George Weigel asks his readers to “reimagine” Vatican II and examines whether it is true that the Council prescribed a fatal concession to the modern world, which according to the disaffected should be “repudiated or quietly buried.”
If such is thought about at all, the legacy of Vatican I seems firmly place. Pope Pius IX convoked the Council to deal with contemporary problems now cloaked in history, but of interest is the adjournment of the Council, which was not formally closed until 1960 by Pope John XXIII when Vatican II was convened, or Vatican I re-convened.
Much of the debate during Vatican I over modern liberalism was left inconclusive: in particular whether modernism strikes at the very foundations the faith. The most solemn condemnation emerging from the council is in the eighteen canons of the “Constitutio Dogmatica de Fide Catholica,” in which the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century errors of pantheism, naturalism, and rationalism are condemned more clearly and fully than in the earlier “Syllabus of Errors.” What is not explicitly stated is whether the same applies to modernism. It remained for Pope Pius X in 1907 to address the gravity of the situation with his analysis of the situation, which begins with the proposition that the modern philosopher places the foundation of his belief in a doctrine usually called agnosticism (Pascendi Dominici Gregis, part 6).
What follows over the next decades is the cultural entrenchment of modernism, with the Hegelian argument that history is everything, which founders on what George Weigel calls the “new thirty years war, 1914-1945,” followed by the Cold War and history that threatened the survival of the human race.
A bit more than a half-century has passed since the time of Vatican II, but the legacy has become problematic, especially as to whether or not the Council created a rapprochement with modern “liberal” Catholicism, or whether such a reform that violates traditional ecclesiastical doctrine while re-modeling the laws that govern our knowledge of God in the spirit of emancipation.
In his “The Idea of a Christian Society,” T.S. Eliot wrote that “liberalism may be a tendency toward something very different from itself…. something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify.” He goes on to note that liberalism “is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at,” formed as it is “from the vaguer [images] in the imagination. Liberalism destroys the traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents by licensing the opinions of the most foolish,” which in turn is modernism’s greatest problem.
Eliot’s life journey ended in 1965, but he was surely aware of how modernism was affecting Christian culture with its high degree of human self-confidence and the belief that humanity could at last master the forces of nature and history, which would justify an optimistic hope for a human earthly future.
Blessed John Henry Newman wrote pointedly on the topic of modernism, and most are in agreement that it would be wrong to call him a modernist, since his theological and biblical attitude was entirely orthodox and traditional and opposed to the liberal malaria vapors around the edges of the Holy See and prevalent during his own time. So, rather than rapprochement with modernism over a century or so, at least from the time from Vatican I to Vatican II, Roman Catholic church history proves good evidence of the Church’s efforts to meet the challenges of modernity.
And inasmuch as Vatican I remained unfulfilled, the sixty years since the closing of Vatican II seem to illustrate that the Council’s “implementation” has been impeded by intra-Catholic battles over its purpose and teaching.
It’s helpful, therefore, to “reimagine,” in the words of George Weigel, Vatican II.
Turn we then to George Weigel’s magisterial To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II.
In his introduction, first of all, Mr. Weigel asks his readers to “reimagine” Vatican II, the council having over time become a familiar piece of shorthand for ”the household of faith,” since no “Catholic event since the Council of Trent had so dramatic an impact on world Catholicism as the Second Vatican Council,” and “virtually none has been so contentious.”
He continues that the meaning has become controverted, sometimes bitterly, and complaints are no longer limited to the disaffected elderly but also deeply committed young Catholics. The sticking point is whether the Council prescribed a fatal concession to the modern world which according to the disaffected, should be “repudiated or quietly buried.”
Maybe so…. Maybe not so.
Mr. Weigel expands the issue by noting, for example, that much of the German-speaking world came to believe that Vatican II was an open invitation to reinvent Catholicism as if it were just another liberal denomination. But at the “macro level” there were or are the daily practical issues of Catholic life with which the people of the church routinely contend. How does Vatican II respond to such modern issues as the sexual revolution, and the erosion of the family, and how is the faith to be transmitted to generations, and what precisely is to be handed on?
