The Thomist 73 (2009): 1-27 ON THE PLACE OF SERVAIS PINCKAERS (t 7 APRIL 2008) IN THE RENEW AL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY ROMANUS CESSARIO, 0.P. St. John's Seminary Boston, Massachusetts I. APERC::US ON FATHER PINCKAERS A S FAR AS I AM ABLE to determine, The Thomist first took extended notice of Servais-Theodore Pinckaers's moral theology in an article that I wrote in 1987. 1 The essay treated theology at Fribourg, and it introduced the main lines of Fr. Pinckaers's Les sources de la morale chretienne, his chef d'oeuvre which had been published a few years earlier at the Editions Universitaires in Fribourg, Switzerland. Because the Belgian Dominican whom this current issue of The Thomist honors for his life-long commitment to the truth of the Catholic faith practiced the virtues that he wrote about, especially the virtues of modesty and humility, few were aware in 1987 that the Holy See was turning to this distinguished University of Fribourg theology professor for assistance with two very important projects: The Catechism of the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul H's encyclical letter Veritatis splendor. The protocols of the Holy See do not allow official confirmation of the list of persons that are consulted about its important documents of recent date. The Church wisely leaves this information for historians to examine. Still, those who later espied on his bureau the handsomely white leather-bound edition of the Catechism that today holds an honored place in the Pinckaers Archives can only 1 See Romanus Cessario, O.P., "Theology at Fribourg," The Thomist 1 51 (1987): 325-66. 2 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. conclude that Fr. Pinckaers had contributed to its composition. Even those who never visited his office in Fribourg could recognize his theological fingerprints in more than one place in the Catechism, which first saw the light of day in a French edition of 1992. Much the same can be said about Fr. Pinckaers's participation in the officially summoned "workshop" that provided Pope John Paul II with the draft materials for the encyclical that he would eventually sign on 6 August 1993. Most Catholic scholars knew in 1987 only that these two literary milestones in the pontificate of Pope John Paul II were forthcoming. Father Pinckaers's work on both the Catechism and Veritatis splendor turned out to supply crowning moments to his more than half-century professional theological life-sixty-three years as a Dominican. No definitive evaluation of the contributions that Servais Pinckaers made to the shaping of twentieth-century Catholic theology exists in print. This happy task awaits the patient work of some future historian of theology who--thanks to the Dominican Fathers of the Albertinum in Fribourg, Switzerland-will find at his or her disposal the bulk of our author's primary materials. At the same time, Fr. Pinckaers's work has not gone unnoticed. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 2005, a celebratory symposium was held at the University of Fribourg. During the program, I sketched out the broad lines of Fr. Pinckaers's biography, both spiritual and academic, and located him within the long tradition of commentators on St. Thomas Aquinas, especially the strain that developed within the borders of his native Belgium. 2 Other speakers on the same program highlighted selected themes from his theological corpus, writings in moral and spiritual theology, and pointed out their significance for contemporary issues. Father Pinckaers first took up his teaching of the whole of moral theology in his native Belgium. The year was 1953, a time when Europe was still living out the traumas of the post-World 2 This intervention was later published: Romanus Cessario, O.P., "Hommage au Pere Servais-Theodore Pinckaers, OP: The Significance of His Work," Nova et Vetera, English edition, 5 (2007): 1-16. SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND THE RENEWAL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 3 War II period. In fact, the experience of the Second World War left a strong impression on the young Servais Pinckaers. The wartime hostilities began for him shortly before 27 May 1940, the date that Belgium surrendered to Germany. They ended in the fall of 1944 when Brussels was liberated from the occupation army. On his first visit to the United States in 1990, Fr. Pinckaers shared his recollections of what he and his family had to endure throughout . the war. He deeply moved his audience at a theological conference held in Washington, D.C., when he prefaced his formal remarks with an expression of gratitude to the American armed forces that had liberated the region surrounding his native Liege. On the occasion of the above-mentioned conference, Fr. Pinckaers delivered a paper titled "The Christian Concept of the Moral Conscience. " 3 The contents of that paper reflect the methodological preferences that Father Pinckaers had been developing since his arrival in 1953 to teach at the Dominican study house at La Sarte, near the Belgian city of Huy. His preferences for the sources of theological investigation included the Sacred Scriptures, the rich treasury of patristic authors from both East and West, with special attention paid to the way that St. Thomas Aquinas incorporated these authorities into his exposition of the sacra doctrina, and the documents of the modern period whose composition had been shaped by certain decisions mandated at the Council of Trent (1545-63) for the reform of Catholicism. 