Posted on 01/31/2003 10:07:52 AM PST by NYer
It is 40 years since the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The Council was convoked by Pope John XXIII for two purposes: the renewal or aggiornamento of the Catholic Church and Christian reunion - two goals which are surely integrally related. The Pope expressed the hope that it would be the beginning of a new Pentecost for the Church.
There have, indeed, been substantial achievements. A nineteenth century Catholic would be amazed at the transformation of the papacy. Pius IX, who denounced democracy and progress and who had to be defended against his own subjects in the papal states by foreign mercenaries, would have been surprised at the thought of one of his successors travelling round the world and upholding human rights and justice. In Catholic countries, where formerly the Church was ready to turn a blind eye to political abuses in return for a guarantee of its privileges and rights, the Church is, or is expected to be, at the forefront of protest against the infringement of people's freedoms and rights. Similarly, what was once a fortress Church is now seriously engaged in dialogue with non-Christian religions as well as other Christian bodies. Internally, too, there have been significant reforms in a number of areas. There is a new code of canon law. New instruments of collegiality and subsidiarity have been put into place. No one would now say, as a famous English monsignore of the nineteenth century asserted, that the province of the laity was to hunt, shoot, and to fish. The vernacular has been introduced into the Mass and the other sacraments and few would wish to return to a wholly Latin rite.
However, inevitably there have been problems and distortions. The pursuit of justice and peace has sometimes seemed to supersede the preaching of the Gospel. The Council's teaching on the role of the laity has, paradoxically, led to a certain clericalisation of the laity, and bishops have often given the impression that the way to implement the decree on the laity is to build up as large a bureaucracy as possible and set up innumerable committees and commissions. Indeed, at times it seems that human organisation has made the Spirit redundant. This has also affected the search for Christian unity, which is not always best served by proliferating ecumenical structures. There too there have been serious aberrations which, to use the old pre-Vatican II word, can only be termed as encouraging indifferentism. In spite of the Council's call for a renewal of the rite of reconciliation, the practice of confession has catastrophically declined; some claim that the answer is general absolution, but sacraments are personal not collective. Finally, and most serious from the point of view of the ordinary Catholic, the English vernacular translations have proved less than satisfactory in their banality and infidelity to the Latin original.
It will take time to get the right balance; there were bound to be exaggerations and misinterpretations. In reaction to the Protestant reformation, Trent had emphasised those doctrines that were under attack, which led to the inevitable neglect of those other Catholic doctrines, like the priesthood of all believers, that the Reformers were stressing. That has also happened in the wake of Vatican II. As Cardinal John Henry Newman remarked, one council does one thing and another another. Moreover, what councils don't say is also significant. Thus evangelisation was not a theme of the Council, with the inevitable unfortunate consequences - that is, until Paul VI's Evangelii Nuntiandi (1974) moved the Church in a new direction.
Few would say it has been a very Pentecostal time. For many, it has seemed more like a Golgotha, with falling Mass attendances and declining vocations, at least in most of the developed world. For others, it has been like a blighted spring, in which high hopes have been dashed by the failure to pursue the progressive agenda.
As a student of Newman, who is often referred to as the "father of the Second Vatican Council", I take comfort from his reflections at the time of the First Vatican Council. There are several points he makes which are I think very relevant to our own post-conciliar situation. First, he warned that patience is called for as time finds remedies for what seem insuperable problems. Second, he pointed out that time is also needed for the implementation of conciliar teachings. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, implementation requires interpretation: texts do not speak for themselves, they have to be read and digested and elucidated.
There was an idea immediately after the Council that bishops could simply return to their dioceses and implement the Council. That was a very simplistic idea. Some obvious changes or reforms can be implemented in this way, others take time and involve a number of different parties. Certainly, authority is involved through the pope and bishops: John Paul II has more than played his part in this, as have other charismatic bishops like Cardinal Lustiger of Paris with his radical reform of the seminary system. But it is not only the magisterium that is involved. Other parts of the Church also have a responsibility for the realisation of Vatican II. Theologians have their role to play as exegetes of the conciliar texts, which have to be understood in relation to the tradition of the Church and to previous councils and magisterial teachings. The grassroots faithful baptised, whether priests or religious or laity, also take part in the process of the reception of a council. And last, but by no means least, those endowed with special charisms - and these charisms are given for the needs of the Church, not least at the time of a council. Thus the Ignatian charism was providential for the implementation of the Council of Trent, since without the Society of Jesus it is hard to see how the Tridentine reforms could ever been carried out.
