Excerpt: The expression often used is Vatican II was "to modernize the Catholic Church." That's a horrible expression. Vatican II was, if anything, going back into the tradition to bring up things that could help the Church deal with the present. If you want a phrase about the spirit of Vatican II, I would say "peace on earth, good will to all... To give you the kind of spiritual shift Vatican II tried to effect, here's how it goes: from threats to persuasion, from adversary to partner, from hostility to friendship, from exclusion to inclusion, from monologue to dialogue, from fault finding to common ground, from laws to ideals, from coercion to conscience, from behavior modification to conversion of heart."
***
The Spirit of Vatican IIBy John W. O'Malley, S.J. http://maryknollmagazine.org/index.php/magazines/457-the-spirit-of-vatican-ii
We've all heard about "The Spirit of Vatican II." But what do we mean by "the spirit"? I mean basic orientations, themes, issues that run through the Council. They appear in many documents but transcend any particular document.
The Council issued 16 documents, which make up close to 25 percent of the documents of all 21 Ecumenical Councils held in 2,000 years of Church history. So I consider Vatican II a language event.
Vatican II operated differently from the basic model for councils. Let's take the first Ecumenical Council, the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine. It made certain laws, and with laws you get a penalty if you don't observe them. They heard the criminal case of the heresy of Arius and condemned him.
This is the pattern followed until Vatican II (1962–1965). Instead of making laws, Vatican II holds up ideals. It has a new vocabulary, not new in the Christian tradition but new for a council: Friend, brother, sister, partnership, cooperation, peace, freedom, dialogue, conscience. These occur again and again in the documents. So it's not simply dealing with what you can do wrong but rather what you can do right, and, therefore, is a universal call to holiness. That becomes a leitmotif of the Council.
Its documents build on one another, quote one another, paraphrase one another. There is coherence among those documents, and, therefore, you can have themes, you can have an orientation, you can have a spirit. To give you the kind of spiritual shift Vatican II tried to effect, here's how it goes: from threats to persuasion, from adversary to partner, from hostility to friendship, from exclusion to inclusion, from monologue to dialogue, from fault finding to common ground, from laws to ideals, from coercion to conscience, from behavior modification to conversion of heart.
Look at the pope who called Vatican II. The life experience of Pope John XXIII was different from that of almost any pope in at least the last millennium. He was born of a family so poor that when he was ordained a priest in Rome in 1904, his family did not have enough money for the train fare from Bergamo near Milan to Rome for his ordination. When the First World War broke out, he served as a medical orderly and then as a chaplain. Afterward, the Vatican sent him as apostolic vicar to Bulgaria, an orthodox country outside Western Europe. He was there for 10 years. Then he spent 10 years in Turkey, a Muslim country. He was there during the Second World War, with all the trouble with the Nazis, the persecution of the Jews, and trying to help the Jews get out of Greece. In 1944, he goes as the nuncio to Paris, which was normally a big plum in the Vatican Diplomatic Corps, but no plum in the aftermath of the war. Then he becomes pope.
He calls the Council to show the Church to be, in his words, "The loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of goodness and mercy." One crisis of modern times was multiculturalism. The world was always multicultural, but by the middle of the 20th century, the colonial powers had been ousted, and "the white man's burden" was not such a nice thing. Where does this leave the Catholic Church, which is so identified with Western culture? The liturgy was in Latin! That's a big problem for a church that wants to be catholic or universal.
There has always been religious pluralism, but by the middle of the 20th century, religious ghettos were dissolving. You were living next to your Lutheran friend, or your Orthodox friend, or even Muslims and Hindus. How did the Catholic Church treat other religions? With derision, contempt, hostility.
Then there is evolution and the origin of the species. Where does this leave Adam and Eve? It's the end of the classical worldview; the world we live in is changing, evolving, expanding.
How did the Council respond to all this? I think the Second Vatican Council was a council of reconciliation. The key document in the Council, as far as I'm concerned, is the first document, the document on the liturgy. It set some of the basic orientations of the Council, from the first line: we're trying to work towards the unity of Christians. When the liturgy is open to symbols, rites and music of all cultures, as long as they're not superstitious, it's reconciliation with multiculturalism.
Consider Nostra Aetate, the document on the relation of the Church with non-Christian religions. It gives the Catholic Church a new mission, a mission of reconciliation among religions. Muslims are not, as Pope Paul III said in the 16th century, "our eternal and godless" enemies, but human beings, who worship one God. We take for granted now this recognition that somehow God communicates not just through the Catholic Church but in other ways as well. We would not have taken it for granted 50 years ago.
Pope Paul VI did not want to stand before the United Nations in 1965 until that document was pretty well approved, because he congratulated the United Nations on its defense of human rights, and especially the right to choose one's own religion. The Church is now a propagator of human rights.
Reconciliation and a spirituality to go with it, now we're getting at the spirit of Vatican II. What are the reconciliations? Here's my list: reconciliation with change, with non-Western cultures, with other churches, with non-Christians and with the world in which we live.
The expression often used is Vatican II was "to modernize the Catholic Church." That's a horrible expression. Vatican II was, if anything, going back into the tradition to bring up things that could help the Church deal with the present. If you want a phrase about the spirit of Vatican II, I would say "peace on earth, good will to all."
Now, until about 7 p.m. on March 13th, I was not very optimistic about the future of the spirit of Vatican II. Pope Francis is the first pope in 50 years who did not participate in the Council, and yet, from what we've seen so far, he seems to have gotten it better than some of those who did. Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI were still fighting the battles of the Council and the immediate aftermath of the Council.
