Theology for a Synodal Church: Vatican II’s unfinished legacy

In 1937, when Rome still forbade Catholics from participating in the ecumenical movement, a young Dominican named Yves Congar published Chrétiens désunis, a book that reread the history of Christian divisions through ecumenical lenses and even borrowed a category from Calvin to imagine a way forward.

Within three decades, the book’s intuitions passed through study circles, journals, and the Catholic Conference for Ecumenical Questions, founded in 1952, before reaching the Second Vatican Council, which recognized elements of the Church beyond the visible borders of Roman Catholicism.

Congar did not wait for doctrine to authorize him; his book anticipated a teaching the Church would formulate only a generation later.

I begin with Congar because the Church is now slowly learning, though not without resistance, to be synodal, while the question of what kind of theology such a Church requires has barely been asked.

I would say it needs a theology that understands itself as anticipation and a Church that knows the difference between theology and doctrine well enough to give each its proper place.

Anticipation names something both human and theological. Human beings live by anticipating the future. Christians add a further claim: if the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruit of what God intends for all things, then reality itself has an anticipatory structure, leaning toward the day when God will be all in all.

A theology faithful to that hope cannot be content to repeat what has already been said. It must read the signs of the times, as Gaudium et Spes (P.4) asks, with deep knowledge of the tradition, close attention to context, and openness to the Spirit, and then dare to say what the Church has not yet said or lived.

Theology and doctrine, each in its place

Here the distinction between theology and doctrine becomes indispensable.

Doctrine is what the Church has received, discerned, and continues to confess as its common faith, and its task is to regulate and preserve the community recognizably as itself across centuries and cultures.

Theology is the work of understanding faith within history, testing its formulations against new questions and exploring paths no one has yet walked. If doctrine guards the threshold, theology is sent ahead to explore what lies beyond it; when the two are confused, both suffer, since theology shrinks into the repetition of the catechism and doctrine, stripped of the theological work that once gave it life, hardens into a set of propositions without history.

Vatican II recognized this distinction and articulated it in its own opening. In his October 1962 opening address, John XXIII distinguished the deposit of faith from the way it is expressed in each age.

As French Jesuit theologian Christoph Theobald has shown, the Italian version of the speech states this plainly, whereas the official Latin version softens it by equating the deposit with a plurality of timeless truths. Much of the post-conciliar quarrel over “pastorality” is an argument between those two versions.

The Council itself leaned toward the Italian version when Gaudium et Spes (P.44) declared that adapting the proclamation of the Gospel to every culture must remain “the law of all evangelization.” The Council was the fruit of anticipation, the culmination of decades of biblical, liturgical, ecumenical, and lay movements once suspected of drifting from tradition, and the starting point for a reception that remains unfinished.

What Latin America teaches

Latin America has experienced both the absence of anticipation and its fruitfulness. The international project The Second Vatican Council: Event and Mandate, an intercontinental commentary on the conciliar documents and their reception, has devoted a continental volume to Latin America and the Caribbean. Its pages show that, before the Council, theology in the region largely reproduced European manuals and magisterial statements without asking what its own contexts demanded.

Afterward, the picture changed as many dioceses convened local synods with broad and enthusiastic lay participation. In 1971, the bishops of the Amazon, meeting in Iquitos, declared that the Church would become Amazonian, treating that territory as a locus theologicus rather than an appendage of a national Church.

Half a century later, Pope Francis would welcome an Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon, and the whole Church would speak of synodality. What those churches lived and thought at the margins was theology that anticipated what doctrine and law would later recognize.

Yet the same volume issues a warning, noting a growing distrust of theology as such in the region, fueled by weak theological preparation among those in office and by sustained opposition to a theology suited to the continent. It also observes that the 2016 norms for priestly formation still call for seminary faculties composed mostly of priests and ignore the role of women in formation.

A Church that asks its people to walk together while keeping theology at arm’s length, or under suspicion, should not be surprised when synodality becomes well-managed consultation.

Institutions matter here. In Veritatis Gaudium, Francis described ecclesiastical studies as a “providential cultural laboratory” where the Church practices interpreting reality in the light of Christ.

In a laboratory, things are tested before they are certain. If synodal councils, ecclesial assemblies, and episcopal conferences are to be more than listening exercises that end in a pastoral letter, theology needs a seat at their table and a voice of its own, as the discipline that can distinguish what the Church must keep from what it is still free to imagine.

Such a discipline requires faculties with real academic freedom, theologians who are lay as well as ordained and women as well as men, and bishops willing to hear anticipations that unsettle them.

Congar was silenced in the 1950s and named a cardinal in 1994. The distance between those two dates measures the cost to the Church of recognizing its anticipations too late. A synodal Church that wishes to shorten that distance will need a theology that explains what it already believes and helps it glimpse what, by the Spirit, it is called to become.