4 3 The date was 20 March 1990. The conference was sponsored by the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family and was held in the auditorium of Caldwell Hall at The Catholic University of America. Unfortunately, the proceedings of this conference have never been published. Father Pinckaers's paper was translated by the Dominican nun who would later make his Les sources de la morale chretienne available to the English-speaking world, the late Sister Mary Thomas Noble, O.P., (1920-2008) a professed nun for sixty-one years of the Dominican monastery in Buffalo, New York. 4 Here are Fr. Pinckaers's words from the typescript he used at the above-mentioned Washington conference: "I propose, therefore, to study with you what we might call the history of the Christian moral conscience, in three main stages: the New Testament, the theology of St. Thomas, heir of patristic thought, and finally the modern manuals of moral theology which have formed priests and faithful through preaching and catechesis since the Council of Trent, that Council which we so often reflect in our current discussions of ethics." 4 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. Formal instruction at the Dominican studium or study house at La Sarte was suspended in 1964. It is my understanding that Fr. Pinckaers viewed this decision as a casualty of an early and perhaps precipitous implementation of reform measures thought by some persons to accord with the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). After a short period spent in preaching and research, Fr. Pinckaers, in 1973, again took up his professional theological activity at the University of Fribourg. He remained active there until his death on 7 April 2008. Those thirty-five years of research, preaching, teaching, and writing afforded this gifted Dominican the time and wherewithal to produce a corpus of work whose dimensions may be judged partially from the bibliography carefully constructed by John Berkman and Craig Steven Titus. 5 Even before his arrival in Fribourg, however, Fr. Pinckaers had begun to publish in the area of moral theology. In fact, the very year that La Sarte suspended formal instruction, 1964, Fr. Pinckaers published his first book-length study, Le renouveau de la morale. 6 Renewal was not a foreign concept to the young Belgian Dominican. When one considers the titles of his licentiate and doctoral dissertations, published in 1952 and 1958 respectively, the impression is gained that Servais Pinckaers had been duly influenced by the theological motifs that would come to characterize much of Catholic theology in the twentieth century. During the course of his preparation for teaching within the Dominican Order, Fr. Pinckaers had turned his attention while still a student himself at La Sarte to "La 'Surnaturel' du P. De Lubac" and, later at the Angelicum in Rome, to "La Vertu d' esperance de Pierre Lombard aSt. Thomas d' Aquin. " 7 Hope and the supernatural: these are themes that one will recognize as important indicators of the concerns that not a few theologians took up during the twentieth century. These and other theological 5 See Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Pinckaers Reader: Renewing Thomistic Moral Theology, ed. John Berkman and Craig Steven Titus (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 397-411. 6 Servais Pinckaers, O.P., Le renouveau de la morale (Tournai: Casterman, 1964). 7 See Berkman and Titus, eds., The Pinckaers Reader, 401, for details of publication. SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND THE RENEWAL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 5 motifs, some would argue, also distinguish in large measure the tenor of the documents of the Second Vatican Council from the sort of theological language used to draft the decrees of the Council of Trent. Father Pinckaers, however, gave no quarter to the view that the twentieth-century ecumenical council of the Catholic Church signaled a rupture, that is, a moment of discontinuity, with all that until 1965 had enriched Catholic theology. II. TwENTIETH-CENTURY THEOLOGY In order to evaluate the place that Servais Pinckaers holds in contemporary moral theology, it is useful to recall the theological world that he inhabited. It is fortunate, then, that the distinguished Dominican philosopher and author, Scotsman Fergus Kerr, has composed recently an account of some twentiethcentury Catholic theologians. 8 With both the scholarly expertise and the clarity of expression that one has become accustomed to expect from this recognized figure of intellectual life in Great Britain, Fr. Kerr presents us with profiles of three Dominican, three Jesuit, and four diocesan priests active during the twentieth century in Roman Catholic theological circles. Although he admits that there may be other figures of meritorious standing whom he has overlooked, these are the chosen clerics whose contributions to the evolution of Roman Catholic theology in the past century he considers worthy of attention. All in all, the book makes for fascinating reading. The author, whose professional career includes service in the Royal Air Force, makes no claim to write the history of Catholic theology in the twentieth century. Instead he supplies, as it were, snapshots of the major themes, their chief exponents, and also of the sometimes, as Kerr reports them, irksome events that crystallized around the Second Vatican Council. This milestone event of Christian life in the twentieth century began in 1962, the year that Fergus Gordon Kerr was 8 Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). 