The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, also known as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II, was called by Pope John XXIII who felt that the teaching and practices of the Roman Catholic Church needed to be updated to remain relevant in the increasingly secularized world of the 20^th century.  It was the 21^st ecumenical council of the Church which met at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome for four sessions between 1962 and 1965.

As stated by Wikipedia, the council, which was attended by both supporters of the pope’s initiative and critics who wanted to maintain the status quo, “proposed significant developments in doctrine and practice: an extensive reform of the liturgy, a renewed theology of the Church, of revelation and of the laity, a new approach to relations between the Church and the world, to ecumenism, to non-Christian religions and to religious freedom.”

On October 11, 2022, Pope Francis celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the council’s opening by presiding over a Mass in St Peter’s Basilica.  During the Mass, he expressed his continued support of the decisions made by the council.  In this post, I will examine the pope’s views on the importance of Vatican II.  I will also review two separate views: one that considers the council a failure in view of later developments, and one that states that its message remains, today more than ever, an essential guide for refocusing the efforts of the Catholic Church.  In later posts, I will examine some of the important documents produced by the council.

As reported by Catholic News Service, Pope Francis said during the Mass that Vatican II “was the universal Catholic Church’s response to God’s love and to Jesus’ command to feed his sheep.”  Such a statement is obviously an admission that the Catholic Church had not always responded appropriately to God’s love and Jesus’ command.  The pope went further:

“The council reminded the church of what is ‘essential,’ the pope said: ‘a church madly in love with its Lord and with all the men and women whom he loves,’ one that ‘is rich in Jesus and poor in assets,’ a church that ‘is free and freeing.’”

Obviously, Pope Francis sees love as the most “essential” element of the Gospel of Christ.  He sees the Gospel as “freeing.”  As I have previously discussed, his preaching on the book of Galatians emphasizes freedom from legalism, as he believes that following rigid rules does not lead to holiness.  Also, in the above statement, the pope recognizes that following Jesus has nothing to do with acquiring wealth.  On the contrary, the New Testament sees the pursuit of material riches as incompatible with the priorities of the kingdom of God.

The pope pointed to Jesus’ question to Peter, “Do you love me?”, and the mandate the question led to: “Feed my sheep.”  This means the pastoral role of the Church must take precedence over human debates that do not necessarily advance the cause of Christ.  He particularly pointed to two human worldviews that have brought conflict into the Church:

“’We are always tempted to start from ourselves rather than from God, to put our own agendas before the Gospel, to let ourselves be caught up in the winds of worldliness in order to chase after the fashions of the moment or to turn our back the time that providence has granted us,’ he said.

Catholics must be careful, he said, because ‘both the “progressivism” that lines up behind the world and the “traditionalism” that longs for a bygone world are not evidence of love, but of infidelity,’ forms of ‘selfishness that puts our own tastes and plans above the love that pleases God, the simple, humble and faithful love that Jesus asked of Peter.’

‘A church in love with Jesus has no time for quarrels, gossip and disputes,’ the pope said. ‘May God free us from being critical and intolerant, harsh and angry. This is not a matter of style but of love.’”

The pope rejects both traditionalism and progressivism.  The word “traditionalism” captures the status quo before Vatican II, including the theological and moral teaching inherited from the long history of the Church, the liturgy in Latin, the rites, etc.  The world “progressivism,” on the other hand, refers to the belief that scientific and technological advances have empowered humans to move beyond a reliance on divine providence toward more trust in the ability of mankind to improve the world through continuous progress.  In his book Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright explains:

“The myth of progress has deep roots in contemporary Western culture, and some of those roots are Christian. The idea that the human project, and indeed the cosmic project, could and would continue to grow and develop, producing unlimited human improvement and marching toward a utopia, goes back to the Renaissance and was given its decisive push by the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. The full flowering of this belief took place in Europe in the nineteenth century, when the combination of scientific and economic advances, on the one hand, and democratic freedoms and wider education, on the other, produced a strong sense that history was accelerating toward a wonderful goal. El Dorado was just around the corner, the millennium in which the world would live at peace. Prosperity would spread out from enlightened Europe and America and embrace the world.”

In the above statement, the pope also noted that the emphasis on love should, very importantly, translate into concern for the disadvantaged, which is obviously in disagreement with the tendency among conservative Christians to vilify the poor:

“’The council, he said, taught the church to see the world around it and to share God’s love with all, knowing that ‘if it is fitting to show a particular concern, it should be for those whom God loves most: the poor and the outcast.”

In agreement with the exhortations of Vatican II, the pope also called for unity among all Christians:

“With Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant representatives present, as they were at the council, Pope Francis also prayed that ‘the yearning for unity’ would grow within each Christian, ‘the desire to commit ourselves to full communion among all those who believe in Christ.’”

