Archbishop Joseph Augustine DiNoia, O.P., is a very fine
theologian who taught theology for decades and has written extensively. Several questions about his teachings
are probably on the minds of Traditionalist Catholics since his recent
appointment as vice-president of the Pontifical Ecclesia Dei Commission. A few hours in a seminary library were
enough to answer some of them.
1) What does the new vice-president of the Ecclesia Dei
Commission teach about the Eucharist?
Then-Father DiNoia contributed a chapter to a Book of
Readings on the Eucharist published in
2006 by the Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy of the United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops. Although the
essay, entitled “Eucharist and Trinity”, is focused on “communio theology”, the author refers to the Mass as a “sacrificial
banquet”. A few excerpts
follow:
The Church is
a creation of the triune God: from
the Father, who sends his Son and his Spirit to transform creaturely persons so
that they come to share, with the uncreated Persons of the Trinity and with one
another, a communion of divine life.
(p. 41)
We have been
invited from the highways and byways to be guests at a wedding banquet that we
did not prepare and in which our participation is confirmed only by our being
suitably clothed in Christ, in robes “washed ... in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev
7:14; see Mt 22:1-14). (p. 41)
The prayer of
consecration involves a solemn invocation of the Holy Spirit, by whose power
the death and Resurrection of Christ are made present, and the bread and wine
are transformed into his Body and Blood.
Then, by worthily consuming the Body and Blood of Christ, the faithful
are made divine and brought into union with the Father and with one another,
through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. (p. 44)
2) What does Archbishop DiNoia think about ecumenism and
interreligious dialogue?
Young
Fr. DiNoia earned a doctorate from Yale University in 1980 by writing a
dissertation on “Catholic Theology of Religions and Interreligious
Dialogue”; one of his advisors was
Prof. George Lindbeck, who had been a Lutheran observer at the Second Vatican
Council. The Dominican friar
subsequently refined his thoughts on the subject and wrote a book, The
Diversity of Religions: A Christian Perspective, published by Catholic University of America Press in
1992.
As
the dissertation title suggests, DiNoia carefully distinguishes pragmatic considerations about dialogue among representatives of
different world religions (e.g. Buddhists and Muslims), on the one hand, from dogmatic considerations about how the Catholic Church ought to view
and treat non-Christian religions, on the other hand. With great courtesy and considerable subtlety, he develops
what has been called a philosophy of interreligious dialogue, which neither
reduces all religions to some anthropological common denominator nor affirms
them all as equally valid paths to heaven. DiNoia’s approach to interreligious dialogue respects the
real and essential differences between the major religions. He also points out that many world
religions are not particularly concerned about salvation as Christians
understand it, and recommends that they seek other subjects with which to begin
their dialogue. Note that DiNoia
is not saying that salvation is unimportant or “negotiable”. He simply makes a pragmatic observation
about cultural realities.
In
discussing “the Catholic theology of religions”, DiNoia restates all the
traditional Catholic teachings about Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world and
the sole Mediator between God and humankind. On that basis, he then examines ways in which the Church can
identify and affirm partial truths that may be found in other religions.
This
twofold approach could be summed up:
“Grounded in faith, willing to converse.”
3) What does Abp. DiNoia think about Vatican II?
In
an oft-quoted essay that appeared in the scholarly journal The Thomist in 1990, then-Fr. DiNoia surveyed “American Catholic
Theology at Century’s End:
Postconciliar, Postmodern, Post-Thomistic”. “Assimilating the work of several generations of bishops and
theologians, the [Second Vatican] Council combined a reaffirmation of the
Catholic Christian identity of the Church with a positive, albeit critical,
approach to modernity,” that is, to the post-Enlightenment intellectual
heritage of the Western world.
With the conclusion of the twentieth century, however, came “the advent
of ‘postmodernity’”. “The fortunes
of the study of Aquinas have shifted in tandem with these fluctuations.”
DiNoia
reviews two important concepts that provided a program for the Council. The first is ressourcement, a French word meaning return to and “creative
reappropriation of [the] principal formative sources” of Catholicism: “Scripture, liturgy, and the Fathers of
the Church”. The second is aggiornamento, an Italian word meaning “updating”. Whereas the Council tried to balance ressourcement and aggiornamento,
tradition and renewal, in the media and among the general public “reform and
renewal were widely viewed as equivalent with modernization.... the program of aggiornamento prevailed in the American Catholic reception
[understanding] of the Council from the outset.” The author’s language is polite, but he clearly does not
approve of that one-sided “reading” of the Council.
Neo-Thomism—the
dry, systematized Thomistic theology of the Latin manuals used for generations
in seminaries—“supplied the means to refute the errors of modernity rather than
to engage its challenge”. This almost
airtight academic system could not deal either with the pluralism of
twentieth-century ressourcement: the proliferation of new theological
approaches (e.g. the Liturgical Movement, Biblical theology, more in-depth
studies in patristics). “Many
American theologians drew the conclusion that neo-Thomism was incorrigibly
anti-modern and obscurantist, and that it had so far crippled the Church in its
encounter with [the modern world].”
As
a Dominican Friar who taught his confreres theology for decades, DiNoia is
aware that “there is a post-Thomistic Aquinas, an Aquinas unencumbered by the
enormous weight of commentary, debate, and systematization that has made his
thought seem inaccessible to modern theologians and unusable for their
theological work, an Aquinas who speaks with pristine clarity to a host of
urgently postmodern theological questions.”
Things
to take away from DiNoia’s turn-of-the-century discussion: the theology of Thomas Aquinas is a
great treasure for the Church. The
dry Latin theology manuals in the seminaries were not necessarily the same
thing. The documents of the Second
Vatican Council have lasting value because they were produced and approved by
an Ecumenical Council under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The interpretations of those documents
by enthusiasts who emphasized “renewal” and ignored “tradition” were not
necessarily the same thing.