6 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. ordained a priest. As noted above, this is the same period during which Servais Pinckaers was preparing for publication his views on the renewal of moral theology. The subtitle of Kerr's book reads: "From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism." Father Kerr observes pleasantly the movement away from the kind of theology practiced in Catholic schools after Pope Leo XIII, in 1879, recalled the attention of Catholics thinkers to both the texts and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. 9 At the same time, Kerr tracks an evolution in the style of doing theology that was, for lack of a better term, less structured than the work of the man whom Kerr deputizes as a standard-bearer for Roman style "Neoscholasticism," his fellow Dominican, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. 10 To give a descriptive name to contemporary Catholic theology, Kerr picks a theme that he observes can be traced back to the third-century thinker Origen of Alexandria. All things considered, Kerr finds surprising the emergence of nuptial mysticism as a leitmotiv for present-day Catholic thought. But there it is. Bridal mysticism however has not made all the problems go away. There are some loose ends to consider. The final chapter of Kerr's book describes issues in postconciliar theological and pastoral circles that today remain more or less unresolved. These include controversies in ecclesiology, liturgical practices, and, especially significant for considering the work of Fr. Pinckaers, moral theology. The work that Fr. Kerr has done helps us to put into relief the importance of Fr. Pinckaers's contributions to contemporary moral theology, even though Pinckaers does not make the cut of Kerr's makers of that theology. As noted below, Servais Pinckaers appears only briefly in Kerr's history and then, for that matter, as part of a concluding remark on the influence of the French Dominican, M.-D. Chenu. The benevolent reader will not be 9 The author earlier addressed this topic in his article, "A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents," International Journal of Systematic Theology 8 (2006): 128-48. 10 Since the publication of Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange has been examined on his own merits by Aidan Nichols, in his 2008 book, Reason with Piety: Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought (Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2008). SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND THE RENEWAL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 7 surprised to discover that this essay aims to suggest that Fr. Pinckaers merits a place of greater significance in the history of twentieth-century Catholic theology than Fergus Kerr seems prepared to acknowledge. But first we need to consider the competition as Kerr presents them. To accomplish this objective, I will offer some benignly critical observations about Kerr's Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians. A preliminary observation may be placed under the heading of perspectival hermeneutics. A crucial decade in the twentieth century separates the present author's generation from that of Fr. Kerr. It is called the 1950s. Fergus Kerr began his public Dominican career in 1962, whereas I and my classmates, the ordination class of 1971, were just then starting the program of institutional studies that would continue through the year that has become emblematic for the large-scale social, cultural, and religious revolutions that occurred, suddenly, a little after the close of the Second Vatican Council: the Year 1968. The French still refer to "68ers," soixante-huitards. In Catholic circles at least, the turmoil experienced especially in northern Europe both during and after 1968 did not erupt with the same vigor in the United States, except among the very avant-gardist. To the best of my recollection, our American theology teachers, both at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., and at The Catholic University of America, did not exhibit the same degree of soul-trying angst that Kerr remarks upon throughout the course of his narrative, especially when he discusses the reactions to the efforts of the Church's pastors to shepherd erring theological inquiry. Our overall theological serenity may also explain why the same Dominican House of Studies and its theological orbit would later come to embrace the teaching of Fr. Pinckaers as quite congenial to its own purposes and experiences. By and large, we were instructed to take the long view of things. Recall too that during the very hectic days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fr. Pinckaers was busy about the work of preaching and evangelization. He was, in other words, practicing with his sources for the salvation of souls. The Dominican motto, contemplare et 8 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. contemplata aliis tradere, with its inbuilt emphasis on seeking the Highest Truth, shields the one who observes it from paying too much attention to the vicissitudes of the temporal. 