Published on Commonweal magazine (http://commonwealmagazine.org)
Vatican II Continued
Half A Century Later
Created 10/01/2012 - 9:04am
The Editors
Catholics have been arguing about the Second
Vatican Council—about what it did and didn’t do, about what it meant and
still means or what it never meant and could never mean—for half a
century. Many reform-minded Catholics today are disappointed by what
they see as a retreat, under the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict
XVI, from the council’s mandate for change, especially change in how the
church is governed (see “Bishops or Branch Managers?”).
Other Catholics, alarmed by the disarray that followed the council and
mistrustful of attempts to reconcile Catholicism to a decadent, godless
modern world, have applauded papal actions disciplining “dissenters” and
reemphasizing traditional markers of Catholic identity. What reformers
see as a rejection of the council’s promise of intellectual openness and
ecumenism, traditionalists view as an indispensible move to safeguard
truths of faith threatened as much from within the church as from
outside it. Catholics who grew up after the council, meanwhile, often
dismiss the polemics of both sides. To them, the changes that so
disrupted the everyday lives of pre–Vatican II Catholics—the vernacular
Mass with its visible role for the laity and particularly for women, the
cataclysmic decline in vocations, the virtual disappearance of
confession, the tolerance for public dissent from church teachings—are
unremarkable, and comprise the only church they’ve ever known.
The result, it seems, is that there are
currently several different, sometimes contending ways of being
Catholic. To some degree that has always been so. The notion of the
church as a rigorously disciplined and monolithic enterprise is largely
myth, and modern myth to boot (see “An Imagined Unity”).
What is not myth, however, is the dramatic change in the
self-understanding of Catholics brought about by the council. For at
least two centuries Catholicism saw itself as a bulwark against the
spread of pernicious liberal and democratic principles, and held fast to
a monarchical and aristocratic worldview in which the church enjoyed a
privileged civic, cultural, and political role. At Vatican II, the
bishops called off this long and ultimately futile struggle against
modernity. Not without ambivalence, they reconciled themselves to the
separation of church and state and to the idea of religious liberty (see
“Outvoted, Not Persecuted”).
They then went further, extending the hand of fellowship to other
Christians, to non-Christian religions, and especially to the Jewish
community, while warmly endorsing human rights and aspirations for
democratic self-determination. Even the pursuit of technological and
material progress, long viewed with world-weary skepticism, was
encouraged.
And so a church once narrowly focused on the
world to come suddenly discovered much to praise in the world at hand.
Most important, perhaps, the laity was now urged to bring its faith into
the secular sphere, to transform a fallen world rather than retreat
from it. This effort at aggiornamento, or updating, looked back to certain neglected aspects of the tradition (ressourcement)
for inspiration and guidance. That project was in part an effort to
find within the church’s own traditions theological and philosophical
sources that could more firmly ground and thus defend what was morally
sound in the modern world’s understanding of human dignity and
individual liberty.
There is nothing intellectually,
theologically, or politically tidy in this long-delayed encounter
between the church and the post-Enlightenment world, as the ongoing
struggles between the Vatican and theologians and the Vatican’s recent
criticism of women religious remind us. Nearly forty years ago, longtime
Commonweal columnist John Cogley offered the following
assessment of the council’s aftermath: “The religious community that
survived the early onslaught of bigotry, with a certain style; that
built up an enormous citadel of protective institutions to protect its
identity; and that valiantly fought its way out of the ghetto to achieve
acceptance in American life may yet have to face its greatest
challenge.” As Cogley understood it, the challenge was the seemingly
irresistible, yet questionable, attraction and authority of modernity
itself, with its atomizing individualism, triumphant materialism,
scientific hubris, and deep skepticism about the existence of any
transcendent values or reality.
Can the church rise to this challenge? So far
the results are mixed. What seems certain is that not everything that
worked in the past will work now. The “New Evangelization”
now being implemented must do more than resurrect the apologetics of an
earlier era when the church had more social and moral capital at its
disposal. The larger cultural situation has changed in fundamental ways,
and so has the church. It is no longer possible to protect Catholic
identity by encasing it in small, carefully guarded institutions; both
American life and Catholic life in America are too fluid, too
differentiated, too focused on a forever idealized future. Like it or
not, Catholics of all theological and ecclesiological opinion have been
profoundly shaped by the larger culture’s deep skepticism toward
hierarchical leadership and tradition itself. Cultivating more fruitful
Catholic practices and associations will require experimentation and
leadership (both lay and clerical).
Just before his death last month, Milan’s Cardinal Carlo Martini lamented the institutional and pastoral paralysis
gripping the European and American church. He cast a sorrowful eye on
“pompous” liturgies, “empty” religious houses, and the church’s stifling
bureaucracy. “Where are our heroes today who can inspire us?” he asked,
and went on to recommend that the pope and the bishops “find twelve
unconventional people to take on leadership roles.” What sort of
unconventional people? “Those who are close to the poor,” Martini
specified; “who can galvanize young people by being willing to try new
approaches.”
One such “new” approach, as suggested by John
Wilkins in this issue, would be a return to the council’s embrace of
collegiality, and the development of that tradition to include genuine
lay participation.
It’s important to keep in mind that over the
centuries the church has found a way to flourish in every sort of
culture, from empire to the industrializing nation-state. To be sure,
today’s world, where social and cultural bonds are often weak and
fleeting, presents a unique challenge to an institution that thinks of
itself as a cohesive community, possessing a tradition that unites
believers even in their disagreements. The sometimes bitter
disagreements among Catholics today are not going to end any time soon.
But that should not be a cause for pessimism or despair. As the
philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has reminded us, every institution or
tradition is “partially constituted by an argument about the goods the
pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and
purpose.” In other words, robust debate about the church and its mission
can be a sign of health. There will need to be more room, not less, for
the “argument about the goods” of the Catholic tradition.
Modern men and women long for a unity of purpose that extends beyond
mere individual striving or difference. Such unity is forged by the
conviction that there is in fact meaning to suffering and death, and
that the meaning and value of life itself can only be found in a good
that reaches beyond this world. That was the first truth the council
proclaimed, and to which it called every Catholic to give witness. The
need for that witness is even greater now than it was fifty years ago.
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