Editors’ Introduction:
Unwittingly, Pope Benedict XVI has written the final chapter to our article, “What Happened After Vatican II?” which we published in the March-April 2004 edition of the Houston Catholic Worker. At the time of its publication, long-time Catholic Worker and Catholic Deacon Tom Cornell spoke positively about our description and analysis of the profound movements, experiences and scholarship that prepared the way for the Council, but recommended an additional final chapter regarding the outcome.
The editors are products of the Vatican II renaissance, so much more profound than some of the post-Vatican II decon-structionism, which we also experienced and were a part of. We told in that earlier article of the enthusiasm and the inspiration of those involved in the renewal movements in the decades before the Council, of how participants were encouraged to love God passionately and give their lives to the poor and how their apostolic action flowed from a deepened understanding of and participation in the liturgy of the Church. These vital movements and the ideas and book publishing that accom-panied them did not reflect a break with the past, but were based in ressourcement, a return to the sources, a renewal guided by the best of the Tradition. When Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council the hope was that this profound renewal would permeate the whole Church and flow into the world.
The years after the Council, for a variety of reasons which included what was going on in the secular culture, the results have been mixed. Press reports during the Council unfortunately featured conflicts between liberals and conservatives more than anything else and that labeling and conflict has often been exacerbated in the 40 years since the Council and passed off as renewal. The conflicts became the focus rather than the documents of Vatican II.
Both groups hardened in their positions. Some seemed to identify themselves more with these labels than with their Christianity. “Liberals,” often spoke about justice in the world and living out the “spirit” of the Council rather than referring to the documents themselves or delving into the writings of the early Fathers of the Church or the saints. “Conservatives,” while endorsing the Magis-terium, sometimes seemed to miss the enormity of injustice and the plight of the poor in the world to which the Gospel calls us to respond with the love of Christ who looked on the multitudes and had pity on them. The two groups seemed to spend a lot of time and energy attacking one another. What came to be called “cafeteria Catholicism” developed during the pontificate of John XXIII with the rejection of William Buckley and his followers of Pope John’s Social Encyclical “Mater et Magistra, Mother and Teacher” (Buckley’s famous comment was: “Mater, sí, Magistra, no” which means Mother, yes, Teacher, no) and then on the other side the strident, confrontational rejec-tion by liberal theologians of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae on birth control and the theology of marriage.
Then came others who, while voicing loyalty to the Church and personal piety, mixed their religion, politics and economics in such a way that the relationship between faith and life in the world became unrecognizable; in fact the theories of some Catholics on war and economics appeared to be the antithesis of the Gospel.
Dualism, a split, between faith and culture, continued to be the drama of the times.
It sometimes seemed hard in these years to find too many who embraced the fullness of the Church’s rich teaching, those who put together adoration and a love of the liturgy with peacemaking and living the Gospel in the marketplace, those who embraced both the Cross and the Resurrection, and the consistent ethic of life, those committed to building up the civilization of love in the Communion of the Trinity together with God’s people.
However, the development of the theology of ressourcement and Communion, of ecclesial movements, and the lives of saints also flourished in the decades after the Council and brought renewed life to the Church.
The heart of Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas message to the Roman Curia (the Cardinals and Archbishops who manage the Vatican Congregations and Pontifical Councils in Rome), was a reflection on and interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. In his message he spoke very positively about the Council and addressed the post-Council problems . He also placed his reflections in the context of suffering and evil in the world.
Peter Maurin, one of the important thinkers in the years before the Council, spoke of the twentieth century as a new Dark Age; he saw the evil to come, even before some of the worst totalitarian excesses of that century came to light, e.g., the Holocaust and hundreds of thousands of deaths under Stalin; he was very aware of the economic suffering of workers caused by neoliberal capitalism, already condemned by the Popes in the encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.
Peter told in his Easy Essays of how the monks (at a time when monasticism was very new) brought light and learning to Europe during what we know as the Dark Ages. Peter and Dorothy Day, like so many others who prepared the way for the Council, believed that it was through faith, through the power and love of the Crucified one that hope and love could be brought once again to our world. Dorothy Day spoke often of the folly of the Cross and of seeing the face of Christ, even the humiliated face of Christ in the poor and those who suffer. Dorothy and Peter and the other giants who prepared the way derived their sustenance for their work in the world from the Eucharist, prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, and the celebration of some of the Hours of the Liturgy of the Hours. (For more on what inspired Dorothy and Peter, see our book, “The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins, Paulist Press 2005).
