On December 8, 1965, 60 years ago today, the Second Vatican Council ended. Bishops from around the world left Saint Peter’s in procession and Paul VI embraced his gray eminence, Jacques Maritain, the philosopher of dialogue. It had been three years of work since John XXIII had created a surprise not only by convening the great doctrinal and strategic meeting of Catholicism, but by the direction of his convening. For the first time, it would be a purely pastoral Council. Without dogmatic definitions. Without anathemas. The “good Pope” wanted “a little fresh air to enter the Church”. He wanted a Catholicism that would have its day by “demonstrating the validity of its teachings and not by condemning them.” From the end of the 19th century, certain theologians were aware that Christianity, according to a witness to the Council such as the journalist and writer José Jiménez Lozano, could not “remain simply on the defensive”. It was necessary to “determine in a new way” the relations between the Church and its contemporaries. And this was going to be done through “dialogue”, a word which had never appeared in the doctrine of the Church and which will appear 28 times in the conciliar documents. On the death of Pope Roncalli, Paul VI assumed his spirit. And during his first conciliar session, he did not need words to get his message across: it was enough for him to remove the tiara and the gestational chair, symbols of the Pontiff’s temporal power.
The Council, as Paul VI himself said, was called to be “a sunny day for the Church”: its adaptation to the world in an era of change like that of the sixties. But nothing would happen according to this optimism. From the start, when two progressive cardinals – Liénart and Frings – asked to redo the working commissions planned by the curia, the shock was underway. Two sides quickly form. On the one hand, the conciliar fathers of the countries where the so-called new theology had been forged, Belgium and Holland, Austria and Germany, a “European Alliance” with provosts such as König and Bea, Suenens and Alfink, in addition to the aforementioned Frings and Liénart. On the other, the International Group of Fathers, which brought together 250 conservative prelates, from the former papal Siri to the future schismatic Marcel Lefebvre. The Churches of Africa and Asia, dependent on rich Churches like Germany, would align themselves with the “European Alliance”. Thus, from the beginning, the Council would experience a clearly progressive impregnation, with theologians like Karl Rahner at the forefront.
Although the more conservative conciliar fathers took a little longer to articulate their response, it arrived, so that in the end most of the 16 conciliar documents, such as the constitution Gaudium et spes— They would have to be negotiated more than expected. This is perhaps why, in the years following its end, two points of view have been expressed on the conciliar appointment: one according to which the Church has not developed the full potential of the Council and a sensitivity for which it has gone too far. In fact, what is truly characteristic is the way in which those who promoted the changes then sought to adjust them. Henri de Lubac, a fashionable theologian at the time, ended up speaking out against “a new Church, different from that of Christ, which was being established”. And two progressive theologians of the Council, Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, would deplore, now converted to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, that “real heresies have been committed” and that “the results of the Council seem cruelly opposed to everyone’s expectations”.
The first to accuse him was Paul VI: far from what was expected, the post-Council was “a day full of clouds, of storm”. This responded to a tradition which, since the Council of Jerusalem in the first century, seems to guarantee that there is no Council without post-conciliar trauma. Paul VI goes so far as to say, in famously dramatic terms, that “the smoke of Satan” has crept “into the temple of God.” The cause of your anxiety? 14,000 abandonments, counting only priests, between 1964 and 1971. Doctrinal rebellions like the Dutch Catechism of 1966 or this “preferential option for the poor” which, agreed at the meeting of Latin American bishops in Medellín in 1968, opened the way to liberation theology. And especially the reactions contrary to the liturgical reform. If intellectuals of all origins, from Jorge Luis Borges to Nancy Mitford, had asked the Pope to maintain the usual Mass, the new Mass was not only going to mean goodbye to Latin: the Holy See suffered to see how, suddenly, the batteries seized the presbyteries and there was even talk of priests who consecrated with donettes. Any progressive wave was stopped when, shortly after the Council, Paul VI, against the will of a good part of the episcopate, established the doctrine on contraception in the encyclical. Human life.
To appreciate the way in which the Council permeated the life of the Church, we might ask how we could today renounce its ecumenical openness to Christian unity, its express denunciation of anti-Semitism or its commitment to religious freedom. A commitment and a freedom which ended up energizing relations between Paul VI and Franco and making the regime literally more papist than the Pope. Also under the tutelage of the Pontiff, the Church, which would support the transition with Tarancón, did not postulate an Italian-style Christian democracy in Spain.
This was not going to please John Paul II, who, moreover, could not inherit the Council in favor of the inventory. If, on the one hand, he intervened with the Jesuits progressiveon the other he excommunicated Lefebvre for traditional. And if he named left-wing figures as cardinals, he would try to alleviate the crisis in religious life with new movements: Opus Dei, Legionnaires. With Benedict and Francis, liturgical struggles over the permissiveness of the traditional Mass returned. And although Benedict himself wanted to frame Vatican II within a “hermeneutic of reform” respectful of the traditional teachings of the Church, only Leo XIV seems to have calmed the intra-Catholic culture wars. He is the first pope, by age, not to be marked by the dialectic unleashed in the sixties. And, as British Catholic journalist Dan Hitchens writes, the fact that the future of liberal ideas around the world is unclear distracts the debate from what to do about them.
Sixty years after the Council, the Church experienced its greatest crisis of credibility due to abuse. It is a Church which, in Europe, has more progressive elites than faithful and clergy. And it is gaining demographic and moral weight in Africa or Asia. Perhaps it is “a handful of losers,” as Paul VI predicted, or “the rest of Israel,” in the words of Benedict XVI, but it has managed to survive, as German convert Martin Mosebach points out, after “having spent centuries without being completely up to date.” And today it is surprising that, suddenly, grandchildren are starting to be interested – in Catholic initiatives like Hakuna or Faitá – in the ancient religion of their grandparents.
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