During the Council, he played a pivotal, if under-appreciated, role by arguing in his gentle way that Vatican II was not summoned to reinvent Catholicism, but to renew it for mission by deepening the Church’s understanding of the gospel so that the Church might more effectively offer Jesus Christ to the world.įor it was Father de Lubac who ignited the War of the Conciliar Succession: the fierce struggle-not between stereotypical “progressives” and “traditionalists” but among the reformist theologians at the Council-over the meaning of the entire conciliar experience. Exiled to the theological sidelines during the last years of Pius XII, he was rehabilitated by John XXIII, who appointed him to one of the commissions planning Vatican II. He was, as just noted, a leading figure in the movement to revitalize Catholic theology by a “return to the sources.” He was a leader in the French Catholic resistance to Nazism after the fall of France in 1940 and a keen student of modern atheism.

Who was Henri de Lubac? He was a veteran of the French army in World War I, during which he was severely wounded. For without de Lubac’s pioneering work in recovering the Fathers of the Church and the riches of medieval biblical commentary for contemporary Catholic thought, the key texts of Vatican II-its dogmatic constitutions on divine revelation and on the Church-would not be so richly scriptural and patristic in content and style. Whatever the outcome of the cause, paying such a tribute to one of the great figures of twentieth-century Catholic theology was a fitting way to continue celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the Council’s opening. On March 31, the bishops of France announced that they would petition the Holy See for permission to open a beatification cause for Father Henri de Lubac, S.J.

Supernatural the official companion