Is Vatican II
Irrelevant Now?
Is
Vatican II irrelevant now
in the seventh year of Francis’s pontificate? In one respect, yes; in another,
no. Neither explanation is what one might expect at first glance.
Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and
Benedict XVI devoted the heart of their respective pontificates to trying to
implement—or salvage, depending on one’s perspective—the teachings of the
Council. All three were present for its duration and major players in its
workings as pope, cardinal-archbishop, and theological adviser, respectively.
All three deeply believed in the Council’s purpose, message, and general
teachings, and sought to make them vibrant within their own Magisteria.
Even
Joseph Ratzinger, who, when writing within the guild as an academic
theologian, openly criticized certain
aspects of various conciliar documents, most notably the Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World, sought to preserve the integrity of the Council
when he became pope. In his first Christmas address to the
Roman Curia in 2005, forty years after the Council’s conclusion, Benedict XVI
made his most famous attempt at rescuing the Council from what he called the
“hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” a method of interpretation that
disregarded what the Council actually said in favour of an agenda inimical to
the Council and to the Church’s teachings, hidden under the nebulous banner of
the “Spirit of Vatican II.”
Benedict, though well aware of the
dramatic upheavals the Council generated, expressed his steadfast commitment to
its correct implementation: “Today we can look with gratitude at
the Second Vatican Council: if we interpret and implement it guided
by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the
ever necessary renewal of the Church.”
It is well known that in the ensuing
decades after the Council, the “Spirit of Vatican II” ruptured the Church’s
theological, liturgical, and pastoral life. All that was part of the Church’s
centuries-long Tradition was suddenly forbidden by those who controlled
parishes, chanceries, seminaries, and universities. Instead, new fades,
prompted not by the faith, but by the left-leaning wanderings of the rapidly
secularizing West, were introduced into every facet of Church life.
A
tiny number of bishops, priests, and lay people laboured to stop these alarming
practices by appealing to the actual texts of the Council: nowhere did a single
document even mention turning the altar to
face the people, or that all religions were equal, or that theologians formed
their own authoritative Magisterium, or that Catholic universities need not be
controlled by the Church, or that clerical celibacy and women’s ordination
ought to be reconsidered. As long as there was at least nominal support from
the pope for realigning post-conciliar practices with what the Council actually
said—and there was from all three popes, even if weakly in the case of the
floundering Paul VI—then it seemed that the Council could be rescued from its
inauthentic interpreters.
Flash-forward
to the present—fifty-four years after the Council’s close and fourteen years
after Benedict’s speech—and the nature of the conversation has shifted. Pope
Francis is the first pope ordained a priest after the Council’s close. From
the start of his
pontificate through to the present, Francis has
been championed by liberal Catholics for his “prophetic interpretation of the
Council,” which is to say, for using his office to advance the Spirit of
Vatican II.
And
this he has done: from opening a study commission for females in the diaconate,
to his rigged synods and his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia that
have softened the Church’s teachings on marriage and family life, Francis has
turned the Spirit of Vatican II into the substance of his papacy. His
recent affirmations and speeches that make
Catholicism appear as just another religion raised legitimate concerns until
Bishop Schneider, during an ad limina Vatican meeting of the Kazakhstani
episcopacy, was able to secure from Francis a clarification that
God permits religious pluralism rather than wills it. Thus if it were not for
vigilant and faithful bishops like Schneider, Francis would be content to give
the Spirit of the Council free rein.
Since
Francis is receptive to its distorted Spirit, he has invoked the Council
without engaging its texts in the manner his predecessors did. Take, for
example, his vigorous declaration that
the liturgical reforms that followed the Council are “irreversible” and any
“reform of the reform”—a reconfiguring of aspects of the Mass that were
wrongfully or harmfully changed—is wrongheaded. Off the table for Francis is
any discussion of the vast distortions between what the Council said about the
Mass verses the new Mass that a subsequent committee engineered. We saw this
illustrated when Cardinal Sarah’s advocacy of ad orientem worship
was sharply rebuked by
the Vatican in the summer of 2016. Three months later, Sarah’s wings were
clipped as Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship when the dicastery’s
episcopal members were replaced by Francis acolytes.
Rather
than return to the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy for analysis,
Francis urged the faithful to reform their mentality and accept the new Mass as
it is. And if these papal assertions were not enough, Francis publicly invoked
his “magisterial authority” to strengthen his speech, a move that not only had
popes before him never attempted, but one that, as canonist Ed Peters pointed out, showcases a
bumbling of the papal playbook.
We
could cite other examples where Francis encouraged a group
of Italian theologians to adhere to the Council without encouraging a
corresponding exploration of its texts, and when, speaking at a canon law
conference, he stated that “the
Second Vatican Council marked the passage from an ecclesiology modelled on
canon law to a canon law conforming to ecclesiology,” a statement that,
again according to Ed
Peters, gives the wrong impression on both subjects.
So
for Francis, Vatican II is still relevant in regards to its nebulous Spirit,
for it provides cover for more distortions of Catholic faith and practice, as
well as a model for how to make these distortions happen in the present. Case
in point is how Francis dispatched his closest collaborators to advance a
reading of Amoris Laetitia that is a serious—and
dangerous—rupture of Catholic teaching on marriage and the Eucharist.
But Vatican II has become irrelevant
in another sense: there is not much motivation to appeal to its documents
anymore. Conservative prelates and laity trying to counter Francis’s disruptive
innovations have been appealing for support not to Vatican II, but to Scripture
and the broader Tradition because Francis and his supporters have steered the
universal Church beyond the texts of the Council. Defending and redeeming these
texts is no longer as important as it seemed only a decade ago because the
issues at stake today were not contemplated by the Council fathers. For
example, no bishop at the Council imagined that divorced and civilly remarried
Catholics could receive the Eucharist while living in an adulterous
relationship.
Does
this mean that the actual teachings of Vatican II will fade into oblivion? Not
in the short term, since the Council’s documents and approach have been
incorporated into the extensive and widely consulted Catechism of the
Catholic Church, which itself was created to rein in the wayward Spirit of
Vatican II.
But as a collective body, the texts
of Vatican II will continue to have less and less import. Ironically, it is the
Spirit of the Council untethered from reality that is both winning the moment,
and inspiring a genuine reform by driving its opponents to the real source of
renewal—Scripture and Tradition.
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