Contested legacy: An Anglican looks at Vatican II

‘Vatican II changed nothing’

One school of Roman Catholic thought has emphasized the continuity of Vatican II with all that went before, especially Vatican I (1870–1) which solemnly defined universal papal jurisdiction and infallibility. For these conservative popes, bishops and theologians Vatican II changed little: it simply applied traditional teaching to modern circumstances. It was not a revolution, hardly even a watershed. ‘Business as usual’ was and remains their motto. They will not allow the outworking of Vatican II to interfere with the business of running the Roman Catholic Church from the centre, the magisterium – in practice, the Roman Curia – any more than they can help. The scholarly flagship of the conservative cause has been the journal Communio, founded in 1972 by Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac.

These conservative interpreters have looked to Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI (the former Cardinal Ratzinger) to deter change. In 1985 John Paul II convened an Extraordinary Assembly of the College of Bishops to take stock of the harvest of Vatican II. The official report of the Synod emphasized the continuity of the Council with all that had gone before. It insisted that the Council was ‘a legitimate and valid expression and interpretation of the deposit of faith as it is found in Sacred Scripture and in the living tradition of the Church’. It condemned any attempt to play off the ‘letter’ against the ‘spirit’ of the Council. The report insisted, ‘The Church is one and the same throughout all the councils.’ ³ In other words, no change. In 2000 John Paul II warned, ‘To read the Council as if it marked a break with the past, while in fact it placed itself in the line of the faith of all times, is decidedly unacceptable.’ ⁴ Nevertheless, John Paul II spoke more warmly of Vatican II than did his successor, Benedict XVI, and notably embraced its affirmation of human rights and its openness to other world faiths. In his Encyclical Ut Unum Sint (That They May Be One) of 1995, John Paul took up the Council’s cordial approach to other Christian traditions and even pushed it further by inviting dialogue with non-Roman Catholic traditions on the meaning of papal primacy.

Between 1988 and 2001 a five-volume History of Vatican II was produced under the editorship of Giuseppe Alberigo in Bologna. ⁵ By tracing the chequered career of the Council’s debates and documents it enabled scholars to see the Council in full historical and political perspective as never before. Rather like modern biblical scholarship, the History of Vatican II brought out the contingent, human element in the emergence of the texts, including the elements of compromise and ambiguity in the drafting. For this reason the History became an object of suspicion to the conservatives and was attacked for liberal bias.

There have been die-hard reactionaries within the RCC who have completely rejected the Council, seeing it as the epitome of all the heresies of the ages and therefore without legitimacy or authority. To some of them, like the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, that was a reason to take schismatic action which led to his excommunication (albeit Benedict XVI sought to woo back his followers in the Society of St Pius X (SSPX)).

The younger Joseph Ratzinger took a different view of the Council to the Ratzinger who was Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith and then Pope. At the time, Ratzinger saw it as a radical event, a watershed. ‘It was undoubtedly a rupture,’ he said in 1966 after the Council, which he had attended as a theological advisor (peritus), ‘but a rupture within a fundamentally common intention.’ ⁶ And in 1985 Ratzinger anticipated a renewal of the Council’s impact through discovering the true `spirit’ of the Council beneath the actual texts. ⁷

In an address to the Roman Curia in 2005, however, Benedict XVI rejected what he called ‘a hermeneutic [method of interpretation] of discontinuity and rupture’ and advocated instead ‘a hermeneutic of reform and renewal’. The Church grows and develops in time, yet always remains essentially the same. Benedict deplored appeals to ‘the spirit of the Council’ that aimed to set up a trajectory of interpretation that would trump the actual texts. He called for ‘a dynamic of fidelity’ and invoked what Pope John XXIII had said at the opening of the Council: traditional teaching would be brought into relation with modern thought and its research methods, without becoming changed in the process. Benedict interpreted Pope John’s subtle statement on that occasion (‘The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another’) to mean that the Church’s meaning and message are always the same. ⁸ Benedict went on to accept that the world-view of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, which (he held) was hostile to the idea of divine revelation, had given way to a new openness on the part of modern science. This fresh context also opened up the possibility of a new partnership between Church and State and a new attitude to other religions, especially Judaism. Benedict concluded: ‘It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists.’ His boldest gesture of affirmation was to describe the effect of the Council as a ‘process of innovation in continuity’. Benedict did not deny, in this 2005 address, that the Council had ‘reviewed or even corrected certain historical decisions’, but he insisted that, in so doing, it had ‘actually preserved and deepened her inmost nature and true identity’.

