Vatican II: The Yes and the No
by Robert Royal
Oct. 16, 2012
During Richard Nixon’s 1971 visit to China, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought about the French Revolution (1789). He reportedly said: “It is too soon to say.”
Many thought this an amusing expression of millennial, oriental perspectives – though several China experts say the interpreter badly flubbed things and Zhou (a tough modern Communist, after all, not a Confucian scholar) was referring to recent student rebellions in Paris (1968).
Some Catholic commentators have tried to hedge their views on the Second Vatican Council (1962-5) with a similar caveat. In the long perspectives of the Church, they say, it’s too soon to say what it will ultimately mean.
This past Friday, the Church “celebrated” the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Council and opened the Year of Faith, even as it had just begun a Synod on the New Evangelization – a New Evangelization necessitated, in part, by some of the negative consequences of the Council.
A half-century into the mission, it’s clear that the long-term argument is a distraction.
The Council’s primary importance, for good and bad – and there was a lot of both – was what it did during the last third of the twentieth century. The long-term impact will depend on what present and future Catholics do with the Council – hence the Synod and other measures.
In many ways, the search for the True Meaning of Vatican II is a lot like the “search for the historical Jesus.” Much depends on the assumptions, especially the unconscious ones, you bring to the task, which cannot be carried out with merely historical or analytical methods anyway.
The texts, important as they are, notably fail to convince people who think that the “spirit,” not the letter, is the Council’s real meaning. John Paul II already had to convene a Synod of Bishops in 1985, which declared that spirit and letter should not be set against each other, and that Vatican II had to be interpreted in continuity with tradition and the earlier councils.
But you’d have to be virtually brain-dead not to know that, almost thirty years later, these are still very live issues in the Church. In the state of Washington at the moment, sixty-three ex-priests are publicly opposing the Church’s attempt to stop the legalization of gay marriage with a classic post-conciliar argument: it violates Jesus’s welcoming embrace of all.
For many Catholics, here and around the world, the main effect of the Council is still to have reduced Christianity to this sort of simplistic monomania.
I was in Rome last week and there was a lot of enthusiasm about the New Evangelization, as there should be, but also much unacknowledged nervousness. The bishops at the synod said some incisive and, occasionally, profound things. But talk is easy. Action, in our circumstances, much harder. And only vigorous action will bring the legacy of the Council into a different course.
The great theologian Henri de Lubac, S.J., one of the inspirations of the Council, warned after the event,
“The Yes said wholeheartedly to the Council and to all its legitimate consequences must, in order to remain consistent and sincere, be coupled with a No that is just as resolute to a certain type of exploitation that is, in fact, a perversion of it.”
La nouvelle théologie brought a lot to the Church. Not only de Lubac, but Congar, Chenu, Daniélou, Boyer, von Balthasar, and others discovered something really valuable in the tradition.
It was no small thing that, at the height of its powers in the twentieth century, the Roman Catholic Church in solemn synod put forward the universal call for holiness, an increased emphasis on the role of the laity in the world, and the vision for a more pastoral and communitarian Church, rather than a juridical one.
And all of it – as Pope John XXIII intended in convening the Council – was to supplement settled Catholic theological and moral teaching and make it more effective in engaging the world.
Joseph Ratzinger, a sharp observer even as a young man, remarked at the time that two early tasks of the Council were: to dispel the notion that everything was fine in the Church and to overcome an “anti-Modernist neurosis.”
The Council certainly did both. But those who warned about where the new course would take us – and who were and are often mocked as hopeless reactionaries – were right in their dire predictions.
Specifically, the recognition that the Church needed to be a less legalistic and more pastoral community led many to think that rules were per se a sign of lack of charity. But as I’ve often said, trying to be pastoral without knowing concretely what helping people means, is like being a doctor with a good bedside manner – who is ignorant of medicine.
And the Church’s “opening to the world” was often taken to mean not only that an excessive wariness about modernity was to be jettisoned, but that modernity itself was to become the standard by which to judge things in a supposedly “mature” and engaged Church.
John Paul II and Benedict XVI have cleaned up a lot of the mess, but a lot more remains, as the Synod deliberations well show. Much of the New Evangelization is aimed at formerly Christian societies.