There is a further clue to be found in Newman's writings about how the post-conciliar Church is likely to develop. At the beginning of his most famous theological work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, he says that it is not true of a religious idea or belief that "the stream is clearest near the spring". On the contrary, it
"is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary..."
If we can apply this to the teachings of Vatican II, then we have to conclude that the meaning of the Council will become clearer in the course of time and that even those who participated in it are less likely to understand its full significance than later generations. If we are too close to something, we may not see it as it really is. And Newman's expression "savours of the soil" reminds us that the soil out of which the Council came was the sixties and that "its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary". I believe that what is called "the spirit of Vatican II" is precisely that interpretation of the Council which savours of the Sixties, and until its "vital element" is disengaged from what is essentially "foreign and temporary" the Council will not bear the fruit it was intended to.
I remember a newspaper article by Bishop BC Butler in the Seventies to the effect that Vatican II could not be implemented until the older generation that was too set in its ways to really accept the Council had passed away. I am sure that was true, but it is also true of the generations that came to maturity in the Sixties and Seventies and who experienced the Council as though it were a revolution rather than simply another development in the Church's history and tradition. Until all those who saw or see Vatican II as a complete break with the Church's past have disappeared from the scene the Council will continue to be misunderstood.
Finally, as Pope John Paul II has said, one of the most important achievements of the Council was the rediscovery of the charismatic dimension of the Church. The Pope also sees the new ecclesial movements and communities as being an answer to Pope John's dream of a new Pentecost. This unexpected phenomenon was not planned or predicted by Vatican II, but nevertheless it represents a concrete realisation of the Council's Constitution on the Church, at the heart of which is the idea of communion between all the baptised whatever their state in the Church, whether clerical or religious or lay. That is why the new communities and movements are ecclesial and not lay as they are often called. It is interesting how those who claim to have "the spirit of Vatican II" are the very people in the Church who most dislike this great charismatic outburst, and who even ludicrously try to argue that it is "against Vatican II".
By Fr. Ian Ker
It is now 35 years since the Second Vatican Council ended. Young Catholics, those under the age of 35, were not even born then, let alone lived through the council and the turbulent times that followed. It is a good time now to take stock and reflect on our present position and what the future may hold.
But the first thing that needs to be said is, as GK Chesterton pointed out, that it is very dangerous to make what he called linear predictions. If the sun is shining today, it would be very rash to assume it will be shining tomorrow. Because this country fought two world wars with Germany in the 20th century didn't mean that Germany would go on being our potential enemy. In fact, the Second World War hadn't finished before it became clear that the threat would now come from our ally against Hitler, the Soviet Union.
Since Vatican II, we have heard many calls for Vatican Ill, a council to continue what are considered the progressive reforms of Vatican II. How often one has heard it said that the present pope - who is quite likely to be the first pope since Gregory the Great to be spontaneously given the same title - has smothered what is called "the spirit of Vatican II". It is this spirit, we are told, which must be allowed to breathe again through another council which will finish the unfinished business of Vatican II.
Newman frequently told people after Vatican 1, which was prevented by political events from concluding its business, that there would be another council, in spite of the fact that the definition of papal infallibility appeared to many to make another council redundant - since most councils had been convened to combat heresies, which could now be settled directly by the Pope himself.
Newman, of course, who was an expert on the early councils of the Church, was far too astute and historically minded a commentator to fall for linear predictions. He saw quite clearly that one council modified another, that the definition of papal infallibility would have to be modified not in the sense of diluting it but in the sense of placing papal primacy within a larger teaching about the Church - as of course Vatican II did in the most important of its documents, the Constitution on the Church.
