Engaging with Communio Ecclesiology

Lakeland offered an assessment of communio ecclesiology when that model was still the model in vogue in the institutional church, at least since the mid-1980s.Footnote ¹⁰ Since the election of Pope Francis, in 2013, this ecclesiological model has been juxtaposed with other models. But already in his 2003 book The Liberation of the Laity, Lakeland offered a nuanced critique of communio ecclesiology: “If what we mean by ‘communion’ is an inward-looking, self-congratulatory, and fearful huddling together against the forces of modernity—the ‘communion’ of the nineteenth-century church—then ‘mission’ will mean little more than the periodic excoriation of the ‘outside’ world. But if ‘communion’ means a generous and loving association of free and faithful children of God, then the dynamic excess of love, without which it is not love at all, spills over into a mission to the whole human race, one marked by a generous sharing of the knowledge that God wills to save the world.”Footnote ¹¹

This nuanced critique of communio ecclesiology is indicative of important motifs of Lakeland’s thought. In an essay published in 2015, Lakeland analyzed three models of apostolicity: 1) “build it and they will come”—wholly centripetal, “apostolicity of maintenance”; 2) “the church of the new evangelization”; 3) “apostolicity of kenosis.” Clearly, his preference is for the third one, a kenotic ecclesiology: “While there is some value to the first [maintenance] and second [new evangelization] of these three types, it is in the third, kenotic form of apostolicity that a vigorous postmodern ecclesiological posture can be discerned. This may be the only one of the three that demonstrates realistic hope rather than muted despair and, perhaps, the only one that follows the christic paradigm of death to self for the sake of new life.”Footnote ¹²

In his 2013 book on Lumen Gentium, Lakeland inserted his preference for kenotic ecclesiology in his treatment and yearning for an “ecclesiology of humility”: “The fundamental theological issue in fostering the grace of self-doubt, even among the official teachers in the church, is the recognition that the grace of God is spread throughout the world, that it is not coextensive with the church, and, indeed, that there is worldly grace that the Church does not control or even know. When grace is seen as the work of the Spirit and not as the preserve of the Church, there is absolutely no option but that of humility, both before the world and in face of the worldly experience of the Catholic laity.”Footnote ¹³

Lakeland’s fundamental ecclesiological option could be summed up in the title of a section in that book: “Kenosis in the Church, kenosis of the Church”: “It places the church in the role of the Samaritan and not like the scribe and Levite passing on the other side [but] … We are both the Good Samaritan and the victim in need of help. We proclaim and embody the grace of God as we also stand in need of that same grace. The parable tells us to look for that grace in some unexpected quarters, to learn from the love of God that suffuses the world, even the world that does not value the Church.”Footnote ¹⁴

What was Paul’s appreciation of “the most positive aspect of the language of ‘the new evangelization’ that is current in today’s Catholic Church”Footnote ¹⁵—the recentering of the parable of the Good Samaritan as an image of self-giving love—has become now, in Francis’s pontificate, an important exegesis of that key theological image of the Good Samaritan in the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, as well as a meditation on how proclamation and humility can go hand in hand.

Engaging “Radical Orthodoxy”

A second theme that is indicative of Paul Lakeland’s ecclesiology is his critique of “radical orthodoxy,” an alternative theological reading of the history and status of modernity/postmodernity, but also a theological reconstruction of the contemporary that took its name from the title of a collection of essays published by Routledge in 1999.Footnote ¹⁶

The seventh chapter of The Liberation of the Laity, titled “Mission in the (Post) Modern World,” employed an epigraph from Joseph KomonchakFootnote ¹⁷ and paid homage to Komonchak’s attempts to go beyond the left- and right-wing stereotypes. Lakeland drew from Charles Taylor for his reading of modernity and secularity, and engaged in a deep critique of the ecclesiological assumption of “radical orthodoxy,” referring to the British scholars John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, and Stanley Hauerwas in the United States.

In a nuanced assessment of Daniel Bell’s book Liberation Theology after the End of History,Footnote ¹⁸ Lakeland wrote: “We require a more nuanced approach to the complex legacy of modernity, which allows us not simply to jettison the Enlightenment. And we need to step back from the potentially totalitarian implications of radical orthodoxy’s claim that it is Christian society that holds the key to history. Then and only then will any alternative we propose to the vision of global capitalism be open to reception in a pluralistic world. Radical orthodoxy needs to be corrected by the work of those who do not share its unqualified suspicion of the Enlightenment.”Footnote ¹⁹

It was not an all-out, uncompromising critique. Lakeland invited here “radical orthodox” theologians to a rereading of Gaudium et Spes, together with an acknowledgment of the contribution of some “radical orthodox” arguments for the church’s mission in the struggle against the dehumanizing program of global capitalism. On the other hand, Lakeland identified a certain essentialism when “radical orthodoxy” talks about the church: “The mission of the church in the world is primarily conducted through countless millions of individual decisions made by laypeople, independently of ecclesiastical authority.”Footnote ²⁰

This critique of “radical orthodoxy” and its reading of modernity and postmodernity gives us more than a glimpse into the ecclesiological thought of Lakeland. In the 2009 book Church: Living Communion, Lakeland advocated for “an inductive ecclesiology,” an “empirical ecclesiology,” taking from Bernard Lonergan’s turn from a “classicist world-view to historical mindedness,” as well as from Gerard Mannion’s 2007 book on postmodern ecclesiology. Here ecclesiology intersects with the idea of “doctrinal pluralism,” drawing from Lonergan’s 1971 Marquette Lecture—not just a development of doctrine, but a new kind of development.Footnote ²¹

The Legacy of Vatican II

In The Liberation of the Laity, Lakeland recognized clearly the limits of the legacy of the Second Vatican Council: “Beyond the story of the mixed fortunes of Vatican II, there is a pressing need to address issues that were largely untouched by the council fathers … so let us suppose for a moment that Vatican III is about to open and that we are responsible for setting its agenda[,] what would we want to see the council addressing?”Footnote ²² The lengthy list proposed by Paul included the nature of ministry, the democratization of church procedures, church and capitalism, and the role of the laity among others.

