Vatican II

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This is an article from George Sim Johnson. I find that this is a very important article as to understanding the necessity of Vatican Council II.

On the third day of the conclave—October 28, 1958—the white smoke signaled to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square the election of a new pope, Angelo Cardinal Roncalli, patriarch of Venice, who took the name of John XXIII. The Roman crowd was momentarily silenced; it could not put a face to the name of a man who had spent much of his career obediently accepting obscure ecclesial posts. The cardinals who had elected him were quite certain what to expect from the 76-year-old Roncalli: a peaceful, transitional pontificate—maybe even a mediocre one. Roncalli himself, who had arrived at the conclave with a return train ticket, never expected to be pope.

He was a kindly, unassuming man, easy to underestimate. Even when, at an advanced age, he was made archbishop of Venice, there were still high prelates to whom he was simply il buon Roncalli. But this son of frugal peasant farmers, whose faith was utterly traditional, launched a reformation in the life of the Church that in some ways still lies ahead of us. The Second Vatican Council has hardly entered the consciousness of most Catholics.

There is still some mystery about how the council was born in the mind of Pope John. There had been 20 previous ecumenical councils, and most were summoned in response to a serious crisis, either a heresy like Arianism or the threats of emperors. But in 1959, everything seemed fine. The first official notice of the council was hardly electrifying—a short statement in L’Osservatore Romano to the effect that the pope intended to take three steps to meet the errors of the time—hold a diocesan synod of the clergy in Rome, summon an ecumenical council of the universal Church, and bring the Code of Canon Law up to date. The officials in the Roman Curia were mostly appalled. The first reaction of Giovanni Battista Cardinal Montini, who as Pope Paul VI would ably steer the council to its conclusion, was that Roncalli had no idea what a “hornet’s nest” he was stirring up.

But Pope John always insisted that his call for a council was an inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He never gave lengthy explanations for his decision, but he said enough to make it clear that he thought the Church needed to examine herself, to find her footing in the modern world while re-maining faithful to her principles. There is a law of conversion in the life of the Church as well as in individual Christians: If you are not moving forward, you are moving backward. The Church in some respects had become rigid. There was a self-satisfied triumphalism that was the reverse of apostolic. Most Catholics did not understand that the Church is not just an institution but an evangelical movement. The world was slipping away from religious belief, and Catholics themselves needed a new conversion if they were to bring it back.

Traditionalists who wish the council had never happened point out that the Catholic Church at mid-century was a great success story. But success, as Martin Buber reminds us, is not one of the names of God. And even then there were warning signs, especially in Europe, the cradle of Catholicism. Roncalli’s last diplomatic post had been in France after World War II, and he was aware of the alarming decline in church attendance and a nominal Catholicism that prompted two young priests in 1943 to publish a book asking if France had not become a mission territory. The Church had lost the allegiance of almost every segment of society, from the workers to the intellectuals, and the remnant of loyal Catholics included a few too many monarchists whose faith had more than a whiff of Jansenism.

Once he launched the council, it was never the intention of Pope John to control or manipulate it; he simply gave it direction. He did not know precisely what the council would do, treating it, in the words of one historian, as an “empty container” waiting to be filled. There were to be no new definitions of dogma. But John was convinced that the 2,500 assembled bishops would find their way to a better understanding of the Church and her mission. His serenity during the turbulent preparatory phase of the council was extraordinary. He was clearly taking a gamble. Conservative members of the Curia, like Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, once they saw that they could not stop the council, apparently hoped that the bishops would meet with great pomp and splendor, rubber-stamp a few documents affirming Church dogma, and then go home, thus letting everything return to normal.

But this was not what Pope John intended. In his opening speech, he said that “the main point of this Council...will not be to discuss one or another article of basic Church doctrine that has repeatedly been taught.... A Council is not needed for this.” Rather, it was time for a new approach. Emphasizing that the Church should have an “ever greater fidelity to authentic doctrine,” the pope famously went on to say: “The substance of the ancient doctrine is one thing, and its formulation is another.” But he was not just looking for new formulas: He was calling the Church out of her Tridentine shell to an active engagement with the modern world. To do this effectively, the Church would have to imitate more closely her Master, drawing nearer to contemporary humanity rather than maintaining a harsh, critical distance.

Although Roncalli was not an intellectual in the manner of his predecessor Pius XII, he was well aware of the “new theology” that for decades had been percolating through the Catholic world. It involved radiant figures like Henri de Lubac, Maurice Blondel, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, along with younger academics like Joseph Ratzinger. These thinkers had become impatient with the “official” post-Tridentine scholasticism, which, although derived from St. Thomas Aquinas, was progressively ossifying into a rationalist caricature. They wanted not only to return to the “sources”—Scripture, the Church Fathers, and indeed Aquinas himself—but also to work with philosophical traditions that had emerged since the breakup of medieval Europe. All these would be the building blocks of a new Christian humanism that could speak to the modern world.

While never openly promoting the new theologians, Pope John gave every indication that he expected the council to embrace their understanding of the Church’s mission. And this is what happened. The council met in four sessions between 1962 and 1965. There was, of course, the usual unedifying behavior that has attended every council since Nicea: theological dogfights, bureaucratic rearguard actions, crafty procedural maneuvers, not to mention the agitation at the edges of the council—the journalists and self-appointed experts who hatched plots and circulated pamphlets in smoky little restaurants near the Vatican. Every council has been like this. All that the Holy Spirit guarantees is the orthodoxy of the outcome, no matter what messy human contingencies may be involved.

Pope John called for an aggiornamento, a “renewal” or updating of the Church. And this, too, was nothing new. It has been going on for 2,000 years. Since the Church must become incarnate in every historical epoch, she has always engaged in aggiornamento. She did this in the early centuries when she appropriated the vocabulary of Greek philosophy in order to define dogma, and she did it in the Dark Ages when she adjusted to the collapse of the Roman Empire. On these occasions, there was always a conservative party to tell her she shouldn’t change, that there were no problems. Fifty years ago, there were problems; they were noticed by the new theologians, as well as by insightful philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand. They were also noticed by the Vicar of Christ.

The following were some of the issues that needed to be addressed if the Church were to evangelize the contemporary world.

The Church and Modernity

Since the Enlightenment, the attitude of the Church toward modernity had been one of unrelieved gloom and pessimism. This morose attitude was understandable given what the Church had experienced since the French Revolution. Consider just the highlights: In 1798, Pope Pius VI was arrested by French revolutionary troops and later died in captivity. His successor, Pius VII, was kidnapped by Napoleon. In 1848, when another revolution was sweeping through Europe, Pius IX’s prime minister was stabbed to death by a mob, and the pope had to flee Rome in disguise. In 1871, the archbishop of Paris was executed by agents of the Commune. In the following decades, modern “democracy” coughed up legions of anticlerical politicians—for example, Emile Combes, the French premier who closed all the Catholic schools, in many cases giving the nuns only a few minutes to pack up and depart.

If the Church’s experience of modern politics was unhappy, so too was her experience of the economic revolution. With the shift to an industrial economy, there was a huge migration into the cities, and it seemed that the moment a peasant set foot on the pavement of the train station in Paris or Milan, he lost his faith.

