The historical view of Vatican-II so far:
The who, what, where, when, and why of the Council
by Michael J. Miller
Oct. 12, 2012
Michael J. Miller headed a team of translators who prepared the English edition of The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story by Roberto de Mattei.
The famous black-and-white photograph of the Second Vatican Council in session, taken from a high balcony at the back of Saint Peter’s Basilica, shows more than 2,000 Council Fathers standing at their places in slanted stalls that line the nave, with more than a dozen rows on either side.
It resembles nothing so much as a gargantuan monastic choir — unless it puts you in mind of the British Parliament with the dimensions quadrupled.
Contemporary perceptions of the Council varied widely, partly because of the extensive media coverage. Although it promulgated a dogmatic constitution on the Church,
Lumen Gentium, Vatican II was not a “constitutional convention.”
An ecumenical council can teach about the Church but cannot modify a divine institution, any more than a Pope can invent a new doctrine or change one of the Ten Commandments.
In his latest book,
The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story (Loreto Publications, 2012), Roberto de Mattei, a historian in Rome, writes:
“[Ecumenical] Councils exercise, under and with the Pope, a solemn teaching authority in matters of faith and morals, and set themselves up as supreme judges and legislators, insofar as Church law is concerned. The Second Vatican Council did not issue laws, and it did not even deliberate definitively on questions of faith and morals. The lack of dogmatic definitions inevitably started a discussion about the nature of its documents and about how to apply them in the so-called ‘postconciliar period.’”
Professor de Mattei outlines the two main schools of thought in that discussion. The first and more theological approach presupposes an “uninterrupted ecclesial Tradition” and therefore expects the documents of Vatican II to be interpreted in a way consistent with authoritative Church teaching in the past. This is the “hermeneutic of continuity” emphasized by Pope Benedict XVI.
A second, more historical approach advocated by Professor Giuseppe Alberigo and the “School of Bologna” maintains that the Council “was in the first place
an historical ‘event’ which, as such, meant an undeniable discontinuity with the past: it raised hopes, started polemics and debates, and in the final analysis inaugurated a new era.”
The “event-dimension” of the Council is Exhibit A in making the case for the elusive “spirit of Vatican II” that looks beyond the actual words of the conciliar documents to the momentum that they supposedly generated.
[But Benedict XVI's hermeneutic does not at all deny or minimize the 'event-dimension' of Vatican II. The Holy Father almost always underscores it as 'that great ecclesial event'. The question has never been whether Vatican-II was a historic event - the dispute has been about what it said and intended to say to the Church and to the world, through the 16 documents that formally constitute its teachings, which must be the objective basis of reference. In this regad, it does appear from even the most cursory reading of the articles that the documents tend far more to be in continuity with Tradition, as the two Council Popes reiterated appropriately, and certainly do not even mention the radical changes to the Church that the progressivist 'spiritists' claim the Council advocated and intended! The egregious, continuing and damaging error of the latter is not just misinterpreting Vatican-II but misrepresenting it deliebrately in order to support their misguided progressivism.]
Professor de Mattei counters such tendentiousness by making a clear distinction: “The theologian reads and discusses the documents in their doctrinal import. The historian reconstructs the events…understands occurrences in their cultural and ideological roots and consequences... so as to arrive at an ‘integral’ understanding of the events.”
[Which is not to say that the historian, any historian, necessarily arrives at an 'integral understanding of the event'. A purely secular historical interpretation without reference to the Tradition and theology of the Church cannot, by definition, be integral.]
Drawing on the work of two Catholic historians and the director of a Catholic news service, this article highlights features in the historical background to the Second Vatican Council by asking the basic questions of journalism: who, what, where, when and why.
Who: John XXIII
Although several were soon to become world famous, none of the 2,381 prelates in the stalls at St. Peter’s on October 11, 1962, and no combination of them, could have initiated an ecumenical council; that was the sole prerogative of the Supreme Pontiff. At that moment the bishop of Rome was the former Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who when elected pope in 1958 had taken the name John XXIII.
