1. Jesus Christ. Refocused our Catholic faith in the divine/human person of Jesus Christ. The singular failure of the postwar Church was detachment from Christ. The entire Christian life is incoherent without roots in Christ. The pontificates of John Paul and the various lay renewal movements reinforce this Evangelical Catholicism.
2. Holiness of the Laity. Clear call to holiness for all, laity, clergy and religious. This is not new but a refreshing and necessary intensification. The invocation of Pope St. John XXIII and the bishops for a new Pentecost subsequently bore fruit in the renewal movements.
3. Ecumenism. Recovery of our deep unity...in Christ, scripture, and the Christian life...with our separated brothers/sisters.
4. Jewish Dialogue. Reset of our relationship with Jews and Judaism; renunciation of antisemitism and anti-Judaism; deepened recovery of our own roots in Judaism; recognition of God's continued Providential love for the people of Israel.
5. Freedom of Religion and Political Liberties. Here the influence of the American model, specifically through John Courtney Murray S.J. is clear. Essential here is the inherent relationship of freedom to truth.
6. Liturgical Renewal. Effort, not without difficulties, to increase lay participation in the liturgy.
7. "Ressourcement." Return to the sources, broader study of the fathers and doctors. The narrow focus on St. Thomas was overcome and scholastic language avoided in the documents. But Monsignor Tom Guarino and others have shown that Thomistic metaphysics and epistemology, especially the concept of analogy, provided the underlying intellectual structure of the Council.
8. Positive Engagement with Modernity. The tradition of suspicion, anxiety and defensiveness was overcome with an inclination to recognize, not uncritically, what is good, true and beautiful in the broader culture and developments.
9. Appreciation of World Religions. Consideration of the good and the workings of God's grace beyond the institutional boundaries of the Church in world religions.
10. Ecclesial Clarity. Hierarchical, apostolic structure of the Church was clarified. The collegiality of the college of bishops, always in union with the Pope, was illuminated. Also, contrasting roles of clergy/laity was highlighted: the laity bring the Gospel to the world as the ordained govern/teach/sanctify the Church. Unfortunately, that distinction has been obscured since the Council by progressive dual clericalist jealousies: lay envy of the priestly vocation (largely advanced by clerics, notably in the new cult of "synodality") and a clericalism in which hierarchs pontificate on prudential, secular, lay concerns including immigration, capital punishment, war, and environment. The properly sacerdotal and lay become convoluted, confused, and corrupted: the lay want to be priests, the popes want to be caliphs.
11. Biblical Revival. Intensified academic and devotional attention to Scripture, properly related to Tradition and Magisterium, had deep intellectual, ecumenical and evangelical consequences.
12. Liturgical Renewal. Return to the scriptural sources and the crusade to engage the laity were proper concerns. Not the documents themselves so much as their disordered implementation led to excessive informality, casualness, and loss of the sacred, often in the name of "the spirit of Vatican II."
It bears repetition: the Council was not a rupture, not a replacement of an outdated Church with a new model. It is not like selling an old car and buying a new. It is more like renovation of a classy mansion that maintains all the integrity but refreshes and renews. It was not an end and a beginning. The Council was the culmination and synthesis of multiple movements of the Holy Spirit in the six decades of the 20th century, especially the two after WWII: ecumenical, liturgical, biblical, Jewish dialogue and engagement with culture, the fathers, and world religions.
This partly explains why the documents of the Council were approved by overwhelming majorities. The bishops and popes involved recognized with remarkable unity the clear directions from the Holy Spirit. Likewise, they were for the most part received with enthusiasm and docility by the laity who recognized values they were already living.
Clearly, the Council was an act of the Holy Spirit and an authoritative declaration by the Magisterium. Yet, it was a human event, finite and vulnerable to imbalance, in need of correction and development. So now, sixty years later, we can identify problems.
1. Unbalanced Positivity and Credulity, especially in regard to modern culture. The problem here is the timing: in 1965 the Council ended with an open, warm, trusting openness to modern culture. At that precise moment, the Cultural Revolution was exploding in the West. Not only did the Council fail to prepare us for this new, fierce Culture War, but it made us weak, trusting, and vulnerable.
