Introducing Communio Theology
An interview with Tracey Rowland by Carl E. Olson
Tracey Rowland holds the St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia). She received her PhD from the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, and her STL and STD degrees from the Pontifical Lateran University. She also holds degrees in law and government from the University of Queensland and philosophy from the University of Melbourne. She is currently a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and, in 2020, she won the Ratzinger Prize for Theology. Her new book is Introducing Communio Theology, published by Word on Fire Academic. She recently corresponded with Carl E. Olson about the book.
What We Need Now: Before we talk about the book, can you tell us about when and how you developed an interest in theology? And, specifically, your first encounter with Communio theology? What attracted you to it?
Rowland: I started to read theology when I was in secondary school. My religious education in primary school was excellent. Four out of seven of my grade teachers were holy nuns—kind and intelligent women. The schools over which they presided were little oases of Catholic culture.
But then, in my secondary school years, the whole approach to religious education changed. The spirit of the 1960s arrived. Instead of reading the lives of the saints and learning the faith through them, or reading the classics of Catholic literature, or Conciliar documents—all things with some intellectual content—we were made to sit around coffee tables, hold hands, light candles, and sing pop songs. It was an ordeal for introverts and mind-numbingly boring for everyone.
I survived because I complained to my parish priest, who supplied me with “samizdat” literature, including recordings of homilies by Fulton Sheen that were peppered with Thomistic principles. Bishop Sheen was my gateway drug to other American Catholic scholars. I discovered the books of James V. Schall, SJ and got myself onto the Ignatius Press mailing list.
In my honours year (1985), I read The Ratzinger Report. Before that time, I was reading a lot of Thomist authors, especially Jacques Maritain, but when I read The Ratzinger Report, my theological interests broadened. I started to read everything by Joseph Ratzinger I could find and a bit of Hans urs Von Balthasar.
When I arrived in Cambridge, the first question my supervisor asked me was: What kind of Catholic are you? Do you prefer Rahner or Balthasar? They were the only options I was given, so I answered Balthasar!
At the time, Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP was also in Cambridge writing a trilogy he privately called his “Balthasar for Idiots”: The Word Has Been Abroad, No Bloodless Myth, and Say It Is Pentecost. These introductions to Balthasar were for me “the low door in the wall” that led from superficial to deeper understandings of the world of Communio scholarship.
WWNN: You state that Communio theology is better understood as “more of a theological sensibility” built on essentials of fundamental theology rather than a school of theology. Why is that, and what are some of the key characteristics of that theological sensibility?
Rowland: Unlike Thomism, which offers a system built upon tightly defined concepts, Communio theology is not typically systematic. Balthasar certainly produced his 15-volume theological triptych, but a lot of what passes under the banner of Communio theology would be described as interventions in the field of fundamental (not systematic) theology.
This is because Communio scholars are often drawn to the project of resolving pastoral crises with theological foundations. They are like theological pathologists, analyzing a cancerous growth in some part of the body of the Church and working out how it developed and what needs to be offered as an antidote. This is especially true of the publications of Joseph Ratzinger. They are not trying to build a new system but to fix cracks in old systems or draft plans for small extensions thought to be necessary for some pastoral reason.
WWNN: As you note, Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ has described as “neo-Cappadocian” the ‘founding trio’ of Communio theology: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and Joseph Ratzinger. How would you summarize the thought and importance of each?
Rowland: Balthasar shows us how to contend with the German philosophy undergirding the cultures of modernity and post-modernity. Any Catholic who has had to deal with Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger, etc., can go to Balthasar for help.
Balthasar also offers a theological framework related to the transcendental properties of beauty, goodness, and truth, in that order. He understood that for many people, the gateway into the faith is first through the portals of beauty or goodness before approaching the portal of truth.
Ratzinger offers several master classes in fundamental theology. He is the absolute master of getting the theological foundations right, and he is the master of scriptural exegesis, showing how one can use the historical-critical method within the horizon of the faith itself.
Lubac is the great pathologist of secularism and the retriever of Patristic insights necessary for the development of a Eucharistic ecclesiology. This is the antidote to the contemporary pathology of treating the Church as if she were some kind of multinational philanthropic corporation to be run according to the latest fads in corporate management theory.
WWNN: What was the relationship between the Second Vatican Council and Communio theology/theologians? And how does Communio theology help us better understand the Council and its documents?
Rowland: Lubac and Ratzinger were both theological advisors at the Second Vatican Council, so when they wrote about their interpretations of the documents, they were speaking as men who took part in the debates on the drafting commissions. They are sure guides for understanding what was behind the documents, the ideas, and the pastoral concerns driving them.
