No More Nostalgia
Just about seven years after Pope John XXIII’s surprise announcement of a new Vatican council in January 1959, Vatican II came to a conclusion on December 8, 1965, with a ceremony led by Pope Paul VI. Vatican II’s implementation had already begun concilio durante—for example, with liturgical reform, as well as with John XXIII’s last encyclical, Pacem in terris. But after December 1965, the bishops and their theological advisors went back to their dioceses. The pope and the Curia remained in Rome to oversee a process of ecclesial reform of unprecedented scale and depth, not to mention new dynamics between Rome and the local churches, the hierarchy and the laity, and the Church and the world.
One can understand the afterlife of Vatican II like that of other revolutions. There was the time of hidden preparation, the dramatic moment, the resolution, the exhaustion of the energies that brought it forth, and its mutation into something else. Consider Europe sixty years after 1917: both in Western Europe and behind the Iron Curtain, it was clear that the “propulsive thrust” of the Russian Revolution was over. Can one say that, sixty years after Vatican II ended, the “propulsive thrust” of the council is over? It’s tempting today to see Vatican II as something that produced certain dramatic changes but was quickly overshadowed and replaced by something else, something different from or even contrary to the intentions of the council—a failed reform or revolution, followed by a counterrevolution.
There are fewer and fewer Catholics from the generation that made Vatican II, and fewer who studied with, or were mentored by, those who were at the council. In academic theology, those who were active during Vatican II or even in the early post–Vatican II period are long gone. We are now in the third generation since the council. Leo XIV was just eight years old when the first document of the council, on liturgical reform, was approved and promulgated. From a sociological point of view, Vatican II ended a long time ago.
From a historical and theological point of view, the picture is very different, and the papacy of Pope Francis was revelatory in this regard. During his pontificate, 150 scholars from around the world undertook an international research project with the intent of reexamining the legacy of the council from a global perspective. (Full disclosure: I have been part of the core group from the outset and am a member of the steering committee.) Over the past year, the first volumes of findings have been published in English and in German, all of them freely available.
For those involved in the project, the experience has been eye-opening. In the beginning, at the start of Francis’s papacy but before the first Trump administration, there was general optimism about the possibility of showing the effects of the council on the world Church in a positive, uplifting, “epideictic” way, as John O’Malley would say. Today, I think the view among scholars is more realistic and mature. There is greater recognition that the reception of the council has been not only diverse but also conflicting, and not just in the United States. There are different kinds of fractures, both between and within different local Churches.
There’s an echo here of what Jesuit theologian and cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) thought about the effects of Trent (1545–63) at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth: the work of the council had to start over again. Later, the conflict between the Jesuits and the Jansenists would mark a whole century and reverberate into the next one. But that was a second- or third-generation response to Trent and the Renaissance. The Tridentine era was not eclipsed by that epoch-making cultural and theological battle.
The best theological and doctrinal impulses of Trent survived Vatican I and even Vatican II—not a bad thing. In a similar way, Vatican II will survive Trumpism and the collapse of the international liberal order within which its participants gathered in the early 1960s. Vatican II is not the final word of the Church’s tradition. But on a number of doctrinal matters, it marked a decisive turning point, just as Pope Leo XIV noted in October when speaking about the anniversary of the declaration on non-Christian religions:
In particular, it should not be forgotten that the first focus of Nostra Aetate was towards the Jewish world, which Saint John XXIII intended to re-establish the original relationship. For the first time in the history of the Church, a doctrinal treatise on the Jewish roots of Christianity was to take shape, which on a biblical and theological level would represent a point of no return.
Vatican II still has a lot to say today, as the masterful 2019 volume by Australian theologian Ormond Rush demonstrates. Its fundamental principles have been received and developed by all popes and the Church’s magisterium in the post–Vatican II period.
According to a famous quote often attributed to Dorothy Day, “Everybody wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes.” This may also apply to the reception of Vatican II. Doing the dishes for Vatican II means remembering the event itself—as well as the documents and their religious, spiritual, and theological value. It’s not about reminiscing over the past glories of an unrepeatable event of grace. There is no longer an audience for nostalgic celebrations, no time for a “the way we were” kind of theology. What remains is to retell all, to all, beginning with young Catholics, in new ways, with the depth of understanding about theological and doctrinal development that enables the Church to be itself and to thrive in a multicultural and multireligious world.
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