Leo's Challenge: Return to Vatican II

It went little noticed in most local churches or in Church media, but last week Pope Leo XIV announced a new project for all members of the Church: a hands-on study of the documents of Vatican II. The pope will set the pace by teaching and preaching the documents himself and placing the study of the Council at the center of the Church’s teaching ministry and self-definition. One of the better reports on his announcement comes from the website of National Catholic Reporter, which seemed to have cut to the heart of the story.  [See also this release from the U.S. Bishops.]
 
There are a fair number of us who grew up in the “pre-Vatican II era” and have also lived sixty years or more in the “post-Vatican II era” and we are still alive. I believe that as part of the Pope’s proposed revisiting of the Vatican II documents, our stories are worth hearing. Most committed Catholics, I believe, are fair-minded and honest enough to assess how the event of the Council and the changes it made [or didn’t] make their lives better. In my own case, Vatican II opened during my first high school semester in a boarding school seminary, in the old order of things. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and I have had the chance to study, teach, and even participate in personal psychotherapy on life with and after Vatican II.
 
FIRST OFF, WHAT EXACTLY WAS VATICAN II?
 
It was the follow-up to Vatican I. Vatican II [1962-1965] was an ecumenical or worldwide council of the world’s bishops in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Bishops of the Church’s two dozen Eastern rites joined their Latin Roman rite fellow bishops as participants.
 
The previous council was Vatican I [1869-1870], which declared the doctrine of papal infallibility, i.e., that the pope cannot err in teaching matters of faith and morals. Given this papal authority, there was a consensus of sorts since 1870 that ecumenical councils were no longer necessary; councils were never mentioned in my elementary catechetical training in the 1950’s.

Thus, the Catholic world was stunned in 1959 when Pope John XXIII announced the summoning of an ecumenical council. His announced goal was a reform of the Church—intellectually, liturgically, ecumenically—which he deemed necessary after the recent two world wars, the Holocaust, the spread of Communism, the emergence of new post-colonial nations, etc. Meanwhile, Catholic theological scholarship in Europe had blossomed in the twentieth century, particularly in areas of history, scripture, worship, morality, ecumenism, and philosophy.
 
GETTING OFF ON THE WRONG FOOT
 
From what I have read over the years, Pope John XXIII, in office barely a year, had three proposals in mind in 1959, and he announced them privately to the working cardinals in the Vatican—executives of the “Curia,” who effectively managed the Church’s day to day business. John announced to this Roman inner circle his three decisions: [1] A synod for the Diocese of Rome; [2] a reform of the Church’s Code of Canon Law, last performed in 1917; [3] An ecumenical council to begin in 1962. The executive cardinals in the room met his mandates with cold stone silence, literally, by all accounts.
 
Pope John did not back down from his proposals. However, to assuage the hostility of the Curia, he gave its members chairmanships of all the various committees who were preparing the schedule and the working papers for the Council. Bishops from around the world were requested to submit input, though here in the United States, and certainly elsewhere, few bishops were familiar with modern theology being taught in the European schools and thus came to the Council ill-prepared for the kinds of reform Pope John had in mind. But whatever many bishops lacked in theological development, they knew something about politics—and there was a growing resentment among bishops about the high-handed way the Curia treated local bishops. The bishops were correct, incidentally; each bishop is a successor of the apostles and theologically enjoyed direct communion with the vicar of Peter, the pope. Most bishops, then, were eager to talk about…well, bishops.
 
But the Curia, directed by its strategic leader, Cardinal Ottaviani, put to paper plans for a six-week meeting consisting primarily of reaffirmation of the status quo of Church teaching and practice. The Curia mandated that all floor proceedings of the Council would be conducted in Latin. Try to imagine that. The Council procedure did allow each bishop to bring a peritus or theological expert with him to explain the intricacies of each vote—and probably to translate the Latin used on the floor. The most famous peritus at the Council might have been Father Joseph Alois Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. Wikipedia’s biography of Ottaviani is hardly elegant, but it does describe his intentions in attempting to preserve sacred Church tradition during the Council, and it is worth reading as a description of the conciliar politics.
 
AND ONCE THE COUNCIL STARTED…
 
The standard one-volume history summary of Vatican II is probably John W. O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II [2008]. I reviewed this work for Amazon in 2017 and recommend it to friends and students. Eminently readable, it remains in Amazon’s one percent of sales as of this writing. If you haven’t read a captivating history of anything in a while, you might actually enjoy this book. If Pope Leo’s wish is to come true—that all Catholics read and study the actual sixteen documents themselves—O’Malley’s book and others like it will become necessary to provide an understandable overview of this process by which the Council’s teachings were formed and, equally important, explained to the Church in literary form.
 
The first session of the Council? I can’t find one word to describe it. Suffice to say that when the bishops arrived and received the prepackaged agenda from the Curia for a brief one-convention encounter to reenforce the status quo, there was collective negative reaction to the proposed structure and timeline by many of the bishops. A new agenda, starting from scratch, would need to be drawn up, a process that guaranteed a second session in 1963, and as it proved, two more in 1964 and 1965.
 
Pope John, who was secretly dying of cancer, stepped in and agreed with the creation of a new arrangement, requiring the establishment of multiple committees to prepare schema or talking points to cover every part of Catholic life, from the Sacred Liturgy to freedom of conscience to relations with the Jews. [At its closure in 1965, the Council had produced sixteen documents for presentation to the faithful, the documents Pope Leo is calling us to read with attention to detail.] Pope John, a career diplomat, appointed co-chairmen to each committee, generally men of opposing viewpoints. The most famous pairing was the ultraconservative Ottaviani with Cardinal Augustin Bea, a champion of modern biblical scholarship and better relations with the Jews. [It is hard to imagine today that the Catholic Good Friday service then in use, the one I served as an altar boy, contained the phrase “perfidious Jews” in the official missal.] Interestingly, the work of the Ottaviani-Bea committee produced one of the Council’s most important documents, Dei Verbum, on divine Revelation, which was approved by the bishops by a vote of 2344-6.
 
If you read the Vatican II documents and history books superficially, nearly all the votes for the final declarations reflect landslides. But those tallies are deceptive, and this is a point that seems to grow more stressful as the years go on. Many of the Vatican II documents were cobbled together in such a way as to satisfy traditionalists and revisionists. [Or, in popular Church language, progressives and conservatives, or more recently, leftist liberals and right-wing rad-trads.] Admittedly, differences at the Council were smoothed out, probably prematurely. The devil was and is in the details. This would lead to strains that fester to this day. [Possibly, Pope Leo had this factor in mind when he cautioned against “'hearsay' or “interpretations that have been given” or attributed to Vatican II.]
 
AND DID IT SUCCEED? WE’RE STILL WORKING ON THAT.
 
In his final chapter, “Conclusion,” O’Malley does offer a telling assessment of perhaps the biggest error of the bishops, particular Western bishops: “They assumed an easier transition from ideas of the scholars’ study to the social reality of the church than proved to be the case.” (p. 292) Hence the turmoil when the bishops returned home. This is a rich observation, to which I can only add that the American Church, at least, did not seem to take the time to listen to the faithful folks in the pew, who had plenty to say—good and bad—about the remaking of the Church as they knew it. It concurs, too, with my own experience of Vatican II, which has impacted my life from high school seminary to retired married man coming up on age 78. In the next post I will take you for an autobiographical tour of the conciliar changes as I experienced them, and it is quite a roller coaster ride.