O\u27Malley, John W.

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Conversations on Jesuit Higher EducationVolume 42 After 50 Years: The Living Spirit of VaticanII Article 39-1-2012The Council's Spirit: Vatican II: The Time forReconciliationJohn W. O'MalleyFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversationsRecommended CitationO'Malley, John W. (2012) "The Council's Spirit: Vatican II: The Time for Reconciliation," Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education: Vol.42, Article 3.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol42/iss1/32 ConversationsThe Council’sSpirit Vatican II: The Time forReconciliationBy John W. O’Malley, S.J.1O'Malley: The Council's Spirit: Vatican II: The Time for ReconciliationPublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 2012Conversations 3When the Second VaticanCouncil ended almost fiftyyears ago, it was clearsomething of great impor-tance had happened. Itsimpact hit every Catholicmost immediately in that theliturgy began to be celebrat-ed in the vernacular, withthe priest turned to face thecongregation. But there was much more. For the firsttime in history Catholics were encouraged to fosterfriendly relations with non-Catholic Christians and evento pray with them. The church entered into formal dia-logues with other churches and revisited doctrines thathad divided the churches for centuries. Catholics in theUnited States rejoiced that the council had for the firsttime affirmed the principle of religious liberty and hadofficially repudiated all forms of anti-Semitism. We in Jesuit universities have grown so accustomedto changes the council directly or indirectly broughtabout in our institutions that we take them for grantedand forget how groundbreaking they were. Among themperhaps the most palpable was the transformation of theformer religion department into a theology or religiousstudies department. The change was much more thancosmetic, much more than a change of nomenclature. Itentailed a radical rethinking of the method and purposeof that department. Whereas before the council the religion curriculumconsisted, for the most part, in Catholic apologetics, itnow took on a much wider scope. Until then, moreover,the department was made up entirely of Jesuits. It wasinconceivable that a non-Catholic might teach in it. Yet,within less than a decade after the council, the situationhad completely changed. Philosophy departmentsunderwent analogous changes, which, among otherthings, resulted in more attention to modern philoso-phies. But the whole university was affected by thecouncil, as reflected in its hiring and admission policies,in how it presented itself to the public, and in how ittried to relate more effectively to American culture whileretaining a distinctive identity.Important though these developments were in them-selves, they do not singly or collectively capture thesense pervasive at the time of the council that somethingfurther happened, something of which these particularswere but manifestations—a further something thatexplained the particulars and fitted them into a largerpattern. The council’s import included but also tran-scended its specific enactments. To express this larger import, people began to speakof “the spirit of the council.” They did not mean to implythat the “spirit” was at odds with the “letter” of the coun-cil’s documents, but, rather, that, while it built on the let-ter, it rose to a higher level of generalization. It fit theparticulars into a coherent and consistent framework.Although the distinction between spirit and letter isvenerable in the Christian tradition and is, indeed, a dis-tinction often made in everyday speech, it is tricky andsusceptible to manipulation. Your spirit of the council maynot be my spirit of the council. Yet, if careful attention ispaid to the “letter” of the council’s documents—that is, tocertain basic orientations found in them—it is possible touncover that “something further” denoted by “spirit.”In comparison with other councils, a truly specialcharacteristic of Vatican II is not only that such orienta-tions pervaded the council but also that they surfaced soearly in it and persisted to the end. They are a set ofissues-under-the issues or issues-across-the-issues thatimbue the council with a truly remarkable coherence. Inother words, the documents of Vatican II are not a grab-bag of discreet units but, taken together, they constitutea single, though complex, testament. Among the issues was the problem of change in aninstitution whose identity is based on proclaiming inunadulterated fashion a teaching announced long ago.Another issue was the relationship between the centralauthority of the papacy and others in the church, espe-cially the bishops but also priests, theologians, and thelaity itself. One of the most immediately practical, how-ever, was how to deal with realities that the church hadtraditionally considered anathema. Could and should thechurch seek reconciliation with