The men who discussed and approved the documents of the Second Vatican Council also oversaw their implementation. The Church’s response to the Council was nonetheless very different from what they expected.
Why did that happen?
I am not a theologian or a historian, but a lawyer. That’s usually not much help in religious matters, but it gives me an interest in institutional and procedural matters that can deeply affect the life of the Church.
At the time of the Council, problems were developing in the world and the Church, such as the disappearance of God from consciousness, that went to the roots of our once-Christian civilization. Some sort of renewal was needed, and many people within the Church had been thinking about what it should look like.
But how complete, accurate, and compatible were their thoughts? And how should they have been tested and developed?
We are told that “the wind blows where it wills … but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” If so, it seems unlikely that renewal would be led by an ecumenical council deciding on particular new directions for theology and pastoral strategy.
That’s not how past episodes of renewal have worked. At such times, the contributions of the hierarchy have mostly involved clarifying doctrine, suppressing abuses, improving discipline, and vindicating the Church’s autonomy over against the secular world. When it seemed appropriate, they also included supporting movements of Catholics not started by the hierarchy. Examples include the Cluniac reform, the rise of the mendicant orders, and the intense spirituality of the Catholic Reformation.
The Church needs her hierarchy (and prelates are sometimes saints), but when acting officially and collectively, their functions are normally less creative or prophetic than critical and limiting. They attend to things of the sort that can be made a matter of discipline and routine. These things are very important, but they’re not everything.
It’s usually not a good sign when politicians are poets, and something similar applies when anyone in a position of institutional authority claims special inspiration. Putting wide-ranging discussions of new directions for the life and thought of the Church in authoritative documents that are very difficult to change can easily be read as an attempt to do quickly and through legal and administrative means what can only be done organically and at its own pace. In short, it can look like clericalism.
The circumstances and problems facing mid-century Catholicism were unprecedented. How could it be prescribed in advance just what was needed? If the prescriptions were clear—even if generally correct—they would soon become too limiting. But if they were ambiguous, they would enable people to claim the overriding authority of an ecumenical council for projects of their own that reflect the problems more than the solutions.
That makes cautious realism all the more necessary for the rulers of the Church. Otherwise, they are likely to avoid the difficulties of actual Church renewal by bureaucratic churning or calling for a new church animated by new paradigms that always seem to be somewhere else or in a perpetually receding future—most recently, a church of the peripheries, or a synodal church.
How should Catholics today think about the Council? For a lawyer, it’s natural to compare an ecumenical council to the Supreme Court. Both are bodies of (we hope) wise and experienced people responsible for interpreting basic principles in a binding and durable way.
No matter how wise and good a judge or bishop, it’s hard for him to foresee what an interpretation of something fundamental will lead to as it works its way through life’s surprises. That’s why the Supreme Court normally accepts limits on what it does, including the case or controversy requirement and the non-binding character of dictum.
The case or controversy requirement tells us that the Court doesn’t issue advisory opinions—interpretations of the law regarding hypothetical disputes not before it. This ensures that when they decide something, they are looking at an actual dispute regarding a specific situation in which people with a stake in the matter can be counted on to develop and present the opposing arguments. That makes it more likely that when the Court does something, they will know what they’re talking about.
That requirement is supplemented by the principle that judicial dicta—statements about the law not needed for the decision—are not binding in later cases. After all, they haven’t been clarified and tested by use in an actual dispute.
Other related principles guide the Court in deciding, in its discretion, which cases to take. They don’t like cases relating to novel issues, since it’s too easy to miss something major or overvalue something minor. So they prefer to decide cases that involve questions that have already been dealt with in varied settings by a number of lower courts. That makes it more likely they will reach a solid understanding of the issues that will help resolve disputes in a sensible way.
When the Court puts such principles aside, it can blunder disastrously. Roe v. Wade is an obvious example, in which they reached out and created a novel principle that they thought would resolve a major social conflict. Instead, they created an enduring situation of gross injustice that has poisoned American politics ever since.
