#119 Vatican II: Legacy and Hope

   With the resignation of Benedict XVI, and the prospect of a new Pope within a few weeks, it is more urgent than ever that we make the 50th anniversary of Vatican II a time of renewed clarity about and commitment to its legacy. The following is the second part of my postings from Vatican II's 40th anniversary:

   In my last post, I suggested we risk losing the legacy of Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) unless the “Vatican II Generation” convinces Catholics too young to remember the Council that Vatican II is too important to forget.  

Pope Paul VI Addresses the United Nations, October 1965

   But why do we risk forgetting Vatican II? And why is it so important to remember?

The most obvious reason for forgetting Vatican II is that 21^st century Catholicism presents a troublingly negative image for younger Catholics, especially in America. The clergy sex abuse crisis has scandalized and depressed many Catholics, and provided others with a convenient excuse to disengage from Church life. The hypocritical and dishonest leadership of Bishops caused even wider damage than the abusive behavior of priests. The result: a self-inflicted crisis of credibility that leaves church authorities powerless to command the respect and compliance of their flock—and obstructs our view of Vatican II’s great accomplishment.

But there is a larger shadow obscuring the memory of Vatican II: the papacy of John-Paul II. This is ironic, because in many respects John-Paul II’s papacy was a product of the Council, impossible to imagine except in the post-Conciliar era. But the cult of his personality has obscured the Council’s importance. For millions of younger Catholics, JP II is their Vatican II – which is to say their Catholic identity is not as “post-Vatican II Catholics” but as “John-Paul II” Catholics.

For example: it has become commonplace in the media, both Catholic and secular, to treat the history of late 20^th century Catholicism as though John-Paul II was its most important feature. As I argued last week, both John XXIII and Paul VI regarded Vatican II as nothing less than the rebirth of the Catholic Church 20 centuries after its founding—an event of much greater importance than any one man’s reign as Pope.

But assuming I am correct that (1) Vatican II is too important to forget and (2) recent events may make us forget –what exactly is the legacy that we risk losing?

Unfortunately, Catholics have floundered for the answer for 40 years. Too often Catholics have sought answers in the overwhelming volume of the sixteen documents of Vatican II. In my own view, those documents provide clear messages

about Vatican II’s reforms, but they do not send a clear, unambiguous, uncluttered message about the purpose of the Council as a whole! Beyond the reforms, everyone seems to know that Vatican II was about “Renewal” – but we have been arguing about what that means for 40 years.

For me, the most direct way to understand what “Renewal” means (and therefore understand Vatican II’s real purpose and legacy) is to listen carefully to the eloquence and unmistakable clarity of Vatican II’s chief architect, Pope Paul VI.

On October 8, 1965, Paul became the first “Pilgrim Pope” when he traveled to the New World to address the UN in New York. Vatican II would end just eight weeks later, but until now it had remained a distant blip on most Americans’ radar. Paul used this speech to announce the Council’s agenda in the most public way imaginable:

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…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.

Listen to this man. He is speaking to the whole world, not just to Catholics. He says the Church has been seeking “a conversation” with that world. He says our new moment in history demands a new understanding of humanity and the human future. He says that will only happen through an inner, “personal transformation” in which spiritual principles animate the whole of our civilized life together.

This agenda goes ‘way beyond turning altars around or shifting rituals from Latin to English. It is about a new relationship between the Church and the world.

Two months later, as Vatican II ended, Paul VI showed he was not naïvely assuming that modern culture was always friendly to Christian values. Rather, he was challenging the Church to reach out to and befriend even a hostile, secular modernity. 

For Paul, charity was the Council’s “principal religious feature.” In stark contrast to the condemnations and siege mentality of past centuries, Vatican II always approached controverted issues with its mind on understanding and its heart on reconciliation. Paul chose to illustrate with the example of secular humanism:

Secular humanism…has, in a certain sense, defied the council. The religion of the God who became man has met the religion (for such it is) of man who makes himself God. And what happened? Was there a clash, a battle, a condemnation? There could have been, but there was none. The old story of the Samaritan has been the model of the spirituality of the council. A feeling of boundless sympathy has permeated the whole of it.

Over the last 25 years, the Church has implemented Vatican II’s call to reach out to the world – how else to explain John Paul II’s constant globetrotting? But even while reaching out, the Church in recent years has often seemed fearful and hostile, rather than charitable and sympathetic.

It’s understandable that many Catholics are disturbed by developments since Vatican II: the spread of legal abortion, the declining numbers of churchgoers, priests, brothers, and sisters; the growing secularization and consumerization of modern society; the rise of terrorism; the decline of “traditional moral values.”

Any of these might be reasons to abandon the positive, open, optimistic attitude, except for one thing: all the troubling developments since Vatican II pale before the horrific developments before Vatican II. Think of WWI (60,000 dead the first day at Verdun). Think of WW II, (over 30 million dead, a majority women and children). Think of the Holocaust, and its systematic attempt to wipe out a people. Think of the Cold War and the global terror it spawned while condemning most of the world to abject poverty.

Here’s the bottom line: if those horrors did not stop John XXIII and Paul VI from proclaiming their vision of a friendly, optimistic partnership between a “reborn” Church and a “transformed” world, why should we, 40 years later, fall prey to pessimism, fear, and hostility? Granted, these 40 years have not produced the kind of spiritually “illuminated” civilization that Paul envisioned at the U.N. But was anyone naïve enough to think that kind of renewal could be accomplished in a single generation?

Paul VI proposed a “conversation with the entire world” to make that vision real. Forty years later, we must ask: are we, as Church, still speaking to the world? And is the world still listening? If the answer is yes, then the conversation continues, the legacy is intact, and Renewal is still our hope for the future.

But if the answer is no, we should not be surprised if the future is bleak, and we have only ourselves to blame if we fail to retrieve the vision of Vatican II and convince the next generation to pick up that conversation anew.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2005