Gérard Philips as Architect of Vatican II and as Precursor to Synodality

In the following story about Prof. Gérard Philips of Louvain, it would be claiming too much to assert that his effort to have Vatican II (1962–1965) interpreted correctly is in fact reprising what John Henry Newman attempted for the rightful interpretation of Vatican I (1869–1870) a century earlier. There is a resemblance, however.

In each case, both writers confront what they consider to be misleading approaches to the raison d’être or spirit of these two most recent ecumenical councils: for Newman and Vatican I, it was the council’s teachings on papal primacy and infallibility and their misinterpretation by a theologically ultramontane faction during and after the council, and for Philips and Vatican II, it was a traditionalist block of conciliar bishops and Roman Curia officials who pressed an agenda during the council that Philips opposed. The opposition both men faced could be termed conservative. This would constitute Newman and Philips as more progressive voices in opposition. (It would be misleading to call Newman and Philips more liberal voices because liberalism, for Newman, has a restricted meaning and is pejorative.)

In the years following Vatican II, the dispute into seeking the rightful key to unlock the true spirit of the council’s sixteen documents was advanced by a conservative faction as the notion of communio, a sort of skeleton key or passe-partout to everything, as it were. For Philips, on the other hand, during the council and thereafter, the key was the notion of populus Dei, and Philips’s story amounts to how he caused the notion of the People of God to be centrally repositioned in the council’s major document, Lumen Gentium, which describes the church. (Story telling, as this essay illustrates, invites a more fluid colloquial writing style than the usual genre of academic prose and elaborate footnoting.)

Newman’s Story

Newman’s effort to set interpretations of the teaching of the First Vatican Council straight is fairly well known and has been studied frequently, including by this author; it need only be rehearsed briefly. Henry Edward Manning, like Newman a convert to Roman Catholicism from the Church of England, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1851 and eventually succeeded Nicholas Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster. In this capacity and already possessing ultramontane views, he attended Vatican I and helped influence the council’s teaching on papal prerogatives, not achieving all that he and colleagues wished but winning enough expressions to be able to advance pro-papal interpretations when he returned to England. In the early 1870s, many moderate-thinking Catholics urged Newman to advance his own more balanced views of what the council taught, but Newman would not without seeming to attack the archbishop, who in 1875 was to be named a cardinal by Pope Pius IX. Newman kept peace in British Catholicism by keeping his pen dry and his mouth shut.

Providence presented Newman an opening. On Guy Fawkes Day, 1874, the just-recent prime minister, William Gladstone, launched a fierce attack on Catholicism, claiming that Catholics in England could not be loyal citizens to the Crown as long as they were under the decrees of Vatican I. Gladstone had been reading Manning’s writings on what the papal prerogatives meant. Newman seized the opening. He wrote his “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” ostensibly to rebut Gladstone—which in fact it did—but it was covertly correcting Manning’s excessive interpretation of papal prerogatives with Newman’s moderate and balanced interpretation of them. Newman’s interpretations of the Vatican I teachings have become the received understanding of them today. In the letter, Newman made a veiled reference to those (i.e., Manning, William George Ward, and Herbert Vaughan who was to succeed Manning as Archbishop of Westminster) who have “done their best to set the house on fire, [and] leave to others the task of putting out the flame.”1 Shortly after, Newman wrote to his old friend, Frederic Rogers (Lord Blachford) that he was grateful to Gladstone for having allowed him to trim ultramontane excesses without having to mention names. “We can speak against Gladstone, while it would not be decent to speak against Manning.”2

Some Prolegomena to the Story of Gérard Philips

The effort of Professor Gérard Philips to achieve a rightful interpretation of the meaning and spirit of Vatican II is not at all well known in the English-speaking world, not at the time the council happened and certainly not today, some sixty years later. The story of how he achieved his aim moves in tandem with the story of how the Second Vatican Council unfolded. The council’s story in main outline is somewhat better known because much was written about it at the time, although Philips’s role, a behind-the-scenes role, was shaded out of accounts. Catholics today, even those self-named as Vatican II Catholics, are hazy about how Vatican II itself happened and are often oblivious of Philips’s crucial role in it. Moreover, Philips’s achievement has a decidedly contemporary benefit. His championing of the People of God motif provided the foundation for Pope Francis’s teaching on synodality as being the church’s raison d’être, a contention that has clearly been embraced and promoted by Pope Leo XIV.

Let Pope Francis speak for himself:

The Second Vatican Council was, in fact, like a seed sown in the field of the world and the Church. ... The Synod of 2021–2024 continues to draw on the energy of that seed and to develop its potential. The synodal path is, in fact, implementing what the Council taught about the Church as Mystery and People of God.3

The final document of that Synod on Synodality process, promulgated on 24 November 2024 by Pope Francis, reiterates the connection just mentioned between synodality and Vatican II’s teaching on People of God, adding that “the synodal journey constitutes a further act of reception of the Council.”4 Connecting synodality’s three motifs of communion, participation, and mission with the council’s teaching on the People of God motif is not up for serious debate today. What had been much debated prior to Francis’s pontificate concerned the central meaning of Lumen Gentium, the council’s document on the church. Was communio its hermeneutic, as advocated by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, or was it populus Dei as advocated by Philips and other voices present at the council?

What, then, is the correct way to interpret Lumen Gentium? This essay proposes that we hear from Prof. Gérard Philips on the question. The story of Philips’s role makes the case that his answer to the question carries significant weight against the weighty views of two popes.

Pope Benedict XVI, who attended the council as the personal peritus of Cardinal Frings of Cologne and also worked on drafts of Lumen Gentium for the Doctrinal Commission, enjoyed an insider’s view of the council and its arguments. Later, as pope, he advocated “a hermeneutics of reform” as the council’s true spirit that would preserve continuity. He proposed that reform is not to be understood as a rupture with the past, and coming from a pope who was present at the council, his view merits attention. In fact, the council was a very complex phenomenon, and its final documents reflect a complexity of varying viewpoints. The documents have been compared to a patchwork quilt of theological emphases. However, is there a skeleton key to an overall orientation of the documents?

The very language of “continuity versus rupture” does not serve the Catholic tradition. What perceptive Catholic scholar, after Cardinal Newman’s celebrated work on the matter, or even after Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, would describe church doctrines as anything other than developmental? Let me present an example of rupture. Colonial Americans lived within a polity in which a monarch was accepted as essential, even as willed by God. Social forces, especially London-imposed heavy taxation, caused them to rebel. Not all Americans rebelled because the aptly called “Loyalists” either returned to England or resisted the rebellion. But the so-called “Patriots” started fighting against British troops and fellow Americans, the colonial Loyalists, winning the ensuing war, and creating a polity with no king. Now this is rupture. When American athletes march into an Olympic stadium, the flag bearer does not dip the flag before the royal box as every other country does. Now this is ingrained rupture.

Probably a better expression for the opposite of continuity is “change of focus” rather than rupture. Did Vatican II represent a change of focus, such that the phrase, “continuity with the past,” while always true in a certain sense, does not sufficiently embrace the phrase, “change of focus?” This essay contends that a change of focus is what Philips achieved at Vatican II.

Philips’s Story in Six Segments

To anticipate the segments in brief:

(1) How the concept of communion emerged as the proposed hermeneutical key to the council,

(2) Arrival in Louvain (Leuven in Flemish) a half dozen years after the council,

(3) Focusing on Gérard Philips,

(4) The unfolding of the Lumen Gentium schema with focus on its second chapter,

(5) Philips’s post-conciliar lectures, L’Église et son mystère au deuxième Concile du Vatican,

(6) The conclusion to (1) above: The hermeneutic of communio is more suggestive of the Mystici Corporis encyclical of 1943 and therefore more supportive of the legitimation of hierarchical authority in the church than is the idea of the church as People of God. The latter is indeed a change in focus for viewing the church. To avoid misunderstanding, the latter idea is not so uniquely true that the former is a false view of what the church is. But according to Gérard Philips, People of God is the clef de voûte, the keystone, for understanding Lumen Gentium and, by implication, the other conciliar documents.

SEGMENT ONE

In terms of the emergence of communio to describe most aptly the mystery of the church, it is necessary to step back in time and review a Vatican document affecting university academics, especially American professors, since the Unites States had more Catholic colleges and universities than anywhere else in the world. Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, on 15 August 1990, which attempted to define how Catholic colleges and universities were to express more effectively, along with help from local bishops, their Catholic heritage in the workings of these institutions. In the following decade, university and college presidents, faculty, and theologians weighed in on Ex Corde’s proposals, especially because federal and state monies were at risk in being withheld in the United States where a separation of church and state is mandated. Should bishops interfere in how a Catholic university is run, grants and tuition loans to students would be in jeopardy. The successful work of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU), the arm of its more than 200 presidents, and guidance during this critical decade by ACCU executive director Sister Alice Gallin, OSU, cannot be overestimated.

Returning to the assessment of communio and how it emerged, the Applicatio of Ex Corde Ecclesiae to American Catholic colleges and universities received the recognitio or approval from the Vatican in May of 2000. The Applicatio text was largely the work of a subcommittee chaired by Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, and communio was its linchpin idea. “The body of [ecclesial] relationships is aptly described by the theological concept of communion. … The richness of communion illuminates the ecclesial relationship that unites the distinct, and yet complimentary, teaching roles of bishops and Catholic universities” wrote the cardinal.

Ex Corde itself did not use communio as its guiding insight. The closest it came was article five of the Norms: “Every Catholic University is to maintain communion with the universal Church.”5 This sentence is more hortatory than analytic. It did not advance the debate.

Very analytic and not merely hortatory was the 1992 document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church On Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion. “The concept of communion,” wrote Cardinal Ratzinger, the dicastery’s prefect, “is very suitable for expressing the core of the Mystery of the Church.”6 And quoting Pope John Paul II’s letter to the American bishops in 1987, Cardinal Ratzinger said outright, “The concept of communion lies ‘at the heart of the Church’s self-understanding.’”7 Even more explicit in the linking of communio with the meaning of Vatican II is the Final Report of the 1985 Synod of Bishops: “The ecclesiology of communion is the central and fundamental idea of the council’s documents.”8 In the Synod’s statement, the idea of communio is applied to legitimate distinctions within a more fundamental unity. That is to say, it asserts the harmonious functioning of unity and pluriformity as opposed to destructive pluralism. The unspoken guidance for ensuring church unity is clearly the hierarchy.

The hermeneutic of communio emerged as a school of thought shortly after Vatican II ended and was offered as the key to interpreting the council’s documents and spirit correctly. Its original proponents were associated with the 1972 launch of the theological review, Communio, reputedly to counteract the polarizing orientation of the influential journal, Concilium, when to their minds Concilium’s articles became too critical of church structures. The originating spirit of the new journal was Hans Urs von Balthasar, and he gathered persons like Louis Bouyer, Henri de Lubac, Franz Greiner, and Joseph Ratzinger to join him. Some of these people had earlier joined Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, and Edward Schillebeeckx in launching Concilium. The traditionalists vs. progressives struggle among bishops at the council (1962–1965) was reprised among these theologians in 1972.

Greiner, the first editor of Communio, introduced the inaugural issue with these words:

We are conscious in the Church community that fronts are forming, that a polarization is taking place.9

And von Balthasar in the same issue wrote:

A religious truth … has to be something special … and not only ‘something’ special among other special things, but the special thing, so much so that it can claim universal importance precisely on the ground of its uniqueness. We … designate it Communio.10

As Ratzinger wrote in the same journal twenty years later, the aim was to protect a hierarchical understanding of the church because the church-as-People-of-God “was understood in the sense of popular sovereignty, as a right to a common, democratic determination over everything that the Church is … and should do.”11 This word communio began to carry a papal pedigree.

SEGMENT TWO

I arrived in Louvain on a rainy August evening in 1971, and I went there to work with its renowned Flemish Dominican theologian, Jan Walgrave. I arrived planning to do a thesis on movements in German ecclesiology between the two great wars, for example, on Karl Adam’s work and on that of Romano Guardini before him. This between-the-wars period was a kind of precursor to Vatican II ideas on the church. But Walgrave convinced me that reading John Henry Newman would be a better preparation for Vatican II ecclesiology. To understand the Philips story below, Louvain had acquired a certain luster during the council and had more periti and consultors working for the council than any other theological school. The Italian press during the council was also aware of Louvain’s professors and their influence, along with Belgian bishops such as Cardinal Suenens, De Smedt of Brugge, and Charue of Namur. The journalists called all of them the squadra belga, sort of the Belgian mafia but without pejorative meaning. They met daily at the Belgian College in Rome to strategize and to plan interventions in committees and in the Council Aula through bishops they advised, including many African bishops.

In 1971, Gustave Thils was still in Louvain, lecturing in the French side of the Faculty of Theology. Still lecturing also were Lucien Cerfaux, Willy Onclin, Albert Houssiau, and Roger Aubert. But Gérard Philips had retired from teaching in 1969 and was to die in 1972. I never met him. I knew of him from reading Yves Congar. Somewhere, and perhaps in a newspaper such as Le Monde, Congar had called Philips le bourreau de travail, the “workhorse,” of Vatican II. Accordingly, I purchased Philips’s Louvain lectures on Vatican II that he delivered after the council ended.

SEGMENT THREE

Who was Gérard Philips? He was born in 1899 in Flemish-speaking Limburg in eastern Belgium where his first name is pronounced in the French manner. Since 1967, Limburg has acquired its own diocesan chancery in Hasselt, but Philips was ordained priest for the francophone Diocese of Liège, which then reached into Limburg. He studied at the Gregorian University in Rome and afterwards taught Dogmatics in the Major Seminary of Liège, even though for someone as brilliant as he, Louvain was the place to teach. Louvain’s Faculty of Theology was restricted to diocesan priests and controlled by them, especially by priests of the Bruges and Brussels-Mechelen dioceses. Religious Order theologians, such as Jan Walgrave, O.P. and Piet Fransen, S.J., were kept from faculty appointments until not long before I arrived. But Philips, a diocesan priest, was kept away earlier. Louvain traditionally preferred Louvain people trained in its more progressive and historically oriented style than would have happened in the Roman universities where Philips studied. This was one reason why Philips was persona non grata to the Louvain faculty. But Cardinal van Roey, a fellow Fleming, stepped in and demanded Philips’s appointment to the faculty in 1944. Philips was never warmly received inside the faculty. From 1953 to 1968, Philips was also a senator in the Christelijke Volkspartij, the CVP, and thus he experienced the politics of a linguistically divided parliament in Belgium. He learned the values of compromise and concession and deal making. These were going to be his style at Vatican II and for which he was to be a workhorse and a successful organizer of conciliar documents.

When Pope John XXIII’s motu proprio of Pentecost, 5 June 1960, Superno Dei nutu, set up the preparations for the future council, preparatory commissions more or less mirroring the dicasteries of the Roman Curia were created, each headed by a praeses (prefect or president) who was the same person as the prefect of the parallel Curia department. These commissions for the most part were populated with the prefect’s like-minded people. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani of the Holy Office thus headed the Preparatory Theological Commission, called in short the Doctrinal Commission. (Technically, beginning with Pius XII, the pope was prefect or president of the Holy Office, and Ottaviani was its secretary, but Pope John XXIII assigned the presidency of the Doctrinal Commission to Ottaviani.) The Commission was officially called the Commissio de doctrina fidei et morum, and Sebastian Tromp, S.J., of the Holy Office, was its secretary. Some theologians outside the Holy Office were appointed members and consultors to the Doctrinal Commission. Philips was appointed a member in July 1960, and Congar and de Lubac, for example, were appointed consultors, a lesser rank, at the same time. Members could speak whenever but consultors could speak only when invited. Everyone was held to a promise of secrecy about Commission proceedings!

When the council opened in the fall of 1962, Philips was appointed by Pope John as an official peritus to the same working group, now called the Conciliar Dogmatic Commission. The Commission remained dominated, however, by Holy Office personnel and by supportive bishops, and this remained the status quo up until the explosive event of Saturday, 13 October 1962, the first working session of the council. The just-arrived council fathers were expected to elect bishop members to the Conciliar Commissions from a prepared list of bishops, in effect rubberstamping Curial preferences. But Cardinal Liénard of Lille arose from the Council of Presidents table and said to the whole Aula, “We need more time.” Cardinal Frings of Cologne then went to the microphone and said, “Döpfner, König and I agree.” The Aula exploded in applause. Cardinal Tisserant, the opening-day moderator, was forced to end the session to the consternation of the people of the Curia Romana who had orchestrated an election of bishops that never happened.

Mentioning these Vatican II details was necessary to locate Philips in the machinery of the council because this is where he made his mark and where, in retrospect, it is seen how he was to be a precursor of the synodality theme of our times. Philips was Roman trained, as mentioned. He was likely thought “safe” by Ottaviani’s people. Tromp knew him when they both attended Maurice de La Taille’s lectures at the Gregorian University in 1925, and Philips had collaborated with Tromp on an apostolate of the laity document in 1958. Besides, Philips and Tromp were native Dutch speakers, bondgenooten (allies) as is said in Dutch. Moreover, Philips had Flemish political experience as a Belgian senator. He could read the lay of the land well and knew how he needed to operate in Roman circles. It must be added, nevertheless, that at the end of Session II (1963), the progressive majority at the council, sensing its obligation to lead events more actively, caused a shakeup in Ottaviani’s Doctrinal Commission. More bishops were voted into it, and Philips was made a vice-secretary of the commission alongside Tromp. Eventually, he came to replace Tromp as secretary, thereafter becoming the drafter of the commission’s documents for the conciliar fathers to consider. He became the workhorse behind the entire council’s documentation, as Congar rightly hailed him. The story of Philips needs to continue.

PART FOUR

Lumen Gentium, with its eight chapters, is too complicated a document to unravel in its many facets. Focus must be placed on the emergence of the commanding theme of People of God and Philips’s decisive role in bringing it about, to which role must be added the helping influence of his fellow Flemish collaborator, Leo Cardinal Suenens. Even this aspect of the People of God theme is complex, and it involved many Philips-led collaborations during the initial autumn 1962 council sessions and the following winter and spring. (In academic-year language, the council fathers met during the fall semesters of 1962 to 1965. During those following spring and summer semesters, the working committees met to prepare documents.)

Council historians, seeking that exactness of reporting their training requires, describe the preparatory phase ordered by Pope John and even a prior preparation period, sort of an ante-preparatory phase. The mentality of the working personnel in 1958 and 1959, who for the most part were Rome-based clerics, envisioned a council that met for one session, a council that would readily approve the documents handed to bishops on arrival. These documents repeated Vatican teachings since Vatican I, teachings from either the popes or the Curia. The document prepared for distribution on the church, for example, used the Mystici Corporis encyclical of Pope Pius XII as a template, and why not? Sebastian Tromp, Ottaviani’s secretary on the Preparatory Theological Commission, was widely known to be the ghostwriter of it for the pope. The envisioned theology of the church, prepared for the arriving bishops, would complement the Vatican I teaching on papal prerogatives in Pastor Aeternus with a further teaching on bishops because Vatican I was suddenly adjourned on 20 October 1870 by the outbreak of war. Vatican I never completed the papal/episcopacy relationship. But under Tromp’s hand the teaching on bishops would fall within the shadow of the pope’s universal and immediate jurisdiction over the entire church. In such a document, prepared for the arriving bishops to rubberstamp, there would be no hint of episcopal collegiality nor of the role of the laity. But this was not to be.

When Philips was appointed a member of the Doctrinal Commission in 1960, he was entering this fait accompli milieu. He was aware of how the Holy Office had treated some of his friends and colleagues who thought differently from it. The writings of Louis Charlier of Louvain’s faculty and those of Dominic Chenu of Paris were put on the Index in 1942. Yves Congar was silenced in 1954 and removed from the faculty of Le Saulchoir in Paris. Roger Aubert of Louvain was given a monitum (issued a warning) in 1954. And Pius XII’s Humani Generis encyclical in 1950 was understood to have condemned the so-called historically-oriented Nouvelle Theologie of Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou, a historical orientation to theology so dear to Louvain’s own style. Philips, the accomplished Flemish politician, needed to navigate cautiously in this witch-hunting milieu.

Two other structures in this preparatory period had little effect on the De Ecclesia document prepared by Ottaviani’s Doctrinal Commission. A Central Preparatory Commission, technically headed by the pope himself, although he stayed aloof from it, was designed to be the funnel, redactor, and transmitter to the world’s bishops of all preparatory commission documents. Pericle Felici of the Roman Curia was appointed its secretary, a role in which he continued during the council years as General Secretary of the entire council. Then there was the Secretariat for Christian Unity, headed by German Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, the only non-Curia and the only progressive-oriented preparatory unit. Ottaviani kept Bea’s influence at a distance, claiming that a secretariat is not a commission and had no right to propose or amend texts for his Doctrinal Commission. Furthermore, any redactions offered from the Central Preparatory Committee were rejected by the Doctrinal Commission, claiming that doctrinal matters were its prerogative. Finally, General Secretary Felici was a Cardinal Ottaviani supporter. Closure was ensured.

The De Ecclesia document prepared for the world’s bishops lacked a synthetic view of the church. It was a series of atomized essays, with cautions against this ism, that heresy. The eleven-chapter schema had remained relatively untouched in a two-year review process from what Tromp first drafted. It began with the nature of the church militant, followed by the necessity of the church for salvation, followed by two chapters on the hierarchy.

Another schema from the Doctrinal Commission, De Fontibus Revelationis, got developed faster and underwent contentious discussion in the Aula of St. Peter’s before the bishops were given the schema on the church. Reporter and church historian Étienne Fouilloux described its reception as “a rude exchange of contradictory arguments” with the result that no other document from the Ottaviani Commission was to be found pleasing to the majority of assembled bishops. “Toute le préparation doctrinale du council est par terre,” which I would freely translate as “Every text from the Doctrinal Commission arrived in the Aula DOA.”

Such was to be fate of the De Ecclesia text discussed two weeks later, on the first day of December. There is no scripture in it, observed Cardinal Döpfner of Munich. It reflects merely the theology of the traditional seminary manuals. Where are church fathers, asked Cardinal Frings? (Recall that Ratzinger was Frings’s adviser.) The most stunning and jaw dropping rebuke came from Bishop De Smedt of Brugge, criticizing the document’s triumphalism, its clericalism, and its juridicism. The Sebastian Tromp-orchestrated schema on the church, like De Fontibus, went up in flames.

Prior to Bishop De Smedt’s famous attack in the council Aula on 1 December 1962, Philips was already working privately on a revision of the Tromp schema. Congar reports in his Mon journal du Concile that Philips told him that Cardinal Suenens on 15 October had asked Philips to draft a schema on the church. According to Congar, who saw the draft, Philips began with the church as the People of God and as a mystery. At an October 25th meeting in the Dominican-run Angelicum, Philips’s draft for this rearrangement got the support of Congar, Rahner, Ratzinger, Otto Semmelroth, and Carlo Colombo, Cardinal Montini’s personal theologian. Suenens then maneuvered to get the Philips text given to the bishops when the schema of Ottaviani’s commission was to be distributed, by utilizing the Secretariat for Extraordinary Affairs as a doorway. But Secretary General Felici blocked the gambit. The bishops received only the Ottaviani schema, leading to the 1 December 1962 attack on it.

To understand better how Philips’s politically trained mind works, he never wanted his draft to replace the commission’s document but rather to be seen as desiderata. Therefore, his People of God approach was not meant to replace the imagery of Mystici Corporis but to complement it with a change in focus. His own text tried to keep as much of the Ottaviani/Tromp schema as he could, after scrubbing it of language redolent of the manuals and scholasticism and inserting pastoral imagery instead, reflecting perhaps the 25 October Angelicum meeting and concerns typical of Ratzinger and Congar.

In the midst of the 1962 session, Suenens began to take a more active role in decluttering the documents to be debated and in fine-tuning the machinery overseeing the debates. On 4 December, he delivered his famous plan-for-the-council of an ecclesia ad intra and ecclesia ad extra division of labor, a plan which Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini of Milan on the following day seconded. The plan did not win the day, but it brought onto the same page with Suenens the man who would be pope the next year. Their sympatico was decisive later on.

What about Suenens and Philips? They were roughly the same age. They were both Flemish. Philips was a man of texts and libraries, Suenens a man of actions and processes. From 1962 on, Philips became Suenens’s operative but was never his confidant. Suenens’s confidant seems to have been Albert Prignon, the rector of the Belgian College in Rome where the squadra belga and their French and German and Dutch allies often met to strategize. The Council threw these two Flemings together. Their mutual wish to see the council achieve Pope John’s hope for a pastoral vision and renewal made them maneuver together. In Congar’s opinion, there was probably no other two-person team as formative on the council’s outcome as Suenens and Philips.

The Philips draft influenced the earlier, and roundly criticized, De Ecclesia text but did not simply replace it. A sub-commission of seven bishops, chaired by Cardinal Michael Browne, staunchly conservative and a Curia man, was asked to rewrite Tromp’s original schema. Cardinal König was on the sub-commission and using Karl Rahner’s help. Bishop Charue of Namur was on it, helped by Philips, and so was Archbishop Garrone of Toulouse, helped by Congar. (Garrone and Congar also shared in being prisoners of war, having served as priests in the French army in WWII.) But with voices on the wider Doctrinal Commission still wedded to ideas in the original schema, what came from the sub-commission was a four-chapter schema beginning with the church in its Trinitarian mystery, a second chapter on the hierarchy, a third chapter on People of God and the laity, and a fourth chapter on the call to holiness. This was mailed to the worldwide bishops before the second session of the council opened, and debate on it in the Aula was the first order of business.

When the bishops arrived, most of the debate was about the hierarchy and the new idea of collegiality. But the focus needed to remain on the nature of the church, which set the backdrop for discussions on collegiality. Proposals were voiced in the Aula to relocate “People of God” from chapter III to before the treatment of the hierarchy. For example, Karol Wojtyła of Krakow said it should go before the hierarchy to show how the latter is meant to serve the former. Suenens had been advocating earlier in the summer the same repositioning, and in July of 1963, he succeeded with the Coordinating Commission to reposition People of God before the chapter on the hierarchy, fostering what Philips wanted all along. It was still up to Ottaviani’s Doctrinal Commission to accept the change to its original ordering of topics. After heated resistance from a minority of conservative bishops on the now-expanded Doctrinal Commission, it accepted placing People of God before the chapter on hierarchy by a 20-4 vote. This was due to the deft political interventions Philips made. He wanted the repositioning passed but not causing a schism in the Committee and later in the Aula.

On 30 October 1963, a showdown moment between progressive and conservative bishops happened in the Aula concerning the idea of collegiality of bishops and the restoration of a permanent diaconate, captured in five voting proposals. The votes fluctuated between 98% and 74% in favor of the wishes of the progressive majority. Moreover, it forced a change of approach on Ottaviani’s Doctrinal Commission. It was at this time that Philips was named a co-secretary of the Commission, and it was Philips from this point who consolidated the later preparatory documents, not Tromp. Philips’s subsequent schema on the church, which now can be called Lumen Gentium, an opening-line phrase suggested by Suenens, adopted the outline of the chapters familiar to us now. Chapter II made People of God its focus, thus providing a-history-of-salvation approach that replaced the juridical view of Mystici Corporis, which had been the inspiration for the original schema from Tromp and was soundly defeated by the majority bishops. Gérard Philips’s effecting the priority of the people of God theme in Lumen Gentium supports why he must be reckoned a precursor of the synodality language used by Pope Francis.

PART FIVE

Returning to Louvain after the council, Philips lectured on Vatican II, and these lectures eventually became his book, L’Église et son mystère. He writes in the introduction that his aim is to express the council’s meaning as exactly and objectively as possible, a pure exegesis of Lumen Gentium sans supplement de vues personnelles. He calls Lumen Gentium the key to every other document of the council, and he terms chapters I and II the keystone to Lumen Gentium itself. His analysis of the document, in bullet fashion, follows:

(1) Chapters I and II are the two shutters of a diptych, les volets du dyptique. (There is an altar backdrop in Sint-Pieters Kerk in Leuven that was possibly his inspiration for the image.) The mystery of the church, lodged within the Trinitarian mystery (chapter 1) requires a complimentary exposé that is absolutely indispensable. The church’s mystery is not an abstraction but a concrete historical reality. Thus, chapter II is not simply the next idea in Lumen Gentium, coming after Mystery; rather, it is the same thing in concrete description. Inner and outer realities are one. In fact, the church itself is properly called a “sacrament.”

(2) One could have rightly called chapter II, he says, “the catholicity-within-history” of the church, Catholicité historique. Catholicity taken by itself is just an abstraction and does not work. It needs concreteness in actual human beings and temporal unfolding.

(3) The church is between the times, entre-temps, between the Lord’s Ascension and His Parousia. Philips writes with a constant refrain: The church is “le peuple de Dieu en marche,” the church on the move!

(4) One cannot grasp the subdivisions—he calls them les spécialisations—of the church without a view of the entire mystery, of the l’édifice total. Bishops, religious, laity, the Virgin Mary, the call to holiness, separated Christians, charism, are all instances of God’s People.

(5) The first time Philips, in his book, implies the notion of communion is when #4 of Lumen Gentium quotes St. Cyprian about how the church participates in the union of the Blessed Trinity.12 But his first actual mention of the word communion itself is restricted to how these different specializations (religious, other laity, clerics, etc.) are joined in a social institution called church.13 Therefore, communio does not function as a hermeneutic for Philips to describe the essence of the church as it will later for Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.14

Recall the original question: What is the correct way to interpret Vatican II? It is striking that communio is not Philips’s hermeneutical key. People of God clearly is the way. He does not use the expression of a hermeneutical key, but he is clear in maintaining that the mystery of the church, infused by Trinitarian divine life, expresses itself as God’s People in history. And this “dyptic with two shutters,” as he explicitly says, is the foundation of the rest of Lumen Gentium.

Furthermore, he is clear that this Dogmatic Constitution on the Church is la pierre d’angle—his other phrase for keystone—to the rest of Vatican II’s documents.

Two codicils must be added about this key person about whom so many people remain unaware. Congar writes that Philips’s parliamentary savvy wrote texts that garnered enough votes from the conservative minority to pass. Congar further notes that Philips is not the only theologian who guided into existence successful Vatican II texts, but he is the father of them all.15 Second, it was purported that Pope Paul VI wanted to make Philips a cardinal after the council because of the instrumentality of his work in achieving voting victories. But it would have been “brutta figura” to have avoided making Tromp a cardinal also, and elevating Tromp Paul VI did not want to do. Consequently, the pope gifted Philips with one of his own special chalices.

PART SIX

It remains to draw some conclusion from the Philips story and to underline their import for ideas on synodality decades later. Six are proposed.

(1) In interpreting documents of a complex process like Vatican II, communio is an abstract hermeneutic. It describes differences, but its accent is on the unity in which they cohere. Unity is fostered and preserved by authority. This focus is not unlike the doctrine of Mystici Corporis. That encyclical described the unity of the church; indeed, it identified the Roman Catholic Church with Christ’s Mystical Body, and it described the social and juridic powers (munera) that maintained it, especially papal primacy. That is where Ottaviani’s Preparatory Theological Commission began and for very long refused to budge until Philips began coordinating affairs. How Ottaviani came to trust Philips sufficiently is matter for a book.

(2) Without ever wanting to disenfranchise the minority, Philips bent over backwards to bring them on board but with a change in focus, and he was successful. Congar became quite agitated with Philips a few times for seeming to bend too much to Curia interests. Philips never wanted an outright rejection of Mystici Corporis because it would have caused a schism at the council. He simply removed it from being the only thing on center stage. It seems clear that he moved People of God to center stage and positioned it more centrally than Mystici Corporis. This is why Philips’s work in drafting documents can be called a change in focus.

(3) The communio hermeneutic surged to the forefront in recent years. It has been used to accentuate the role of magisterium and the expectation of obedience to it that were certainly hallmarks of the papacy of John Paul II. One can admit that certain events and publications needed to be reigned in. But let us draw inspiration from that cautionary analysis John Henry Newman did in 1877 of the three features in the church viewed sacramentally: the priestly or devotional life, the prophetic or the theological life of the church, and the kingly office. By “kingly,” Newman means church polity and its use of authority. Newman says that its inherent danger is the tendency to tyranny and ambition. This is precisely what happened in the Modernist period with Sodalitium Pianum, a type of secret police reporting doctrinal deviations to Pope Pius X via the Holy Office, a reign of terror so well reported by Leuven professor Louis Janssens in the pages of Louvain Studies.16

A kind of cautionary question remains associated with communio: In the rightful mission to foster and preserve unity, when does communio become an agenda or justification for unnecessary uniformity or heavy handedness? This was a style of church authority during the ultramontane period under Pope Pius IX that begot Newman’s ire.

(4) The People of God change in focus brings many suggestive values into being, or in Philips’s words, values of L’Église en marche. One of them is openness to how the Holy Spirit is leading the church not only by clerics but also by laity. Here is a European instance. In March of 2012, an Austrian pastor prohibited a gay man in a registered domestic partnership from serving on the parish council after the man received a great number of votes from fellow parishioners supporting him. The Archdiocese of Vienna at first upheld the church rules on the matter that the pastor had duly quoted and followed. But Cardinal Schönborn then asked himself, “How would Jesus have responded?” The cardinal did what Jesus had so often done, share a meal with marginalized children of Abraham. Schönborn invited the man to lunch, and the cardinal came to find him full of faith and humility and desire to serve others. So Schönborn began a reexamination of the archdiocesan restrictions for serving on parish councils, and he then overturned them. Not many years later Schönborn brought to the Synodal Process of 2022–2024, of which he was a strong advocate, this openness to the voices of the laity who seemed marginalized. The import of being People of God justified it.

(5) In the discernment of what the Holy Spirit is prompting, the prime example of openness to the Holy Spirit is Acts 6. The Hebrews and the Hellenists, living in the same Jerusalem commune in the years immediately following Jesus’s death, tangled over the Hellenist refusal to worship in the Temple. The Hellenists, Greek-speaking diaspora Jews confessing Jesus as Messiah, were convinced that believing in Jesus did not require Temple usage any longer. The twelve, now including Matthias as replacement for Judas, were part of the Aramaic-speaking Hebrews in the commune. From the beginning they worshipped in the Temple and observed Torah laws that were consistent for them with belief in Jesus as Messiah. Although the sympathies of the twelve lay with the Hebrew faction in the commune, they gave the Hellenists their own leadership and their freedom, Stephen, et al. It turns out that the Spirit-led church was in the Hellenist direction, according to the final picture from Acts. It is the Christian legacy today. Jesus has replaced Jewish cultic institutions such as the Jerusalem Temple. Therefore, could not a better name for Acts of the Apostles be Philips’s L’Église en marche?

(6) It is clear that the style of the papacy exercised by Francis was more aligned with Philip’s L’Église en marche than were the styles of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This is not to say that their styles were fully wrong, any more than Philips said that Mystici Corporis was simply wrong. It is not a question of pushing an earlier focus, like Mystici Corporis, fully to the side and rendering it silent. Pope Francis was not promoting rupture although critics of synodality made such charges against him. People of God is a change in focus in thinking about the nature of the church. Vatican II and especially Philips brought about this focus change. Pope Francis proposed a synodal church that listens to all the baptized and non-baptized, that walks beside people to support them in their consciences, and that is willing to admit its sinfulness and its mistakes, all this in an effort to ask “What does God want of us today?” Such institutional honesty reflects Lumen Gentium (# 8) and not Mystici Corporis. Pope Francis’s wish for a church synodal in style reflected a Vatican II theology associated with People of God and for which the deft editorial hand of Gérard Philips must be recognized as a precursor.

Postscript on Newman and the Idea of Synodality

Having begun with a resemblance between John Henry Newman and Gérard Philips, it is fitting to conclude with a Newman resemblance to the notion of solidarity, an idea advocated by Pope Francis as describing the Catholic Church itself and recently developed by Pope Leo XIV in his first major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The encyclical, a lengthy (over 42,000 words) and cogent teaching on human dignity and society’s common good grounded in the social doctrine of the church, quotes extensively Pope Francis’s Final Document of the Synod on Synodality, mentioned above. Leo writes that “the common good takes the form of a synodal approach for mission.” 17

Subsidiarity [read “listening”] … involves recognizing and supporting the faithful and intermediary ecclesial organizations as they carry out their responsibilities, valuing charisms and skills and avoiding any form of paternalism [read “clericalism”].18

“Walking with” and “listening” were key words for Francis, and Leo has reprised them:

In this regard, listening to the victims of spiritual, economic, institutional, sexual and power-based abuse, as well as abuses of conscience, is an integral part of a journey toward justice. … All authority is at the service of the People of God. This ministry of service is expressed not only through our faith celebrated and lived in the Sacraments, and in the adoption of a synodal style, but also in the concrete sharing of goods.19

No word could be more congenial to Newman’s ministry and mindset than listening. Consulting the laity, even in doctrinal matters and not just on how their children should be educated, appeared in a palmary and personally painful essay he composed in 1859. In addition, laity poured out their consciences to him in letters, to all of which he responded supportively. In the realm of how ideas, such as church teachings, advance and develop, it was again knowing how to listen to other voices and opinions, and being hesitant to control or squelch what seems extravagant. “Errors have a suicidal propensity” was a favorite expression he used. A fine example of listening, of letting opinions circulate, appeared in a letter to his Oxford colleague, Edward Pusey.

Life has the same right to decay, as it has to wax strong. This is specially the case with great ideas. You may stifle them; or you may refuse them elbow-room; or again, you may torment them with your continual meddling; or you may let them have free course and range, and be content, instead of anticipating their excesses, to expose and restrain those excesses after they have occurred.20

A last example of listening suffices, composed when Newman was Rector of the Catholic University in Ireland and describing the kind of university he wanted. A university is a

place to which a thousand schools make contributions; in which the intellect may safely range and speculate, sure to find its equal in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the tribunal of truth. It is a place where inquiry is pushed forward . . . . and rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge.21

Collision does not mean intended antagonism. It means healthy debate, candid exchange of views, having a certain open-mindedness to arrive at eventual truthful insights.

When I entered the University of Louvain, more precisely the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL), in 1971, Robert Prevost, the future Leo XIV, was a sixteen-year-old student in an Augustinian seminary high school in Indiana. Jorge Bergoglia, the future Francis, was a thirty-five-year-old Jesuit, recently ordained, and completing his tertianship in Spain. Newman was dead just over eighty years. History does not always depict living connections, such as Philips had with Cardinal Ottaviani or with Yves Congar, but history often suggests actual connections, as was the case with the change in focus Philips achieved at Vatican II with People of God and Pope Francis’s use of it as the foundation for synodality. The word would have been totally foreign to Newman. As Philips, therefore, was a precursor to Popes Francis and Leo XIV, Newman’s penchant for the value of listening to others, really listening sympathetically, was a precursor to what happened at Vatican II. The idea of listening, of walking with others hearing their views, is very congenial to Newman, even essential.

1 Newman, Diff (Longmans, Green, 1885), 2:177.

2 Newman, LD, 27:123.

3 Pope Francis, A Synodal Church in Mission, synthesis report (Holy See, 28 October 2023).

4 Pope Francis, For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission (Holy See, 24 November 2024).

5 John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (Holy See, 15 August 1990).

6 Joseph Ratzinger, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church On Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion (Holy See, 28 May 1992).

7 Ratzinger, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church On Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion.

8 Final Report of the 1985 Extraordinary Synod.

9 Franz Greiner, Communio (1972): 1.

10 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Communio (1972): 1.

11 Joseph Ratzinger, Communio.

12 Gérard Philips, L’Église et son mystère (Desclée, 1967), 91.

13 Philips, L’Église et son mystère, 130.

14 Philips, L’Église et son mystère.

15 “mais il en est pourtant le père,” Journal II: 81.

16 Louis Janssens, “The Non-infallible Magisterium and Theologians,” Louvain Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 195–259.

17 Leo, Magnifica Humanitas, (Holy See, 2026), ch. 2, §86.

18 Leo, Magnifica Humanitas, ch. 2, §87.

19 Leo, Magnifica Humanitas, ch. 2, §89.

20 Newman, Diff, 2:79.

21 Newman, HS (Longmans, Green, 1891), 3:16.