The Second Vatican Council

Celebrating its Achievements and the Future

Gavin D'Costa, Emma Harris, Gavin D'Costa, Emma Harris

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780567051639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

The Second Vatican Council (1963-65) changed the face of modern Catholicism in bringing it into a positive relationship with modern culture. There were significant changes in Catholic thought and practice regarding major topics. This timely and significant book looks at those major issues: revelation, liturgy, the church, ecumenism, world religions, mission, the role of Mary, and the future of the Church. The reader is introduced to the content of Vatican II documents, debates around their interpretation and the manner of their implementation. The essays are written by the leading figures in the Catholic Church and allow the reader to see the Council's impact upon modern Catholicism and engagement with the modern world.

1

Vatican II after Fifty Years: The Virtual Council versus the Real Council

Fr Matthew L. Lamb

The fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council occasioned many reflections on the histories, the texts, the hermeneutics and the consequences of what has been termed the most important religious event in the twentieth century. Rather than discussing the superficial mass media framework on the Council, along with those who follow its division between ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ camps, the announced retirement of Pope Benedict XVI invites us to consider how well he has guided the Church’s implementation of Vatican II. Pope Benedict was not surprised by the confusion so rampant after the Council. He called attention to the conflicts in interpretation that tend to follow significant ecumenical councils. He dramatized this in the case of the very first among such councils, Nicaea, by quoting St Basil the Great:

The raucous shouting of those who through disagreement rise up against one another, the incomprehensible chatter, the confused din of uninterrupted clamoring, has now filled almost the whole of the Church, falsifying through excess or failure the right doctrine of the faith.¹

While admitting that the post-conciliar period of Vatican II has not been so dramatic, Benedict XVI calls attention to contemporary difficulties in implementing the renewals and reforms called for by the Council. The genuine event of the Council was truncated to a struggle between liberals and conservatives, and the documents of the Council were misread within what Benedict XVI accurately terms a hermeneutics of rupture and discontinuity. The ‘spirit’ of the Council was severed from the texts promulgated by the Council. The texts are ‘compromises’ that contain, as Benedict XVI states, ‘many old and ultimately useless things that had to be dragged along’ in order to ‘make room for the new’. This way of interpreting the Council, he asserts, found ‘favor among the mass media’ and in some sectors of modern theology.

In his address to the clergy of Rome on 14 February 2013, he forcefully put forward some parting reflections on the ‘two councils’. This was a few days after announcing his resignation and he spoke without notes, and from his heart. Most of his talk centred on the important changes that were required if the redemptive truth of Catholic faith was to evangelize the modern world. He spoke of the role he played in the important impetus for reform that came from the northern European bishops, supported by Blessed John XXIII, in reformulating the agenda of the Council, setting aside the rather wooden schema provided by the curia. This was, he said, ‘a revolutionary act’ taken by the fathers in full responsibility for their pastoral duties. The Church would no longer simply contrast its teachings to the errors of the modern world, but would seek to show how what was of value in cultures could be improved and elevated by the teachings and practices of Catholic faith.

A first and fundamental priority is the true worship of the triune God in the liturgy of the sacraments and prayers of the church. So the first constitution promulgated was Sacrosanctum Concilium, as the fruit of liturgical and patristic theological studies after the World War I, reforming the worship of the church and encouraging strong sacramental participation; the minds and hearts of the faithful had to be centred on the great paschal mystery, the life, sufferings, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ redeeming the world created by the Word of God.

Then the church had again to be seen more strikingly as the ‘Light of the Nations’ (the constitution ‘Lumen Gentium’), and the unfinished work of Vatican I had to be strengthened and extended, linking the Petrine primacy to the collegiality of the bishops; the teachings of Pius XII on the mystical body of Christ were enriched in the trinitarian ecclesiology of the council: ‘the people of God-the Father are indeed the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit’. This was followed by the constitution on revelation, Dei Verbum, in which the importance of scripture was highlighted as the revealed Word of God proclaimed in the believing and worshiping church. A basic truth of the document on revelation is how the scriptures cannot be properly and fully understood except in the faith and worship of the church. There can be no disjunction between scripture and the handing on of the Word of God in the Catholic Church, carrying forward the visible and invisible missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the evangelizing mission of the Church.

