Memories Are Made of This--Refashioning Vatican II

October 11^th this year marks the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and one of the behind-the-scenes struggles for the direction of the Catholic Church concerns just what that Council taught in its various decrees, declarations, and constitutions.  One would think that the Council’s teachings would be quite clear.  I mean, it is all there in black and white (though in Latin) in the official documents, but one thing historians know and the rest of the world must learn is that a document is not enough—the real “trick” is in the interpretation of the document.  I don’t mean the translation—though that too is a matter of interpretation as despite the best efforts of Liturgiam Authenticam to fool you to the contrary, there is no such thing as a literal interpretation, at least a faithful literal interpretation—but I mean the interpretation of what the documents mean.  We all know what a document says (or actually reads as documents don’t talk) but what does it mean?  We have the same issue in the United States when it comes to interpreting our Constitution.  There are strict constructionists like Mr. Justice Scalia for whom it is a static set of words and ideas and who insist it be interpreted in a narrow historical context for the exact meaning of its author(s), and you have the broad constructionists, generally liberals, who treat it like a living organism whose meaning has evolved over the years as it is applied to situations never foreseen by its 18^th century proponents.  So too the Documents of Vatican II:   must they be understood as to the intentions of the authors and the Council Fathers who approved them or are they able to be mined for new meanings that develop as the Church grows and develops.  Certainly this much is true: the Church of 2012 would be beyond the wildest imaginations of the Pope (John XXIII) and Bishops who marched into Saint Peter’s Basilica 50 years ago.  Where are the legions of veiled nuns?  What are lay people doing bringing Holy Communion to the sick?  What language is this we are hearing at Mass?  Why are these Africans dancing around the altar?  Look at all these black and brown and yellow bishops!  Lots of changes—some good, some not so good.   The once dormant Church of Latin America is alive and thriving—raised from the dead!   The Church of Europe is sinking fast. Who’da thunk it?
So how do we interpret the Council decrees?  When it comes to the US Constitution, the conservatives want a “strict construction.”  When it comes to the Decrees of Vatican II, it is the liberals who are arguing to stay with the original intent of the Council Fathers.  It is the liberals in the Church who believe that the Council has been stolen from them by an attempt to reinterpret the decrees in a way very different from how they were originally understood.  Before the current school year opened, Cardinal Wuerl wrote a letter to the seminarians of his Archdiocese  calling on them to study hard and, as the 50^th anniversary of the Council approached, to study the Conciliar documents closely so as to defend them against those who would interpret them with a “hermeneutic of discontinuity.”   This, in a nutshell,  is the argument over the Council—are the Conciliar decrees “continuous” with the teaching of the pre-conciliar Church or do they represent a sharp break in our Catholic heritage?
It is the conservatives—led by people in Rome, including Pope Benedict—who want to alter the history of the Council by reshaping the teaching of the Council according to a “hermeneutic of continuity.”  A great part of this is from the Holy Father’s ardent desire to reconcile the Traditionalist movement begun by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  Most Catholics think that the fight with the traditionalists is over the “New Mass” but the liturgical reforms of Paul VI are only the tip of the iceberg.  I have long felt that the only people who really understand the Second Vatican Council are those who reject it.   I am not endorsing a rejection of the Council—far from it.  I think the Council has saved the Church for the future.  But the Council saved the Church by taking radical means.  There was at Vatican II, for example, a complete reversal of Catholic teaching regarding ecumenism.  Catholics had been forbidden to engage in any ecumenical activity prior to the Council—discussion groups, collaborative projects, mission work—and never, never, never were we to pray with Protestants (who were heretics) or even the Orthodox (who were only schismatics, but separated none the less from the “True Church”).  Ecumenism had been explicitly condemned by Pius XI in his 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos.   
Another discontinuity is that the Council itself was a bit of backtracking on the infallibility of the Pope.  Vatican I with its decree Pastor Aeternus declaring Papal Infallibility had made the idea of a Council superfluous.  All authority resided in the Pope.  There would never again be a need to gather the bishops to share the teaching office of Peter.  To not only gather them in a Council but to permit them to openly discuss Catholic doctrine and discipline was nothing less than a reconsideration of Papal authority as defined at Vatican I. 
Dignitatis Humanae, the Decree on Religious Liberty totally reversed Catholic Doctrine that taught that freedom of worship should be limited to the Catholic Church and that ‘error has no rights’ meaning that non-Catholic worship should be proscribed by civil law.  Dei Verbum, the Constitution on Divine Revelation not only permitted but encouraged the very sort of biblical studies that Pius X had condemned in his battle against modernism.   
Recently the Vatican announced that The Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences is interested in collecting the journals, diaries, and private notes of the Council Fathers (participants) at Vatican II for the archives so that future scholars could better study the Council.  Hopefully this project will be a failure and the various dioceses and religious orders will preserve the relevant documents.  There would be no more effective way of advancing the lie of the “hermeneutic of continuity” than to isolate from scholars, historians, and theologians the relevant documents that show what the bishops were thinking at the time of the Council.  To reinterpret the Council in the “hermeneutic of continuity” is to rob the Council of charismatic character with which the Holy Spirit endowed it and to reduce it to a tool of those who want to turn back the clock and undo the work of Grace.

