Ormond Rush

Fifty years after Vatican II, we are still trying to make sense of it. What is the "spirit of Vatican II"? How do we read the documents? Rush, an Australian priest and theologian, has written this short book to make sense of that question. Drawing on Ricoeur's hermeneutics, he describes how we need to read the documents of Vatican II in terms of author, text, and receiver.

The hermeneutics of the author focuses on the historical context of the documents and their sources. What conflicts were going on at the Council? We must read the documents in light of the compromises the Council Fathers agreed on and the attendant ambiguities in the texts. We must read them in light of John XXIII's statement that the Council was primarily pastoral, not doctrinal. And what do the texts cite? The documents cite biblical and patristic sources more than Vatican I did.

The hermeneutics of the text (the "letter" rather than the "spirit") focuses on the texts themselves. How do they relate to one another? How does each text relate to the entire Vatican II corpus? What is the rhetoric and tone the texts are written in? What is the intended audience?

Perhaps the most controversial debate has been in terms of the third category, the hermeneutics of the receiver. What is the role of Vatican II in church history? What has the reception of the text been? Rush delineates a tension between neo-Augustinian interpreters (Lubac, Ratzinger) who wish to go back to a world-denying patristic tradition, and a world-affirming Thomistic interpretation (Rahner, Congar). He notes that we must look at its reception in the tradition, the magisterium, the theologians, and the sensus fidelum.

Benedict XVI frequently comments that interpreters of Vatican II overemphasize a 'hermeneutics of rupture' rather than a 'hermeneutics of continuity' that sees how the Council flowed from the Church's tradition. Rush proposes a middle way out of the dilemma by looking at the ruptures of the council as micro-ruptures: ruptures with the recent tradition since Trent or with the 'militant Catholicism' of the nineteenth century. These micro-ruptures seek to reclaim earlier strands of tradition, and none of them are macro-ruptures.

In the last chapter, Rush seeks to make sense of the statement that the Spirit worked in the Council and its reception. He says this could not be possible without the historical consciousness raised by the Enlightenment, with the rise of the history and historical-critical method. Rush elaborates a "reception pneumatology" in which we creatively interpret the movement of the Spirit to guide the Church in the right direction. This is in line with the "substance/expression" theology that John XXII referred to: the faith's substance is unchanging but its expression is not. We must constantly re-receive the tradition and the Spirit.

Overall, this was a useful book. I am unsure about Rush's distinction between micro- and macro-rupture. For example, Dignitatis Humanae, the declaration on religious freedom, does seem to be a maco-rupture in some ways. To my understanding, never before had the church declared that other religions should have political freedom to practice. I wish he had clarified this more.… (mais)