The Pope saw the documents produced by Vatican II as essential guidelines for better alignment of the life of the Church with the Gospel of Christ.  Consequently, he encouraged Catholics to read and study them:

“Pope Francis has asked Catholics to prepare for the Holy Year 2025 by re-reading and studying the documents: Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (‘Sacrosanctum Concilium’); Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (‘Lumen Gentium’); Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (‘Dei Verbum’); and Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (‘Gaudium et Spes’).”

On October 11, 2022 Ross Douthat, an opinion writer for the New York Times and a conservative Catholic, published an article with the title How Catholics Became Prisoners of Vatican II.  Douthat is the author of a book, Bad Religion, in which he reviews developments in American Christianity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  It is clear from the book that he rejects progressivism, a category within which he includes modernists (19^th and early 20^th centuries), accommodationists (Late 20^th century) and other new movements he considers heretical.  Even though he does not see himself as a traditionalist, he seems to be more aligned with the theological and moral teaching of the old Church.

In his article, Douthat contrasts conservative and liberal attitudes regarding Vatican II:

“In the wars within Catholicism that followed the council, the conservatives interpreted Vatican II as a discrete and limited event — a particular set of documents that contained various shifts and evolutions (on religious liberty and Catholic-Jewish relations especially) and opened the door to a revised, vernacular version of the Mass. For the liberals, though, these specifics were just the starting place: There was also a “spirit” of the council, similar to the Holy Spirit in its operation, that was supposed to guide the church into further transformations, perpetual reform.”

He explains that the liberal interpretation was dominant in the 1960’s and 1970’s and led to changes “to the church’s liturgy and calendar and prayers, to lay customs and clerical dress, to church architecture and sacred music, to Catholic moral discipline.”  With Pope John Paul II, the conservative interpretation took over and led to changes “to rein in the more radical experiments and alterations, to prove that Catholicism before the 1960s and Catholicism afterward were still the same tradition.”  It is worth noting that Douthat expresses his admiration for Pope John Paul II in his book and, therefore, shares with the pope the hope for continuity between the “old tradition” and the Church of the future.  However, as we will see later, Vatican II was not calling for continuity.

Douthat credits Pope Francis for a reawakening of the liberal interpretation of Vatican II, but also blames him for tensions resulting from it:

“Instead, the council poses a continuing challenge, it creates intractable-seeming divisions, and it leaves contemporary Catholicism facing a set of problems and dilemmas that Providence has not yet seen fit to resolve.”

He admits that Vatican II was necessary because a response to the challenges of its time was needed.  But he declares that the specific responses adopted by the council resulted in failure:

“But just because a moment calls for reinvention doesn’t mean that a specific set of reinventions will succeed, and we now have decades of data to justify a second encapsulating statement: The council was a failure.

This isn’t a truculent or reactionary analysis. The Second Vatican Council failed on the terms its own supporters set. It was supposed to make the church more dynamic, more attractive to modern people, more evangelistic, less closed off and stale and self-referential. It did none of these things. The church declined everywhere in the developed world after Vatican II, under conservative and liberal popes alike — but the decline was swiftest where the council’s influence was strongest.”

It is clear from the above statement that Douthat sees membership size as one of the most important criteria to measure success.  But he also claims that membership engagement with the Mass has declined.  Furthermore, he feels that the Church has become more inward-looking instead of being more engaged with the secular world:

“And if anything, post-1960s Catholicism became more inward-looking than before, more consumed with its endless right-versus-left battles, and to the extent it engaged with the secular world, it was in paltry imitation — via middling guitar music or political theories that were just dressed-up versions of left-wing or right-wing partisanship or ugly modern churches that were outdated 10 years after they were built and empty soon thereafter.”

While Douthat’s comments may be accurate observations, it seems to me that they focus on administrative and cosmetic matters.  He also seems to view church life in terms of conservative and liberal sides in constant conflict with each other.  As seen above, he gives the liberal side no credit for advocating for what he calls “a ‘spirit’ of the council, similar to the Holy Spirit in its operation, that was supposed to guide the church into further transformations, perpetual reform.”  He puts Pope Francis on the liberal side but says nothing about the pope’s main argument: That the Church should be about Jesus and sharing God’s love with the world.  But that argument happens to be the core of Christianity and there should be no debate about it.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to see where Douthat stands on that basic item.  In fact, I have been puzzled by the way he describes Jesus in his book:

