Keywords

Introduction: Part 1: The Dilemma

This chapter will consider challenges to the Catholic educational vision, through the work of two twentieth-century Jesuit theologians; each highly influential, though neither an educational theorist as such. The Uruguayan Juan Luis Segundo (1925–1996) was a distinctive but contrarian voice among Latin American liberationists. Karl Rahner (1904–1984), from Germany, taught for many years at the Jesuit faculty in Innsbruck, and is unmistakeably one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century.

Alongside these two figures, and in some respects contrapuntal to them, we will consider the French philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861–1949). Blondel’s account of human action is championed by John Milbank in his important work Theology and Social Theory, as the most adequate account of the ‘supernatural’ available to contemporary theology. For Blondel, every human action is prophetic of Christ, or secretly refers to him. Milbank points to what he regards as serious inadequacies in the theology of both Rahner and the liberation theologians (including Segundo)—hence Blondel as a ‘contrapuntal’ voice.

Here I will seek neither to support nor to refute Milbank’s judgment, but simply to identify convergent themes in the three authors. These will help us to address the critical challenges for Catholic faith formation within a formal educational setting. There is, of course, no shortage of such challenges. Sean Whittle has identified three deficiencies: firstly, the use of ‘Catholic edu-babble’ and vague sloganising; secondly, the inability to think of Catholic education in other than catechetical or confessional terms; thirdly, the underdeveloped relation between theology and education theory (2015, p. 117).

These are related, and will be addressed in various ways in this chapter. However, the central dilemma to be considered here is Segundo’s striking argument that Christianity is not, and was not intended to be, a ‘mass movement’. Its message is directed, not at people en masse, but at a smaller, intentional ‘elite’.

Naturally, democratic Anglo-Saxon sensibilities recoil from the terms ‘elite’ or ‘elitist’. The Hispanic mindset, however, seems to less worried about their pejorative implications. Segundo is describing the phenomenon of a minority of persons, characterised by the difficult skills they have acquired, such as doctors. They are ‘elitist’ in a negative sense, only if they use their expertise to bolster their own prestige and privilege, rather than place it at the service of all.

Nevertheless, this anomaly lies at the heart of any educational project. Given the essentially elitist dynamic of schooling, and especially of tertiary level formation, with its centripetal concentration of resources to the benefit of the few, can there ever be such a thing as a universally liberative education? This is, after all, the perpetual crisis of the liberal conscience, the inability to make its freedoms available to all.

The challenge of ‘mass’ versus ‘elite’ aspiration is not merely sociological or political. It lies at the heart of the gospel message, which asserts God’s universal saving will, while at the same time presenting the Christian ideal as one of concentrated, intentional discipleship. There is the massa damnata, and there are those who enter by the ‘narrow gate’.1 At the heart of the Christian scheme of things is a perplexing numerical asymmetry. ‘Masses and minorities: is this a basic constant in humanity? If it is, which processes are proper to Christianity—those akin to literacy training or those akin to conscientization?’ (Segundo 1976, p. 211).

The dilemma is especially contorted for faith schools, which do not complete their mission simply by enabling academic attainment. They are also expected to be vehicles for the transmission of Christian tradition, and for a deepening of religious commitment. Students and alumnae are to be ‘women and men for God’, as well as for others. And yet, the levels of practice and allegiance during and after Catholic schooling in secular western societies are depressingly low. Even the best Catholic faith schools seem, sadly, to have an inoculating effect against Catholic faith.

Given this stark reality, of ‘mass’ versus ‘elite’, as what Segundo assumes to be an ‘anthropological constant’, how are we to assess the situation of Christian Catholic education? An aspiration to form ‘men and women for others’ can look like a scaling-down of ambition; is it a tacit, resigned admission that the best our schools and colleges can realistically aspire to is the nurturing of what Karl Rahner called ‘anonymous Christians’?

Part 2: The Response: ‘Faith’ and ‘Ideology’

Segundo’s ‘liberation of theology’ may help us to reframe this challenge as a properly theological possibility, rather than a counsel of realism or despair. Specifically, as Gerard I. Capaldi suggests, he may assist us in breaking down an impasse between ‘confessional’ and ‘non-confessional’ approaches to Religious Education (Capaldi 1990, p. 60). The fact of pluralism in Christian faith requires differentiation of what is of absolute and of relative value. Hence the importance of Segundo’s distinction between ‘faith’ and ‘ideology’, and to Gregory Bateson’s concept of ‘deutero-learning'.

