VATICAN II REVISITED
The Background, seen from the Present Time
Paper presented at the Clergy Assembly, Melbourne, February 7, 2000]
Kevin O’Shea, C.SS.R.
Redemptorist Community,
24 Garden St.,
Kogarah, N.S.W., 2217
Introduction
Setting the scene: how things were then – things in the church, and things in the world; how they led towards what happened; recalling the time and the spirit of it; and, looking back, how does it sit, where has it left us, and where to now? If you had been in charge then, would you have had a Vatican II? If you were in charge now, would you have another one? What can you ‘do with it’ now? Do you think Vatican II was a success? or a disappointment? Is its agenda still real for us? Do you want to ‘revisit’ Vatican II?1 Did you ever really ‘visit’ it before?
This is an attempt to recapture the times before and during Vatican II, to span the times between then and now, and to raise questions about how the abiding result of Vatican II fits, or does not fit, into the present scheme of things in church and world. It will cover a large period of history, which many of us have lived through, beginning before Vatican II and reaching into the present.2
It is an attempt to look at both church and world in that period of time, or better, to locate what was going on in the church in the horizon of what was going on in the world. This seems to be in the spirit of Vatican II, whose major document was its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes).
It is presented primarily to pastoral priests, and as Pastores Dabo Vobis did, will look at intellectual, spiritual, human and pastoral issues. It will look at them together.
As well as doctrinal issues.
The outline of the paper is as follows:
This outline is based on an understanding of history, in which Vatican II occurs at the very end of the period called ‘Modernity’, and in which the use of Vatican II occurs in the beginning of the period known as ‘Post-Modernity’. For practical purposes, Modernity is considered to have ended in Europe (symbolically at least) in 1968. Post-modernity has two phases: it rules, in its negative phase, from (approximately) 1968 to 1989; this is termed ‘deconstruction’. The decade of the nineties – at least in some significant places - ushers in a new and more positive mood of Post-Modernity.
This framework is predominantly cultural and sociological. Within it, Vatican II, as an ecumenical council of the church, is a witness to a perennial doctrinal tradition. The paper will use the cultural framework to show that there were two integrated dimensions
of Vatican II: socio-historical, and doctrinal-perennial.
There will be an attempt to present the material in relation to the Australian situation, but it will use references to the situation in the U.S.A. as well. One of the difficulties in presenting the material in such a context, is that the issues that gave rise to Vatican II and to its aftermath, are fundamentally European, and were not grasped immediately elsewhere.
The paper is not a thesis: it does not advocate any position. Rather, it is an attempt to provide a horizon of history for everyone to make a contribution, in the light of Vatican II and a large sweep of history since that Council. What it asks is a willingness to understand history a little better, and to assess the present pastoral situation in its light.
It will also attempt to offer an instrument, or working-model, with which to assess what has happened in the church after and as a result of Vatican II, and so to discern how Vatican II can influence us positively now. It is in this sense that it will ‘revisit’ Vatican II.3
1 Before Vatican II: the church that was
I can remember being told by a Christian brother, at the age of about 8, that there had been a Vatican I, that it had never been finished, and that some of us might live long enough to see it completed. [I would say now that I do not see Vatican II as its completion, and that I hope I will not be around to see it completed!]4
Rather than wonder about that, I learnt the Penny Catechism5 by heart, and knew it perfectly by the time I was confirmed. I read Schuster’s Bible History, "Pray the Mass", Powers’ Manual, and various books about Christian Politeness. And later, "Things in me that make me a believer" by a Dominican named McEvoy.
The Church before Vatican II was stable, but it had already changed, and was already trying to move forward. Pius X had left his stamp on it: the confraternities and the sodalities that we knew were a response to his invitation to a more frequent access to the Eucharist. Pius XI had left his mark on it, too: the many forms of catholic action came from his advocacy of a cooperative role for the laity. Pius XII too: the wartime Pope symbolised prayer, austerity, and international charity. But in the years prior to Vatican II there was a sense in the Church that God enabled it to survive, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.6
It may be fair to say that many Catholics thought that the present social world would be without end. I wonder if many of them gave the matter much thought. They were not ‘historically minded’. Perhaps we could call them ‘survival minded’ and ‘eternity minded’.
Owen Chadwick says that it had been assumed that Vatican I had made councils unnecessary: the regular functioning of the Roman Curia had taken their place.7
In my memory, the church of the early sixties was indeed a stable, solid church: a high percentage of Catholics were regular church-goers; there were lots of confessions every Saturday; seminaries8 were rebuilt, and full9. [I taught in one of them, at Ballarat, at the time.] In the seminaries, and in the Roman universities, there was a stolid theology, with little critical historical consciousness.10
There were ‘plenty’ of priests, massive support in numbers for those priests, and many younger ones following on.11
Religious education processes had hardly changed for many decades, and a standard ‘catechism-orthodoxy’ prevailed.
When we look back now, we can think that the church of that time canonised certain practices and almost worshipped immobility. I am not sure that that was its conscious intention at the time. It simply lived its life, as a place of security for a world troubled by the aftermath of two world wars.12
I can remember, in the mid sixties, my first visit to the US, being amazed that parish priests were not only expected to dress in black, but also to have a black car. They did.
I dressed in black then, and had no car – I was an ordained monk, almost totally unaware of issues that would lead to Vatican II.
2 The experience of Vatican II: the hope that came
In Vatican II there came to this perennially stable church a ‘divinum incitamentum’ as John 23rd called it, to enter into what was going to be a ‘kairos’.
This was to be a new kind of council, new in the entire history of the church and its councils: one that would not condemn errors, but that would be ‘pastoral’, ‘doctrinae vim uberius explicando’. Like John 23rd himself, it would take an ‘optimistic view of history’. It would positively promote the progress, growth, development, evolution and maturation of the church. It would propose ‘aggiornamento, an ‘updating’ that would adapt the church to fundamentally changed conditions of life and social structures. It is true that as time went on within the sessions of the Council, and as Paul VI succeeded John 23rd, the language became less romantic: it was toned down somewhat at least, until it became 'renewal, renovation, rejuvenation, revival, rebirth’, and even, with due interpretation, ‘reform’. But the impression was given, and taken, that Vatican II was a real and highly significant turning point in the entire history of the church.13
To many of us trained and practised in Redemptorist mission preaching, this was good stuff. To those of us in pastoral/missionary work, and in theology, who thought at times we would really like to be prophets as well as priests, we felt – at last? – that we had something to prophesy about. [There were of course some who thumbed their noses at it all: they had their sermons and did their work, and thought the advocates of the new ideas had their feet firmly planted in mid-air.]
I remember the inspiring themes of that time: paschal mystery, resurrection, sacramentality, collegiality, universal call to holiness, the spiritual meaning of scripture, a modern=friendly-and-human sort of ‘people-church’. Happy and positive. The Christ-life. On trial for hope. A human apostolate. Kerygma, koinonia, diakonia, (and perhaps no so much (ascetical) martyria). I used these themes as titles of my own books and articles at this time.
I remember the series of invitations, and accidents, that took me around Australia, New Zealand, North America, England and Ireland, not to mention many places in Asia, communicating loyally this message of ‘Vatican II’. It certainly changed my life.
I think that for most people the whole event was a huge surprise. Even a shock. Even the style of the new Pope, John 23rd, a charismatic risk-taker, was so different from his predecessor – from any of his predecessors in living memory.
We were of course too obedient and submissive then to ask, is this a good idea?
We would not have allowed ourselves to think or speak like that.
But for most, almost all of us, it was soon a wonderful new way of appreciating what had always been and (always) would be. For the first few heady years, it was inspirational. It was an Indian summer for preaching and pastoral theology. It gave birth to a renewed spirituality. It touched the hope of the people. Its dream was to do so in such a way that genuine change would happen.14 It was not immediately clear what such ‘genuine change’ would mean.
There is evidence of tangible results quickly. Prayer movements, charismatic movements, Cursillo movements, new forms of retreats, parish missions involving teams of priests, brothers and lay people, calling all to participate actively15.
