Living Vatican Ii

[cmotherofpirl]

After the Council: Living Vatican II
By George Sim Johnston

In that moral masterpiece, Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II begins with
the Gospel episode of the rich young man before Christ, and it’s not a bad
place to start a discussion of the Catholic Church since Vatican II. It is
easy to think of this encounter as a parable, but it really happened and
that well-to-do young man is somewhere right now. In the Gospel story, he’s
a devout Israelite who, as John Paul puts it, has grown up “in the shadow of
the Law.” He has faithfully followed its precepts. But something is missing,
and he asks Christ what it might be. Christ’s answer—“Come, follow me”—is
completely unexpected. It goes well beyond the young man’s idea of
“religion,” and so he walks away sad and perplexed.

The rich young man is not unlike a pre–Vatican II Catholic in the affluent
West. He has spent his life (mostly) following the rules and understands
“eternal life” as an extrinsic reward for having done so. And yet despite
the double consolation of economic security and religious correctness, it
occurs to him that something more is needed. Christ tells him to keep the
commandments. The young man replies, “I have kept all these. What do I still
lack?” At this point, like a good pre–Vatican II Catholic, he’s probably
expecting to be told to perform extra devotion: Go and recite the seven
penitential Psalms. Or an extra discipline: Don’t eat meat on Fridays.

Instead, Christ offers him precisely the challenge that Vatican II made to
the Catholic world. It is a challenge both personal and deeply supernatural.
The council was a call to Catholics to break from their harness of legalism
and externalism. To stop compartmentalizing their religion and risk a
transformation in grace. To pass from a merely objective faith—something you
have—to one fully lived. It suggested that the more fruitful line of
questioning is not, What is prohibited? or, What is required? but rather,
What sort of person am I to be? And it proposed the Person of Christ as the
answer. Only after absorbing this truth can we fully comprehend why it is we
follow His commandments, which otherwise can be a joyless burden.

The Second Vatican Council was a call to full spiritual maturity. It was
time to take off the training wheels—to stop living “in the shadow of the
Law”—and take our vocations as Christians seriously. The pre–Vatican II
Church “worked” marvelously well, which is why there are those who are
nostalgic, but it wasn’t spiritually creative. The council offered the
difference between a minimalist, rules-oriented Catholicism and full
discipleship, especially for the laity. In its focus on the human person,
rather than on dogmatic truths about the divine order, it reminded us that
we’re obliged to become the person God wants us to be and that this isn’t a
limitation of our freedom—as the rich young man supposes—but its guarantee.

Once we had achieved that freedom through the call to holiness, we could go
out and change the world. This has been the program of John Paul’s
pontificate. But the pope has faced serious obstacles within the Church in
implementing the council. The problem has been summed up by Joseph Cardinal
Ratzinger: “What devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was
not the Council but the refusal to accept it.” In fact, it’s striking how
ill-equipped the Church—clergy and laity included—was to receive the
teachings of the council (and, for that matter, Humanae Vitae a few years
later). The philosophical richness and originality of the documents were
missed entirely. Instead of spiritual renewal and a new evangelization, what
we got was a fight between “conservatives” and “liberals,” both stuck in
previous categories of Church thinking.

It is safe to say that most of the bishops who attended the council had
little idea how to implement it. That generation of American bishops had
many strengths, but an appreciation of Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento, and
the theological vision behind it, was not among them. They returned to
business as usual, and the council’s teachings became a dead letter. In one
chancery (I am told) a few months after the council ended, the archbishop
was sitting with his retinue, and a monsignor spoke up: “Shouldn’t we do
something about the council?” To which the archbishop shot back, “You do
something about the council.”

It was this failure of the Church’s leaders to explain the council that
allowed it to be so easily hijacked by progressives. Unfortunately, the
story doesn’t end there. Powerful mid-century prelates like Francis Cardinal
Spellman of New York and James Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles, presiding
as they did over an American Church that was a great “success story,” didn’t
appreciate a deeper problem that had been working through the Church for
decades and was about to turn it upside down.

