The Fortieth Anniversary of Vatican II

            This year, on December 8, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, marks the fortieth anniversary of the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council.  Not long after he was elected pope, John XXIII announced to the Church and the world the future convening of the council.  It began in the autumn of 1962 and ended a little over three years later in 1965.  Vatican II was extraordinary, both as to the reason for its inception as well as the seeming effects of its work.

            Blessed Pope John made known that he was calling for a “pastoral” rather than “dogmatic” council for the unusual purpose of reinvigorating the Church in order to make the message of the Gospel all the more clear to the modern world, which he described as being in a state of “spiritual poverty.”  Clearly, as this stands, it was a noble intention.  But much controversy surrounds what are called the effects of the Council. 

            What do forty years reveal to us?  In a real sense, it depends on where you look.  Certainly there are those, usually of the Vatican II generation, who speak of these past four decades as unalloyed progress for the Church.  And from the other side, nowadays more and more from the younger generation, there is if not a lack of knowledge about the Council, then a growing dissatisfaction with its legacy. 

            Perhaps neither side has the whole picture right, and I do not suppose myself an expert, though I have as a Catholic and a priest sought to truly explore and understand the major documents of Vatican II.  The rosy picture of things – brought about supposedly by the Council – that is often presented to us has a hard time of it in the light of the facts of reality:  the last forty years have witnessed in many areas of the world (most notably the affluent West) the implosion of the religious orders, a steep decline in the number of priests, a severe drop in Mass attendance, public and often cranky dissent on almost all the teachings of the Church (especially in the area of sexual morality), unusually serious scandals in the priesthood (the sexual abuse scandal, the occurrences of which drastically peaked in the 1970s, in, that is, the post-Vatican II church), and a ballooning ignorance of the Faith among those formed during these years.  Is all this the fault of the Council?  If so, how do we then explain the almost opposite picture coming to us from the developing world, where the Catholic Faith experienced in the same time period – and is still experiencing – a boom almost unprecedented? 

            Surely, things are a bit more complicated than many would think, and perhaps there are, as a part of this complexity, many causes for all these things.  I offer two suggestions that may help explain what has happened.  The first is to point out that the decline of the Church in the West may be far more due to the steep and general decline of the social, moral and cultural life of the West.  For the developed world is decadent:  while contracepting itself out of existence, it indulges in the basest and most banal entertainment (our modern version of bread and circuses), promotes and worships the god of pleasure and comfort, and with no real cultural and intellectual life to elevate it, it wonders why things are falling apart and searches petulantly for a scapegoat to blame.  All this is a pervasive influence in our society, and none of us escapes it completely, its effects being felt within the Church as well.  And that does not bode well for the future.

            My second suggestion – often dismissed by traditionalists – is that there was, and still is, a problem with the implementation of the Council’s directives and advice.  Granted, there are a number of ambiguities (noted by many scholars) in the documents, still, I cannot find in those documents any basis for the construction of hideously ugly churches, the wholesale destruction of beautiful statues and priceless high altars, the use of plain polyester and burlap vestments, “clown Masses,” and altar vessels that most people would be embarrassed to use at any banquet.  (Years ago, one elderly woman, always bedecked in jewels, complained because her pastor had replaced the pottery vessels with gold and said that she had to wear her sunglasses when she looked at the altar.  “Do you wear them,” the response could have been, “when you open your jewelry box or set out your silverware?”)   Vatican II did call for a “noble simplicity” in these things, but “simplicity” without the “noble” often becomes the farcical and banal.   

            One conclusion from these suggestions could be that whoever it was who somehow set the lead in the forty years of implementation either did not know the documents of Vatican II, or, knowing them, simply used them – and what is often appealed to in such cases as “the spirit of Vatican II” – to push his or their own agendas, agendas heavily influenced by a modern world going through the throes of the sexual revolution and succumbing to the shallowness of modernity and mass culture.  To a large extent they got away with it, because there is a lot of ignorance about what the documents actually do say.  This is readily illustrated by comments and questions, which I myself have heard very often, like “But I thought Vatican II did away with Latin,” “After all, Vatican II tells us that the individual human conscience must now decide and define for itself what is true and false,” “Vatican II teaches us that everyone will be saved,” “Vatican II said that all religions are of equal value,” “Vatican II changed Church teaching,” “Vatican II….”

            Time to read the documents of Vatican II!  Especially now in this year of the fortieth anniversary of the Council’s closing, and especially now with Pope Benedict’s reiteration of the need to rightly understand them – see them embedded in the long tradition of the Church’s life and unchanging doctrine and morality.  And in order to understand something, we must know its purpose, and so we return to the reason for which Pope John XXIII called the Council:  not for the Church to mimic the world, but for the Church to speak to the world in an intelligible manner the fullness of truth entrusted by Christ to her.