Writing my new book, To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books), afforded me the welcome opportunity to dig into the Council’s 16 texts and the many fine commentaries on them. It also made me ponder why the Council was necessary. That question is often raised today by young Catholics who, unsettled by the excessive ecclesiastical air turbulence over the past decade and generally ill-informed about the pre-conciliar Church, imagine that everything in Catholicism was copacetic until John XXIII made the fatal mistake of summoning an ecumenical council. That, however, was not the view of some quite orthodox Catholic leaders in the decade before Vatican II.
Msgr. Giuseppe De Luca was a stalwart churchman who had drafted the Holy Office decree placing the books of 1947 Nobel Prize-winner André Gide on the Index of Forbidden Books. In 1953, however, he found the atmosphere in the Holy Office, the Suprema among curial offices, insufferable. So he vented his frustrations to Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Pope Paul VI) in these no-nonsense terms: “In this suffocating atmosphere of unctuous and arrogant imbecility, perhaps a scream — chaotic but Christian — would do some good.”
Then there was the Swiss polymath-theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. In 1952, he published a small book in German, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in This Age, in which he worried that the great Catholic tradition had become fossilized and had “slipped out of the [Church’s] living center of holiness.” The “great salvage operation” of the Counter-Reformation had been necessary, Balthasar argued, but it was over, and the Church had to get out of its defensive crouch and get on with offering humanity the truth of God in Christ.
In the years immediately after the Council, Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), who was one of the three most influential theologians at Vatican II, knew that the Council’s reception was imperfect and its implementation even more imperfect. Nonetheless, he identified further reasons why Vatican II was necessary and why its teaching was essential for the Church’s life going forward:
“[The] Council reinserted into the Church as a whole a doctrine of [papal] primacy that was dangerously isolated; it integrated into the one mysterium of the Body of Christ a too-isolated conception of the hierarchy; it restored to the ordered unity of faith an isolated Mariology; it gave the biblical word its full due; it made the liturgy once more accessible; and, in addition, it made a courageous step forward toward the unity of all Christians.”
Thus, the Council had many theological and doctrinal accomplishments to its credit. These were crucial to rekindling that radical, Christ-centered faith that would be the source of a revitalized Catholic mission to convert the modern world. Similarly, the Council’s rejection of Catholic triumphalism was good in itself and necessary for its mission: “It was both necessary and good for the Council to put an end to the false forms of the Church’s glorification of self on earth, and by suppressing her compulsive tendency to defend her past history, to eliminate her false justification of self.”
That having been done, however, Ratzinger believed that continual, obsessive self-flagellation put another obstacle in the path of evangelization and mission. Unlocking the promise of the Second Vatican Council meant renewing our faith in the Lord’s pledge “to be with you always” (Matthew 28:20). So, the future pope concluded, “it is time…to reawaken our joy in the reality of an unbroken community of faith in Jesus Christ. We must rediscover that luminous trail that is the history of the saints and of the beautiful — a history in which the joy of the Gospel has been irrefutably expressed throughout the centuries.”
That reference to “the saints and the beautiful” helps us understand another reason why Vatican II was necessary. The Church’s pre-conciliar proclamation and apologetics were strong on logic. But a world become irreligious — not pagan, for paganism had a sense of this world’s englobement in a greater reality, but irreligious, tone-deaf to rumors of angels — was not, in the main, going to be converted by logical demonstrations. It would be converted by holiness, manifest in the lives of those who had become friends of the Lord Jesus Christ and joined themselves to his cause. It would be converted by the Church offering more beauty than the world could manage to create.
Where Catholicism is alive today, and Vatican II well-received and implemented, it is because local Churches have embraced holiness and beauty as evangelical and catechetical pathways toward a Christocentric future.
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Did Vatican Council II render itself irrelevant in the life of the universal Church? That question can only be answered by a incisive look at the fruits of the Council in the ensuing 50+ years. No one can offer an objective appraisal of the work of the Council without doing a thorough analysis of the state of the Church over her recent past. What are its fruits exactly? I sincerely want to know.
As far as I can see, we have a Catholic Church where few, if any, of its faithful are perceptively engaged in evangelization. If this were not so, the numbers of Catholics would not have fallen so tragically into the abyss. If the mission of the Church is to proclaim the Gospel to the world, we’d have to admit that the Church deserves an F- grade.