11 III. THEOLOGY AND THEOLOGIANS It is fair to observe that the history of Catholic theology in the twentieth century remains largely a European affair. The authors Kerr studies save one are each continental Europeans: French, Belgian, German, Swiss, and Polish: Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Edward Schillebeeckx, Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Hans Kiing, Karol Wojtyla, and Joseph Ratzinger. And while the Canadian Bernard Lonergan retired to Boston College (U.S.A.), he spent most of his mature years teaching in Rome. Kerr, in any case, finds himself wellplaced to comment on developments that transpired for the most part on the other side of the English Chanel. Kerr also, perhaps inadvertently, alerts his readers to the fact that theology has come to be identified with theologians. Today, many people take this equation for granted. It was not always so. In the Catholic world at least, the identification of theology with the scholars who manufacture it emerges as a largely unnoticed upshot of the Second Vatican Council. During the first half of the twentieth century, the views of individual theologians counted for much less than they do today among many students and, especially, teachers of theology. How did everyday theology students occupy themselves for the better part of the twentieth century? They studied theology. Catholic students, at least, were expected to learn the sum of theology, whether they acquired only the conclusions of this special science or, as happened with the intellectually bright, they also made an effort to discover the arguments that support the conclusions. In either case, theology students left their courses with the conviction that they held a purchase on a complete body 11 A Latin antiphon once used at the first nocturn of Matins on the Feast of St. Dominic captures the Dominican preference for the eternal: "Documentis artium eruditus saris, transiit ad studium summae veritatis." SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND THE RENEWAL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 9 of knowledge that, for the majority at least, would enable them to conduct the business of the Church. This "business" of salvation would have included everything from running large urban dioceses to preparing first holy communicants. For a small minority from whose ranks the ten twentieth-century theologians treated in this book were selected, it would have meant in the normal course of affairs passing on to the next generation of clerics the theology that they had received. However, there is not muc,h evidence to support the <;:laim that Catholic clerics (effectively the only ones to undertake theological studies before the 1960s) thought of themselves as adhering to a system or to a method authored by a specific theologian of their own generation. 12 Most Catholic thinkers expressed no substantial reservations about the above-described way of learning and doing theology. Indeed they considered the established practice, if you will, as eminently suited to the "sapiential" character of the instruction that they received. This instruction the same Catholics would have referred to simply as "theology." A sapiential conception of theology set up certain expectations. Those who engaged seriously the task of doing theology assumed that they were being exposed to a specifically divine science, one that would communicate to them the highest wisdom, a sacred teaching articulated by propositions, the ultimate authority for the truthfulness of which resides in God. Aquinas refers to the sacra doctrina in the first question of the Summa Theologiae, and he observes there that "holy teaching goes to God most properly as deepest origin and highest end. " 13 The typically Catholic preference for the sapiential in theology created a certain ambience in which Catholic theology was undertaken. There was, for example, not much interest in the tenets of other Christian denominations, let alone in what other 12 Even the casuist authors, who were obliged to deal with the application of moral principles to culturally specific cases, were entitled to official recognition (auctores probatz) only after their death. 13 See STh I, q.1, a. 6: "sacra autem doctrina propriisime determinat de Deo secundum quod est altissima causa" (English translation adapted from that of Fr. Gilby in volume 1 of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa theologiae [Blackfriars, 1964]). 10 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. religions held. The expression "religious studies" was largely unknown in Catholic circles. Theology did not train one for a proprietary occupation. Few considered studying theology the religious equivalent of taking up other learned professions, such as law or medicine. Theology was about divinely revealed, supernatural truths that showed the way to embracing a beatific and beatifying Wisdom. As the widespread popularity that grew up during the first decades of the twentieth century around the nineteenth-century Carmelite nun, Therese of Lisieux, illustrates, the Catholic people knew instinctually that one did not require a university education in order to grasp the highest truths of Catholic theology. The theologians whom Kerr studies, with the exception of the two diocesan priests who became Popes, Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, voiced significant objections to this sapiential way of doing and learning theology. They of course were not opposed to seeking divine wisdom. Instead the eight objectors whose work Kerr sketches wondered whether the received way of doing theology, to put it nicely, met the needs of their contemporaries. Another way to describe succinctly the outlook that applies to all ten twentieth-century theologians Kerr discusses is aggiornamento. Each in his own way felt that some improvements needed to be made to the Scholastic theses that had become standard in the Catholic schools of their day. It comes as no surprise to discover that Kerr's theologians either theorized about or themselves modeled new ways of doing Catholic theology. One or two of them attempted to do both. Before the end of the 1960s, studying theology, as far as many students of theology were concerned, effectively meant studying theologies. Pluralism had become not only allowed but fashionable. This new openness to diversity did not proceed without some high-ranking support. The eminent, Paris-trained archbishop of Montreal, Paul-Emil Cardinal Leger, was heard to exclaim at the Second Vatican Council: "Vae Ecclesiae unius SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND THE RENEW AL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 11 doctoris!" 