‘Lumen Gentium’: A Bright Light for Theology in Our Time
National Catholic Register, 21 November 2024
The dogmatic constitution on the Church, released 60 years ago, is notable not only for what it taught, but how it taught it.
Lumen Gentium (The Light of Nations), the Vatican II constitution on the Church, marks its 60th anniversary Nov. 21.
As a “dogmatic constitution” of an ecumenical council, it is officially one of the most important magisterial texts of the last century. It also remains a high-water mark for theology in our time.
Nothing in the Church is ever entirely new. Lumen Gentium built upon the theological reflections on the Church during the 19th century, the teaching of Vatican I and Pope Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi, on the mystical body of Christ. Nevertheless, Lumen Gentium marked a different style of theological writing, nourished more directly by Sacred Scripture and expressed in a more beautiful literary style. The document was important not only for what it taught, but how it taught it.
Over the course of this year, Opus Dei Father Joseph Thomas provided an overview of Lumen Gentium’s teaching for the Register.
“With this solemn document, the Church sought to respond to a key question that the Council Fathers wanted to answer,” Father Thomas wrote. “What does the Church have to say about herself?”
What the Church thinks about herself is called “ecclesiology,” the branch of theology that deals with the nature and mission of the Church.
In 1962, as the Council opened, the bishops were presented with a draft text, De Ecclesia (On the Church). It was found lacking — and not only by so-called “progressives.” Blessed Stefan Wyszyński, primate of Poland, considered it too shallow.
“Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, archbishop of Milan and the future Pope Paul VI, expressed his opinion that while the existing text presented the truths of ecclesiastical law, it needed to give more attention to the mystery of the Church and, in particular, to the intimate relationship between the Church and Jesus Christ,” wrote Father Thomas. “The Council needed to show clearly, the cardinal noted, that the Church receives everything from Jesus Christ and can act only through Christ’s presence and action.”
The future St. Paul VI wanted a shift from the law of the Church to the love of God in Jesus Christ.
The revisions of the text followed in that vein. The initial first chapter was entitled “On the Nature of the Militant Church.” The final version was called “The Mystery of the Church,” and began with a proclamation about Christ himself, not the Church: “Christ is the Light of nations” and the purpose of the Church is “to bring the light of Christ to all.”
In the re-drafting of Lumen Gentium there was a shift toward theology that explicitly began with Scripture, and returned to the insights of the patristic period. It was a return to the theology of the early Christian centuries, before important questions of structure, law and the relationship with the state came to the fore.
George Weigel, in his 2022 book To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II, wrote how ecclesiology had been put “into a defensive crouch” by the “two-edged assault on Catholicism by Enlightenment rationalism and political modernity.”
“Reflecting Catholicism’s long post-Constantinian entanglement with state power, this Roman theology typically presented the Church in essentially juridical and legal terms,” wrote Weigel. “The Catholic Church was the societas perfecta, the ‘perfect society,’ self-contained and self-governing, and adherence to it was defined by obedience to the perfect society’s laws. In this perspective, the theology of the Church was the stepchild of canon law.”
If ecclesiology had become the stepchild of canon law, Lumen Gentium sought to restore it to full sonship — and if a son, then also an heir — in the world of biblical theology. And also literature, not the language of law.
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