“Christianity is a paradoxical religion because the Jew of Nazareth is a paradoxical character. No figure in history or fiction contains as many multitudes as the New Testament’s Jesus. He’s a celibate ascetic who enjoys dining with publicans and changing water into wine at weddings. He’s an apocalyptic prophet one moment, a wise ethicist the next. He’s a fierce critic of Jewish religious law who insists that he’s actually fulfilling rather than subverting it. He preaches a reversal of every social hierarchy while deliberately avoiding explicitly political claims. He promises to set parents against children and then disallows divorce; he consorts with prostitutes while denouncing even lustful thoughts. He makes wild claims about his own relationship to God, and perhaps his own divinity, without displaying any of the usual signs of megalomania or madness. He can be egalitarian and hierarchical, gentle and impatient, extraordinarily charitable and extraordinarily judgmental. He sets impossible standards and then forgives the worst of sinners. He blesses the peacemakers and then promises that he’s brought not peace but the sword …”

Douthat’s Jesus is a rather conflicted character and the founder of a “paradoxical religion.”  To Douthat, this bipolar Jesus defines the best of Christianity.  In reality, such an understanding of Christianity is one of the reasons Christendom has been both a force for good and a force for evil in the world.  It is not my intention to address all the details of the above statement here, but I will briefly make a few comments:

• Jesus accepted Jewish law as the appropriate standard for the people of his time, but brought, in agreement with Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah, a higher standard that was more aligned with God’s will, ie guiding principles for life in the kingdom of God. That is the biblical new covenant.
• Preaching about the kingdom of God, a realm where Caesar was not the accepted king, was a political statement that got him killed by Rome.
• He promoted kingdom of God ethics and was very clear about right and wrong. But he also described God the Father as an infinitely compassionate and gracious God who values forgiveness.  Knowing that all humans are sinners, he told his disciples not to judge and be forgiving.
• He rejected violence and retaliation. As I have explained elsewhere, his statement about bringing “not peace but the sword” only meant that his message (which was indeed political) would bring division (including parents against children), and he warned his followers about the cost associated with discipleship: They would be “sheep among wolves” who would not carry the sword but would be threatened by it.

My point is that Douthat chooses to understand Jesus in terms of paradoxes even though Jesus is in fact quite self-consistent.  Throughout history, those who shared Douthat’s interpretation of Jesus’ statement about the sword, for example, did not hesitate to engage in violence, warfare and other ungodly behavior, supposedly in God’s name.

Douthat also declares that Vatican II cannot be undone, and explains what he means by that:

“I just mean that there is no simple path back. Not back to the style of papal authority that both John Paul II and Francis have tried to exercise — the former to restore tradition, the latter to suppress it — only to find themselves frustrated by the ungovernability of the modern church. Not to the kind of thick inherited Catholic cultures that still existed down to the middle of the 20th century, and whose subsequent unraveling, while inevitable to some extent, was clearly accelerated by the church’s own internal iconoclasm. Not to the moral and doctrinal synthesis, stamped with the promise of infallibility and consistency, that the church’s conservatives have spent the last two generations insisting still exists, but that in the Francis era has proved so unstable that those same conservatives have ended up feuding with the pope himself.”

Papal authority.  Governability.  These are the considerations Douthat seems to focus on, as if the church were to be governed like earthly kingdoms where success is measured by the ability to eliminate dissent.  In the kingdom of God, God’s rule is seen in the fact that believers spontaneously, without any form of human coercion, strive to live their lives according to principles given to them by Christ.  And yes, they are guided by the Holy Spirit, who reminds them that God is love.  Jesus never advocated for a “well-governed” state.  If Pope Francis focuses on love of God and love of neighbor, he is doing the right thing.

In an article published on October 14, 2022 in America, Terence Sweeney offers a response to Douthat.  He recognizes that Douthat is correct regarding the decline in membership:

“In a way, one can see why Mr. Douthat makes the claim that Vatican II failed. In the decades since the council, Catholics have abandoned the church in droves. To enter church buildings on both sides of the Atlantic is to encounter emptiness (unless the church has been turned into a brew pub). There is nothing worse than a person leaving the church, and yet so many have. Those who leave are our brothers and sisters. When whole countries, whole generations, turn away from the altars, all our hearts should be torn a little bit.”

However, Sweeney is more grateful than Douthat for the teaching of Vatican II about the mission of Catholicism:

“So are we prisoners of a failed council? No, for several reasons. First, in the Vatican II documents themselves, we received a wonder of theological richness promulgated with the full teaching authority of the church. They provide definitive teachings on the nature of the church, on the nature of the human person and on the vocations of the baptized. With the promulgation of these documents, we have officially refuted an antisemitic past and begun to engage earnestly in interreligious dialogue.

