The Demand for Renewal Starts from Below
Between the 1960s and the 1990s the destruction and scars of the Second World War appeared healed and about to be forgotten. Industrialized societies, powerfully driven forward by the needs of reconstruction, seemed launched on a path of pragmatically sensible development, without unexpected shocks. But beneath the smooth facade of formally codified institutions, deep pressures and forces of incredible power were at work. These included not only the preparation of the protet movements that were to peak in May 1968 but also capillary demands for renewal in the Catholic world traditionally tied and loyal to the directives of the Church’s teaching. These requests did not come from the top. It is well known that the summit is rarely interested in the processes of renewal. Renewal, when it came, came from below and started out from the periphery. Think of the experience of Don Enzo Mazzi at the Isolotto in Florence, of that of the Abbot Giovan Battista Franzoni at San Paolo fuorile mura in Rome, not to mention the earlier Esperienze Pastorali of Don Lorenzo Milani.
The proposals of Pope John XXIII, in some ways prophetic, were an initial sign of opening up. Under this pressure, it was no wonder that the Catholic hierarchy finally decided to make a collective repsonse to these requests, which were mysteriously pressing at the basis of the church and in extraecclesiastical society. This response was the summoning of the Second Vatican Council. An old, already ailing pope, universally held to be a pope typical of transition, imprinted a decisive change of line on the Roman curia, with all the frankness of a true revolutionary.
Naturally, it cannot be said that the overall evaluation of the work of Vatican II and the directions emerging therefrom have been concluded. Rather, it has scarcely begun. It would be superficial and hasty to believe this represented only a reply by the Church to the protest movements of the postwar period. Undoubtedly, its roots concerned at least fifty years of history, and especially in Italy, one cannot overlook the “modernist movement” at the beginning of this century. This, with Romolo Murri and others, was to shake Catholics’ consciences and disturb their age-old, Counter-Reformation acquiescence. Aside from this broad historical background, there was no pronouncement of the council that lacked a not-always limpid, and indeed often difficult, contorted story, of which it came to represent the problematic and far from definitive outcome. Indeed, what was striking in the history of the Church was its ability to wait and its serene calculations based not on the measure of a man’s life nor on biographical chance, but rather its taking into consideration the logic of the development of an institution whose trajectory of change must be analyzed and evaluated in terms of centuries.
Little more than twenty years separate us from the council, twenty years, it has been usefully remarked,
which in the course of three pontificates, Paul VI until 1978, John Paul I, pope for a month, and John Paul II, inaugurated that same year, are still probably a very liquid lava of tendencies and phenomena, pressures and counterpressures, to the point that one can perhaps say we are only at the end of an initial phase of the postcouncil. … It is thus a matter of attempting a partial, provisional balance sheet of the council, naturally not therewith claiming to write a real history of the Church in the twenty postconciliar years, since this would probably be a rather different—or, better, the start of a rather different—history from the previous one.1
This historian’s caution is laudable and legitimate. Here, on the other hand, I shall try to grasp the significance of those events, with the courageous hope that the reader will not mistake this either for daring nor an excess of speculation.
On the death of John XXIII the control of Vatican Council II passed to the Montini Pope, Paul VI, perhaps the most intellectually prepared and subtle pope of this century. With great clarity, he outlined the aims of the council as: (1) self-awareness of the Church; (2) its renewal; (3) the reunification of all Christians; and (4) the Church’s dialogue with the contemporary world.
It is hard to argue, as has been authoritatively attempted, that in the face of the precise clarity of these objectives Vatican Council II was none other than a work of codification and legal registration of changes already underway and set out. In his opening speech to the Ecumenical Council Vatican II in 1962, John XXIII was fully aware of the innovations being prepared and stated: “In the present order of things, Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, through the intervention of men and moreover beyond their very expectation, are developing towards the fulfilment of Its higher, unseen designs. And everything, even human diversity, is laid out for the greater good of the Church.” However, today, twenty years from its ending, can the council still be considered a radical, genuine turnaround in the life of the Church: or else, first discretely under Paul VI and then more decisively with John Paul II, as a process of slow but continuous emptying of its essential innovatory content, has it reached the point of justifying the suspicion that, in the letter and in spirit, it has been betrayed rather than enforced?
The question cannot adequately be dealt with just on the basis of suspicions and clues that mostly do not rise above the level of hearsay, capricious and fragmentary for the most part. Behind this question there lie problems of principle that concern the process of renewal of the Church and the interpretation of Christianity in depth. One must critically reconsider the image of man that lies at the heart of the positions taken by the most recent popes. For John XXIII, man is always, systematically, beyond the letter of the law. Man in flesh and blood wins over juridical and theological formalism. The first gesture of this unforgettable pope was at once simple and revolutionary: the visit to the prisoners in Regina Coeli, Rome. Moreover, the reminiscence of his own relatives, communicated with phrases colored not by holy writings but by the most immediate and intellectually unprotected everydayness—including recollections of how they were caught cutting wood one day on an estate and later imprisoned—was as though to say: I am one of you; I know by direct experience what your situation is; we are all prisoners, imprisoned in this world. This kind of “papal complicity” was an unheard-of act. There was the outstretched hand and embrace of one human being for another, rather than merely a sovereign on the throne of Peter. There was a deeply felt sense that no man is an island, no one can save themselves unaided, and that power is the occasion for blame.