Segundo’s scepticism with regard to Paolo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ (i.e. that there is a parallel or affinity between literacy training and conscientisation) underpins a third theme to be explored here: his argument for a re-calibration of gospel strategy as a working with, and toward, an ‘elite’.2

‘Faith’ and ‘ideologies’ for Segundo are two universal anthropological dimensions (2006, pp. 15–16). Despite popular usage, these do not point to the oppositional realms of ‘religion’ and ‘non-religion'. Rather, they are complementary: ‘faith’ is aligned with (subjective) value or meaning, and ‘ideology’ with (objective) efficacy or instrumentality. For Segundo, ‘faith, understood in the broadest, secular sense, is an indispensible component, a dimension, of every human life. It is an anthropological dimension’ (2006, p. 25; emphasis in original). Faith shapes and structures meaning-making in three different phases (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood), according to the structure of freedom; the limits of the experience of satisfaction, and so on. It refers to a conscious decision in favour of ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-existence’—akin to, but stronger than ‘trust’, insofar as faith involves a conscious decision.

But this decision issues in a change of conduct, not a religious conversion as such. In other words, ‘religion’ is to be located in the realm of instrumentality—ideology—rather than value structure. This is the force of Jesus’ polemic against the religiosity of his opponents, who have elevated religious observance to the level of ‘faith’. ‘Faith’ corresponds to the goal of a revolutionary process, ‘ideology’ to the proper means to be used to achieve it.

The terms are loaded with preconceptions, of course; negative ones especially, in the case of ‘ideology’. Segundo argues for an essentially complementary relationship between faith and ideology. The adolescent may be disposed to be ‘pro-life’, or ‘pro-existence’. However, only a few mature individuals go beyond the level of this basic commitment, and follow it through to its ultimate consequences. In other words, for most people, faith does not find expression in ideology: and ‘faith without ideology’, as without ‘good works’ (see 1 James), is dead. Of itself, faith has no content. It has sense and meaning only insofar as it serves as the foundation stone for ideologies ‘… Christians cannot evade the necessity of inserting something to fill the void between their faith and their options in history. In short, they cannot evade the risk of ideologies’ (Segundo 1976, p. 109).

The significance of this for the present discussion, is that it urges a re-alignment of our understanding of what ‘faith formation’ might involve. Segundo argues, in short, that we should overcome the tendency to identify ‘faith’ with explicitly Christian, or even religious commitment, in a way which renders it superior to—and independent of—‘ideology’. What if we break this connection, and place ‘religion’—understood as religious practice, observance, etc. —in the category of ‘ideology’? That is, as a means or instrument for a humanly liberative process, rather than an end in itself?

Part 3: The ‘Elite’ Verses the ‘Masses’

The second major theme in Segundo is the notion of ‘deutero-learning’. He explores this biblically, pointing to the density of the scriptural accounts of encounters with God. Each is relativised in history, and yet each is an encounter with the objective font of absolute truth. The particular circumstances and context of each meeting are ‘ideological’, but through these ideological moments the people of Israel learned how to learn. The formal doctrines about Christ are an example of a secondary stage or level of learning, arising out of the primacy of the first. Segundo finds in Gregory Bateson’s ‘deutero-learning’ a better alignment of the complementary poles of faith and ideology than Freirean pedagogy. The capacity for ‘learning how to learn’ points us once again toward the notion of conscientisation as a minority pursuit.

This becomes clear in the provocative final chapter of The Liberation of Theology, where Segundo argues for the Church as a committed ‘elitist’ minority movement. He draws analogies from revolutionary politics, from the sociology of kinship groups, and even from the laws of thermodynamics. Something like the law of conservation of energy is at work: in normal human living, people ‘channel’ their energy into love, marriage, familiy life, professional work, with more general activities having to perform at a lower ebb (Segundo 1976, p. 225).

His argument is, ultimately, ecclesiological. Jesus himself gathered and formed a select group of disciples, yet Christianity has understood its imperative to be all-inclusive. But this imperative only makes sense if the Church is mistakenly identified as the ‘community of salvation’, as in the notorious adage, extra ecclesia nulla salus. Membership of the church is essential for salvation—so Christianity becomes a ‘mass project’.

