Benedict's wise path for the journey of faith (Opinion)

It was a fundamentally wise move of Pope Benedict XVI to urge the Church to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Second Vatican Council by returning to, and studying afresh, the actual texts the council approved, writes The Tablet in an editorial.

These are the historical baseline for any interpretation or application of the council’s teaching, and a corrective to the claim that any new policy or development is, or is not, in accordance with what the council intended.

All that sounds simple; it is not. Half a century after the opening ceremony in October 1962, the Catholic Church is not the same as it was. The council changed it. The four subsequent papacies changed it further.

The conciliar texts cannot therefore be read now as they were read when they were new – sometimes startlingly new. What is certain is that by returning to those momentous texts, the Catholic Church will refresh its understanding of itself and its mission. That will be a great benefit, but it will also revive the controversy surrounding the interpretation of the texts.

That may also prove beneficial, if it leads the Church back to its scriptural, patristic and theological roots – the process called ressourcement  – where new riches, by the grace of God, still wait to be discovered. 

The late Cardinal Martini’s final word to the Church was to urge it to return to the Scriptures. That is the ultimate agenda for reform.

The Pope has repeatedly emphasised that there is more than one way of understanding Vatican II, and not all understandings are equally valid. 

Some remarks he made in 2005, not long after his election, have been understood as favouring, and maybe even wanting to impose, a highly conservative interpretation of what the council achieved. He appeared to contrast a “hermeneutic of continuity”, of which he approved, with a “hermeneutic of rupture”, which he rejected.

But that itself is a conservative interpretation of what he actually said. The words of his Christmas Address to the Roman Curia that year were much more nuanced. He fully acknowledged the tension between continuity and reform that characterised much of the council’s debates, with more continuity in one place, more reform in another.

There is no papal mandate for imposing a hermeneutic of continuity on all of it – the view that the council fundamentally changed nothing. Such a serious distortion of the council’s work would amount to a rejection of it.

Continuity and reform
 
Sometimes the only continuity discernible in the texts is with Scripture, rather than with more recent church history. 

There is no continuity whatever between the declaration Nostra Aetate, on relations with Jews and other faiths, for instance, and the previous two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism – as promoted, say, by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

That is indeed a rupture, for which we may thank God.