That problem was described by the great French Thomist Jacques Maritain who,
in The Peasant of the Garonne (1966), asked why so many priests and
religious took such a bad turn even before the council ended. The
explanation, according to Maritain, was a malaise that had been building for
half a century. In the preconciliar Church there had been a kind of
“practical Manichaeism,” which involved “purely moralistic prohibitions,
injunctions to flight, habits of fear, disciplines of denial in which love
had no part, where science was held the enemy of religion...the almost
exclusive recourse to disciplinary measures, the spiritual impoverishment of
the laity, who thought the call to the perfection of charity is the
exclusive concern of monks.... [A]ll this was going to build up, in the
unconscious of a great many Christians, clerics and laymen, an enormous
weight of frustration, disillusionment, repressed doubts, resentment,
bitterness, healthy desires sacrificed....”

“Then,” Maritain continues, “comes the aggiornamento. Why be astonished that
at the very announcement of a Council...the enormous unconscious weight
which I have just mentioned bursts into the open in a kind of explosion that
does no honor to human intelligence?” Romano Guardini similarly noticed in
German theology professors decades before the council a Catholicism that was
merely liberalism kept in check by a reluctant obedience to dogma. In the
very heart of many religious orders and theology faculties, the Faith was
experienced as a fetter, an imposed burden, a set of rules. Do you remember
the “bad” nun in the movie The Song of Bernadette? It would have been
impossible to remain in this state, council or no council. A crisis was
inevitable, and perhaps not entirely regrettable. If the journals of the
late Alexander Schmemann, a gifted Russian Orthodox priest and theologian,
are any guide, one problem with modern Eastern Orthodoxy has been the lack
of a crisis, resulting in an increasingly ossified, ahistorical religiosity
that has no idea how to engage the modern world.

Traditionalist Catholics who blame all the Church’s recent problems on
Vatican II should ponder a few questions: If the Church was in such good
shape before the council, why did things fall apart so rapidly in the 1960s?
How do you account for the fact that the rebellion was the work of bishops,
theologians, and priests who came out of the Tridentine system? Had all
those priests and nuns who suddenly wanted to be laicized received adequate
formation under the old system? Why was there so much dissatisfaction? It
won’t do simply to rattle off statistics about the decline of the Church
since the council. There’s no question that there were good and holy
Catholics in the old days—even some saints—and that since the council we
have lost much that is good. But there were also problems waiting to erupt.
Might not the Magisterium have been correct in addressing them in the
council’s documents?

Called by the council to full spiritual adulthood, a significant number of
priests and religious instead broke out in adolescent rebellion, a discharge
of decades of narrow, rules-based formation and institutional frustration.
It seemed that the preconciliar Church had produced legions of clerics who
were incapable of intelligently and prayerfully studying the council’s
documents. And their bishops certainly weren’t going to insist. Imagine
Father Burner in J. F. Powers’s devastating short story “The Prince of
Darkness” (1947) picking up Gaudium et Spes; he would quickly fix himself a
drink and turn on the television.

The late philosopher David Stove, an acute diagnostician of the modern age,
writes about how what passes for much of modern philosophy is no more than
an acting out of a horror of all things Victorian. This syndrome has its
counterpart in the modern Catholic Church. Among Catholics of a certain age,
there is a dread of anything smacking of preconciliar Catholicism. Latin,
Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, incense, gothic and baroque
architecture, dogmatic definitions—all evoke a reaction well-described by
Stove: “A sensation of darkness, stillness, enclosure, and, above all, of
weight or pressure....” And the impulse of these progressive Catholics is to
do exactly what their counterparts have done in the secular culture: Knock
down everything they find left standing from the old days.

As a result, the reception of the council by “liberals” amounted to no more
than the commandeering of a few phrases—such as “people of God” and “signs
of the times”—out of context. It was time to break the fetters. A loud “Non
serviam!” erupted within the Church, along with a surrender to the secular
world, which itself was going through a massive identity crisis. These
dissidents conjured away the council’s demand for inner reform and apostolic
zeal, substituting in its place a generic Christianity that is
indistinguishable from bourgeois liberalism’s understanding of the common
decencies.

As for the Catholic laity: Do not underestimate the role of rising affluence
in the troubles since the council. The post-conciliar mischief was initiated
by disaffected clergy, but during these years, an increasingly wealthy and
assimilated laity was perfectly happy to follow the path of least resistance
marked by dissident theologians. In 1937, the Protestant thinker H. Richard
Niebuhr drew attention to a soft-core spirituality among Americans: “A God
without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment
through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Was it likely that
Catholics would be immune once they emerged from the ethnic ghetto, moved to
the suburbs, and joined the mainstream? The Book of Revelation’s warnings to
the Christians at Laodicea—who “say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I
need nothing...’”—no doubt find application in every age but have particular
relevance for the contemporary Catholic who has made his comfort zone the
ninth Beatitude.