There had been a quiet build-up to it, and around it, in Australia: lectures, principally in scripture, liturgy, and catechetics, by Johannes Hofinger, Clifford Howell, Alexander Jones, Bruce Vawter, Godfrey Dieckmann, others. Some Australians had studied at Lumen Vitae and other centres.16
In parish life, the most evident change was in the liturgy. It went into the vernacular, and the president of the liturgy faced the community that actively celebrated with him.
Any mood of romantic idealism tends to breed pluralism17, but it was too soon to see that, and much too soon to assess its value. The mood was one of initial enthusiasm, not critical analysis.
Those years did not last long, and as a result we could say that the dream of Vatican II was never made fully real. The real reason was that there was not enough time, before the secular world itself experienced a massive cultural change: but more about that in a moment.
In Australia, the real impetus of Vatican II did not happen instantly. In fact, it was – in my memory – into the (early) seventies before tangible effects were observed.18 Then they were suddenly very tangible indeed. By then, of course, the cultural changes just mentioned had already happened in Western Europe and North America, and we were soon to feel them here as well.
3 The reception of Vatican II: divergent assessments
In hindsight, we can now see that the immediate, post Vatican II Church basically did not know how to achieve the dream of the Council, (and in any case did not have time). The Council had offered a rhetoric of relationship and re-commitment in Christian life. That alone could not do it: much more was needed, and it was not immediately forthcoming.
Again, it was not a proper question, and it was not asked: but was a Council the real, or best, way to go if you wanted to touch the faith of the people and change their way of living?
Perhaps new social structures were also needed: but the Council did not have within its own resources a capacity to create new social structures that would give shape to the new inspiration. [Archbishop Quinn said so in his now famous Oxford address, and in his consequent book.] Perhaps a restatement of doctrine would do it: but that, in the catholic tradition, is a tricky business: it is the development of doctrine that in principle does not change, and in the end, how many ordinary people are pastorally affected by the perhaps too technical results? [Karl Rahner asked once whether the major part of theology would remain unchanged if the church had no doctrine of the trinity.]
What was really needed - I would say now - was a more critical assessment of the moment of history in which people lived, a sharing of this assessment with the people, and a re-statement of the ‘core of the faith’ that would get to the people in this ‘new situation’. To do that, there was need of understanding and interpreting that new situation, that is, of how things had changed in the ‘real world’ outside the church. And how things had declined, both outside and inside the church.
There was change going on within the Church, in the period of less than twenty years that spanned the gap between the end of World War II and the opening of Vatican II. At one level, it was a change in the way thinkers were thinking, but in truth not many of the faithful, and not many of the bishops, seemed to be aware of it. At another level, it was a change in the way people lived, and how they were allowing new criteria to influence their options about life. That came from the post-war world rather than the post-war church. One of the constant difficulties in estimating this period of history, is the emergence of a different practice in the Church, which is not fully or primarily dictated by or even informed by a different way of thinking. For this reason, and because novelty is often perceived as something bad in a traditional society like the church, much of this was perceived as ‘decline’.
What was needed, then, was a consciousness of history, one in which the ‘decline’ of things could be perceived and understood, be those things rhetorical, or structural, doctrinal, or attitudinal. What was needed was an account of change that showed the reasons for change. John Courtney Murray said at the time that this was the issue underlying all the issues of the council. Of the 2,540 bishops assembled, some few seemed to have such a consciousness of history, another few seemed strongly opposed to having one, while the majority seemed – on the evidence available - not to grasp fully the significance of the question. A set of preparatory documents, hardly any of which had such a historical consciousness, and hardly any of which were approved eventually, did not help. There was a need to produce documents of major import, and of a new kind, within a very short time. This had to be done in a very large group, conscious in a very new way of its self-will as a college and of its relative inexperience in dealing with the agenda it had set itself. The bishops and their helpers worked hard, and got down to the immediate job in hand. I do not want to call them ‘liberal and conservative, and neutral’. I would prefer to call them all ‘bishops’. Perhaps it was God’s way of not letting the church move too quickly?
It has been said (for example, by no less a historian than Hubert Jedin) that the history of the council is a history of argument and strife within the council, and that it continued after it. I would prefer to call it ‘difference’ rather than ‘strife’. The strife that was perhaps there, was between those with a historical consciousness and those without one. I do not think that the large majority were, in the end, of a mind to take sides, as is evidenced in the virtually unanimous votes for almost all documents. The wonder is that, given those differences in vision, the Council came to the agreements it did, and produced so much.19 The quality of informed consent with which the bishops voted would be a fascinating study if we had access to the necessary data. We will never have it.20
It is useful to look at the ways in which much of this consensus happened. Increasingly it became clear that the two major21 documents of the council were those on religious liberty and on the role of the church in the modern world.22 In fact, these were promulgated only on the penultimate day of the council, in 1965.
There was one group of bishops at the Council (largely Italian and Spanish) who did not initially want to change previous positions about religious liberty and the place of the church in the modern world. There was another group (largely North American23 and North European24) who wanted the church to move from a previous grudging toleration of these things, to a more positive acceptance of pluralism. The former wanted a condemnation of communism, the latter wanted a more liberal style of living with and around it and other social systems. It seems that it was bishops from Eastern Europe (like Wojtyla, Slipji, Beran) who had had experience of living in and under communist regimes, who inclined the whole council to the more open attitude it took in its document on religious liberty, and in Gaudium et Spes.25 It was in effect these latter bishops, more than the others, who had a concrete and even political ‘historical consciousness’ of the place of the church in the actual world.26
My own experience in learning a critical, historical consciousness (and philosophy, and social science) and with it a broader pluralism, took place just after 1968, in universities (in New York, Chicago and Paris) that were outside the catholic tradition. I remember the challenge of it, to someone brought up within a non-historical theology (and yet with a historical sense of scripture), and I retain deep sympathy with, and appreciation of, the bishops of Vatican II, and their theological advisors, who had to meet this problem so suddenly.
That is why, I think, that later assessments of the results of the Council differ so much. They range from romantic attempts to continue the original enthusiasm to harsh criticisms. It is probably still too soon to give it its place in longer history: Jedin still (in 1981) finds it impossible to abandon his initial reserve about it. Louis Bouyer in 1968 regretted that it had not given us the hoped for regeneration, but that an accelerated decomposition of the church had - even at that date - followed it.
The romantics insist that since Vatican II the church is looser internally and more open
externally, to ecumenism, and to the secular world. They note that it all still needs a process of fermentation, which the Council did initiate. They see a larger participation of the people of God, in a church that is less clerical and more democratic. And so on.
The critics say that since the council there has been a perplexity in faith, due to a pluralism in theology and preaching ushered in by the council. They say that there is a continuing decline in mass attendance, due to the new liturgy. They say that there has been a weakening of the authority of the church, due to a kind of ‘earthly messianism’ and a less demanding moral sense. They say that there has been less influence of the church on the world, due to a softening of the church’s challenge to the world.
In the end, there is probably some truth in both these extreme versions, and in all the midway positions. Ratzinger has said: "whether in the end it will be reckoned among the luminous moments of church history, depends on the people who transfer it to life". He is right, of course, but similar comments were made, at a similar time after the end of the Council of Trent!27
But – beyond historical consciousness of decline – there was something else needed too. It is not enough, in catholic life, to be orthodox in doctrine and orthopractic in observance. We need a catholic imagination, and a catholic culture. Vatican II did not give us one, and in many ways it was the occasion on which we lost a valued old one which had been carried in and by the parishes. We became vulnerable. And we did not hand on the core of the faith in ways that were tangible in people’s lives, and that spoke to them in their real world. As a result we lost the ‘next generation’ –or two.28
Teachers have told me of repercussions of this in Australian schools in the late sixties. After the Wyndham Report, there was an extra year of secondary education: students were now 18 years of age, and many of them began to think more critically. They became unable to accept "what the church taught" and wanted to question everything. Adequate answers, sadly, were not forthcoming to them, either from their teachers, or from the church.