14 The purpled Father may not have envisioned how things would turn out. He may not have foreseen that many more serious woes would follow. Still, in retrospect, one could opine that from that moment on the floor of the council, at least symbolically, the hermeneutics of discontinuity began to pick up steam. 15 In any event, many theologians and others as well still commonly describe themselves as Rahnerians, Lonerganians, disciples of de Lubac and surely of Balthasar and, a few at least, as followers of Hans Kiing. The Dominicans Chenu, Congar, and especially Schillebeeckx remain influential, even though their family names have not become commonly used theological sobriquets. The pope-theologians of course occupy a different place in the Church's theological architecture, although the present Holy Father still distinguishes explicitly some of his scholarly work from his exercise of the Petrine office. 16 IV. A LONG AND TESTED TRADITION The question of the overall effectiveness of the twentiethcentury theologians who challenged the established way of doing things is one that Fr. Kerr, as far as I am able to discern, leaves unanswered. I do not blame him. Who would want to run the risk of making a definitive statement about the present-day state of Catholic theology? One fact remains: until the mid-1960s, and in some places later still, students of theology were content with studying, in one form or another, the writings of the great Scholastic authors, which since the end of the nineteenth century meant almost exclusively the works of Thomas Aquinas, especially Cited from Acta synodalia III/VII, 709 in Nikolaus Lobkowicz, "Der Beitrag der (deutschen) Neuscholastik zur Versohnung der Kirche mit der Moderne," Forum Katholische Theologie 20 (2004): 241-56, at 252. The article discusses the same subject as Fr. Kerr, but with emphasis on the German-speaking world. 15 For further discussion on and analysis of this theme, see Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, ed. Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 16 For an account of the present Holy Father's initial training in theology see my article, "The Theological Heritage of Pope Benedict XVI," Nova et Vetera, English edition, 5 (2007): 267-70. 14 12 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. his Summa Theologiae. This program surely held true for both dogmatic and moral theology, although as Fr. Pinckaers has pointed out, the casuist paradigm for doing moral theology seriously distorted the Thomist approach to this discipline from the mid-sixteenth century until the close of the Second Vatican Council. 17 Dogmatic theology remained Thomist. Sometimes primary texts were used. At other times, theological texts by recognized authors (called manuals to indicate the convenience of reference that they afforded) were employed because of their overall pedagogical utility. When Catholic theology students read outside the list of required texts, they turned generally to approved authors who expounded particular aspects of what is known simply as Catholic doctrine. Most of this extracurricular reading would have fallen into the category of spiritual reading. Whatever else may be said about this Thomist-based program for teaching and learning Catholic theology, it had passed the test of time, in fact, a test of centuries. Neoscholasticism, it should be observed, accounts for only about ninety years of this long Thomist-dominated history. The death of John Capreolus in 1444 marks a turning point in the Thomist tradition and in Western theology in general. 18 Based on the diffusion of the summaries of his four-volume Defensiones, it is arguable that the practice of learning theology by studying approved compendia has been in place since the end of the fifteenth century. 19 How earlier developments in Western 17 For a brief treat.ment of this topic, see Servais Pinckaers, O.P., Morality: The Catholic View, trans. Michael Sherwin, O.P. (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2001), 32-41. Other sacred sciences, such as canon law and Sacred Scripture, also were taught according to the established practices of a given period. The emergence in the modern period of the scientific study of Sacred Scripture is a topic that requires its own treatment. In any case, scripture studies do not fall within the compass of Kerr's book, which probably explains why the Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange (d. 1938) does not make the cut. 18 For information about Capreolus and his Defensiones, see John Capreolus: On the Virtues, ed. Kevin White and Romanus Cessario (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), especially, xxvii-xxxv. Father Pinckaers wrote the foreword to this volume. 