Ultramontanes keen on linear predictions would have said that the definition, which disappointed them by what it did not say, would have to be filled out and strengthened by the Pope, or another council.
Ultramontanism did in practice continue to dominate the Church for the next century, culminating in the pontificate of Pius XII. And no doubt many people supposed then that the next pope would give himself the title Pius XIII to continue the tradition. In fact, of course, nothing of the sort happened, but an aged Italian; who was seen as a caretaker pope, suddenly changed the course of the Church.
Liberal Catholics were delighted by the subsequent election of Paul VI, who had been one of the foremost cardinals at the council and on the side of reform. And then to their horror towards the end of his pontificate Paul began to show shockingly conservative, even reactionary, tendencies.
Paul, like the great French Jesuit theologian, Henri de Lubac - who if anyone was the theological architect of the council - was horrified by the way he felt the council had been hijacked by extreme liberals. Still, it was felt to be just a temporary setback. And the election of the smiling John Paul I suggested that business would now be back to usual.
I well remember the letter that was sent to The Times and other international newspapers by Hans Kung and other leading liberal theologians describing the kind of pope they wanted: he should be non-Italian; preferably not from the first world, aware of social issues, comparatively young and able to relate to the young, an intellectual and theologically-minded pope.
The late Bishop Butler immediately wrote to say that such a pope would be a superpope and not at all the kind of collegial pope envisaged by the Constitution on the Church. Well, we now know of course that Kung and his colleagues got what they asked for, although not quite what they wanted, and that Butler was proved right in the sense that John Paul II has indeed turned out to be the superpope who helped bring down the communist empire and who has now led the Church into the new millenium.
I also also remember a newspaper article by Butler after the council in which he said that the council could only be really fully implemented when the old generation of pre-Vatican II Catholics had passed on. It was taken for granted that the future lay with the young, progressive bishops enthusiastic about the council. I think that Butler was obviously right that there was a whole generation that was more or less opposed to the council and more or less reluctant to implement it.
But I think where he was wrong was in assuming a sort of linear progress, as in fact the Vatican Il generation were not necessarily at all the generation that would absorb the real meaning of Vatican II. The trouble was that they, like their elders, took a negative rather than a positive view of the council, I mean by that that for them what was important about the council was that the Church decisively turned its back on the old pre-Vatican II Church.
It was as though the whole history of the Church since the time of the New Testament was just a sort of dark age till the new dawn of Vatican II. It was, you might say, a very, "Protestant" view of Church history, except that for Protestants the new dawn was in the 16th century. In practice, it meant that almost anything in the pre-Vatican II Church had to be got rid of and everything emphasised at Vatican II had to be so highlighted as to eclipse everything else.
If people used to say their rosary at Mass, then rosaries were to be torn up; if people used to attend devotions like Benediction or Exposition in the past, then from now on the only kind of service that was permitted was to be the Mass; if the Church had been juridical in the past, from now on it was to be free-wheeling. The list could easily be lengthened.
And, of course, it was quite an understandable reaction. It was, in fact, a reaction against the Tridentine Church - just as the Council of Trent itself was a reaction to the Protestant Reformation. And the Counter Reformation, for all its glories and achievements, did suffer too from being a reaction: if the Protestants called for a vernacular liturgy and emphasised the Bible and the priesthood of all the baptised and personal faith as against the objectivity of the sacraments, then the Catholic Church had to do the diametrically opposite.
VATICAN II aimed to redress the balance, not only for ecumenical reasons but also to restore what was deficient or lacking in the life of the Church from its tradition In the event, as might have been predicted, the, reaction against the Tridentine Church produced a new imbalance.
And instead of the greatest achievement of Vatican II, the Constitution on the Church (which lies at the heart of a Council that was predominantly concerned with Church internally and externally) being appreciated in all its fullness as a recovery of the scriptural and patristic understanding of the mystical and sacramental nature of the Church, only specific parts of the constitution - those on the laity and the college of bishops - were highlighted.
More seriously, the council's commitment, in contrast to the old isolationism and intransigence, to ecumenism, dialogue with other religions and the world, and to justice and peace, led to these unquestionably important issues going right to the top of the agenda, even dislodging what the Church is all about: the person of Jesus Christ.