It is easy to look at the Church today and be pessimistic. There’s an
easygoing spirituality among the laity, disaffection and heterodoxy among
the clergy, an episcopate that veers between laxity and damage control, and,
of course, the scandals. Looked at in a certain way, post–Vatican II
Catholicism would all seem a downward spiral, a crisis from which there’s no
obvious exit. But any such pessimism is misplaced. First, as someone once
said, the Church isn’t a museum of saints but a hospital for sinners. This
includes all of us. Human failure will always be generously spread among the
faithful. Christ warned about this explicitly. It isn’t clear that the
Church today is any worse off than it was in 500 or 1500. In fact, there’s
probably now a higher proportion of good bishops, dedicated priests, and
devout laity.

But history has even more important lessons. Christopher Dawson once
identified six great periods of Church history, and each one begins with a
crisis. Nearly all of the 21 ecumenical councils have upset the Church’s
equilibrium. The aftermaths of Nicea and Chalcedon shook the Church to its
foundations in a way that makes recent decades look like a tea party. That
most of the Church didn’t immediately “get” the teachings of Vatican II also
has ample precedent. The same happened after the Council of Trent, whose
decrees were ignored in France for almost a century. St. Augustine reminds
us that the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church is slow, often
imperceptible, but without interruption.

And just as the Council of Trent was implemented—in fact, rescued—by a few
great popes, especially St. Pius V, we now have in the pontificate of John
Paul II the council’s definitive interpretation. One reason for Wojtyla’s
election in 1978 was the conclave’s awareness of his vigorous promotion of
the council’s decrees in the Archdiocese of Kraków. Even before the council
ended, Bishop Wojtyla told his flock, “I want to awaken the Archdiocese of
Kraków to the true meaning of the Council, so that we may bring it into our
lives.” Such words were not heard on this side of the Atlantic. Catholic
dissenters who complain that this pope has “betrayed” the council forget
that John Paul was an enthusiastic participant in all four sessions,
strongly aligning with the “progressives” against the ecclesial bureaucrats
who wanted simply to reiterate doctrine in the accepted neo-scholastic
format. And he hasn’t changed at all.

The most extraordinary—and providential—fact of recent Church history is the
alignment of Karol Wojtyla and Vatican II. From the very beginning, when he
was a philology student in the late 1930s, Wojtyla had been pursuing a
philosophical project that dovetailed remarkably with the concerns of the
council. He was ready for Vatican II in a way that few other bishops were:
He put a strong mark on the council’s three most important documents—Lumen
Gentium, Dignitatis Humanae, and Gaudium et Spes. And as pope he has given
us a gloss on the council, starting with those astonishing 130 Wednesday
audiences on the “theology of the body,” whose depth and originality exceed
anything that has come out of the papacy since Leo XIII, or perhaps even St.
Gregory the Great.

This pope has taken the documents of Vatican II for what they are: marching
orders for the new millennium. And he has expanded their richness and
application. Whoever the next pope may be, he won’t have to do much writing.
The Church’s middle management has been slow to absorb John Paul’s
writings—in many chanceries and seminaries they remain, in Mary Ann
Glendon’s phrase, “unopened letters”—but this won’t be determinative. They
have touched enough intelligent Catholics, especially among the laity, to
change the Church in the long run. This is how the Holy Spirit works. Two
thousand years have taught us the Church’s remarkable recuperative powers.
And whether it was the sixth or the 16th century, spiritual renewal has
always been a matter of grassroots movements inspired by and working with
the papacy. The difference now is that whereas for Gregory the Great and
Pius V the agents of evangelization were monks or Jesuits, for John Paul II
it will be the laity.

