Vatican II at 60

Today is the 60th anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council—and one can be excused perhaps for feeling a little exhausted by the entire topic.

After all, it was a council that, by its own admission, was mostly pastoral in nature, and therefore it is thoroughly legitimate to ask if the pastoral concerns of the early Sixties are still relevant to our world today. Indeed, when one goes on social media and writes anything in defense of the Council, younger folks routinely dismiss it with comments like, “Okay, boomer. Enjoy your hippie-era council. The rest of us have moved on.”

One can hardly blame young people for having such views. More often than not, the pastors and Catholic educators they have encountered who are the most enthusiastic promoters of the Council are also the biggest purveyors of the kind of “beige” halfway-house Catholicism that seems so insipid and pointless to them.

Vatican II thus comes to represent to them a Catholicism in retreat and in full embarrassment mode over the fact that the Church still exists as anything more than liberalism at prayer.

Going deeper, beyond exhaustion and clichés

Such views are understandable. But they are also wrong. Exhaustion over a topic must never be confused with the importance of the topic. Indeed, the more important the topic, the more likely it is that it is going to be beaten to death in a thousand different ways, which can then lead to an exhausted cognitive collapse and subsequent resentment at the topic’s very existence and persistence.

When this state of conceptual and cultural exhaustion is reached, the relative “peace” of the status quo, with its modus vivendi between warring parties having been in place for a long while, always seems preferable. And so, a quiet mediocrity of compromised frustration takes root, with nobody quite satisfied with the results, but all in agreement that “extremes” need to be avoided. However, what now counts as “extreme” is daring to insist that the topics in play are still of vital importance and that the pablum of a “no man’s land” form of the Faith, where nothing of any real substance is ever debated, is not sustainable in the long run.

I think this is the situation we find ourselves in today. A certain version of the Council, largely defined and put into place in the 70s and 80s, quickly became the standardized status quo of a Catholicism made safe for the culture of the suburban cul-de-sac. We even built our new “churches in the round” to look like the cul-de-sac. Built, in theory, to facilitate kinetic “fellowship”, these new churches became the architectural expression of a runaway horizontalism that was constantly chasing its own tail and leading nowhere of any particular interest to anyone. “Hooray! We can now see the priest at Mass as he faces us!” Except, as it turns out, nobody really much cared about that.

My claim is that this state of exhaustion over the Council, and the boredom created by its flawed implementation as a vast project of accommodation to modern secular culture, actually presents us with a unique opportunity to step back and look at it with fresh eyes. The immediate post-conciliar project is over, and the status quo “peace” it created is a Laodicean failure. But this failure, rather than leading us to reject the Council, should instead act as a motivation to go back and retrieve the truly radical Catholic project it represented and attempted to enact.

And by “radical” I mean that in the most orthodox sense of going back to the “roots” of the faith to set a Christological fire.

Despite exhaustion, now is the time to ask the deeper question of just what the specific pastoral concerns of the Council were. It is easy to dismiss those concerns as the now irrelevant enthusiasms of “boomers”. But this is not true when one examines the Council in real detail and not in memes and clichés. And following upon that question, the related question of whether the cultural realities the council sought to address are still with us in some form today. And finally, the question of obedience to the magisterium, as the magisterium still seems to think, as it has for 60 years now, that the Council still matters greatly.

It is critical that we do this because, with all due respect to my traditionalist friends, the Council was called for a reason. And that reason had everything to do with the clear indications that there were grave problems with the pre-conciliar Church. Furthermore, those problems were fatal flaws when it came to the Church meeting the cultural challenge of modernity in its full de facto atheist mode. Already in 1958, a young Father Joseph Ratzinger penned a bombshell article entitled, “The New Paganism in the Church”. Note well his unvarnished, raw, and scathing comments:

