EXCERPT:
The seismic jolt of Vatican Council II (1962-1965) meant little to Americans Catholics until the first shockwave reached our shores—exactly 45 years ago this week.
This is the moment when Pope Paul VI broke all tradition and precedent (the pope had been, quite literally, the “prisoner of the Vatican” for the previous 94 years) by traveling across the Atlantic to deliver his Church’s message to the world.
The scene was the stuff of high theater...
…Now this “Pilgrim Pope” stood before the General Assembly, the first Pope to visit the New World, and spoke in French.
Paul appealed to outlaw all nuclear weapons, issued his famous cry: "Jamais plus de guerre!”(Never any more War). He also urged more concerted action on hunger. And he even advised the UN to admit Red China.
Most surprising and significant of all, however, were the Pope's extended remarks about his own Church and the UN itself. He began by giving the Catholic point of view:
Like a messenger who, after a long journey, finally succeeds in delivering the letter which has been entrusted to him, so we appreciate the good fortune of this moment, however brief, which fulfills a desire nourished in the heart for nearly twenty centuries. For, as you well remember, we are very ancient; we here represent a long history; we here celebrate the epilogue of a weary pilgrimage in search of a conversation with the entire world, ever since the command was given to us: Go and bring the good news to all peoples.
Next, he challenged the UN to an extraordinarily exalted view of its own mission:
Now, you represent all peoples...The edifice which you have constructed must never fall; it must be perfected and made equal to the needs which world history will present. You mark a stage in the development of mankind from which retreat must never be admitted, but from which it is necessary that advance be made.
The Pope paused. Then, in the measured tones of the career diplomat he was, he sharpened his point by comparing the UN's global mission to Catholicism's:
You are a bridge between peoples. You are a network of relations between states. We would almost say that your chief characteristic is a reflection, as it were, in the temporal field, of what our Catholic Church aspires to be in the spiritual field: unique and universal. Your vocation is to make brothers not only of some, but of all people.
Finally, he argued that Catholicism’s concern with humanity's spiritual needs should link, rather than separate, the two organizations:
This edifice which you are constructing does not rest upon merely material and earthly foundations, for thus it would be a house built upon sand; above all, it is based on our own consciences. The hour has struck for our "conversion," for personal transformation, for interior renewal. We must get used to thinking of humanity in a new way...With a new manner, too, of conceiving the paths of history and the destiny of the world...The edifice of modern civilization must be built upon spiritual principles which alone can, not only support it, but even illuminate and animate it.
It was October 4, 1965. Vatican II would end just eight weeks later, but until now it had remained a distant blip on most Americans’ radar. Millions saw the TV coverage of the pope landing in New York, the pope meeting the President of the United States, the pope before the UN, the Pope saying mass at Yankee Stadium. Paul had used this speech to announce the Council’s agenda in the most public way imaginable.
The implications of the seismic shift we have witnessed in Catholicism since Vatican II cannot be fully understood without accounting for the prior model being left behind. What was it, exactly, that was being changed, lost, abandoned, rejected? And what was supposed to replace it?
The world has never had a global religion. In fact, the overwhelming majority of religions in human history have never extended beyond the clan, tribe, or local region where they began…In all of history, in fact, only a handful of religions have expanded beyond local culture to become known as "world religions." But even these show marked geographic and cultural limitations...
Christianity did attempt global status once, but its bid was based on a faulty strategy that ultimately limited and even weakened its influence. The turning point was the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in the early 4th century. Christianity...now adopted Greco-Roman culture as its sponsor…Christendom, became the cultural vehicle for expanding the Christian mission. As this European culture was exported across the globe via colonialism, Christianity went with it, replacing native religions wherever it went.
...But the strategy was doomed, because the attempt to Europeanize the whole world could never succeed.
Indeed, the last half of the 20th century saw…The movement of the Third World to throw off colonialism and its alien European culture
At Vatican II, the Catholic Church, in the very act of abandoning Eurocentrism, committed itself to a second attempt at making Christianity the world's first global religion. This time, however, the strategy was quite different: if there could be no global culture, if Eurocentrism was dead, then the alternative was obvious. Christianity must evolve into a religion tied to no one culture, capable of opening and adapting to any surroundings, aiming to influence without first dominating.
In Paul’s vision (inherited from John XXIII), if Vatican II's global gamble succeeded, Catholicism would lead Christianity into a position of new prominence. Already the world's largest religion, Christianity would become the world's first truly global religion -- the "Light of Nations" (Lumen Gentium), shining with vast influence as the world's "expert on humanity" to promote a "civilization of love" and a “culture of life.” If Vatican II failed, Catholicism could lose its own identity.
Forty-five years later, that gamble’s outcome remains unknown. But the “conversation with the entire world” evoked by Paul VI has blossomed, under the papacies of John-Paul II and Benedict XVI, into a permanent dialog aimed at the good of all humankind.
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