The Most Important Religious Event of the Century

What was Vatican II? Why was it convened? What does it mean today?

By Joseph A. Komonchak

Almost everyone describes the Second Vatican Council in dramatic terms. One historian called it the most important event in the Church since the Protestant Reformation. Another said that in the decade after the council, the Church changed more than it had in the entire previous century. Many historians voted it the most important religious event of the 20th century, and Catholics of a certain age still divide their Catholic memories in two — before Vatican II and after it.

Scarcely an area of Catholic life was left unchanged by Vatican II. Some transformations were intended, such as the revised rites for all seven sacraments, the introduction of vernacular languages into the liturgy, new fast and abstinence rules for Fridays and Lent, the promotion of lay ministries, the encouragement of dialogue with Protestants and Jews, and so on. Many of these were controversial by themselves, but when accompanied by other unintended changes — the decline in Mass attendance, plummeting vocations, demonstrations of open dissent — attitudes toward Vatican II became inevitably bound up with judgments about its aftermath.

In my undergraduate course on Vatican II at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., I have the students interview older Catholics who remember the Church before the council. The students ask the elders what it was like to be a Catholic then, what they appreciate about the changes, what they don’t like. The experience vividly shows the students how differently people interpret Vatican II. Some regard it as the greatest thing since Pentecost, while others, like the father of one of the students, exclaim, “Those d––d liberals fixed what wasn’t broken!”

Roughly speaking, Catholics view the council in one of three ways. The progressives see it as a long-overdue and much-needed accommodation to the modern world. Pope John XXIII opened the windows, they say, and let the Spirit blow back in. If there have been troubles since Vatican II, it’s because the conservatives have blunted the sharp edge of conciliar reform.

Traditionalists, meanwhile, say the Church’s long-standing suspicion and even condemnation of the modern world was appropriate. The Church had grown strong and self-confident through this countercultural stance, they say, as illustrated by the beauty of its liturgy, the popularity of its devotions, the committed obedience of its members. The crises that have followed Vatican II are the bitter fruit of the council’s mistaken repudiation of centuries-old habits of mind and heart.

Finally, reformists reject the sharp contrast posed by the first two groups. They insist on the elements of continuity in the teachings of Vatican II, and look realistically at the state of the Church before Vatican II. It was not as irrelevant or archaic as the progressives say, nor was it the ideal thing the traditionalists nostalgically describe. The popes and bishops intended necessary reform, they argue, but not revolution.

To shed light on the debate, it may be helpful to step back and consider just what is meant by Vatican II, anyway. In the first place, Vatican II is the 16 documents produced over four years of debate and compromise by the popes and bishops of the council. The documents make up a relatively small book, but are an obligatory reference point, especially when extravagant claims are made about what the council said or endorsed.

Second, technically speaking, Vatican II is what happened between January 25, 1959, when Pope John XXIII announced his intention of convoking a council, and December 8, 1965, when Pope Paul VI brought it to a close. And it is from this perspective that the drama of the council is best perceived. The first session in 1962 is the setting for a number of particularly dramatic events, starting with Pope John’s opening speech . Here, the bishops showed that they were interested in significant reform, and that they did not wish to issue documents that were as defensive and condemnatory as the texts that had been prepared for them. The result was that those who had been in charge of the preparation of the council were suddenly revealed to be in the minority, while those who had been marginal during the preparation were now in charge.

During this time, many bishops spoke of what a change of mind and heart the conciliar experience had caused in them. And those fortunate enough to be in Rome followed every day the ups and downs of the debates and voting. Indeed, Catholics around the world read eagerly about the council on the front pages of their newspapers. They wondered at the sight of all the bishops gathered together, at the magnitude of the debates carried out in a spirit of charity and for the good of the Church. For almost everyone, this was a completely new experience of the Church.

A third definition of Vatican II considers the unintended consequences of the council. While the popes and bishops of Vatican II may have meant to make simple or straightforward decisions, they inspired some revolutionary consequences. These aftereffects are another way of looking at Vatican II.

Three of the council’s basic decisions created strong, unintended consequences felt to this day. The first was the very project of embarking upon serious self-examination for the sake of self-renewal and reform. This is what Pope John called aggiornamento, or updating. The goal was to better discern Christ’s wishes for the Church and improve pastoral effectiveness in the modern world. Yet Catholics were not very familiar with the idea of self-criticism; in fact, they had been told more than once by recent popes that the Church had no need of reform. Soon it would seem that there was hardly a single aspect of Catholic life — worship, preaching, catechesis, devotions, presence in the world, relations with others — that would not be examined and more or less altered.

Once the genies of reform had been let out of the bottle — and by none other than the Church’s supreme authority — Vatican II proved to be far bigger and more difficult to control than the popes and bishops had expected. People began extending aggiornamento into areas and at levels that the council never anticipated.

A second decision that prompted unintended consequences was the council’s validation of local Churches, that is, its urging that the Church be genuinely Asian in Asia, African in Africa, and so on. This went against the Church’s tendency toward uniformity and the long-held assumption that its Greco-Roman roots and its integral role in European history compelled it to remain Eurocentric.

The council argued that people of other cultures did not need to imitate Europeans to become Christians, that the task of becoming genuinely at home in other cultures can only be undertaken by members of that culture. It called for greater self-responsibility for the local Churches, thereby undermining the centralization of decision making in Rome that had reached new heights in the 20th century.

Finally, the popes and bishops of Vatican II adopted a far more nuanced attitude toward the modern world than had been typical of the previous century and a half. When Pope John in his opening speech criticized the “prophets of doom,” he was referring to Church leaders who could see nothing in the modern world but decline and degradation, apostasy from Christ. He asked whether the modern world might not offer new possibilities for the reign of Christ.

Vatican II responded by calling for dialogue with the modern world, which meant listening as well as speaking, learning as well as teaching. Catholics were now encouraged to enter into respectful conversation with other Christians, those of other religions, and nonbelievers.

This open attitude ran counter to the logic that lay behind many Catholic movements and organizations that had grown up in the previous century. Many of these existed precisely in order to inoculate Catholics from the world, to give them a powerful sense of identity, and to prepare them for the combat that would win the world back to Christ. Now the bishops were saying the world is not all bad, that we may have some things to learn from it, that there is much that unites us with Protestants and Jews.

Suddenly, Catholics had to forge a new identity, one that could hold even if we didn’t demonize other people. And that proved harder than many expected, and more than a few Catholic organizations declined in membership or disappeared entirely.

These are the three decisions — to undergo self-examination, to increase local control, to open the Church to the modern world — that had deeper consequences than participants in the council had anticipated. Almost 40 years later, we live the dynamism of these great decisions: We know our permanent duty to review how we live our Christian lives; we feel our responsibilities to undertake Christ’s work in our local Churches; and we understand that we are the Church in the world, a world that has much to praise and assimilate, a world that needs Christ. If those three things remain clear in our consciousness and strong in our conscience, then Vatican II is still alive. It can still become the “new Pentecost” that Pope John hoped it would be.

Taken from http://www.catholicdigest.org/stories/200110060a.html