Here is a long entry, but one well worth
reading. A friend sent it along; it was
originally printed in the London Tablet. This being the 50th anniversary of
Vatican II, it is very appropriate and there is much here I would like to “unpack”
over the several subsequent postings.
Don't
let anyone tell you the Council didn't change much
by
Robert Blair Kaiser (
2012 Tablet Lecture via CNUA)
These
days, both wings in the Church are saying the Council was a failure. The left
wing is saying the Council didn't go far enough. The right wing is saying it
went too far. I do not believe the Council was a failure. It has already
changed the way we live - and think - as Catholics. I believe the charter that
was written at Vatican II is the only thing that will save the Church, the
people-of-God Church, not the hierarchical Church.
I had
a peculiar vantage point on Vatican II. I was Time magazine's man at the
Council, sent there in part because I had spent 10 years in the Jesuits and
because I was one of the few reporters on earth who could speak fluent Latin,
the official language of the Council. So, here I am in mid-August 1962,
chatting with Pope John XXIII's secretary, Loris Capovilla, at the papal summer
residence, Castel Gondolfo. All of a sudden here comes John XXIII bouncing up
the marble hallway. 'Why,' he says, arms outstretched, 'What a wonderful
surprise!' Of course, it wasn't a surprise at all. It was all prearranged by
Time magazine's friend in New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman, arranged that
way so the Pope wouldn't be breaking tradition.
I
thought I might have a few mostly chatty minutes with the Pope, and then make
my move to leave. But no. The Pope grabbed my elbow and said he had some things
he wanted to tell me. He was at last ready to tell the world (and he chose to
do it through Time magazine) that he did not intend his Council to be a
strictly churchy event, but a worldly event designed to bring people together,
people of all faiths, even the so-called godless Communists.
His
predecessors, Pius XI and Pius XII had mounted crusades against communism. As
an historian, Papa Roncalli knew what a disaster the Crusades had been. Now, he
said that, in a world that was armed with megaton nuclear warheads, the time
had come to say, 'No more crusades.' In fact, he didn't want the Council to
launch condemnations of any anything or anyone.
Time
magazine's foreign editor Henry Grunwald didn't want to believe my report, but
what could he do? This Rome correspondent had talked with the Pope and he
hadn't. So Time ran with my reporting, on this NO MORE CRUSADES story, and on a
good many other initiatives the Pope was starting to make.
Grunwald
had to admit: 'We've got to watch this Roncalli pope. What's this word
aggiornamento? What is that all about?' I had to admit: aggiornamento was a
pretty bold word for the pope to use, in Roma aeterna, where nothing ever
changed. How do you bring a Church that never changes 'up to date'? The top
cardinal in Rome, Alfredo Ottaviani, the pro-prefect of the Holy Office of the
Inquisition, could not conceive of any of the changes that the word aggiornamento
implied, and I soon found out from theologians like Yves Congar, Jean Danielou,
Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx (all of whom had been silenced before
Vatican II for their 'radical thinking') that Ottaviani was doing almost
everything he could to put roadblocks in the way of Council's major
change-projects. And why wouldn't he? His coat of arms said it all: Semper
Idem. Always the same.
How
would the Council bring things up to date? Early on, this wasn't too clear to
anyone, not even perhaps to the Pope himself. He was a modest man who used to
end jokes with his secretary with the punch line, 'I'm not infallible, you
know!' But he had an intuition: that 2,500 bishops encouraged to speak freely
in a kind of parliament of bishops would figure it out.
They
did this very quickly. After a month-long debate on whether the Church should
scrap its traditional Latin Mass for the vernacular, the Council Fathers voted
2200 to 200 in favour of the language of the people. It was our first clue:
that Vatican II was trying to re-create a people's Church.
Up to
now, the bishops had been part of the ecclesia docens, the teaching Church,
while the rest of us were the ecclesia discens, the learning Church. Here at
the Council, the bishops all became part of the learning Church. Hobnobbing
with theologians like Congar, Danielou, Chenu, Schillebeckx, they began to
start speaking of the Church in new ways, promising to create a new kind of
Church, a people's Church, not a Church that was making itself less and less
relevant with its excessive clericalism, juridicism and triumphalism. Some of
the best Council speeches were now calling for a Church that believed God was
at work in all men and women, in individuals as well as in humankind as a
whole, a Church that wanted us to be all that we could be - in this life as
well as in the next.
As
the Council opened, I sought out America's most famed Catholic preacher, Bishop
Fulton Sheen (he was staying at the Excelsior, the most pricey hotel on the Via
Veneto), to ask him about his hopes for the Council. He turned down my request
by denying the very humanity of the Council itself. 'It will be all about the
Holy Spirit,' he said. 'He will tell us what to say and do.' Bishop Sheen
didn't tell me how I should go about interviewing the Holy Spirit.