More major change was happening in the teaching staff itself. With state aid, came salaries, and a whole new economic reality. Lay people could teach in catholic schools without being religious. A different ladder of upward mobility existed.
.
The agenda had changed: it was no longer a case of appreciating more deeply a faith that was accepted without criticism: it was a case of re-examining the foundations of faith itself in a different sort of world-experience. Enthusiasm alone would not be enough.
4 The horizon of Vatican II: conflict with Modernity
The ‘trouble’, perhaps, could, in hindsight, be identified: the church was trying to negotiate with Modernity29, without at the time fully grasping Modernity or Modernity’s place in the larger framework of human history. The church could not know then that Modernity itself would – within a few short years - meet a global cultural change that would – perhaps forever - remove it from the centre of discussion, or at least change its place in history.
It is not easy to say this in an Australian context. The first white Australian population had been placed here on the assumption that Modernity was, and had always been, the only way of living, even if it did not have the name of ‘Modernity’. Very little if anything had occurred within Australian life, up to the time of Vatican II, to make anyone here think that there were any issues between the Church and Modernity. It was just the way things were, and the church itself had taken on many of the contours of Modernity, especially in its material and financial dimensions. The whole agenda about Modernity (and its later collapse into PostModernity) is largely foreign to ordinary Australian experience.
By Modernity I mean a whole way of life that came cumulatively from the scientific revolution of the 17th c., the philosophical revolution of the 18th, the revolution in historical consciousness of the 19th, and the high technological revolution of the 20th c.
Two centuries down the track, Vatican II was a belated attempt to address the issues of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, and fraternity – and the issues of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment . The main agenda was separation of church and state, distinction between the sacred and the secular, and the evolution of new patterns of authority and community.30
‘Modernity’ had been a good and a bad time. Good: never had human rights and human dignity been so acknowledged. Bad: never had issues of transcendence been so sidelined.
There had been a whole vision of a human life in which God, and religion, and Christianity, meant less and less in the lives of people.
Looking back, we could say that Modernity favoured the individual, isolated self in a way that had never been done in human history. It promoted progress, unlimited progress, of a consumerist self (either in a capitalist or socialist form). A ‘Modern’ person could spend all his/her time and energy on making money, achieving fame and individual glory, without giving primary importance (or much importance at all) to questions about ultimate destiny and transcendence.
Modernity had given rise to a ‘critical’ mindset. I use the word in the sense that it favoured an individual self-reflective awareness, and was reluctant to accept simple and naive statements and practices without attempting to locate their meaning in that awareness. The critical dimension of modernity was opposed in principle to the unexamined character of inherited religious practice.
The church stood both against31 the perceived selfishness of Modernity, and for that traditional and popular religious inheritance. As a result, the encounter between the church and modernity, over a long period, had been a confrontation. Especially since the middle of the 19th c., the church had adopted an officially negative attitude to it. In the 20th c., there were unsuccessful or incomplete attempts to deal with it: for example, the condemnation of what was called ‘Modernism’ in the opening decade of the 20th c., and the condemnation of what was called ‘La theologie nouvelle’ at the middle of that century. In every instance of such an encounter, except Vatican II, the ideas that were favourable to modernity lost out to official negative policy. A kind of theology (scholastic) supported a kind of church law (codified), and a kind of piety (devotional), and they formed a system set up to support this strong negative response, especially among the (descendants of the) poor of the industrial revolution. Many people in practice identified this ‘system’ with the church itself. What was different about Vatican II?
In simple terms, Vatican II did not speak that scholastic language, did not use that kind of legislation, and did not advocate that kind of devotion, and in many ways, did not address that population but a globally more educated one, and in effect did not support ‘the system’. My impression at the time was that many priests were saddened by the Council’s failure to do this. There are still people around in the church who regret this. Vatican II tried, in effect, to create a positive rapprochement between the Church and Modernity.32
But let us locate, a little more in detail, what made this change happen. The build up to it began just as World War II began. Liturgical, biblical, patristic, and ecumenical renewals had made them possible. Theologians entered into dialogue with the philosophies of modernity, and tried to use them to form a theology in the service of a new inspiration. They criticised the older theology and its pastoral derivatives. In one sense they ‘won’: the old scholastic language was buried, as something that had been dead for decades. Very few people learnt or knew the new philosophy. But its presence allowed them to drop the old pieties and criticise the current laws, and to go along with the practical new things – use of the vernacular in liturgy, small groups, human relations, etc, that in their mind would ‘renew’ the church. And it took away a lot of the old interpretations of scripture and history and seemed to open the door to a more human way of living the Christian life.
It was this ‘new’ theological community that influenced a number of the bishops from Western and Northern Europe who led Vatican II in the direction it took. And it was the ‘older’ theological community that influenced many other bishops, who, even while voting positively, either never fully grasped the import of what was going on, or really resisted it. But Vatican II, through their theology, and through the refined instinct of the bishops of Eastern Europe, did orient the church, in a historically new way, cautiously but really, towards some positive attitude to ‘modernity’.33
One of the consequences of this was the virtual ‘death’, in the Catholic academic community, of an ‘anti-modern’ construct, in philosophy and theology, in which most of the clergy and pastoral workers of the church had been intensively educated.34 [This was the ideological support of the ‘system’]. They felt de-skilled in the face of what Vatican II seemed to want of them. They also felt unable and/or unwilling to learn new skills. A gap existed, for at least a generation, between the positions officially proposed by the church, and the capacity of its pastoral ministers to implement them. [One group which felt particularly perplexed by it all was the missionaries in foreign countries: many of them felt that the church which sent them out no longer existed when they returned home.35]
In religious education, all this was very clear. Experience-based programs tended to replace content-based programs: teachers were unsure about what to teach, and students were unwilling to be told ‘substance’. New psychological ideas turned RE classes into "feel good" times when friendships developed but no real head work was done. RE became a "bludge" subject which students enjoyed but did not respect. They left school without knowing even the basics of catholic faith. The rote learning died, but they learned virtually no content that made sense to them. This situation lasted too long, in view of the changes that were occurring outside the church and its schools. We lost a generation or two of informed catholics. Many did not practise their faith later.
In parish life, a difficulty occurred in the celebration of liturgy. The council had mandated to the Holy See the task of renewing the rituals of the sacraments. The work took much longer than many had desired. As a result, there was a period in which the older rituals continued, and did not seem to express the new ideas. When the renewed rituals were published, much of the work did not seem to have been worth the wait or the effort, or to have caught the mood and needs of the people, at a pastoral level. This is particularly true of the renewal of the sacrament of penance.
It is useful to reflect on the larger history that had led to the confrontation within the church of groups that for a long time have been labelled conservative and liberal.
The roots of conservatism in the church go back to the attempts, in France, to restore the monarchy in the wake of the French Revolution. They go back to Action Francaise (with Charles Maurras).36 This is a movement, largely among some French Catholics, to move poltically in the direction of a restoration of the French Monarchy, and so to reject the political influence of the French Revolution, and thus of ‘Modernity’. It advocated a conservative, divine-right monarchical kind of authority, for both state and church. [The effect of this kind of political thinking can be seen, in our world, in different and diluted ways, both in the emergence of ‘catholic action’(of the Cardijn, or YCW type), as a suprapolitical focus for the laity, and in the emergence of various kinds of ‘catholic intervention’ in secular politics (of the Santamaria, or DLP type).] Action Francaise was also the formation group of Marcel Lefebrve and the defenders of the traditional Latin Mass. [Some of their derivatives are visible in the present Australian scene.]
This conservatism was given colour through an affective alliance (at least) with the Franco regime in Spain, and took on the contours of a ‘martyr catholicism’ in loyalty to ‘Christ the King’. [This mentality was promoted in Australia in ‘anti-communist’ terms at annual processions in honour of Christ the King.]