them? On the day the council opened, October 11, 1962,Pope John XXIII delivered a remarkable address inwhich he tried to provide the council with its orientation.In it the pope distanced the council from the scoldingand suspicious attitude toward “the world” that had per-vaded official Catholic thinking for over a century, as ifeverything modern was bad. The church, according tothe pope, should not simply wring its hands and deplorewhat was wrong but engage with the world so as towork together for a positive outcome. It should “makeuse of the medicine of mercy rather than of severity” indealing with everyone. It should eschew as far as possi-ble the language of condemnation.Although Pope John did not use the word reconcil-iation that was what he was speaking of. He asked forJohn O’Malley, S.J., is a university professor atGeorgetown University and author of several books onJesuit history and What Happened at Vatican II.(Left) The Vatican II fathers of the church. 2Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, Vol. 42, Iss. 1 [2012], Art. 3http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol42/iss1/34 Conversationsreconciliation with “the world” —with the world as it is,not as it was supposed to be according to the fantasy ofan idealized “Christian Middle Ages” that still held manyCatholics in thrall. He wanted to end the siege mentali-ty that had gripped Catholic officialdom in the wake ofthe French Revolution and the subsequent seizure of thePapal States, a mentality that feared all things modern. John XXIII had a wider experience of “the world”than any pope in modern times. As a young priest hehad served as an orderly and chaplain in the Italian armyduring World War I. He had spent decades as a papaldiplomat in either predominantly Orthodox or predomi-nantly Muslim populations, and he performed well asnuncio in Paris at a most delicate moment for the churchin post-war France. Then, finally, he served with distinc-tion as bishop (technically, patriarch) of Venice.We should not be surprised, therefore, that at the cru-cial moment of the council’s opening he introduced thetheme of reconciliation. It was not a new theme with him.Two and a half years earlier in 1959, when he announcedhis intention of convoking a council, he gave as one of thecouncil’s two principal aims: the extension of a “cordialinvitation to the faithful of the separated communities toparticipate with us in this quest for unity and peace, forwhich so many long in all parts of the world.” His invita-tion found response from other Christian bodies that wasas positive as it was unanticipated, and it resulted in theextraordinary phenomenon of the presence at the councilof sometimes as many as a hundred or more representa-tives of the Protestant and Orthodox churches. Nothinglike this had ever happened before.The decreesThus, even before the council opened, reconciliationhad begun to take hold as an issue and goal. During thecouncil its scope broadened. In the first document thatthe council passed, the decree on the sacred liturgy,Sacrosanctum concilium, the council asked the churchto break out of its Eurocentrism and to admit other cul-tures as partners. The Catholic church had, of course,consistently presented itself as catholic in the sense ofembracing all peoples and cultures. Although there wasconsiderable truth in that claim, the church had been sostrongly imprinted with the culture of the West as toseem identical with it. With the voyages of discovery ofthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came the shock oflarge populations and altogether different cultures thathad not heard of Christianity. The discoveries severelychallenged the claim of universality.A vigorous program of evangelization followed,which in virtually every case entailed the simultaneousintroduction of Western traditions and values, as if thesewere inseparable from the gospel message. There wereimportant exceptions, as with the Jesuits in China led byMatteo Ricci, who in respect for their Chinese hosts triedin their life-style and mind-sets to become Chinese. Theyeven won permission to celebrate mass in Chinese andpublished a Chinese missal. The Holy See eventually condemned theJesuit experiment. Through the nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries,Catholic missionaries as well as Protestantsaw themselves as bearing “the whiteman’s burden” of bringing Western waysto their flocks. It was this approach thecouncil gently but firmly repudiated. The liturgy decreeset the council on its course when it affirmed, “TheChurch cultivates and fosters the qualities and talents ofdifferent races and nations” and admits their customs“into the liturgy itself, provided they harmonize with itstrue and authentic spirit.” In its subsequent documentsthe council repeatedly took up the theme of reconcilia-tion with cultures other than Western, most notably in thedecree on the church’s missionary activity.Of course, the most obvious and direct act of