According to religion statistics, old Europe is still an almost completely Christian part of the Earth. But there can be no better case than this to prove what everyone knows, that statistics lie. The appearance of the church in the modern era shows that in a completely new way it has become a church of pagans, and increasingly so: no longer, as it once was, a church made up of pagans who have become Christians, but a church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians, but have really become pagans. Paganism is entrenched today in the church itself. That is the mark both of the church of our time and also of the new paganism. This paganism is actually in the church and a church in whose heart paganism lives. (Hochland, October 1958. Quoted in Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life. Volume I, 296)

The greatest challenge the Church had ever encountered

Therefore, to the question of what the main pastoral concerns of the Council were, we can state that the primary concern was a lukewarm Church living off the last gasp of a dying Christendom. The Church was locked into a fortress mentality, but with little awareness that those inside the fortress had long ago lost interest in the defensive project and had even begun to sympathize with and envy those on the outside.

Theologians such as Ratzinger and his allies, and bishops including a young Karol Wojtyla, understood this fact. And they further understood that the grave pastoral crisis of the time was a crisis of unbelief, of a de facto atheism and increasingly aggressive secularism in the culture and in the Church, and thus a crisis of the deepest and most severe proportions imaginable.

In other words, the leading lights of the Council understood that modernity represents the gravest challenge the Church had ever encountered. In all previous crises, be it the Gnostic or Arian or Protestant challenges, the Church could at least still presume that there was a shared reservoir of religious consciousness wherein all parties agreed that the questions of God, salvation, and spiritual existence still mattered as the most important things of all. But this was no longer true of modernity, which represented a movement that sought to negate the Faith at its deepest roots and to kill the entire plant and all plants like it.

The conciliar leading lights understood that modernity is Babel writ large and on steroids: the Promethean attempt to construct an entire civilization on the proposition that the question of God not only does not matter but is actually an impediment to human well-being and “progress”. They further understood that standard scholastic theology had failed to inspire and breathe fire into the Church’s doctrinal equations, and was too obsessed with “truth vanquishing error in deductive certitude” to actually steel man against the atheistic arguments of modernity in order to confront them authentically and effectively.

To be sure, there were also those at the Council who did not share this assessment of modernity as a latently atheistic project and whose vision of a broad “aggiornamento” with modern Liberal culture included a warm embrace of many modern secular values. We can see traces of this approach in the second half of Gaudium et Spes in particular. Followers of influential theologians, including Karl Rahner and Hans Küng, viewed Vatican II as a first step toward a second Reformation that would completely change the constitutive nature of basic Catholic doctrines. But such radically revisionist theologies cannot be said to have been the majority view at the council, as any objective reading of the texts will confirm (more on this topic below).

Many critics of Vatican II constantly repeat the lament that it issued no condemnations or anathemas of the errors of the day; that it issued no new canons and no new dogmas; that it was instead a word salad of theological verbiage that was too prolix for its own good. But this is to appeal to the very ecclesial model that had proven so ineffective in the first place and had led to the pastoral lassitude that so afflicted the Church. As if scholasticism and the original conciliar schemata of Cardinal Ottaviani’s Holy Office weren’t already a dense thicket of impenetrable and, quite frankly, boring distinctions that appealed to nobody outside of the shrinking camp of restorationists and hard integralists who seemed oblivious to the revolutionary cultural challenges at hand.

In reality, all of that so-called “theological verbiage” of the Council was in the service of constructing a renewed understanding of Revelation and its ecclesial mediations as a Trinitarian/Christological reality which alone could ground a renewed theological anthropology worthy of the challenges of modernity. Condemnations and anathemas would achieve nothing except a smug comfort in our own rightness. What was needed instead was a theological and metaphysical vision deep enough and broad enough to position the Church’s message as the deeper cosmology and the deeper anthropology. And, therefore, as the deeper and only truly authentic “humanism”.

In many ways, the conciliar theological project was a continuation and advancement of the Christian humanism of men like St. Francis de Sales, as well as the deep Christological cosmology and anthropology of the patristic era. The Council sought to tap into the Church’s vast intellectual resources beyond the categories of scholasticism, even as it utilized the best of scholastic/Thomistic thought to give those patristic insights greater precision.