During the second world war, this conservatism formed a bond with the Vichy regime (Petain) in France, and lived off a nostalgia for the past, and for a conservative clericalism ‘remembered’ from the days of the monarchy. A certain kind of ‘Romanita’ in the Vatican attempted – with some success - to ecclesiasticise and universalise this mentality. In fact, there seems to be an influence of the Action Francaise type of thinking on models of ecclesiastical authority central to Vatican thinking in the past decades.
In contrast, the French Resistance was the seed-bed for a more liberal way of thinking in the church. [Later, the Polish Resistance, and solidarity movement, could make similar claims.] In France, there emerged the ‘Mission de Paris’ and the priest worker movement.37
But it was the French (of this inclination) who saw that the real issues were theological, and even doctrinal. The schools of Lyons (Fourviere)[Jesuit] and Paris (Le Saulchoir) [Dominican] began publishing series of books ("Theologie" and "Sources chretiennes"), and two periodicals (Revue des sciences religieuses, and Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques). The Institut Catholique, both in Lyons and in Paris, followed suit. Not only were they negotiating with Modernity: they were going into the resources of tradition as they had not done before. They were the formative influence on the theologians who directed much of the thinking around Vatican II. [A conservative French school at Toulouse (St.Maximin, Dominican) largely opposed them. Some, originally from there, had massive influence in the Vatican.38 ] In Paris, Cardinal Saliege and the then Papal Nuncio, Roncalli, (later John 23rd) supported the new thinkers.39
This new thinking actually envisaged what it called ‘a new christian way of living’.40 It would come out of the pastoral implications of a key distinction used in this theology. It was the distinction between the core of dogma, and the culturally conditioned conceptualisation (or ‘packaging’) in which it has historically come down to us. This distinction itself is the bottom line of the negotiation of the church with the methodology of universities that worked in the tradition of ‘modernity’. It is not a theory of ivory-tower theology. It suggests that there is indeed more than one way of living the christian mystery and message, and that history and culture affect the way we actually do it.
It must be noted that no a priori limits were established in the use of this distinction. For true academics, there could be none: what was ‘core’, and what was ‘package’, depended on serious historical and critical research. For defenders of the ‘faith’ within the church, there had to be limits, and there was a tendency to define them in a conservative rather than a liberal fashion, using the criterion of what the ‘faithful’ church-goers had ‘always thought’.
It is interesting to reflect that the character of Vatican II largely depended on the personal style of the two popes who led it. John 23rd used the distinction just mentioned as the rationale for, and key to the meaning of, the council itself, in his opening address to the first session of the Council. Paul VI (Montini) had been under the influence of Maritain (as, later, John Paul II had also been), through the meetings at Meudon in which representatives of both the new and the old thinking came together.41 He continued the work of Vatican II in the spirit of the key distinction. Through this, there came an official legitimation of critical thinking in theology. [It had already happened in scriptural circles, and the theologians owe it to their biblical masters.]
This key distinction itself arose from something much deeper than a tactic with which the church could renegotiate its relationship with Modernity. It came from a new contact with and immersion in the ancient sources of the christian message, the scriptures, the liturgy, and the tradition of the Fathers. It was really this that Fourviere and Saulchoir, and other centres, had contributed. And it is in this that Vatican II, drawing on this, did something more than a manoeuvre in the political position of the church. The council was pastoral, but it was pastoral as founded on doctrinal insight.
[After Vatican II, there was for a time (all too brief?) a kind of public freedom in the church for theologians who were working with the pioneering program that led to the agenda of the council. It is worth saying that many of the leaders in Fourviere and Le Saulchoir – such as Danielou, de Lubac, Bouillard, von Balthasar, Chenu and Congar – seem to have been envisaged but not named in Pius XII’s encyclical against the ‘nouvelle theologie’. These were later the architects of the more open persuasion within the council, and Paul VI invited them to concelebrate the Eucharist with him in the aula of the Council, before its close.42 He and John Paul II eventually made four of them cardinals – Danielou, de Lubac, von Balthasar, and Congar.]
It is also true that in the euphoria after the council, this kind of thinking was advocated with much less nuance that that of these great minds. It seemed to move in a direction that was more liberal than the Council itself. Many of the theologians who had influenced the Council, as they grew older, turned away from the mood that had developed in significant ways after it, and turned towards a more contemplative vision. Von Balthasar and Maritain are clear examples. At a public level, two publishing ventures emerged, around the periodicals ‘Concilium’ and ‘Communio’, offering more-liberal and more-conservative interpretations of Vatican II and theological issues arising in the post-Vatican II era.
It should be said that this new way of ‘critical’ thinking (with the catholic use of enlightenment philosophies) had a negative response from a number of people, who were educated, not in such a way of thinking, but in the mentality of the catholic ‘system’ of old. Their rapprochement with the new situation around and after the Council, was the development of ‘spirituality’ in ways hitherto unknown in the recent church. For many it represented a way of continuing the enthusiasm that gave rise to the council. Because this enthusiasm was anchored neither in the old scholasticism nor in the new enlightenment philosophies, it lacked adequate critical and theological foundations. One unfortunate consequence was the emergence of a conflict between the ‘uncritical holiness’ of this movement, and the ‘critical thinking’ of the academics (liberal or conservative) after the council. In simpler terms, it was a difference between affective christianity and thinking christianity.
5 The unexpected aftermath: the collapse of Modernity
But the paradox of Vatican II, seen as the Church’s first positive encounter with modernity and its first experience of the inappropriateness of its own ‘anti-modernity’, is that within a few years modernity itself ‘died’.43
It might be ungracious to ask, with the huge benefit of hindsight, whether the encounter between the church and modernity, which Vatican II undertook, was worth the effort. Hadn’t facts just caught up with the faithful, and the faithful with the facts? Would they not do so very quickly? Even the notion of ‘modernity’ was one that, in the sixties, was hardly grasped in places like Australia, or, in my own experience, hardly even in the US and Canada. It seemed largely to mean being friendly instead of official, being non-judgmental about non-church people, and not standing on ceremony! Didn’t it just mean living a kind of pastoral closeness to the people, a tradition that we thought the Australian church had always believed in and developed?
Modernity’s collapse is symbolically dated as ‘1968’. It was then that students at European, especially French universities (and then their counterparts in North America) revolted both against the prevailing Idealism (Modernity Philosophy) of their institutions, and against the ‘alternatives’ up till then proposed (Marxism, in particular). The revolt was public, in the streets, and closed the universities for some months. This was the beginning of a period of some twenty years or so, in which there was a large disillusionment about ‘nearly everything’. It is now called negative Post-Modernity.44
As far as I know, these dates went without being seriously known in Australia. The foundations of the ‘way things are’ were not shaken.
My own limited experience in the USA would suggest to me that the change was not notably known in the catholic community there.45
Did Vatican II come too late, as Nicholas Lash has suggested? Or – heaven forbid my asking – would it be better if that council had not been convened at all?
In the end, it did not really matter.
Hubert Jedin, again, has written:
"The undoubtedly present phenomena of dissolution are at least partly not to be referred to the Council, but to the upheaval within industrial society and in the third world, and hence in the long run have struck root in the turn of world history in which we stand". I would like to look at the place of Vatican II in that "turn of world history in which we stand".
The ‘turn of world history in which we stand’ came – symbolically at least – in ‘68’: it means the collapse of the culture of Modernity. Please note that we do not equate modernity with contemporary life: ‘modern’ is an adjective we apply now to a past period of history. ‘Modernity’ in many senses ended then after ‘68’, and we have been said to be in a post-modern situation ever since.46
It is perhaps worth noting that ‘68’ did not occur in a vacuum. For some time there had been a trend towards the radical left among many Christians, especially in France. They saw their world as pagan, ‘communist-slanted’, yet reaching towards an ideal of human life. They wanted to join forces with the working proletariat, not in their ideological or political communism, but in their demand for humanity and justice. The ‘priest-worker’ movement47 (Chenu, Loew, Perrin) is an instance of this. It developed into a desire for internal change in the church (declericalisation, etc), and even more for change in society itself (to analyse which they used Marxist models, if not Marxist theory). Well before 68, there was movement towards a radical criticism of ‘modern’ society and culture.48
I found myself in need of a new education – this time into the philosophy of post-modern deconstruction, and into a style of criticism that removed the foundations of both modernity and the views the church had used to fight it. The new views were most alive in France, especially in schools of philosophy linked in particular with European psychoanalysis. They had also come to schools of literary criticism in North America.