As with many documents, legal, political, or theological, the interpretation of Conciliar documents requires the application of a hermeneutical framework. The different interpretations of the Council are due to the application of different frameworks.
For example, it makes a huge difference whether one reads Gaudium et Spes through a quasi-Hegelian hermeneutic that views contemporary social movements as the work of the Holy Spirit in history, or as a document that offers what Ratzinger called a daring new theological anthropology, based on a belief that Christology is essential for understanding the human person.
The hermeneutical frameworks applied by Communio scholars are all very Trinitarian and Christocentric, and thus they are said to offer a Trinitarian-Christocentric reading of the Council.
WWNN: What has been the approach and work of Communio theology with Scripture scholarship and exegesis? And why is it important after two centuries of scholarship rooted in secular assumptions and the limitations of the historical-critical method?
Rowland: The Communio approach to scriptural exegesis reads the Scriptures within the horizons of the faith itself.
The historical-critical method, though not rejected by the Church, cannot supply all that is needed for a Catholic understanding of the Scriptures. It can be useful but not sufficient. The great Hungarian Cistercian, Denis Farkasfalvy, who was a contributor to both the Hungarian and English-language editions of the Communio journal, famously remarked that “excluding the experience of faith from the exegetical process on methodological grounds is like subjecting a musical piece for the judgment of a jury whose members must be deaf, so that their aesthetic experience would not interfere with the unbiased objectivity of their judgment.”
Joseph Ratzinger dealt with this issue in his Erasmus Lecture delivered in New York in 1988. He also presided over the drafting of The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1994), a document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission offering guidance on scriptural hermeneutics.
A book that brings these various threads together is Fr. Aaron Pidel’s The Inspiration and Truth of Scripture: Testing the Ratzinger Paradigm (Catholic University of America Press, 2023). I highly recommend it for young Catholic scholars grappling with the problem of how to approach scriptural exegesis.
WWNN: In the chapter titled “Christocentric Moral Theology,’ you discuss the important relationship between the Trinity, Jesus Christ, and moral truth. What are some insights into that relationship from recent Communio thinkers?
Rowland: The Communio scholars see the moral life as a process whereby people grow into the likeness of Christ by participating in the virtues of Christ.
Holiness is therefore about participating in the life of the Holy Trinity itself. It cannot be separated from sacramental theology and spirituality as a stand-alone moral code, easily comprehended by any rational person. It best makes sense in a Trinitarian context, which explains why some of the Church’s moral teachings, such as those found in Humanae Vitae, are so hard for those outside the Church to comprehend.
Some of the big names associated with Communio moral theology include Livio Melina, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, José Noriega, and José Granados. They argue that what is required is a freely willed participation in the divine law, wherein love and reason coincide.
WWNN: How would you describe the relationship—historically and currently—between Thomistic theology and Communio theology? Do you have a foot in both camps?
Rowland: My short response would be “rocky but stabilizing,” and I do feel comfortable in both camps, though most of my work is in the Communio territory because of my focus on Ratzinger.
A longer response would be that I started reading Thomist books when I was in secondary school (part of the haul of samizdat literature I received from my parish priest), and I lapped them up. I especially loved all the Latin maxims.
However, in my undergraduate years, I started to realize that not all those who claimed the “Thomist” label had the same ideas. The more Thomist authors I read, the more it became clear to me that there were different “species” of Thomists, like there are different species of big cats at a zoo. They are all, in a sense, feline, but some have differently colored spots and stripes from the others. I started to realize that I would need to decide what species of Thomist I was. I was drawn to the Thomism of Alasdair MacIntyre because he was the most history-sensitive of the Thomist “big cats.”
When trying to understand why it was that, after the Council, ecclesial leaders all over the world ditched Catholic high culture for pop culture and sought to market the faith by correlating it to popular culture, I tracked the problem to theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx and Karl Rahner.
Unfortunately, in the immediate post-Conciliar period, Thomism was treated as if it were some kind of garbage recycling plant where any kind of ideology could be fed into it, and then the system was supposed to separate the good bits from the bad bits and then hoover up the good bits. We had a generation trying to synthesize Thomism with all manner of social theories. Even Rahner called this “gnoseological concupiscence”! A lot of the garbage was never filtered out.
It was because of my opposition to cultural correlationism and to the post-Conciliar belief of Rahner that we all had to be moderns now that I ended up attracted to Lubac, Balthasar, and Ratzinger, and thus Communio theology. This attraction was not, however, synonymous with any opposition to classical Thomism.
