Searching for the keys to unlock Vatican II

To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II
George Weigel
Basic Books
Oct. 2022
368 pages
ISBN: 978-0465094318

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If one were to ask what is the principle task of the post-conciliar Church of the twenty-first century, I suppose few would suggest it would be to go back and study the documents of Vatican II. I suppose many of those documents have been completely forgotten and are rarely dusted off. And yet this is precisely what George Weigel suggests. The Church, he says, “must learn what the Second Vatican Council actually taught, by reading its texts in their proper sequence and interrelationship, using the keys provided by John Paul II and Benedict XVI.” And if one were to do this, Weigel’s To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II would make an excellent guide.

In the first part of this work Weigel looks at the background to the Council, observing that some crisis or other must have occasioned the Council since “ecumenical councils are responses to profound threats to the Church’s unity or its very life….” The crisis, in the words of John Henry Newman, was that the world was confronted by “a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it” – a crisis in belief which had its seeds at the very beginnings of the Modern period in European culture and by the mid-twentieth century and after two world wars, had finally lead to the demise of Christendom. In its place there was simply “religious and spiritual boredom”. And, according to Father Joseph Ratzinger writing in 1958, the epithet “pagan” was no longer the preserve of those yet to become Christians, but now belonged to “a Church of pagans who still call themselves Christians”.

Weigel looks at the century leading up the Second Vatican Council, and the work of the great theologians of the nineteenth century like Möhler, Rosmini, Scheeben, and most especially Newman who sowed the seeds of the Council and the “Leonine Revolution” – Pope Leo XIII’s ground-breaking programme to bring the Church the face the challenges of an increasingly hostile culture. The Modernist crisis of the first years of the twentieth century perhaps exacerbated the problem by hardening the sense in Rome that the only trustworthy theology was a rigid form of Neo-Scholasticism. The Church had grown more and more centralised on the Pope and autocratic under the “peremptory Roman Curia”. Despite this, the middle decades of the century saw a flowering of great pre-conciliar thought of theologians such as Balthasar, de Lubac and Chenu, neo-Thomists like Maritain and Gilson, and The Liturgical Movement and thinkers such as Guéranger, Guardini and Ratzinger. There was a growing awareness of the need for far-reaching reforms in the Church, of her liturgy but also of her own self-understanding.

While the notion of convening a short Council to simply tie up the loose ends from the unfinished work of Vatican I had been mooted during the previous decades, when the Council was actually announced in 1959 it had much more ambitious scope for it was, in the words of Pope John XXIII, “an invitation to spiritual renewal for the Church and the world” – “a new Pentecost”. The young Council Father Bishop Karol Wojtyla saw that the Church had to propose a Christ-centred humanism to confront the materialistic forces that dominated the modern world. It was also in his view an opportunity to remind lay Catholics that their role in the Church was something much greater than the mere passive reception of the pastoral ministrations of the clergy.

In the second section of the book Weigel gives a very useful analysis of the sixteen documents of the Council; a chapter each for each of the four constitutions of the Council, a chapter on the eight declarations and decrees dealing with states of life in the Church, and a final chapter on the one declaration and two decrees concerning the Church’s relationship with other religious bodies. By way of introduction Weigel points out that the Second Vatican Council was historically unprecedented for its size (2,800 bishops attended) and diversity (they came from 116 different countries), not to mention the host of observers and theological advisers (periti) in attendance. What was going to prove more problematic in time was the intense media interest in the goings on of the Council – problematic because the media, especially the Anglophone media, from early on reduced the Council to a punch up between liberals and conservatives. Such an overly simplistic analysis was doomed to be deficient.

Weigel returns to Pope John XXIII’s own explanations for the Council which clearly went much deeper than the socio-political interpretation given it by the media; he clarified that, far from being a socio-political event, the Council was an event in the realm of the spirit: “The purpose of the Council is, therefore, evangelisation.”

Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, is the first Conciliar document analysed by Weigel. Far from seeking to resolve purely technical issues regarding the nature of divine revelation, Dei Verbum goes much deeper, clarifying that God’s revelation is a self-revelation and an invitation to man to intimate friendship. This goes far beyond the narrower conception of revelation as the impersonal revealing of a series of facts or propositions about God to be believed with faith. Such revelation is both conserved and served by the magisterium of the Church. The document also clarified the nature of sacred Scripture, putting “the Bible at the heart of Catholicism’s evangelisation and catechesis, and declared Scripture to be ‘the very soul of … theology’.” For Weigel Dei Verbum “emerges as the fundamental achievement of Vatican II: the clarifying lens through which the rest of the Council’s texts should be read.”

Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, drawing on the renewed ecclesiology of key theologians of the preceding century, sought to challenge the defensive and overly-institutional self-understanding the Church had fallen into, especially in its reaction to the trauma of the Reformation. The role of the laity in the sanctification of the world on the basis of “their baptismal incorporation in the Mystical Body of Christ, not by delegation from the Church’s ordained leadership” was central to this renewed ecclesiology.

Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, is not a stand-alone document but is intrinsically linked to the overall intention of the Council to revivify the faith and evangelisation. Such revivification however must be nourished by right worship, and worship is not something the Church occasionally does, rather “The Church’s worship is the fullest expression of what the Church is.” Through it the Council confirmed the direction which had been taken by the Liturgical Movement during the previous decades, and even centuries: to recover the “full, conscious, and active” role of the laity in the liturgy as a corrective to the spectator model of engagement with liturgy.

Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, proposes a Christian anthropology in the face of the social developments of the modern world, memorably affirming that man is only “revealed to himself” in Christ, and that “man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself” to others. The document did not envisage the profound cultural crisis which was about to engulf the world and in this way has been criticised as suffering from an excessive, naive optimism.

Weigel goes on to examine the remaining documents of the Council with his usual extraordinary lucidity and brevity. He gives particular importance to the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae as its move away from integralism occasioned the Lefebrvist schism a little over twenty years later. The document affirms the individual’s fundamental right to religious freedom in the face of State coercion. At the same time the Church must ensure its own freedom from being coopted as an instrument of State control over civil society.

He then goes on to look at the eight conciliar documents concerned with specific roles or states of life in the Church (such as priesthood, consecrated life, laity) followed by the three documents concerned with the Council’s teaching on the Eastern Catholic Churches, on Ecumenism and non-Christian religions.

In the final section Weigel discusses, as we might well expect, the question of what happened after the Council. How is it that things went apparently so wrong in the subsequent years, and in Jacques Maritain’s words, the Church appeared to be “kneeling before the world.” For Weigel the problem was that Vatican II was the “Council without keys” built-in in the form of defined doctrines, anathemas, canons or the like. A degree of ambiguity was made inevitable by the fact that it was from the outset a pastoral council. At the same time the Council coincided with the almost unprecedented social upheaval of the 1960s which also profoundly shook the Church.

However the keys for interpreting the Council did eventually arrive, initially in Pope Paul VI’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, but then more authoritatively in the genius of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Both these Popes, in particular through their encyclicals, provided the keys to correct interpretation of much disputed teachings of the Council, and corrected the fallacious “hermeneutic of rupture” of both progressives and radical traditionalists; the former lauding and the latter lamenting the same perceived ditching of the pre-conciliar world. But both groups, according to Weigel, “understood neither the Church nor the Council”. The former were “content to live in a religious ghetto of its own construction” while the latter uncritically embraced modernity.

Weigel’s is right to recommend that the conciliar documents be read in the light of the keys provided by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Certainly this book brings to life the rationale and the drama in their drafting in the first place, and serves to throw great clarity on so much of the confusion that even a half century later swirls around discussion of the Council.