Pope Benedict XVI introduced his Christmas message with John Paul II’s reflections from his last book “Memory and Identity,” in which he “has left us an interpretation of suffering that is not a theological or philosophical theory but a fruit that matured on his personal path of suffering which he walked, sustained by faith in the Crucified Lord.” Benedict notes that “Both at the beginning and once again at the end of the book mentioned, the Pope shows that he is deeply touched by the spectacle of the power of evil, which we dramatically experienced in the century that has just ended. He says in his text: ‘The evil was not a small-scale evil … It was an evil of gigantic proportions, an evil which availed itself of state structures in order to accomplish its wicked work, an evil built up into a system.”
The question for John Paul II was, “Might evil be invincible? Is it the ultimate power of history? Because of this experience of evil, for Pope Wojtyla the question of redemption became the essential and central question of his life and thought as a Christian. Is there a limit against which the power of evil shatters? ‘Yes, there is,’ the Pope replies in this book of his, as well as in his Encyclical on redemption.”
Benedict XVI’s Christmas message presents John Paul II’s answer to the great question which haunts so many: “What limits the force of evil, the power, in brief, which overcomes it – this is how he says it – is God’s suffering, the suffering of the Son of God on the Cross: ‘The suffering of the Crucified God is not just one form of suffering alongside others…. In sacrificing himself for us all, Christ gave a new meaning to suffering, opening up a new dimension, a new order: the order of love… It is this suffering which burns and consumes evil with the flame of love…. Christ has redeemed the world: ‘By his wounds we are healed’ (Is 53:5)”
Before speaking directly of his reflections on the Council, Benedict also wrote about adoration, correcting the post-Council idea that somehow Mass and adoration at other times of the Risen Lord “present in the Eucharist with flesh and blood, with body and soul, with divinity and humanity” were in opposition to each other. The Holy Father quoted St. Augustine who said, “No one should eat this flesh without first adoring it,… we should sin were we not to adore it,” adding that “Receiving the Eucharist means adoring the One whom we receive … it is precisely this personal act of encounter with the Lord that develops the social mission which is contained in the Eucharist and desires to break down barriers, not only the barriers between the Lord and us but also and above all those that separate us from one another.”
Pope Benedict XVI’s reflections on the interpretation of Vatican II follow:
The last event of this year on which I wish to reflect here is the celebration of the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council 40 years ago. This memory prompts the question: What has been the result of the Council? Was it well received? What, in the acceptance of the Council, was good and what was inadequate or mistaken? What still remains to be done? No one can deny that in vast areas of the Church the implementation of the Council has been somewhat difficult, even without wishing to apply to what occurred in these years the description that St Basil, the great Doctor of the Church, made of the Church’s situation after the Council of Nicea: he compares her situation to a naval battle in the darkness of the storm, saying among other things: “The raucous shouting of those who through disagreement rise up against one another, the incomprehensible chatter, the confused din of uninterrupted clamouring, has now filled almost the whole of the Church, falsifying through excess or failure the right doctrine of the faith…” ( De Spiritu Sancto, XXX, 77; PG 32, 213 A; SCh 17 ff., p. 524).
We do not want to apply precisely this dramatic description to the situation of the post-conciliar period, yet something from all that occurred is nevertheless reflected in it. The question arises: Why has the implementation of the Council, in large parts of the Church, thus far been so difficult?
Well, it all depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or – as we would say today – on its proper hermeneutics, the correct key to its interpretation and application. The problems in its implement-tation arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarreled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit.
On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the “hermeneutic of reform”, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.
The hermeneutic of dis-continuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts.
These innovations alone were supposed to represent the true spirit of the Council, and starting from and in conformity with them, it would be possible to move ahead. Precisely because the texts would only imperfectly reflect the true spirit of the Council and its newness, it would be necessary to go courageously beyond the texts and make room for the newness in which the Council’s deepest intention would be expressed, even if it were still vague.
In a word: it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the Council but its spirit. In this way, obviously, a vast margin was left open for the question on how this spirit should subsequently be defined and room was consequently made for every whim….
The hermeneutic of dis-continuity is countered by the hermeneutic of reform, as it was presented first by Pope John XXIII in his Speech inaugurating the Council on 11 October 1962 and later by Pope Paul VI in his Discourse for the Council’s conclusion on 7 December 1965.