recon-ciliation was the decree on ecumenism. Its opening lineaffirms, “The restoration of unity among all Christians isone of the principal concerns of the Second VaticanCouncil.” It bids Catholics to respect the beliefs of thosenot in communion with the church, and sets in motiona process of respectful dialogue with them. These stepsmight seem cautious and minimal, but they constituted adramatic course reversal from condemning all otherChristians and counseling Catholics to avoid, as far aspossible, all contact with them. After the wars of religionof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religious dif-ferences eventually got recognized as inappropriate,name-calling, but deep antagonisms had persisted untilthe eve of the council. He wanted to end the siege mentality that had gripped Catholic officialdom in the wake of the French Revolution and the subsequent seizure of the Papal States, a mentality that feared all things modern3O'Malley: The Council's Spirit: Vatican II: The Time for ReconciliationPublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 2012Conversations 5Remarkable about the decree on ecumenism is howeasily the council accepted it. The same was not true forthe decree on non-Christian religions, Nostra aetate. Fewother documents had a rougher course. It originatedwith John XXIII’s deep concern about anti-Semitism andChristian responsibility regarding the Holocaust. DuringWorld War II he has used his diplomatic post in Istanbulto help Jewish refugees flee Poland, Slovakia, andHungary, even prompting Hungarian nuns to issuephony baptismal certificates to save Jews from certaindeath in the Nazi concentration camps.  In its early drafts, therefore, the decree dealtexclusively with the church’s relationship tothe Jews. Objections were raised against it ontheological grounds—were not the Jews anaccursed race?—but also on politicalgrounds. It made the Arab states nervousbecause it seemed to be a step towardVatican recognition of the state of Israel, which up tothat point the Vatican had not done.Nostra aetate eventually won approval, but onlyafter it was expanded to include other non-Christianbelievers, most notably the Muslims. In fact, it treats theMuslims at much greater length than any of the others,including the Jews. No longer were they “our eternal andgodless enemy,” as Pope Paul III described them in 1542in his bull convoking the Council of Trent, but peopledeserving respect, who shared with Christians many ofthe same religious traditions going back to the commonpatriarch, Abraham.Few decrees of the council seem timelier in our post9/ll era. Nostra aetate sounds a note of reason and com-passion. It is the diametrical opposite of hate-inspiredpolemics, and it invests Catholics with a special role asagents of reconciliation in the present tense internation-al situation. By extension it invests all those associatedwith Jesuit universities with that same agency. The council’s final document was entitled Gaudiumet Spes or in English “The Church in the Modern World.”Although the church-world relationship was not at all onthe official agenda when the council opened, it hadclearly emerged by the end of the council’s first year. Nowonder, for it, in fact, took up the theme of reconcilia-tion with the modern world that John XXIII had pro-posed in his address opening the council. The title is sig-nificant: not the church for the modern world; not thechurch against the modern world; not the church eitherabove or below the modern world, but simply in themodern world.What the document recognizes and promotes is whatin fact has always taken place but never before so straight-forwardly professed— the reciprocal dependency ofchurch and world. “The church, which is both a visibleorganization and a spiritual community, travels the samejourney as does all humanity and shares the same earthlylot with it.” The church is to act as a leaven, but it alsoreceives from the world as well as gives to it. Obviousthough such an affirmation might seem, it was virtuallyunprecedented in official church documents, most espe-cially since rampant suspicion of all things modern beganto dominate Catholic officialdom in the nineteenth centu-ry. By being addressed to all men and women of goodwill, whether believers or not, the document extended thereconciliation theme to its ultimate limits.John XXIII’s speech opening the council soundedthe theme of reconciliation but in an understated andaltogether generic way. The council took it up as a fun-damental orientation and imbued it with a remarkablescope. It extended reconciliation to the church’s relation-ship to non-Western cultures, to non-Catholic Christians,to non-Christian believers, and, in its final document, to“all humanity.” But there is an even more pervasive level at whichthe theme operated so as to substantiate the intrinsicrelationship between spirit and letter. We must return toJohn’s opening address. When he asked the council torefrain from condemnations, he introduced