To create a necessary ground plan, Mr. Weigel begins this history by asking a question: “What, precisely, was Vatican II”? The “protocols,” which began on January 25, 1959, came with the newly elected Pope John XXIII, whom many expected to be an elderly place-holder but who stunned the church when during a Christmas octave he announced that he would summon an Ecumenical Council. Mr. Weigel notes that the shock was more stunning since most Catholic thinkers had consigned such ecclesiastical gatherings to the dustbin of history.
And surely an assembly of bishops numbering in the thousands would be something to be avoided, what with the ambition and wrangling that would take place.
More so, what were the disputed questions which presumably were dividing the Christian community in the mid-1950s, and which would then necessarily lead to reforms and a common self-understanding?
Mr. Weigel’s thematic point is that past Ecumenical Councils had been called typically to address and if possible heal divisions within the Church caused by doctrinal disputes and contradictory practices that had led to the break down of ecclesial unity: in other words, last resort responses to Church-dividing crises.
This becomes the subject matter of Chapter 1, “Crisis What Crisis?” Here Mr. Weigel surveys past gatherings and Councils, which emerged to deal with breakdowns in unity. Councils have always been responses to profound threats to the Church’s unity, which meant such a question was likely to be asked “immediately after John XXIII announced his intention to summon Vatican II.”
What’s interesting, then, is that even during the Council itself the question continued to be asked especially by those bishops dismayed by the Council’s theological direction. Mr. Weigel notes as good background that the answer was given more than a century before during the reforming movement within the Church of England by Blessed John Henry Newman, which has led to some characterization of Newman as the “father” of Vatican II. Mr. Weigel quotes Newman, who argued that the times were perilous with trials lying before the Church, which were of such an intensity to make dizzy even the most courageous hearts.
For centuries the Church had to deal with false gods and superstitions and heresies but here was something different: the epidemic of modernism which as Mr. Weigel then makes clear in Chapter 2, “Modernity as Ideology,” had radically changed the concept of the human person and in turn fundamentally a challenge to the order of ideas and culture.
Properly so, then, Mr. Weigel makes the point that the Enlightenment had turned its back on the past and that with this new era of liberty and equality, religion would no longer shackle the human spirit with superstitious religious dogma, which also meant that modernism had become antagonistic to Catholicism’s offerings, instead favoring atheistic humanists.
Mr. Weigel is precise, therefore, in beginning his legacy of Vatican II with careful pronouncements as to the ideology of modernism, such that the legacy of Vatican II is not, as many have assumed, a rapprochement with modernism.
That issue is complicated by the time period between World War I and World War II, which came about as a result of modernism’s ideology. More so, World War I only began civilization’s self destruction, which means that the guns that thundered in August 1914 were a mere offering as to what was downstream: World War II, therefore a product in time of World War I. Mr. Weigel quotes Arthur Koestler, who captures the historical distortion in Darkness at Noon. Looking back it seemed as if the world had spent thirty years in a frenzy: “Perhaps it wasn’t healthy…. to cut off the old ties, to disengage the brakes of thou shalt not.”
“For the most alert Catholic minds of the mid-twentieth century,” Mr. Weigel writes, the meaning of all this was clear: the Church was now living the situation Blessed John Henry Newman had presciently described in his Sermons at Olton in 1873. The Church was confronted by a “darkness different in kind from any that had been before it. The Church was living in a world simply irreligious.’’ Europe had deconstructed itself culturally into a world in which Catholicism would cease to act as a cultural inheritance. And in Chapter 3, “The New Thirty Years War,” he makes the argument that in the retrospect of “more than a century,” the World Wars seemed “an exercise in civilizational suicide.”
Christendom was possibly over, although the reason was less one of overt animosity than of religious and spiritual boredom.
If this, therefore, was the spiritual condition of post-World War II Christianity in Europe, then the renewal of the Catholic mind was awaiting its historical moment.
Were there, however, Catholic apologists gifted enough to renew the Catholic theological mind? Mr. Weigel here turns to the reformist theologians Romano Gardenia and Joseph Ratzinger, who argued that the church was most itself in the liturgy and that the liturgy needed to be brought more directly into the church’s theological understanding.
Chapter 5, then, “The Renewal of the Catholic Mind,” begins more properly to place Vatican II in a relation to one of its predecessors, “The Syllabus of Errors,” as a rejection of all things modern and the condemned argument that the “Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” Pointedly, his argument deepens in this chapter when he includes an analysis of philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, who began the process of demolishing “traditional metaphysics… [and] because of that, they tended to think of religious faith as a sentiment rather than an assent to truths,” which in that time frame led to the sense that the church should adapt itself to the spirit of the age, even if that meant repudiating much of what Catholicism once thought to be true.