Here I shall cite only John XXIII’s well-known words, which unequivocally express this hermeneutic when he says that the Council wishes “to transmit the doctrine, pure and integral, without any attenuation or distortion”. And he continues: “Our duty is not only to guard this precious treasure, as if we were concerned only with antiquity, but to dedicate ourselves with an earnest will and without fear to that work which our era demands of us…”It is necessary that “adherence to all the teaching of the Church in its entirety and preciseness…” be presented in “faithful and perfect conformity to the authentic doctrine, which, however, should be studied and expounded through the methods of research and through the literary forms of modern thought. The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another…”, retaining the same meaning and message ( The Documents of Vatican II, Walter M. Abbott, S.J., p. 715).
It is clear that this commit-ment to expressing a specific truth in a new way demands new thinking on this truth and a new and vital relationship with it; it is also clear that new words can only develop if they come from an informed understanding of the truth expressed, and on the other hand, that a reflection on faith also requires that this faith be lived. In this regard, the programme that Pope John XXIII proposed was extremely demanding, indeed, just as the synthesis of fidelity and dynamic is demanding.
However, wherever this interpretation guided the imple-mentation of the Council, new life developed and new fruit ripened. Forty years after the Council, we can show that the positive is far greater and livelier than it appeared to be in the turbulent years around 1968. Today, we see that although the good seed developed slowly, it is nonetheless growing; and our deep gratitude for the work done by the Council is likewise growing.
In his Discourse closing the Council, Paul VI pointed out a further specific reason why a hermeneutic of discontinuity can seem convincing.
In the great dispute about man which marks the modern epoch, the Council had to focus in particular on the theme of anthropology. It had to question the relationship between the Church and her faith on the one hand, and man and the contemporary world on the other (cf. ibid. ). The question becomes even clearer if, instead of the generic term “contemporary world”, we opt for another that is more precise: the Council had to determine in a new way the relationship between the Church and the modern era.
This relationship had a somewhat stormy beginning with the Galileo case. It was then totally interrupted when Kant described “religion within pure reason” and when, in the radical phase of the French Revolution, an image of the State and the human being that practically no longer wanted to allow the Church any room was disseminated.
In the 19 th century under Pius IX, the clash between the Church’s faith and a radical liberalism and the natural sciences, which also claimed to embrace with their knowledge the whole of reality to its limit, stubbornly proposing to make the “hypothesis of God” superfluous, had elicited from the Church a bitter and radical condemnation of this spirit of the modern age. Thus, it seemed that there was no longer any milieu open to a positive and fruitful understanding, and the rejection by those who felt they were the representatives of the modern era was also drastic.
In the meantime, however, the modern age had also ex-perienced developments. People came to realize that the American Revolution was offering a model of a modern State that differed from the theoretical model with radical tendencies that had emerged during the second phase of the French Revolution.
The natural sciences were beginning to reflect more and more clearly their own limitations imposed by their own method, which, despite achieving great things, was nevertheless unable to grasp the global nature of reality.
So it was that both parties were gradually beginning to open up to each other. In the period between the two World Wars and especially after the Second World War, Catholic statesmen demonstrated that a modern secular State could exist that was not neutral regarding values but alive, drawing from the great ethical sources opened by Christianity.
Catholic social doctrine, as it gradually developed, became an important model between radical liberalism and the Marxist theory of the State. The natural sciences, which without reser-vation professed a method of their own to which God was barred access, realized ever more clearly that this method did not include the whole of reality. Hence, they once again opened their doors to God, knowing that reality is greater than the naturalistic method and all that it can encompass.
It might be said that three circles of questions had formed which then, at the time of the Second Vatican Council, were expecting an answer. First of all, the relationship between faith and modern science had to be redefined. Furthermore, this did not only concern the natural sciences but also historical science for, in a certain school, the historical-critical method claimed to have the last word on the interpretation of the Bible and, demanding total exclusivity for its interpretation of Sacred Scripture, was opposed to important points in the interpretation elaborated by the faith of the Church.
Secondly, it was necessary to give a new definition to the relationship between the Church and the modern State that would make room impartially for citizens of various religions and ideologies, merely assuming responsibility for an orderly and tolerant coexistence among them and for the freedom to practise their own religion.
Thirdly, linked more generally to this was the problem of religious tolerance – a question that required a new definition of the relationship between the Christian faith and the world religions. In particular, before the recent crimes of the Nazi regime and, in general, with a retrospective look at a long and difficult history, it was necessary to evaluate and define in a new way the relationship between the Church and the faith of Israel.
These are all subjects of great importance – they were the great themes of the second part of the Council – on which it is impossible to reflect more broadly in this context. It is clear that in all these sectors, which all together form a single problem, some kind of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity had been revealed but in which, after the various distinctions between concrete historical situations and their requirements had been made, the continuity of principles proved not to have been abandoned. It is easy to miss this fact at a first glance.