Benedict held a meeting Friday for the surviving bishops who had been participants in the Council, at which he virtually summed up the experience of the last fifty years:
The Council was a time of grace in which the Holy Spirit taught us that the Church, in her journey in history, must always speak to contemporary man, but this can only happen through the strength of those who are profoundly rooted in God, who allow themselves to be guided by Him and live their faith with purity; it does not happen with those who adapt themselves to the passing moment, those who choose the most comfortable way.
CNS starts a valuable service
featuring news and texts
from Vatican II 50 yeras ago
"Vatican II: 50 years ago today” is a step back in time to the daily activities of the Second Vatican Council. Pope John XXIII called for an ecumenical council in 1959, the first to be held since 1870.
After more than two years of preparatory work, the council convened its first session, Oct. 11-Dec. 8, 1962. After the Pope’s death the following year, Pope Paul VI reconvened the council for three other sessions. These ran Sept. 29-Dec. 4, 1963; Sept. 14-Nov. 21, 1964; and Sept. 14-Dec. 8, 1965.
A total of 2,860 bishops, referred to as council fathers, participated in one or more of the sessions. The council produced 16 documents — two dogmatic and two pastoral constitutions, nine decrees and three declarations.
The documents address everything from liturgy to Scripture, missionary activity to ecumenism and interfaith relationships, and the functions of clergy and laity to religious freedom.
During the four years of the council, Catholic News Service, then known as News Service of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the predecessor of today’s United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, or in shorthand, “NC,” provided some of the most comprehensive English-language coverage of the sessions, the council fathers and those who assisted in the work.
In 1965, it published a compilation of its reporting, the working documents and proceedings of the council in a remarkable three-volume set known simply as the
Council Daybook. It was edited by then NC director and editor-in-chief Floyd Anderson, and was mainly the work of Msgr. James I. Tucek, a priest of the Diocese of Dallas-Fort Worth who was NC Rome bureau chief from 1956 to 1964.
Writing in the preface of the first volume of the Council Daybook, Bishop Albert R. Zuroweste, of Belleville, Ill., said, “The first session of the Vatican Council II created more ‘firsts’ than any previous ecumenical council. Among these ‘firsts’ and one of the most important was the establishment of the United States press panel as a source of daily news releases that gave to the session the greatest news coverage ever accorded a religious convention, meeting or council. The world today is linked by a vast network of communications media, and the press panel made the daily events of the council available to all.”
The bishop said that as the council’s first session began, journalists and writers were told that no prior texts would be made available and pre-written stories — the practice in those days since texts usually were handed out ahead — would be inaccurate. Those covering the council could only get texts at the end of the day, if available. “The rule of secrecy, more often violated than observed, added to the confusion,” he wrote. There was near revolt by the press corps.
The U.S. bishops acted quickly to create a daily press panel composed of specialists in Scripture, canon law, dogmatic and moral theology, and church history and social sciences. It was an immediate hit.
“The panel assisted and guided the [newspersons] in interpreting the daily proceedings of the council and furnished valuable background information,” Bishop Zuroweste wrote.
“It also established good will and corrected the dissatisfaction that was general in the first days of the council sessions. The satisfaction with the panel as a source of reliable information grew with each meeting, and before the first session was completed, the attitude and morale of the correspondents were excellent,” he wrote. “At the last session of the panel, the press corps publicly expressed its thanks to the United States bishops for establishing this source of accurate information.”
In this section, CNS will present the fruits of that vast labor of the bishops, panels of experts and NC editors and correspondents.
Each day CNS will post the entry from the Council Daybook, just as it was reported on the corresponding day at the council 50 years ago. The entries are unaltered from the reporting styles of those times. CNS will often include important addresses of the popes and council fathers or interventions of experts. We also will identify some of the people or issues in the dispatches when the references may not be clear to today’s reader. However, for the most part this will be a page of history as it was reported then.
CNS is grateful to the past U.S. bishops and the U.S. council fathers still with us today, the press panel experts, Floyd Anderson, other former NC editors, especially NC assistant director Burke Walsh, and to all of the past NC correspondents — James C. O’Neill, Patrick Riley and Benedictine Father Placid Jordan, who covered the council and whose contributions appear in the Council Daybook. It is an astonishing and important legacy of Catholic journalism for the church.
Several items have already been posted on this special site:
http://vaticaniiat50.wordpress.com/[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 18/10/2012 16:19]