The media image of “Good Pope John,” the unpretentious, grandfatherly Pontiff, had its basis in fact. Roncalli was gracious and optimistic by nature, and studiously avoided taking sides in the theological disputes that increasingly divided the Catholic Church. Yet a full portrait is more complex, as we read in
Pope John and His Revolution, by the Catholic British historian E. E. Y. Hales.
Roncalli did have “peasant roots” — his parents were sharecroppers —but he was also descended from the impoverished branch of a noble family. His diary shows that he had pursued sanctity since his seminary days, yet he excelled in history rather than theology. His priestly ministry was spent almost entirely in chancery, seminary, and diplomatic positions (with the exception of a few years as an army chaplain during World War I) - it is ironic that the ecumenical council he convened as pope should proclaim itself to be “pastoral”.
Hales’s specialty is 19th-century Church history, a politically tumultuous era when Catholic social doctrine began to be formulated officially. “John was as anxious as any previous pope to reaffirm some continuity in papal teaching; but in fact, in his brief reign, he changed both its spirit and its content.… The novelty of Pope John consisted in his embracing, with enthusiasm, novel ideas about world unity, colonialism, aid to underdeveloped countries, social security, and the rest, which belonged mainly to such recent times as the period since the Second World War; it consisted in his accepting these new ideas, saying they were good, and urging the world to pursue them.”
The 1961 encyclical
Mater et Magistra, “On Christianity and Social Progress,” brings Catholic social teaching “right into the world of the Welfare State,” according to Hales. “The Pope…is embracing what many would call socialism, and he is acknowledging that a new concept of the duties of the State is involved.”
Another characteristic of the Roncalli papacy identified by Hales is its “universal quality.” “Addressing himself to ‘all men of good will,’ he went out of his way to make friendly contact not only with the separated brethren but also with those who professed a philosophy hostile to Christianity.”
The 1963 encyclical
Pacem in Terris, “On Establishing Universal Peace,” transcends the interests of the Church, or even of Christendom, and “looks steadily at the world as a whole.” Pope John XXIII took his role as Universal Pastor literally: “He was not directly trying to get the world ‘back in’ [to the Church]. He was going out into the world, to help the world. … [H]e was thinking of all men as sons of God and therefore of himself as their spiritual father on earth.”
Pope John’s contribution to the writing of the Vatican II documents may have been minimal, yet his view of his own pastoral ministry and of the Church’s role in the modern world had a momentous effect during the Council and in the years that followed.
What: Theological Currents
The question, “What was Vatican II about?” is objectively answered by reading the titles of the documents that the Council approved. From a broader perspective, it is often noted that in some respects the Council completed the work of Vatican I , which had defined precisely the powers of the papacy but had been adjourned before it could discuss episcopal authority in the Church.
Roberto de Mattei sees the remote causes of Vatican II in the early 20th-century Modernist crisis. Although Pope Pius X peremptorily clamped down on a wide range of philosophical and theological errors, many of them “went underground” in the academic world and in certain provinces of religious orders. The real need for reform in the Church continued, but it was not being addressed by erudite and antiquarian studies or fantastic speculation. (Recall that Teilhard de Chardin, SJ had many enthusiasts in the Council hall.)
Besides Modernism, de Mattei examines various 20th-century movements within the Church: biblical, philosophical, liturgical, ecumenical. He depicts a fruitful theological pluralism which in places was bursting the seams of the neo-Thomistic system that was still prevalent, especially in the Roman Curia.
Through the participation of theological experts at Vatican II, the best of that scholarship contributed significantly to the conciliar documents. But the journals of several “periti” — scholarly experts —that have been published in recent years confirm that neo-Modernism was a real force and that some advisors arrived with scores to settle and strategies for refighting old battles.