It’s notable that the council fathers did not limit themselves to themes that had been dealt with extensively within the Church, so that the merits of this view and that could be discerned from experience. There hadn’t been much previous discussion of episcopal collegiality, for example, or of a right to religious liberty rooted in the dignity of the person.
Nor is it entirely clear what the documents bind us to. The Council demonstrated that we can say good things about the modern age and other religions. But we can also say bad things, and when to say what isn’t something on which definitive guidance is possible.
The Council also tells us that people have the right to religious freedom within due limits. But what are these limits? They are said to include respect for public morality, and Dignitatis Humanae itself notes that men and societies have enduring moral duties toward what it calls the “true religion” and the “one Church of Christ.” It seems then that respect for public morality would include respect for those duties. If so, the scope of religious freedom becomes narrower than many believe.
So, what might a lawyer say about the situation? As many have noted, the council fathers enacted no canons, pronounced no anathemas, and adopted no new doctrinal definitions. Instead, they mostly presented lengthy discussions, some very eloquent, about the Church and its relation to the world.
From a lawyer’s standpoint, though, these discussions neither relate to a case or controversy nor establish enforceable rules. They’re very much like judicial dicta, and thus not the sort of thing he would normally view as binding, however lofty the source. Perhaps something like that is the effect of calling the Council “pastoral”: sixty years ago, the council fathers—I believe correctly—thought new approaches were needed, and urged the ones that then seemed best to them.
It is hard to believe they thought they were thereby permanently discrediting previous approaches in favor of a general process of revision. Today, after a great deal has gone wrong and the problems the Council worried about seem worse than ever, it seems unrealistic to suggest Catholics should be bound to accept the former view.
Why not let them instead draw what inspiration they can—within the limits of Church doctrine—from all aspects of Church history, not only Vatican II but also what preceded it?
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The guarded analogy between the Council and the U.S. Supreme Court is only marginally helpful, at best, in the perspective of a non-lawyer.
The greatest similarity is mostly in the pretense of the justices—as also with academics with their plumage on graduation day—to mimic or even expropriate the vestments previously associated with the Church.
About the Church, then, in what way is the guardian Apostolic Succession—commissioned by Jesus Christ and indwelled by the Holy Spirit—comparable the court system’s artform of crafting legal doctrines based on contested details of secular case law, and legal precedent rather than Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), and subject to a majoritarian vote rather than the categorically quite different Magisterium?
And, about those Council positions which are “binding,” Gaudium et Spes does clearly identifies the “the permanent binding force of universal natural law” (n. 79). It is also clear that in the secular domain the Church offers clear principles rather than contingent answers (n.33). And, “[e]arthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of God’s kingdom. Nevertheless, to the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the kingdom of God” (n. 39).
About religious freedom, the Council is explicit that this means a negative and personal “immunity from coercion”—then combined with the positive personal obligation to still seek to discover (not presume to construct) the truth (Dignitatis Humanae, n. 1).
So, as to the question, “How should Catholics today think about the Council?”…
… the elementary starting point is likely Pope Benedict’s longstanding distinction between the “real” Council of the Documents” versus the “virtual” Council of the media. Amidst the cobbled-together Documents, there can be found the needed precision beneath what seems “ambiguous.”
Yes, too, the digging out of precision (versus slogans) does resemble the thought process in good secular case law.
The Church is governed by a government run by human beings that operates largely – although not of course on the supremely important points – in ways similar to human arrangements in general. So analogies seem likely to be somewhat illuminating, especially when things go wrong. It seems to me it’s not what is unique about the Church that causes that but the things she has in common with other societies.
As to the documents of the Council, Benedict had issues with some of them, notably Gaudium et Spes, which he found sometimes “downright Pelagian” in tendency. The point I suppose is that you read them in accordance with their intention, which is largely pastoral and thus not it seems the final word on anything, and as continuous with preceding doctrine even where they don’t necessarily sound that way when read in isolation.
