In 1959 I was a young theological student in Paris, attending lectures on the history of the Church by a man who, I thought then, was a master ecclesiologist and who,  later, was almost universally acknowledged as the leading Catholic ecclesiologist of the twentieth century, the Dominican Yves Congar. One thing I learned from those lectures struck me at the time as momentous. Two distinct attitudes are required of Catholics on the basis of two distinct theological models of Church. Obedience to Church authorities is called for when Church is conceived on the model of a hierarchical authority, and dialogue and consensus are called for when the Church is conceived on the model of a fraternal communion. Congar himself had no doubt which model was more faithful to the gospel Jesus, namely, Church as communion.

               Three years later, in 1962, I had moved on to study theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. Anticipation and excitement were high in Rome that year. Angelo Roncalli, the Cardinal Archbishop of Venice, had been elected Pope John XXIII in October 1958 and in January 1959 he signaled that he would not be the expected stop-gap Pope, electrifying the Catholic world, perhaps even the entire world, by announcing that he was summoning a Second Vatican Council. That Council opened with much pomp and ceremony on October 11, 1962, and Pope John’s opening speech set the overall course of the Council. In it he chastised the “prophets of doom,” who prophesied the demise of the Church and prescribed that the Council would be an exercise of the pastoral office of the Church, an exercise of mercy rather than of the traditional severity. It would be a preservation of the heritage of the Church but also an aggiornamento of it, an updating in contemporary terms, for, he argued, the substance of the faith is one thing and its mode of presentation is quite another. We theological students were in a ferment of excitement and anticipation, at least those of us who believed that the Pope’s call for a doctrinal aggiornomento was overdue. As the early days of the Council unfolded, I was in a particular ferment of theological excitement because I lived in a house where I had access to some African Bishops attending the Council and mystified by the latinitas of its procedures. That made them question the documents that had been prepared for Council discussion and talk about the discussions that surrounded them.

Among the documents prepared for discussion was a then-traditional, hierarchical document on the Church. At the opening session, that document was roundly rejected by the Council Fathers and returned to the Preparatory Commission to be reworked to bring it in line with Pope John’s call for the aggiornamento of doctrinal language. By the end of the second session, the document had been rearranged in eight chapters and, on November 21, 1964, in the third session, by an overwhelming vote of 2151 to 5, it became Lumen gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. The transition from the preparatory document to Lumen gentium is a transition from a juridical vision of Church that sees it as hierarchical institution to a theological one that sees it as a mysterious graced communion. It is a transition from a fixation on hierarchical office and power to an appreciation of co-responsibility and service, from an exclusive focus on Roman primacy to a focus on ecclesial communion, both vertical with God and horizontal with all Church members. Congar, who was very involved in the discussions that yielded Lumen gentium, commented in those 1958 lectures that the communion model of Church dominated in the first millennium and the institutional model dominated in the second. My hope and prayer at Year 50 of the Second Vatican Council is that the communion model will dominate again in the third millennium and that Catholic believers, instead of engaging in unseemly, unproductive, and downright unchristian bickering, will, in the wise words of Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann, give one another life and come alive from one another in pacific communion.