John XXIII, more through his practical attitudes than through his explicit teaching, had started the Church on a process probably destined to continue into the first decades of the next millennium. This process it would perhaps not be incautious to call the “end of Constantinian Christianity.” This son of a Lombard peasant family had in fact set up the council almost as a family council, a kind of informal family meeting with his bishops. All the experiences of the Church on a world scale would be discussed and used to bring the gospel in the same fashion to all the countries of the world. The age-old practice of secret Vatican diplomacy, in which the aristocratic Pius XII (a man unusually well-versed in canon law and at home in all the chancelleries of the powerful) excelled, was simply abandoned and forgotten. John XXIII, with his encyclical Pacem in terris established the basic points of a new world order of peace and justice.
The Church and the Individual
These new perspectives as regards the structure and government of the Church thereafter found their most authoritative expression in the “Pastoral Constitution for the Church in the Contemporary World.” It seems certain that through his practical example as pope, John XXIII rediscovered and promoted the concrete truth of the “mystical body” in polemical tension with the hierarchically stratified and arthritic Church, exalting, on the contrary, the “People of God” as the basic category and foundation of ecclesiastical teaching. The formula servus servorum took on again in him all its value and penetrating power in everyday practice, beyond the purely liturgical connotation of the formal ritual.2
In practical terms, with John XXIII we have finally the confirmation of the gospels’ promise that those who are last—the prisoners, the excluded, the segregated, and the emarginated—shall be first. At the same time, this meant a break with the ruling circles and social leadership that, historically, had often managed to combine positions of objective privilege and moral authority with the Church’s blessing. Even more explosive were the consequences on a world level concerning relations with the other universal religions. One might say that with John XXIII the Catholic church’s Counter-Reformation had at last ended, and that the Church of Rome had opened up on an essentially equal footing not only to the “separated brothers” but also, as an absolute novelty, toward the “men without myths.”3
Felice Balbo designated with this formula those human beings who, though belonging to no church or religious faith, expressed through their simple humanity the basic convergence of the values and transcendental unity of the positive historical religions.4 Perhaps they might also be defined, in the light of Tertullian, as “naturaliter Christiania,” if the simplicity of their purely human virtues did not consign them, as ideal citizens, to a broader, more flexible and mobile historical and religious horizon than the Christian context. In this sense, whatever the future development of John XXIII’s teachings and the council he desired, the ecumenical outlook linked to those teachings and practice will forever remain exemplary. By this, the Church seemed to burn its bridges with western European civilization as the sole repository of the values of human civilization. It opened up to other cultures. It seemed ready to see in men and women, independently of faith, race, or culture, the unifying, creative center of value. The human person had intrinsic value. No chrism could enoble or save it from without. No blessing from above could enoble it. It was end, goal of history, and of its own destiny.
To instrumentalize the human person, even for the goal of universal salvation, or with the prospect of the redemption of mankind, so as to draw it from the original fall and free the individual from the obsessive “remembrance of the forbidden fruit,” meant to mistake or betray its essential prerogatives. These belonged to a creature capable of creation and self-creation, at least in the sense of a self-consciousness that made up and guaranteed the autonomy of the person: what we might call with a pardonable pun, the “personality” of the person.
The Break with the Church of the Pacts
How far we are from the Church that signed agreements with regimes that by principle and practice were hostile to the person—such as the fascist and nazi regimes or the more recent dictatorships that for years have bloodied Latin America! Is it not perhaps true that all absolutist governments have eagerly sought legitimation through the Church’s approval on the basis of the principle “A Deo lex—a rege lex”? It is strange to have to observe how at all events, since the donation of Sutri, the Church has always systematically aligned with the established order, proposing solid reasons against critics of religion who took advantage of it to reduce the religious phenomenon to an “opium of the people,” to a mass fraud, and in any case a poor, residual phenomenon, destined to disappear with the progress of rationality among men and in the world.5 The situation had troubled not only the “strong” thinkers of the Enlightenment but also inspired the imagination of the poets: “For those to whom the earth has no more to offer, heaven was invented. … Long live this invention! Hail to a religion that pours into the bitter cup of suffering humanity some drops of a sweet draught, of spiritual opiate, some drops of love, hope and faith.”6
Beyond the stereotyped and at times frankly vulgar anticlerical propaganda that has generally seen the priest in the service of the powerful and privileged social groups—wholly unmindful of the evangelist’s Vae divitibus!—one must recognize that the Church established itself as an established social power only with the ending of the imperial persecution when in 312 of the current era it obtained the status of religio licita from the emperor Constantine. Constantine was a thoroughly ambiguous figure, inclined to every opportunism to triumph over his political opponents, to the point of making his own fortunes as military leader and last resource of power in an empire in crisis depend on the link with the Church and Christianity in general.7
That there may be a link of continuity between the new political Christian-imperial theology and the classical one that made the emperor the political and the religious leader of the empire, thus uniting religion and politics closely, seems to me a difficult question. It would require a detailed examination of the unfortunately incomplete texxts of Marcus Terentius Varro and other writers. They reflected on the “theologia civilis” that was the basis of the “religio pubblica” of the Roman state. This, even today, has a precise resonance in those jurists who tend to legitimize power in the name of its decisionism and sovereign autonomy as regards society—not on the basis of the demands of society but only of its ability and capability to decide. They thus confuse authority as authoritativeness with authority as clumsy authoritarianism.8
The breaking with this past carried out by John XXIII was explosive. However, for this reason its further development was to encounter significant obstacles. Caesaro-papal political theology had necessarily to confront the new orientation and try by all means (from condemnation of the liturgical innovations desired by Paul VI as devilish to the resumption of secret diplomacy, by definition subordinate to raison d’état), in order to slow down its developmen...