The problem with Vatican Council II as I see it was not in its proceedings and documents per se but in its implementation. In retrospect, the Church’s essential error was attempting to mimic the predominant ethos of the culture rather than for the Church to inform the culture with Christocentric values and thinking. The Church became an agent of the secular. This error has continued relentlessly down to our current day. When you have the Vatican issuing documents with nary a reference to Christ just about sums up the problem. We’ve forgotten the kerygma and the very purpose of the Church. When Catholic charititable organizations receive the majority of its funds from government sources we see firsthand how the Church is an agent of the secular. Other illustrations of the perversion of the Church’s very mission are ample indeed..
One of the leading apostate Cardinals, Eminence Walter Kasper, has publicly stated that words used in many documents coming out of V2 were settled upon to permit divergent interpretation. This was of course to open the foor for further divergence in implementation.
Deacon: I too am concerned with Church organizations taking funds from any government. We must not compromise our message with secular culture ,government or politics. Catholics as individuals can as long as they don’t compromise their faith.”
Once you understand the art of government is picking a million pockets inconspicuously of indistinguishable small amounts constantly in order to make a few conspicuous and significant payments, generally with silver shovels for “ground-breaking” or hedge clipper sized scissors for “ribbon cuttings” or the presentation of giant novelty sized checks, you start to realize government “assistance” is always a way to buy votes, all else follows.
I pity people who don’t understand the Somali day care centers were operating as planned, the only fly in the ointment was a young man who publicized the vote buying scheme.
The “cobbled-together” nature of the documents reflects three years of sometimes overly polite groupthink, with later “interventions” often neutralizing earlier Teilhardian wording, but without actually deleting such earlier language, as in the “‘downright Pelagian’ tendency” in parts of Gaudium et Spes. The most significant intervention, by the International Theological Commission at the request of Pope Paul VI, is the three-page “clarifying” Prefatory/Explanatory Note added (before the final vote) to Lumen Gentium, Chapter 3 on collegiality among the bishops and the papacy. Collegiality as recently morphed into ambiguous “synodality,”
About which, this backstory during the Council:
“Then one of the extreme liberals made the mistake of referring, in writing, to some of these ambiguous passages [in Lumen Gentium], and indicating how they would be interpreted [!] after the Council. This paper fell into the hands of the aforesaid group of cardinals and superiors general, whose representative took it to the pope. Pope Paul, realizing finally that he had been deceived [!], broke down and wept.
“What was the remedy? Since the text of the schema did not positively make any false assertion, but merely used ambiguous terms, the ambiguity could be clarified by joining to the text a carefully phrased explanation. This was the origin of the Preliminary Explanatory Note appended to the schema” (Fr. Ralph M. Wiltgen, SVD, “The Rhine Flows into the Tiber: A History of Vatican II,” 1967, p. 232).
For Pope Leo XIV to now refer back directly to the “largely” but not-exclusively “pastoral” Documents themselves—rather than to the more recent and disconnected experiment in deformed synodality—is stabilizing rather than a continued “mess.”
Also in step with the Council is the Consistory of Cardinals together with the Papacy. This institutional architecture has more of a future than yet another round of geographic and overly congregational synodal roundtables–diocesan, regional, continental, with a third and self-validating synod-on-a-synod-on-synodality (!!!), as earlier suggested for 2028.
The Apostolic Succession, within a Eucharistic Church indwelled by the Holy Spirit, is both analogous to (yes), and yet totally unique and different from any human organization. So, when “things go wrong” perhaps it’s actually due to termites—obsolete “extreme liberals”—still intent on exploiting planted ambiguities in order to replace the perennial Catholic Church, as a divine institution, with an admitted “paradigm shift”—a novelty when misapplied from how progress is made in the natural sciences (the term is lifted from Thomas Kuhn’s, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” 1960).
I’m old enough to remember the Second Vatican Council. (I was 12 when it concluded.) Although I was too young to understand all that was happening, I clearly recall how at one point in the mid-60s, it seemed like every time we went to Mass, something was different. Like so many of my generation, I drifted away from the Church in my mid-teens, but when I started returning in the early ‘80s, it was like I was going back to something that only partially resembled what I’d left.