You are using here a commonly held but illogical sweeping generalization that the dwindling numbers of Catholics after Vatican II is directly caused by the Council and thus you have your preconceived bias confirmed that the Council was a disaster furthering your chosen resistance and rejection of the reforms and teachings of the Council manifested especially in your disrespect and disloyalty of Pope Francis who continues to implement Vatican II today. This reason is irrational and unfounded. This view is indicative of a very limited and misplaced North American and European perspective which is blind to the explosive growth of Catholic membership in other continents especially in Africa after the Council. Besides the decrease in religious practices in the West did not only affect the Catholic Church but also other churches and religions as well. This phenomenon is scientifically attributed by sociologists and anthropologists to the overall rise and spread of secularism in the West. It is therefore erroneous to imply a direct connection between Vatican II and the decline of the number of Catholics.
The facts speak for themselves.
Edward Peitler: Yes the facts from around the world speak and they belie and debunk the F- grade you give to the Council. Something is fundamentally inaccurate in your evaluation.
There is no such thing as “scientific proof” in sociology and anthropology. But your point about what Francis is “trying to implement” is way off base. The syncretism, secular utopianism, and neophiliac faith in the forces of power elitism bears no connection to Catholicism at all either seen through the lens of tradition or Vatican II.
Weigel is silent however about Pope Francis and his efforts precisely to implement the grand designs of Vatican II. Surely, he must realize that one reason for why so many on the trad-con right of the Church are so against him is because of his commitment to Vatican 2. And yet, this “lip service” to the necessity of Vatican 2 fails to note the continuing efforts of the current papacy to bring the spirit and letter of Vatican 2 to ecclesial fruition.
Where Catholicism is alive today, and Vatican II well-received and implemented, it is because local Churches have embraced holiness and beauty as evangelical and catechetical pathways toward a Christocentric future.
I suppose if someone has an airplane, a full bank account, and a lot time on his hands, he can find such places in abundance. The rest of us are stuck with the wreckage imposed by the “necessary” council — and now Mr. Weigel’s gaslighting.
“Where Catholicism is alive today…”
I think most of those places are in Africa & Asia.
I get it: the Church was too logical for modern times. That tells us a lot about modern times. So, what is the alternative to logic–emotion, passion, lies, fantasy? While a Vatican Council may have been necessary, what we now have has failed to address modern times. In the past, the Church was necessary for salvation, but not today. We can now be Buddhists, Protestants, Hindus, Jews, atheists, Muslim and whatever. It’s all ok. Just be the best atheists that you can be. The Church is dying. The part of the Church which is not dying, is the part made up of adherents to tradition and the old Latin Mass. And that has to be suppressed.
I’d agree that traditional Catholics are the portion of the Western Church who are growing demographically but that only reflects the West- which isn’t growing overall.
SE Asia & Africa are the future. They’re actually reproducing themselves unlike most of us in the West.
Since Mr. Weigel doesn’t mind repeating himself on how great Vatican II was (no matter the subsequent results) I should not mind repeating myself.
To the typical mass going catholic, after 60 years, Vatican II means that the priest faces the people during mass, and the mass (in the USA) is in English. That’s it. I would venture to say that not one mass going catholic in one hundred has read the sixteen documents. The pope, bishops, and academics keep beatiing this horse, but that’s it.
“Where Catholicism is alive today, and Vatican II well-received…” I don’t think that would be here, where bishops will not even obey Canon 915, where bishops not only forbid mentioning from the pulpit politicians who promote and try to even expand the killing of the unborn, but even prohibit mentioning it in the Church bulletin. That is where we are today, sixty years after Vatican II.
All this following of authority and denying of reality–it’s like something out of George Orwell’s novel “1984,” or out of Mao’s China, or out of the old Soviet Union, or something akin to Holocaust Denial or the big lie about massive, organized, outcome-changing fraud 2020 presidential election.
Yes, it will be a scandal for the Church to admit that Vatican II-promoting popes, who’ve been declared to be saints, actually did great harm to the Church.
Yes, it will be a scandal to admit that a raft of documents, approved by 99% of the bishops at an Ecumenical Council, did great harm to the Church.
But an even greater scandal will be to let the terrible harm go on interrupted ad infinitum.
This whole matter is sort of like choice involved in the priest child abuse scandal in the Church. Cover it all up, pretend like it never happened, and go on? Or fully expose the rot and thereby begin to correct things?
Weigel faults the pre-conciliar church as containing too much LOGIC. Eureka! Of course!
That you, VCII, for ridding the faith of that unnecessary unpleasant trait! We have VCII to thank for making possible the sinking ship we’re now in. But fear not! Pollyanna’s gospel will save us!
I’m happy that the Church is growing in Africa and Asia. But there seems to be an implication that that’s supposed to justify the decline (to be generous) of the Church in the West. Do we not matter anymore?