Where: Spotlight on the “European Alliance”
An ecumenical council by definition is a gathering of prelates representing the Universal Church, and since Vatican I, the Catholic hierarchy had become thoroughly international. During the preparatory phase of Vatican II every effort was made to consult the bishops worldwide and to distill from their input outlines on topics to be addressed during the council sessions. Professor de Mattei writes:
"During the summer of 1959…the “vota” or recommendations from the bishops, the superiors of religious orders, and the Catholic universities arrived [in Rome]. The compilation of this enormous quantity of material began in September and concluded in late January of 1960. The approximately three thousand letters that were sent in fill eight volumes…"
When the Council first met on October 13, 1962, “the day’s agenda provided that the assembly would elect its representatives (sixteen out of twenty-four) on each of the ten Commissions that were delegated to examine the schemas drawn up by the Preparatory Commission.”
All Council Fathers were eligible, unless they already had been appointed to the commissions. Ballots were distributed with a separate page listing the names of those who already had expertise in certain areas because of their work on the related preparatory commissions.
In a planned preemptive strike, Cardinal Achille Liénart of Lille, France, grabbed the microphone out of turn, complained that “it is really impossible to vote this way, without knowing anything about the most qualified candidates,” and recommended that the Council Fathers defer the vote until they could consult with their national bishops’ conferences. His illegal “motion” was seconded by Cardinal Frings of Cologne, and Cardinal Tisserant moved to adjourn.
De Mattei points out that “one immediate consequence” of Cardinal Liénart’s unsettling “solution” was “the introduction of a new organizational form…the episcopal conferences... into the conciliar dynamics.”
“The Central-European conferences were the first to play the new role assigned to them,” according to de Mattei. The bishops’ conferences of the Rhineland nations — France, Germany, and the Low Countries —had a disproportionate share of the Church’s wealth, universities, publishing houses, and news services, so it was no surprise that most of the candidates whom they proposed were elected to the Conciliar Commissions.
The “European Alliance,” as it was nicknamed, then used its position of dominance to discard many of the schemas that had been drawn up by the preparatory commissions, and to start over with texts drafted by the progressive
periti.
These two shifts had momentous consequences during the four sessions of the Council and in the postconciliar period: (1) authority was displaced from individual bishops and Curial officials (who held authority delegated directly by the Pope) to ad hoc geographical gatherings of prelates that were usually run by a few movers and shakers, and to theologians who were simple priests; (2) the Council strangely became less “ecumenical” and more Eurocentric — an ominous trend, in hindsight.
This influx of Central European and “democratic” ideas into the workings of the Roman Church was captured by Father Ralph M. Wilgten, SVD, editor of the Divine Word News Service, in the title of his classic book,
The Rhine Flows into the Tiber.
When: Cold War politics
Political unrest interrupted Vatican I: King Victor Emmanuel of Italy captured and annexed the city of Rome, and French armies could no longer vouch for the Council Fathers’ safety. Less than 100 years later, Vatican II conducted its sessions during the Cold War, with Europe divided, the Soviet sphere of influence expanding, and an uneasy peace maintained by a policy of mutual assured destruction.
Father Wiltgen, in his week-by-week eyewitness account of Vatican II, notes that a significant percentage of the vota from the world’s bishops had recommended that the ecumenical council explicitly condemn Marxist socialism. During the third session, on October 23, 1964, Archbishop Paul Yu Pin of Nanking, China, speaking on behalf of 70 Council Fathers, asked that a new chapter on atheistic communism be added to the schema on “The Church in the Modern World.”
“It had to be discussed in order to satisfy the expectations of our peoples…especially those who groan under the yoke of communism and are forced to endure indescribable sorrows unjustly.”
Despite this intervention and others like it, when the fourth session of the Council opened, the revised schema still made no explicit reference to Communism. A petition asking for a reiteration of the Church’s teaching against Communism was drawn up by the International Group of Fathers, headed by Archbishop Sigaud of Diamantina, Brazil, and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and signed by 450 Council Fathers.
Although it was submitted in due form and in a timely fashion, a French prelate in the Curia shelved it, so that the intervention never reached the commission to which it was submitted.
