A journey of hope and joy

Mention the Second Vatican Council to young Catholics today, and chances are that they will voice their lack of interest in the Church’s most important event in four centuries, believing it to be as relevant to their lives today as the dusty LPs of Engelbert Humperdinck and Mantovani.

They might say that they are turned off by talk of a council that took place long before they were born. In terms of Church history, of course, Vatican II was a very recent event.

If the history of the Church was a football pitch and we stood on the goal-line, Vatican II would be about two and a half metres ahead of us. Or, if Church history was a 24-hour day, with the first Pentecost representing a second after midnight and today being a second before the next midnight, Vatican II would have happened at around 11:24pm.

In short, Vatican II is still immensely relevant precisely because it took place so very recently—just 36 minutes ago.

As we begin our year-long weekly series of articles under the Hope&Joy banner, we hope to bring the Second Vatican Council and its teachings closer to the Catholic community. By focusing on various themes as they relate to the vision and teachings of the council, we hope to present Vatican II not as an abstract point in history, but as a living entity which reverberates in everything we do as Catholics.

Vatican II changed not only the way Catholics celebrate the Eucharist, but also how they relate to one another. It is significant that in our inaugural Hope&Joy article there is a refrain of references to the laity. Where once the laity’s role was, in the popular wisecrack, to “pray, pay and obey”, the faithful are now called to active participation in the mission of the Church.

The various documents of Vatican II, and those that flowed from the council, serve to guide us in living out our call to the royal priesthood. The mandate, so often reiterated by Popes John Paul II and Benedict, to be missionaries in the workplace by showing others the hope and joy of our faith is a fruit of the Second Vatican Council.

The Hope&Joy movement takes its name from Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), the council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. In 1982, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) described Gaudium et Spes as “an attempt to officially reconcile the Church with the world” and as an escape from the “ghetto complex” which the Church had maintained since the French Revolution of 1789.

Vatican II changed profoundly the way in which the Church relates to the modern world, in particular to other Christian churches and adherents of non-Christian faiths.

The council did not have much to say about Catholics who become inactive in their faith, but it is fair to say that Pope Benedict’s decision to set up the Congregation for New Evangelisation to oversee the Church’s missionary activities in Europe is a reflection of the spirit of Vatican II. It says that even in traditionally Christian regions, the Church must come to the people, not expecting the people to come to her.

In the course of our Hope&Joy series, we will look at concrete examples of how the teachings of Vatican II are being lived out, and offer reflections on what these teachings mean in our pursuit to live our lives with Christ at the centre.

The series will cover themes as diverse as death and liturgy, ecumenism and priesthood, family and media. We will also look at subjects such as HIV/Aids and how that crisis, which erupted two decades after the council, relates to its teachings.

The series will not go into questions about whether the ecclesiological expectations of Vatican II have been met; that is an important debate for another time.

Our aim is to present the Second Vatican Council as still relevant in the life of the Church, having moved with the times, from the LPs of Engelbert Humperdinck and Mantovani in the 1960s to the digital era of Lady Gaga and Lady Antebellum.