Published on Commonweal magazine (http://commonwealmagazine.org)
Turning Point
A Theologian Remembers Vatican II
Created 09/17/2012 - 9:42am
Bernard P. Prusak
In the fall of 1965, I worked in the
final session of the Second Vatican Council. A young priest and doctoral
candidate, I was tasked with distributing documents and collecting
votes and amendments from my assigned section of bishops. Almost half a
century later, a bound set of those documents holds a prized place in my
library—and the events and personalities of those days hold a prized
place in my memory. I recall the buses filled with bishops leaving St.
Peter’s piazza after each day’s session, the sun reflecting their
colorful robes through the windows. Many were bishops from poorer parts
of the world, returning to modest residences at various religious houses
in Rome. Some American bishops also lived in such residences, but more
were in hotels. The council was the first to bring together so large a
gathering from all continents, and one sensed that it marked a new
chapter in the life of the church: a truly global church, its unity
expressed in a diversity of cultures and rites.
Though glad to be involved in the council, I
had no idea I would witness proceedings that would bring enormous change
to so many aspects of Catholic life and practice. I had come to Rome as
a seminarian in 1959, and after being ordained as a priest for the
diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, had returned in 1964 to study for a
doctorate in canon law at the Lateran University. During my first years
in Rome, in the time immediately before the council opened in October
1962, I’d seen little outward evidence of what lay ahead. Pope John
XXIII, who announced the council in 1959—much to the consternation of
the Roman Curia—had been crowned with the Triple Tiara and still wore it
on ceremonial occasions. Indeed, I photographed him coming into St.
Peter’s on the sedia gestatoria, carried on the shoulders of attendants and ushered in by large ceremonial fans of ostrich feathers.
Yet despite such trappings of tradition, change was in the air. In 1943, Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Divino afflante spiritu
had cautiously opened the door to new methods of scriptural
interpretation long pioneered by Protestant scholars—a development that
threatened the antimodernist, ahistorical ethos of the Curia. In the
ecclesiastical universities, new currents in scholarship were creating
obvious tensions. I studied theology from 1959 to 1963 at the Gregorian
University. At the Pontifical Biblical Institute just across the piazza,
the Jesuits Stanislas Lyonnet and Maximilian Zerwick, who embraced the
historical-critical method, were suspended from their posts.
As it turned out, such events were a prelude
to the council’s debates over revelation and liturgy. The run-up to
Vatican II saw a final campaign by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani,
the prefect of the Holy Office (now the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith), and other Curia theologians to reject any move toward a
historical-critical approach to scriptural interpretation. As the
Scripture scholar John Donohue has noted, the draft document prepared
for discussion at the first session of the council “crystallized the
reactionary tendencies of post-Tridentine and antimodernist theology.”
The draft rarely referred to Divino afflante spiritu—and never
cited those passages that explicitly authorized modern methods of
interpretation. As far as Ottaviani and most of the Curia were
concerned, the church was Semper Idem, always the same: what is, has always been, and therefore must always be. The notion of historical development was anathema.
Pope John, however, did not share the Curia’s fear of change, and one of his goals for the council was aggiornamento,
or the updating of the church. This emphasis engendered a sense of
hopeful openness to change. I was present for the pope’s opening speech
on October 11, 1962, in which he noted that in the daily exercise of his
pastoral office, he sometimes had to listen to “prophets of gloom” who
insisted “that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse.”
Such doomsayers, he lamented, “are always forecasting disaster, as
though the end of the world were at hand”—while he himself, by contrast,
saw Divine Providence “leading us to a new order of things.” John
acknowledged the need to translate the message of Christianity anew for
the current culture. “The substance of the ancient doctrine of the
deposit of faith is one thing,” he famously asserted, “and the way in
which it is presented is another.”
The first session of the council saw bishops
strongly criticizing the draft documents prepared by the Curia; I
vividly remember the evening discussions with fellow students on the day
when 60 percent of the bishops voted to reject the draft of the Constitution on Divine Revelation.
The same day, the public defense of the first historical-critical
dissertation at the Biblical Institute attracted an extraordinarily
large audience, including curial cardinals in the great foyer of the
Gregorian. We all wondered how the conflict between the Curia and the
bishops would be resolved. Pope John rose to the occasion by appointing a
mixed commission that included persons open to modern biblical studies,
such as Cardinal Bea, Karl Rahner, and others. In the end, after much
further debate and revision, the seventh draft of the Constitution on
Revelation would be approved and accepted in the final session on
November 18, 1965.
