The fruits of Vatican II
NEXT week the Church will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of one of the most consequential events in Catholic history: the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II.
The Church culture before Vatican II, the preconciliar era, has effectively ceased to exist. The liturgy is profoundly different now, for example, and Jews are no longer scorned in the Good Friday liturgy as “perfidious” but are honoured partners in interreligious dialogue.
The faithful have changed as well—partly due to the greater respect accorded to them in the postconciliar Church, partly because the social realities in the second half of the 20th century have provided the laity with a greater sense of self-confidence and independence.
As late as the 1940s it was still possible for the US bishops to threaten movie producers with a Catholic boycott of objectionable films by means of banning an obedient laity from viewing them. Today many lay people unilaterally negate those papal teachings they disagree with, especially in the domain of sexual morality and procreation.
Clearly, social progress and the changes of Vatican II make a return to the preconciliar Church not just impracticable, but utterly impossible
Today’s Church must find ways of accommodating social shifts when defining its teachings (in Vatican II parlance, be able to read the “signs of the times”), while at the same time still trying to digest the rich harvest of the council.
And that process of interpreting Vatican II has become a source of deep division within the Church. Conservative Catholics, especially in the United States, have long complained of many postconciliar clergy misrepresenting Vatican II in pursuit of a (perceived) radical liberal agenda. Mean-while, many progressive Catholics protest that Pope John Paul II rolled back the advances of the council, especially by returning undue power to the Roman curia instead of instituting the type of collegiality where the bishops govern the Church with the pope.
Both perspectives have been represented and articulated by eminent theologians and even council fathers—who themselves embraced all kinds of philosophies, from traditionalists to innovators. Neither should be dismissed in the on-going debate about the fruits of Vatican II—a process that cannot be expected to be completed within 40 years, a short time indeed in the Church’s history of two millennia.
Without a doubt, the shapers of Vatican II’s legacy now are those who interpret the council more cautiously than those who understood it as a sweeping ecclesiastical reform.
Pope Benedict has already indicated that he sees his pontificate as a means of consolidating the teachings on the council formulated by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, which he has described as the authentic interpretation. (As prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he helped to define these.)
It is unlikely, however, that the papal explication of conciliar teachings will attract an unchallenged consensus within the Church, or even among the hierarchy.
The debate on how to read Vatican II will continue for many years yet.
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