I
went on to interview everyone else I could find, often in 18-hour-days, and,
much to my surprise, I was getting stories about the Council into the magazine
almost every week. And then at the end of the Council's first session, the
Macmillan Publishing Company in the U.S. and Tom Burns of Burns, Oates and
Washburn asked me to do a book on that first session of the Council. Time's
editors gave me six weeks off to do it. I went off to the Rome headquarters of
the Society of the Divine Word and wrote pretty much around the clock (with a
couple of hours home for lunch every day). The Observer serialised the book,
installments on page one every Sunday for four Sundays in a row in August 1963.
And when the book came out, first in London and Dublin, it shot to number one
on the bestseller list.
In
the book, I used an extended metaphor, imagining the Church as the barque of
Peter, a boat that had been in port for too many centuries, its bottom so
encrusted with barnacles that it couldn't even sail. Now, by calling a Council,
I said that Pope John had figuratively launched that vessel out on to the seas
of the world.
Pope
Paul VI liked the image so much that he got one of his American monsignor
friends who lived in Rome to ask me for permission to have my book translated
into Italian and published for the benefit of the Italian bishops who didn't
quite understand the Council was trying to create a new kind of Church, one
less concerned with its own power, one more at the service of humankind.
My
barque-of-Peter image underlined what was different about Vatican II. For all
the other councils of history (20 of them) the Church turned inward on itself.
This council was turned out to the world.
Not
everyone understood that right away. Pope John's Curia didn't get it--they may
have never gotten it. The most curious among you might want to read Yves
Congar's Journal of the Council, a daily diary of his exhaustive and exhausting
work behind the scenes, battling with Cardinal Ottaviani and his chief aide,
the Dutch Jesuit Sebastian. To get ready for the Council, they were crafting a
compendium of the faith as enunciated by all the papal encyclicals written
since Pius the Ninth, doing everything they could to make Vatican II into
another Council of Trent.
'This
is all wrong,' Congar wrote. 'This is papalist nonsense. It is making the
Council into a textbook manual that will not help bring about the aggiornamento
Pope John XXIII is calling for--a recreation of what the faith was in its
primitive beginnings. To rediscover the beauty of that faith, we have to take a
deeper look at Sacred Scripture, and study the Fathers of the Church. And only
then will the Council speak to the world in language it can understand.'
Reading
Congar's accounts now, I realise my reports in Time and my book on the first
session reflected only dimly what a fierce battle was going on. The Observer
had a poster for my series that appeared in all the tube stations of London. It
screamed out the headline THE PLOT TO THWART POPE JOHN. Read Congar and you
will see that headline was an understatement.
Why
am I telling you these stories? Because I want you to be aware during the
coming year of efforts to dumb the Council down, of efforts to convince you
that the Council didn't change the Church very much. I think it did, and after
you recall what kind of Church we lived in before Vatican II, I think you will
agree with me, and rejoice with me and be glad for what the Council did do,
irreversibly, I hope.
The
Council changed the way we thought about God, about ourselves, about our
spouses, our Protestant cousins, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Jews, even the
way we thought about the Russians. When a handful of bishops kept pushing for
conciliar condemnation of Communism, John XXIII kept insisting that that kind
of talk would only blow up the world. Pope John and his Council made some
preliminary moves that helped end the Cold War. For this, the editors of Time
made John XXIII the Man of the Year.
The
Jews? The Council reversed the Church's long-standing anti-Semitism. Until the
Council, Catholics believed that, if Jews didn't convert to Catholicism, there
was something wrong with them. The Council Fathers took another look at that
idea and decided that Jews were still living their ancient covenant with God.
We decided there was nothing wrong with the Jews; they became our brothers and
sisters.
Before
the Council, we thought we were miserable sinners when we were being nothing
but human. After the Council, we had a new view of ourselves. We learned to put
a greater importance on finding and following Jesus as 'the way' (as opposed to
what we said in the Creed. It didn't matter so much what we said. What mattered
was what we did: helping to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and find shelter
for the homeless. That's what made us followers of Jesus.
Before
the Council, we were told we were excommunicated if we set foot in a Protestant
Church. After the Council (where Protestant observers were welcomed, given seats
of honor, and spoken of no longer as Protestants, but as 'separated brethren'),
we stopped fighting the Methodists and the Presbyterians and conspired with
them in the fight for justice and peace and marched with them to Selma.
Before
the Council, we thought only Protestants read the Bible. After the Council,
we've seen a new Catholic appreciation of the Scriptures; they've been given a
more prominent place at Mass; and in many parishes, we have groups gathering
every week for Bible study.
Before
the Council, we took pride in knowing that we were the only people on earth who
could expect salvation, according to the centuries-long mantra, 'There is no
salvation outside the Church.'