Years later I read an interview with one of the Council Fathers. (I think it was Henri de Lubac, but I’m not sure.) In the interview he stated outright that the Church that existed in the early ‘90s was not the Church that members of the Council had envisioned. He also said that as a former student of Reginald Garrigou-Legrange, he had come to see the Domincan’s theology as outmoded, but by the time of the interview, he was praying for the great Thomist’s intercession.
The council fathers fell for a bait and switch operation. Yes, the world was seriously entering into a maturing atheistic paradigm which had been developing since the protestant revolt, but they were naive to think the problem was not salted among them while they engaged in their deliberations. Voila! The poetics of documents designed to bandage a cancer while it metastasized.
Catholic education eradicated, the priesthood and religious life nearing extinction, monasticism in collapse, the sacramental life consigned to irrelevancy for hundreds of millions of baptized pagans and an episcopate in opposition to faithful laity, et al.
But there is nothing wrong.
“Why not let them instead draw what inspiration they can—within the limits of Church doctrine—from all aspects of Church history, not only Vatican II but also what preceded it?”
Bishop Strickland focuses on that very issue in his podcast, Pillars Of Faith, The Watchman’s Lamp episode 21. Worth viewing.
Cdl. Heenan in “A Crown of Thorns” and, especially in Fr. Wiltgen’s book “The Inside Story of Vatican II” (who were both firsthand participants and witnesses to the discussions in the aula) were both very clear about how muddy the waters were regarding the topic of “Religious Freedom” in particular. That said, how can a novel theory – with various meanings being proposed but no real clarity offered – be “implemented”? Now add “participation” in the Mass. What does THAT look like? It’s no wonder, when one stops to contemplate the “novelty” of what were held out to be the guiding principles of Vatican II that it would be nothing short of a disaster to “implement”. Add now the tautology of a “Synod on Synodality” and contemplate briefly about how well implementation for that might proceed. As the psalmist says “As the twig is bent so grows the tree”. I fear what was planted 60-years ago is too twisted to salvage; especially in light of the fact that those societies that have remained true to the expression of the faith pre-Vatican II are all very much thriving and able to provide the clarity, direction and mystery for which the the human heart and soul were crafted and for which both long.
I am not a theologian or a historian, but a lawyer. That’s usually not much help in religious matters – Kalb.
Although, a lawyer is a sleuth, mentally trained to discover facts in comparison to words, outcome in respect to intent. All the underlying conditions that shape reality. Perhaps more keenly equipped to assess direction. Although as I read on Kalb discusses this better than I can.
What resulted during Vatican II are viewed as open ended discussions, at least as viewed from a lawyer’s perspective. That seems to coincide with the concept of Synodality, which Fr Raymond de Souza quoting G Weigel as a Church, in respect to Francis’ Gaudium et Spes to a morphing Church of Mission to a Church of Meetings. Interestingly de Souza perceives Leo XIV gently moving the Church in a direction consistent with Pope Francis’ initial, more doctrinal early direction.
From this writer’s perspective that he chose same sex proponent Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe to offer the meditation during the recent Consistory is consistent with Pope Leo’s theological dance of the seven veils .
Fr de Souza doesn’t identify a specifying direction in Leo XIV to date except to re present early years Francis in a more gentle, perhaps orthodox way. Still we remain as Weigel aptly put it a Church in perpetual discussion. Kalb suggests as many of us, do we return to what if not all preceded VII. There must be a cohesive continuity with our Apostolic past. Focus on a Church in evangelical mission armed with revealed perennial truths is the best direction. One that is apodictally in line with its founder.
“I am not a theologian or a historian, but a lawyer. That’s usually not much help in religious matters – Kalb.”
Sort of like being a priest commenting on the constabulary, or Bishops opining on economic matters, no?
I’m becoming more and more convinced theology is logomachy in service to opacity and complexity.
Pitchfork: I think you are on to something.