As is widely acknowledged, Benedict’s stewardship of the See of Peter was marked in large part by caution, suspicion and defensiveness. The modern world was alien and a threat. Change was to be feared. He will be remembered, as far as his official teaching is concerned, more for his stern condemnation of modern liberal ideology, culture and morals, than for his edifying, indeed inspiring, theological encyclicals. For Ratzinger-Benedict, since the student riots across Europe in 1968 the West had been going to moral and intellectual rack and ruin. But in that address of 1962 to the Council, John XXIII had actually taken to task those gloomy souls for whom ‘the modern world is nothing but betrayal and ruin … prophets of doom who are forever forecasting calamity’. In November 2013, in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), Pope Francis I deplored the ‘disillusioned pessimism’ that ‘stifles boldness and zeal’ and adopts a ‘sour’ attitude to life. If Benedict XVI represented a recurrence of suspicion and fear, a return of the repressed, Francis embodies a more relaxed attitude to the world, something of the humanity, joy and optimism of John XXIII. He is already being described as ‘good Pope John’ redivivus.

‘Vatican II changed everything’

For other Roman Catholics, however, Vatican II changed everything. It brought the RCC into the modern world. It threw off the insularity, defensiveness – even paranoia – that had characterized that Church since the eighteenth century, the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the lowest ebb of the RCC’s fortunes until the present day. It adopted a pastoral tone, not hectoring but inviting, not condemning but persuading – the first Council in history to do so since the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. It pronounced no anathemas. It opened the windows of the Church to fresh hope and renewed energies. The two watchwords – one Italian, one French – of its approach were aggiornamento (coming up to date, modernizing) and ressourcement (drawing on the neglected riches of ancient tradition, the writings of the early Fathers). The theological flagship of the progressive tendency in the interpretation of Vatican II is the journal Concilium which is associated with Hans Küng, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx, and first appeared in 1965.

It is perfectly clear that Vatican II made some radical changes in Roman Catholic doctrine and Church policy. Let me mention some of the most startling ones:

Vatican II reversed the traditional RC rejection of the principle of religious liberty, emphasizing freedom of conscience.

That list is more than sufficient to show that something decisively different took place in Vatican II. ⁹

Vatican II galvanized the RCC and made non-Roman Catholics look at that church with fresh eyes; some non-Roman Catholic Christians were bowled over and converted. For progressive Roman Catholics Vatican II changed a great deal. It was about reform and renewal – themes on which the Council had spoken in uncanny echoes of the Reformers of the sixteenth century. As Benedict had said, true reform involves both continuity and discontinuity. But where to put the emphasis remains hotly debated. As O’Malley puts it, to insist exclusively on continuity ‘is to blind oneself to the discontinuities, which is to blind oneself to change of any kind. And if there is no change, nothing happened.’ ¹⁰ To deny change is to negate history and if we do that we let tradition go. ¹¹ In the 1840s John Henry Newman worked out a concept of development, the development of doctrine, no less – an idea that, while it was vehemently resisted by the RCC at the time, allowed Newman to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1845. It would be perverse to deny that development in the Church takes place – that would be to shut our eyes to all of history. The crucial challenge is to find the criteria, or ‘tests’ (as Newman called them), of authentic development, the kind of development that enables the Church to respond to the demands of mission while remaining faithful to the gospel.

Vatican II remains ‘unfinished business’ in the sense that, in some key areas, it has not been followed through: its implementation has been aborted. Hermann Pottmeyer describes Vatican II as ‘a building site’. He suggests that four great supporting columns for a renewed church and a renewed ecclesiology have been constructed:

the idea of the Church as ‘the people of God’

