November 14, 2025 // Diocese

‘We Can’t Be a Church if We’re Not in Communion’

Ken Hallenius

“Will we find ways to live with each other?” asked Glenmary Father Aaron Wessman in his opening keynote talk at a conference on “Deepening Communion in a Polarized World,” which was held at Saint Meinrad Seminary on November 4-6. Wessman, an organizer of the conference, is a guest lecturer in theology at Saint Meinrad, vicar general of the Glenmary Home Missioners, and author of “The Church’s Mission in a Polarized World” (New City Press, 2023).

Co-hosted by the Benedictines of Saint Meinrad Archabbey and the Glenmary Home Missioners, the conference featured four panel discussions that considered how Catholics can move beyond polarization to promote unity among the hierarchy, in the liturgy, in the reception of the Second Vatican Council, and in Catholic media. More than 200 attendees participated in the discussions including clergy, theologians, seminarians, lay ministers, diocesan staff, and parishioners from across the United States.

Jennifer Newsome Martin, the John J. Cavanaugh Associate Professor of the Humanities and director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, was invited to contribute to the panel about polarization surrounding Vatican II. In her opening remarks, she traced the history of two influential schools of interpretation that arose among theologians soon after the last of the council’s 16 documents was completed.

“In the years immediately following the council, there was the establishment of two competing academic journals, which I think still affect the current theological and ecclesial landscape, even if people are not reading those journals or have even heard of them,” Martin said.

Consilium was established within weeks of the council’s end in December of 1965, and it coalesced around the work of Jesuit Father Karl Rahner, a prolific German theologian whose work was influential on several of the conciliar documents and was broadly grounded in subjective human experience. Rahner was joined by other theologians, including Dominican Father Yves Congar, Father Johann Baptist Metz, and Dominican Father Edward Schillebeeckx, among others, in founding the journal, which continues to publish, in five issues a year, theological discussions exploring “the spirit of Vatican II” from a broadly progressive point of view.

The rival journal, Communio, was established in 1972 as a deliberate alternative to Consilium. Its founders included Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss academic whose theological explorations take as their starting point the objectivity of divine revelation and extend to topics of beauty, spirituality, imagination, and culture. His collaborators in founding the journal included the theologians Father Joseph Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI) and Jesuit Father Henri de Lubac. Balthasar and de Lubac had originally been founding members of the Consilium board but had become “quite anxious about what they perceived as a kind of ‘spirit over the letter’ approach” that they saw taking shape in the pages of Consilium, Martin said.

The tension between these contrasting viewpoints remains relevant today. Martin cited Pope Benedict XVI’s 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia, soon after the 40th anniversary of the close of the council, in which he spoke about the unresolved question of whether Vatican II was an occasion of “discontinuity or one of reform.” Approaching the council’s legacy from the perspective of discontinuity “risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the council do not yet express the ‘true spirit’ of the council.” According to Martin, in Benedict’s understanding, true reform “is a combination of continuity and discontinuity. This idea, of course, is very closely connected to St. John Henry Newman’s understanding of the development of doctrine, something that is simultaneously progressive and conservative.”

Martin suggested that it is possible to move the Church beyond this reductive binary approach that has contributed to polarization about the council.

“How can we take up the ‘spirit of Vatican II,’” she asked, “if we have not yet spent sufficient time with the texts? Perhaps one strategy to assist in deepening communion around the implementation of Vatican II is simply to revisit the texts, to read them again together within our parishes and communities.”

By reading together the foundational texts of our tradition, we take up what we have received, that we might understand and apply it to our own time.

Referencing Balthasar’s inaugural essay in the first issue of Communio, Martin concluded: “Now, more than 50 years later, the demand to address political, religious, theological, cultural, and ideological polarization is more pressing than ever. But Balthazar’s inaugural essay argues that we must go with openness, with the absolute love of Christ. Balthasar is abundantly clear that the true basis of communion is Trinitarian, Christological, liturgical, and sacramental. That communion, he believes, has already been established from the foundations of the world and has been bestowed on the human community through God, in Christ, by the Holy Spirit.”

Martin’s fellow panelist, Father Richard Lennan, an Australian theologian teaching at Boston College, spoke about how recent synod discussions echo the council’s emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church and how developing a synodal spirituality can help heal divisions. Father Lennan said that the recent synod on synodality, like Vatican II before it, emphasized our shared baptism as the basis of our unity and harmony.

“We can’t be a Church if we’re not in communion,” Father Lennan said. “The Church is at the same time both holy and in need of purification. As Pope Francis wrote in Gaudete et Exsultate, ‘Holiness is the most attractive face of the Church.’”

Additional panels at the conference included a conversation about deepening communion among the American hierarchy with Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, and Archbishop Paul D. Etienne of Seattle. Both bishops spoke about the transformative experience of prayerfully listening to their fellow delegates during the recent Synod of Bishops on synodality, and they expressed hope that the American hierarchy will implement among themselves a similar path of prayerful listening and dialogue.

A panel on liturgy discussed ongoing tensions regarding communal worship, including the reform of the Mass after Vatican II, particularly Pope Benedict XVI’s granting of universal permission for priests to celebrate the pre-conciliar Tridentine Mass via the document Summorum Pontificum (2007), a decision later reversed by Pope Francis in Traditionis Custodes (2021).

The final conference panel featured three Catholic journalists speaking about the challenges they face in an age of soundbites and “hot takes,” and how their publications work to counter polarization in the Church. Panelist J.D. Long-Garcia, senior editor at America Magazine, suggested that being immersed in the constant flow of information fed by the 24-hour news cycle and social media algorithms hampers our ability to heal our divisions.

“If we are constantly consuming, we do not have time to sit back and reflect on what we have taken in,” he said. “If we’re going to get out of polarization, we don’t need more information, we need to take a step back and reflect. And this needs to be done in person, not online.”