Some Council Fathers had warned that the Council’s silence about the errors of Communism would be viewed by history as cowardice and a dereliction of duty. The progressives at the Council argued that a condemnation would jeopardize negotiations with Communist governments. Was a crucial teaching moment missed?
[Interesting paradox, but I had been led to believe by various statements made by credible sources that the Church, even under such a passionate anti-Communist as Pius XII (or John Paul II, for that matter) had opted for what would come to be known later as Ostpolitik, to refrain from open provocation of the Communist regimes in order to facilitate dealing with them behind the scenes to minimize the persecution of Catholics, especially of leading members of the hierarchy. That, in fact, this policy was carried on by John XXIII and eventually by Paul VI and John Paul II - who, despite the major role he played in bringing about the collapse of Communism in Europe - appeared to have limited his 'activism' to promoting the interests of Polish Catholics, primarily, rather than of all persecuted Catholics throughout Europe (or China, for that matter).]
Why: Light to the Nations
Those who wonder why the Church held its 21st ecumenical council at all might have to wait until the next life to learn the full answer. Still, the stated purposes of Vatican II should be our starting point.
Professor de Mattei notes that in October 1962 the Council Fathers informally issued a “Message to the World.” In it they proclaimed: “In conducting our work, we will give major consideration to all that pertains to the dignity of man and contributes to true brotherhood among peoples.”
Good Pope John was apparently persuaded that a war-torn world was finally ready to listen again to the age-old wisdom of Holy Mother Church — a truly international society — and that the institutional Church had to gear itself up for this new dialogue with contemporary man.
This rapid, journalistic survey of Vatican II focused not on what it taught in its documents but rather on several important circumstances of the “event,” some of the opportunities and obstacles that helped shape the Council.
As the Church observes the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, the conciliar teachings should be understood against the contrasting background of historical facts, without being reduced to an “epi-phenomenon” determined by those facts.
On the other hand, there are Catholics who believe, as the Lefebvrians do, that the Pope should merely expunge the documents of Vatican II from the Church Magisterium! As if any Pope had the authority to nullify the Magisterium of the largest and most truly international ecumenical Church Council ever held, legitimately constituted by the Pope (two Popes, in this case, one succeeding the other) and all the bishops of the world! Of course, Vatican-II was not 'perfect', as which Council is? I am sure that if the traditionalists examined every word that emanated from the sacrosanct Council of Trent, they would find as many documentary 'errors' - if not more, by the very fact that the Council spanned 25 years and three Popes - to quibble with. This article by one of the one of the mainstays of the traditionalist publication The Remnant (which often seems to be more intransigent than the FSSPX), grows more execrable as the writer exposes his 'arguments', freely dispensing openly fallacious statements. Wolfe is
Vatican II at 50
By Kenneth J. Wolfe
Oct. 11, 2012
Fifty years ago today, the Second Vatican Council began with a clear indication of
who had gained control of the Catholic Church’s direction. From the Latin Mass to meatless Fridays to the concept of salvation, numerous components of the faith were set to be reformed, led mostly by clerical academics who had served on preparatory commissions.
So powerful were they that Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, a conservative who headed what is now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (which the future Pope Benedict XVI would later lead), was vocally heckled and silenced by his participating colleagues.
[The very way Wolfe asserts this is deliebrately misleading. The documents from the preparatory commissions in Rome, of which Cardinal Ottaviani was the very powerful and emblematic leader, were not 'reform-minded' but conservative, and that is the reason they were opposed so effectively by most of the Council participants, who had come to Rome expecting to take part in 'reforms' that would renew the Church and update it to the contemporary world, which the more orthodox bishops believed could be done without sacrificing Christian principles and hallowed Tradition.]
As described to journalist Robert Moynihan by Monsignor Brunero Gherardini, who attended the council and lives at the Vatican, Cardinal Ottaviani was addressing the 2,000 assembled bishops in October 1962: “As he speaks, pleading for the bishops to consider the texts the Curia has spent three years preparing, suddenly his microphone was shut off. He kept speaking, but no one could hear a word. Then, puzzled and flustered, he stopped speaking, in confusion. And the assembled fathers began to laugh, and then to cheer...” This was on day three.