After
the Council, we began to see there was something good and something great in
all religions. And we didn't think we had all the answers. After Vatican II, we
started thinking of ourselves not as 'the one, true Church'. We were 'a pilgrim
people'. It was a phrase that summoned up an image of a band of humble
travellers on a journey who, though we are subject to rain and snow and high
wind and hurricane, to thirst and starvation and pestilence and disease and
attack by leopards and locusts, keep on plodding ahead with a hope and a prayer
that we will someone reach our destination. The image was calculated to counter
an old self-concept that hadn't stood up to scrutiny - of a triumphal Church
that had all the answers, lording it over humankind.
Before
the Council, we identified 'salvation' as 'getting to heaven.' After the Council,
we knew that we had a duty to bring justice and peace to the world in our own
contemporary society, understanding in a new way the words that Jesus gave us
when he taught us to pray, 'thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it
is in heaven.' By the end, among the most influential figures at the Council,
we encountered two humble souls, one a woman, Dorothy Day, the founder of the
Catholic Worker movement, who wasn't allowed to speak to the assembled bishops
at Vatican II (no woman was), and a bird-like figure, Dom Helder Camara, the
archbishop of Recife, in Brazil. Both of them went around Rome telling
individual bishops and those who were putting together the Council's crowning
document, Gaudium et Spes: please don't forget the poor.
The
Council did not forget the poor, and the statement out of Rome in October 2011
allying the Church with the world's have-nots only proves that even the current
powers-that-be in the Church (still so unaccountable in so many other ways) get
it. I will quote Gaudium et Spes: The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the
anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way
afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers
of Christ .
Before
the Council, we were sin-obsessed. It was even a sin to eat a hamburger on
Friday night after the game. After the Council, we had a new sense of sin. We
didn't hurt God when we sinned. We sinned when we hurt somebody else. Or
ourselves. After the Council, we had a new holy hopeful view of ourselves,
redefining holiness as the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton did: to be holy
is to be human.
Before
the Council, we were told we were condemned to hell if we made love to our
spouses without at the same time making babies. After the Council, we knew we
had a duty (and the God- approved pleasure) to make love even if we could not
afford to have another baby.
Before
the Council, we thought God spoke directly to the Pope and that he passed the
word down the ecclesiastical pyramid to the bishops, then to the priests, then
the nuns, and, properly filtered, to us. After the Council, we learned a new
geometry. The Church wasn't a pyramid. It was more like a circle, where we are
all encouraged to have a voice. We are the Church. We have a right and a duty
to speak out about the kind of Church we want.
Please
note that most of these changes did not come about because the Fathers of
Vatican II revamped what we had already professed believing in the Apostles
Creed. They didn't change our faith, they didn't come up with a new
understanding of God. Still one God, two natures, three persons. Only in this
sense can I agree with Pope Benedict XVI when he keeps insisting on something
he calls 'the hermeneutic of continuity.'
I
have to agree with him when he says the Council didn't come up with anything
new. No, no new dogmas. (And thank God for that. The last thing modern,
thinking Catholics want are dogmas of any kind. 'Dogma' and 'dogmatic' are
words that we do not much resonate with. When I think of dogma, I think of the
hundreds of anathemas laid down by the Council of Trent: 'believe these
dogmatic propositions or be damned.')
When
Jesus addressed the multitude on that hillside overlooking the lake, he did not
enlighten their minds by reading them the Ten Commondments. He enkindled their
hearts by telling what would make them happy.
The
Council Fathers did not follow the example of Trent. They followed the example
of Jesus. They did not anathematise anyone or anything. They set a new style of
thinking about ourselves as followers of the guy who told us how we could have
life and have it more abundantly.
We
make a mistake if we comb through the sixteen documents of Vatican II and hope
to find explicit warrants for the Church we want to see take shape in the
future. We can only capture the real, revolutionary meaning of the Council by looking
at the new kind of language that permeated all those documents. It was not the
kind of legalistic language Cardinal Ottaviani loved. The American Jesuit John
W. O'Malley, author of the most authoritative work on the Council, What
Happened at Vatican II, says the Council's message was hidden in plain sight.
Fr O'Malley describes it by contrasting the old language with the old: ...at
stake were almost two different visions of Catholicism: from commands to
invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to
persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from
ruling to service, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal,
from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to
partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to ongoing, from passive
acceptance to active engagement, from fault finding to appreciation, from
prescriptive to principled, from behaviour modification to inner appropriation .
Mere
words? I do not think so. They underline my thesis - that the Council helped us
all be more real, more human and more loving. The Council helped us realise
that the world was a good place. It was good because God made it, and he made
it because he loved us and loved the world, too. As should we .
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