Practical Theology and Pierre-André Liégé

Radical Dominican and Vatican II Pioneer

Nicholas Bradbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317076650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Pierre-André Liégé, one of the foremost French theologians of the 20th century, influenced John XXIII and Paul VI, and sat on Vatican II committees with both the future John Paul II and Benedict VI. Fifty years on from Vatican II is a good time to remember the decade of dramatic struggle and pioneering work that preceded it, and review what it accomplished. This book explores the life and work of Pierre-André Liégé, presenting it to an English speaking readership for the first time. Discussing the impact and profound challenges Liege's work raises for spirituality and church life today, Bradbury tackles issues including: the organisation of parish life rooted in theological criteria; cradle to grave corporate Christian formation; a compelling vision of what the church is for and why, and how should this be expressed in practice. Bradbury argues that for faith to match real life, the church today needs to let go of much baggage, align its talk to its action, and radically re-examine the question of what the church needs to do to conform to the Gospel. This book takes critical issues confronting practical theology and the church, breaking them open in a lively and accessible style.

1 Liégé in Context

DOI: 10.4324/9781315601892-2

The State of French Catholicism in the Mid-Twentieth Century

An Anachronistic Dominant Theology and a Church under Siege

The dominant theology of the Roman Catholic Church during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century was inherited from the Middle Ages. It had become highly defensive and for good reason. It had endured the shock of the Protestant Reformation, then of the Enlightenment, then of the French Revolution, which had all but destroyed the church in France. It had suffered greatly from science’s bold attacks on the biblical sources, let alone the dogmatic interpretation of faith. It was much bruised by the Russian Revolution of 1917. In fact it felt threatened by every aspect of the modern world except the coming of railways that allowed more pilgrimages. The fear of these threats goes a long way to explaining the harshness of successive popes’ response to modernism. And by centralising Rome only echoed ‘the creation and then the consolidation of the modern state and of executive power within it’ (Fouilloux 1995: 73). It was not intended as an end in itself. Theoretically it was for the sake of ‘unity among the troops, unity of command and operation’ needed to withstand assaults from outside (Fouilloux 1995: 73). Catholicism needed to emphasise its difference.

So Roman Catholicism had shut itself up, ignoring current intellectual and social developments. Kant was still the great enemy, responsible for modern individualism. Hegel, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche were largely ignored. It had built itself a citadel, the so-called Roman system, which preferred to remain anachronistic than open up to the modern world. The theological result was unworthy of the great Dominican, St Thomas Aquinas. It was ‘a Thomism desiccated by having been too often compressed into succinct theses; a deductive Thomism that ground up contemporary realities according to the rhythm of its impeccable conceptualisations’ that ‘sought God at the end of syllogisms’ (Fouilloux 1995: 83). This rationality was accompanied by uncritical devotional credulity characterised by Fouilloux as ‘dubious Marian apparitions, stigmatizations not officially acknowledged, sulphurous types of sanctity’ (Fouilloux 1995: 83). The cult of Mary had been allowed to proliferate into a Mariology that amounted to an appreciably different religion that Congar would call ‘Mariano-Christianity’ and Liégé would attack head on.

Pastoral theology as taught in French seminaries until Vatican II was centred on the cleric and the traditional acts of his sacerdotal ministry. But it had become bogged down in an inherited conventionality with a second-hand feel. At parish level in France, pastoral care was the task of priests. As the twentieth century proceeded they shared an increasing and overwhelming sense of frustration and alienation. They were merely following the recipe. Pastoral teaching until the 1950s consisted of a commentary on the rubrics of the Missal, the Breviary and ritual. Doctrinal rectitude was paramount and no local adaptation was acceptable. Given that these years were times of socio-cultural mutation, this could even be damaging to the psychological equilibrium and spiritual health of the pastor. Ministers were alienated from their own thinking and authority and just had to be obedient to handed-out formulae that often did not fit their circumstances or experience.

A leading scholar in this field, Gilbert Adler suggests that this way of pastoral thinking, still operational in the 1950s, originated with S. Rautenstrauch who founded a chair in pastoral theology under Maria-Theresa of Austria in 1774. His interest was ‘how theological theory must be applied in a concrete manner in a way useful to the practice of human life’ (Adler 2004: 28). F. Grifschutz was the first chair holder. He wrote:

The pastor, as a particularly important member of society, has now many occasions to keep subjects in peace, in tranquillity, to stifle all spirit of revolt, to inculcate strongly in the head of all subordinate beings their duties with regard to superior authority: faithfulness, obedience, respect, honest payment of taxes etc. (Adler 1996: 2).

As a live subject, pastoral theology had lost its way. In fact the entire neo-scholastic theological apparatus that underpinned the Roman system no longer connected with life. ‘My catechism doesn’t travel a hundred metres into the street with the child’, joked the catechetical pioneer Marie Fargues in the 1920s, naming the increasingly radical divorce between faith and life; between Christian teaching and the experience of children. But all attempts at reform were repressed. Rome was stuck in an immobilising ‘ecclesial and theological fixism’ as Alberigo (1995a: 35) puts it, ‘a Catholicism rendered immobile by its certainties’; intransigent, fearful, pessimistic and under siege.

