This sacred Council has several aims in view: it desires to impart an ever increasing vigor to the Christian life of the faithful; to adapt more suitably to the needs of our own times those institutions which are subject to change; to foster whatever can promote union among all who believe in Christ; to strengthen whatever can help to call the whole of mankind into the household of the Church. The Council therefore sees particularly cogent reasons for undertaking the reform and promotion of the liturgy.
And so it happened on December 4, 1963, after two full working sessions of the Council, its first teaching document was promulgated or released to the world, Sacrosanctum Concilium, “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.” That the Council even got off the ground at all is something of a miracle. When Pope John XXIII, in 1959, announced to an audience of Roman Cardinals his intention to call an Ecumenical Council [i.e., a gathering of the “full house” of the Church] three years hence, there was stone cold silence. The Cardinals present represented the sentiment of the Roman Curia, the bureaucracy in Vatican City which essentially runs the Church. If you still own a copy of the Baltimore Catechism, you will look in vain to find any references to Church councils, although prior to Vatican II there had been twenty such councils beginning with the epic Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. which produced our Mass Creed. The last Council, Vatican I, was summoned in 1869 for the purpose of formalizing the doctrine of papal infallibility. There was a popular sense that with the infallibility of the pope now established, there would no longer be a need for costly and possibly controversial gatherings. There are some indications, however, that during the conclave of cardinals which elected Angelo Roncalli to the papacy in 1958, the idea of a council was floated in the smoked-filled rooms between ballots. In his excellent biography John XXIII: Pope of the Century [1984, 1994] Peter Hebblethwaite affirms that the newly elected pope had been thinking about a council for some time. Most Catholics are not aware that, as a young curial official, Angelo Roncalli ran afoul of Mussolini’s fascist government, then negotiating with the Vatican the Concordat of 1929. In 1925 the Vatican exiled the outspoken Roncalli to a string of thankless diplomatic posts, including Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, and post-World War II France before elevating him to the College of Cardinals and the Patriarchy [Archdiocese] of Venice in 1952. Having witnessed the world wars and political chaos of Europe up close as a diplomat, Roncalli was acutely aware that the Church was sick and ineffective as a voice of reason and justice in what were, ostensibly, Catholic countries or populated with significant Catholic populations. It is a sobering thought that the two largest churches in Germany during the Nazi era were the Lutheran and Roman Catholic communions. A healing council, in his view, would need to examine every aspect of Catholic life to ensure that the Church was true to its past and open to the promise and the challenges of the future. It is important to note here that Paragraph 1 of Sacrosanctum Concilium is the first statement of purpose issued by the Council, period. Thus, it introduces not just the subject matter of the Liturgy, but the agenda of the entire Council. This agenda reflects the hopes of Pope John, though he did not live to see this agenda stated solemnly by the Church in December 1963. The first point put forward is “an ever-increasing vigor to the Christian life of the faithful.” The hope of the Council was an intensification of personal faith, knowledge, spirituality, and identity with Christ in every baptized person. A critical term here is “the faithful.” Certainly, in my youth there was a two-tiered intensity of spirituality. Priests and religious were expected to live to a higher standard of holiness—they were under obligation to pray the Breviary daily [The Liturgy of the Hours], live lives of intense chastity and obedience [and, in many cases, a simple economic mean], and to be available to God’s people around the clock. The opening of Sacrosanctum Concilium in paragraph one calls for a “democratization of the spiritual life,” so to speak. As will be discussed later in SC, the great religious identity equalizer was the Council’s restoration of the initiation triad of Baptism/Confirmation/Eucharist. It is these sacraments of initiation which bring an individual into the quest for full union with Christ—both in the manner we live out our spiritual identities and the public energies we exert in bringing Christ’s reality to the world. Orders and religious vows were particular ways of living the Baptized life of the Church, but in truth the obligation and call to holiness extended to the entire Church by virtue of the sacraments of initiation. The second highlighted goal of the Council was for the Church “to adapt more suitably to the needs of our own times those institutions which are subject to change.” This is a deliciously vague mandate that not a few in the Church understood as a wholesale endorsement of modernization. This became one of the most disputed issues in the implementation of the Council as people of good will would disagree on the measure of accommodation to the times was appropriate for the Church. Interestingly, in very recent years some sober reconsiderations of the initial interpretations of the Conciliar documents are appearing in print by thoughtful theologians and analysts. In her Sin in the Sixties: Catholics and Confession 1955-1975 [2022] Maria Morrow observes that the Church may have been too hasty in jettisoning its communal rites of penance, such as meatless Fridays; most Catholics, she observes, had little skill in creating their own penitential agendas, although most bishops believed otherwise, perhaps too ambitiously. John W. O’Malley, S.J. writes in his own history of Vatican II: “They [the Council bishops] assumed an easier transition from ideas of the scholars’ study to the social reality of the church than proved to be the case.” Hence the turmoil when the bishops returned home. And which institutions were “in need of change?” One example: Pope Francis, in our own time, has responded to a need for greater communication between laity and clergy, and laity with each other, in what we call today “synodality,” a significant modification of the age-old communication from leadership as “top-down.” The third point in this paragraph calls upon the Church “to foster whatever can promote union among all who believe in Christ…[and] to strengthen whatever can help to call the whole of mankind into the household of the Church.” There would be considerable controversy over the “both-and” nature of Church teaching from the Council, as significant portions of the documents, including paragraph one here, seem to endorse distinctive points side by side. In this third agenda item, the Council is promoting unity among “all who believe in Christ,” a reference to the many Christian denominations and church bodies not presently in union with Rome. On the other hand, there is a call for the whole of humankind to join the household of the Church. By way of explanation, the Council was acutely aware that since the Reformation the Roman Catholic policy was “outside the Church there is no salvation.” Pope John and many Catholic scholars wished to correct this position, noting that wherever Christ is worshipped, true Christian ministry exists. Hence the efforts of the Catholic Church, after the Council, to engage in ecumenical prayer and discussion with other Christian Churches. On the other hand, the identity of Catholicism as the one true Church of Christ was maintained in Lumen Gentium [“The Light of Christ”], “The Sacred Constitution on the Church.” LG developed a formula in paragraph 8: “This Church [i.e., the Church of Christ], constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church." The more you read Church documents, you may be frustrated at times by what appears to be a dialectical style, as in “yes, this is true, but this other position is true, too.” We Americans are accustomed to think like computers, which are nothing more than billions of on-off switches. The binary digital system used in computers has only two numbers, 0 and 1. However, this is a Western way of thinking; other cultures are comfortable with mystery and complexity. The Council of Nicaea put forward the greatest contradictory statement in the universe: Jesus is truly God and truly man in both senses. This is the ultimate in impossibilities; as St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:23, “but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” [Nicaea, by the way, was attended primarily by bishops from the Eastern Mediterranean. Only a handful of Western Europeans were present.] To go further, Jesus himself taught in parables, literary devices that invited believers into a deeper realm of mystery. The New Testament calls forth a mystical response to the identity and message of Jesus. The Council fathers attempted to integrate this Biblical spirit into the teaching of the Church, though it remains a struggle for a Church with a millennium of scholastic theology and Canon Law at its back. Some of those who were [and still are] most critical of Vatican II point to a kind of “watering down” of absolute truth. Pope Francis, deeply impacted by the teachings of the Council, has been accused of creating confusion in his press conferences and encyclicals for his recognition of the complex interdisciplinary considerations in matters such as economic justice, marriage, and same-gender attraction. [“Who am I to judge?”] While the Council never came close to endangering any doctrinal bedrock of the Church, nor has Pope Francis, it did question whether the articulation of Church truth in the present day represented the roots of the teachings as our ancestors understood them, and whether the articulation of such truths in a modern age and milieu needed consideration and study. This is where we find ourselves today, and Pope Francis’ call for the “synodal process” needs to be understood in that sense. Some questions for reflection: Do you have a historical sense of the events leading to Vatican II? [Recommended: my review of John O’Malley S.J.’s What Happened at Vatican II? or better yet, reading the book itself. Another thorough source: John XXIII: Pope of the Century by Peter Hebblethwaite.] If you are in my generation, do you remember the Council and its immediate effects upon you and your local church? Did you feel that “reasons for the changes” were adequately explained by your local church? If you are born after 1960, how was Vatican II taught in your Catholic school or religious education program? Was it taught at all? Is it a priority in today’s catechetics? If you were the pope, would you convoke a council today, and what vision and issues would you bring to the world’s bishops? Next post on this stream: Paragraph 2, in about two to three weeks.
1 Comment
Norman Stachura
1/10/2023 07:53:38 pm
Thank you, Tom, for this presentation and I look forward to your next writing on this subject.
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