This is a theological project still worth pursuing. In fact, it must be pursued lest the Church continue to contend with the modern world with one hand tied behind its back and with only one eye open. Furthermore, given the conciliar shift in focus to a more patristic orientation, the time is also now ripe for the Church to go back to the best of her scholastic/Thomistic heritage and to retrieve those elements as well. We see this being done in a Thomistic revival that is now in a fruitful dialogue with the inheritors of the ressourcement/Communio traditions. This effort must continue in order to bring the Council to greater fruition as a grand intellectual alternative to the exhausted dead-ends of nihilistic modernity.

A flaw exploited by the rupturists

This is not to say that the Council did not have flaws. Of course it did, as all councils have had flaws of varying degrees of magnitude. In my view, the chief flaw of Vatican II was that in so emphasizing its continuity with past teachings, it tended to gloss over that it was developing doctrine in key areas and that all of its formulations were in a tight organic continuity with the past. Msgr. Thomas Guarino, in his excellent book, The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II, refers to this conciliar glossing over of development as a “masking”. He emphasizes that this was not an effort at deception in the slightest. It was instead a sincere attempt to take account of the objections of the traditionalists at the Council—objections which St. Pope Paul VI repeatedly insisted had to be taken seriously.

In other words, the Council did provide us with a hermeneutic for its own interpretation, and that was a hermeneutic of continuity. But it did not give us a well-articulated theology of the development of doctrine with clear criteria in place. And that deficit left the door open for later misinterpretations of just what these developments meant. To wit, were they the deepening of ideas already in the tradition (the proper view), or were they dog whistle code for a new “open season” on revisiting every Catholic doctrine in the light of modern canons of rationality?

Specifically, the smooth narrative of continuity had some minor cracks that were exploited by later progressives to portray the Council as a “rupturist” enterprise that needed to be taken further, in almost all areas of theology. What the council lacked in this regard was an explicit document providing clear hermeneutical principles for how it itself was developing doctrine in some key areas (e.g., religious freedom, ecumenism, interreligious dialogue) and that these developments were to be properly interpreted from within the tradition and not based on any extra-ecclesial ideologies.

Hindsight is 20/20, and the Council fathers, in one sense, could hardly be faulted for just presuming that its texts would be interpreted faithfully from within the theological categories of the entire tradition. Especially since the actual texts go out of their way to position the conciliar teachings firmly within the tradition! What more, they might now ask us, could they have done? Were they wrong, or at least naïve, to presume upon the goodwill of later misinterpreters? The famous “ambiguities” of the Council should not be exaggerated since the clear intent of the Council fathers comes nowhere near the rupturist fantasies of later saboteurs, a fact constantly repeated by both St. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.

The strategy of the saboteurs was to try and portray Vatican II as more of a “rupturist event” rather than a set of normative texts embedded within the tradition, thus enabling them to ignore the actual words of the Council in favor of a culturally conditioned “spirit of Vatican II”. This is by now a cliché observation, but one that bears repeating. The Council was manipulated, distorted, and betrayed by a well-organized group of theologians in league with certain influential prelates. And any objective reading of the actual conciliar texts is all the evidence one needs to substantiate this claim of betrayal. It was, in fact, a kind of ecclesial coup d’état, the effects of which are still with us.

After the Council, there also emerged, in alliance with the rupturists, a new theory of the relationship between the theological guild and the Church. It deemphasized the ecclesial context for properly doing Catholic theology, and asserted that there is not a single “magisterium” of the Church centered on the hierarchy, but that there are multiple “magisteria” in the Church, with the theological guild constituting an independent magisterium all its own.

This clever act of theological legerdemain allowed entire theology departments at major Catholic universities to declare their “scientific independence” from the magisterium of the bishops and the pope. And the revisionism was so widespread and deep that there was little the Church could do to stop it short of draconian disciplinary measures that most likely would have failed anyway to stop the bleeding. It would have been tantamount to putting a Band-Aid over an aortic aneurysm.