Pope Francis—like John XXIII—has completely different experiences. When he explained why he chose the name Francis, it was very illuminating. He said, "Francis was for the poor, and he was for peace, and he loved nature, and our poor planet is so abused." I think he was telling us his priorities, and these are very much in tune with Vatican II.
The Council issued 16 documents, which make up close to 25 percent of the documents of all 21 Ecumenical Councils held in 2,000 years of Church history. So I consider Vatican II a language event.
Vatican II operated differently from the basic model for councils. Let's take the first Ecumenical Council, the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine. It made certain laws, and with laws you get a penalty if you don't observe them. They heard the criminal case of the heresy of Arius and condemned him.
This is the pattern followed until Vatican II (1962–1965). Instead of making laws, Vatican II holds up ideals. It has a new vocabulary, not new in the Christian tradition but new for a council: Friend, brother, sister, partnership, cooperation, peace, freedom, dialogue, conscience. These occur again and again in the documents. So it's not simply dealing with what you can do wrong but rather what you can do right, and, therefore, is a universal call to holiness. That becomes a leitmotif of the Council.
Its documents build on one another, quote one another, paraphrase one another. There is coherence among those documents, and, therefore, you can have themes, you can have an orientation, you can have a spirit. To give you the kind of spiritual shift Vatican II tried to effect, here's how it goes: from threats to persuasion, from adversary to partner, from hostility to friendship, from exclusion to inclusion, from monologue to dialogue, from fault finding to common ground, from laws to ideals, from coercion to conscience, from behavior modification to conversion of heart.
Look at the pope who called Vatican II. The life experience of Pope John XXIII was different from that of almost any pope in at least the last millennium. He was born of a family so poor that when he was ordained a priest in Rome in 1904, his family did not have enough money for the train fare from Bergamo near Milan to Rome for his ordination. When the First World War broke out, he served as a medical orderly and then as a chaplain. Afterward, the Vatican sent him as apostolic vicar to Bulgaria, an orthodox country outside Western Europe. He was there for 10 years. Then he spent 10 years in Turkey, a Muslim country. He was there during the Second World War, with all the trouble with the Nazis, the persecution of the Jews, and trying to help the Jews get out of Greece. In 1944, he goes as the nuncio to Paris, which was normally a big plum in the Vatican Diplomatic Corps, but no plum in the aftermath of the war. Then he becomes pope.He calls the Council to show the Church to be, in his words, "The loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of goodness and mercy." One crisis of modern times was multiculturalism. The world was always multicultural, but by the middle of the 20th century, the colonial powers had been ousted, and "the white man's burden" was not such a nice thing. Where does this leave the Catholic Church, which is so identified with Western culture? The liturgy was in Latin! That's a big problem for a church that wants to be catholic or universal.
There has always been religious pluralism, but by the middle of the 20th century, religious ghettos were dissolving. You were living next to your Lutheran friend, or your Orthodox friend, or even Muslims and Hindus. How did the Catholic Church treat other religions? With derision, contempt, hostility.
Then there is evolution and the origin of the species. Where does this leave Adam and Eve? It's the end of the classical worldview; the world we live in is changing, evolving, expanding.
How did the Council respond to all this? I think the Second Vatican Council was a council of reconciliation. The key document in the Council, as far as I'm concerned, is the first document, the document on the liturgy. It set some of the basic orientations of the Council, from the first line: we're trying to work towards the unity of Christians. When the liturgy is open to symbols, rites and music of all cultures, as long as they're not superstitious, it's reconciliation with multiculturalism.
Consider Nostra Aetate, the document on the relation of the Church with non-Christian religions. It gives the Catholic Church a new mission, a mission of reconciliation among religions. Muslims are not, as Pope Paul III said in the 16th century, "our eternal and godless" enemies, but human beings, who worship one God. We take for granted now this recognition that somehow God communicates not just through the Catholic Church but in other ways as well. We would not have taken it for granted 50 years ago.Pope Paul VI did not want to stand before the United Nations in 1965 until that document was pretty well approved, because he congratulated the United Nations on its defense of human rights, and especially the right to choose one's own religion. The Church is now a propagator of human rights.
Reconciliation and a spirituality to go with it, now we're getting at the spirit of Vatican II. What are the reconciliations? Here's my list: reconciliation with change, with non-Western cultures, with other churches, with non-Christians and with the world in which we live.
The expression often used is Vatican II was "to modernize the Catholic Church." That's a horrible expression. Vatican II was, if anything, going back into the tradition to bring up things that could help the Church deal with the present. If you want a phrase about the spirit of Vatican II, I would say "peace on earth, good will to all."
Now, until about 7 p.m. on March 13th, I was not very optimistic about the future of the spirit of Vatican II. Pope Francis is the first pope in 50 years who did not participate in the Council, and yet, from what we've seen so far, he seems to have gotten it better than some of those who did. Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI were still fighting the battles of the Council and the immediate aftermath of the Council.
Pope Francis—like John XXIII—has completely different experiences. When he explained why he chose the name Francis, it was very illuminating. He said, "Francis was for the poor, and he was for peace, and he loved nature, and our poor planet is so abused." I think he was telling us his priorities, and these are very much in tune with Vatican II.
To view a related video in flash player or YouTube.
No comments:
Post a Comment