Similarly, I would argue that the “neo-Cappadocian trio” were also never hostile to classical Thomism, but they were hostile to particular appropriations of Thomism, especially Suárezian Thomism or what is sometimes called “baroque Thomism” and to elements of early twentieth century neo-Thomism that were running on a sharp separation of nature and grace and faith and reason, and thus philosophy and theology. In other words, they were opposed to varieties of Thomism that had bought into dualisms fostered by Protestant theologians in the sixteenth century and people like Kant in the eighteenth.
Nonetheless, when Lubac criticized Suárezian Thomism, he found himself opposed by members of his own Jesuit Order and, more overtly, by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP. Today, if one reads Rad-Trad blogs, Garrigou-Lagrange is presented as the superhero who defended the Church from the modernism of the evil Lubac.
If, however, one reads the works of Communio scholars, Lubac was no modernist. He was retrieving what he believed to be the position of St. Thomas. He read St. Thomas through the lens of his Patristic predecessors, rather than reading him backwards, as it were, through the lens of his later commentators, as was the common practice.
Further, in the late 1960s, when the priesthood and the papacy came under attack, and ecclesial leaders were marketing the faith with reference to the cultural tropes of Californian hippies, Lubac and Balthasar were two of the biggest names sounding alarm bells. Balthasar’s The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church was the strongest defense of the papacy written in that era and perhaps of any era. Moreover, Balthasar was a strong defender of Thomistic metaphysics.
Since the 1940s, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. A new generation of Thomist scholars has arisen. This generation understands the debates of the 1940s and the different appropriations of Thomist thought, the different sub-species of Thomist “cats” mentioned above. There is now a Thomist Ressourcement. The most successful project of this group has been the large number of publications produced under the banner of “Biblical Thomism.” Biblical Thomists present the Thomist corpus in a non-dualistic manner, keeping the theological and philosophical elements together.
My experience has been that the Thomist Ressourcement types and Communio scholars have no trouble respecting each other’s contributions and working together. Balthasar described truth as “symphonic.” Thomists and Communio scholars are members of the same orchestra, following the same score, but playing different instruments. The Thomists are usually quite gifted at analytical work, while the Communio scholars tend to shine at synthetic and interdisciplinary work. Typically, Communio scholars have a greater interest in history and culture. These descriptions are just sociological generalizations. They are often summarized by the suggestion that Thomists are left-brain dominant and Communio scholars are right-brain dominant.
There are some people who are completely at home in both parts of the orchestra. Aidan Nichols, OP is a good example of this. He made the point that one important distinction between Thomists and Balthasar is that Balthasar thought that, to contend with the German philosophy of the past three centuries, he needed to expand the philosophical range of Thomism. I agree with this judgment.
When people ask me: “Why do we need Balthasar when we have Thomas?”, my response is “because Balthasar understands modern German philosophy, and if we are to do something about the epic disaster that is the Catholic Church in the German-speaking parts of Europe, we need some heavy Balthasarian artillery.” We need the insights of someone who survived the German tertiary education system with his faith intact, someone who knows about Lessing’s “great ugly ditch” and how to get around it. Balthasar and Ratzinger were such men, and both owed much to Lubac.
Finally, I would recommend Matthew Levering’s The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Aidan Nichols’ Balthasar for Thomists for those who long for a harmonious alliance—an entente cordiale!
WWNN: The final chapter, titled “Genealogies of Secularism,” is an important and fascinating one. You write that “a non-dualistic relational mode of thinking is the frame through which scholars in the Communio circles analyze social pathologies.” Can you unpack that a bit, explaining why this is what we need now?
Rowland: Secularism is not a virus that floats around in the biosphere and comes into the home through the air-conditioning system. It is rather a mental attitude or pattern of thought that develops when the critical couplets of the Catholic intellectual tradition get broken up and separated from their intrinsic relationships to one another.
We have ended up with a secular culture because nature got separated from grace, faith got separated from reason, history got separated from ontology, scripture got separated from tradition, and, in short, humanity got separated from the Holy Trinity. These relationships need to be restored, and their place in the Catholic intellectual tradition explained and highlighted in our ostensibly Catholic educational institutions.
Fortunately, large numbers of Generation Z are so sick of living in a disenchanted, materialist cosmos that they are searching for alternatives. Many have discovered Bishop Barron and his Word on Fire podcasts. At least through watching these podcasts, they can start to discover pieces of the “jigsaw” of a Catholic cosmology where nature and grace, faith and reason, etc., work together in tandem.
Carl E. Olson is editor of Catholic World Report and Ignatius Insight. He is the author of Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?, Will Catholics Be “Left Behind”?, co-editor/contributor to Called To Be the Children of God, and author of the “Catholicism” and “Priest Prophet King” Study Guides for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire. His recent books on Lent and Advent—Praying the Our Father in Lent and Prepare the Way of the Lord—are published by Catholic Truth Society. Follow him on Twitter @carleolson.