Would this change have happened had there been no Vatican II? Yes. It had to happen: it was a huge reaction to the wars, the conscriptions, the industrialisations, the controls over life, the economic slaveries (and colonisations) that recent generations had lived through. After World War II there was a focussing of this issue around the role of the New Germany and the United States in the new world order and consequent cold war. For some they represented a bastion against the feared rise of global communism. For others they represented a push towards a feared nuclear war. For others still they represented a symbol of a world become secular.
It is in this new secular ‘light’ that the distinction between the core and the packaging of doctrine in the church has come to look like a very small matter, important only within afficionados of intra-ecclesiastical thinking. Even Vatican II itself does not loom so large in the perspective of history seen in this way. [Could the rise of secularisation be seen in some ways as a secular response to the Church’s attempt to make more of itself than it really was?]
There are some in the church today who regret the demise of what they see as a Christianised modernity.49 They – with great effort at times – went through the adjustment that Vatican II seemed to call for, and took a positive attitude to modernity. There was even what many called a Camelot period, an Indian Summer of this ‘theology open to the modern’. And now, all that seems threatened, and they feel let down, although they naturally keep trying to set up enclaves that respond to the message of modernity. They feel caught between the old world that they rejected, and a ‘different-again’ new world that is now rejecting them. Many pastoral and educational leaders in today’s Church belong to this ‘generation’. Some have stuck to what they learnt in this period of their own real formation; others have rejected it and reverted to an older worldview; and some have been unsure, and not adopted any consistent position.
It might be added that the era of the ‘big theologian’ is clearly over. In fact, not only the persons, but the questions now important in theology have changed as well. Present serious work is too interdisciplinary for one mind to do it all. Most of the real work now is done within large academic associations in the context of post-modern inquiry and criticism, prescinding from the personal allegiance of its many members to church-institutions and group, and even from particular universities, secular or ecclesiastical.
Modernity had introduced global consumerism: socialist/communist in the second world, capitalist in the first world, and oppressive in the third world. The church had a big hand in the eventual overthrow of communism in the second world, but capitalism survived in the first world, and has now become global: even the third world is invited into it, and its ‘free market’, at the price of its survival. This new capitalism is part and parcel of the new secularisation.
The clearest evidence of the new post-modern situation is this global, consumerist-capitalist secularisation, whose God is the market.50 It retains the amenities of modernity without modernity’s vision. It introduces criticism rather than appreciation of the past. The old church is seen as irrelevant, and old, something that secularisation has largely deconstructed out of existence. At best, this church continues temporarily for those pockets of the first world that have refused secularisation, and for parts of the third world that are not yet the beneficiaries of the industrial revolution. Secularisation seems to be winning. Where it holds sway, neither the processes of the older church, nor those of the church immediately after Vatican II, seem able to make any headway.
The inspiration that came from Vatican II has been quite unable to deal with this post-modern secularisation. It has suddenly looked like an ideal from another age, without reality in the new one.
It has tended to give way to a new official Church policy of negativity to post-modern things. The church that was, at Vatican II, prepared to hold out a tentatively positive hand to modernity, has – rightly in the view of many inside and outside the church - been most unwilling to do the same to secularisation.
One instance of secularisation at this time, is the reneging on the practice of serious preaching, in favour of processes that come from secular, popular ‘ psychologies’ like the telling of one’s personal story, and the sharing of one’s emotional experiences. These dynamics, perhaps neutral in themselves, have at times been used as substitutes for the core processes of communicating the Word inherited from a long tradition.
In religious education, the times have not been good. There has been a reductionism about, that saw ‘religious education’ largely as a function of human or personal development, and not enough has occurred in the substantive presentation of the christian message, or in the emergence of germane methods of conveying it.
Secularisation has also meant a fairly dramatic drop-off in church attendance, one that seems to have steadily continued. It also meant, over the years, that those who came to church tended to be more like ‘special interest’ groups, mostly in particular forms of ‘spirituality’ or ‘devotion’, whose interest was largely conservative rather than liberal. As a result, parishes grew less ‘catholic’ (in the sense of universal), and were more ‘sectarian’ (in the sense of places to promote special devotional forms and liturgies, whether of older or more recent origin).
One of the fascinating concomitants with the rise of secularisation has been the emergence of a kind of new gnosticism, an interest in ‘spirituality’ rather than religion, and indeed in a ‘spirituality’ based neither on the specifically christian or catholic tradition, nor on any serious critical philosophy. It seems to be the option of some who both refuse secularisation and what goes with it, and are disillusioned with the church and the academy as they have known them. Often adherents of this approach use it to maintain something of what they see as positive in the earlier moment of history, when there was an attempt to christianise something of ‘modernity’.
The latter years of the present Pontificate seem to have focussed on giving a challenge to capitalism (in the US and the new Europe, especially), and to overcoming its negative features, just as in an earlier moment the church had a hand in the demise of communism.
But we are a long way from the death of world consumerism.
As a result some quintessentially nineteenth century ecclesiastical attitudes51seem to have revived – attitudes which include a style of using authority (typical of the Ancien Regime) and an advocacy of social positions that seem untenable to present people in the face of post-modern approaches to life.
One result of this is a curious reversal of positions in the church. At and just after Vatican II, the official church seemed to be taking a progressive position in relation to its own more conservative past. Now the official church seems to be taking a conservative position in relation to a more capitalist world, and also in relation to the progressive position of Vatican II. There is public appearance of a major change of strategy.
There is an interesting question here: was the pre-Vatican II (i.e. pre World War 2) church in a sense pro-German? and anti-Communist(Russia)? (and anti-the French who had seen something positive in communism?)
In World War 2, did the Vatican form its mind in expectation of a German victory over both US and Russia?
When Germany lost, and US-Russia won, they set up a New-Germany cum US alliance, which at the cold war was anti-Russia. The church backed them, expected their eventual victory, and supported their form of capitalism. As preferred to communism.
In time, the US/German thinking came to accept an openness to living with communism as an issue of democratic freedom.
At Vatican II, on the key issues of religious freedom and the modern world, the split initially was between the pro-US/New Germany bishops, who reflected this openness, and the pro-‘condemn the communists’ bishops.
The split was seemingly resolved by the group of bishops who had experience of life under the communist east European regimes. They refused support for a further condemnation of communism, and opted for a living with and around it, an option that ultimately put the church in a position to influence the demise of communism. I think they did so for different reasons than those which motivated the pro US-New Germany bishops. It was not a question of opting for a ‘christianised’ form of capitalist modernity. It was more a question of finding the best tactic with which to survive integrally as a church, and with which to continue a tradition that was longer and deeper than socialist or capitalist modernity, as a way of human living.
When John Paul 2 became Pope, it was a very natural consequence of this sequence of history. In the latter part of his pontificate he – having seen the demise of Russian communism - turned the church against the ‘new’ capitalism of the free market economy symbolised by the US and the New Germany. This appeared to many to be another ‘reversal’ of policy.
It was rather a new identification of the adversary. In effect, the official church opted against the current Western European (or First World) use of an economic model of democracy. It espoused a bond between what it considered to be a remnant of the positive gains of Modernity in the West, and the Eastern European world emerging from communism. In this, there was also hope of an ecumenical reunion of Rome and Eastern orthodoxy. It is not clear where this will lead.
Once again, it may well be the bishops from elsewhere, perhaps from Asia (and Africa) who will influence this discussion...