It turns out, according to Monsignor Gherardini, that it was Cardinal Achille Lienart, a leading liberal from France serving on Vatican II’s board of presidency, who cut Cardinal Ottaviani’s microphone. Ottaviani would later author a major critique of the vernacular Mass that came out of the council, a plea to Pope Paul VI that fell on deaf ears.
[So Leinart did not play fair - nor would his fellow progressivists play fair in the post-Conciliar chaos. That still does not change the fact that Ottaviani and the preparatory commissions were 'conservative' in the strictest sense and apparently totally unprepared for the climate of change that characterized Vatican II.]
Some of the reformist-oriented clergy participating in the Second Vatican Council would eventually rise through the ranks of the Catholic Church.
Karol Wojtyla (the future John Paul II), who was a young archbishop in Cracow, was seen
as the liberal counterweight to Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, who was the conservative, yet popular, primate of Poland.
[Really? Wasn't Wojtyla Wyszynki's favorite spiritual son?]
Father Joseph Ratzinger (the future Benedict XVI), was the
peritus (theological expert) for Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne, writing the cardinal’s speeches for the council, including one calling Cardinal Ottaviani’s Vatican office too traditional and authoritative. Even though Ratzinger had been ordained a priest over a decade ago, his attire throughout the Second Vatican Council was a secular business suit and necktie.
[This attempt to diss Joseph Ratzinger is typical of the flat-out, deliberately erroneous and petty generalizations made by traditionalists to demean the Conciliar and post-Conciliar Popes. The few photographs we have seen of Fr. Ratzinger at Vatican-II show him in cassock, if only because wearing 'clergyman' suits did not become a practice till after Vatican[II, as Mr. Wolfe ought to know!... As for describing both Wojtyla and Ratzinger as 'reform-minded clergy', Wolfe makes it sound as if they were afflicted with leprosy!]
The results of
holding a council during prosperity in order to modernize the institution quickly became disastrous. While countless priests, brothers and nuns quit, most Catholics stopped attending Mass and the remaining Catholics largely embraced dissent.
[After the Council! The problem was not in holding the Council, but in the obviously wrong way these dissenting Catholics chose to interpret it afterwards!]
Even Pope Paul VI, who led most of Vatican II, reflected 10 years after the council’s opening with an infamous observation that “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”
[Yes, indeed, the phantasmal 'spirit of Vatican II' being that 'smoke of Satan'!]
Fast-forwarding, the Latin Mass has made a comeback, in part because of
the rightward-drifting Pope Benedict.
[Somehow, the description feels insulting!]
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, head of the church in the U.S., writes about restoring meatless Fridays and fasting. And the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), a traditionalist order of priests,
has forced the Vatican to address the substance of the Second Vatican Council.
[That statement is also deliberately misleading. The Vatican, under Benedict VXI, agreed to discuss with the Lefebvrians their four specific objections to Vatican II - even if, as the months went on, the FSSPX gradually expanded their objection to all of Vatican-II, going much farther than even their founder had stood for]. Benedict XVI obviously was relying on the fact that most rational open-minded Catholics would see reason in what Vatican-II says about religious freedom, ecumenism, inter-religious dialog and episcopal collegiality. The traditionalist do-or-die objection to the first three principles indicates they have decided they will be hermetically sealed forever in a mythical 'fortress Church', ignoring that Jesus told his discples to "go forth and preach to all nations"; and their objection to collegiality ignores the fact that Vatican II always coupled the principle inseparably with the principle of being simultaneously "in communion with the Successor of Peter". apparently, they have no faith in the Lord's assertion that 'the gates opf Hell shall not prevail" over his Church.]