Then there was the modern intellectual onslaught against not only the Church, but Christianity itself. From Voltaire onward, the “best” public minds were generally hostile to the Faith, often basing their attacks on a superficial reading of the natural sciences. Their polemics were magnified by the emerging popular press, where anticlerical journalists asked how anyone in an age of steam engines and telegraphs could believe in God.

In reaction to all this, there was a tendency in the Church simply to retreat to a fortified position and hurl down anathemas on the modern world. The locus classicus of this position was Pius IX’s famous “Syllabus of Errors” (1864), which condemned the view that the pope “can or should reconcile himself to…progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” But by the middle of the 20th century, Catholic thinkers like Maritain and von Balthasar found this mentality exasperating and counterproductive. There was a rejection not only of what was bad in the modern world but also of what was good. They believed that the healthy Catholic attitude should be that any truth that is out there is ours. Instead, there was a deep suspicion of wide areas of human endeavor, especially in the arts and philosophy. This defensive attitude made it increasingly difficult for the Church to talk to her contemporaries. The vocabulary of neo-scholastic manuals (written in poor Latin) was inadequate, as were the baroque and stilted communiqués of the Roman Curia.

The Church had to learn again how to radiate outward. The way to dissipate error was not simply to condemn it but to make a more convincing presentation of the truth in language that the modern world could understand. And it was undoubtedly better to start a dialogue with Protestants or the Eastern Orthodox with what we share instead of pronouncing anathemas. Henceforth, the Church understands herself to be neither against the world, nor of the world, but for the world.

What Is the Church?

Accompanying the old mental rigidity was an institutional rigidity that needed correcting. The institutional model of the Church that had prevailed since the Council of Trent, and in many respects had done good service, was no longer adequate. This model saw the Church as a juridical machine operated by the bishop of Rome. Over the centuries, the Church’s government had become top-heavy and centralized. This trend had been fortified by Vatican I, which defined papal infallibility, but (partly due to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War) did not address the role of the bishops, let alone the laity. There was a tendency to regard “Rome,” especially the bureaucratic machinery of the Curia, as the Church. The situation was such that a monsignor in the Vatican could be far more powerful than the bishop of a large diocese.

So the council supplemented and balanced the one-sided ecclesiology of Vatican I. It revived the fraternal element in the hierarchy. It confirmed that, in union with the pope, the bishops have a collegial responsibility for the universal Church and not just the care of their own diocese. As for the pope, no writing in Church history has stronger language about papal authority than Lumen Gentium (n. 25), a document about which dissenters do not like to be reminded. But the Council Fathers were interested in moving beyond the Church conceived primarily as a hierarchy or institution—with its Roman centralism and clericalism—to a Church that is a communion of the faithful. And so the council describes the Church in non-juridical, biblical ways: a sheepfold, a pasture, a pilgrim moving through history.

But the documents go even further and emphasize that the Church is a mystery. She is a mystery because she is a Person. Only as such can she change the world. The French writer Paul Claudel said of the fallen world that Christ had entered: “The problem was so enormous that only the Word could respond to it, bringing not an explanation but a presence.” This was the idea of the council. By sanctifying herself and acting as a communion of the faithful, the Church’s presence in the world would be not so much that of an organization or a credal formula, but of Christ Himself.

Where Are the Laity?

A major problem of pre–Vatican II ecclesiology was its disregard of the laity. The laity was a misplaced object in the magnificent baroque edifice of the Counter-Reformation Church. They were defined negatively—“not the clergy”—and almost treated as passive bystanders. The message was: If you want to be holy, become a priest or nun; otherwise, take a seat in the bleachers, where you may watch the priests and nuns, who are the true athletes of holiness, and you shall be holy to the extent that you plug in, however distantly, to their holiness. At the council, Bishop John J. Wright of Pittsburgh said: “The faithful have been waiting for 400 years for a positive conciliar statement on the place, dignity and vocation of the layman.”

Until Vatican II, there was little sense of calling the laity to serious ascetical struggle and adult intellectual formation. All that was the preserve of the priests and nuns, who were somehow the “real” Church. The council was a clarion call to the laity to share actively in the mission of the Church. They are henceforth to act as leaven in the world and not to leave all the heavy lifting to the clergy. Today, many Catholics (including some bishops) seem to think that Vatican II was about the role of the laity in the Church—eucharistic ministers, lectors, and so forth. But it was really about the role of the laity in the world. The true Catholic life is one of personal conversion and evangelization; it does not involve hanging around the sacristy. Recently, Francis Cardinal George of Chicago said that the biggest failure of the post–Vatican II Church was her failure to get out the council’s message about the laity—who, after all, comprise 99 percent of the Church.

The Formation of the Clergy

Then there was the situation in the religious orders—and in the seminaries—where again there was too much narrowness and rigidity. The old seminary system had many strengths, but it also seemed designed to prolong the immaturity of young men. A priest’s education was remote from that of his lay contemporary, so that he had difficulty understanding the secular world. There was also an implicit notion that holiness is achieved by the elimination of natural feeling and that sex drives should not exist in a person consecrated to God. (If you wish to seek the root causes of the recent crisis, start looking here.) There was often strictness where strictness was not particularly helpful. For example, many nuns’ orders changed between their winter and lighter summer habits twice a year according to the European calendar, no matter what the weather was actually like in, say, Alabama.

More importantly, there was little connection between theology and the devotional life, the latter of which was often dangerously routinized. And in some seminaries or religious houses, if you wanted to discover the Church Fathers or any Catholic thinking outside of a closed neo-scholastic system that gave only the illusion of completeness, you did so with a flashlight at night. Many good men left Catholic seminaries in the 1940s and 1950s be-cause they found the intellectual and emotional formation stultifying.

Obviously, there were wonderful and holy priests in the old days. But the fact that the “eruption of mediocrity” in the Church (as von Hildebrand put it) after the council was mainly the work of clergy who had received their formation before the council is evidence enough that the council was right to want to update the human and spiritual formation in convents and seminaries.

The Liturgy

Ask most American Catholics what Vatican II was about, and they would say that it changed the Mass from Latin to English. Actually, it is surprising how little the council said about the use of vernacular in the liturgy. It comes down to two sentences whose modest scope would surprise most Catholics: “The use of the Latin language...is to be preserved in the Latin rites. But since the use of the vernacular, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or in other parts of the liturgy, may frequently be of great advantage to the people, a wider use of it may be made, especially in the readings, directives and in some prayers and chants.”

It is unlikely that the Council Fathers ever envisioned the Mass being said entirely in the vernacular. But they did want to revise the liturgy. The old Tridentine Mass had many strengths and beauties. A problem—not intrinsic to it, but an abuse nonetheless that needed correcting—was the nonparticipation of many of the faithful. People in the pews would say their rosaries or do private prayers and devotions during the Mass. The council wanted to change this. The Mass is the summit of Christian life here on earth, so there should be “full, conscious and active participation.” The word “active” in the original text could better be translated as “authentic,” and by “participation,” they meant mainly interior participation. In other words, silence.

But in the wake of the council, bishops around the world apparently decided that the way to achieve “active participation” was to have the entire Mass said in the vernacular. You could argue that this is a “traditionalist” solution. The first eucharistic liturgy, said by Christ, was undoubtedly in Aramaic. Until the end of the third century, the Mass was said in demotic Greek, because that was the vernacular. Then it was switched to Latin for the same reason.

