A funny thing about Vatican II . . .

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 04, 2010 | In On the Documents of Vatican II

They say a funny thing happened on the way to the forum, and that’s certainly true of the fate of the documents of the Second Vatican Council on their way to the larger forum of the Church in which they were implemented. It wasn’t funny funny, you understand; it was funny peculiar. As an Englishman might say, it was damned peculiar.

This situation calls to mind the tendentious collection of essays by forty Catholic scholars published about 20 years ago under the title of Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After. In a 1991 review, Piers Paul Read notes the unfailingly Modernist trajectory of the contributors, culminating in this:

Most revealing is a section by F. J. Laishley, head of the department of Christian Doctrine at Heythrop College, on the Council’s ‘Unfinished Business’. With a barrage of intimidating jargon, he appears to advance the theory that the Council fathers did not know what they were really saying and therefore did not mean what they actually said, particularly about such things as celibacy, birth control, the Pope, or the status of the Roman Catholic Church.

Read concludes that “this may be orthodox deconstructionism but it is not even heterodox Catholicism if the word is to have any meaning.” He is right; the intelligentsia took the supposed spirit of Vatican II and twisted it into something that was not so much an ineffective implementation of Catholicism as an effective implementation of something else entirely. That’s as succinct a summary of the damned peculiar thing that happened on the way to the Catholic forum as any I’ve seen.

Today I’m launching an intermittent (and therefore inevitably prolonged) series of commentaries on the individual documents of Vatican II, in which I intend to focus very briefly on their key ideas, illustrating their depth and beauty through select quotes, and highlighting the concepts that have become controversial, especially in light of the peculiar thing that happened to them between their approval by Pope Paul VI and their implementation. They were implemented, of course, by All the Usual Suspects—that is, by the nominally Catholic theologians, bishops, priests and sisters who abandoned the Faith without leaving the Church in the heady days of late 20th century secularization, and who have used their power to take as many unfortunate souls with them as possible. Now is an excellent time to review the documents precesely because the tenure of All the Usual Suspects in the halls of Catholic influence is finally nearing an end as ignominious as it was slow in coming.

Before turning to the individual documents, however, a few general remarks on the misinterpretation of the Council are in order. By far the biggest offenders have been the Modernists, who were extraordinarily excited (one is tempted to use the word “titillated”) by the Council’s fresh openness to Catholic interaction with the larger world after the siege mentality of the previous two or three generations. In their euphoria they really did claim there was a spirit at work in Vatican II that transcended the letter of the documents, which were viewed as but a temporary effusion of that spirit. They were certain that the Church would move down the new path they were so vigorously blazing. When the Church didn’t keep up, they saw it as proof that she was stifling the spirit of the Council. Never has there been so circular an argument.

Notice that I spell this favorite word “spirit” with a lower-case “s”. These neo-Modernists or Secularists (call them what you will) spoke of this spirit as if its first letter were capitalized and its first name was “Holy”. It was indeed a damned peculiar business, and here I am using the word “damned” advisedly.

But there were also some significantly misguided reactions to the Council on the other side, reactions caused only partially by the excesses and errors of the spiritists. Thus some champions of Catholic tradition also began to read certain conciliar texts as if they were breaks from Tradition when, in fact, there was never any need to do so. Having intellectual difficulty reconciling these (relatively few) texts, they fell back on various implausible arguments to the effect that there was so little spirit of any kind at the Council that its decrees and constitutions did not have to be taken seriously—a position emphatically denied by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Some have even bemoaned the “vague” language of the conciliar documents, which are actually generally quite clear and even inspiring, simply because that language contrasts with many earlier councils which had identified long series of formal propositions to be condemned. They seemed not to recognize that denouncing what is not true does not take one very far. For example, if the Magisterium condemns the statement that “the Church must conform herself with the modern world”, this anathema teaches us almost nothing about which attitudes, ideas and approaches to contemporary problems the Church may legitimately use, and which she may not. A positive exposition of how the Church ought to engage contemporary culture is far more enlightening—and far more difficult.

Vatican II offered such a positive exposition, and as a result struck a significant blow against the growing tendency of Catholics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to live their Faith prescriptively (obeying rules and fulfilling duties) rather than evangelistically (living the Gospel out of gratitude and love). The proof that this was a huge tendency, if any proof is necessary, can be found in what happened to Catholic life after the rules were relaxed, and after the consequences of breaking them were de-emphasized. While we are still struggling with the resulting chaos, it is also true that the slowly growing number of Catholics today who fully adhere to Church teaching do not live rightly because of rules. No, they live rightly because they love God and understand that the Catholic Church is the key to His Presence in the world.

As we examine the documents of the Second Vatican Council, we shall see that the text of the Council—and therefore its Spirit—almost invariably tends toward this sort of deep and genuine renewal. And in discovering this renewal, we will at last learn what the Council was all about.

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Next in series: The English Editions of the Documents of Vatican II