Religious liberty and the Mass are at the heart of the talks, including whether the SSPX is permitted to simply ignore these pastoral (as compared to dogmatic) writings. Ecumenism, which was called “the enemy of the Immaculata” by Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest killed in a Nazi concentration camp,
[With all due respect, being a saint and martyr does not mean the person was infallible and free of error!] is being weighed and discussed
after 40 years of visits to mosques, temples and other non-Catholic houses of worship with little conversions as a result.
[Dear Lord, I cannot believe such pettiness and irrationality! If Popes have visited mosques and synagogues, it was not because they thought that would gain instant converts - they are not stupid! - but to symbolize their recognition that there are other ways of honoring God, which does not mean they cease to believe that Christianity is the right way!]
To contrast, when Pope Pius XII negotiated with the chief rabbi of Rome, the rabbi converted to Catholicism and chose Pius’s name of Eugenio as he was christened.
{Great! Cite the one obviously exceptional occurrence as the standard for inter-religious dialog!]
Defenders of the Second Vatican Council from a center-right perspective have insisted that nearly all negative indicators of the Catholic Church have stemmed from the “spirit of the Council.”
As seminaries continue to close (all but one remains in Ireland), parishes continue to merge and convents are redeveloped, a key question ought to be what tangible, positive results have occurred in those five decades.
[The reassertion of Catholic identity in Lumen gentium, and the new and more informed attitude towards Scripture in Dei verbum, to begin with. And certainly, the declarations on religious freedom, the non-Christian religions and ecumenism, which were the core modernizing principles introdcued by Vatican-II without contradicting core Christian doctrine!]
No one has been able to point to an actual statistical benefit of Vatican II and its 16 documents. [If statistics were to be the yardstick by which one measures a Council, what 'statistics' were there to show that the Council of Trent, wbich lasted from 1545-1563, managed at all to stem the tsunami of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which continued widening since Luther's 96 Theses in 1517 to overwhelm almost all of Europe except the southern countries through the 16th-18th centuries? More than anything, the Council of Trent - and this was obviously its main intention - reinforced the faith of orthodox Catholics and produced an exceptional crop of saints, but did little to be able to retain the disaffected Catholics who turned Protestant in droves because Catholicism had become too cumbersome and inconvenient for lifestyles that allowed more and more people more and more freedom.
In an increasingly populous world, ecumenical councils cannot have an immediately measurable effect for what they set out to do. Unfortunately, in the case of Vatican-II, the simultaneous rise of the dictatorship of the media over public opinion - including the most suggestible and weakest priests and bishops - due to quantum leaps in communications technology, also meant that the counterweight to the intentions of the Council was for the first time, real, overwhelming, and simultaneous to the Council as well as continuing long afterwards.]
Ironically, the only current growth in vocations is in religious orders such as the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter that reject the new Mass and most of the liberalizations of Vatican II.
[That is also false, if one goes by the recent statistics of the Church in the United States!]
Fifty years later, the greatest accomplishment that can be said for the Second Vatican Council is Pope John XXIII’s stated goal to “throw open the windows of the Church.”
[And how can that be an 'accomplishment' if Wolfe and his fellow intransigent traditionalists refuse to look out those windows, much less wave a friendly hand to others outside the edifice of the Church?]
Yet from conversions to Mass attendance, it has produced nothing measurable in the upward direction. [Wolfe is deliberately ignoring the dramatic figures from the Church in Africa over the past 50 years, as if the African churches were not worthy of consideration at all in the panorama of the universal Church!]
Perhaps traditionalist Catholics, led by the FSSPX, are onto something when they call into question the Council itself. [A fine time to call it into question 50 years after the fact! When their own founder was a Council Father who signed all 16 Council documents, even if he later claimed that he was tricked into signing the document on religious freedom - he did not say anything about the other 15 documents!]
Their solution is for the Pope to simply erase all 16 Vatican II documents and restore the liturgy, teachings and discipline in place before the collapse of all that was considered good and holy in 1962. [How dastardly and cowardly of Wolfe to simply attribute these last two ideas to the FSSPX instead of coming out directly to say he shares these ideas fully!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/10/2012 13:42]