2 - Remembering the Covenant

Summary

On 8 April 1979, the Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, awarded Karl Rahner an honorary doctorate. In response, Rahner gave a lecture in which he described Pope John XXIII's extraordinary exercise in ‘updating’ the Roman Catholic Church as ‘the first major official event in which the Church actualized itself precisely as a world Church’. What Rahner tries to present is, in his own words, a ‘fundamental theological interpretation of Vatican II’—an interpretation, that is, which is ‘suggested by the Council itself’. Vatican II was remarkable because for the first time in the history of the Church a genuinely ‘world episcopate’ gathered with the Bishop of Rome as the ‘final teaching body in the Church’. Whatever its limitations, the Council marked the beginnings of a major shift of horizons. The influence of bishops from Asia and Africa, the demise of Latin as the language of the liturgy, and the emergence of particular local and more genuinely non-European churches, made the Roman Catholic Church as a whole more conscious of its ‘world responsibility’.

This could, of course, be interpreted as no more than a belated attempt to reverse the introspective mentality dominant since the Modernist crisis. There is something to be said for such a view. Rahner, however, writes as a theologian. He is concerned with a theology of history, and particularly with the history of the Council as a theological ‘event’ in its own right.