Communio, concilium, and Pope Francis
Why an old cage match struggle between two theological schools still matters.
As I sat in the Philadelphia airport this week awaiting a flight to Rome, my mind wandered back to January 2023, when I sat in this same airport on my way to the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI.
Two different popes, each representing the two great theological strands, often in conflict with each other, of the post-conciliar ecclesial landscape.
I speak of the two schools of thought represented by the two journals, Concilium and Communio, which became influential in the years following the Vatican Council II.
The comparisons are not perfect, since intellectual typologies are, by nature, rather general. But from where I sit Pope Francis was clearly closer in theology and tonality to the Concilium school and Benedict to Communio, which is natural, since Benedict XVI was a co-founder of the journal Communio, along with fellow theologians Fr. Henri de Lubac and Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar.
The comparison between these two schools of thought is by now a rather anodyne and boilerplate observation. Furthermore, there were, and are, other currents of theological thought at play in the post-concliliar period.
Nevertheless, cliché or not, the typology of post-conciliar thought really is best characterized as a playing out of two theological orientations.
In assessing the papacy of Pope Francis it is necessary to contextualize it within those post-conciliar streams.