We experience now a church where the laity matter—where, for example, a Times columnist without any church title can have a voice. Many Catholic institutes established since Vatican II (like the Collegium Institute in Philadelphia, where I work) are lay-led, lay-initiated endeavors to present Catholic thought and culture to the most secular of audiences. As participants in these works, we do not follow the world; we are working in it to lead it to Christ.”

As I mentioned earlier, I will be examining some of the important documents produced by the council in later posts.  But it is noteworthy that Sweeney mentions “an antisemitic past” as part of the legacy of the traditional Catholic Church.  He also implies that “interreligious dialogue” is an innovation from Vatican II.  As seen earlier, Douthat mentions that Vatican II introduced “various shifts and evolutions” on matters of “religious liberty and Catholic-Jewish relations,” but he does not seem to consider them particularly important.  On the other hand, Pope Francis has consistently declared that true Christianity has no room for antisemitism and has consistently promoted dialogue with Judaism and Islam.  Since the pope is, in my view, absolutely correct on these matters, I have to ask: How could the traditional Catholic Church be so wrong?  Obviously, Vatican II corrected some awful misrepresentations of the teaching of Christ!

In the above statement, Sweeney also refers to the freedom associated with the Gospel of Christ, which results in the fact that the laity, including Douthat himself, can no longer be silenced by the clergy.  Of course, the history of the Catholic Church has been abysmal in this respect.

Sweeney then further explains why Vatican II was and remains relevant in redirecting the mission of the Church to make it more aligned with the Gospel:

“What if instead of dissecting the failure of Vatican II, we recognize that the council’s time to succeed is only just arriving? Vatican II gave us the tools and the evangelical vision to live out the Gospel in these Christ-forgetting times. The collapse in religious practice (and community life) that began in the 1960s was too comprehensive in Western society—from Episcopalians to bowling leagues—to have been halted. The church needed to be prepared for a world she no longer controlled. Vatican II was part of that preparation.

Like so much else in the 1960s and 1970s, the teachings of Vatican II were not always accepted by a world that was not ready for them, and too many rejected the council and Catholic tradition in favor of conforming to the world. This is the true meaning of Pope Francis’ hard words recently for progressives that ‘line up behind the world’ and for traditionalists who ‘long for a bygone world.’ Both are attaching their dreams to a world instead of being evangelical. And in a Christ-forgetting time, worldliness is death and evangelization is life. We need to get busy living.”

In other words, there is no reason to wish for a return to the Church as it existed before Vatican II because it did not represent the Gospel of Christ adequately.  On the other hand, by leaning toward secularization, progressivism did not provide a good alternative to the failed Church.

On the subject of freedom, Sweeney adds the following:

“Vatican II prepared us for a world that is evangelical territory. There is no space left where temporal power can be used to batter people into the pews. The council taught us to give up on coercion, to instead live evangelically. As Pope John XXIII put it at the opening of the council, the church’s ‘present needs are best served by explaining more fully her doctrines’ and by using ‘the balm of mercy’ rather than issuing more condemnations enforced by ‘the arm of severity.’ The arm of severity was always the wrong way, but it would now be a ludicrous way. Vatican II freed us from strategies of coercion in favor of evangelization at the moment that the church was losing the final vestiges of its coercive power.”

As I have suggested before, the adoption of coercive power by Christendom goes back to the marriage between church and state in the Roman Empire.  Christians, from then on, decided that they were serving God by persecuting non-Christians, by using violence to convert them and by using the power of the state to implement a religious agenda.  Sweeney explains that Vatican II turned the Church away from such misguided practices:

“Vatican II restored to us what Bartolome de las Casas calls the only way to teach the living faith of Christ, ‘the way that wins the mind with reasons, that wins the will with gentleness, with invitation.’ That is the freedom of the Gospel. Vatican II was not about stopping secularization. It was about how to live as Christians in a secularized, sometimes hostile and sometimes apathetic world. The only way to live as Christians in such a world is evangelically. Vatican II frees us to do this, frees us from political power to be a church that Pope Francis describes as ‘madly in love with the Lord and with all the people whom he loves.’ A church so in love that she does not follow the world but instead goes out to the world to proclaim Christ and him crucified.”

Bartolome de las Casas, a 16^th century clergyman who was among the early European settlers in the American continent, strongly denounced the evil deeds of the European Catholics against native populations.  By mentioning his name here, Sweeney is hinting at the sad reality that the old Catholic Church could not be salvaged because it had lost its connection to Christ.  It is therefore no wonder Pope John XXIII felt that it was important to start from scratch.

It should be noted that Sweeney’s idea of religious freedom has nothing to do with the religious freedom pursued by conservative Christians and Christian nationalists.  They want to impose their views through legal coercion (such as anti-abortion laws) or even the use of violence, just as the Catholic Church did in the old days.