A Council for the Global Church: Receiving Vatican II in History.

Rausch, Thomas P.

A Council for the Global Church: Receiving Vatican II in History. By Massimo Faggioli. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015. Pp. ix + 349. $44.

Few have proved as insightful in commenting on Vatican II and its reception than Faggioli. For over 50 years the controversy has been ongoing. Some have sought to implement its reforms, even seeing it as having a constitutional value for the life of the Church, a view rejected by Pope Benedict XVI, while others have continued to resist it. Under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI the debate over the council was shaped not by the academy but by the doctrinal policy of the Holy See, often at odds with the recent contributions on the history of the council, for example the works of Guiseppe Alberigo in Bologna and Peter Hiinermann in Germany.

F. argues that the council must be seen from a historical perspective; "de-historicizing" it by submitting it to the ideology of "absolute continuity" can only lead to a re-Europeanization of a now global Catholicism (10). But for Pope Francis, ordained after the council concluded and the first pope from Latin America, the council is not to be reinterpreted or restricted, but implemented and expanded. F. traces how three master narratives, the traditionalist or ultratraditionalist (Lefebvrites), the ultraliberal (Hans Kiing), and the neoconservative (Novak, Neuhaus, Weigel), struggle to control the recent past of the Church, at the risk of leaving the interpretation of the council in the hands of "theological pundits" and ideologues, weakening the understanding of Vatican II as a reform council. Much of the book is devoted to telling the story of its not always successful efforts at reform.

A proposal of some of the fathers for a permanent board of bishops, a concilium episcoporum centrale, to assist the pontiff (not unlike that created by Pope Francis) went nowhere, while Paul VI, whose "red pencil" was quite active in reviewing the conciliar documents, substituted his version of the synod of bishops for the one suggested by the conciliar debate. F. argues that the only real reform was that of Sacrosanctum concilium with its eucharistic ecclesiology, but liturgical reform was rejected by some as a way to reject the council itself. Gaudium et spes is central to two streams of interpretation of the council, the Augustinian and the Neo-Thomist, though the constitution was not so polarizing for the churches of Latin America, Africa, and Asia as it has proved to be for the American church. F. argues that the council as a theological event reentered the Church, moving beyond an inoffensive Catholicism in line with the cultural mainstream and pointing the way towards a Church closer to the world's margins.

In spite of restoring the balance between the juridical and communal dimensions of the Church, the council ecclesiology ad intra is still a work in process, a "building site" (189), with the failed attempts to establish a central board of bishops to assist the pope, the rejection of a proposal for reforming the process of episcopal appointments, an ineffective synod of bishops rather than one envisioned by the bishops themselves, and restrictions on new forms of collegiality and synodality. The period between 1985 and 2000 was marked by steps backwards. But ad extra, the Church is simply different. Its stance towards non-Catholics, Jews, non-Christians, and modernity cannot be separated from what the Church believes and teaches about itself. One of the council's significant accomplishments was to change the relations between the center and the periphery of the Church. F. explores this in terms of the role of episcopal conferences, noting that Christus Dominus remained somewhat vague and ambiguous about their legislative powers, while the 1983 Code and Apostolos suos (1998) limited their role, especially as the Church's center of gravity shifted to Asia and Africa. That is changing under Pope Francis who has said that the juridical status of episcopal conferences has not yet been sufficiently elaborated, citing in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium those of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the United States, and France. For all its successes and failures, the council remains important for the Church today. Indeed, F. argues that many post conciliar features of the Church surpass the letter of the constitutional documents. He concludes that it marks the passage from a Eurocentric Catholicism looking inward to a global Catholicism.

Since most of the chapters in the book were previously published as articles or given as talks, the book is occasionally repetitive. It stands in need of more careful copy-editing; some sentences are awkward or difficult to decipher. Nonetheless it is a fascinating reflection on the council, deepened by the fact that F.'s perspective includes his experience as a scholar who has lived in both Europe and North America.

DOI: 10.1177/0040563915620187

Thomas P. Rausch, S.J.

Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles