|
This
past Wednesday, theologian and Episcopal priest Matthew Fox gave an
online presentation entitled “Père Chenu: Father of Liberation Theology,
Creation Spirituality, and Much of Vatican II” for the Association of Pittsburgh Priests.
Over 250 participants joined the call to listen to Fox’s memories,
reflections, and insights into the life of the Dominican theologian,
whose work continues to impact the church today.
Fox knows his subject well, having studied with him in the late 1960s at
the Institut catholique de Paris. It was Thomas Merton who encouraged
Fox to pursue his doctorate at the Institut—a fitting bit of
soul-friendship that is still bearing fruit through Fox’s many writings and public initiatives.
From Chenu, Fox learned that there were two divergent strands of
Christian spirituality: one beginning with the Fall and leading to
redemption, and the other beginning with Creation. Biblically speaking,
Fox noted, the latter is the “older source.” He described this discovery
as “a complete revelation.”
Fox lauded the book Chenu published in 1968, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century,
as “an absolute classic.” He drew attention to how nature—“another word
for creation”—comes first in the title, and explained Chenu’s view that
the renaissance of the twelfth century was cultivated by workers from
the “bottom up” as opposed to the “top-down” renaissance of the
fifteenth century. In line with this insight, Fox characterized Chenu’s
view of history as being not about “individuals” but “the people” as a
whole.
Chenu was condemned several times by the church hierarchy, including
Pope Pius XII and the head of the Dominican order. His 1937 publication,
Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir, was placed on the
Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books in 1942. Ironically, the book is a
veritable “menu” of topics that would be explored, elaborated, and
codified during the Second Vatican Council, Fox explained.
Chenu’s reputation was rehabilitated in 1962 when an African bishop from
Madagascar invited him to be his theological advisor at the council.
Fox noted how a “trinity” of Chenu’s ideas—“reading the signs of the
times,” “continuous creation,” and “continuous incarnation”—were
fundamental to the theology of the council and the language of Gaudium et Spes in particular.
Fox went on to share some of his favorite quotes from Chenu’s corpus:
“Faithful questioning is the most acute expression of the life of the
Spirit”; “The Holy Spirit cannot be a prisoner of rationality”;
“Tradition is not an inventory of propositions bundled in a book of
dogmas”; “The history of Spirit is the history of nature.”
Toward the end of his life, Chenu “prayed almost exclusively to the Holy
Spirit,” Fox said. He recalled one of his teacher’s favorite credos:
“There is no fear of change, because change is in the hands of the Holy
Spirit.” Following the notion that the Spirit “makes all things new,”
his prayer life lent him an element of youthful flexibility. “The
youngest man I ever met in my life was 76 years old,” Fox said. “He had
not an ounce of bitterness for all the struggle he’d been through.”
Gustavo Gutiérrez called Chenu the father of liberation theology; Yves
Congar, his student, received his ecumenism from him and helped develop
it in conciliar documents such as Unitatis Redintegratio; and
Fox himself credits him with naming and sparking the movement that was
to become creation spirituality. That one of Fox’s students was a
primary drafter of Laudato Si’ shows how Chenu’s teachings now
have generational import, redounding to a twenty-first-century
eco-theology where “the human person is entirely one with the cosmos.”
Fox sees this a signal moment to keep building on the legacy of his
mentor: “You don’t freeze a prophetic movement. You take its energy and
you keep moving, and looking for the next invitation to the prophetic.”
Michael Centore
Editor, Today's American Catholic |
No comments:
Post a Comment