Latin remains the normative language of the Church, and there are at least two good reasons for this: It is the language of the most beautiful prayers and hymns ever written, from the Salve Regina to Adoro Te Devote. And it is a dead language; in other words, its meaning and nuances do not change over the centuries. This is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church, originally written in French, was officially rendered into Latin. Catholics 500 years from now will know exactly what the Church was saying.

Religious Liberty

The most radical departure from history in the council’s teachings concerned religious freedom. A professor somewhere has said that one of the great revolutions of the 20th century was the Catholic Church’s strong turn toward human rights. She entered the modern age carrying a lot of baggage from her entanglements with the ancien régime. The council made it clear that she no longer wanted a confessional state tied to a monarchy; it was high time to make peace with liberal democracy. Henceforth the Church does not impose but proposes the truth; she will not rely on the coercive machinery of the state. This was the area where the Americans, especially the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, made their contribution to the council. The Constitution of the United States, which keeps the government out of the chancery, had served the Church well.

Reinventing Moral Theology

Although the council did not issue a decree on moral theology, its documents are shot through with a “personalism” that set a new course for teaching morality. In many quarters of the Church, moral theology had been reduced to a dry and overly scholastic parsing of sin. Call it legalism or externalism, but many Catholics had the idea that religion is mainly a matter of following rules. Returning to the biblical roots of her moral teachings, the Church henceforth was to get out the message that behind every “no” in the commandments, there is an even greater “yes”; that the commandments are meant to educate our nature and not put a lid on it.

This personalist approach is especially helpful with such issues as contraception and priestly celibacy. The old manualist arguments concerning both do not convince the modern mind; it is more effective to talk in the language of “person” and “gift.” It is an interesting historical point that the most mischievous heresy to emerge after the council—the “proportionalism” or “consequentialism” of theologians like Charles Curran and Richard McCormick—derives not from the teachings of the council but from a rationalist perversion of the old scholastic double-effect reasoning.

What Is Man?

Some of the major questions addressed by the council were anthropological: What is man? How does he flourish? Previous councils had focused on the truth as an objective fact and how the Church as structure was going to preserve this truth. Vatican II went further and pointed out that the truth is also a subjective experience. Following the trajectory of certain modern philosophical schools, the attention shifted from structure and object to subject. As one theologian puts it, the thinking of Aquinas was complemented by Pascal, who in his Pensées focused on the experience of man before God. In talking to modern agnostics, it might be easier to start with man’s need for God, rather than God Himself. Certainly, the old Thomistic proofs for the existence for God, while intellectually airtight, don’t seem to move people anymore. This “personalism” of Vatican II is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church begins with a quotation from St. Augustine: “We were made for thee, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” And it is why a saint has the last word, so to speak, in every section, as a testimony of the lived experience of faith.

At the council, the Church moved to a relational, Trinitarian theology of the human person. Our faith is not simply the intellectual acceptance of a series of creedal statements but a relationship with a Person. It is also our relationship with others. As the council puts it, “Man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self.” There you have a good theology of marriage—and the priesthood—in a nutshell.

A Crisis of Saints

The council’s most important message was the “universal call to holiness.” If the Church is going to fulfill her evangelical mission, it will ultimately be the work of saints, lay and clerical. In some ways, the council was calling for a retrieval of the experience of the earliest Christians. The early Church was an enterprise of all the baptized who saw the Faith not as a checklist of obligations but an adventure in grace. The hermeneutical key to the council, then, is the lives of the saints. In fact, you will get a good idea of what the council was about by reading a biography of the (now beatified) pope who called it into being. As one biographer puts it, the “Johannine impact was of a person, not a program.” Angelo Roncalli was able to do two things together that many Catholics find difficult: Remain utterly faithful to the Church’s teachings while radiating outward to the world. That is also the lesson of Vatican II.

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Here is a follow up article from James Hitchcock.

Most Catholics in 1959 probably didn’t even know what an ecumenical council was. And yet, here it was. Pope John XXIII announced that the goals of the Second Vatican Council would be “the renewal of the spirit of the Gospel in the hearts of people everywhere and the adjustment of Christian discipline to modern-day living”—a proclamation that was on the face of it ambiguous. How was authentic renewal to be achieved? How should essential discipline be adjusted to modern culture?

John was a relentless optimist, inclined always to look for good in the world, disinclined to scold, and deeply convinced that he had been called to help bring about a new Pentecost in the Church. He further believed that the Counter-Reformation era, characterized both by defensiveness inside the Church and aggressiveness toward those on the outside, was over. The council made only an oblique reference to the fact that the 20th century had already seen a persecution of Christians more severe than any in the entire history of Catholicism.

The Church was apparently flourishing during John’s pontificate. By contrast with what would come later, its members were unusually serious, devout, and moral. But such a Church could be criticized as fostering formalism, a neglect of social justice, and an overly narrow piety, and it’s likely that John XXIII thought that a new Pentecost could build on this foundation to reach still higher levels.

In his opening address to the council, John affirmed the infallibility of the Church but called on it to take account of the “errors, requirements, and opportunities” of the age. He regretted that some Catholics (“prophets of gloom”) seemed unable to see any good in the modern world and regarded it as the worst of all historical periods. The dogmas of the Church were settled and “known to all,” so the conciliar task was to explore new ways of presenting them to the modern world.

The preparatory commissions for the council were dominated by members of the Curia, who were inclined toward precisely such a pessimistic view. When the council opened, there were objections to those commissions, with the result that the council fathers were allowed to approve new schema prepared by some of their own. In some ways this procedural squabble was the most decisive event of the entire council, and it represented a crucial victory for what was now called the “liberal” or “optimistic” party, guaranteeing that the council as a whole would look on its work as more than a mere restatement of accepted truths. There was an officially endorsed spirit of optimism in which even legitimate questions about the wisdom of certain ideas were treated as evidence of lack of faith.

The intellectual leadership of the council came mainly from Western Europe, the most influential prelates being Bernard Alfrink of the Netherlands, Leo Jozef Suenens of Belgium, Achille Lienart of France, Julius Doepfner and Joseph Frings of Germany, and Franz Koenig of Austria. Those five countries, along with the rest of Europe, possessed an ancient tradition of Catholicism, and they had nourished a vigorous and sophisticated Catholic intellectual life.

As theological questions arose, the council fathers almost automatically deferred to the opinions of these European prelates, who were in turn influenced by men recognized as the most accomplished theologians of the age—Henri DeLubac, Jean Danielou, and Yves Congar in France; Edward Schillebeeckx in the Netherlands; Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger in Germany.

But in many respects the Church in those five nations—with the possible exception of the Netherlands—appeared less than robust (judging, for example, by rates of church attendance and religious vocations). Indeed, the vigorous intellectual life of those countries was colored by a certain sense of crisis—the need to make the Faith credible to modern men. By contrast, the Church in the British Isles, Southern Europe, and the United States, to say nothing of the Third World, lacked dazzling intellectual achievements but appeared to be relatively hearty.

Most council fathers therefore seemed to have felt little urgency about most of the questions that came before them. For many, the discussions involved issues that, before now, hadn’t even been considered, such as making the liturgy and religious life more “relevant.” But an unquestioned faith that the Church would always be preserved from error, along with the leadership of John XXIII and Paul VI, led most of the delegates to support the schema that were finally forged from the debate. No decree of the council provoked more than a small number of dissenting votes. Ironically, in view of the later claim that the council brought about the democratization of the Church, deference to authority was a major factor in determining how most of the fathers voted.