The Immaculate Conception

Mary and Jesus, from an altarpiece in

the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine

Florence, Italy

Well, triggered by the word “prevenient” in the new translation for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, we have been looking at original sin in order to better understand how the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception developed.  It is a fairly late doctrine and despite its being infallibly defined we will see that it cannot claim, at least historically, to have been part of the Tradition handed down from the Apostles.  
     As I mentioned in my previous post, while the idea of original sin can be traced back through Augustine to even earlier patristic sources, it is a theological concept that never developed in the Christian East and is unknown in Orthodox and Eastern Catholic sources.  Without a concept of original sin, there is no doctrine of the Immaculate Conception because the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that Mary was conceived in her mother’s womb without the original sin that has affected the rest of the human family.  Mary is unique in this regard.  The Church says that she was saved from original sin through the merits of the death and resurrection of her Divine son even though that passion, death, and resurrection had not yet taken place in time: hence “prevenient.”  Although the Eastern Churches did not celebrate Mary’s Immaculate Conception they did celebrate her conception, affixing the date  (originally) to December 9—nine months (minus one day) before the feast of her birth.  In the same way the Church celebrated the conception of her Son nine months before the Church celebrates his birth.  (March 25^th is nine months before December 25^th.)  These are the only two “conceptions” I know of being celebrated in the Church calendar.  The feast of Mary’s Conception originated in the Church of Syria (which included the Holy Land) in about the sixth century but soon was celebrated throughout Eastern Christianity. 
       How did the feast come to the West?  Scholars agree that it was the Normans who introduced the feast to the Western Church.  In the eleventh century Normans conquered Sicily and Southern Italy where the Church, at that time,  followed the Greek Rite rather than the Western Latin Rites.  It was probably at this time that the Normans became familiar with the feast of the Conception of Mary.  There was a problem though in the west.  Western theologians, including Augustine, saw that Mary was, like the rest of us, conceived in original sin.  How can we celebrate a sinful conception?  (Remember the East, not believing in original sin, saw no sin in the conception.)  Immediately a theological debate broke out.  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a great devotee of the Blessed Virgin insisted that she, like us, was conceived in original sin.  Saint Thomas would pick this up and affirm that Mary was conceived in sin.  The Franciscans and Carmelites however, came to Mary’s defense and insisted that she had been spared original sin in order to prepare her for being the Mother of Jesus.  The debate raged through the Middle Ages.  When Pope Sixtus IV put the feast of Mary’s Conception on the universal calendar in the fifteenth century it was simply called the Conception of the Virgin.  The Dominican Pope, Saint Pius V, in revising the Roman Calendar also simply called it “The Conception of the Virgin.”  In Franciscan and Carmelite Churches, and several dioceses, however, it was called “The Immaculate Conception.” 
       The doctrine remained an open question for centuries with Catholics free to believe that Mary suffered the consequences of original sin or that she had been preserved from it by a special dispensation of “prevenient” grace.  In much the same way, while Catholics today must believe that Mary was assumed body and soul at the end of her earthly life, we are free to believe that she died or that she did not die before her assumption.  The matter is undefined.  In regard to the Immaculate Conception,  however, Pope Pius IX closed the issue in 1854 by defining the doctrine that Mary was conceived without sin through a dispensation on the merits of her Son’s passion, death, and Resurrection.  Thus today this is a defined dogma for the Church, though the Eastern Churches—the various rites that comprise the Eastern Churches in union with Rome as well as the Orthodox Churches, sort of nod their heads in ambiguous assent and go on their way thinking that we westerners argue over the darnedest things.  And perhaps we do. 