In another sense, therefore, Vatican II emerged with the intent to develop a cultural argument for revelation and supernatural truths, which would require an ecclesiology with a deeper understanding of the Bible and the history of doctrine. Thus Vatican II should be thought of as an embellished cleansing that would renew the entire tapestry of the Catholic faith.
A good deal of which would require a robust education for Catholic priests.
Mr. Weigel brings the reader, then, to Chapter 7, devoted to the question “What Kind of Council? To What Ends?” Interestingly he begins with a generalization by noting that with the death of Pius XII on October 9, 1958, casual observers and devout Catholics were of the mind that the Church was solid and stable, imperious to confusion.
Others were not so sure.
Citing Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mr. Weigel notes a desire on the part of some that the Church be more open to the “working of the Holy Spirit [and] roused ‘from the bed of historical sleep for the [needs] of today.’” On the other hand, there were some opposed to the idea of a Council, a resumption of Vatican I, since such might be the desire of the worst of the Church’s enemies: i.e., the modernists.
John XXIII had something else in mind.
He imagined the Council as “an invitation to spiritual renewal for the Church and the world.” And then the following: His Council would encourage “the enlightenment, edification and joy of the entire Christian people” and “extend a renewed cordial invitation to the faithful of the separated communities to participate with [the Church] in the quest for unity and grace, for which so many souls long in all parts of the world.” Inferred in those gracious words was also a plea for no condemnation, no anti-Protestant or anti-Eastern Orthodox polemics. The Council would proceed with an open hand, not a clenched fist.
Mr. Weigel then pointedly argues that the Council was called to bring about renewal and reform with a new ecumenical engagement, which should center less on those things that separate, but which would instead search for all that brings us together. This would include the reminder that lay Catholics were not mere objects of the clergy’s pastoral attention but baptized members of the Mystical Body with “a specific responsibility.” Such should become a “mutual effort of the laity with the clergy for the building-up of the Body of Christ.” Priests, furthermore, “should steer clear of ‘defensive’ or ‘patriarchal’ postures… and also steer clear of a kind of apartheid over against the laity, all of which runs counter to the building-up of the Mystical Body.”
In “What Vatican II Taught,” Mr. Weigel considers the Council’s distinctive features apart from its sheer size, as well as its breaking of precedent with invited observers from other Christian communities.
He begins also with a superb chapter titled “John XXIII’s Original Intention,” which Mr. Weigel notes was the reason for the Church’s existence: to enrich and intensify the Church’s proclamation of the salvation won for humanity by Jesus Christ. The world was in great need of the good news of Gospel.
Therefore, let the Church take the lead in restoring our confidence in our Savior, who has not left the world He redeemed. One would think, however, that after John XXIII’s death such would be the death of the Council.
Providentially, the impetus was carried now with urgings amplified by one Bishop Karol Wojtyla’s memorandum using the Council to rescue the project through the bold proclamation of a Christian humanism centered on the person of Jesus Christ which would require a world open to transcendence to that which is also greater than ourselves and is not simply an academic question. Mr. Weigel then takes the reader through series of chapters devoted to the sixteen documents that emerged from the Second Vatican Council many of which defined the works of evangelization bringing the truth of Christ into temporal affairs.
Of course Council members were likely tiring, which required commentaries published in the years following. In 1966, Joseph Ratzinger described the Council’s “Declaration on Christian Education” as a weak text.
What’s wise about his commentary is a prescient way to conclude this writing. He wrote that in the centuries preceding and in the decades following Vatican II, the Church had challenged the modern state’s tendency to absorb all educational functions and institutions within itself. The state, however, should not monopolize education but should acknowledge that parents are the primary educators of the children and create the circumstances in which parents can live out that responsibility.
The Church and parents are the moral educators of the young, a sort of communion of disciples, Mr. Weigel concludes, who “live that understanding with joy—even in the face of scorn and persecution.”
For no other foundation can anyone lay than that
which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
—1 Corinthians 3.11
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The featured image, uploaded by Lothar Wolleh, is a photograph of the Second Vatican Council. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.