2. Null Curriculum. This is the concerns that are significant for their absence.
- Communism is not mentioned. It was at that time in history the primary antagonist of the Church. In 1962, in the Metz Accord, the Vatican agreed with Russia to avoid condemnation of communism in exchange for permission of bishops from that bloc to participate in the Council. This was in accord with a broader conciliatory approach in which the Vatican hoped to appease the communists. Tragically, this same policy is now at work in China. John Paul, long a quiet but resolute opponent of communism, was to replace this with a warrior approach that (aligned with Regan's hard ball diplomacy) triumphed. In any case, a student of history reading the Council documents would get a false, limited view of the Church of 1962-5 with the avoidance of its single biggest enemy. Could you write a history of WWII without mention of Nazi Germany?
- Sexuality. The Council properly emphasizes the unitive, along with the procreative, end of sex within marriage. It deliberately punted on the issue of contraception. This is understandable as that technology was brand new at that time; prudence dictated patience. The flaming hot issue was placed in the hands of the Pontifical Commission on Contraception. In 1966 the members voted 64-4 to allow contraception within marriage when motives are pure, generous and prudent. Pope Paul VI controversially rejected this guidance, heeding instead the minority report, championed by Cardinal Wojtyla (to be John Paul) in Humanae Vitae 1968. This was a striking decision: Paul listened to the majority and minority reports and then decided with the 6% minority. Is this the "synodal" way? Probably not; but it is the Catholic way. In any case, the Council documents give no hint that the Church was about to enter into a "forever war" over sex, gender, family and the value of incompetent human life.
- Secular Age: Loss of the Sacred. Unintended consequences. What was happening in the 1960s in the West and especially the USA was a surge of unprecedented prosperity. This contrasts sharply with the hardship and suffering of the Depression and the War as well as the religious revival of the post-war years. With it came a sweeping secularism: infatuation with science, technology, progress; the triumph of the therapeutic; loss of a sense of the sacred, of the supernatural, of the diabolic. The Council did not endorse this, but nor did it directly confront it. There seems to have been a euphoric positivity about society and culture, an ease with this confidence, a diminished sense of the holy and the demonic. This included a disparagement of religious tradition, of authority, of the sacredness of both paternity and maternity. Here again, the Council noticeably misread the signs of the times. In its unbalanced positivity towards modernity and world religions, it became vulnerable to relativism and subjectivism. In its liturgical reform, it diminished the sense of awe, the solemnity of the Latin and an ancient rite, of communion with our ancestors as well as the Church Triumphant (heaven) and Suffering (purgatory).
And so we see that the diabolical forces already active and about to surge were minimally recognized by the Council. In fact, the unintended consequences, not only of the implementation but also of the actual documents, was to weaken the spiritual immune system of Catholicism. An entire culture collapsed in the wake of the Council, not as a direct result, but partly because it weakened rather than strengthened defensive forces: preaching on sin and repentance, confession of sin, silence in liturgy, reverence for priesthood/religious life, vigilance about the diabolical, awe of sexuality, and consideration of the last things of death/judgement/heaven/hell. Inexorably but unintentionally, especially among academic elites, Catholic piety was being replaced by the therapeutic and social justice activism.
Conclusion
Vatican II was an organic, complete, coherent, inspired and inspiring gestalt of mid-20th-century Catholicism, peaking exactly in 1965. At the same time, it unintentionally weakened our combative resources against the axis of world/flesh/devil that was surging to attack us at that very moment.
Now, sixty years later, we are under attack from those same forces: communism (now relocated to China), cultural progressivism (now deep within our hierarchy with Parolin, Fernandez, Cupich, etc.), and we might add Islamic terrorism. John Paul and Benedict were seasoned Cultural Warriors... clear, decisive and assertive... against antagonists: Nazism, Communism, Cultural Liberalism, the Culture of Death, the violent irrationality of Islam, and the Dictatorship of Relativism.
In contrast to this "soldier of Christ" militancy, we see in the papacies of Francis and Leo a return to appeasement and accommodation, a weakness in clarity and decisiveness, often summarized as "the Spirit of Vatican II." As we invoked and received the Holy Spirit in the Council and in many forms afterwards, we do well to again pray for Pope Leo, the cardinals and bishops: "Come Holy Spirit!"
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