After 38 Years,
Rehabilitation of Cardinal Daniélou
Posted to Personal
Update | Issue 118 | 18/06/2012
Cardinal Jean Daniélou
was one of the leading theologians of the Second Vatican Council, ranked with
Josef Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Described as “a
forgotten hero of the Vatican Council”, today he is hardly ever mentioned, and most
of his books are out of print. When you mention his name to Catholics familiar
with events in the Sixties, you are likely to notice a moment of embarrassment
and hesitancy. In effect, the memory of Daniélou remains ambiguous, ever since
he was found dead, one May afternoon in 1974, at the home of a prostitute on
the fourth floor of the Rue Dulong 56, Paris.
Jean Daniélou was born
in a small town North of Paris in 1905. Despite his father being an
anti-clerical politician at a time when the French government was embroiled in
a struggle to remove the Church’s role in education, Jean entered the Society
of Jesus in 1929 and was ordained in 1938. After his short spell as a military
chaplain ended with the fall of France in 1940, he devoted himself to the study
of the Fathers of the Church, and with Fr Henri de Lubac was one of the
founders of Sources Chrétiennes, a popular yet scholarly series of key writings
from the patristic period. Over the years, Daniélou produced a flow of books
and articles on the worship and theology of the Early Church. Such was his
reputation and influence that Blessed Pope John XXIII named him as a
theological expert for the Second Vatican Council. In 1969 he was made a
cardinal by Pope Paul VI, and elected to the Académie Française.
A Secret Work of
Charity
In May 1974, the
69-year old cleric was the chaplain to a group of nuns in Paris, and lived
alone in a small apartment close to the convent. On a Monday afternoon that
month, the local police were astonished when a Madame Santoni, known to her
customers as “Mimi”, phoned them urgently to say that a cardinal had just died
in her apartment. They were right to be startled, for the Rue Dulong was one of
Paris’ seedier areas, and the woman in question was known to them as a “madame”
and the wife of a man recently jailed for pimping.
When a cardinal
suffers a fatal heart attack, with a substantial sum of money in his pocket,
and in the house of a prostitute, there’s a story that can run for weeks. The
Paris newspapers had a field day with the anti-clerical, Le Canard Enchaîné,
trumpetting yet another exposé of Catholic hypocrisy.
Conspiracy theorists
were not slow to offer their explanations about the presence of a Prince of the
Church in such an inappropriate place. Had Daniélou being leading a double
life? Was he the victim of an assassination at the hands of his enemies within
the Church? Or was his death the work of the Masons, known to be capable of
eliminating those who betrayed or threatened their machinations? Or, finally,
had the Cardinal been caught up in some murky political scandal and been
silenced by France’s notorious secret service?
Mother Church’s
spokesmen didn’t do a great job in responding to these lurid speculations.
Cardinal Marty, Archbishop of Paris, refused the call for a public enquiry on
the grounds that Cardinal Daniélou “wouldn’t be able to defend himself”.
Against what? Not long after, Cardinal Garonne, speaking in Rome at the
Cardinal’s memorial service, said, “God grant us pardon. Our existence cannot
fail to include an element of weakness and shadow.” Even the orthodox La Croix
assumed the worst, commenting: “Whatever the truth is, we Christians well know
that each of us is a sinner.”
One thing was for
sure, Cardinal Daniélou’s reputation as an authoritative teacher in the Church
was eclipsed by his death. Although the French Jesuits carried out a thorough
investigation into his sudden death and discovered the visit to the Santoni
residence was part of his secret works of charity to the most despised people
in need of God’s love, his confrères made little effort to dispel the miasma of
suspicion that enshrouded the name of this illustrious scholar. That afternoon
Cardinal Daniélou’s final errand of mercy was to give Madame Santoni money to
hire a lawyer to get bail for her jailed husband.
You would be correct
in thinking that there must be more to this tale.
Renewal or Revolution?
Since 1965, Cardinal
Daniélou had watched with growing dismay the spread of certain ideas among
Catholic religious orders that were profoundly at variance with the teaching of
the Second Vatican Council. Like his fellow French scholar and conciliar
expert, Fr Louis Bouyer, he saw the teaching of the Council being twisted,
disfigured and betrayed by many so-called reformers. Nowhere was the spread of
these ideas more rapid and damaging than among his own confrères in the Society
of Jesus.
He had remonstrated
with Father Pedro Arrupe, General of the Jesuits since 1965, but received a
tart dismissal for his fears and warnings. The search for the “primitive
charism” of the Society of Jesus, directed by Father Arrupe, had long carried
the Jesuits beyond caring about the traditional forms and requirements of
religious life.
In 1971, Daniélou gave
an interview broadcast on Vatican Radio, in which he attacked “decadence”
masquerading as renewal in the religious orders. The bitterness generated by
this interview was such that Daniélou chose to leave the Jesuit house in Paris
where he had lived for decades. His confrères viewed his outspoken comments as
an obvious attack on Fr Arrupe’s style of leadership and the root-and-branch
“renewal” of Jesuit training and community life then being undertaken—and
undoubtedly they were correct. It was bad enough, they said, to criticise the
reforms, but to criticise the Jesuit leadership so obviously was little short
of treason. Daniélou now found himself the object of a whispering campaign, and
became isolated and ignored.
