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, contrasting “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” with “the hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us.”
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, and he gave it in print. In an appendix to A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace — Appendix C, titled “The Council and the Para-Council” — he described how the Church after 1965 was pressed to conform not to what the Council had said but to what its interpreters thought it ought to have said. The real Council was the documents the Fathers debated and signed. The para-Council was the slogan-world built beside it, and it proved the more powerful of the two.
Just as the Second Vatican Council received from a number of theologians’ instructions about various points of the task it should assume, under the pain of “disappointing the world,” so too the “post-conciliar” Church was immediately and from all sides assailed with summons to get in step, not with what the Council had actually said, but with what it should have said … This is the phenomenon which we should like to designate as the “para-Council.”
— Henri de Lubac, S.J., “The Council and the Para-Council,” Appendix C to A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace
He was blunt about how completely the substitution had worked. The para-Council, he wrote, “often deserved the name ‘anti-Council’” — and it had been “mistaken for the true Council” by partisans, opponents and docile followers alike, “all of whom were equally fooled.” Whatever in the Council’s actual work failed to match the para-Council’s programme, he added, “has more than once been neglected or misrepresented.” What its activists wanted was not a development but a break: “a mutation [of the Council]: a difference not of degree, but of nature.”
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.
- Concilium (1965) Founded to advance a progressive reading of Vatican II. Early roster included Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng and Yves Congar. Reads the Council as a new beginning and a mandate for ongoing transformation.
- Communio (1972) Founded by de Lubac with Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Louis Bouyer. Reads the Council as renewal within the living tradition — the same Church, the same faith, more deeply understood.
- What divided them Not whether to obey the Council but how to read it. Both camps were Catholic; both accepted Vatican II.
- The later name Benedict XVI in 2005: “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” against “the hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church.”
- He never left De Lubac never questioned the Council’s authority, never denied the validity of the reformed liturgy, never flirted with sedevacantism.
- The critique is internal It is the lament of a man who built the renewal and watched a counterfeit wear its clothes.
- The misuse to avoid To enlist him for a rejection of Vatican II is to misread him exactly as the para-Council misread the Council.
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)
- Henri de Lubac, S.J., “The Council and the Para-Council,” Appendix C to A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace (Eng. ed., Ignatius, 1984) — the source of the para-Council quotations here
- Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the Roman Curia, 22 December 2005 (vatican.va) — quoted verbatim