A few years later, in 2007, Lakeland proposed, in Catholicism at the Crossroads, “ten steps towards a more adult church.” These included: “the whole church needs to make an option for the poor and marginalized”; equality in lay clerical relationship; better education in the history of the Catholic tradition for both laity and clergy; “seminary and ministerial training should be for ministry in real life”; “genuine parish and diocesan pastoral and financial councils that have deliberative as well as consultative roles”; “real and significant lay participation in the process by which pastors and bishops are selected”; “renewed attention to the sacrament of baptism”; “centrality of the Eucharist in Catholic tradition for the life and structure of the church”; recognition of the “resource for education and renewal represented by our Catholic colleges and universities, and the colleges and universities need to recognize their responsibilities for helping the church to think”; “women achieve their rightful positions as fully equally partners with men.”Footnote ²³ Chapter 10 of the same book was titled “Catholics and American Culture,” and its first section was concerned with “overcoming dualism.”Footnote ²⁴

Once again, we see in Lakeland’s proposal a foreshadowing of Francis’s pontificate. In Church: Living Communion, Lakeland named the problem of “elite theologizing” and the need to look at the real church, together with the need to reread Gaudium et Spes for a more inductive ecclesiology.Footnote ²⁵ In the final chapter on inductive ecclesiology, Lakeland invited us to a practice of intelligence and discernment.Footnote ²⁶ Further, he proposes the use of new models for the church such as “the Church as hospice, as pilgrim, as immigrant, as pioneer.”Footnote ²⁷ This language belongs to not just the letter, but also the spirit of Vatican II in papal teaching. Strikingly, many invitations that Lakeland offered almost fifteen years ago have now become customary papal language.

In terms of assessing Vatican II, Lakeland, in 2013, identified the major obstacle in the reception of Vatican II not simplistically with clerical or institutional resistance and conservatism, but with a lack of historical consciousness:

In later works, such as an essay published in 2022 in a volume on receptive ecumenism, Lakeland returned to the “inductive turn” in Lonergan: “Following Lonergan and modifying him somewhat, I see the church as a collective incarnate subject growing and changing through history in a constant process of intellectual, moral, and religious conversion. The generator of ecclesiological insight is the Spirit-filled work of the community of faith as it seeks to fulfil its mission in a constantly changing world.”Footnote ²⁹

This opens a window on what kind of post–Vatican II church Lakeland imagines ecclesiologically. Certainly, it is radically ecumenical: “A candidate for consideration as a model more adequate to the emerging reality of Catholic ecclesiality today is afforded in the concept of ‘whole-body ecclesiology’ that in 1999 became a focus of British ecumenical discussions on conciliarity among Anglican, Methodist, and United Reformed Church representatives published as Conversations on the way to Unity.”Footnote ³⁰

One of the typical problems of the post–Vatican II church, the continuing “infantilization of the laity,” can be addressed in a “whole-body ecclesiality” in which “it is the praxis of the community that determines ecclesiology, not merely its liturgical praxis or its understanding of evangelization, but what it says about itself by the organizational structure it employs in the service of mission. The beauty of whole-body ecclesiology is that it sees ecclesiology grounded in a polity that takes modern people seriously and that is appropriately adjusted to the cultural expectations of adults.Footnote ³¹

Lakeland recognized that “there are some challenges to the employment of the whole-body model in the Catholic tradition, but taken as a whole it is suggestive for a way forward …Whole-body or synodical thinking seems much more compatible with the freedom of the children of God than their continued infantilization in a condition of structural oppression where their freedom as children of God is apparently considered to be compatible with having absolutely no formal voice whatsoever in shaping their own church.”Footnote ³²

Conclusions

Paul Lakeland has opened and even anticipated new paths for Catholic ecclesiology. Some of the questions he raised deserve a fresh look in light of the present historical and theological context. The option for a kenotic ecclesiology poses the challenge of the possibility and conditions for kenosis in this new age of normalization of war, in the sense of both cultural war and warfare. The aspiration for democracy in church life must also deal with the crisis of the democratic ethos in our secular political systems. The problem of “elite theologizing” and the need for theologians to look at the real church is more acute than ever and has to be considered in the context of the gradual marginalization if not disappearance of theology from the university. Finally, facing the limits of Vatican II—in what it said and did not say—is a necessary first step toward tackling the new hermeneutical question raised by the normalization of the rejection of the council and its teaching, a movement no longer confined to the fringes of schismatic and sedevacantist groups. To face these new trials, Paul Lakeland’s work represents a major contribution from which the new generation of ecclesiologists must begin.