What is the context here? As the twentieth century began, the catechism purported to refer to four realities. It was a book of Christian truth presented as questions and responses. It was an event; the curate’s catechism classes. It was the group undergoing instruction. It was an institution; the way one prepared for first communion. The catechist was the instructor.

The official French catechism in use as Liégé’s ministry began was the 1947 edition, a revised version of the unified 1937 catechism which had brought together material from a number of diocesan handbooks. It showed how Christian religion contains truths to believe, commandments to observe, and sacraments to receive. It contained 607 questions and responses without further commentary. Number 287, for example, gave the reasons for the prohibition of the duel. Its feel was ‘exterior’; over against you. This is your duty. This saves your soul. You must submit to this. There is little mention of God’s plan in creation or the economy of salvation. Ninety-one of the questions begin ‘what is …?’ (a miracle, la gourmandise and so on). Its mode is juridical. It stands in an historical vacuum. It is ahistorical in making no reference to the development of dogma, context or progressive revelation. It transcends history. It is abstract, claiming it had to be; to be exact, to avoid being blurred. It was concerned to avoid all passion and pernicious subjectivity. It had enormous confidence in itself and the words it chose. It never doubted that there could be a gap between a word and its meaning. It never thought of ‘context’ as an issue. It was as if the formulations mastered the divine realities, forgetting the essentially analogical character of theology. It mistook words for realities. It confidently offered four proofs of God’s love: the contingence of creation; the presence of order in the universe; universal belief in God and the moral law.

No mention is made of the context of revelation as to do with God’s love. The famous response (No. 22) about who God is – ‘God is pure spirit, infinitely perfect, eternal, Creator and Sovereign Master of everything’ – is cold. It is an intellectualist presentation of God using cold reason. It does not evoke passion. Qualifications are precise, abstract, with no affectivity or personal dynamism. There is no aspect of the ‘face of God’ (Adler and Vogeleisen 1981: 32).

There is a total absence of any critical spirit with regard to language. Aware of a background of nominalism, Deism and Enlightenment criticism, it was concerned to emphasise reason. The résumé of the life of Christ is an exception and not entirely bloodless. The problem for this approach at this date was that in continuing to rely on the device of offering ‘proofs of God’ it lacked plausibility.

The life and miracles of Jesus are given as proofs of his divine condition. The gospels are a repertoire of facts to believe about Jesus. Other biblical works are not mentioned. Gospel means ‘the doctrine’ rather than the books. Indeed the bible is not considered as the ‘Word of God’ but as the source book of doctrine, merely, along with Tradition. So, for example, John’s text on the remission of sins becomes the message ‘be penitent and regular at Communion’. Matthew on common prayer becomes a guarantee of indulgences. And the institution narratives are taken from the liturgy rather than from Scripture. Jesus is not central, though mentioned in one response out of five. But he is not significant in himself, in his words and actions. The accent rather is on the ‘mystery of the Incarnation’ or ‘redemption’. In the Passion, Christ is passive; it is but a question of his will. History is mere anecdote; the timeless mysteries are essential.

Worthy reception of the sacraments is important. But it is a question of a cult to be done, not a common or celebrated life. It is reductionist. Belief becomes a legalistic practical imperative. In the 1937 manual Christ is not truly human. Religion becomes cult plus obedience. It is a matter of will and reason, never of affectivity. The key thing is to ‘hold as true’ the long list of truths from beyond our experience. Faith is conviction, not illumination: believe what God said, not in God. The faith of Abraham or Aquinas is lost. Aquinas wrote, ‘the act of the believer does not reach its end in a statement but in the thing’, in other words, God himself as the object of faith (Actus autem credentis non terminatur ad enuntiabile, sed ad rem S.Th.2a 2ae). But in the 1937 manual, ‘Faith is no longer a meeting or encounter (une rencontre) or a first step (une démarche) but a collection of convictions’ (Adler and Vogeleisen 1981: 39). So, for example, the resurrection is an important proof, not a sign, the summit of salvation history and the revelation of God’s love. It is a miracle. And that it all happened in history is taken as read.

The church is presented ‘as the place in which all this submission can happen’ (Adler and Vogeleisen 1981: 42). It is the place where you can do what the priests, especially the Pope, tell you. It is essentially hierarchical. Outside the Church there is no salvation. Jesus had all this organised from the outset. That is why he prepared Peter. The Kingdom or the Good News are secondary to Jesus Christ’s founding of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. So too the Holy Spirit’s task is ‘to help the apostles establish the Church’ (No. 141). Sacraments are a means of grace to help the faithful be virtuous. We are to pray because God has a right to our homage, because Jesus told us to and as a way of getting the necessary graces.