Creating Radicals

John XXIII announced Vatican II as a “pastoral” assembly, but there were growing differences of opinion as to what exactly that meant. Pious, instinctively conservative prelates might think of encouraging Marian devotions or kindling zeal for the foreign missions. The dominant group, however, moved the council toward dialogue with the modern world, translating the Church’s message into a language modern men understood.

The council fathers always strove to remain balanced (see George Sim Johnston’s “Was Vatican II a Mistake?” March 2004). To take what are now the most fiercely debated issues, they imagined no revisions in Catholic moral teaching about sexuality, referring instead to “the plague of divorce” and to the “abominable crime” of abortion. Deliberately childless marriages were deemed a tragedy, and the faithful were reminded of the Church’s condemnation of artificial birth control.

At the same time, the fact that practically every aspect of Catholic belief seemed to be under discussion had results that John XXIII probably didn’t intend. Famously, at one point he removed the subject of contraception from the floor of the council and announced that he was appointing a special commission to study the issue—an action that naturally led some to believe the teaching would indeed be revised. When Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae in 1968, liberals were outraged that he rejected the commission’s recommendation to permit some forms of birth control and accused him of betraying the council.

The council fathers each had periti, or advisers, on matters of theology and canon law, and some of them were very influential, both in shaping the thought of the prelates whom they advised and in working behind the scenes with like-minded delegates and other periti. In explaining the theological revolution that occurred almost immediately after the council, some orthodox Catholics speculate that a well-organized minority intended from the beginning to sabotage the council and that they successfully planted theological time bombs in the conciliar decrees—doctrinal statements whose implications were deliberately left vague, to be activated later. But there’s little evidence of this.

It’s characteristic of revolutions that they are rarely planned ahead of time. Rather, they arise from the sudden acceleration of historical change, caused by the flow of events and the way in which people relate to those events. There is no evidence that anyone came to the council with a radical agenda, in part because such an agenda would have been considered hopelessly unrealistic. (Some liberals actually feared that the council would prove to be a retrogressive gathering.)

A major factor in the postconciliar dynamic was the reformers’ own heady experience of swift and unexpected change. For example, in 1960 no one would have predicted—and few would have advocated—the virtual abandonment of the Latin liturgy. But once reformers realized that the council fathers supported change, it became an irresistible temptation to continue pushing farther and faster. What had been thought of as stone walls of resistance turned out to be papier-mâché.

The council itself proved to be a “radicalizing” experience, during which men who had never met before, and who in some cases had probably given little thought to the questions now set before them, began quickly to change their minds on major issues. (For example, Archbishop—later Cardinal—John F. Dearden of Detroit, who was considered quite rigid before the council, returned home as an uncritical advocate of every kind of change.) When the council was over, some of those present—both periti and bishops—were prepared to go beyond what the council had in fact intended or authorized, using the conciliar texts as justification when possible, ignoring them when not (as recounted, for example, by Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, who was in charge of liturgical reform after the council, in his book The Reform of the Liturgy). Aware that the council didn’t support their agenda, they quickly got into the habit of speaking of the “spirit” of the council, which was said to transcend its actual statements and even in some cases to contradict them.

The Role of the Media

While the council was still in session, it occurred to some that it was less important what that body actually said and did than what people thought it said and did. Thus as early as the first session, in 1962, there was an orchestrated propaganda campaign to present the deliberations and define the issues in particular ways and to enlist the sympathies of the public on behalf of a particular agenda. Certain key journalists became “participant-observers,” meaning that they reported the events and at the same time sought to influence them—the chief practitioners being “Xavier Rynne” (the pen name of the Redemptorist historian Francis X. Murphy), who wrote “Letter from Vatican City” for the New Yorker magazine, and Robert Blair Kaiser, who reported for Time.

Such reports were written for a largely non-Catholic audience, many of whom were unsympathetic to the Faith, and the thrust of the reporting was to assure such readers that the Church was at long last admitting its many errors and coming to terms with secular culture. Most Catholics probably relied on these same sources for their understanding of the council and so received the same message.

The key reason why postconciliar “renewal” often went wrong is the almost incredible fact that the hierarchy in the early 1960s made almost no systematic effort to catechize the faithful (including priests and religious) on the meaning of the council—something about which many bishops themselves seemed confused. “Renewal experts” sprang up everywhere, and the most contradictory explanations of the council were offered to Catholics thirsting for guidance. Bishops rarely offered their flocks authoritative teaching and instead fell into the habit of simply trusting certified “experts” in every area of Church life. Indeed, before the council was even over, several fallacious interpretations were planted that still flourish today.

Even the best journalistic accounts were forced to simplify the often subtle and complex deliberations of the council fathers. But there was also deliberate oversimplification for the purpose of creating a particular public impression. The media thus divided the council fathers into heroes and villains—otherwise known as liberals and conservatives. In this way, the conciliar battles were presented as morality plays in which open-minded, warm-hearted, highly intelligent innovators (Cardinal Alfrink, for example) were able repeatedly to thwart plots by Machiavellian reactionaries (Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office). It was a morality play that appealed to the prejudices of many Westerners of the mid-20th century. It also had a real if immeasurable influence on many bishops, who soon discovered that being viewed as “progressive” would gain them a favorable press, while the opposite would make them into public villains.

For understandable reasons, vastly disproportionate attention was lavished by the media on such things as the vernacular liturgy and the end of mandatory Friday abstinence, since concrete practices could be easily dealt with journalistically and such practices had long helped to define the differences between Catholics and others. Catholics who understood almost nothing of the theological issues of the council came to understand that its “real” purpose was repealing rules that had become burdensome and old-fashioned.

But in another sense the attention lavished on such things was not disproportionate, because in a sacramental Church “externals” are the doorways to the spirit. In theory it perhaps ought not to have mattered whether nuns wore habits, but in practice the modification, then the total abandonment, of those habits marked the beginning of the end of religious life as it had existed for centuries. For many people the distinction between essentials and nonessentials was almost meaningless. If Catholics were no longer forbidden to eat meat on Fridays, why could they not get divorced, especially given the widespread conviction that the purpose of the council and of “Good Pope John” was to make people comfortable with their faith?

Many of the council fathers, after they returned to their dioceses, seemed themselves to be in a state of confusion over what they’d done. Only a relatively few—some orthodox, others less so—had a clear and consistent understanding. For most, the postconciliar period proved to be a time of rudderless experimentation, as Catholics groped to understand what the council had mandated. For many people the one sure thing, amid all the postconciliar uncertainty, was the fact of change itself; in an odd way it seemed safest to do or believe almost the opposite of what Catholics had previously been taught.

The Scars of Renewal

Underlying the council were two different approaches to reform—approaches that were not contradictory but that required serious intellectual effort to reconcile. One was ressourcement (“back to the sources”), a program of renewing the Church by returning to its scriptural and patristic roots (DeLubac, Danielou, and Hans Urs Von Balthasar all held to this). The other was aggiornamento (“updating”), by which the supposed demands of contemporary culture were the chief concern (Hans Küng, Schillebeeckx, and to some extent Rahner, were all proponents). Kept in balance during the council itself, these two movements increasingly pulled apart afterward and resulted in the deep conflicts that continue to the present.

