The joys and the hopes,
the griefs and the anxieties of
people of this age,
especially those who are poor or in
any way afflicted,
these are the joys and hopes,
the griefs and anxieties of the
followers of Christ.
Gaudium
et Spes
I’ve been doing so much reading about the Second Vatican
Council these days, partly because there is so much interest around it this
year as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of its convening. I just
finished a wonderful book called “What Happened at Vatican II” by John
O’Malley, that my confrere Fr Bruno recommended, that for me read like a action
novel! I know that a lot of things have been excused, and sometimes wrongly, in
a stretching of this nebulous “spirit of Vatican II,” and yet I came away from
that book thinking that there really was a spirit to it.
The Roman Catholic church doesn’t like to think of itself as
ever changing, especially when it comes to dogma and doctrine, so instead three
different words were used––aggiornamento,
development, and resourcement.
That first word in Italian means “updating.” This is what the saintly Pope John
XXIII wanted for the church, and updating, to open the windows and let the
Sprit blow some fresh air in, especially after 500 years of a very solid post-Reformation
counter-Reformation stance, protecting against all enemies, especially
theological ones. Where the “development” came in was, for example, not 100
years earlier popes were condemning ecumenical dialogue, religious freedom and
what they called under the large banner of “modernism,” which included things
like new academic disciplines directed at Scripture as well as any talk of
evolution. All of those by 1965 were embraced and encouraged, and many of the
theologians who were silenced in the years before––Yves Congar, John Courtney
Murray, Teilhard de Chardin––wound up having great influence on the final
documents of the council. That was quite a development, and it left a small but
vocal minority very unhappy, leading some even to go into schism, as in the
case of Archbishop Marcel Lefevre. The resourcement, on the other hand, is a French word that basically
meant skipping back, sometimes up 1,500 years, and returning to the sources,
back to the apostolic times and the Patristic era, the earliest era of church
teachings, and for religions orders and congregations it meant going back to
the original inspiration of their founders and recovering their original
charism, intent and hopefully fervor as well. That was all part of the spirit
of Vatican II––updating, developing, and going back to the sources.
But there was something more, of which these three were just
manifestations. Whereas the stance of the church at least for 500 years had
been to circle the wagons and condemn anything that we didn’t agree with, there
were no condemnations issued out of the Second Vatican Council. Instead, an
unheard of theme got brought up over and over again––“dialogue with the world.”
So much so that the Council fathers issued a document that was addressed not
just to the church, but to the world! Gaudium et Spes––and it begins with those marvelous words:
The joys and the hopes, the griefs
and the anxieties of people of this age,
especially those who are poor or in
any way afflicted,
these are the joys and hopes,
the griefs and anxieties of the
followers of Christ.
Indeed, nothing genuinely human
fails to raise an echo in their hearts.
For theirs is a community composed
of human beings.
United in Christ, they are led by
the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father
and they have welcomed the news of
salvation which is meant for everyone.
That is why this community realizes
that it is truly linked with humankind and its history by the deepest of bonds.
Hence this Council, now addresses
itself without hesitation,
not only to the children of the
Church
but to the whole of humanity!
This was the spirit of Vatican II: dialogue with the
world––not antagonism against the world––not circling the wagons and protecting
ourselves against the world––dialogue with the world. As a matter of fact in
his opening address to the second session of the Vatican Council Pope Paul VI
called on the church to change its attitude toward the modern world, in these
words I have reflected on countless times:
NOT TO CONQUER BUT TO
SERVE
NOT TO DESPISE BUT TO
APPRECIATE
NOT TO CONDEMN BUT TO
COMFORT
O’Malley adds this list, that the vision of Catholicism was
moving
…from laws to ideals, from
definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience,
from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to
integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from
hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust,
from static to ongoing, from passive acceptance to active engagement, from fault-finding
to appreciation, from prescriptive to principled, from behavior modification to
inner appropriation.
We heard these wonderful words about Jesus in the gospel
today, that he was move with pity for the crowd because they were like sheep
without a shepherd. One might think that they
are only addressed to those who officially minister in the church. But that’s
not how I understand it. By our Baptism we all share in this triple vocation of
Christ who was prophet, priest and king––and king as Vatican II was at pains to
define it––king as servant. It is notable that the documents of Vatican II
never refer to the papacy as a monarchy; the pope too is simply the “servant of
the servants of God.” We are supposed to “rule” the world by being its servant.
Why? Because they are like sheep without a shepherd, Christ wants to be their
shepherd, and we are the body of Christ.
We have no idea what will face us in the future––but the
signs of the times show, and some great thinkers among us believe that, us that
it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could be heading toward some
great ecological disaster, of worldwide financial collapse, or some horrible
nuclear disaster––not to mention random acts of terrorism or horrendous
senseless violence like we had this past week in Colorado. We are going to need
each other, to be shepherds to each other. But even more, the world––which God
loves so much––is going to need us as its shepherds: not to conquer it but to
serve it; not to despise it, but to appreciate it; not to condemn it but,
especially, to comfort it, in the name of Jesus who had compassion on the
crowds; Jesus, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians, who is our
peace, who has broken down the dividing wall of enmity, who proclaimed peace to
those who are far off and those who are near, through whom we have access in
the Spirit to the Father.(cf. Eph 2:14-18)
cyprian
21 july 2012
