De Lubac Breaks with Concilium
The theologian who renewed the Church by returning to the Fathers recoiled from the rupture made in the Council’s name.
Henri de Lubac, S.J. (1896–1991), one of the great ressourcement theologians of the twentieth century, who broke with the progressive Concilium circle and helped found the rival journal Communio. Photo: Peter Geymayer, public domain.
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Henri de Lubac helped renew Catholic theology by returning to Scripture and the Fathers — and then watched, in dismay, as the Council’s renewal was claimed by men bent on rupture. His break with the Concilium circle is one of the clearest signs that the post-conciliar crisis was not the Council itself, but a reading imposed upon it.
Few theologians shaped the twentieth-century Church more deeply than Henri de Lubac, S.J. His ressourcement — the “return to the sources,” to Scripture and the Church Fathers — had once made him an object of Roman suspicion; for a time in the 1950s he was quietly removed from teaching. Yet his vision of a Church renewed by drinking again from her own ancient wells helped prepare the very best of the Second Vatican Council, where he served as a peritus (expert) and was later named a cardinal by John Paul II. De Lubac was no reactionary. He was a reformer in the truest sense — and that is exactly what makes his alarm so telling.
For when the Council closed in 1965, de Lubac found that its name had been seized by something he did not recognize. The renewal he had labored for was being recast as a revolution: a break with the Church’s past rather than a deeper communion with it. He had wanted the Church to return to her sources; he now watched many invoke “the spirit of the Council” to cut her loose from them.
Two Journals, Two Readings of the Council
The fault line ran through a single project. In 1965 a group of theologians founded the international review Concilium to advance a progressive interpretation of Vatican II. Its early roster was formidable — Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng, Yves Congar — and for a moment it gathered nearly the whole generation of conciliar periti. De Lubac was associated with its beginnings. He did not stay.
Within a few years he, together with Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Louis Bouyer, drew apart from the Concilium project and, in 1972, founded a rival review: Communio. The two journals named the deepest argument of the age. Concilium read the Council as a new beginning, a mandate for ongoing transformation. Communio read it as renewal within the Church’s living tradition — the same Church, the same faith, more deeply understood. Decades later Benedict XVI would give the dispute its lasting names: a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” against a “hermeneutic of reform” in continuity.
Both camps were Catholic; both accepted the Council. What divided de Lubac from his former colleagues was not whether to obey Vatican II but how to read it — as a break or as a deepening. That this argument ran between theologians who had built the Council together is the whole point: the rupture was a reading imposed on the Council, not the Council itself.
The ‘Para-Council’
De Lubac gave the distortion a name. Alongside the true Council, he wrote, there had arisen a kind of phantom — a “para-council,” a media-and-faction construct that spoke in the Council’s name while contradicting its texts. The real Council was the documents the Fathers debated and signed; the para-council was the slogan-world of “the spirit of Vatican II,” which licensed whatever its partisans desired. His later writings return again and again to this grief: that the genuine aggiornamento he had served was being devoured by an ideology wearing its clothes.
De Lubac never left the Church, never questioned the Council’s authority, never denied the validity of the reformed liturgy, and never flirted with sedevacantism. His critique came from within — the lament of a man who loved the renewal and saw it betrayed by a counterfeit. To enlist him for a rejection of Vatican II is to misread him exactly as the para-council misread the Council.
Why It Belongs on This Timeline
The liturgical reform did not happen in a vacuum; it rode the same current that carried the “spirit of the Council” everywhere else. De Lubac’s break is the theological mirror of the liturgical story this timeline tells: a sound renewal, rooted in the sources, overtaken by men who mistook rupture for progress. When the new rite was built and the old one pushed aside, the same two readings were at work — and the same division ran through the Church’s finest minds.
That a founder of the conciliar renewal could recoil from what was done in its name is the strongest possible witness that the traditional critique is not a war on the Council. It is a plea, with de Lubac, to read the Council by its own words — and to receive its reform as continuity, not conquest.
Events That Led Here
- Henri de Lubac, S.J., At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances That Occasioned His Writings (Eng. ed., Ignatius, 1993)
- Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace (1980) and post-conciliar essays on the “para-council”
- On the Communio / Concilium division: Joseph Ratzinger and the founding of Communio (1972)
- Benedict XVI, Address to the Roman Curia, 22 December 2005 (hermeneutic of reform vs. rupture)