19 The first compendium of Capreolus appeared in 1497, the Opus in Capreolum, by the Italian Dominican Silvestro da Prierio (d. 1527). For further information, see Michael Tavuzzi, "Capreolus clans !es ecrits de Silvestro da Prierio, o.p. (1456-1527)" in Jean SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND THE RENEWAL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 13 theology that date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries comport with this generalization hardly requires elucidation. The medieval achievement is both well known and, at the same time, too complex to summarize here. 20 It is true that during the later medieval and early modern periods variety emerged among the Schoolmen. The theses multiplied. Universities allotted chairs to Thomist, Scotist, and Nominalist professors. Sometimes new findings from either philosophy or the physical sciences affected some Catholic theologians. But figures such as Raymond Lull (d. 1315) and Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464), although both prolific authors, never produced complete presentations of Catholic doctrine. The sixteenth-century Protestant reformers each agreed that the medieval Schoolmen had missed altogether the point of Christian theology. "Yes," wrote Luther in 1541, "we have a beautiful, pure, and holy Church-one such as existed in the time of the apostles. " 21 Followers of Luther and the other reformers went on to generate their own history of theology, their own Scholasticism of sorts. In the Catholic world, however, clerical students, by and large from the start of the sixteenth century, read Aquinas and his commentators to prepare for their service to the Church. This practice was effectively confirmed on 11 April 15 67 when Pope St. Pius V proclaimed Thomas Aquinas a Doctor of the Church, the first theologian to be added to the traditional list of eight doctors from the patristic period. Why Aquinas? The Church had to ensure that those who studied theology received a complete instruction in the deposit of faith. Elsewhere I have summarized the development of Thomism after the Council of Trent. 22 It is true that there existed differences of opinion among the schools and within the schools. The enigmatic Dominican Thomas of Campanella (d. 1639), Capreolus en son temps 1380-1444, ed. Guy Bedouelle, Roman us Cessario, and Kevin White (Paris: Cerf, 1997): 239-58. 20 It is useful to reflect that the standard theological curriculum has not changed much since it was formalized in the Sentences of Peter the Lombard (d. 1160). 21 Text cited by Guy Bedouelle in his The Reform of Catholicism, 1480-1620 (Toronto: PIMS, 2008), 30. 22 See my A Short History of Thomism (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005). 14 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. especially with his views on the Immaculate Conception, provides one example. Sometimes these differences became aggravated, but not threatening to Catholic truth. The Molinist controversies at the end of the sixteenth century fall into this category. At other times the differences in fact threatened to distort Catholic truth. The Church's lengthy responses to Jansenism and Quietism witness to threats of this nature. Theology rarely lapses into periods of inertia. However, the majority of theology students still studied their lessons from books approved for their fidelity to Catholic doctrine. They mastered the "givens of Catholic faith." 23 The authors of these Thomist compendia and manuals became household names, so to speak, and there developed established pedigrees within the commentatorial tradition. It is also true that during this period the Church oversaw the teaching of Catholic theology according to the diverse means available to her in the face of European political absolutism. After all, the sixteenthcentury Protestant Reform had provided what today we would call a salutary wake-up call. Religious communities require some way to regulate the doctrines and practices that keep them together. The French Revolution did much to disturb in Europe the practice of both Roman Catholic life and theology. After the first quarter of the nineteenth century, practitioners of theological studies began to regroup. It was about this time that the young Gioacchino Pecci, the future Leo XIII, while still a student in Viterbo, recalled that he had seen an edition of Aquinas's Summa on his father's library shelf, and wrote home to ask that it be sent to him. The seeds of the Leonine renewal of Thomism had been planted. Can one point to smart Catholics who were not fullfledged Thomists? The example of Cardinal Newman may come to the minds of some readers. But even today, no one would argue that the finely crafted writings of this distinguished Englishman supply a complete course in Catholic doctrine. We are left with the conclusion that the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas set the standard for theological education. 