Remodelling the Church
In the song “A New Argentina” from the Lloyd Webber/Rice musical Evita, the generals sing: “We face the world together with no dissent from within.” For many, sympathisers and critics, this may seem the position of the Catholic Church past, present and future. Vatican II, I believe, views this as a mistaken “model” of Church.

Bishops fill St. Peter’s Basilica as Pope Paul VI presides over a meeting of the Second Vatican Council. (CNS photo/Catholic Press Photo)
Cardinal Avery Dulles, in his classic book Models of the Church, presents a number of historical and contemporary images of the Catholic Church: perfect society, servant, herald and so on. I am not going to use this work, though it is highly recommendable. Rather I would like to tease out from its documents what Vatican II said about the Church.
The two key documents that modelled the Church of Vatican II were Lumen Gentium (1964) and Gaudium et Spes (1965). That some in the Church emphasise one over the other is also instructive.
The former is ad intra, the Church looking in on itself at its structure and function as an institution. It is frequently used by conservatives to defend tight hierarchy and authority in the face of attempts to “modernise” Catholicism.
The latter is ad extra, looking outwards to the world and asking how we can proclaim the Gospel in our particular times and contexts. It is frequently cited as a proof text for a more liberal Church.
Both texts are misused in the process.
The fact that these two documents exist says a lot about the tensions that were played out at the Council.
As all the best historians of the Council (Rynne, O’Malley, Alberigo et al) report, it was not the case of a liberal coup d’état; nor was it simply business as usual, a continuation from the First Vatican Council. What was distinctive was that the Council Fathers took on board the discipline that informed the thinking of its originator, John XXIII: history. They took the history of the Church, and therefore tradition in its deepest sense, more fully.
Too often history is confused with antiquarianism, a nostalgia for a past (all too often non-existent) Golden Age. The proper study of the past, including the realisation that it is studied through the lenses of present biases and interests, reveals a more complex picture—and one that can never be replicated.
History, as opposed to antiquarianism, pervades both documents. Lumen Gentium, though it did not overturn the centralism of Vatican I, corrected its excesses by taking note of a more collegial model of Church governance of an earlier era.
It did not move the Church back to conciliarism—the notion that the supreme Church authority was a council of the Church that could overrule or even unseat a pope. Rather by affirming the authority of a council with the pope and never without him, it opted for a middle way, a kind of collegial monarchy. It also emphasised the need for dialogue and consultation at every level within this hierarchal system.
With Gaudium et Spes the Council revised drastically its attitude to the world. Where before the primary attitude was often suspicion and mistrust, even hostility, the emphasis moved towards positive engagement.
As Pope John himself had noted, there was much goodness in the world, much to be praised. The Church could not withdraw, not least because its members were as much part of the world as anybody else. Through engagement and through sharing its spiritual insights, the Council Fathers believed the Church could cooperate in making the world a better place.
Two images of Church—the Mystical Body and the Pilgrim People of God—pervade the Council texts. While the Mystical Body might be seen as ad intra and People of God as ad extra, this interpretation undermines the central point: the Church as both the Mystical Body of Christ and the Pilgrim People of God. The Mystical Body is the Pilgrim People, and vice versa.
In a sense the Council affirmed that the Church was simul justus et peccator, both justified by faith yet sinful and in need of redemption.
What did come under fire were models of the Church that were clericalist and triumphalist.
By emphasising the role and vocation of the laity (indeed the priesthood of all baptised) and the need for consultation, and by recognising that the Church was both teacher and learner, the Perfect Society model had to be abandoned. By seeing good in other churches and other religions, the notion of an exclusive elect was broken down.
Most of all, the Church came to see itself as a people on the move, a work in process, moving through prayer and service towards the original reason the Church came into existence: cooperation with God in bringing about God’s reign. A closed-in society of the Elect, in short a cult, cannot do this.
As Fr Karl Rahner observed in 1967, shortly after the Council ended: “God addresses to the Church the question whether it has the courage to undertake an apostolic offensive into [the] future and consequently the necessary courage to show itself to the world sincerely, in such a form that no one can have the impression that the Church only exists as a mere survival from earlier times because it has not yet had time to die. But even if it has the courage to change, time is needed and time must be taken.
“For the Church cannot change into something or other at will, arbitrarily, but only into a new presence of its old reality, into the present and future of its past, of the Gospel, of the grace and truth of God.”
A Church ancient yet modern, conserving yet renewing, prayerful yet activist—this is the essence of tradition. This is the Church of Vatican II.
This concludes our year-long series on Hope&Joy.
- Saint Paul and the Bible - July 29, 2019
- Religious Orders: Then and Now - November 6, 2018
- A Brief History of Religious Orders in South Africa - October 25, 2018