I would suggest that there is at least a complementary consideration. There is a longer tradition, originally in the eastern churches then more dominantly in the west, in which ‘participation’, generously understood, is the life-blood of both church and society. Could it be a renewed sense of ‘participation’, creatively retrieved from such sources, that can allow the church to enter into dialogue with the emerging thinking of Asian and African milieux? and have a future that goes beyond not only Modernity but also the division between East and West?
In this light, it is possible to wonder if the actual ‘political’ position taken by Vatican II (in partial rapprochement with Modernity) has passed into history, and been superseded by other such positions, while the doctrinal vision behind it, from a deeper immersion in the sources, remains?
6 Revisiting Vatican II?
Now, the issue is this: if we ‘revisit’ Vatican II in this new period of world history, do we try to take Vatican II’s new positive approach to modernity, when modernity is dead? do we try to raise the pre-Vatican II church from its pre-modern tomb? do we simply repeat the spiritual rhetoric of Vatican II without knowing how to get it through in a telling way to the post-modern lives of our people? I would suggest that all these options are now passe. Do we make attacks on the church of Vatican II from within our own ranks for putting us in the present position? I would suggest that these outbursts are uninformed, and hurtful, and often resented today. And in that sense, I believe that the arguments that characterised our theology and policy for the last thirty years can and should be put to rest.52
7 Where to go from here?
The start of a new century and a new need for positivity
Towards a new positivity in the Church and the World
We need, I suggest, to enlarge our framework of history, into a canvas larger than the 100 years just behind us. Vatican II was not everything. It articulated Tradition.
The perennial tradition of catholicism has been positive in its message to a world suffering from tragedy after tragedy.
I think we need to realise the significance of World War II, and indeed of the two Great Wars, in estimating the point of the post-war reaction that eventually gave birth to Vatican II as one more voice in the catholic tradition. They were essentially an experience of tragic negativity, and gave rise to great fear, whether it focussed on Russia or on the new Germany and the United States.
At the moment, at the end of the millenium, something new is again beginning to happen. The world is sick of this tragic negativity: it is re-examining its own resources for positive vision. [One fascinating symbol of this is the breaking down of the Berlin Wall in 1989.]
In the catholic community, I do not see such a new positive vision emerging either from the ‘critical’ thinking that came after the council, or from the ‘spiritual’ attitudes that were in many ways its counterpoint. I do not even see it as flowing very directly from the ‘political’ positions taken by the Council. I see it coming rather in continuity with the doctrinal positions of the Council, but in a form much more developed than the form they took at the Council.
I see it emerging from a new coming to terms with issues that pertain to philosophy.53 They were present in the doctrinal vision of Vatican II but not highlighted as such in its more pastoral documents. They allow us to appreciate more fully the doctrinal wisdom expressed in Vatican II.
I see it, for example, in new attitudes to the person, to the cosmos, to social relations.
Academic movements outside church circles are looking for a different, and a more positive vision precisely in these fields: they can be seen in new phenomenologies of the person, in the science/religion dialogue, in new understandings of justice among nations.
Younger people today are hungering for depth, and understanding, and models of personhood that do not privilege autonomy. They want more than affective spirituality and piety: they do not want to share their feelings without knowing the acquisitions of older people's wisdom. They have been taught to think critically and find foundations for what they know. They are, in their own way, looking for a philosophy to found their appreciation of faith. It might be suggested that many of their teachers, not formed in such thinking, are at a loss to respond to them.
The various shapes of spirituality that have emerged since and around Vatican II are well out of date: they are responses to issues of the late seventies and early eighties, rather than to issues of today.
I have again found a personal need to look at foundations: to re-assess the perennial philosophical tradition, in the context of the church’s ancient faith, and to find in it foundations for optimism.54 It is consoling to know that they are there, and being appreciated anew by many today.55
In its own ambience, the Church has again realised that it needs to give a renewed message of positive inspiration. My own conviction is that it still does, and that this desire - of Vatican II - can only be satisfied by the resources of a tradition that includes Vatican II but that is much larger than Vatican II. What is the message of this larger tradition?
The church of a long, long time ago came to a profound realisation that was extremely positive. It faced the ultimate questions, about God, and our identity, and our destiny after death, about good and evil, and sin and love, and the gift of meaning and salvation given us in and through Jesus Christ. It looked at all this in the light of what I would call ‘participation’. We need today to locate the desire for positive inspiration that emerged from Vatican II, within that longer tradition of the Church, and its deep positivity. Let me sum up the fruit of that tradition as I see the upshot of it today.
There is a God, a Creator, and we participate through God’s gift in God’s goodness. Our vocation is to realise that, to thank God for that, and to come back from the gifts to the Giver. Our origin is in God, and our destiny is in God. We are persons with a task to perform, one of ‘eucharist’. In the liturgy of our lives. Our Creator has made it possible for us, through the gift of Grace and his own divine Presence. It is a fundamental sense of the gift of participation in God that is the fruit of creation and grace. It has come to us through the person of Jesus Christ.
We need to say this is a different language. It is the language of a personhood that does not claim absolute autonomy or the freedom of a first mover, and of an interpersonal love that is open to another more than to the self. It is the language of a life that is not afraid of death. It is the language of authentic relationship and moral values. It is the language of inclusive, non-discriminatory communion. It is the language of preferential love for the put-down and the left-out. It is the language of Jesus Christ, rediscovered from the gospels.
This is not pre-Vatican II old-scholastic language. It is not the biblico-kerymatic language that was promoted around V2. But above all, it is not the language of modernity or secularisation or deconstruction. I do not think, even, it is really or primarily the language of historical consciousness. There is something too eternal about it to call it that. I like to call it the language of ‘participation’56. I believe that while it is not the actual language of Vatican II, it is a language that is inspired by Vatican II if we revisit it from our standpoint today.
It could be said that the chief themes of Vatican II were an attempt to express ‘participation’: however, they did not succeed in giving the insight a workable form. I am thinking of the collegiality of bishops, the relation of individual bishops to bishops’ conference, and their relation to the curia; of the presbyterium as a participative body; of the relationship of laity to and in the secular world; of the acceptance of those outside the roman church into the larger communio of the Church, etc.
It would be interesting to ask what is the role of the Synods of Bishops that have been held regularly since the Council. Are they an attempt to hold things at the point of development of the Council itself, or to move things along in response to the changing agenda of the world situation? They are surely open to either use.
There have been calls for what amounts to a new Council57, notably and most recently by Cardinal Martini at the Synod of European Bishops (and by other church leaders, like Etchegaray in Lyons, and O’Brien in Glasgow, and Quinn in the USA, and Lehmann in Germany.) The issues he named as an agenda are: the church as communion in relation to ecumenism; ordained ministry, lay ministry, women’s ministry; democracy, sexuality, marriage, and penitential practice. They are all issues of participation. And they are asking for a positive message that opens up more participation.58
Perhaps Vatican II was a success, because it remains as a permanent challenge to speak an eternal message in contemporary idiom. A success, and a challenge, like all the other councils, like the entirety of catholic tradition, because it always points beyond itself, to the parts of the journey we have not yet walked. I would prefer to see it as a step along the road that the Word of Love takes to express itself when sent into our human world.
In conclusion
The main drift of this paper has been to suggest that when we look any any dimensions of pastoral practice in today’s church, such as parish life, religious education, liturgy and ritual, or whatever, we ask a series of historical questions:
what was it like before Vatican II?
what was it like at Vatican II?
what was it like in the ‘Camelot period’ after Vatican II?
what was it like as as response to Modernity?
what did post-Modernity and secularisation do to it?
what signs are there of a new positive vision in it?
what influence does the core doctrine of the church have on it?
I would like to name just a few ideas that have come to me, as a result of my own revisit to Vatican II and its history, and my own use of these questions, that might be taken back to parish life.
ADDENDUM
A reflection on humanitarianism in the past 50 years (cf. J.C.Rufin)
[they parallel the history of war and peace]
[towards the 3rd world, victims of ‘Russia’]
[(few) romantic heroes, ill-equipped, effective, a kind of ‘miracle’:
compassion for the hurting,
pity and admiration for the helpers]
e.g. Medecins sans Frontiers
Did this release the energy demobilised after 68?
