The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, the most important Catholic event since the 16th-century Council of Trent, was solemnly opened by Pope John XXIII 50 years ago, on October 11, 1962. Commentators ever since have taken that date as the beginning of the Catholic Church’s engagement with modern society and culture. In fact, however, the Church’s grappling with modernity began 84 years earlier, with the election of Pope Leo XIII on March 3, 1878. That date marks the beginning of the transition from the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation to the Catholicism of the New Evangelization. And in that process of transition, Vatican II played a crucial, accelerating role.
Vatican II is sometimes imagined to be an example of ecclesiastical parthenogenesis: the Council just happened, absent significant antecedents, in a decisive rupture with the past. That, too, is a misconception. Leo XIII paved the way to Vatican II by initiating his reform of the Church’s philosophical and theological life, by sponsoring Catholic biblical and historical studies, and by defining the basic principles of Catholic social doctrine. The Leonine reform was intensified by the Catholic intellectual and liturgical renaissance of the mid-20th century, which shaped the early, reforming-years-pontificate of Pius XII: the most-cited source (after the Bible) in the documents of Vatican II. No Leo XIII, no Liturgical Movement, no Catholic Action, no revival of Thomistic philosophy, no rediscovery of the importance of history for theology, no Pius XII—no Vatican II.
John XXIII intended the Council to be a new experience of Pentecost for the Church, so that Catholicism could more effectively proclaim the message of God’s mercy and love. Yes, the Council opened the Church’s windows to the modern world. But the Council also challenged the modern world to open its own windows (and doors, and skylights) in order to rediscover the world of transcendent Truth and Love—the world of the supernatural, which is the really real world. The growing end of early 21st-century Catholicism is found in local churches that have embraced the Council’s evangelical intention and the Council’s teaching in full. Those who have done so have found both a new understanding of Word and Sacrament, the twin pillars of Catholic life, and a new passion for evangelism.
It took awhile. Vatican II was like no other ecumenical Council in history, in that it did not provide authoritative keys for its own interpretation: the Council Fathers wrote no creed, condemned no heresy, legislated no new canons, defined no dogmas. Thus the decade and a half after the Council ended on December 8, 1965, was a bit of a free-for-all, as varying interpretations of the Council (including appeals to an amorphous “spirit of Vatican II” that seems to have more in common with low-church Protestantism than with Catholicism) contended with each other in what amounted to an ecclesiastical civil war.
The Providence raised up two men of genius—John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both men of the Council—to give Vatican II an authoritative interpretation. Their teaching, carried throughout the world by an unprecedented series of papal pilgrimages, has given the Church the truth about the Council—although some Catholics seem a bit slow to get the message, Moreover, in summoning the world Church to the Great Jubilee of 2000, John Paul II gave Catholicism the Pentecostal experience that John XXIII for which hoped, thus preparing the world Church to enter the third millennium with great missionary energy: to “put out into the deep,” as John Paul II put it, of the New Evangelization.
And that, finally, is Vatican II’s message to every Catholic. Vatican II did not displace the Church’s tradition. Vatican II did not create do-it-yourself-Catholicism. Vatican II, which accelerated the great historical evolution of Catholicism from a Church of institutional maintenance to a Church of evangelical mission in a genuine and Spirit-led development of self-understanding, taught Catholics that they enter mission territory every day. The degree to which each of us brings the Gospel to others is the degree to which we understand Vatican II at its golden anniversary.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
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Comments:
When, oh when, will we admit we've gone down a dead end, so we can turn back and find the way again?
Vatican II's ambiguous documents, which pander to the unspiritual mentality of the modern world in the vain hope of charming readers with their amicability, have borne such fruits as the sex abuse crisis, an effeminate and corrupt priesthood, the near-destruction of the liturgy, rampant heresy and indifference to Catholic doctrine, and the almost total disappearance of real catechesis. But, other than that, it's been just splendid.
Note that Weigel feels compelled to remind his readers that Vatican II "didn't displace the Church's tradition." What other Ecumenical Council ever required that kind of caveat?
Someday, the spin will have to stop, and the truth will have to be acknowledged: the documents of this council describe the faith in an incomplete, ambiguous, and easily misinterpreted way, and their acceptance was a blow to the Church's salvific mission. Vatican II's dark anniversary is to be mourned, not celebrated.
The church needs a modern Thomas Acquinas to re-display to the modern world the precious unchanging pearls of Christian truth.
Thomas's postulates of an ordered, divinely inspired, natural law shaped world had a natural ally, many centuries later, in Newtonian Physics.The latter postulated an orderly mathematically deterministic world. Cardinal Newman, G K Chesterton and CS Lewis and many other prominent Catholic writers of the late 19th Century were creations of these two world views.
Unfortunately but slowly, with technological advancement, Newtonian Physics had to be abandoned. The replacement was quantum mechanics and particle physics and Einsteinian relativity unbelievably complex and non linear and seemingly chaotic.
Add to that appetisers like Marxism and Nazism, and the world view of population masses, became unbelievably complex, chaotic, nihilistic and cynical. That is what we have today. The ideas of Thomas Acquinas cut no ice now. Empty closed churches, unprecednted faith ignorance, widespread vice, empty monasteries and seminaries are just consequences of a real and very serious intellectual crisis in Christianity. In short we need Thomas Acquinas Two. I doubt that I will see him in my lifetime.
Also, read Martin's "The Jesuits"--tells you what happened to the Church due to the 'pope's men' turning their back on petrine primacy.
@ Vicarius Cooperatus: yes, let us all go along to get along! To hades with truth.
But I must say this to fellow conservatives that are highly critical of the council...If you believe the teaching of the Church and that the Holy Spirit's hand is and has always been on the bishops--ESPECIALLY when they sit in ecumenical council--then talk of a Church Council as an occasion to be mourned or a Council to be condemned borders on heresy. It risks a sin against the Holy Spirit.
And it resembles the obstinate disobedience we conservatives so often decry among liberal Catholics.
Vatican II was grossly and maliciously misinterpreted by many nominal Catholics. Just as the Bible has been by the Enemy and his pawns throughout history. In both cases, I much imagine the ill that's resulted is the fault of the people doing the twisting, not with the Holy Spirit.
But we do not throw out the inspired, infallible word of God. Nor can a true Catholic throw out Vatican II.
Do you believe that God can bring His purposes to fruition with imperfect human tools? Do you believe Flannery O'Connor's observation that sometimes it is loyalty to the Church in her imperfection (and suffering) that works out God's salvation within us? Do you wish to build up the Church rather than fundamentally undermine Her authority in the world?
If so, you MUST accept the authority of the Church Councils. There are not problems with Vatican II so much as their are problems with some interpretations (and interpreters) of Vatican II.
The documents of V2 were deliberately written in a very ambiguous way, using new and poorly defined terminology, so that each party could interpret it according to its own wants and needs. When liberals were in the ascendent, we got a liberal interpretation of the Council; conservatives are now in the ascendent, and we get a conservative interpretation. What man has done, man can do, and if there is another liberal reaction in the Church, it will appeal to V2 for support of its ideas as much as Pope Benedict does today. Strangely enough, no one walked away from Vatican I with even the tiniest doubts about what it had said on Papal infallibility.
Sadly, Vatican II walked away from that beauty of holiness when they walked away from the Tridentine Mass in Latin.