For me, the council brought a
new sense of openness and hope, grounded in a genuine dialogue among
Catholic scholars, bishops, and eventually the laity. As Joseph
Ratzinger wrote at the time, the bishops at Vatican II “had taken a
giant step beyond being a mere sounding board for propaganda,” to
become, as an “independent body of bishops,” a force that the papal
Curia had to reckon with. And perhaps nowhere was this giant step more
evident than in the vexed issue of liturgical reform. Within the church
as it was experienced “from below” by Catholics of the so-called Latin
Rite, the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council would be
particularly unexpected.
Most Catholics today don’t know what
liturgical life was like before the council. On weekday mornings the
priest, frequently dressed in black vestments, silently “said” a “Low
Mass” for the dead, in Latin, with his back to the people. He read the
Epistle—again, in Latin—on the right side of the altar. The altar server
then moved the book to the left side of the altar for the reading of
the Gospel, also in Latin. Only on Sundays was the Gospel read a second
time, in English, from the pulpit. On weekdays, the faithful fended for
themselves. They could follow along by reading their missals—a grudging
concession to the laity, one so forcefully resisted that those who had
produced the first translations of the liturgy, decades earlier, had
been penalized for doing so.
In 1947, Pius’s encyclical Mediator Dei
had offered a guarded nod to the movement for liturgical reform,
acknowledging that the liturgy “grows, matures, develops, adapts, and
accommodates to temporal needs and circumstances.” Yet Mediator Dei was
hardly a reformist document. Decrying “the temerity and daring” of
novel innovations such as making use of the vernacular, it declared
Latin a manifest sign of unity and an effective antidote to corruptions
of doctrinal truth. It warned against any attempt to restore the altar
to its primitive table form, or to exclude black as a color for
liturgical vestments. It criticized those who disapproved of Masses
offered privately and without any congregation, and those who
disapproved of simultaneous Masses, in which different priests offered
Mass at different altars in one church at the same time. The encyclical
asserted that Communion was obligatory for “the priest who says the
Mass,” but only “earnestly recommended to the faithful,” and further
declared that the “dialogue” Mass could not replace the High Mass,
which, “though it be offered with only the sacred ministers present,
possesses its own special dignity due to the impressive character of its
ritual and the magnificence of its ceremonies.”
By contrast, Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum concilium)
returned to the church’s earliest sources to retrieve a vision of
church as a particular or local community assembled for the Eucharist.
The constitution emphasized that “it is through the liturgy, especially,
that the faithful are enabled to express in their lives and manifest to
others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true church.”
This was an enormous shift in the church’s self-understanding, a
dramatic move away from identifying the essence of the church with its
juridical organization as a “perfect society.” Referring to the Epistles
of Ignatius of Antioch, the constitution emphasized that “the principal
manifestation of the church consists in the full active participation
of all God’s holy people in the same liturgical celebrations, especially
in the same Eucharist, in one prayer, at one altar, at which the bishop
presides, surrounded by his college of priests and by his ministers.”
My own thinking in this regard had been shaped
by Ludwig Hertling, a Jesuit historian at the Gregorian. Hertling
offered an alternative to a way of thinking, prevalent since the Middle
Ages, that conceived the church as a pyramidal hierarchy, with the pope
at the top and the bishops as his subordinates. He emphasized the
central role of the concept of communio in the early church,
depicting the church not as a pyramidal structure, but rather as a large
circle containing many smaller circles, the local churches presided
over by bishops. The Church of Rome was at the center of a web of
communion, a sacramental relationship uniting all the churches.
Hertling’s lectures drew me into reading the Didache, the
letters of Ignatius, Irenaeus, and many other patristic sources that
revealed how differently the organizational structures of the early
church had functioned from those of the second millennium. This attempt
to reclaim a long-neglected patristic inheritance found expression both
in the council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy and in the Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church, both of which reflect Vatican II’s revival
of the ancient understanding that the Catholic or universal church is
actualized in and through the community of a particular locale,
especially when assembled in prayer.
Looking back at Vatican II, I see a remarkable
time, full of spirited discussion and ad hoc innovations of significant
import. Orthodox and Protestant observers engaged in lively dialogue
with cardinals and bishops in the aisles on either side of St. Peter’s
and in the two crowded coffee bars nearby. Twenty-nine lay auditors—all
male—had been invited to sit in on the proceedings. After heated debate
over whether laywomen should be allowed to attend, twenty-three women
were invited to be observers during the third conciliar session of 1964.