the questionof the style of discourse the council was to adopt. Onthe very first working day of the council, Cardinal JosephFrings of Cologne explicitly brought that question to thefloor of the council. A number of other prelates subse-quently took it up. By the end of the council’s first year,the question had become a major issue, but it wasalready on the way to a remarkable resolution.When early in the second year the council found itsvoice, its style of discourse, it spoke through a literaryform and a vocabulary that was new for councils.Instead of issuing laws, which almost invariably hadpenalties attached for non-observance, the councildecided to hold up ideals to inspire inner appropriation.This shift in form required adopting a vocabulary thatwas new to councils, in which the theme of reconcilia-tion, though expressed in a variety of terms, emergedwith dominant force.Instead of words consisting primarily in anathemasand verdicts of guilty-as-charged, the council spoke mostcharacteristically in words of friendship, partnership,kinship, reciprocity, dialogue, and collegiality. Suchwords occur too frequently and too consistently in thedocuments of the council to be dismissed as mere win-dow-dressing or casual asides. They imbue Vatican IIwith a literary and, hence, thematic unity unique amongNostra aetate sounds a noteof reason and compassion4Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, Vol. 42, Iss. 1 [2012], Art. 3http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol42/iss1/36 Conversationschurch councils. They express an overall orientation andcoherence in values and outlook. They are central tounderstanding the council.The values the words express are anything but newto the Christian tradition. They are as common inChristian discourse, or more common, than their oppositenumbers. But they are not common in councils, nor didthey, up to that time, play such a determinative role inofficial church pronouncements. Vatican II did not inventthe words or imply they were not already fundamental ina Christian way of life. Yet, taken as a whole, they con-vey the sweep of a newly formulated and forcefully spec-ified way of proceeding that Vatican II held up for con-templation, admiration, and actualization. That way ofproceeding was the most pervasive of the issues-under-the-issues or the issues-across-the-issues at Vatican II. Itwas the essence of the “spirit of Vatican II.”How it changed usA simple pairing of the model implied bythis vocabulary with the model it wantedto replace or balance conveys the vocabu-lary’s import: from commands to invita-tions, from laws to ideals, from threats topromises, from coercion to conscience,from monologue to dialogue, from rulingto serving, from exclusion to inclusion,from hostility to friendship, from rivalry topartnership, from fault-finding to appreci-ation, and from behavior-modification toinner appropriation of values.In promoting the values implicit inthis model, the council did not deny thevalidity of the contrasting values. No insti-tution can, for instance, be simply open-ended. Sooner or later decision isrequired. No institution can be all-inclu-sive and not in the process lose its identi-ty. Certainly, no institution whose veryreason for existence is proclaiming thegospel message can be so committed toreconciliation as to compromise that mes-sage. Yet, what is more constitutive of themessage than love of neighbor? The council was a rich and complexevent, in which it is easy to get lost in thetrees and lose sight of the forest. If it isimportant to reflect on how the councilchanged us, it is even more important tograsp the new orientation the councilenvisaged for the church and, in so doing,for every Catholic. As I have been tryingto show, however, that orientation extendsfar beyond Catholics, and it thus affectseverybody associated with Jesuit universities, no matterwhat the individual’s religious beliefs or non-beliefs mightbe. It affects the institution itself, in its policies and in itsway of proceeding.The council issued a message that was bold yet soft-spoken. It was meant to find resonance in the hearts ofall persons sensitive to the call of conscience that bids usavoid evil and do good. In a world increasingly wrackedwith discord, hate-spewing blogs, pre-emptive strikes,war and the threat of war, the result was a message thatcould not be more timely. It was a message counter-cul-tural while at the same time responsive to the deepesthuman yearnings. Peace on earth. Good will to all. ■Pope John XXIII signs the papal bull convoking the Second Vatican Council onDecember 25, 1961. CNS Photo.5O'Malley: The Council's Spirit: Vatican II: The Time for ReconciliationPublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 2012

The Council\u27s Spirit: Vatican II: The Time for Reconciliation

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The Council\u27s Spirit: Vatican II: The Time for Reconciliation

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