I find the reasons for the Council by St. John XXlll very laudable. Catholics had fallen into indifferentism when it came to practicing the Faith. St. John XXlll saw this and called for the Council. Archbishop Marcel Lefevre is quoted as saying, “If the Council would have gone as planned, we would have had a great Council.” St. Pope John XXlll said that the Council was to be in line with the Councils of Nicea, Trent, and Vatican l. And it was to be a great Council. But the Council Of St. John was voted out, and we instead got a Council whose outcome was disastrous. The total opposite of the real intentions of the Council.
And the irony is that it was St. John XXIII, himself, who opened the door to all those votes, in dealing with a standoff on the first schema to be reviewed. Still in November 1962, he broke the tie vote, such that this lead-off document, on Revelation (and then inevitably the rest of the seventy) would be replaced, but although still cherry-picked as source material:
“The question being put to the vote [the Cardinal Frings presentation, written by his peritus theologian, Ratzinger] was very complicated. Those who wanted new things had to vote no. And those who wanted old things, had to vote yes. Anyway it was a very close vote. Those who won were those who wanted to stay with the original schema. So from a legal perspective there was a very slight majority in favour of maintaining the first draft of the text. But then Papa Giovanni [himself! John XXIII] saw that the majority was too thin to be viable, and decided that the vote should be reopened […]” (“Benedict: Last Testament in His Own Words,” in Seewald, 2016, p. 133).
Benedict defends the needed rewrite but also, yes, regrets, the disastrous outcome (your caricature) that later transpired. He writes:
“Cardinal Frings later had intense pangs of conscience. But he always had an awareness that what we actually said and put forward was right [basing the schema on the fact of Jesus Christ, rather than on letterhead documents about Christ], and also had to happen. We handled things correctly, even if we certainly did not correctly assess the political consequences and the actual repercussions. One thought too much of theological matters then, and did not reflect on how these things would come across” (“Benedict: Last Testament,” 2016, p. 142).
I enjoy reading true stories of what happened at the Council. I grew up believing the Council was a peaceful setting where the Holy Spirit resided. Then I read that the actual Council was a battleground, sometimes almost breaking out into actual physical struggles. Those who know the true stories of Vatican ll should tell them and a book written. It would help us, the laity, better understand what is happening. And better understand what Vatican Council ll is really all about. As for now, it means absolutely nothing to most of us.
According to the Biography of Pope Benedict XVl, The Holy Father speaks of a Council Father who forcefully took the microphone and began to speak about changes to the 70 Schemas. Benedict says Pope John was very pleased. I believe that St. Pope John was under the illusion that the Council Fathers wanted to take the 70 already perfect Schemas and perfect them. Years back, I saw a Documentary on Television where an elderly Cardinal was being interviewed, he was from England, and he said this, “After the first session of the Council was over, Pope John XXlll called his closest Cardinal Collaborators together, I know because I was one of them. He called on us to think of a way to gracefully end the Council as he saw trouble ahead.” I see they didn’t want to create a greater Council. They wanted to throw out the Council of St. Pope John XXlll and create their own Council.
But, three years after the death of Pope John XXIII (that is, 1965), as for the “trouble ahead” and your editorial remark that “they wanted to throw out the Council of St. Pope John XXIII and create their own Council, what, in fact, was the outcome?
Was it “their own Council,” or was it the completion of the “suspended” First Vatican Council, by treating instead the relationship between the papacy and the bishops? The Constitution of the Church affirms both the office of the papacy as the successor of Peter, and the office of bishops as successors of the apostles (n. 20).
The “hierarchical communion” means, for example, “Together with its head, the Roman Pontiff, and never without this head, the episcopal order is the subject of supreme and full power over the universal Church” (n. 22); and “In other words there is not distinction between the Roman Pontiff and the bishops taken collectively, but between the Roman Pontiff by himself and the Roman Pontiff together with the bishops” (from “The Prefatory Note of Explanation,” added to the Constitution at the direction of Pope Paul VI, the successor of St. John XXIII).
“[T]rouble ahead,” of course…but “their own Council”?
Still unsuccessful have been efforts to channel (!) St. John XXIII as to his current views on what actually transpired (a “hierarchical communion”) after he made his remark in 1962, quoted in retrospect by an aging English cardinal (quite possibly Cardinal Basin Hume?).
“The Church’s pre-conciliar proclamation and apologetics were strong on logic. But a world become irreligious was not, in the main, going to be converted by logical demonstrations.”
So V2 was necessary because the Church failed.
Which explains why Synodality (aka Vatican III) must be ongoing.
Nonsense. Weigel, erroneously, tries to justify the Council downplaying scholastic traditions. The resulting lack of coherence in Catholic apologetics, often replaced by juvenile sentimentality, has been a disaster, a concrete disaster for all you skeptics who refuse to admit that sometimes correlations are related to causality. These idiotic synods are not necessary. It should be obvious that a corruption of the faith is not an advancement of the faith.