It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. In this process of innovation in continuity we must learn to understand more practically than before that the Church’s decisions on contingent matters – for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free inter-pretation of the Bible – should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.
On the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change.
Basic decisions, therefore, continue to be well-grounded, whereas the way they are applied to new contexts can change. Thus, for example, if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning. Consequently, it can-not be accepted by those who believe that the human person is capable of knowing the truth about God and, on the basis of the inner dignity of the truth, is bound to this knowledge.
It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction.
The Second Vatican Council, recognizing and making its own an essential principle of the modern State with the Decree on Religious Freedom, has recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church. By so doing she can be conscious of being in full harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself (cf. Mt 22: 21), as well as with the Church of the martyrs of all time. The ancient Church naturally prayed for the emperors and political leaders out of duty (cf. I Tm 2: 2); but while she prayed for the emperors, she refused to worship them and thereby clearly rejected the religion of the State.
The martyrs of the early Church died for their faith in that God who was revealed in Jesus Christ, and for this very reason they also died for freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess one’s own faith – a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God’s grace in freedom of conscience. A missionary Church known for proclaiming her message to all peoples must necessarily work for the freedom of the faith. She desires to transmit the gift of the truth that exists for one and all.
At the same time, she assures peoples and their Governments that she does not wish to destroy their identity and culture by doing so, but to give them, on the contrary, a response which, in their innermost depths, they are waiting for – a response with which the multiplicity of cultures is not lost but instead unity between men and women increases and thus also peace between peoples.
The Second Vatican Council, with its new definition of the relationship between the faith of the Church and certain essential elements of modern thought, has reviewed or even corrected certain historical decisions, but in this apparent discontinuity it has actually preserved and deepened her inmost nature and true identity.
The Church, both before and after the Council, was and is the same Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, journeying on through time; she continues “her pilgrimage amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God”, proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes (cf. Lumen Gentium, n. 8).
Those who expected that with this fundamental “yes” to the modern era all tensions would be dispelled and that the “openness towards the world” accordingly achieved would transform everything into pure harmony, had underestimated the inner tensions as well as the contradictions inherent in the modern epoch.
They had underestimated the perilous frailty of human nature which has been a threat to human progress in all the periods of history and in every historical constellation. These dangers, with the new possibilities and new power of man over matter and over himself, did not disappear but instead acquired new dimensions: a look at the history of the present day shows this clearly.
In our time too, the Church remains a “sign that will be opposed” (Lk 2: 34) – not without reason did Pope John Paul II, then still a Cardinal, give this title to the theme for the Spiritual Exercises he preached in 1976 to Pope Paul VI and the Roman Curia. The Council could not have intended to abolish the Gospel’s opposition to human dangers and errors.
On the contrary, it was certainly the Council’s intention to overcome erroneous or superfluous contradictions in order to present to our world the requirement of the Gospel in its full greatness and purity.
The steps the Council took towards the modern era which had rather vaguely been presented as “openness to the world”, belong in short to the perennial problem of the relationship between faith and reason that is re-emerging in ever new forms. The situation that the Council had to face can certainly be compared to events of previous epochs.
In his First Letter, St Peter urged Christians always to be ready to give an answer ( apo-logia ) to anyone who asked them for the logos , the reason for their faith (cf. 3: 15).
This meant that biblical faith had to be discussed and come into contact with Greek culture and learn to recognize through interpretation the separating line but also the convergence and the affinity between them in the one reason, given by God.
When, in the 13 th century through the Jewish and Arab philosophers, Aristotelian thought came into contact with Medieval Christianity formed in the Platonic tradition and faith and reason risked entering an irreconcilable contradiction, it was above all St Thomas Aquinas who mediated the new encounter between faith and Aristotelian philosophy, thereby setting faith in a positive relationship with the form of reason prevalent in his time. There is no doubt that the wearing dispute between modern reason and the Christian faith, which had begun nega-tively with the Galileo case, went through many phases, but with the Second Vatican Council the time came when broad new thinking was required.
Its content was certainly only roughly traced in the conciliar texts, but this determined its essential direction, so that the dialogue between reason and faith, particularly important today, found its bearings on the basis of the Second Vatican Council.
This dialogue must now be developed with great open-mindedness but also with that clear discernment that the world rightly expects of us in this very moment. Thus, today we can look with gratitude at the Second Vatican Council: if we interpret and implement it guided by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the ever necessary renewal of the Church.
Copyright 2005 Libreria Editrice Vaticana To read the Holy Father’s speech in its entirety, go to http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches .
Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XVIV, No. 2, March-April 2006.
