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WHERE, OH WHERE, HAS VATICAN II GONE?
August 29, 2008



The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) and the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) stand as two remarkably clear and almost diametrically different bench marks in the history of Christianity.

Vatican I was the culmination of a tendency toward Roman centralism, which goes back to the fourth century in origin but became increasingly systematized during and following the various reform movements of the 16th century. The two dominant outcomes of this council were the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility and the endorsement of Pope Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors." The former was the most dramatic statement of claims of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. The latter distanced Roman Catholicism from four "modern" phenomena: Protestant teachings (some of which sought to recapture the essence of Early Christianity), rationalism, liberalism, and materialism. In effect, Vatican I said a firm "No!" to initial explorations toward ecumenism that were emerging throughout the rest of the Christian world.

Important voices during the council spoke out against both of these movements. Among these was theologian Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger, who left the Roman Catholic Church following the council. Others, such as James Cardinal Gibbons (who voted for the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility) sought a more moderate understanding of the outcome of the council in the years to come.

In the nine decades separating the two councils, other theologians and bishops sought to guide the Roman Catholic Church in a new direction. Among them were prelates such as Richard Cardinal Cushing, and theologians such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (whose work was suppressed by the Vatican), Henri de Lubac, Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, John Courtney Murray and Gustave Weigel. The spirit of reform found an advocate and champion in Angelo Giuseppe Cardinal Roncalli who was elected Pope on October 28, 1958, and chose to be called John XXIII.

Vatican II embraced what Vatican I rejected. Cordial and sincere invitations went out to the Orthodox, Evangelicals, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, and liberal denominations to send official observers. In contrast to the concentration of authority in a specific office that received official status in Vatican I, the second council sought to restore the collegial principle of the Early Church, with the additional stimulus to explore an increased participation of lay voices in future deliberations that would continue to guide the Church. Rather than a rejection of the modern world, the second council sought loving engagement with that world as the first step in renewed evangelism.

Vatican I was intended to be a final word. Vatican II was intended to be the beginning of an ongoing conversation. Essentially, two mutually exclusive ideologies underlie the two councils. Vatican I ended with militant and triumphalist absolute statements from an authoritarian hierarchy. The second council produced sixteen documents that read more like prologues to continuing discussion within the Church than final words of authoritarian pronouncements. These documents presented a variety of exciting possibilities for the future of the Church: liturgy and ministry were opened to greater participation by the laity, the collegial role of bishops was reaffirmed, and the bishops made a clear commitment to ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue.

One can get a sense of the excitement that greeted these promised changes by reading books by two theologians, one Roman Catholic and one Baptist, published within a decade of the closing of Vatican II: Hans Kung, The Church (London: Burns and Oates, 1967, originally published in German in the same year as Die Kirche by Herder in Freiburg, Basle, and Vienna) and Langdon Gilkey, Catholicism Confronts Modernity: A Protestant View
Langdon Gilkey wrote his book eight years later. By that time he had sufficient close encounters with Roman Catholic colleagues and students at the University of Chicago's Divinity School. He had this opportunity for constant exposure to Roman Catholic thought at a liberal Protestant center for graduate theological education thanks to the ecumenical spirit of the second council. His book is filled with enthusiastic hope for a renewed Church led by a revitalized Rome. "A Catholicism that has relinquished its absolutism and has recognized the new world of relativity, and yet that as Catholic and sacramental cans still relate grace and the wondrous width of divine activity to the total life-world of men and women, this Catholicism may well find itself more relevant to modern needs, more creative in the modern situation, and less anachronistic to modern sensibilities than any form of Protestantism." (p. 196)

Gilkey's is not a unique Protestant view. Vatican II had a profound impact on the entire world of Western Christianity. Indeed, one can't understand liturgical reform, liberation theology, or modern ecumenism-whether in Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Methodist circles-without reference to the second council.

Thus, the question: "What ever happened to Vatican II?" The questions arises when one reads, for example, Hans KUng's Disputed Truth: Memoirs II (New York, Continuum: 2007), particularly Chapter XI, "The Great Confrontation." Having recounted his being barred from teaching at Roman Catholic institutions as a result of his publications in the spirit of Vatican II, Kung then goes on to another chapter that underscores his rejection of a Vatican I militant authoritarianism and his embracing of a Vatican II commitment to ongoing discourse. He gives Chapter XII the title, "Roma Locuta - Causa non Finita: Rome has Spoken, but the Case is Not Over."

But the question is most boldly underscored when one reads the documents produced by the Second Vatican Council (which can be easily accessed online at: http://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/V2ALL.HTM) and compares those documents with the present policies and practices of the Roman Catholic Church.

Happily, one can find the precepts and trajectory of Vatican II alive and well in a number of locations apart from the Roman Catholic Church, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Episcopal Church, and particularly within the Ecumenical Catholic Communion. On the latter observation, consult the "Catholic Quiz" on the St. Matthew ECC Parish web site at http://www.saint-matthew.org/Take%20the%20Catholic%20Quiz.htm. Compare the ECC positions with the documents of Vatican II. You will clearly see the continuation of the conversation begun at the second council. And once you have done that, consult the ECC web site at http://www.ecumenical-catholic-communion.org/. Spend some time learning about this coalition of communities committed to a Catholic perspective that is open to greater lay participation, ecumenical relations, and embracing a modern world that is part of God's continuing creation.

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