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Konzil in der Perspektive: Heribert Schauf und sein Tagebuch zum II. Vaticanum (1960–1965) ed. by Dominik Burkhard und Joachim Bürkle (review)

2024; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2024.a921755

1534-0708

Jared Wicks,

Christian Theology and Mission

Reviewed by: Konzil in der Perspektive: Heribert Schauf und sein Tagebuch zum II. Vaticanum (1960–1965) ed. by Dominik Burkhard und Joachim Bürkle Jared Wicks S.J. Konzil in der Perspektive: Heribert Schauf und sein Tagebuch zum II. Vaticanum (1960–1965). Edited by Dominik Burkhard und Joachim Bürkle (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2022. Pp. 525. € 69. ISBN: 978-3-402-24867-6.) We have now one more published Vatican II diary, the work of peritus Heri-bert Schauf (1910–88), priest of the diocese of Aachen and loyal disciple, close friend, and co-worker of Sebastian Tromp (1889–1975), the Secretary of the preparatory and conciliar doctrinal commissions, under their President, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. I have presented two volumes of Tromp's published Council diary in 2012 and 2019 issues of this journal. Schauf's diary records his involvement and his judgments on several controversies within and around the commissions' work, especially on Catholic doctrines of God's revelation and the Church. This contrasts with Tromp's "office diary," which aims to sketch a complete record of the commission with its sub-commissions, listing their personnel, meetings, and major decisions taken in composing and revising several texts of Vatican II teaching, especially Lumen gentium (1964) and Dei Verbum (1965). Schauf's seminary education was from 1929 to 1937 in Rome, where he lived at the Pontifical German College and studied philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University, leading to the STD with a dissertation directed by Tromp on the grace doctrines of Carlo Passaglia and Clemens Schrader, professors at the Roman College in the era of Vatican I. Schauf returned to his diocese for initial pastoral assignments with a strong sense that his Roman formation placed him in a Catholic elite dedicated to promoting Counter-Reformation and Antimodernist causes. In 1945 he began teaching canon law in Aachen's seminary and serving on diocesan tribunals. In 1959 he wrote a seven-page draft votum for his bishop's proposal of topics for Vatican II, singling out for condemnation false ideas then circulating on the evolution of revealed doctrine and on the need to "demythologize" biblical narratives, while urging that the Council complete Vatican I with a full account of the Church as a visible and hierarchically ordered "perfect society" of unequal members. The present edition gives an eighty-page introduction to Schauf and the positions he took during the Council, describing theological conflicts with Josef Rupert Geiselmann, Karl Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger, and Walter Kasper. The diary began on July 20, 1960, when Schauf read in Osservatore Romano that he was among the consultors named to assist the Preparatory Theological Commission. Two years [End Page 201] later he became a peritus of the conciliar Doctrinal Commission, while continuing his diary from the preparation through the four periods and three intersessions of the Council to December 29, 1965 (87–336). The editors annotate the diary entries, and in appendices they list Schauf's publications in chronological order and offer helpful short biographies of the more than 200 persons mentioned in the diary. Schauf's plan was to publish his diary along with an ample documentary volume of his correspondence during the Council years and a selection of his relevant shorter pieces from specialized journals and Festschriften. The diary's editors intend to add to the diary a volume of documents, but one much reduced from the dimensions Schauf had intended. In August 1960, Schauf learned of the main topics of the Vatican II doctrinal preparation at a reunion of his ordination class at the Eucharistic Congress at Munich, where Tromp was their invited speaker on issues of ecclesiology. Afterward, Schauf drove, with Tromp as his passenger, back to Aachen for a short visit before he took his mentor to Maastrict, where Tromp spent his vacation at the Dutch Jesuit theologate. In these days, Schauf heard that their Commission was starting work on four dogmatic constitutions, namely, (1) on the Church, elaborating a treatment of bishops, their sacramental ordination, and their college, while guided by but going beyond Pope Pius XII's Mystici Corporis Christi (1943), on which Tromp had served as drafter; (2) on God's revelation in the dual...