The modern world at the end of the second millennium of Catholicism needed a response to the ecumenical movement seeking the reunification of the Church, as well as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust, and so the declarations on religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae) and on the abiding covenant of God with the Jewish people (Nostra Aetate), as well as the wider dialogue among the world religions, sought to enlighten major concerns and hopes of so many peoples. These concerns and hopes were taken up in the final constitution of the Church and the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes). In all of this Pope Benedict speaks of the challenges and changes as true developments of the deep life of the Church’s Catholic and Apostolic faith. But why the turmoil after the Council? He concludes his talk in ways that electrified the audience.

Permit me to quote at length:

I would now like to add another point: there was the Council of the fathers – the true Council – but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council unto itself, and the world perceived the Council through these, through the media. Therefore the Council that immediately and efficiently arrived to the people was that of the media, not that of the fathers. And while the Council of the fathers was realized within the faith, and was a Council of the faith that seeks “intellectus,” that seeks to understand itself and seeks to understand the signs of God at that moment, that seeks to respond to the challenge of God at that moment and to find in the Word of God the word for today and tomorrow, while the whole Council – as I have said – was moving within the faith, as “fides quaerens intellectum,” the Council of the journalists was not realized, naturally, within the faith, but within the categories of today’s media, meaning outside of the faith, with a different hermeneutic. It was a political hermeneutic. For the media, the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different currents in the Church. It was obvious that the media were taking sides with that part which seemed to them to have the most in common with their world. There were those who were seeking the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression “people of God,” the power of the people, of the laity. There was this threefold question: the power of the pope, then transferred to the power of the bishops and to the power of all, popular sovereignty. Naturally, for them this was the side to approve of, to promulgate, to favor. And so also for the liturgy: the liturgy was not of interest as an act of faith, but as a matter where understandable things are done, a matter of community activity, a profane matter. And we know that there was a tendency, that was also founded historically, to say: sacrality is a pagan thing, perhaps even in the Old Testament, but in the New all that matters is that Christ died outside: that is, outside of the gates, meaning in the profane world. A sacrality therefore to be brought to an end, profanity of worship as well: worship is not worship but an act of the whole, of common participation, and thus also participation as activity. These translations, trivializations of the idea of the Council were virulent in the praxis of the application of liturgical reform; they were born in a vision of the Council outside of its proper key, that of faith. And thus also in the question of Scripture: Scripture is a book, historical, to be treated historically and nothing else, and so on. We know how this Council of the media was accessible to all. Therefore, this was the dominant, more efficient one, and has created so much calamity, so many problems, really so much misery: seminaries closed, convents closed, liturgy trivialized. . . . And the true Council had difficulty in becoming concrete, in realizing itself; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council. ²

Never before was an ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church so extensively covered and reported by the modern mass media as Vatican II (1962–65). The impact of this coverage was pervasive and profound in its portrayal of the Council in the ideological categories of ‘liberal versus conservative’. The Council was dramatically reported as a liberal or progressive accommodation to modernity overcoming Catholicism’s traditional conservative resistance to modernity. Foreign correspondents from 1962 to 1965 knew there were two international scenes that would guarantee their stories got top billing: the war in Vietnam and the Council in Rome. Journalists of the print and electronic media flocked to Rome with little or no expertise in Catholic theology. They depended upon popularized accounts of the Council deliberations and debates offered by periti and theologians with journalistic skills.³ An American Redemptorist, Fr Francis Xavier Murphy, contributed much to the propagation of such ‘conservative versus liberal’ reporting on the Council debates in his widely read ‘Letters from the Vatican’ under the pen name of Xavier Rynne in the New Yorker.⁴

Pope Benedict has addressed repeatedly that the real council is one that emphasizes the underlying continuity in the ongoing changes and developments of the teachings and practices of the Church. Serious theological scholarship is needed, not simply the kind of superficial sound bites of the mass media. Pastors, theologians, catechists and all the faithful need to show how the ‘real council’ corrects the errors in the mass media’s ‘virtual council’. The reforms and renewals are in continuity with the principles of the Catholic faith and magisterial teachings. The reforms do initiate very real changes, but as the best works on Vatican II illustrate, they do not claim a ‘rupture’ with the principles underlying Catholic doctrine. The Pope himself illustrated this with reference to how Catholic martyrs illustrate a proper separation of Jesus Christ and any political regime. No Caesar, no political regime, can take the place of God. Christianity from its inception is trans-political. The Kingdom of God is beyond the bounds of earth and time.

The Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church is properly understood within the theological and sapiential framework of Apostolicity. Irenaeus offers a powerful witness to the living faith handed on from one generation to the next down to our own day:

Anyone who wishes to discern the truth may see in every church in the whole world the apostolic tradition clear and manifest. . . . This apostolic tradition has been brought down to us by a succession of bishops in the greatest, most ancient, and well known Church, founded by the two most glorious Apostles Peter and Paul at Rome. . . . For with this Church, because of its more effective leadership, all Churches must agree, that is to say, the faithful of all places, because in it the apostolic tradition has been always preserved . . .⁵

Without faith human reason cannot theologically understand the fundamental importance St Irenaeus attaches to the Apostolic tradition with its preaching, teaching, sanctifying and governing mission. The above quotation from St Irenaeus, born in the second century (probably between 140 AD and 160 AD), has the vividness of living personal witness, intensified no doubt by the martyrdom of his friend and mentor, Bishop Polycarp. St Irenaeus of Lyons knew the martyred Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna. He had reported to Irenaeus his conversations with the Apostle St John, ‘eye-witness of the Word of Life’, our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ as the Word of Life is not an abstraction for St Irenaeus – nor can he be for those who know him in the faith-filled worship of the Church. The very office of an apostle is defined by the initial ‘follow me’ that applies as well to all the successors of the apostles since the same Lord promised ‘and behold, I am with you always until the end of the world’.⁶

Early on Professor Joseph Ratzinger expressed this interpersonal character of Apostolic succession and tradition well:

First and foremost, it is clear that successio and traditio, as they were first used, meant practically the same reality, and indeed were expressed by the same word, διαδοχη, which meant both tradition and succession. “Tradition” is never a simple, anonymous passing on of doctrine, but is personal, is the living Word, concretely realized in the faith. And “succession” is not a taking over of official powers, which then are at the disposal of their possessor, but is rather a dedication to the Word, an office of bearing witness to the treasure with which one has been entrusted. The office is superior to its holder, so that he is entirely overshadowed by that which he has received; he is, as it were – to adopt the image of Isaiah and John the Baptist – only a voice that renders the Word articulate in the world.⁷

This leads Professor Ratzinger to comment that it is not so much as readers of a book, but as hearers of the Word preached by the apostles and their successors that we must approach scripture in tradition:

. . . if true apostolic succession is bound up with the word, it cannot be bound up merely with a book, but must, as the succession of the Word, be a succession of preachers, which in turn cannot exist without a “mission,” i.e., a personal continuity reaching back to the apostles. . . . Apostolic succession is essentially the living presence of the Word in the person of witnesses. The unbroken continuity of witnesses follows from the nature of the Word as auctoritas and viva vox.⁸

The living Word requires faith. Any theology of Apostolicity and Magisterium can only be properly done with faith enlightening reason. If the light of faith is dimmed or extinguished, all that is left are texts as so many dead letters whose real truth is not grasped. There is a profound inadequacy of purely social views of Apostolic succession as power and patriarchy. Instead a theological attention to the realities signified in the early fathers provides the following picture:

The Church is the living presence of the divine Word. This presence is made concrete in those persons (the bishops) whose basic function is to hold fast to the Word, who are, then, the personal embodiment of “tradition” (paradosis – παρα′δοσις) and to this extent are in the apostolic line of “succession” (diadoch – διαδοχη). Conspicuous among the successors of the apostles is the line of the apostolic sees, which ultimately is concentrated in the See of Peter and Paul. This is the touchstone of all apostolic succession.⁹

This very cogent statement of the living presence of the divine Word in the Church mediated by Apostolic succession can be known and understood by theologians only when the light of faith enlightens their minds and hearts.

Some Catholic theologians have also kept the light of Catholic faith under a bushel in their writings on Apostolic, papal and episcopal aut...