Did it capture some of the motivation lost by the churches?
Is this the incarnation of prosperity rather than of defeat?
end of Cold War, fall of the Wall, end of Communism in Russia
from historical, charismatic leaders to classic politicians, who were hardly born in the previous period]
Does this correspond to Thatcher, Reagan ?
no opponents makes for banalisation of life
‘Armies for Peace’ in the petrol states
a TECHNOTACTICAL approach to humanitarianism: (e.g welfare state)
you need massive money beyond the capacity of individuals
you need highly technical skills
no longer any simplicity or innocence about it: that is a myth and illusion
has to be done on world scale, by one massive organisation (capitalist)
virtual end of the effectiveness of private organisations
one for peace (pacifist)
Red Cross,
UN
ex American democratic idealism
one State (as was), one vote
interdict wars
thus create victims
directly,
indirectly
famine, exodus, violation of land,
terrorism, etc.
The political and military dimensions of the operation for peace
As a ‘security system’ for the world community
the other for charity (heal the victims)
after wars,
alongside wars
[almost depend on wars to be functional]
There is public television re crisis, shocking images, disaffection and scandals in the aid groups
There is a parcelling up of operations, so that no one is effective (or interesting)
Parallels with the church of this whole period ??????
ADDENDUM 2
It is important to reflect on the gains of each stage of the history outlined.
For myself, the gains of the pre-Vatican stage, were, through Gagnebet, an awareness of an Augustinian-style synthesis in St.Thomas, rather than a Cano-style set of deductions and theses. It was a synthesis of truth, founded in love.
For myself, the gains of the Vatican II stage, were, through NT gospel work, an awareness of a biblical thematic affectively colouring the previous vision. In this sense it was nearer to life and experience.
For myself, the gains of the encounter with Modernity, were, through a new study of Hegel and others, a refusal of the whole project of Idealism in favour of the synthesis outlined above. With a new capacity to relate it to the modern point of view.
For myself, the gains of the encounter with Deconstruction, were, through a real study of Lacan and others, a refusal of the whole project of Nihilism and reductionism, in favour of the transcendent synthesis, now purified.
For myself, the gains of the return to metaphysics and personalism, were, through a new appreciation of the historical Thomas, a grounding of the synthesis in a philosophy that was historically true and pertinent to contemporary issues. With a realisation that it demands a critique of prevailing social science models.
Endnotes
1….There was a time when any theological position was presented as the thought of ‘St.Thomas’. There were a few years when such positions were presented as the thought of ‘Vatican II’. I think and hope that that rhetoric is behind us. We can historically take things as they were, and own our own positions as well.
2…..There are three difficulties that need to be faced in attempting this presentation. First, it is only about now, at a space of nearly 40 years, that we have sufficient perspective to look historically at Vatican II. Secondly, we might wonder if it is ‘Vatican II’ as such that we ought to be ‘revisiting’. Is it like visiting the Battle of the Bulge or Midway, instead of visiting World War II? Thirdly, do we have, in church circles, sufficient awareness yet of the place of matters ecclesiastical in the secular history of this century?
3. Professional studies of Vatican II in history are just beginning. See G.Routhier, Recherches et Publications recentes autour de Vatican II, Laval Theologique et Philosophique, 1999, Fev. 115-149. See also J.Kobler, Towards a history of Vatican II, Chicago Studies, 1999, n.2, pp.177-191. Both these reports refer to the major work projected (in 5 vols) edited by G.Alberigo and J.Komonchak, The history of Vatican II. The first volume has appeared (1995): announcing and preparing Vatican Council II: towards a new era in Catholicism. It is subtitled: from the security of the fortress to the lure of the quest.
4. It is important to remember that now hardly any churchgoer under the age of 40 was alive at the time of Vatican II. It is about as remote to people today as Vatican I was to me then.
5. In the USA, it was the ‘Baltimore Catechism’. A similar major work is in progress in Paris and Brussels.
6. "...the lack of education and the obedient stance of the American immigrant church prior to the late 1950’s discouraged intellectual initiative." (T.O’Meara, Thomas Aquinas,undp, 1997,194.
7. Owen Chadwick, The Christian Church in the Cold War, Penguin, 1993, p.116: "the Church was much more efficiently run by a civil service with experience than by a crowd of bishops from all over the world".
8. Manly was the model, if not archetype of the Australian seminary. For its history, which parallels most of what this paper treats, see Kevin Walsh’s Yesterday’s Seminary. It was a special, historically conditioned reality, a post-Tridentine seminary in an Irish ‘empire’.
9. Note the great era of recruitment in the sixties.
10. I must add that this theology, stolid as it was, was founded on a real philosophy, in which most priests at least were grounded at that time. It is to be regretted that this tradition has not continued. Philip Gleason, historian of Notre Dame, has named neo-scholasticism as ‘pre-conciliar ideology’: see Catholic Commission and Intellectual and Cultural Affairs Annual, undp, 1989.
11 To borrow the title of a book on Jesuits in the US, they were ‘Men Astutely Trained’ (see P.McDonagh, the Free Press, New York, 1992).
12. Socrates said, in The Apology: "the unexamined life is no life for a man". He also said, that if he were to say that, people would believe him even less! [Reference, courtesy of Kevin Carroll.]
13. John 23rd does not seem to have had particular or detailed agenda for the Council, or to have imposed limits on the Council.
14. "The council would create an atmosphere in which theological education would rapidly extend to young and old, clergy, religious, and laity." ibid, 195.
15. Many of these models were conditioned by the special mood of those times. Attempts to continue them as such in later times, when that mood was no longer present, have not been successful.
16. Fordham University in New York City, where I have taught for the last 30 years, began its program under the inspiration of Lumen Vitae.
17….Philip Gleason, cited above, suggests that the increasing upward mobility of catholics and their movement into the wider stream of secular society provided a natural seedbed for pluralism. The claims of biblical and kerygmatic theology were not synthesised with those of systematic theology. Attempts at unified vision were abandoned in the face of the new spread of options.
18. Australian history over the past half century and more needs a special understanding. Australia, an island geographically, has been insulated from decisive events of world history. It did not know war or destruction on its own soil. The sense of the ‘end of the world as previously known’ that obtained in Europe after World War 2 was quite unknown in Australia. Up until the arrival of large numbers of immigrants in the (say) sixties and after, there was little sense here that life could be different anywhere else. [Quite a number of Australians were amazed that new arrivals did not speak English!] There has been a sense that documents from Rome have been written for some situation that we never knew, and appear rather irrelevant to ‘real life here’. There has been a kind of ‘time-lag’ in the perception of overseas things, possibly something like a decade, but becoming less and less. This is important to realise in considering the slow dawning of awareness here of what Vatican II really meant. There are anecdotes about Australian bishops at the Council. One is said not to have filled in some questionnaires since he had no real comment to make. Another is said to have reported that after the Council there will be no change at all. A third is said to have compared the purple clad bishops emerging into the sunlit piazza of St.Peter’s, to a paddock full of Patterson’s Curse! There is documentary evidence that Daniel Mannix, at the age of 99, sent a ten page (Latin) response to the proposed schema De Ecclesia (or at least to some of it). He thought it was rather disappointing, full of abstractions that were very alien to an Anglo-Saxon mentality, and showing a certain harshness and pride. He sent these comments to Cardinal Suenens, who was the leader of the bishops in having this schema rejected. Cardinal Gilroy is credited with objections to the concepts of ‘mystery of the church’, ‘people of God’, and ‘charism’, as likely to be completely unintelligible to the general run of the faithful. See Jeffrey Murphy, The lost (and last) animadversions of Daniel Mannix, ACR January 1999, 54-73. William McCarthy’s life of James O’Collins would also be a useful source.
19. Consider the difficulties experienced in Australia last year in getting consent to a few sentences of a Preamble to the Constitution.
