in 1972 he helped found, along with Joseph Ratzinger, the conservative-tilting journal Communio. Ratzinger, in the prime of his career as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer, in 1988 also wrote a brief foreword to Catholicism.

In that foreword, the cardinal pays moving tribute to the formative influence de Lubac’s book had on his own theology. But in a sign of how much Ratzinger—or the times, or both—had shifted, he said that the “social dimension” of the faith that de Lubac stressed and that was so important in earlier decades had been “simplified and flattened” and that the dangers today were a “merely sociological” view of faith rather than the “narrow-minded individualistic Christianity” that originally concerned de Lubac. It was a left-handed compliment from a rightward-leaning churchman, and not out of character for Ratzinger, who was always anxious to rationalize his own evolution.

But if Ratzinger was correct, or if he was just using the foreword to talk about what he wanted to talk about, it seems clear that the Church and the world today are so divided and atomized that de Lubac’s focus on the universal over the tribal, the social over the individual, is needed more than ever. Perhaps that is why this work from the late 1930s—a few years before de Lubac would find himself in the French underground working against fascism—seems so fresh to me. It presents Christianity as it was to the classical world, and ought to be now, “a radiant novelty in the midst of a world grown old in its divisions.”


David Gibson is a journalist and author and director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. 

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