But if we move beyond this understanding, regarding the church instead as a ‘light to the nations’ Lumen Gentium, then the need to draw people en masse—to ‘compel them in’—is removed.

The Church exists to be at the service of human beings, who seek and attain salvation in the world, with lives of love and justice. It is an instrument of the liberative process, a means and not the goal of salvation. The Church is a lighthouse, as it were, rather than a lifeboat. The world, not the Church, is the theatre of God’s saving activity.

As we have seen, Segundo resists the analogy of literacy training proposed by Freire. The skill being described in the process of consciousness-raising is not one that is ‘possessed’ once and for all, like the ability to read and write. Discipleship is a much more complex capability, one which becomes more difficult to use, not (as with most habits) easier: ‘literacy training can be a mass process, but conscientization cannot. To push people towards situations that are more complex, difficult, and intermediate is to create minorities’ (Segundo 1976, p. 210).

What might be the implications for a theory of Religious Education? A school might reasonably aspire to a set of measurable, attainable goals, such as a minimum level of academic qualifications, which all students are expected to achieve. But does it make sense to anticipate comparable results for ‘conversion’ to the cause of the poor and the service of others? ‘Faith’,as Segundo understands it, requires not simply a general orientation toward the good, but a conscious and mature embrace of the meansthat is, the ideology—which will make it concrete and sustainable. The ‘skill’ to be acquired remains difficult, no matter how much it is practised. And the evidence suggests that only a minority of human beings manage to acquire it.

We should add to this that, according to Segundo’s typology, the ‘faith’, even of this minority, may not take explicitly religious or Christian form. So the expectation that the alumnae of faith schools and colleges should emerge en masse from their schooling as fully-rounded, devout, and committed Catholics would be fundamentally unrealistic. It would be unfair to regard low church commitment of students as a sign of failure or crisis—in the way, for example, that a wholesale collapse of academic grades certainly would be.

Part 4: Karl Rahner: Engaging With Mystery

There is much, in spirit, that Segundo shares with the Innsbruck theologian Karl Rahner. For Rahner, the human being is nothing less than ‘the event of God’s free self-communication’. This event is independent of the person’s ecclesial commitment-independent, possibly, of any explicit religious commitment.

Rahner’s controversial category of the ‘anonymous Christian’ is his attempt to consider how a human subject may have an authentic relationship with God, without being aware of it; indeed, perhaps while being actively hostile and resistant. The idea is beautifully rendered in his alleged response to a questioner who claimed never to have had a religious experience: ‘I don’t believe you!’ Rahner understands human subjectivity as such to be oriented towards transcendence. In our reaching out in intellect and love, in our receptiveness to the transcendent, we know ourselves to be ‘God-shaped’, like a keyhole shaped to receive the key.

The pastoral imperative of Rahner’s work—helping the Christian of today to believe with intellectual honesty—is undeniable, and of urgent relevance to contemporary faith education. The Rahnerian educational theorist Sean Whittle makes this connection, asserting that proper attention to philosophy in the curriculum—a philosophy shaped, that is, according to Rahner’s theological anthropological presuppositions—can ‘inspire and support the development of a robust theory of Catholic education’ (2015, p. 99). Philosophy is, so to speak, ‘an inner moment of theology’. The two disciplines converge, with practically every aspect of traditional theology capable of being approached in an anthropological key.

For Rahner, our everyday experience of the world and of ourselves is already ‘graced’, and is as such a doorway to the transcendent. One does not have to begin with the ‘religious’; the human desire and capacity for asking honest questions provides a starting-point. One thinks of the child forever asking ‘why’ questions. If we only continue this chain of questioning, more complex inquiries emerge, even ultimate ones. There is a link between questioning and transcendence (IBID, p. 106).

Related to this general characteristic of human beings—our capacity for transcendence—two other ‘existentials’ are significant for Rahner: freedom and history. These are often experienced as a tension, insofar as human freedom is often curtailed or limited by historical context. Sustained reflection upon this tension, says Rahner, upon the fact that human freedom unfolds in and through world, time and history, will bring us to the heart of the human condition.

