Reclaiming Key Terms: The Spirit of Vatican II, a Pastoral Council

Since we are approaching the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council I have been reading several things on the Council and what happened there. One of these is the 900 page Journal of Yves Congar. (It is an amazing read for its frankness.) Last night I read an article about a Church historian who said he believed there would be a schism in the Roman Catholic Church. In general he acknowledged that such things are healthy so this was not really a doom and gloom piece. There is no doubt that the Church as a whole is in crisis, and that is true in Europe, the US and South America as well as Australia. One of the specific problems Diarmaid MacColluch brought up was the following: [[ Catholicism faces a division over attempts by popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI to "rewrite the story of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council by portraying it as a "minor adjustment" in church governance, rather than as a "radical move to change the way authority is expressed.]]

I found that statement a remarkable summary of what has come to be the struggle over the interpretation of the Council. Most importantly it occurred to me that the phrase "radical move to change the way authority is expressed" is a pretty good summary of part of what is sometimes called "the Spirit of Vatican II." And as I thought about that I realized that I have become somewhat reticent to speak of "the Spirit of Vatican II" because of all the complaints about the vagueness of the term. Most criticisms of Vatican II, most statements of resistance to it I have read or heard usually start with objections to "the Spirit of Vatican II" as though that phrase never referred to anything real and as though we can truly understand the documents themselves apart from that Spirit which drove their composition and redaction; some have tended to forget that this term refers to the reality which mainly animated the Council itself and was the inspiration for John XXIII's calling the Council at all.

The related word then, the term which defines the Spirit of Vatican II and gives shape to all it meant to accomplish is "pastoral." It is no surprise then that this term is the second one which is usually demeaned by critics of Vatican II and those who would like to reduce our reading of the Council to the documents themselves divorced from their history and the struggle it took to compose and promulgate them. In other words the Spirit of Vatican II was the Spirit of the pastoral Church, the Church which trusts the power of the Gospel entrusted to her; it is the Spirit which defines how authority is to be expressed and how the Church is to teach and be Christ for a needy world. In calling for a PASTORAL council John XXIII clearly opted for a different way of expressing authority. It was the HUGE struggle throughout the council --- getting documents that were truly pastoral in tone and approach. The individual documents were important but at least as important was the tone and tenor John XXIII wanted the Church to assume in its teaching.

And yet, right from the beginning of the Council's history of reception these two terms were demeaned and ridiculed. We've all heard innumerable times, "Oh, it was just a pastoral council" and the implication was that it was not authoritative, not a solemn teaching of the ordinary universal Magisterium. Sometimes this was explicitly claimed. Questions were raised during the Council --- and resolved there as well. Yet, even today you will find people, usually traditionalists, who play Trent, a dogmatic council, off against Vatican II, a "merely" pastoral Council. At the same time these same folks tended to ridicule what was done in "the Spirit of Vatican II" because these things meant being pastoral, exercising authority in the way Jesus himself did; they were done --- dare I say it --- in ways which were sensitive to and respectful of individual truth as well as objective truth and so, represented a sometimes more feminine, nurturing way of approaching reality. And you know, all of this ridicule, scoffing, and denigration of central hermeneutical keys had an affect!

I would ask anyone reading this if you too have become more reticent to speak of the Spirit of Vatican II in the face of it all. How about becoming more hesitant to boldly proclaim that a PASTORAL Council is more demanding than and just as authoritative in what it teaches as one which is concerned with making dogmatic "de fide" statements? After all, together these two terms define a Council which called the Church to reform herself, to be converted in every way into a community of faith in Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit. She was called not only to teach, but to teach CREDIBLY and with the authority of authentic Christians --- something John XXIII and the majority of Bishops at the Council understood meant pastorally.

So MacCulloch's comment really struck me. I came to see that as long as we are left without a sense of the SPIRIT of VII we will be missing what we are meant to proclaim --- and that is a radical move to change the way authority is exercised/expressed. Unless we reclaim our insistence that this was a demanding pastoral Council which, precisely in this way, provides us with the keys to reading and implementing the documents of the Council we will continue to lose the ability to move forward with that task. All too often today we are seeing the way authority is expressed by an unconverted, yet-unreformed hierarchy, a hierarchy which has defined the process of reading and implementing the documents of the Council by effectively ruling certain words out of the conversation. Bearing this in mind, I think my own hesitancy is cured. With what the NT calls parrhesia, I think I will speak boldly of the Spirit of Vatican II; I will try to make clear what it really means to call this Council a pastoral Council --- that is, a Council where the Church, speaking with the authority of Christ, calls herself --- her entire self --- to conversion and then reaches out to the world she is meant to pastor. I sincerely believe this is a key to reclaiming the Council and making sure the work of the Holy Spirit continues.