The arsenal for this renewal will be the documents of Vatican II and the
writings of this pope, which form a perfect continuum. Both are a call to
personal conversion—to a maturity in self-giving—that goes far beyond simply
obeying laws and commandments. The question for each orthodox Catholic is
whether to take up the Magisterium’s challenge or be content with the
“fundamental option” of the rich young man, who is more comfortable with a
religion based on rules than on self-donation. Of course, the challenge is
hardly new. Sts. Paul and Augustine taught that the fruit of Christian
conversion is a new freedom wherein the rules (important as they are) hardly
matter. This is the only possible meaning of Augustine’s “Love God and do
what you will.” But this was not the message of Tridentine Catholicism, and
in fact, not since Augustine has there been so much emphasis in sound
Catholic theology on personal freedom.

The new Christian humanism proposed by the council and John Paul II is the
only possible solution to the crisis within the Church. The modern world
wants “freedom.” The rebels within the Church want “freedom.” Complaints
about the Church are mainly about its moral teachings, which are perceived
as putting a lid on everyone’s freedom. This problem isn’t going to be
solved by a further insistence on the rules, but rather by a call to
holiness and a positive vision of the human person and the uses of his
freedom.

This is what the pontificate of John Paul II has been all about. Those who
view him as an authoritarian who keeps tightening the screws are not paying
attention. This papacy is all about freedom. But the pope insists that
authentic freedom is based on the truth about the human person; otherwise,
it will be a counterfeit and make us unhappy. Building on the council, he
has proposed a sweeping vision of the human person that invites us into
depths barely touched by the old scholastic casuistry. Right now, those in
the Church who are shaping its future are busy unpacking these teachings.

John Paul’s writings basically try to answer the question, What is man?
Having lived under the two worst totalitarianisms that the 20th century had
to offer, he’s convinced that the principal philosophical error of modern
times is a misreading of the human person. Today, either man is a thing—a
chemical accident, a mere collation of atoms—or he’s a Cartesian ghost
inhabiting a machine. The first reading leads straight to the concentration
camps and abortion mills. If man is no more than disposable biological
matter, then disposable biological matter he will be. The second reading,
which is that of dissenters from the Church’s sexual teachings, treats the
body as an extrinsic object that can be manipulated for whatever purpose.
Put another way: It erroneously supposes that what we do with our bodies has
little to do with who we are. This led to the sexual revolution.

The pope answers the Darwinian proposal of man as a “thing” by insisting on
our mystery and transcendence. Human creativity—everything from the Sistine
Chapel to the infield fly rule—cannot be a mere epiphenomenon of matter. Nor
can human love. We are created in the image of a Trinitarian God, three
persons in the act of eternal, mutual self-giving. We have the “law of gift”
inscribed in our being. There are two sentences from Gaudium et Spes that
John Paul quotes repeatedly; they are the leitmotiv of his pontificate.
First: Man “can fully find his true self only in the sincere gift of self.”
In other words, contrary to our hedonist culture’s notions of happiness, we
find our humanity more in self-giving than self-assertion, in relationship
rather than self-sufficiency. And the second is like it: “Christ the new
Adam...fully reveals man to himself.” The truth about ourselves is
ultimately not a proposition but a Person, who Himself is defined by total
self-donation.

As for the second modern error about man—the Cartesian ghost in the
machine—the pope’s answer is to be found in his voluminous writings about
marriage and sexuality. These writings are extraordinarily important. They
are the best response to the modern world’s principal objection to the
Catholic Church. As early as 1926, G. K. Chesterton predicted that the “next
great heresy” would be an attack on sexual morality, and in recent decades
every institution has surrendered except the Church. The Church needs to
explain her teachings about sex to the world—and also to herself, since it’s
safe to say that three-quarters of American Catholics don’t accept them.
This should be the first area of the Church’s self-evangelization, and it is
going to be mainly the work of the laity.

First, what’s the position of dissenting theologians regarding sex? They
want to baptize the sexual morality of the post-Kinsey culture. How do they
get there? By arguing the primacy of conscience (the autonomous self as a
little god, decreeing right and wrong); by divorcing personhood from the
body (a Cartesian anthropology that posits a free-floating “I” that has
nothing to do with one’s concrete acts); and by consulting “experience”
rather than nature (which in practice allows the three concupiscences to run
on their own program).