A prime example of the postconciliar dynamic at work was the “renewal” of religious life. Cardinal Suenens wrote the influential book The Nun in the World, enjoining sisters to come out of their cloisters and accept the challenges of modern life. Whatever might be thought about them as theological principles, such recipes for “renewal” also promised that those who adopted them would experience phenomenal revitalization, including dramatic numerical growth, and for a few years after the council the official spirit of naive optimism won out over the “prophets of gloom.”

The most famous instance of such renewal in the United States was that of the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Los Angeles. Their program of aggiornamento had all the ingredients required at the time—intense publicity from an overwhelmingly favorable media, a prestigious secular “expert” (the psychologist Carl Rogers), picturesque experiments with nontraditional behavior (encounter groups), and a reactionary villain (James Cardinal McIntyre) portrayed as the only obstacle to progress. Not until it was too late did anyone ask whether the IHM Sisters, along with countless others, were simply abandoning their vocations completely.

A tragic dimension of the conciliar period was precisely the irrelevance and ultimate failure of the exciting intellectual programs that emanated from what were then the five most influential Catholic nations. For a very brief period, Dutch Catholicism made a bid to give the universal Church a working model of renewal, before “the Dutch Church” imploded and sank into oblivion. Rates of church attendance and religious vocations may have been worrisomely low in Belgium, France, and Germany in 1960, but the bishops of those countries probably couldn’t imagine how much lower they would fall. In ways not recognized 40 years ago, it’s now clear that the strategy of countering secularism by moving closer to the secular culture just doesn’t work.

The partisans of aggiornamento became the first theologians in the history of the Church to make systematic use of the mass media, entering into a working alliance with journalists who could scarcely even understand the concept of ressourcement but eagerly promoted an agenda that required the Church to accommodate itself to the secular culture. Strangely enough, some theologians, along with their propagandist allies, actually denied the Church the right to remain faithful to its authentic identity and announced a moral obligation to repudiate as much of that identity as possible. “Renewal” came to be identified with dissent and infidelity, and Catholics who remained faithful to the Church were denounced as enemies of Vatican II.

This occurred at the most fundamental level, so that the authority of the council itself was soon relativized. The notion that a council would claim for itself final authority in matters of belief came to be viewed by liberals as reactionary. Vatican II was thus treated as merely a major historical epiphany—a moment in the unfolding history of the Church and of human consciousness when profound new insights were discovered. According to this view, the council’s function was not to make authoritative pronouncements but merely to facilitate the movement of the Church into the next stage of its historical development. (For example, the Jesuit historian John W. O’Malley in 1971 proposed that certain conciliar texts could be legitimately ignored as merely reflective of intellectual immaturity, timidity, and confusion on the part of the council fathers.)

After the council, the concept of “the People of God” was reduced to a crude form of democracy—doctrine as determined by opinion polls. The liturgy ceased to be a divine action and became a communal celebration, and the supernatural vocations of priests and religious were deemed to be obstacles to their service to the world.

Nothing had a more devastating effect on postconciliar Catholic life than the sexual revolution, as believers began to engage in behavior not measurably different from that of non-believers. Priests and religious repudiated their vows in order to marry, and many of those who remained in religious life ceased to regard celibacy as desirable. Catholics divorced almost as frequently as non-Catholics. Church teachings about contraception, homosexuality, and even abortion were widely disregarded, with every moral absolute treated as merely another wall needing to be breached.

Off the Rails

Ultimately the single best explanation of what happened to deflect the council’s decrees from their intended direction is the fact that as soon as the assembly ended, the worldwide cultural phenomenon known as the “the Sixties” began. It was nothing less than a frontal assault on all forms of authority.

Bereft of catechesis, confused by the conciliar changes, and unable to grasp the subtle theology of the conciliar decrees, many Catholics simply translated the conciliar reforms into the terms of the counterculture, which was essentially the demand for “liberation” from all restraint on personal freedom. Even as late as 1965 almost no one anticipated this great cultural upheaval. The measured judgments of Gaudium et Spes, the council’s highly influential decree on the Church and the modern world, shows not a hint of it.

Had the council met a decade earlier, during the relatively stable 1950s, it’s possible that there could have been an orderly and untroubled transition. But after 1965 the spirit of the age was quite different, and by then many Catholics were eager to break out of what they considered their religious prison. Given the deliberately fostered popular impression that the Church was surrendering in its perennial struggle with the world, it was inevitable that the prevailing understanding of reform would be filtered through the glass of a hedonistic popular culture. Under such conditions it would require remarkable steadfastness of purpose to adhere to an authentic program of renewal.

The postconciliar crisis has moved far beyond issues like the language of the liturgy or nuns’ habits—even beyond sexual morality or gender identities. Today the theological frontier is nothing less than the stark question of whether there is indeed only one God and Jesus is His only-begotten Son. It is a question that the council fathers didn’t foresee as imminent and, predictably, the council’s dicta about non-Christian religions are now cited to justify various kinds of religious syncretism. The resources for resolving this issue are present in the conciliar decrees themselves, but it’s by no means certain that Church leaders have the will to interpret them in final and authoritative ways. Forty years after the council, serious Catholics have good reason to think they’ve been left to wander the theological wilderness.

[Cam42]

And one more article from George Sim Johnson:

In that moral masterpiece, Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II begins with the Gospel episode of the rich young man before Christ, and it’s not a bad place to start a discussion of the Catholic Church since Vatican II. It is easy to think of this encounter as a parable, but it really happened and that well-to-do young man is somewhere right now. In the Gospel story, he’s a devout Israelite who, as John Paul puts it, has grown up “in the shadow of the Law.” He has faithfully followed its precepts. But something is missing, and he asks Christ what it might be. Christ’s answer—“Come, follow me”—is completely unexpected. It goes well beyond the young man’s idea of “religion,” and so he walks away sad and perplexed.

The rich young man is not unlike a pre–Vatican II Catholic in the affluent West. He has spent his life (mostly) following the rules and understands “eternal life” as an extrinsic reward for having done so. And yet despite the double consolation of economic security and religious correctness, it occurs to him that something more is needed. Christ tells him to keep the commandments. The young man replies, “I have kept all these. What do I still lack?” At this point, like a good pre–Vatican II Catholic, he’s probably expecting to be told to perform extra devotion: Go and recite the seven penitential Psalms. Or an extra discipline: Don’t eat meat on Fridays.

Instead, Christ offers him precisely the challenge that Vatican II made to the Catholic world. It is a challenge both personal and deeply supernatural. The council was a call to Catholics to break from their harness of legalism and externalism. To stop compartmentalizing their religion and risk a transformation in grace. To pass from a merely objective faith—something you have—to one fully lived. It suggested that the more fruitful line of questioning is not, What is prohibited? or, What is required? but rather, What sort of person am I to be? And it proposed the Person of Christ as the answer. Only after absorbing this truth can we fully comprehend why it is we follow His commandments, which otherwise can be a joyless burden.

The Second Vatican Council was a call to full spiritual maturity. It was time to take off the training wheels—to stop living “in the shadow of the Law”—and take our vocations as Christians seriously. The pre–Vatican II Church “worked” marvelously well, which is why there are those who are nostalgic, but it wasn’t spiritually creative. The council offered the difference between a minimalist, rules-oriented Catholicism and full discipleship, especially for the laity. In its focus on the human person, rather than on dogmatic truths about the divine order, it reminded us that we’re obliged to become the person God wants us to be and that this isn’t a limitation of our freedom—as the rich young man supposes—but its guarantee.

