MAN ACCORDING TO VATICAN II

Man according to Vatican II

From the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII, the Church has striven for relevancy of its message in a world that was changing, though not without a certain nostalgia for the halcyon days of popular piety. As Blessed Pope John XXIII made clear, the essentials may be eternal but they must be taught in a language as varied as the available milieu. Either this or be a stranger in one’s own surroundings. The ecclesial apparatus must serve the peace and justice of the world rather than bolster the Church’s own status. Opening the Church to the new humanism, the Council fathers recognised the autonomy of earthly affairs and modern science. This was a healthy sign of the Church’s readiness to discern the signs of the times as the ongoing manifestations of the Spirit’s concern in the events of today’s world.

The very first words of the first chapter of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World reveal the Council’s intention of elaborating the place and role of the People of God in today’s world. The frontiers of Church and world are fluid, the life of Faith and temporal works kiss and mingle. The Introductions of four Constitutions are mutually complementary and immediately put forward the aim of the Second Vatican Council, at once positive and pastoral, and no less founded on the Word of God and the theological virtues:

Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC): on the Liturgy,

Dei Verbum (DV): on Revelation,

Lumen Gentium (LG): on the Church, and

Gaudium et Spes (GS): on the Church in the Modern World.

As if to say in epitome: “The sacred Council speaks to the world of God which is the Light of the nations in order to bring them Joy and Hope” (C. Moeller, Commentary, Vol. V, pg.84).

One will discern the Council’s desire and programme for a new world in Jesus Christ, not without the accompanying tension as a necessary condition of man’s being and growth in freedom, a fellow pilgrim to his Father’s dwelling.

The paradoxical union between human and divine, existing in time and pointing beyond history, spells out in large letters the tension milieu of man. Far from canonising the past or consecrating the present, he prepares for the future, that abiding City which is the goal of the messianic people living in and loyal to the present (LG 9). This is continuous with the Messiah who takes nothing away from temporal welfare, but rather elevates and purifies it. By their very concrete duties done in history (LG 36), men deliver creation from the slavery of corruption, and thereby cooperate to bring about the promised restoration already begun in Christ whose death and resurrection have invoked the final age upon us (LG 48). Man has to maintain his integral personality in the tenuous person-society interdependence (LG 25), and while he thirsts for a fuller life (GS 9), in trying to decipher God’s purpose (GS 15), he has to admit that his heart is the theatre of conflicting forces (GS 13). All this is part of the world’s crisis of growth (GS 4), the conflict with evil (GS 37), and the rebellion against death, instigated by the seed of immortality within him (GS 18), planted at the original creation and reinforced by the paschal mystery into which man is plunged, especially by baptism (GS 6).

The conflict is implicit in the liturgy and kergyma whereby the Church reveals to men the real truth about their condition and their total vocation (AG 8), presenting to them the Gospel which is the catalyst of their progress in human history. Like its first missionary activity, the Church’s liturgy vibrates between the first and second coming of Christ (AG 9), unfolding the mystery of Christ for each generation and maintaining in men’s hearts the hopes and future of the Lord (SC 102).

                                       ROUND UP

Our theme has been the ambivalent situation of the human condition: the tension anthropology of Vatican II. Already in the bosom of his family, man is in the ambiguous situation of dependency and the breakaway drive from it. In the give and take of a fast moving society, which affords him a certain independence and privacy in terms of mobility and anonymity,  he has to build his personality by his contribution to the community, and maintain his integrity as a free individual in the teeth of a dominating and institutionalising economy. Thus man enters the stream of human history – the confluence of the unfolding of the divine plan and human decision. Human history is definitively marked by the ongoing history of the Word of God. The picture of dialectic man is thereby illuminated by the historical economy of biblical revelation moving with the slow but sure conquest of the Gospel like leaven in the human narrative. The theme conception of this picture is the nature of man with the accent not so much on his origin but on his becoming future. This transformation is at the heart of his dramatic tension which, far from being a static endowment, points to the dynamism of a promise located above man. Man’s life and activity are continuously within the dynamic of the summons produced by the presence of the eschaton. The world he constructs from raw nature and the society that evolves from human material are not entirely his to dispose of. Man is only the penultimate end – a steward with accountability. Since he is on no man’s land between the past promise and the awaited fulfilment, he can hardly affirm the world except as transient – passing over from its own proud autonomy into the kingdom of God. He is, in fact, called upon to help effect this passage by applying the critique of the Gospel and working for the Lord’s coming. The wealth of the Vatican Council’s documents provide a massive base and a fertile term of reference for a descriptive existentialism of man.