A taxonomy of ‘mystery’ includes mysteries which are solvable or unsolvable, in principle or in practice, all underpinned by one underlying mystery. Certain issues come into focus where rationality appears to reach an impasse. The task of the educator at such points is to foster a sense of humility; to enable students to acknowledge reason’s limit in the face of ‘unsolvable in principle’ mysteries. Examples of such can be found, argues Whittle, within the curriculum for mathematics, physics, history and above all philosophy. With this question-and-answer format, discussion of ultimate meaning is opened up to every person, not just the believer. Rahner's approach provides a ‘theological justification of a non-confessional account of Catholic education’ (Whittle 2015, p. 115).

Part 5: Critique: The French and German ‘Styles’

Even within a movement which has been an ‘irritant’ for the Church, few liberation theologians have been quite as provocative as Juan Luis Segundo. Karl Rahner, the better known and more influential theologian, has also left an important but controversial legacy. By way of a critique of both of these approaches, I wish to draw attention to John Milbank’s identification of two streams of ‘integral’ theology. In so doing, I will bring in—courtesy of Milbank’s analysis—another conversation partner, Maurice Blondel.

Theology and Social Theory is an important but challenging work, in which Milbank offers a trenchant critique of liberation theology, as too beholden to the secular presuppositions of sociological analysis, especially Marxism. He expresses appreciation for the liberationists’ attempt to overcome theology’s disastrous rupture between nature and grace. Unfortunately, their ability to do this effectively, according to Milbank, has been hampered by their choice of philosophical method. Instead of opting for the (French) trajectory, which derives ultimately from the philosophy of Maurice Blondel, the main liberationists have been formed—‘without exception’—in the transcendental anthropological approach of Karl Rahner. Milbank’s concern is that Rahner’s approach, in seeking to explore how a Christian in the modern world might believe with integrity, conceded too much to the Enlightenment spirit.

The 'French’ option, Milbank describes as ‘supernaturalising the natural’, while the second—less adequate—alternative, derived from the Germanic tradition, ‘naturalises the supernatural’. What is the difference? A Blondel-inspired approach enables us to move ‘beyond secular reason’, by recovering a pre-modern sense of the Christianised person as the fully real person. The Rahnerian trajectory, on the other hand, remains hostage to a spurious and bankrupted Enlightenment myth of secular ‘autonomy’—the very myth which Milbank’s postmodern theology is seeking to unmask and dismantle.

The point here is not to get too involved in complex late-twentieth-century discussions of nature and grace; much less to adjudicate between the two trajectories, as Milbank does.3 What interests us is Milbank’s positive appraisal of Blondel, who—possibly—may complement or enrich Juan Luis Segundo’s project, rather than rival it.4

Blondel asserts that action, not contemplation, is the point of entry into the supernatural life (hence the title of his 1893 book, L'Action). The will is 'never equal to itself’: desire always demands a completion which is beyond its own resources. We are as it were, forever playing 'catch-up’ with ourselves.

The argument is similar to Rahner’s; but for Blondel it is in action, rather than intellectual appraisal or contemplation, that this truth becomes evident. Openness is not something which accompanies our action, it occurs as the action, as something which occurs to us and is offered to us. For Blondel, 'the logic of action, of every action, demands the supernatural'. Milbank parses this to mean that in every action there is an implicit faith, that the action will produce a new, ‘correct’, and satisfying synthesis. What holds our disparate actions together is an intuited harmony of unity or combination.

Both Blondel and liberation theologians reject the idealist misapprehension that action is only the expression of a prior, ‘original’, fully formed thought. Rather, the completed thought is the completed action: ‘God acts in this action, and that is why the thought that follows the act is richer by an infinity than that which precedes it’ (Blondel 1984, p. 211).

As indicated above, Milbank argues that Blondel’s account of the supernatural is more adequate than Rahner’s, and that liberation and political theologians have gone astray in following the German rather than the Frenchman. Here, however, we need only note the similarity of their endeavours, rather than the divergences. Karl Rahner and Juan Luis Segundo, and before them Maurice Blondel, are seeking to re-calibrate our account of the grace-nature relation (put simply: how we are to understand what it is to be human before God?). Whatever the merits of these respective attempts, it seems that some version of this re-calibration is needed, if we are to construct an adequate account of Catholic education.

