Was Vatican II "Pre-Conciliar"? | Dr. James Hitchcock | IgnatiusInsight.com
Was Vatican II "Pre-Conciliar"? | Dr. James Hitchcock | IgnatiusInsight.com
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/jhitchcock_vatican2_feb08.asp
In many ways the promise of
the Second Vatican Council has not been fulfilled, and most of this failure is
traceable to fundamental misunderstandings of its intentions, to the very meaning
of the process called "renewal." Some of this misunderstanding is sincere, but
some has also been deliberate, on the part of people who know that the Council
did not authorize the changes they wanted but who pretend that it did.
Often unnoticed is the fact
that there were two different ways of understanding the Council's reforming
efforts, approaches which are not contradictory but which do move in different
directions. A common term for post-conciliar reform was "aggiornamento," an
Italian word meaning "updating," which conveyed the need for the Church to
adjust itself to historical change, to make evangelization more effective by
relating to the needs of the modern world. Less commonly used, and probably
unfamiliar to most Catholics, was the French word "ressourcement"—"return
to the sources"—which saw reform as recovering the earliest roots of the
Faith, judging later developments by the criterion of authoritative early
teachings. The dominant thrust of the conciliar decrees was the latter, and there
is scarcely a passage anywhere in them which is not supported by references to
Scripture, and sometimes to the Fathers of the Church.
But advocates of unlimited
change have espoused an extreme form of aggiornamento. Realizing that the
Council did not support their agenda, they quickly got into the habit of
speaking of the "spirit" of the Council, which is said to transcend its actual
statements and even in some cases to contradict them. Since there is no
authoritative way by which this "spirit" can be determined, it has been invoked
to justify virtually whatever any particular individual happens to want.
The post-conciliar crisis
cannot be understood unless it is recalled that, almost immediately at the
Council's end, but for the most part undetectable while the Council was still
in session, there occurred the world-wide cultural crisis called "the Sixties,"
which was nothing less than a frontal assault on all forms of authority, at all
levels of society.
Confused by the conciliar
changes, and unable to grasp the subtle theology of the conciliar decrees, many
Catholics simply translated the conciliar reforms into the terms of "the
counter-culture," which was essentially the demand for "liberation" from all
restraint on personal freedom. Had the Council been held a decade earlier,
during the much more stable l950s, it is likely that the post-conciliar
upheaval would have been far less severe. (The most perplexing question about
the post-conciliar period is why the hierarchy made so little effort to insure
that the faithful were educated as to the Council's authentic meaning, and why
the hierarchy failed to insure the authenticity of those programs which claimed
to do so.)
Thus, at a time when
authority was being assaulted on all levels, many people interpreted concepts
like "the people of God" simply in terms of democracy. Their agenda for "reform"
became one of intense opposition to the teaching authority of the Church, often
to the point of advocating in effect that doctrine be determined by majority opinion.
Initially liturgical change
was urged on a reluctant laity by insisting that those changes marked a return
to the practices of the early Church and thus represented a more authentic
understanding. But quickly the agenda changed to one of making liturgy "relevant,"
which meant conforming it as closely as possible to contemporary culture —
in language, ritual practices (balloons, dancing), and music. For many people
liturgy lost its entire supernatural dimension and was reduced to a communal
celebration whose meaning is exhausted by the subjective effect it has on the
participants.
Even though Perfectae Caritatis ("Perfect Love") in
particular expressed the idea of ressourcement—religious communities were
to be reformed by returning to the original vision of their founders—the
crisis of priestly and religious life emanated from a distorted idea of
aggiornamento. The world and the cloister were now pitted against each other,
the supernatural vocations of priests and religious deemed to be obstacles to
their service to the world. Furthermore, this service itself was now understood
in exclusively worldly terms—the priest or religious as counselor, social
reformer, or community leader but not as witness to the Kingdom of Heaven.
In practical terms nothing
had a more devastating effect on post-conciliar Catholic life than the Sexual
Revolution, as believers of all kinds began to engage in behavior not
measurably different from that of non-believers. Priests and religious
repudiated their vows to marry, and others remained in religious life but
ceased to regard celibacy as either possible or desirable. Catholics divorced
almost as frequently as non-Catholics. Church teaching about contraception and
even abortion was widely disregarded. All this represented not only the
influence of a secular culture but also the effects of post-conciliar
theological dissent, which Church officials, apparently themselves confused as
to the meaning of renewal, were rarely willing to confront directly.
The early development of
ecumenism consisted mainly of formal dialogue with particular groups. However,
liberal Protestants, who were the most visible and influential kind throughout
the Western world, simply became more and more liberal, so that the assumptions
made by both sides when ecumenical dialogue began in the early 1960s were no
longer valid a decade later. (All the liberal groups began ordaining women and
most accepted, to one degree or another, the Sexual Revolution, including
abortion.)
Perhaps surprisingly, the Council
had relatively little to say about missions, except to reaffirm their
importance and to suggest that some adaptation of the Gospel to non-Western
cultures was necessary. If a Third Vatican Council were held today, that
subject would probably dominate. But the Second Vatican Council scarcely
addressed the crucial question of how, and to what extent, Christianity can be
adapted to non-Western cultures, an issue which is now coming to the center of
attention.
Since the Council, the task
of reading the signs of the times has become far more difficult, and
consequently far more crucial, than it was in 1965. Wave after wave of
movements have burst upon the scene — Marxism, the Sexual Revolution,
Feminism, Environmentalism, and many others — each claiming to have
discovered the single most important truth, each demanding that the Church
support it uncritically. With God's grace still with it, the Church has, as it
must, avoided capitulation to these movements, but they nonetheless exercise
substantial influence.
Caught in the maelstrom of "the
Sixties," and fundamentally confused about the nature of renewal, many
Catholics after the Council (priests and religious especially) pursued a path
of personal "liberation," which ended by creating a spiritual vacuum at the
center of their lives. Rather than providing the sense of peace and fulfillment
they sought, this in turn made them pathetically vulnerable to secular
movements claiming the authority which the Church itself no longer wielded.
Thus authentic efforts to renew the Church according to the teachings of the
Council are now automatically dismissed as "pre-conciliar" by people who have
lost the ability even to understand genuine Catholicism, much less to live it.
This column originally appeared in the November/December 2000 issue of The
Catholic Dossier.
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• Is Tolerance Intolerant? | James Hitchcock
• Vatican II and the Ecclesiology of Joseph Ratzinger |
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• Pope John Paul II and the Christ-centered Anthropology
of Gaudium et Spes | Douglas Bushman
• Our Enslavement to "Freedom" | James Hitchcock
• Conscience and Chaos | James Hitchcock
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• Personally Opposed--To What? |
Dr. James Hitchcock
Dr. James Hitchcock, (e-mail)
professor of history at St. Louis University, writes and lectures on contemporary
Church matters. His column appears in the diocesan press, in the Adoremus
Bulletin, and on the Women
for Faith and Family website. He is the author of several books, including
The Recovery of the Sacred, What is Secular Humanism?, and Years
of Crisis: Collected Essays, 1970-1983.
Princeton University Press just published his two-volume history of the
Supreme Court, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life:
The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses (Vol. 1) and
From "Higher Law" to "Sectarian Scruples"
(Vol. 2). He is also a regular contributor to many Catholic periodicals,
including Catholic
World Report.
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