23 The phrase is adapted from the title of a book by the French Dominican Ambroise Gardeil (d. 1931), Ledonne revete et la theologie (Paris, 1910). SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND THE RENEWAL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 15 Each twentieth-century theologian treated by Fergus Kerr, having undergone his basic theological formation before the Second Vatican Council, was educated not by reading the interesting theologians du jour but rather by studying the comprehensive list of theses in philosophy, dogmatic theology, and moral theology that more or less reflected the main tenets of Aristotelian Thomism. Whether they were Dominican, Jesuit, or diocesan priests, each was obliged to appropriate the time-tested theses that were held to reflect the authentic thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Ad mentem divi Thomae, as the expression went. 24 As Fr. Kerr makes abundantly clear, each of the theologians he treats reacted, with various degrees of antipathy and for various reasons, against one or another expression of this thesis-based Thomist theology. This observation applies as well to Bernard Lonergan, even though his early compositions reveal that he was a master of the literary genre that had become accepted in the theological schools. Lonergan's theses on soteriology, which are still very useful today, would reveal to not a few Catholic theologians and others what they do not know about the complete Catholic teaching on the mystery of our redemption. 25 What remains unclear is whether the reaction to the way of teaching the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas also meant on the part of Kerr's ten twentieth-century theologians a rejection of the Common Doctor. V. CHALLENGES TO CATHOLIC DOCTRINE Father Kerr, like many other observers of developments in modern Catholic thought, identifies the difficult-to-define movement known as Modernism as the catalyst for eruptions in 24 To give just one example, there is the Jesuit Giovanni Maria Cornoldi (1822-92) whose lessons in philosophy were put into Latin under the title Institutiones Philosophicce ad mentem divi Thomce Aquinatis. He was a prominent refuter of Rosminianism. 25 Father Matthew Lamb, a student of Fr. Lonergan, reports that the latter recognized the importance of the manuals. Indeed, his systematic treatises De Dea Trina and De Verba Incarnato, as well as yet unpublished scripta on the sacraments and other topics from when he taught the Jesuits in Canada before going to Rome, used the manual thesis method. What Lonergan wanted was that a number of theologians with different expertise in biblical, patristic, and Thomist studies would collaborate in developing these pedagogical tools. 16 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. Catholic theology during the twentieth century. Talking about "Modernism" is like talking about "the Inquisition." It is easy to become stereotypical. At the same time, it remains a safe generalization that the ecclesiastical precautions taken in the face of Modernism shaped a generation of theologians who took up the challenges of interpreting and implementing the contents of Pope St. Pius X's 1907 encyclical letter Pascendi dominici gregis. As Kerr frequently reminds us, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange stands out as the lodestar of this group. Kerr further informs us that it was the same Garrigou-Lagrange who supervised the doctoral dissertation on hope by Servais Pinckaers. 26 It should be noted that Modernism and its Church-supported opponents did not destabilize completely the environment of twentieth-century Catholic thought. Even with the vicissitudes, and in some cases the ravages, of two world wars played out on their terrain, Europe and Great Britain managed to produce theologians and experts in the theological subdisciplines who did not develop the same allergic reaction to Leonine Thomism that Kerr reports to have animated many of his selected twentiethcentury theologians. To cite some examples of these other twentieth-century theologians, one could name from the English Dominican Province alone Bede Jarrett, Gerald Vann, Victor White, and the indomitable Thomas Gilby who is responsible for the last successful effort to translate the whole Summa Theologiae into an English that would render it useful for mid-twentiethcentury readers. It may even be possible to number Herbert McCabe, whom Kerr considers "one of the finest recent Catholic theologians," among those Catholic intellectuals who were not bent on tinkering with the Thomist foundations of theology. 27 One could easily add the names of theologians from other European countries to this list. To cite only Dominicans, there are the moral theologians, Michel-M. Labourdette at Toulouse and the Belgian Bernard Olivier at La Sarte (whom Fr. Pinckaers recognizes as a formative influence on his own work), and the 26 27 Kerr, Catholic Theologians, 33. Ibid., 211. SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND THE RENEWAL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 17 dogmatic theologians, Jean-Herve Nicolas also at Fribourg and the Belgian Jerome Hamer, a teacher of Servais Pinckaers, who later served as a curial cardinal. Jesuits, Franciscans, Salesians, and Discalced Carmelites (especially for mystical theology) would be able to augment from their own ranks the number of theologians who merit a place on this list of "other" twentieth-century theologians. Diocesan priests should take pride in the accomplishments of the Swiss-born Charles Cardinal Journet, whose theological writings, like those of Garrigou-Lagrange, today draw attention, at least in the United States, from twenty-first-century Catholic theology students. While anti-Modernist precautions may have affected the tone of some twentieth-century Catholic theology, we should be grateful to the popes for setting these cautions in place. At the very least, putting the brakes on Modernism allowed the Church and her theologians the chance to develop a mature approach to the fresh ideas that figure in the complex proposals advanced by those whom we have come to identify with Modernism. This period of reflection is all the more important when one recalls that, by and large, the Modernist proposals originated from outside the patrimony of