A Holy Boldness

For many Roman Catholic clerics at the Second Vatican Council, the most vital arena was not St. Peter's Basilica, where the prelates gathered for discussion, but a room on the third floor of Rome's college for German seminarians. Scores of cardinals and bishops from Germany, France, Africa and Latin America made pilgrimages there for theological advice. Theologians visited to discuss the issues and events of the council with the sad-eyed, soft-spoken man who occupied the room. He was Karl Rahner, 58, whom many eminent Roman Catholic thinkers regard as the most profound and most exciting theologian their church has produced in the 20th century.

As the council ended its first session last week--it is scheduled to reconvene in Rome next September--Rahner's admirers could claim that he had exerted more real influence on the council than any other theologian. Professor of dogmatic theology at Innsbruck University, Jesuit Rahner is personal theologian to both Franziskus Cardinal Konig of Vienna and Julius Cardinal Dopfner of Munich. Despite opposition to Rahner by many Italian churchmen, Pope John named him to the select group of periti, the official council theologians. In Rome's Catholic bookstores, his writings are bestsellers. "We can't keep this man's stuff in stock," a bookseller said happily. During the council's debates, many "progressive" bishops from northern Europe cribbed abundantly from his writings. Rahner personally wrote a draft resolution on the relationship of Scripture and tradition that last month was put before the council as an alternative to one proposed by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, the powerful and conservative chief of the Vatican's Congregation of the Holy Office.

A New Language. Churchmen who know Rahner's work have strong opinions about him. U.S. Jesuit Theologian Gustave Weigel calls him "the world's greatest theologian." Many conservative churchmen, on the other hand, view Rahner's work with suspicion and hostility. Three weeks ago, Monsignor Francesco Spadafora of Rome's Lateran University told a gathering of Mexican bishops that Rahner was a "formal heretic." Cardinal Ottaviani, too, suspects Rahner. has tried three times to get Rahner's work formally condemned, and last month vainly asked Pope John to send Rahner back to Innsbruck.

Much of the conservative suspicion of Rahner stems from his Socratic approach --he keeps relentlessly asking questions, dangerous, thought-prodding questions. Rahner believes that each generation must rethink the problems of theology for itself. He never rejects outright the dogmatic definitions of past councils or Popes, but he is constantly asking what the words of those definitions really mean. "The theologian of today," he says, "must be in search of a new language. We've got a lot of things to rethink. A holy boldness is needed."

Rahner's boldness has led him to reconsider church teaching on everything from ethics to eschatology, from the meaning of the parish to the nature of political power. "Rahner," says Cardinal Konig, "sees new aspects behind every traditional teaching." In his study of the relationship of the hierarchy to the Pope, for example, Rahner argues that the highest authority in Catholicism is not the Pope but the Pope in union with his bishops. When the Pope decides a matter for the entire church, says Rahner, he does so not by virtue of his own office alone, but as head of the bishops, who collectively are the descendants of the Apostles. Rahner reaches even farther, arguing that the entire hierarchy in its collective wisdom does not hold all the keys to the temples of truth. There is, he says, a "charismatic" element in the church, independent of the tables of organization. Just as God in the Old Testament spoke through prophets who were not priests, so he may in this century speak through prophetic laymen.

A Jolting Challenge. For many Catholics, morality is essentially a matter of sticking to the rules laid down by the church. But Rahner, notes an admiring fellow theologian, "sees the moral life not merely in terms of acts but rather of basic commitments." The world, in Rahner's vision, is full of "anonymous Christians"--men who may formally disbelieve in Christ or the church, but who nonetheless have made a personal and total surrender to the truth of an "unknown God." For Rahner, these truth-wedded men are, in a sense, Christians also--perhaps better Christians than those reared as Catholics who carry on their spiritual life by rote.

Such ideas and attitudes give Rahner's works a powerful ecumenical appeal. "Rahner thinks in a way that transcends confessional differences," says Yale's Lutheran Theologian George Lindbeck, an observer at the council. "Most of the time when I read Rahner I'm not conscious that I'm reading a Roman Catholic." As his enemies see Rahner, there are times when he does not even read like a Christian, for he asks paradoxical questions about even the basic assumptions of the faith. "Is God dead?" he sometimes asks his students, in a jolting-challenge to their conventional idea of God. "It could well be that the God you believe in and take comfort in is dead."

A Path Found. As a child in Freiburg im Breisgau, in southern Germany, Rahner often jolted his devoutly Catholic parents. He was a mischievous boy, seemingly devoid of promise, got such disgraceful marks that his father, a scholarly Latin teacher, once threatened to take him out of school. But he suddenly reformed, climbed to the top of his class. In 1922, he joined his elder brother Hugo as a member of the Society of Jesus. "Hugo's entering I can understand," said his father. "But Karl?"

Once he found his path, Rahner displayed a staggering diligence. Day after day, he gets up at 3:30 a.m. and goes to bed around n p.m., and most of the time in between he works. He can get away with expressing unconventional views because he knows orthodox thought in all its historical ramifications as well as the most formidable of his conservative opponents. He was editor of the Enchiridion Symbolorum, the standard compendium of documents expressing the true teachings of Catholicism. He is currently co-editing a massive encyclopedia of theology that will be completed in 1965 or thereabouts.

Despite his eminence among theologians, Rahner remains virtually unknown among laymen. He has never written a book summing up his theology--his insights are scattered among 700 books, articles and essays, and they are hard reading. As a young man he studied under German Existentialist Martin Heidegger, and the influence of that baffling philosopher is apparent in both Rahner's thinking and his labyrinthine style. "When I am an old man and have the time," jokes his brother Hugo (himself a noted theologian), "I want to translate Karl's writings --into German."

A Faraway Faith. Rahner is sometimes called an existentialist, and he has indeed found inspiration and challenge in existentialist thinkers. He burns with a passionate conviction that the church has failed to grapple effectively with the existential problems of the 20th century. "For modern man the faith is too far away," he says. "The theological problem today is to find the art of drawing religion out of a man, not pumping it into him. The Redemption has happened. The Holy Ghost is in men. The art is to help men become what they really are."

Ironically, Rahner at the moment is in no position to assist in this theological task. Last July, despite strenuous objections from his friends in the Austrian and German hierarchies, the Holy Office ordered him to submit all future writings for clearance by his Jesuit superiors in Rome. Since then, Rahner has written no new theological work; friends say that he will not speak out again until the ban is lifted.

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