Once we had achieved that freedom through the call to holiness, we could go out and change the world. This has been the program of John Paul’s pontificate. But the pope has faced serious obstacles within the Church in implementing the council. The problem has been summed up by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: “What devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was not the Council but the refusal to accept it.” In fact, it’s striking how ill-equipped the Church—clergy and laity included—was to receive the teachings of the council (and, for that matter, Humanae Vitae a few years later). The philosophical richness and originality of the documents were missed entirely. Instead of spiritual renewal and a new evangelization, what we got was a fight between “conservatives” and “liberals,” both stuck in previous categories of Church thinking.

It is safe to say that most of the bishops who attended the council had little idea how to implement it. That generation of American bishops had many strengths, but an appreciation of Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento, and the theological vision behind it, was not among them. They returned to business as usual, and the council’s teachings became a dead letter. In one chancery (I am told) a few months after the council ended, the archbishop was sitting with his retinue, and a monsignor spoke up: “Shouldn’t we do something about the council?” To which the archbishop shot back, “You do something about the council.”

It was this failure of the Church’s leaders to explain the council that allowed it to be so easily hijacked by progressives. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. Powerful mid-century prelates like Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and James Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles, presiding as they did over an American Church that was a great “success story,” didn’t appreciate a deeper problem that had been working through the Church for decades and was about to turn it upside down.

That problem was described by the great French Thomist Jacques Maritain who, in The Peasant of the Garonne (1966), asked why so many priests and religious took such a bad turn even before the council ended. The explanation, according to Maritain, was a malaise that had been building for half a century. In the preconciliar Church there had been a kind of “practical Manichaeism,” which involved “purely moralistic prohibitions, injunctions to flight, habits of fear, disciplines of denial in which love had no part, where science was held the enemy of religion...the almost exclusive recourse to disciplinary measures, the spiritual impoverishment of the laity, who thought the call to the perfection of charity is the exclusive concern of monks.... [A]ll this was going to build up, in the unconscious of a great many Christians, clerics and laymen, an enormous weight of frustration, disillusionment, repressed doubts, resentment, bitterness, healthy desires sacrificed....”

“Then,” Maritain continues, “comes the aggiornamento. Why be astonished that at the very announcement of a Council...the enormous unconscious weight which I have just mentioned bursts into the open in a kind of explosion that does no honor to human intelligence?” Romano Guardini similarly noticed in German theology professors decades before the council a Catholicism that was merely liberalism kept in check by a reluctant obedience to dogma. In the very heart of many religious orders and theology faculties, the Faith was experienced as a fetter, an imposed burden, a set of rules. Do you remember the “bad” nun in the movie The Song of Bernadette? It would have been impossible to remain in this state, council or no council. A crisis was inevitable, and perhaps not entirely regrettable. If the journals of the late Alexander Schmemann, a gifted Russian Orthodox priest and theologian, are any guide, one problem with modern Eastern Orthodoxy has been the lack of a crisis, resulting in an increasingly ossified, ahistorical religiosity that has no idea how to engage the modern world.

Traditionalist Catholics who blame all the Church’s recent problems on Vatican II should ponder a few questions: If the Church was in such good shape before the council, why did things fall apart so rapidly in the 1960s? How do you account for the fact that the rebellion was the work of bishops, theologians, and priests who came out of the Tridentine system? Had all those priests and nuns who suddenly wanted to be laicized received adequate formation under the old system? Why was there so much dissatisfaction? It won’t do simply to rattle off statistics about the decline of the Church since the council. There’s no question that there were good and holy Catholics in the old days—even some saints—and that since the council we have lost much that is good. But there were also problems waiting to erupt. Might not the Magisterium have been correct in addressing them in the council’s documents?

Called by the council to full spiritual adulthood, a significant number of priests and religious instead broke out in adolescent rebellion, a discharge of decades of narrow, rules-based formation and institutional frustration. It seemed that the preconciliar Church had produced legions of clerics who were incapable of intelligently and prayerfully studying the council’s documents. And their bishops certainly weren’t going to insist. Imagine Father Burner in J. F. Powers’s devastating short story “The Prince of Darkness” (1947) picking up Gaudium et Spes; he would quickly fix himself a drink and turn on the television.

The late philosopher David Stove, an acute diagnostician of the modern age, writes about how what passes for much of modern philosophy is no more than an acting out of a horror of all things Victorian. This syndrome has its counterpart in the modern Catholic Church. Among Catholics of a certain age, there is a dread of anything smacking of preconciliar Catholicism. Latin, Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, incense, gothic and baroque architecture, dogmatic definitions—all evoke a reaction well-described by Stove: “A sensation of darkness, stillness, enclosure, and, above all, of weight or pressure....” And the impulse of these progressive Catholics is to do exactly what their counterparts have done in the secular culture: Knock down everything they find left standing from the old days.

As a result, the reception of the council by “liberals” amounted to no more than the commandeering of a few phrases—such as “people of God” and “signs of the times”—out of context. It was time to break the fetters. A loud “Non serviam!” erupted within the Church, along with a surrender to the secular world, which itself was going through a massive identity crisis. These dissidents conjured away the council’s demand for inner reform and apostolic zeal, substituting in its place a generic Christianity that is indistinguishable from bourgeois liberalism’s understanding of the common decencies.

As for the Catholic laity: Do not underestimate the role of rising affluence in the troubles since the council. The post-conciliar mischief was initiated by disaffected clergy, but during these years, an increasingly wealthy and assimilated laity was perfectly happy to follow the path of least resistance marked by dissident theologians. In 1937, the Protestant thinker H. Richard Niebuhr drew attention to a soft-core spirituality among Americans: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Was it likely that Catholics would be immune once they emerged from the ethnic ghetto, moved to the suburbs, and joined the mainstream? The Book of Revelation’s warnings to the Christians at Laodicea—who “say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing...’”—no doubt find application in every age but have particular relevance for the contemporary Catholic who has made his comfort zone the ninth Beatitude.

It is easy to look at the Church today and be pessimistic. There’s an easygoing spirituality among the laity, disaffection and heterodoxy among the clergy, an episcopate that veers between laxity and damage control, and, of course, the scandals. Looked at in a certain way, post–Vatican II Catholicism would all seem a downward spiral, a crisis from which there’s no obvious exit. But any such pessimism is misplaced. First, as someone once said, the Church isn’t a museum of saints but a hospital for sinners. This includes all of us. Human failure will always be generously spread among the faithful. Christ warned about this explicitly. It isn’t clear that the Church today is any worse off than it was in 500 or 1500. In fact, there’s probably now a higher proportion of good bishops, dedicated priests, and devout laity.

But history has even more important lessons. Christopher Dawson once identified six great periods of Church history, and each one begins with a crisis. Nearly all of the 21 ecumenical councils have upset the Church’s equilibrium. The aftermaths of Nicea and Chalcedon shook the Church to its foundations in a way that makes recent decades look like a tea party. That most of the Church didn’t immediately “get” the teachings of Vatican II also has ample precedent. The same happened after the Council of Trent, whose decrees were ignored in France for almost a century. St. Augustine reminds us that the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church is slow, often imperceptible, but without interruption.

