In 2018, Pope Francis promulgated the apostolic constitution Veritatis Gaudium, which was a document devoted to the reform of ecclesiastical universities and seminaries.

As Pope Francis states in the foreword, this text was issued as a much-needed update to Sapientia Christiana, the apostolic constitution promulgated by Pope St. John Paul II in 1979 on the same topic. Both documents were themselves an attempt to implement the decree Optatam Totius of the Second Vatican Council (1965), which called for a systematic reform of the seminaries and other ecclesiastical schools.

All three of these documents have been largely overlooked for reasons having more to do with the disparate nature of modern education than any grand conspiracy of silence.

Therefore, it behooves us to note that all three documents make the point that the reason why this reform is so very necessary is that the modern world presents the Church with a truly unique set of cultural and intellectual challenges the likes of which the Church has never encountered before.

Given the Church’s mandate from Christ to evangelize the world, her essential missional orientation demands a type of theological formation that takes the phenomenon of modern secularity and unbelief seriously — one that engages the modern world and embraces what is true and good, but also challenges it with the counter message of the Gospel.

Therefore, if we want to understand what John Paul and Francis are calling for in these documents, it is necessary to understand the theological project of Vatican II viewed precisely as a response to contemporary challenges we face. This process of reform had begun before the Council, but it was Vatican II that gave it its theological orientation — an orientation that we are still unpacking 60 years later.

I know this frustrates some people who want to leave Vatican II behind as a failed council and move on. But I would submit to you that even if Vatican II has missed its Overton window for implementation in a full sense, this call for the theological renewal of ecclesiastical schools is as important today as it was then and perhaps more so. Therefore, it is important to take a step back and look again at the cultural and theological context that led to this conciliar call for reform.

In 1944, amid the carnage of World War II, the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac published his now-famous book, The Drama of Atheist Humanism. He was attempting to demonstrate that the great misery of the 20th century had been caused by atheistic thinkers who had promoted a false humanism grounded in a false anthropology — erroneous philosophical constructions of what it means to be a human being. He therefore saw it as the urgent task of the Catholic Church to counteract these errors and their attendant evils by promoting a true humanism grounded in an anthropology centered on Christ as the model for what it means to be human.

During the Second Vatican Council, and heavily influenced by de Lubac’s insights, the conciliar theological peritus Joseph Ratzinger and the young shepherd from Krakow, Bishop Karol Wojtyła, helped to steer the Council in precisely this direction for a renewed Christian humanism. The high point of this Christocentric anthropological vision was the beginning of Section 22 in Gaudium et Spes:

“The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”

This Christocentric vision is the heart and soul of the Council (as both John Paul II and Benedict XVI affirmed) and guided the conciliar deliberations on a host of issues. And one of those issues was the reforming of seminaries and other pontifical universities.

What this means concretely is the overcoming of the “divorce between theology and pastoral care, between faith and life” (Veritatis Gaudium, 2). What it means is a theology that is capacious enough to embrace truth wherever it is found, which in turn requires what I like to call a “foraging theology” that grazes in even the wildest spaces.

This is the art of a theology utterly confident in its own truths, without succumbing to a closed triumphalism; a theology that has the courage of its convictions to such an extent that it can enter into the deepest encounters with unbelief without the fear of losing itself. This is a non-defensive theology that is, nevertheless, always ready to “make a defense of the faith,” but now in a posture of engagement wherein the Church proposes a deeper humanism, a better anthropology, and a more compelling narrative of the meaning of our existence that gets us beyond the “monism of meaninglessness” that characterizes modernity.

Along these lines, Pope Francis, building on the legacy first established by Pope John Paul II, recognizes that the world of today has reached “a breaking point” that makes this renewal of theology all the more pressing in its importance. Halfway measures will not do and a purely defensive theology will not help to reunite the pastoral and doctrinal elements of the Church into a coherent synthesis.

Therefore, Pope Francis establishes four basic criteria for the reform of theology in ecclesiastical schools to meet this challenge.

First, and in keeping with the insights of the previous two pontiffs, theology must always begin and end with the full truth of God’s revelation in Christ. You cannot give what you do not have, and thus the Church has nothing to add to the conversation other than what is her only true possession: God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, Pope Francis adds his own emphasis when he points out that the “solidarity” that the modern world seeks, but which eludes it, can be found when we realize that it is precisely this Trinitarian God that grounds all true relations. He states:

“… discovering in the whole of creation the Trinitarian imprint that makes the cosmos in which we live a ‘network of relations’ in which ‘it is proper to every living being to tend towards other things.’ This in turn fosters ‘a spirituality of that global solidarity which flows from the mystery of the Trinity.’”

Second, and building on this, is the need for a “wide-ranging dialogue” characterized by a true “encounter” with the realities of the modern world. This will lead in turn to a more creative theology that can “reach places where new narratives and paradigms are formed” (4b). The text here does not elaborate on this point further, which is unfortunate since the use of terms like “dialogue” and “encounter” have been so overused to undermine the normative nature of Revelation as the location for God’s revelation that criterion “b” in the Pope’s list threatens to undermine criterion “a.”

Progressive theologians, imbued with an exaggerated and false reading of Karl Rahner, have tended to emphasize that God also reveals himself in “the world” in ways that are equally normative and which have led to theologies of a plurality of religions all of which are essentially trending to the same divine origin. Therefore, one does wish that the Pope had done more in this text to guarantee that all such dialogue and encounter with the “new paradigms” flow from, and lead back to, Jesus Christ.

The third criterion is one that academic theologians have been speaking about for decades. And that is the need for theology to be interdisciplinary. This is difficult to do since one does not want to be a dilettante and it is hard to master a multiplicity of disciplines.

Nevertheless, this difficulty can be assuaged a bit when one realizes that not all disciplines are equal in their benefit to theology. In particular, philosophy, history and the various human sciences (e.g., psychology and sociology) are of critical importance in the theological project. But beyond the benefit to theology, there is also the need for theology to act as a synthetic guide to the whole, creating a true university wherein a plurality of disciplines finds their most proper identity in a “center” that vivifies.

In other words, the Catholic academy ought to be about the business of demonstrating how faith in Jesus Christ opens up an integrating process that allows for the deepest humanistic impulses to be lifted up into the light of the Gospel and to be transformed without being destroyed. In fact, not only not destroyed, but made more truly itself. Nature is never more “natural” than when it is lifted up in grace.

Finally, Pope Francis wants the various ecclesial schools to work in a closer network of collaboration in order to create a unified approach. This is important since the tendency of so many schools and seminaries is toward an administrative tunnel vision that focuses on the immediacy of the practical demands of running a school. But a truly integrated approach is now needed, and so collaboration is no longer a luxury but a necessity.

Will these reforms finally happen? I think they will. And I think they will because there are reforms already happening, especially in seminaries.

I continue to believe that the future of genuinely Catholic theology, at least in the short term, is in the seminaries, since it is really only there that the Church’s voice — which is the voice of Revelation — gets a privileged hearing. Pope Francis’ first criterion (Revelation as the grounding starting point) remains problematic in many Catholic universities — especially, ironically, in Jesuit schools.

The Church’s voice is not only not privileged but is often held up for special ridicule. Thus, the implementation of Veritatis Gaudium in the seminaries is a most urgent and ongoing ecclesial task of the highest importance.