So, he withdrew from
his once-supportive community to the Rue Notre-Dame des Champs, where he acted
as the chaplain to a community of nuns. His lifestyle was simple, even austere.
No secretary, no car, none of the paraphernalia that normally went with his
status. The only external sign of his exalted rank was his red socks.The good
sisters had one complaint, and that was the Cardinal’s habit of spending 20
minutes in silent prayer after Holy Communion, and only then concluding Holy
Mass, thereby upsetting their daily timetable.
By now he realised
that he had become a problematic figure in both the Church in France and the
Society of Jesus. Yet he refused to renounce his witness to the truth, and had
announced that he was compiling a list of dissenting theologians—“assassins of the
Faith” in his own words—that would be published. The rupture was complete.
One of the cardinal’s
most bitter opponents was Fr Bruno Ribes, SJ, the editor of Études, a leading
cultural publication of the French Jesuits. At the time of Daniélou’s death, the
editor had published an open attack on Humanae Vitae and Pope Paul VI’s efforts
to recall the religious orders to obedience. The same Fr Ribes together with
two Dominicans, Frs Jacques Pohier and Bernard Quelqueje, would help the French
Minister of Health, Simone Veil, to introduce a liberal abortion law in France
in 1975. The same year Ribes left the Jesuits, and then the Church. Fr Jacques
Pohier finally left the Order of Preachers in 1984 after many years of dissent.
He then took up a post with the voluntary euthanasia society of France,
becoming its chairman in 1992.
The Cardinal’s Radio
Interview
“I think that there is
now a very grave crisis of religious life, and that one should not speak of
renewal, but rather of decadence.”
“The group dynamic
replaces religious obedience. With the pretext of reacting against formalism,
all regularity of the life of prayer is abandoned and the first consequence of
this state of confusion is the disappearance of vocations, because young people
require a serious formation.”
When asked about the
causes of this collapse, the Cardinal responded: “The essential source of this
crisis is a false interpretation of Vatican II. The directives of the Council
were very clear: a greater fidelity of religious men and women to the demands
of the Gospel expressed in the constitutions of each institute, and at the same
time an adaptation of the modalities of these constitutions to the conditions
of modern life.”
In particular, he
spoke of “errors”, disseminated by well-known magazines, conferences and
theologians reputed to be authoritative, and accepted without question as “the
Council’s teaching” by religious superiors.
- Secularisation:
“Vatican II declared that human values must be taken seriously. It never said
that we should enter into a secularised world in the sense that the religious
dimension would no longer be present in society, and it is in the name of a
false secularisation that men and women are renouncing their habits, abandoning
their works in order to take their places in secular institutions, substituting
social and political activities for the worship of God.”
- Personal
freedom: “A false conception of freedom that brings with it the devaluing of
the constitutions and rules and exalts spontaneity and improvisation. This is
all the more absurd in that Western society is currently suffering from the
absence of a discipline of freedom. The restoration of firm rules is one of the
necessities of religious life.”
- Change:
“An erroneous conception of the changing of man and of the Church. Even if
these change, the constitutive elements of man and of the Church are permanent,
and bringing into question the constitutive elements of the constitutions of
the religious orders is a fundamental error.”
“What, then,” he was
asked, “are the remedies for this unhappy state of affairs?”
The “only and urgent
solution”, replied Daniélou, is to stop all experimentation in new forms of
religious life, and to exclude comprehensively the many sources of error and
decadence now in circulation. Failing that—and the Cardinal knew then that this
solution was very unlikely to be adopted—the minorities in religious orders,
faithful to their own tradition and the teaching of the Council, should be
allowed to form distinct communities.
Rough Justice for
Non-Conformists
He was referring to
religious, male and female, who had no wish to embrace the “reforms” thrust
upon them. “… it seems to me that those religious cannot be denied who want to
be faithful to the constitutions of their order and to the directives of
Vatican II, and to establish distinct communities. Religious superiors are
bound to respect this desire.” A sensitive point then and now.
No one familiar with
Church life at that time would have forgotten the fate of a group of some 100
Spanish Jesuits in 1969. They were strongly opposed to the radical changes
being introduced across the order, and had petitioned the Vatican to be allowed
to form a separate branch where they could continue to follow traditional
Jesuit life. Without doubt, the petition strongly suggested Fr Arrupe’s search
for the “primitive charism” would not lead to that of St Ignatius. The Spanish
bishops voted by a slim majority to support the protesting Jesuits, an event
that set off alarm bells at the Jesuit headquarters in Rome.
Fr Arrupe reacted with
remarkable speed and energy to suppress this “uprising”, even though the
priests in question were a mere handful out of some 3500 Jesuits in Spain.
Together with his four General Assistants and armed with each priest’s detailed
record, he arrived in Spain on May 1, 1970 where he and his team met the
disaffected members. He must have made them an offer that they could not refuse,
for nothing more was heard of the petition by the time Father General departed
for Rome on May 11. Around this turbullent time, some French Dominicans managed
to form a small community, named after St Vincent Ferrer, where they maintained
the ancient Dominican rite and observances. From hearsay the Fraternity
continues to flourish and attract new entrants.
The Fraternity of
Saint Charles Borromeo and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome
jointly organised a one-day conference on the theology of Jean Daniélou on May
9, 2012. The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross is under the direction of
Opus Dei.
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