2013-02-23          First published in Kairos, Archdiocese of Melbourne magazine, Vol 24, Issue 1

INTERPRETING VATICAN II TODAY   

PART 1   THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITY  

Bishop Peter J. Elliott, Melbourne

Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council raises questions. How are we to understand the Second Vatican Council today? What is the right “hermeneutic” or way of interpreting and explaining this Council? And how do we evaluate the changes and projects that followed?  

Since his first Christmas address to the Curia on December 22, 2005 , Pope Benedict XVI has invited us to interpret the Council in the perspective of continuity. He said that “two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarreled with each other”, a resonance of his own painful experience in 1968 when he parted company with Karl Rahner and Hans Kung. He sees a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” set against “the hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the one subject Church” He finds continuity within the very nature of the Church.  

Avoiding complex analysis, I open questions raised by this “hermeneutic of continuity”. Here and there I include personal recollections.  

Self-Conscious Catholics  

The Second Vatican Council recedes in time but we are all part of developments that flowed from it. We also inherit baggage from the recent past. It is difficult to step out of our little “life situations”, difficult to look objectively at the major ecclesial event of the Twentieth Century.  

We carry an unhealthy Catholic self-consciousness. This preoccupation affects members of my generation and the preceding generation who remember the Council era vividly. To a lesser extent, younger generations also inherit this distraction.  But there is also a generation gap. My generation cannot pass on the enthusiasm we experienced fifty years ago to those born in the decades that followed Vatican II.  

Much time and energy has been expended over the past fifty years in agonized ecclesiastical self-scrutiny. At times this self-conscious exercise was carried out in emotive ways. Family feuds tend to run that way. It is evident in a range of critical books, published from the time of the Council up to the new Millennium. The preoccupation lingers through a wide spectrum of relentless blog sites, some spiteful, others delusional. It seems best to rise above the preoccupation by going back to the aims of the Council and its achievements.  

Great Expectations  

Vatican II had three aims: faith, unity and reform – the same as the other Ecumenical Councils, but with a different emphasis, described as opening the Church to the world. Looking outwards, this path of dialogue was evident in Ecumenism which advanced rapidly after Blessed John XXIII was elected in 1958. The Council took his work forward. At the same time Inter-Faith dialogue began, for example opening Jewish-Catholic relations, so clouded by the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.  

Looking inwards, four major documents of the Council initiated developments within the Church. The liturgical movement triumphed in the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium and a program of reshaping worship in the Roman Rite began. A deeper understanding of the nature of the Church was proclaimed in Lumen Gentium and a clearer understanding of Divine Revelation in Scripture and Tradition was set out in Dei Verbum. In Gaudium et Spes we find a development of our understanding of the human person and the sacrament of marriage.  

“Left” and “Right’?  

With developments and renewal, a polarization soon divided Catholics, particularly in “developed” countries. Everyone was judged in terms of his or her attitude to “the Council”. This was often reduced to simplistic categories, along the conventional political spectrum from the “Left” to the “Right”, which is how secular journalists tried to depict the Council.  

Imposing that political spectrum on the Church of Jesus Christ is wrong. This mistaken approach has reduced the interpretation and application of the Council to secular political positions. Progressives or liberals are described as being “on the Left” and conservatives and traditionalists are called “Right wingers”.  I criticized that crude analysis twenty five years ago in an article in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 

People do not neatly slot into these categories. Dorothy Day was on “the Left” in social and political terms, but on “the Right” when it came to doctrine, liturgy and spirituality. Then there were certain American Catholics who were politically of “the Right” but ardently liberal when it came to their understanding of the Council. In Australia Catholics on the “Left” or the “Right” held, and still hold, attitudes in the Church which bear little or no resemblance to their political opinions.  

Towards the Centre  

In his encyclical Ecclesiam Suam. Pope Paul VI rose above categories. He presented the Church not as some kind of linear spectrum, running from left to right, but as a series of concentric circles. He did not do this by focusing only on the Church, rather on the whole human race, which has at its centre the People of God. People are either tending towards the centre, the Church gathered around the Pope, or heading away from the centre. His letter on the Church was the first magisterial fruit of the Council and we can all benefit from reading it in these times.  

A Flawed Debate  

Unfortunately polarized debate on the hermeneutic of continuity is evident today in Italy . It is not helpful because it reduces the “conversation” to two small groups of extremists scoring points and making much noise with little content, perhaps reflecting Southern European florid rhetoric and Northern European bluster. Most of us cannot identify with these extremes. 

 However, as long as we avoid thinking in political categories of “Left” and “Right”, it is useful first to examine the extremes, but critically, noting their weaknesses and strengths, which is what I intend to do in the next two articles. Not everything I say will be palatable!  

Fifty years on we may ask whether extremist attitudes can contribute to the wider discussion about the interpretation and application of the Council. Then we can focus on a deeper appreciation of the “hermeneutic of continuity and reform” and anticipate how this can free us from self-consciousness that does little to advance the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. That Kingdom shaped the vision of Blessed John XXIII when he composed a prayer in preparation for the Council.  

He concluded with these words: “Renew in our time your wondrous works, as in a New Pentecost, and grant that Holy Church, gathered together in unanimous, more intense prayer, around Mary the Mother of Jesus, and guided by Peter, may spread the Kingdom of the Divine Savior, which is the Kingdom of truth, of justice, of love and of peace. Amen.
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