History Sometimes Flunks Theology Exams

The Theodora Episcopa Mosaic in the Basilica

of Santa Prassede in Rome

Sometimes I get correspondence about this blog asking why I bring up contemporary issues such as the new translation of the Mass which goes into effect at the end of this month or suggesting that I keep opinions to myself and “stick to the past.”   I think this is because most people who have not studied history in depth don’t understand what history is all about.  History is not about the past.  History uses the past as metaphor to speak about the present and the future.  In that way history is really a tool that helps us better understand not only our world and how it has evolved to be the way it is, but to help us understand human nature and how and why people act the way they do.  If one gets the doctorate in Church History one gets a degree such as D.Hist. or H.E.D. (Historia Ecclesiae Doctor) depending on the institution at which one studies but in the “real world” of academia, if academia can be called a real world—and I admit that is very debatable—the doctorate is Ph.D.  Philosophiae Doctor—Doctor of Philosophy.  We study history as philosophy, that is as a branch of the “love of wisdom” (which is what the word “philosophy” means.  It is not enough to know the facts, one has to be able to interpret the facts into a coherent narrative that gives us not only information but insight. 
     And a historian who studies the history of the Church is looking for insights, often insights that Theology—a discipline that is restricted by the authority of the Church—is prohibited from giving.  The historical facts often contradict the Theological doctrines, leaving theologians, at least Catholic Theologians,  powerless to set the record straight about things.  There are, for example, teachings once declared infallible that are no longer held by the Church.  At one point in the history of the Church, for example, the Church taught that only those “subject to the authority of the Roman Pontiff” could be saved.  The Church no longer holds that—and has not held it for a long time.   What are the implications of that for the notion of papal infallibility?    There are theological presuppositions unsupported by history—what does that do to magisterial authority?  For example: current Church teaching declares definitively that there never were women ordained to the ministries of bishop or priest.  Frankly, that question is—from a historical perspective—not closed.  (It is from a doctrinal one.)  Historians are still weighing and debating evidence to that question.  There are some archeological monuments that can be interpreted as referring to female bishops or priests.  The question is complex from historical and archeological perspectives.  Are we sure that they mean that the referred to females were bishops or priests?  No.  They could be the wife of the bishop (not uncommon before the fourth century) or the priest (not uncommon before the 12^th century).  There is a famous mosaic in the basilica of Santa Prassede in Rome that displays the image of “Theodora episcopa”—Theodora, the Lady Bishop.  This mosaic—from the early ninth century, is far too late for there to have been a lady bishop; moreover we know that Theodora was the mother of the Bishop, Pope Paschal I.  So you have to be careful how you interpret these things, but just because this particular artifact does not mean that the woman was a bishop one cannot say that several dozen other inscriptions from earlier centuries cannot refer to a woman bishop or priest.  And if they do so refer—was the bishop or priest in question a bishop or priest in the “Great Church” (i.e. the orthodox and apostolic Christian Church which antecedes both the Catholic and Orthodox Church) or from one of the many sects now seen to be schismatic or heretical such as the Collyridians or the Montanists who did ordain women.  Frankly the jury is out on the question of women’s ordination and the difficulty is that to prove that the Church never ordained women is an all but impossible task whereas a single example suffices to prove that they did.  Historans can look at these questions; Catholic theologians can’t—at least publically.  Moreover, the ministries of bishop and priest have evolved through the centuries.  Indeed, were there “bishops” and “priests” –in our theological understanding of a tripartite Sacrament of Orders—Bishops, Priests, Deacons—before the time of Ignatius of Antioch at the end of the first century?  It is a complex question.   There were episodes in the history of the Church—perhaps as late as the thirteenth century—when priests could confer the sacrament of Holy Orders.  On the other hand, there were times when it seems that priests were not seen as having the “power” to say mass or forgive sins.    The “powers” ascribed to the various orders (as in Holy Orders) have changed over the course of time.  Historians uncover the fact that things we think can never change have in fact been the product of historical evolution. The History of the Church unlocks possibilities for the future by showing us the variables of the past. 
     My closest friend of many years and his wife are Lutherans.  We often travel together and in the years I have lived in Rome they have been frequent guests.  They have never been able to get enough of Saint Peter’s—always wanting to return there. (I can think of a dozen churches I think are more beautiful and more interesting—including Santa Prassede that I mentioned above.)  And I always remind them that it was the building of this Church—Saint Peter’s—that triggered Luther and his protest against selling indulgences.  I love irony and history is full of irony.   History shows us that only God was in the beginning, is now, and shall be evermore.  We humans and our frail institutions—including the Church—come and go, changing to the needs of the times and like Ozymandias passing from the scene altogether when no longer needed.