Communio Is Founded

In 1972 three of the most formidable theologians of the twentieth century launched an international Catholic review and called it Communio. Its founders were Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict XVI — and Henri de Lubac, and around them gathered a wider circle that included Louis Bouyer, the young Walter Kasper, and Jean-Luc Marion. They were not founding a journal of protest. They were founding a journal of renewal — but a renewal of a very particular kind: the renewal of theology, in their own words, “in continuity with the living Christian tradition.” To understand why that mattered, and why it belongs on a timeline of the liturgy, one has to see what Communio was answering.

An Answer to Concilium

Seven years earlier, in 1965, the same men had stood near the center of a different project. As the Council closed, a powerful coalition of its expert theologians had founded the review Concilium to carry forward what they called the “spirit of Vatican II.” De Lubac, von Balthasar, and Ratzinger had all been associated with its beginnings. None of them stayed. De Lubac withdrew within months, alarmed that an appeal to the Council’s “spirit” was being used to cut the Church loose from her own past; Ratzinger drew away as the turbulent late 1960s wore on.

Communio was their constructive reply. Where Concilium read the Council as a fresh start, Communio read it as a deepening — the same Church, the same faith, more fully understood. The first issue appeared at the beginning of 1972 in two languages, German and Italian; a North American and a French edition followed in 1974, and the review grew into a federation of journals now published in more than a dozen editions. From the outset its mission was stated in terms of fidelity, not rupture.

Balthasar’s Program

The German edition opened with a programmatic essay by von Balthasar simply titled “Communio: A Program.” In it he set the review against what he saw as a deadly polarization tearing at the post-conciliar Church — and refused both poles of it. The journal would not be a redoubt of reaction, nor a vehicle of revolution. It would be an attempt to recover the Church herself as a communio: a communion whose first source is not a party or a program but Christ.

That double refusal is the key to the whole enterprise, and it is why the journal cannot be flattened into one “side” of the culture war. Communio did not exist to defeat Vatican II; it existed to receive it rightly. Its founders held that the Council’s reform was real and binding, and that the way to honor it was to read its texts in the light of the whole of Tradition rather than against that Tradition. This is the seed that would later flower, under Benedict XVI, into a pontificate built around exactly that principle.

Why a Theological Journal Belongs on a Liturgical Timeline

A history of the Mass might seem to have no room for a learned review. But the battle over interpreting the Council was, from the first, also a battle over how the Council’s liturgical reform should be received. To read Vatican II as continuity is to read its call for reform as organic development — pruning and renewal within a living rite. To read it as rupture is to license a far more sweeping recasting of Catholic worship. The same appeal to a forward-rushing “spirit” that animated the progressive reading animated the swiftest and most radical changes to the rite in the years after the Council.

Communio supplied the intellectual spine of the other reading. Its insistence that the Council be received in continuity with Tradition is the theological root of the later argument that the old and new forms of the Roman Rite are not two rival religions but one Church’s worship — an argument that would one day be written into law.

The Long Reach of 1972

The founding of Communio was a quiet event — a journal, not a decree, launched while the noisier dramas of the 1970s unfolded around it. Yet its long reach is hard to overstate. The men who organized around it would, in the decades to come, give the Church the language of the “hermeneutic of continuity,” a pontificate devoted to it, and the legal generosity of Summorum Pontificum. The continuity camp did not win every battle of the 1970s; the reform of the rite was already largely accomplished. But in Communio it found its intellectual home — and it is from that home that the strongest case for reading the whole story of this timeline as continuity, not conquest, still comes.