Nevertheless, in today’s world priests frequently become involved in civil law issues because we’re involved in matters of the law. Examples include the right to life of compromised patients, and whether protective civil law limits medical decision making that abrogates a patient’s rights.
Theology when well understood has its basis in the natural law, which laws are universal – Marcus Tullius Cicero said these laws are the same in Athens as they are in Rome. Theology when well understood helps us understand the moral application of civil law, its limits and viability since all law must be moral and sensitive to human rights.
An example is Color Law, when someone who appears to be acting with government authority [like a police officer or official] but is actually violating the law or an individual’s rights, often under the pretense or guise of their official power, leading to federal civil rights violations like false arrest, excessive force.
Amen to the conclusion.
In connection, I believe that one enormous over-arching effect of Church establishment behavior in the wake of the Second Vatican Council has been to cultivate a ham-fisted authoritarian-ism by self-styled progressive Bishops and Cardinals, and a “vibe-shift” cult-psychology that outright eclipses the authority of Jesus, and offers as grotesque substitute a capricious, multi-headed confederacy as the “new false god.” It is, in an apt description, what Fr. Robert Imbelli has alluded to as “The De-Capitated Body of Christ.”
A catchword of our poor deformed Church is its word “reform,” which in its contemporary use has been rendered devoid of any Christian meaning.
My own response to the behavior of the Church establishment, especially since the tyrannical reign of the Pontiff Francis, has been to hold evermore closely to the Authority of Jesus, despite being schooled in the tin-pot despotism of fraudulent, mediocre and apostate characters of the Church establishment.
In the past the Church has many times almost “gone off the rails”, but it never happened-just as promised to Peter. And if we believe Jesus, it will never happen in the future as bleak as things seem now. Do we believe this?”
I believe the reference you are making is the promise that “the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”
Is that what you are referring to?
The Council also tells us that people have the right to religious freedom within due limits. But what are these limits? They are said to include respect for public morality, and Dignitatis Humanae itself notes that men and societies have enduring moral duties toward what it calls the “true religion” and the “one Church of Christ.” It seems then that respect for public morality would include respect for those duties. If so, the scope of religious freedom becomes narrower than many believe.
Almost no one has interpreted it this way though after a half century. Dignitatis Humanae has largely been interpreted as either baptizing the American notion of religious freedom, reversing the “bad old days” of the dark ages Church of the Inquisition and the Confessional state, thus justifying further “developments” in doctrine. There are nuances and variations here but this unites Communio “conservatives” with the Concilium “radicals”. You have the added nuances of some of the Communio figures who claim that DH is somehow a restatement of a patristic and scholastic account of freedom (Dr. Schindler) while still representing a major development in doctrine away from at least a thousand years of the ordinary magisterial teaching on church and state. Its interesting that a lot of the recent scholarship on this issue has resulted in massive tomes. Schindler’s 2015 work (reviewed at CWR) I think is around 500 pgs, Michael Dunnigan’s work (2023) is 520 pgs and David Wemhoff’s work on DH is again I think over 500 pgs. Can we say that any of this has moved the needle?
I fear that Mark Tabish’s comment that, “I fear what was planted 60-years ago is too twisted to salvage…” may well be true.
The council Fathers said they were reading the signs of the times. What times? Immediately following the council we had the full blown sexual revolution. This was followed by the full blown Vietnam war. Shortly thereafter we had the legal murder of a million unborn babies per year in this country alone. Moving further along we now have legal so called same sex marriage, woman declaring they are men and men declaring they are women, and they must be treated as such. We are not only killing the young but now also the elderly and the sick.
Even if they were reading the signs of the times, as a pastoral council, not a doctrinal council, their reading would have applied to those times.
Even though we have a new catechism (CCC) pope Leo said that he is going to start a series of talks on catechesis of Vatican II. Good luck with that.
The Church hierarchy presents Vatican II as Pentecost. This is when the Church began. Forget the previous 1900 years, forget the previous 20 councils. We should now measure dates and times not as BC and AD, or even the secular BCE and CE, but rather as BV2 and AV2.