This was the monumental betrayal and ecclesial catastrophe that confronted the newly elected Pope John Paul II. Which is why one of the primary projects of his long papacy was to bypass the entire mess by developing a large body of magisterial teaching on the proper hermeneutic of the Council and its true theology. The young traditionalists of today, many of whom are increasingly critical of John Paul, fail to grasp the nettle of the problem he faced and its monumental challenge to the Church, and therefore fail to grasp his true greatness within the context of the crisis he faced.

The success of Vatican II

The remaining question about Vatican II is a simple one. In light of the clear betrayal of the Council, is it now so mortally wounded and compromised that it cannot be revived? That seems to be the attitude of many of the self-described traditionalists. The thinking seems to be that, despite much of the profound theology in the conciliar texts, there is simply no way to revive the patient. It has bled out. Likewise, despite the greatness of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, their papacies were tied at the hip to the Council, and so they also have been eclipsed by events. It is now better, they say, to just ignore it all and to go back to the preconciliar theology and form of the Church in a kind of great reset.

I respectfully disagree. There are examples of failed councils, and perhaps Vatican II is one of them. But it is also true that councils of great consequence often take a very long time to be received properly. Just ask St. Athanasius what he thought of the post-Nicene conciliar scene.

Furthermore, the traditionalist claim that the aftermath of the Council proves it was a failure needs to be challenged a bit. It is indeed true, viewed as a massive attempt at a glorious pastoral reinvigoration of the Church, that the Council clearly did not lead to such an outcome.

But what if we lower the bar and use a retrospective appraisal to view the Council more accurately for what it really turned out to be, which was an attempt at pastoral renewal via the path of theological renewal. What if we can now see with greater clarity that the primary strength of Vatican II was that it was a council of theologians, by theologians and for theologians? That it was a “theologian’s council” seeking to position the Church intellectually to confront the ideological challenges of modernity?

Viewed in this more limited light, it can be credibly stated that the Council was actually a success. Even taking account of the vast amount of bad theology that entered the Church after the Council, the fact remains that there has been an explosion of truly profound theological scholarship over the past sixty years that is nothing short of astounding. And that scholarship has greatly enhanced the intellectual ability of the Church to meet the challenges of today. There is a resurgence of deep Thomistic scholarship currently ongoing, as well as Communio/ressourcement theologies, but also in whole new approaches to theology that are thoroughly orthodox but which utilize insights from phenomenology, psychology, sociology, and a host of other disciplines.

Therefore, viewed as a council that sought theological retrieval and renewal, Vatican II was a success. And so, ironically, perhaps it is time to move on from the Council. But not because it was a failure, but because it was a success insofar as it accomplished a theological renewal that is now moving forward on its own steam.

Finally, perhaps now, in light of this theological renewal, even the loftier pastoral aim of a new springtime in the Church can be achieved. The superficial accommodationist theologies of the immediate post-conciliar era are happily giving way to serious theologies grounded in the Paschal Mystery and the Trinitarian God of love made known therein. Perhaps now, finally, we can see a reinvigoration of the laity and the universal call to holiness. Perhaps now, finally, we can seek sanctification grounded in a deep Christocentric vision filled with evangelical zeal.

And perhaps we can now stop arguing about Marian titles and worry more about emulating Mary’s prayer to “cast down the mighty from their thrones and to lift up the lowly.” In other words, to put on Marian subjectivity so we can live, radically, the wild ride that is Christological objectivity, and its clarion call to “come up higher”.

I think it is too early to write the obituary of Vatican II. And a simplistic return to the structure and theology of post-Tridentine Baroque Catholicism would be a pastoral mistake of the highest order. Therefore, must move forward and redouble our efforts at retrieving the real Council—no matter how exhausted we might all be with that project. Giving in to exhaustion when fortitude is called for instead is an act of cowardice, while retreating into the putative safety of a fortress with gossamer walls is a fool’s errand.