At least least three times Schillebeeeckx raised the eyebrows of authorities in Vatican. He was summoned to Rome in December 1979 to exthre plain himself to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the office that had run the Inquisition. He likened the experience to being a naughty schoolboy sent to the headteacher's study, but still went. Küng, under scrutiny at the same time, refused a similar summons, saying that he would not submit to a medieval trial. As a result, while Küng had his church licence to teach theology in Catholic universities removed by the Vatican, Schillebeeckx survived to continue as professor of dogmatic and historical theology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.
In July 1984, he was again called to Rome over his comments that, in extreme circumstances, lay people could take on the place usually reserved for the priest in consecrating the eucharist. His inquisitor was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later to become Pope Benedict XVI. On condition that he drop the reference to lay ministry from any subsequent publications, Schillebeeckx again avoided official censure. Küng jokingly claimed that Schillebeeckx was spared only because nobody on Ratzinger's team could read his texts in the original Dutch.
His final, very public, act of rebellion came in 1989 when he joined other leading Catholic theologians in signing the Cologne Declaration which signed by 163 theologians from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands (eventually 130 theologians from France, 23 from Spain, 52 from Belgium and 63 from Italy, including some from Rome itself, signed the statement). Complaining that the collegiality called for by Vatican II was “being smothered by a new Roman centralism,” the declaration predicted: “If the pope undertakes things that are not part of his role, then he cannot demand obedience in the name of Catholicism. He must expect dissent”.
Schillebeeckx bore in silence the pain of witnessing many of the reforms he had supported and promoted being undone. Yet his reputation throughout the Christian churches and beyond as a prophetic thinker could not be dented by papal disapproval. He greeted plaudits – including the Erasmus prize (1982) for his contribution to European culture, the first theologian so honoured – and admirers with humility and an old-fashioned courtesy.
He may just have allowed himself a wry smile when he looked back on a 1968 declaration, published in Concilium, the still flourishing progressive theological journal that he helped to set up, which insisted that the Pope "cannot and must not supersede, hamper and impede the teaching task of theologians as scholars". His own name was there among the signatories, as was that of the then Father Ratzinger.
Edward Cornelius Florentius Alfonsus Schillebeeckx, Dominican priest and theologian, born 12 November 1914; died 23 December 2009.
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