The pope’s responses to the dissenters, and to the culture in general, are
deep and convincing. First, he argues that the purpose of a conscience isn’t
to manufacture the truth but to locate it. Truth is something we discover
rather than invent. And once we do find a truth, there isn’t merely an
obedient and grudging application, but rather a creative response that
translates it into positive virtues. Second, the pope vigorously rejects the
idea of man as a vaporous “subject” that happens to have a body. We are our
bodies, and we are what we do with our bodies. And when it comes to sex, our
body has a language, a nuptial meaning that expresses the “law of gift”
written at the core of our being. The pope insists that sex is such a deep
and wonderful thing that when you use it improperly inside or outside
marriage, making your partner an object, a vehicle of pleasure, the result
will be the “culture of death” that’s all around us.

In fact, if Catholic dissenters were serious about consulting “experience,”
they would look honestly at the results of the sexual revolution. What they
would see are the results of a denial of nature, of the “truth” about our
sexuality. The question finally is whether we create ourselves on our own or
receive our nature as gift. Adam and Eve chose the first option; their sin
was not about an inordinate love of apples but about freeing themselves from
the “givens” God put in their nature. It is an impulse shared by heterodox
theologians. But we’ve discovered—as did our first parents—that this
“liberation” is a false freedom. The pope argues that the human person is
truly free only when he acts on truths that are received and not invented.
The perfection of freedom doesn’t consist in radical self-creation but in
the choice to live in accord with our nature.

One of the hopeful signs in the Church today is that energized laity like
Christopher West, Janet Smith, Mary Beth Bonacci, John Haas, and others are
out there explaining to audiences the beauty of the pope’s “theology of the
body.” There already is some recognition among twenty-something Catholics
that the baby boomers didn’t exactly solve the mystery of sex and that it
must mean something more than an exchange of pleasure between consenting
adults. The pope has the answer: It is an exchange of persons, and its
ramifications are never entirely private. The health of the entire culture
depends on it. Which is why the pope has spent so much intellectual energy
explaining sex to a culture trying to evacuate it of its mystery and
transcendence.

But this pontificate is about much more than sex and marriage. It is a
clarion call to evangelize the culture, which John Paul II insists is what
really drives history. Catholics have to stop being preoccupied with
intra-Church issues and recover a sense of having a message for the world.
For centuries—maybe since the Treaty of Westphalia—the Faith has been
privatized, so that many Catholics think it’s mainly something you carry
around inside your head. Vatican II proposed evangelization as the deepest
identity of the Church, but it’s going to require some digging to recover
this lost truth.

We need a great relearning guided by the true “spirit” of Vatican II. The
Church is going to have to rebuild itself from the bottom up by personal
decisions made by Catholics inspired by the rich teachings of the
Magisterium. The three most important realities in the Church today are a
great teaching pontificate, the lay initiatives at the grass roots, and the
new religious orders whose demographics are the reverse of the older ones.
History tells us that this is more than enough for a new springtime of
faith.

But for the renewal to gain momentum, there’s one change demanded by the
council that has yet to happen: the retirement of the old clericalism, the
idea that priests and nuns constitute the “real” Church. Most laity still
have the odd notion that they must wait for a signal from the bishop or
local pastor to do anything. The council taught that if you have the Faith,
you spread it. John Paul’s understanding of this point may come from his
experience in Poland, where visible, clerical-mandated lay associations were
virtually impossible under the Communist authorities; individual Catholics
had to show initiative and not wait for clerical permission to live their
Christian vocation.

Finally, a Catholic restoration will depend on individuals who answer the
call to holiness. Cardinal Ratzinger, who has been more sober than John Paul
in his assessment of the aftermath of the council, knows his Church history
well enough to sense that the legacy of an ecumenical council is always at
risk: “Whether or not the Council becomes a positive force in the history of
the Church depends only indirectly on texts and organizations; the crucial
question is whether there are individuals—saints—who, by their personal
willingness, which cannot be forced, are ready to effect something new and
living.... [It] depends on those who will transform its words into the life
of the Church.”

This generation of Catholics has been given much by the Magisterium. Much
should be asked of it.

George Sim Johnston is a member of the Crisis executive board and author of
Did Darwin Get It Right? (Our Sunday

[MagiDragon]

i intended to avoid postings on new topics for a while, but this is far too excellent for me to remain quiet on it. unfortunately words will not come that adequately sum my feelings for this summary of recent Church history.

*copies and saves onto computer*

Peace,
Joe

[MorphRC]

Wow Long Article, Ill add this to my favs.