And just as the Council of Trent was implemented—in fact, rescued—by a few great popes, especially St. Pius V, we now have in the pontificate of John Paul II the council’s definitive interpretation. One reason for Wojtyla’s election in 1978 was the conclave’s awareness of his vigorous promotion of the council’s decrees in the Archdiocese of Kraków. Even before the council ended, Bishop Wojtyla told his flock, “I want to awaken the Archdiocese of Kraków to the true meaning of the Council, so that we may bring it into our lives.” Such words were not heard on this side of the Atlantic. Catholic dissenters who complain that this pope has “betrayed” the council forget that John Paul was an enthusiastic participant in all four sessions, strongly aligning with the “progressives” against the ecclesial bureaucrats who wanted simply to reiterate doctrine in the accepted neo-scholastic format. And he hasn’t changed at all.

The most extraordinary—and providential—fact of recent Church history is the alignment of Karol Wojtyla and Vatican II. From the very beginning, when he was a philology student in the late 1930s, Wojtyla had been pursuing a philosophical project that dovetailed remarkably with the concerns of the council. He was ready for Vatican II in a way that few other bishops were: He put a strong mark on the council’s three most important documents—Lumen Gentium, Dignitatis Humanae, and Gaudium et Spes. And as pope he has given us a gloss on the council, starting with those astonishing 130 Wednesday audiences on the “theology of the body,” whose depth and originality exceed anything that has come out of the papacy since Leo XIII, or perhaps even St. Gregory the Great.

This pope has taken the documents of Vatican II for what they are: marching orders for the new millennium. And he has expanded their richness and application. Whoever the next pope may be, he won’t have to do much writing. The Church’s middle management has been slow to absorb John Paul’s writings—in many chanceries and seminaries they remain, in Mary Ann Glendon’s phrase, “unopened letters”—but this won’t be determinative. They have touched enough intelligent Catholics, especially among the laity, to change the Church in the long run. This is how the Holy Spirit works. Two thousand years have taught us the Church’s remarkable recuperative powers. And whether it was the sixth or the 16th century, spiritual renewal has always been a matter of grassroots movements inspired by and working with the papacy. The difference now is that whereas for Gregory the Great and Pius V the agents of evangelization were monks or Jesuits, for John Paul II it will be the laity.

The arsenal for this renewal will be the documents of Vatican II and the writings of this pope, which form a perfect continuum. Both are a call to personal conversion—to a maturity in self-giving—that goes far beyond simply obeying laws and commandments. The question for each orthodox Catholic is whether to take up the Magisterium’s challenge or be content with the “fundamental option” of the rich young man, who is more comfortable with a religion based on rules than on self-donation. Of course, the challenge is hardly new. Sts. Paul and Augustine taught that the fruit of Christian conversion is a new freedom wherein the rules (important as they are) hardly matter. This is the only possible meaning of Augustine’s “Love God and do what you will.” But this was not the message of Tridentine Catholicism, and in fact, not since Augustine has there been so much emphasis in sound Catholic theology on personal freedom.

The new Christian humanism proposed by the council and John Paul II is the only possible solution to the crisis within the Church. The modern world wants “freedom.” The rebels within the Church want “freedom.” Complaints about the Church are mainly about its moral teachings, which are perceived as putting a lid on everyone’s freedom. This problem isn’t going to be solved by a further insistence on the rules, but rather by a call to holiness and a positive vision of the human person and the uses of his freedom.

This is what the pontificate of John Paul II has been all about. Those who view him as an authoritarian who keeps tightening the screws are not paying attention. This papacy is all about freedom. But the pope insists that authentic freedom is based on the truth about the human person; otherwise, it will be a counterfeit and make us unhappy. Building on the council, he has proposed a sweeping vision of the human person that invites us into depths barely touched by the old scholastic casuistry. Right now, those in the Church who are shaping its future are busy unpacking these teachings.

John Paul’s writings basically try to answer the question, What is man? Having lived under the two worst totalitarianisms that the 20th century had to offer, he’s convinced that the principal philosophical error of modern times is a misreading of the human person. Today, either man is a thing—a chemical accident, a mere collation of atoms—or he’s a Cartesian ghost inhabiting a machine. The first reading leads straight to the concentration camps and abortion mills. If man is no more than disposable biological matter, then disposable biological matter he will be. The second reading, which is that of dissenters from the Church’s sexual teachings, treats the body as an extrinsic object that can be manipulated for whatever purpose. Put another way: It erroneously supposes that what we do with our bodies has little to do with who we are. This led to the sexual revolution.

The pope answers the Darwinian proposal of man as a “thing” by insisting on our mystery and transcendence. Human creativity—everything from the Sistine Chapel to the infield fly rule—cannot be a mere epiphenomenon of matter. Nor can human love. We are created in the image of a Trinitarian God, three persons in the act of eternal, mutual self-giving. We have the “law of gift” inscribed in our being. There are two sentences from Gaudium et Spes that John Paul quotes repeatedly; they are the leitmotiv of his pontificate. First: Man “can fully find his true self only in the sincere gift of self.” In other words, contrary to our hedonist culture’s notions of happiness, we find our humanity more in self-giving than self-assertion, in relationship rather than self-sufficiency. And the second is like it: “Christ the new Adam...fully reveals man to himself.” The truth about ourselves is ultimately not a proposition but a Person, who Himself is defined by total self-donation.

As for the second modern error about man—the Cartesian ghost in the machine—the pope’s answer is to be found in his voluminous writings about marriage and sexuality. These writings are extraordinarily important. They are the best response to the modern world’s principal objection to the Catholic Church. As early as 1926, G. K. Chesterton predicted that the “next great heresy” would be an attack on sexual morality, and in recent decades every institution has surrendered except the Church. The Church needs to explain her teachings about sex to the world—and also to herself, since it’s safe to say that three-quarters of American Catholics don’t accept them. This should be the first area of the Church’s self-evangelization, and it is going to be mainly the work of the laity.

First, what’s the position of dissenting theologians regarding sex? They want to baptize the sexual morality of the post-Kinsey culture. How do they get there? By arguing the primacy of conscience (the autonomous self as a little god, decreeing right and wrong); by divorcing personhood from the body (a Cartesian anthropology that posits a free-floating “I” that has nothing to do with one’s concrete acts); and by consulting “experience” rather than nature (which in practice allows the three concupiscences to run on their own program).

The pope’s responses to the dissenters, and to the culture in general, are deep and convincing. First, he argues that the purpose of a conscience isn’t to manufacture the truth but to locate it. Truth is something we discover rather than invent. And once we do find a truth, there isn’t merely an obedient and grudging application, but rather a creative response that translates it into positive virtues. Second, the pope vigorously rejects the idea of man as a vaporous “subject” that happens to have a body. We are our bodies, and we are what we do with our bodies. And when it comes to sex, our body has a language, a nuptial meaning that expresses the “law of gift” written at the core of our being. The pope insists that sex is such a deep and wonderful thing that when you use it improperly inside or outside marriage, making your partner an object, a vehicle of pleasure, the result will be the “culture of death” that’s all around us.