All these Obstacles yet 1930–1960 becomes a Golden Age for French Theology

The portrait painted so far is hardly theologically promising, is it? It might seem a wonder that a radical theologian like Liégé could have existed at all. Given the blows to the French church inflicted by the Revolution and its aftermath and Rome’s overwhelmingly negative response to everything modern, it is indeed paradoxical that by the mid-twentieth century France had assembled what Fergus Kerr (1997: 106) calls ‘a remarkable generation of French theologians’ whose ‘great influence’ particularly ‘through the Second Vatican Council’ expresses their ‘wholly new vision of the priorities for theology, and irrepressible energy to put their ideas into practice’. It is the more odd because censorious Roman control was never more in operation than between 1930 and 1957. Yet though the theological reformers were never more oppressed than in these three decades, there was a strong positive feeling on the ground. Congar, returning from five years in Colditz after the Second World War, was to write: ‘Anyone who did not live through the French Catholicism of 1946–7 missed one of the most beautiful moments in the life of the Church’ (Congar 1974: 60–61). By 1948 Jacques Maritain can say: ‘France is light years ahead of other countries … but one knows that it is opening the ways of the Lord, and that the rest of Christendom will follow where France has gone’ (Greenacre 1996: 17).

How can we make sense of this paradox? Any attempt at an explanation will start with a description of the breathtaking array of scholarly renewals, initiatives and interests in continuous development throughout the nineteenth century and the first 60 years of the twentieth century. But scholarly renewals do not always change practice. One highly significant feature of this period in France is that renewed scholarship was accompanied by spiritual, pastoral and practical renewal. They stayed connected. They cross-fertilised. There was an inter-disciplinary synergy. So when Liégé’s pastoral theology emerges as such in the 1950s it emerges out of practice. But this is to anticipate. We need first to know what territory these renewals in France from about 1800 actually covered.

There are many available accounts of this phenomenal period of renewal (among them, Cholvy 2002; Dubost 1989; Fouilloux 1998; Greenacre 1996; Harvey and Heseltine 1959; Kerr 2007). The Napoleonic Concordat of 1801 ‘gave Roman Catholicism official status as the national faith’ (Harvey and Heseltine 1959: 601). But no one could have foreseen the renewals about to blossom in so many areas and with such a dazzling array of associated figures! Among the blooms were significant new shoots in history, philosophy, spirituality, politics, journalism, the human sciences, biblical and literary criticism, catechesis, exegesis, patristics, medieval studies, historical and textual scholarship, ecclesiology, education, liturgy, and a welter of initiatives in social justice, work with the poor and with young people.

In the literature of the period religious interests can hardly be separated from political, social and general human concerns. On this basis, a great writer like Balzac, as well as more religious writers, provide the literary backcloth to the developments in related fields. A list of such writers would include Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, Lammenais, Charles de Montalembert, Alphonse Lamartine, Hippolyte Taine, Edgar Quinet and later Colette, Paul Claudel, Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos, Saint-Exupéry, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the field of biblical and literary criticism and history the outstanding name was that of Ernest Renan (1823–92). Renan was a great Semitic scholar of immense erudition whose Vie de Jésus (1863) caused a sensation by revealing that: ‘beneath an enchanting lyrical picture of the carpenter’s son growing to maturity amid the flowers of the Galilean countryside lay a rationalization of the fundamental belief in the divinity of Christ’ (Harvey and Heseltine 1959: 601). Jacques-Paul Migne (1800–75), opening up neglected patristic texts, paved the way for the appearance, from 1903, of the great encyclopaedias on a new scholarly basis that would later be built on by the Jesuits Jean Daniélou (1905–74) and Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) in their important patristic series ‘Sources chrétiennes’. Alfred Loisy, the all-rounder theologian and founder of Modernism, was born two years before the Dominican Ambroise Gardeil (1859–1931) whose more open approach to Thomism with its desire to ‘return to the sources’ (le ressourcement) would influence the two great lay philosophers Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) and Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) (Kerr 2007: 10–18, 34). ¹ Gilson’s book Le Thomisme (1920), a popular, clear introduction to a more historical, less speculative approach to Aquinas, was enormously influential, as were Maritain’s lectures in Paris. The impact of these two men on the next generation of scholars was crucial. Also important were the flowering of various schools of philosophy like Rousselot ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Timothy Radcliffe OP
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Liégé in Context
• 2 Liégé the Man
• 3 The Foundations of Liégé’s Pastoral Theology
• 4 Liégé’s Pioneering Pastoral Theology (1955–1977)
• 5 Liégé and Practical Theology in France and Canada since his Death
• 6 Liégé’s Distinctive Vision
• 7 The Story of St Aidan’s, Rothercliffe, 1948–1984
• 8 Learning from Liégé about Catechetics
• 9 Learning from Liégé about Practical Theology
• 10 Liégé’s Legacy
• Bibliography
• Index