They were Australian, European, Middle Eastern, Latin and North
American; nineteen were either members of religious communities or
single; three were widows; and one was married, a Mexican mother of
twelve whose husband had received a separate invitation. To keep men and
women separated, a third coffee bar was opened, just for the women. At
one point, the married woman’s husband and other male friends of the
women were refused entry—a policy that was changed after a protest to
the conciliar president, Archbishop Felici. Sr. Mary Luke Tobin,
president of the Conference of Major Religious Superiors of Women in
the United States (the group recently investigated by the Vatican),
noted three kinds of treatment accorded the women by the bishops: a
minority supported their presence; the majority was indifferent and even
uneasy meeting them; some openly disapproved of their presence and
completely avoided them. For the most part, no real importance was
attached to the women’s participation—although, at the urging of the
Redemptorist moral theologian Bernard Haring, they acted as full voting
members of the commission for the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in
the Modern World (Gaudium et spes).
Right and left, things were happening that
overturned the received presuppositions of centuries. Reading the modi
or amendments regarding Jews and the death of Jesus during the
discussion of the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to
Non-Christian Religions (Nostra aetate) was an especially
eye-opening moment for me. An equally compelling moment came on December
7, 1965, the day before the close of the council, as I watched Paul VI
and the delegate of Patriarch Athenagoras ceremoniously lift the
reciprocal excommunications that had been issued nine hundred years
earlier, to repeated, thunderous applause from the bishops. Such actions
gained worldwide attention. Time, Newsweek, and the International Herald Tribune ran stories about the council. Irving R. Levine’s reports for the TV evening news were beamed to the states via satellite.
In its reaffirmation of “the
priesthood of all believers” and its references to the church as the
People of God, Vatican II inaugurated a remarkable change in how lay
Catholics thought about their place in the church. The term church no
longer meant a “they,” composed of the ordained and the hierarchy;
rather it was a “we,” including all the baptized, non-ordained and
ordained. Such changes recaptured the original meaning of the biblical
term ekklesia, or assembly. The council closed amid a
tremendous sense of engagement and anticipation. Sadly, at least from my
perspective decades later, much of that sense of possibility has faded,
as previous patterns of authority and demands for obedience have
increasingly been reasserted. Looking back, I admire the initiative of
the bishops who voted to reject documents prepared by the Curia. I am
still amazed at their candor and outspokenness, and their criticism of
the church’s triumphalism. And I wish they were still around.
My experience of the council had a profound
personal effect on me; it is fair to say that it changed the course of
my life. The more I read ancient sources, bolstering my understanding of
changes in the history of the church, the more I began to regret a
celibacy that cut me off from many of life’s meaningful relationships
and experiences. Back in New Jersey, now a vice-chancellor living in the
bishop’s residence, I gave numerous talks about the council in parishes
and to groups of sisters. At one of the talks, I met a young
Benedictine sister. We became close friends; eventually, we decided that
we wanted to live our lives together. I applied for and received a
dispensation, and my wife Helen and I were married for forty-one years
until her death early this year. Fortunately, the formal letter or
“rescript” of dispensation did not include the stipulation that the
recipient not hold a teaching position in a Catholic college or
university. I had applied for a teaching position in theology, and was
offered one by Villanova University—where I have been teaching since
1969.
Fifty years after the council, I still believe
the church has to face up to new possibilities. It won’t be easy. Not
long ago the biography of John XXIII on the official Vatican website
reminded us of the following: “When on October 28, 1958, the cardinals,
assembled in conclave, elected Angelo Roncalli as pope many regarded
him, because of his age and ambiguous reputation, as a transitional
pope, little realizing that the pontificate of this man of seventy-six
years would mark a turning point in history and initiate a new age for
the church.” That turning point came on January 25, 1959, less than
three months after John XXIII’s election, when he announced his
intention to convene the Second Vatican Council.
Tellingly, the biography that currently
appears on the Vatican website has been revised, and no longer describes
John’s pontificate as one that “would mark a turning point in history
and initiate a new age for the church.” Those words have been struck,
and their absence reflects a new era in which the prospect of a pope
calling for aggiornamento in the church is extremely unlikely.
Yet John XXIII’s foresight lives on. His openness to the future must be
kept in mind in the sometimes revisionist discussions about whether he
really envisioned where Vatican II would take the church. He may have
been somewhat surprised, but in my view John would not have been
surprised to be surprised.
The words of the council spoke movingly to so many of us—about joy
and hope amid grief and anguish, about solidarity with other believers
and with the entire human race and its history, and about the church
keeping the freshness of youth. These words and ideas still ring true.
As the Australian priest and theologian Ormond Rush has observed, our
task involves new questions “that the past cannot answer for us, and the
past may need us to help it answer them in fidelity to the past.”
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