But, Pottmeyer argues, the great dome that should rest on the four pillars has never been built. The pillars still await the dome that would draw them into a unity. ¹² At the present time the Christian world waits in prayerful expectation to see how far Pope Francis I will be able to complete the unfinished business of Vatican II. Without continually banging the Vatican II drum in public, Francis is deeply committed to its teaching and tone. Gerry O’Collins identifies seven themes that are common to the Council and to the present pope’s teaching and practice:

confessing one’s sinfulness and looking for continual conversion

The Council has also had an enormous impact on Anglicanism, especially on the Anglican understanding of the Church, its liturgy, ministry, mission and approach to Christian unity. By opening up the RCC to ecumenical dialogue it made the work of ARCIC (the Anglican – Roman Catholic International Commission) possible. With a few bumps along the road, ARCIC has achieved significant convergence in several areas that previously separated our two traditions, notably eucharistic theology, ministry and ordination, justification, ecclesiology and authority. In the spirit of ARCIC, Anglicans and Roman Catholics have come together locally in many practical ways and the two episcopates have held conversations in various parts of the world under the aegis of a parallel but more recent body, the International Anglican – Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM). So a debate about the legacy and significance of Vatican II, that may appear at first sight to be a purely internal issue for Roman Catholics, is actually vitally important to Anglicans or Episcopalians.

Getting to grips with the Council

Particularly helpful to someone wanting to get to grips with the riches of Vatican II is the well-named Keys to the Council: Unlocking the Teaching of Vatican II, by Richard R. Gaillardetz and Catherine E. Clifford. These authors provide beautifully clear, exceptionally edifying expositions of the central texts, especially in sacramental theology, though they do not reproduce the full texts themselves. It is the best introduction to the doctrinal legacy of Vatican II that I have come across and would be an excellent resource for group study. A more academic collection, Heft and O’Malley’s After Vatican II, discusses a range of issues in the wake of the Council, including RC moral theology, the ‘New Catholic Movements’ and the RCC’s attitude to other faiths, especially Judaism.

Several of the titles mentioned here take us to the heart of the contested legacy of Vatican II. Faggioli’s Vatican II is, as the subtitle The Battle for Meaning suggests, an account of the ‘reception’ of the Council. While the author’s personal commitment to the ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ interpretation is apparent, he deals fairly with views opposed to his own. Considering that it is written in what is not the author’s first language, it is very readable. The essays published under the name of John O’Malley, Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?, is, on the whole, a more polemical, combative contribution to the contest for the patrimony of the Council and is suited to those who are already versed in the key texts and familiar with the ecclesiastical politics of the RCC. It stands alongside O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II.

Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, edited by Lamb and Levering, is designed as the antidote to the O’Malley camp and consists of expositions of the Council documents from the standpoint of the hermeneutic of continuity. It adopts Benedict XVI’s line as the last word on the interpretation of Vatican II (of course, Benedict was still pope when the book was written and published). It brands the ‘progressive’ view as ‘ideological’ (as though its own stance were ideologically neutral) and as being in thrall to a crude media tactic of polarizing ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ interpretations of the Council. It is as though nothing in the Church needs to change. Any suggestion that reform might be necessary is conspicuous by its absence from the editors’ own contributions. In an eloquent conclusion, Matthew Lamb quotes Paul Claudel claiming that ‘everything of the good, the great and the beautiful from one end of the earth to the other’ rightly belongs to the (Roman) Catholic Church (p. 442). Of course, there is much that is good, great and beautiful in the Church – which is one reason why as Christians we love the Church so much. But evidently it also harbours much that is seriously out of order, in fact despicable and sometimes criminal. This romantic, complacent, rose-tinted view of a traditional, essentially unchanging Church has been made to look not only woefully inadequate but also morally sick, by the sexual abuse scandals, exacerbated by the failures of the hierarchy in whom the traditionalists claim to put their trust. All the major churches have failed in this area and all are tainted to various degrees. All need to show the same penitence and make the same amends.

As an Anglican looking at Vatican II with admiration and gratitude and whose theology has been profoundly shaped by its teaching, I am not the slightest bit interested in playing politics with the Council or taking sides in the battle of conservative versus liberal interpretations. But of one thing I am sure: a church that invests heavily in defending the status quo and is not passionately committed to reforming itself continually on the basis of self-scrutiny before the word of God and holds back from corporate penitence for its failures is a church that has lost the plot and missed its vocation, whether it be the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England. Their leaders and pastors, whether the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope, inevitably model the defining stance of their churches at a given time and many Christians take their cue in these matters from them – which is not the least of the responsibilities that Church leaders assume. And that fact raises far-reaching issues of leadership styles and the understandings of leadership and authority that lie behind them. ¹⁴