Catholic thought. This fact in part explains why someone like Garrigou-Lagrange found in the philosophy and the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas a veritable arsenal of arguments to refute the culturally attuned proposals from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Modernist authors were persuaded would prove indispensable to the survival of Christianity. As it turns out, they were wrong. Kerr appraises critically the authors whom he surveys. While his overall disposition toward the ten thinkers remains sympathetic, he acknowledges that sometimes they raised questions they were unable to answer. In a word, they were only able to accomplish so much. While each of them raised important questions for twentieth-century theology, not one of them produced a complete presentation of the sum of theology. In fact, no one in the post-Vatican II period has managed to compose the kind of theological tools that, arguably, developed first with John 18 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. Capreolus and that kept Catholic theology together and running smoothly for about five centuries. I refer to the textbooks of the Thomist commentatorial tradition. The followers of Hans Urs von Balthasar are most likely to make the claim that they possess in the voluminous work of their Swiss theologian a replacement for the achievement of St. Thomas Aquinas and his tradition. In another place however, Kerr strongly rebukes one of the followers of Balthasar for her bombastic remarks about twentieth-century (and perhaps all) Thomism. Kerr writes sharply of Communio theologian Tracey Rowland, whose somewhat bizarre sentiments he quotes: It is one thing to celebrate the Thomist tradition for "its openness to the best of pagan thought," as Thomists often did. It is quite another to treat his "synthesis" as "a kind of all-purpose garbage recycling unit with the capacity to pick up any rubbish and repackage it as something useful." Who-one wonders-ever thought that? 28 Kerr clearly recognizes that some anti-Thomist reactions are capable of approaching the ridiculous, even when they appear under the auspices of the Communio group. 29 While Balthasar surely provides inspiration for many Catholics, his essays do not supply everything that the theologian needs to interpret the deposit of faith as it is set forth in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. To cite only one reason, there are too many concepts borrowed from Greek philosophical categories, such as physis or nature, that have been incorporated into the Church's official See Fergus Kerr, "Gardener With A Thirst for Beauty," a review of Tracey Rowland's Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI, in The Tablet (22 March 2008): 34. The citations are taken from a previous book by Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (London: Routledge, 2003). 29 For another and more recent example of difficult-to-justify remarks about what the Church regards as the "enduring originality of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas" (Fides et ratio, no. 43), see the review of Fergus Kerr's book, "Thomist Resurgence," by William Portier in Communio: International Catholic Review 35 (2008): 494-504. In a succinct but trenchant manner,Joseph Bottum explains why Portier's remarks do not help the cause of contemporary Catholic theology (First Things, no. 194 Uune/July 2009): 69-70). 28 SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND THE RENEWAL OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 19 pronouncements of Catholic doctrine and about which Balthasar in his works provides little commentary. 30 VI. THE RENEWAL OF MORAL THEOLOGY Fergus Kerr mentions Servais Pinckaers once in his book. The reference comes in the conclusion to the chapter that Kerr dedicates to the French Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu. It is actually somewhat surprising to discover that Kerr recognizes in the work of Servais Pinckaers a monument to Chenu's achievement. In the end, the venerable maftre of Le Saulchoir opted for an upside-down theological method that Fr. Pinckaers would not have endorsed. 31 Kerr however offers another appraisal: "The best testimony to Chenu's advocacy of historicalcontexualist studies as the way to retrieve and appropriate Aquinas's thought most creatively may be found in the work of the Belgian Dominican Servais Pinckaers." Kerr then goes on to observe that "most Catholic theologians, however, do not find it attractive, or even necessary, to study Aquinas in Chenu's or anyone else's way. " 32 There is no need to cavil with this generalization. The real question is whether Catholic theologians, especially moral theologians, will need to study Aquinas in order to remain faithful to the new order of moral theology that, if all indications are correct, Servais Pinckaers deserves a great deal of the credit for enshrining in the official documents of the Catholic Church. If we return to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and to the encyclical letter Veritatis splendor, the answer is patently ° 3 For further discussion and commentary, see Brian Shanley's review of Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition in The Thomist 68 (2004): 143-48. 31 In a "Post-scriptum" written in 1985, Fr. Chenu wrote: "Pastoral theology undergirds the theology called speculative. From this it follows that the truth of the Christian act depends not only on an orthodoxy, but also-a neologism-on an orthopraxis which results from the faith-sense of the People of God" ("La theologie