In fact, if Catholic dissenters were serious about consulting “experience,” they would look honestly at the results of the sexual revolution. What they would see are the results of a denial of nature, of the “truth” about our sexuality. The question finally is whether we create ourselves on our own or receive our nature as gift. Adam and Eve chose the first option; their sin was not about an inordinate love of apples but about freeing themselves from the “givens” God put in their nature. It is an impulse shared by heterodox theologians. But we’ve discovered—as did our first parents—that this “liberation” is a false freedom. The pope argues that the human person is truly free only when he acts on truths that are received and not invented. The perfection of freedom doesn’t consist in radical self-creation but in the choice to live in accord with our nature.

One of the hopeful signs in the Church today is that energized laity like Christopher West, Janet Smith, Mary Beth Bonacci, John Haas, and others are out there explaining to audiences the beauty of the pope’s “theology of the body.” There already is some recognition among twenty-something Catholics that the baby boomers didn’t exactly solve the mystery of sex and that it must mean something more than an exchange of pleasure between consenting adults. The pope has the answer: It is an exchange of persons, and its ramifications are never entirely private. The health of the entire culture depends on it. Which is why the pope has spent so much intellectual energy explaining sex to a culture trying to evacuate it of its mystery and transcendence.

But this pontificate is about much more than sex and marriage. It is a clarion call to evangelize the culture, which John Paul II insists is what really drives history. Catholics have to stop being preoccupied with intra-Church issues and recover a sense of having a message for the world. For centuries—maybe since the Treaty of Westphalia—the Faith has been privatized, so that many Catholics think it’s mainly something you carry around inside your head. Vatican II proposed evangelization as the deepest identity of the Church, but it’s going to require some digging to recover this lost truth.

We need a great relearning guided by the true “spirit” of Vatican II. The Church is going to have to rebuild itself from the bottom up by personal decisions made by Catholics inspired by the rich teachings of the Magisterium. The three most important realities in the Church today are a great teaching pontificate, the lay initiatives at the grass roots, and the new religious orders whose demographics are the reverse of the older ones. History tells us that this is more than enough for a new springtime of faith.

But for the renewal to gain momentum, there’s one change demanded by the council that has yet to happen: the retirement of the old clericalism, the idea that priests and nuns constitute the “real” Church. Most laity still have the odd notion that they must wait for a signal from the bishop or local pastor to do anything. The council taught that if you have the Faith, you spread it. John Paul’s understanding of this point may come from his experience in Poland, where visible, clerical-mandated lay associations were virtually impossible under the Communist authorities; individual Catholics had to show initiative and not wait for clerical permission to live their Christian vocation.

Finally, a Catholic restoration will depend on individuals who answer the call to holiness. Cardinal Ratzinger, who has been more sober than John Paul in his assessment of the aftermath of the council, knows his Church history well enough to sense that the legacy of an ecumenical council is always at risk: “Whether or not the Council becomes a positive force in the history of the Church depends only indirectly on texts and organizations; the crucial question is whether there are individuals—saints—who, by their personal willingness, which cannot be forced, are ready to effect something new and living.... [It] depends on those who will transform its words into the life of the Church.”

This generation of Catholics has been given much by the Magisterium. Much should be asked of it.

[Cam42]

I want people to be able to read these articles....they are important.

[journeyman]

there's a lot here Cam . . . but I've got them

[phatcatholic]

do u have links for these articles?

[qfnol31]

Now some would ask, "Was it ecumenical?"




And those we would call Orthodox ********/schismatics.

[Cam42]

[url="http://www.crisismagazine.com/march2004/johnston.htm"]Open Windows: Why Vatican II Was Necessary[/url]

[url="http://www.crisismagazine.com/june2004/hitchcock.htm"]Off The Rails: Was Vatican II Hijacked?[/url]

[url="http://www.crisismagazine.com/julaug2004/feature1.htm"]After the Council: Living Vatican II[/url]

There ya go Nick. The links.

[Didacus]

Thank you for posting this (and bumping it) CAM. Though I don't have the time to read it all now, I most certainly will. It makes 'research' so much easier when someone more knowledgeable than yourself can point to the good stuff, saves the trouble of filtering some unreasonable critiques and stuff that can lead astray proper understading.

I guess that's what supernumeraries are for!

mille mercis!
(a thousand 'thank yous')

[EcceNovaFacioOmni]

I like Vatican II.

[phatcatholic]

[quote name='Cam42' date='Sep 7 2005, 02:49 PM'][url="http://www.crisismagazine.com/march2004/johnston.htm"]Open Windows: Why Vatican II Was Necessary[/url]

[url="http://www.crisismagazine.com/june2004/hitchcock.htm"]Off The Rails: Was Vatican II Hijacked?[/url]

[url="http://www.crisismagazine.com/julaug2004/feature1.htm"]After the Council: Living Vatican II[/url]

There ya go Nick.  The links.
[right][snapback]714571[/snapback][/right][/quote]
looks like i had them already ::
[url="http://www.phatmass.com/directory/index.php/cat_id/492"]http://www.phatmass.com/directory/index.php/cat_id/492[/url]

also see here:
[url="http://www.phatmass.com/directory/index.php/cat_id/338"]http://www.phatmass.com/directory/index.php/cat_id/338[/url]

pax christi,
phatcatholic

[philothea]

I have read, and will soon comment.

Not that you asked for comments. I'm just a chatterbox.

[Cam42]

[quote name='philothea' date='Sep 7 2005, 06:41 PM']I have read, and will soon comment.

Not that you asked for comments.  I'm just a chatterbox.
[right][snapback]714722[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]


Chatter away.....I am looking for some serious thoughts on the subject.

[Didacus]

This statement has me somewhat perplexed:

[quote]The council made it clear that she no longer wanted a confessional state tied to a monarchy; it was high time to make peace with liberal democracy. Henceforth the Church does not impose but proposes the truth; she will not rely on the coercive machinery of the state.[/quote]

Now I might be at the disavantage of being a little too young to know the differences between the church prior and after Vatican II, but how would you describe how the church imposed her views on others prior to Vatican II? [i](and if you start off with the inquisition, I will be very very disapointed)[/i]

I can understand how this is part of "delivering" the message and in no way affects the message itself. If there is one thing I know of Vatican II, is that it did not change the teachings of the Church, it just changed her presentation of her teachings, making them accessible to a more critical audience that had generally grown in education and general comprehension of the world. This, as far as I can see, is one of the predominant factors of misunderstanding that plague the proper intergration of Vatican II. Please correct me if I am wrong...

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edit to add:

[quote]Remain utterly faithful to the Church’s teachings while radiating outward to the world. That is also the lesson of Vatican II. [/quote]

This quote I really like. Many find that being faithful to the church is only limited to giving obediance, but I believe it is so much more. Like being faithful to my wife is not limited to sexual intercoarse.

Edited September 8, 2005 by Didacus

[Didacus]

[quote]Had the council met a decade earlier, during the relatively stable 1950s, it’s possible that there could have been an orderly and untroubled transition. But after 1965 the spirit of the age was quite different, and by then many Catholics were eager to break out of what they considered their religious prison. [/quote]

From every realiable source speaking of Vatican II, this is precisely the impression I get; if anything the Vatican II council came too late.

After reading that second post of yours Cam42, I am certainly frustrated once again by the media...
No surprises there. A secualr media form, taking advantage of a momentous event, to sell newspapers and air-time without realizing nor caring for the lies and damage they where spreading. It seems the spirit of greed was hard at work to destroy the council's conclusion long before the council was over.