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Catholic Theology in Britain: the Scene since Vatican II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Aidan Nichols OP
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A good place to begin this survey of the post-conciliar Catholic theological scene in Britain—which means, overwhelmingly, in this context, England—is the symposium on theology and the Catholic Church in this country, held at Downside under the presidency of Dom Christopher Butler in 1963. Though, as that date indicates, the papers were written and published while the Second Vatican Council was still in session (they were the product of the sixth of a series of Downside symposia on matters of intellectual interest to Catholics beginning in the later 1950s), the majority of the authors consciously looked forward to what would be, they imagined, the setting and general direction of Catholic theology in Britain after the Council. In various respects, to be examined shortly, the Catholic contributors were right in their predictions, but not in all. The historian will note the role of Christopher Butler as inspirer of the Downside symposia in general and author in particular of the opening essay in Theology and the University. An Ecumenical Investigation. As abbot of the only English monastery with a substantial scholarly tradition, a writer of distinction on the Gospels, ecclesiology, spiritual theology and apologetics, as well as a nationally known radio personality through the panel programme Any Questions, his attendance at the Council as that rare bird a theological peritus with voting rights— owing to the accident that he was at the time abbot president of the English Benedictine Congregation—gave him the opportunity to become the single most influential interpreter in England of the Council’s devices and desires, especially when he was made a bishop auxiliary to Cardinal Heenan with, in effect, a special portfolio for doctrine and theology.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 80 , Issue 944 , October 1999 , pp. 451 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

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34 Milbank, J., Pickstock, C., Ward, G. (eds.) Radical Orthodoxy. A New Theology (London 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The vision of the history of philosophy found in these writers is sometimes idiosyncratic. A more dispassionate account has been made available to English Catholics by F. C. Copleston, the Heythrop Jesuit, volumes of whose A History of Philosophy, begun in 1946, continued to appear throughout the Conciliar period and beyond.

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59 Davis, H. Francis, Williams, A. O. S. B., Thomas, I. O. P., Crehan, J. S. J., A Catholic Dictionary of Theology, I‐III (London 1962–71Google Scholar). They were gathering materials, in effect, for a ressourcement systematics: cf. I, p. ix, ‘Our work aims at presenting Catholic doctrines in the sources from which they are drawn in Scripture and Tradition, since the study of these sources is leading to a rejuvenation of theology in many parts of the Catholic world today’.

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61 Lash, N., Believing Three Ways in One God. A Reading of the Apostles' Creed (London 1992)Google Scholar; more elements of an overall dogmatics in idem., Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London 1986)Google Scholar; The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (Cambridge 1996)Google Scholar, but these are essentially essays, manifesting at times a deliberate rejection of the project of systematics as such: thus, e.g. Theology on the Way to Emmaus, op. cit., p. ix. Also offered in essay form was the work of the gifted Jesuit dogmatician Bruno Brinkman, in his To the Lengths of God. Truths and the Ecumenical Age (London 1988)Google Scholar. Here, however, I must mention an ambitious proposal for a new dogmatics, based philosophically on the concept of ‘kenotic ontology’ and theologically on the root idea of the divine compassion, announced by Oliver Davies, on whom see above, n. 50.

62 For a history of the place, see Penny, B., Maryvale (Birmingham 1985)Google Scholar. It is hoped that the Maryvale course books will eventually be made available to a wider audience in published form.

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64 Chiles, D., A Silken Thread. The History of Plater College, 1921–1996 (Oxford 1996), p. 200Google Scholar. What is needed is a ‘think‐tank’ which is also a ‘heart‐tank’ since empowered by the Liturgy and especially the Mass, on which English Catholics have not ceased to write, if not always to consistent effect. See, for example Lash, N., His Presence in the World. A Study of Eucharistic Worship and Theology (London 1968)Google Scholar; McHugh, J. F., The Sacrifice of the Mass at the Council of Trent', in Sykes, S. W. (ed.), Sacrifice and Redemption. Durham Essays in Theology (Cambridge 1991), pp. 157–181CrossRefGoogle Scholar; FitzPatrick, P. J., In Breaking of Bread: the Eucharist and Ritual (Cambridge 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McPartlan, P., The Eucharist Makes the Church. Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh 1993)Google Scholar.

65 Ker, I., Newman and the Fullness of Christianity (Edinburgh 1993)Google Scholar. See also his John Henry Newman. A Biography (Oxford 1988)Google Scholar; The Achievement of John Henry Newman (London 1991)Google Scholar; Healing the Wound of Humanity: the Spirituality of John Henry Newman (London 1993)Google Scholar. Fr Ker could look back to the inspiration of a Belgian Newmanian domiciled in England–Dessain, C. S., John Henry Newman (London 1966)Google Scholar, and the wonderful edition of The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, still continuing, of which Dessain brought out the First volume in the year, 1961, before the Second Vatican Council opened.