Although ecumenism has to some extent stalled in recent decades, it
is still alive and active between the churches – and for that we must be
glad, writes
FR ENDA McDONAGH AFTER 50 years as memories fade and witnesses die and nobody under 65 could have had any effective experience of Vatican II as an immediate media phenomenon, the vast majority of Catholics are faced with a historical, even alien event.
Such radical changes as the Mass in the vernacular, introduced as a result of the council and despite the recent disputes about translation, excite little interest in the council itself.
Appeals to the “Spirit of the Council” or insistence on its correct “interpretation” by “warring” parties within the church scarcely touch the under-50s. All that does not necessarily betoken a total collapse of faith or church interest among the younger members of the population, rather that the appeal to Vatican II may not be the way to engage them.
However, many of the legacies of the council, positive and negative, are among the hidden connecting points with their religious backgrounds for various generations of the believing, half-believing and non-believing.
This is an attempt to expose in fragments some of these connecting points.
Apart from the use of the vernacular at the Mass and the other sacraments, to which we shall return, one of the more obvious, and to succeeding generations acceptable, reforms of Vatican II was the new relationships with other Christian churches.
Again, most of them would not know it was a radical change introduced at Vatican II, after the more radical invitation of the members of these churches to attend the council and the indirect influence they had on its working. Shared prayer and worship at weddings and funerals seem now normal practice between Christians.
They attract Catholics and other Christians who might not otherwise attend church. Other shared prayer occasions are frequent enough, as are Bible study groups and co-operation in works of charity and justice. For the baptised who were genuinely shocked by church divisions and the hostility they sometimes generated, these changes may initiate a true faith renewal.
Similar developments, but more limited partly because of fewer opportunities in Ireland, have occurred in relation to Judaism and other world religions. But the principle inherited from the council that the one God is Father of all deepens and enlarges interior life and practical outreach of all religions in ways that can be meaningful to the larger constituency.
These documents on “Ecumenism and Relations with Non-Christian Religions” were entirely new departures for a church council. Their legacies have been dominantly positive.
Although ecumenism has to some extent stalled in recent decades, it is still alive and active between the churches.
The early fears as voiced by its opponents that it would lead to religious indifferentism have not really been verified but neither have its early hopes of any quick move to full church unity.
The Constitution on the Liturgy as it was called because of its importance to church and council has also been dominantly positive in its effects, which are still alive and reasonably well.
A negative effect, characteristic of most of the significant council documents, is the bitterness with which some of the debates were conducted.
That sharpness revealed itself again in the row over the new translations and marks much of the post-conciliar divisions in the church. How it will be overcome remains a serious challenge to love and imagination in the years ahead.
There were four documents designated constitutions at the council, On the Church, On Divine Revelation and on the Church in the Modern World, together with the Liturgy. Their presumed and actual importance to the life and mission of the church was borne out by the intensity of the debates and the substance of their end-products.
Lumen Gentium (“On the Church”) was the most controverted of council documents, not least by members of the Roman Curia. In its final format there were inevitably elements of compromise and ambiguity, but its main thrust in material order, in chapter headings and in substantial content, issued in a vision and practice for the church which were certainly, in comparison with the first draft and with the dominant text-book theology of the time, unique and distinctive.
Chapter One, the “Mystery of the Church”, took its self-understanding beyond any simply organisational view into the transcendent, the mystery of the divine presence itself, embodied in history in the community of the disciples of “Jesus, the People of God”, the title and theme of Chapter Two.
Its position immediately after Chapter One on the “Mystery” and before Chapter Three, “The Hierarchical Structure of the Church”, indicated a further priority in church identity or self-understanding. A priority which together with the later treatment of the “Whole Church’s Call to Holiness” (Chapter Five) underlined the significance of the mystical and contemplative call of the church as a whole and of its individual members, all the baptised.
In its active as well as its prayer life all members were to participate and co-operate. This was emphasised at the level of pope and bishops in ruling the church as a whole in the College of Pope and Bishops but the collegial or collaborative links should operate throughout the church from parish to diocese to region to the church universal.
If properly implemented this should undermine the self-enclosing power structures at all these different levels and help dissolve the restrictive and impoverishing clerical culture. It would promote a church of dialogue among all rather than a church of diktat by the few.
Needless to say very little real progress has been made in developing such a collegial and dialogical model of church over 50 years. And that may be an important root of the current crisis of indifferentism which many at the council feared but for the wrong reasons.
Despite a difficult introduction and continuing debate in the Aula, the “Constitution on Revelation” (Dei Verbum) was finally passed with the usual very large majority. Its subsequent influence has been positive and largely non-controversial.
However, the hoped for involvement of a wide personal readership has not been very successful, as far as one can judge.
Two other significant documents provoked stormy debates, the “Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (Gaudium et Spes) and the “Declaration on Religious Liberty” (Dignitatis Humanae). The first was very new for an ecclesiastical document, while the second seemed to contradict flat-out earlier 19th-century and mid-20th-century positions.
They may, however, be the most successful of the council documents in terms of their follow-up. Gaudium et Spes restored a more positive view of the world beyond as well as within the church.
While in line with a doctrine of creation and of the all peoples as of the family of God it also emphasised in human context the primacy of conscience, human creativity and brotherhood in its discussions of culture and politics, addressing such thorny issues as just war in a nuclear world and deprivations of so many nations and populations.
In its discussions of religious liberty, that second document overcame the entwining of religion and secular power to return to a gospel vision of the freedom of personal religious belief which is even more necessary in some parts of the world today than it ever was.
In any such brief and fragmentary review of the events and achievements of what has been described as “the largest meeting ever held worldwide”, major omissions are bound to occur and judgments are inevitably only partially true and partially justified.
Yet the best hope is that a new generation will take positive hints from the work of the council to help renew the church for the sake of the world as Pope John envisioned it.
When asked why he to everybody’s surprise undertook the task, the “transitional” pope, as he was sometimes described, replied “it just came to me”.
No doubt in subsequent reflection and before he announced it he recognised the voice of the Spirit.
He must have recognised the difficulties it would give rise to and the unfinished state in which he would have to leave it.
The unfinished state continues and now it is left by him, his successors and the Holy Spirit to generations to continue that good work, if also in fragmentary fashions.
Such a divine and human world will always by unfinished but there are so many enriching fragments always to hand.
More than 12 basketfuls.
Fr Enda McDonagh is emeritus professor of moral theology and canon law at St Patrick’s College Maynooth, a position he held from 1958 to 1995. In 2007 he was appointed an ecumenical canon at St Patricks Cathedral, Dublin.