Part V: Concluding Discussion

Milbank’s criticism of Rahner, and of the liberationist approaches which derive from him, presents a choice between two 'integral’ accounts of the nature/grace relation. Perhaps we do not need to follow Milbank in his strict distinction between the French (Blondelian) and German (Rahnerian) approaches. What these styles have in common with the liberation and political theologians whom they have inspired is their shared commitment to overcoming the ruptures which have disfigured Christianity: the gaps between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’, between theory and practice and- ultimately, between faith and life.5

Here are three possible ‘takeaways’ from Karl Rahner (via Sean Whittle’s utilization of his doctrine); from Maurice Blondel (as situated by John Milbank in the contemporary theological debate concerning the supernatural); and from Juan Luis Segundo.

Firstly, Sean Whittle draws on an adaptation of Rahner’s account of mystery to propose a curriculum oriented toward ‘unsolvable in principle mysteries’. This ‘non-confessional’ activity would bring students to a point of threshold—the threshold of theology. He notes the positive connotations of this image—a point of entry into something beyond. The purpose of the whole curriculum would be to bring the student to this point, where he/she has now been enabled to engage properly with religious meaning.

Above all, such an approach is respectful of the student’s decision not to cross the threshold, or to reject what he or she finds there: ‘To ensure that pupils are in a position to accept, reject, or ignore theological answers to the presence of unsolvable in principle mysteries they need to be at the point where this is a viable choice.’ (Whittle 2015, pp. 130–131). Whittle identifies practical examples, such as the concept of infinity in mathematics, or the cosmological questions which emerge in the ‘new physics’. Another example would be the tensions relating to freedom embedded in causality, as revealed in the study of history. I would add that the study of literature can provide similar examples, such as the ‘mystery’ of freedom and fate at the heart of great tragedy.

Secondly, we have seen that Blondel’s phenomenology of action is theologically inflected. The logic of every action ‘demands the supernatural’, and every such action is ‘prophetic of Christ, or secretly refers to him’. Reflection upon action- or more precisely, through and after action- is therefore a form of faith reflection.

To act, therefore, or to think at all, may be to create, to assert oneself, but it is equally to lose oneself, to place what is most ours—much more so than any inviolable inwardness—at a total risk. … Blondel associates all action with self-immolation and sacrifice: by acting/thinking we grope toward a synthesis which seems ‘right’ to us, and yet is not originally intended by us, but only ‘occurs’ to us out of the future plenitude of being, and has implications that we cannot contain. (Milbank 2006, p. 214)

Could such a perspective on acting/thinking be incorporated into a school curriculum? What, in any given discipline, would count as ‘successful action’, to be analysed in this way? Again, one can see how the study of literature could be enriched by such a hermeneutic. But the description of Blondel's approach as a ‘supernatural pragmatic’ suggests a further application. A successfully completed action is an ‘experiment’: something endowed with a relative power of endurance. It 'works’, in the way that a statue which endures, and which can be replicated, ‘works’. (Milbank IBID).

Is it possible for us to ‘sell’ Christianity as something which ‘works’, which endures as successful action? The excitement in the chemistry or physics lab is in seeing science working, insofar as it has predictive power, and can be replicated, etc. The dreadful and unnecessary rift between ‘faith’ and ‘science’ is surely due in part to our inability or unwillingness to draw attention to faith, like science, as ‘successful technique’.

Oliver Davies speaks of Christianity as ‘spiritual technology’. We need criteria to back up the claim that ‘Christianity works’. This should be possible, given our new awareness of the ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe, above all through advances in neurobiology (Davies 2013, pp. 247–248). He cites the example of St. Paul, whose revolutionary upheaval of the great edifices of as law, ethnicity, culture, and empire, etc. is only comprehensible because, in some mysterious sense, history was on his side. To cite Stanley Hauerwas, he lived ‘with the grain of the universe’. In Paul—who is ‘in Christ’—the basic elements of his humanity come into a new configuration. A configuration of the human, which can be observed, imitated, and passed on to others.

Just as Whittle’s Rahnerian vision sees the potential for faith formation in the use of selected topics as ‘triggers’ for confronting ‘unsolvable in principle’ mystery, so a Blondelian reflection upon the phenomenology of human action might form a much needed bridge between the burgeoning scientific imagination of the young student, and his or her faith understood as ‘spiritual technology’.