A turning point in the history of the Church was the startling confession some years ago by Cardinal Suenens, who had criticised Paul VI for his failure to implement collegiality sufficiently, that he and others had been far too concerned with Church structures and not enough with faith in Christ.
Significantly, it was one of the new so - called movements in the Church, charismatic renewal, which had led to this change of heart. I also think that the recent humiliating rejection of the call for another council by Cardinal Martini, a well-known critic of the new movements, will also prove to be a turning point.
I am convinced that Bishop Butler was wrong: it was not just the pre-Vatican II generation that had to die off, it was also that generation which was too close to get a proper perspective of it within the whole history of the Church. Not long ago I argued in these pages that the new movements and communities within the Church, a few of which pre-date - that is, anticipate, the council, will prove to be to Vatican II what the Jesuits and the other Counter Reformation orders were to Trent.
In particular, the striking way in which priests, religious or their equivalent, and the laity live and work edgether as the baptised members of the Body of Christ with their varying charisms and functions, is the concrete embodiment of the first two deeply traditional but by the same token deeply radical chapters of the Constitution on the Church.
Before Vatican I we had a clericalised Church; since Vatican II there has been a concerted drive to have a laicised Church. But the Church is neither clerical nor lay: it is the community of the Spirit-filled baptised.
That is the other omission in Butler's thesis, for at the end of the day the Person who will implement Vatican II will be the Holy Spirit. And, to return to linear predictions, I am quite sure that the Church is neither going back in a straight line to where it was before the council, nor on the other hand, proceeding in a straight line in the opposite direction as the progressivists fondly imagine.
There is no future for the Lefevbrists. But, equally, our ageing 60s liberals are beginning to look increasingly like poor Castro and his fellow revolutionaries in Cuba where the young aren't interested in a revolution they never knew, but want to go to Miami and buy jeans.
Rather as our young Catholics aren't interested in "the spirit" of a council they never knew; if they're interested in anything, it's more likely to be in finding out about Catholicism.
The above article first appeared in the 7th January 2000 issue of The Catholic Herald.
.... or the liberal, left wing element. I agree that it will take many years before the dust settles and the full fruit of Vatican II even begins to ripen.
There is no future for the Lefevbrists ... or the liberal, left wing element.In media stat virtus.
Didn't he know that it's forbidden for a Catholic to criticize the Pope in any way???
Tsk, tsk, tsk!!! LOL!!!
The endless series of this "experiment" and that "experiment" and a new "experiment."
As Heraclitus said, "You never step into the same Church twice."
I'm not Catholic, but have become increasingly interested (especially in the traditionalist vs. conservative controversy) since attending a Latin Requiem Mass (the very one discussed here) for King Louis XVI a little over a year ago. I have found these Catholic debates fascinating. As a classical musician and monarchist, I perhaps inevitably sympathize with those who would turn back the clock, although I do think Desdemona and B-chan have also made some good points from the more moderate side.
It's not my intention to argue about these issues with cradle "neo-Catholics"; however, I did want to let FR traditionalists know that they have a friend outside the church.
Roman Catholic Faithful - The Church has paid more than $1 billion to settle abuse cases since the 1980s. There are more than 1,400 insurance claims on the books. And the current spate of litigation is expected to cost several more billions of dollars. Further, it's known that not a few priests are dying from AIDS at a rate four times greater than that of the general population. As Catholic World Report noted: "When more of your priests die by sodomy than by martyrdom, you know you've got a problem; when the man you bring in for the fix comes down with AIDS, you know you've got a crisis; and when the Pope first gets the facts thanks to '60 Minutes,' you know you're corrupt."
Warning, you are now entering the neo-Catholic Zone
the present pope - who is quite likely to be the first pope since Gregory the Great to be spontaneously given the same title
Madness. Stark raving lunacy.
Nah. Madness is signing up four days ago in order to criticize the greatest Pope of the 20th and, likely, the 21st century.
You're exactly what we need around here: another glass-half-full-can't-quit-bitchin' trad.
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