20. As far as I know, there is no living Australian bishop who attended Vatican II.
21. I use the word ‘major’ here in the sense of perceive public impact.
22. It was indeed a ‘pastoral’ council: the import of the doctrinal texts was to provide a foundation for pastoral attitudes.
23 Influenced by the vision of a John Courtney Murray.
24. Infuenced by Bishop de Smedt.
25. Se Owen Chadwick, op.cit. The role of Bernhard Haring in the formation of key sections of Gaudium et Spes is well known: his experiences on the Russian front of World War II were central in his own formation.
26 I think that the Western church generally (and especially in Australia) has had little awareness of the impact of these leaders of the Eastern churches on the Council and afterwards.
27. Present areas of criticism in the church are sometimes linked to ‘partial and selective reading’ of Vatican II. One example of this is a recent address of Pope John Paul II to the German bishops. It accuses reformist catholics of a unilateral presentation of the church as a purely institutional structure deprived of her mystery. I am not clear how attitudes taken to contemporary issues can historically be linked to Vatican II, which could not have known or taken a position in regard to them.
28. Kevin Seasoltz quotes Rembert Weakland to this effect in a recent article in Worship, 1999, Artistic images of Jesus: a challenge to liturgists, religious educators, and theologians.
29 The usual expression ‘the world’ means the same in this context as modernity.
30 Cf. W.Uren, Discerning the Australian social conscience, Jesuit Publications, 1999,181.
31. It is worth noting that the a horizon of conflict surrounds the discussion. Although Vatican II’s document is entitled, the church ‘in’ the modern world, ‘in’ ought be read as ‘in moderate conflict with’. It is with difficulty that the church finds, in this context, a middle path of challenge and contribution, without adopting one of non-conflictual harmony.
32. One example of this, in the immediate post-Vatican 2 period, was the change in religious life. Part of the change was a change in clothing. Another part was the sudden death of ridiculous practices of penance. Etc.
33. It has been compared (and contrasted) with perestroika.
34 It could also be suggested that this was the beginning of the death of the seminary as it had been known.
35. A parallel group was made up of priests and religious who went overseas to study in the mid to late sixties, and returned to a totally different world at home. They were perhaps like pilots of aircraft who had taken off from an aircraft carrier, and returned to find that the carrier was no longer in the water!
36. Some (such as Xavier Sallantin) suggest that the issue in France has been that of Maurrasism versus Marxism. Maurras is said to have remarked that there was something German, and something Jewish, about Marxism.
37. See F.Leprieur, New Blackfriars,1999, September.
38. Garrigou-Lagrange is a prime example. He was described by Danielou himself as ‘like a typhoon or volcano erupting’. He threatened Blondel with God’s punishment in the next life if he did not recant. He described Maritain (on first meeting him) as ‘a Bergsonian, a great young lout with a very kind face, who looked like a Slav, with bushy hair". He was an apostolic visitor of the dominicans in (the south of) France in 1942. [All this stands for me in some contrast with the more mellow octogenarian I came to know.] These reflections come from Henri de Lubac!
39. I have been told what a struggle it was for loyal, thinking French people (catholics), to come to terms with the conflict of conscience that the conservative-liberal options presented to them.
40. It was always a question of a new way of living, and not just of ‘ivory tower’ thinking. The blending of political and theological thinking in it all is quite strong.
41. It is here that both these popes met the influence of French personalism, under Mounier.
42. Congar, then suffering from multiple sclerosis, was unable to do so.
43. When I suggest that Modernity ‘died’, I mean that it ceased to be the dominant ideological influence on global values. Of course, in many tangible ways, it is still ‘alive’, especially in economics, in the dominance of business schools in the universities, and in the consumerism of the younger generation.
44. Alternatively, the word ‘de-institutionalisation’ expresses what was going on. This had already been noted and studied sociologically by Thomas O’Dea (The dilemmas of de-institutionalisation), Parsons and Merton.
45. I have heard religious superiors there remark, ‘it isn’t happening here’.
46. Some would prefer to call the present time ‘the late period of modernity’: the judgment does not affect the argument here. All agree there is a significant new period of world history.
47. At its high point there were over 500 priest workers in France, mostly centered around Dominicans in Paris and in the south of France.
48. It is well to note that Pius XII, in response to Paul Marella, nuncio in France, gave negative judgment against the priest worker movement. Cardinal Feltin, Archbishop of Paris, attempted to get John 23rd to reverse the decision, but unsuccessfully. The resulting and unresolved tension between this model of ministry and the more accepted style of parish ministry, has coloured all discussions of ministry and priesthood since. (Even if Vatican II did say that manual labour could be part of the work of a priest.)
49. See Commonweal, November 19, 1999, The crisis of liberal catholicism.
50 It is perhaps useful to distinguish three senses of ‘secularisation’. First, there is a secularisation that is intrinsic to modernity itself -–it is the same thing as accommodation to real, contemporary experience. Secondly, there is a secularisation that is the fruit of global capitalist consumerism and the deconstruction of transcendent values thereby. Thirdly, there is a secularisation that could be coterminous with incarnation itself. It is in the second, and present, sense, that it is taken here.
51…Uren, op.cit.
52 It is time that we went past the ‘manicheeism’ of both right wing and left wing catholic thinking, which mutually exclude each other, and blame each other for whatever seems to go wrong. [It is strange to realise how the dynamics are much the same in the right and in the left!] It is a case of the whole body suffering from a kind of unrecognised ‘schizophrenia’. It is not christian, or catholic.
53 John Paul II is the most professional philosopher ever to be elected Pope.
54 I have found the metaphysics of W.Norris Clarke, (see his The One and the Many, undp, forthcoming, June 2000), the metaphysically based anthropology of D.Burrell, (see his God’s Original Peace, undp 1998), and the renewed ‘Thomasian’ studies of the Toulouse Dominicans (especially in Revue thomiste).to be most helpful in this. I might also mention, in a minor way, the work of the Cambridge group of younger scholars (sometimes called ‘radical orthodoxy’), such as Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward.
55 The American Catholic Philosophy Association has chosen as the theme for its meeting in November, 2000, the role of philosophy in catholic theology.
56 Perhaps it is not too outrageous to say that ‘modern’ now means ‘post-participationist’, and that ‘post-modern’ or ‘secular’ means ‘post-post-participationist’. If we turn from modernity, do we build a different future on ‘older’ building blocks? not because they are older, but because they are true? Is ‘post-Vatican II’ really ‘post-arguments-about-times-of-history’ and a new look into – eternity?
57. Here I would renew my earlier comments and questions: is a council the effective way to reach the people?
58. Perhaps we might see a relevance in an older work, of Gaston Fessard, Autorite et Bien Commun, Paris, Aubier, 1944. It is a theory of discernment of the common good. The discernment is seen as a dialectical relation between two freedoms, that of authority promulgating its norms, and that of collectivity availing itself of them, and making them truly its own. In this process it is the ‘esprit de corps’ that transforms the collectivity into a community founded on the good. This process does not happen without negotiation, bargaining, and exchange, through which dissent is engaged, and consent emerges. It is important that neither the authority nor the community be imprisoned in passion and illusion. What all need is a way of disalienation from one another, a deconditioning from past positions held tightly. These views are a contemporary expression of the dynamics of the Spiritual Exercises of St.Ignatius. It was Ignatius who saw so clearly that there could be dialogue with God, and not simply a monologue from God. The relationship is meant to be bilateral, mutual and reciprocal. God is not an Absolute who has mercy on us (sometimes). Mercy is the not the whole of love. God wants to become the eucharist of humanity, so that humanity can be the eucharist of God. We have here a ‘participation model’ for the relations between Christ and the Church, and in the Church, for the relations between those who represent Christ in various ways, and those to whom they represent Him. This holds especially for the relations between the doctrinal function of the magisterium, and the pastoral wisdom of the people of God. Each has to realise that ‘conscience decisions’ (by both) end up in a realisation that we do not, and cannot, by our own means, know the next step in the Way of Love: to know it, we need to ask, together, and humbly, the assistance of Him who is the Way.