The third 'takeaway’ is to return to Segundo, for whom Christian faith is concerned with an educative process of ‘advocating and enhancing learning to learn in and through the appropriation of ideologies’ (Capaldi 1990, p. 69).Capaldi identifies a number of implications for the Christian religious educator, of which I will mention four: firstly, that speaking of education as ‘induction’ into a culture, tradition or believing community is too vague to be helpful (we need to ask harder questions about what kind of culture or community); secondly, that the teacher needs to make clear the ideological structure of all Christian faith expressions; thirdly, that he or she should express a certain reserve toward his or her expressions of faith (so as not to foreclose new and unexpected expressions); fourthly, for a faith which is rooted in Israel’s God-directed educative process, no ‘neatly packaged’ pattern of belief and action can be presented as ‘absolute’ (IBID, pp. 69–71).

Segundo addresses the intimation that gospel commitment may be attainable only for a minority 'elite'. An honest admission of this should shape the aspirations of our educational vision. This requires a clearer identification of means and ends. What if integral human liberation is the absolute goal of human life and action, to which religious belief and praxis are ancillary instruments? A startling reversal, in other words, of our accepted way of looking at things. We have come to think of religiously-observant pupils as the ‘gold standard’ end-product. When they turn out to be generous atheists or agnostics, we too often resign ourselves, unspokenly, to winning the silver.

Segundo’s distinction reverses this value-judgement. A reframing of the goals of education according to his ‘faith-ideology’ scheme might enable more honesty and realism about these goals; or at least an admission that they might be in tension with one another. A school might provide an excellent context for nurturing faith awareness—the orientation toward ‘pro-existence’—and yet be a poor and inefficient vehicle for transmitting the Catholic tradition (and vice versa).

Here is the opportunity to relativise a Christianity which has sadly become self-referential, to the point of idolatry. This has been one task of liberation theology: an ‘ecclesiogenesis’, restoring authenticity to the Christian faith which has too often been turned into infantilism and abject submission to the established order. Pope Francis’ programme of breaking the habits of clerical self-protection and defensiveness has struck a chord with many (even as it has encountered stern resistance). Segundo and his liberationist confreres called for an even more radical decentring, for the Church to make way, unambiguously, for the advent of the Kingdom.

By placing ‘religion’ and ‘Christianity’ in the ‘ideology’ scale, rather than in the category of ‘faith’, we are reminded again of the Church’s ancillary vocation. The Christian ‘ideology’—expressed in worship, sacraments, etc.—is only ever a sign of, and instrument for, the accomplishment of something other than itself. Its function is not to impose elitist demands upon the masses, nor to water the gospel demands to a minimalist level. Rather, its purpose is to create new forms of energy which will serve as the basis for new and more creative possibilities.

And yet without such a crystallisation into instrumental form, the values associated with ‘faith’ are in danger of vaporous dispersal.

Faith without ideology is dead.

Notes

  1. 1.

    There is a paradox in Paul’s Adam/Christ typology: all human beings have fallen and are in need of salvation; and yet, only a minority of human beings come to an explicit commitment to Christ.

  2. 2.

    See Chap. 8 of The Liberation of Theology, entitled ‘Mass Man- Minority Elite- Gospel Message’ (Segundo 1976: 208–240). A condensed version of the 'faith and ideology’ distinction occurs in Chap. 4 of the same volume (101–124).

  3. 3.

    Even if his strictures against a Rahnerian approach are valid, it is not all clear that Segundo is guilty as charged. After all, his own studies were in Louvain and Paris, rather than Innsbruck, and Rahner is not a significant presence in Segundo's writings. This refutes Milbank’s claim that ‘without exception’ (207) liberation theologians have chosen the Rahnerian rather than the French route.

  4. 4.

    Milbank (2006: 207); see the chapter entitled ‘Founding the Supernatural: Political and Liberation Theology in the Context of Modern Catholic Thought’ (pp. 206–256). The three theologians taken as representative of liberation theology are Gustavo Gutiérrez, Juan Luis Segundo, and Clodovis Boff.

    The following summary of Blondel is largely taken from Milbank’s ‘excursus’ on him (Milbank 2006: 2010–2020).

  5. 5.

    Worth noting, however, is the interest Pope Francis has shown in the nouvelle theologie of Henri de Lubac (following Blondel), and in the French intellectual tradition generally. https://onepeterfive.com/pope-francis-reveals-his-mind-to-private-audience/ (accessed 5th November 2019).