Implementing Vatican II

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - October 21, 2005

This December we mark the 40th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council. We begin this week in the Anchor a series of articles meant not only to bring to life the persons and events that characterized the propitious days of the Council, but to assess its ongoing legacy.

Vatican II had a dramatic impact both within the Church and in the way the Church related to those outside of it. Internally, the Council fathers called for a more conscious and active participation of the laity not only in the liturgy, but in the life and mission of the Church. In a succession of documents, they clearly called all Catholics to holiness, to the assimilation and proclamation of the Word of God, and to total self-discovery in imitation of the self-giving love of Christ, who fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear. They summoned bishops, priests, religious and laity, each according to their state of life, to follow Christ's priestly, prophetic and shepherdly example in the concrete circumstances of their daily lives. They deeply enriched the understanding of the Church as a communion, calling the people of God to become, with God's help, a sacrament of salvation — an efficacious sign of Christ's saving work in the midst of the world.

Outside the Church, the Council fathers made dramatic and bold overtures, flowing from the Church's faith, toward all people of good will. They invited the world to enter into dialogue with the Church for the common good. They launched a new push toward the restoration of unity among all the disciples of Jesus Christ. They praised the Jewish people as the people of the Covenant to whom God will always remain faithful. They lauded the seeds of the word that can be found in other religions and affirmed that the Church accepts whatever is good and true in the cultures based on them. They called on all to respect the right to religious freedom, which is based on the dignity of the human person and the inviolability of his conscience. They even charted the path for the proclamation of the Gospel in the new and ever improving means of social communications media.

Despite all of these achievements, however, the hopes engendered by the Council have gone largely unfulfilled. When Blessed Pope John XXIII convoked Vatican II, the stated aim was to bring about a new birth in the Church's life and mission. He wanted the Council to be a "dawn" which would be "a forerunner of most splendid light."

The fact that these expectations were not met can be seen empirically. Despite the liturgical reforms, Catholic participation in all seven sacraments is way down. The Council called for a deeper penetration of Sacred Scripture, but ninety-seven percent of practicing Catholics admit, according to a recent study, that the only Scripture they encounter each week is at Sunday Mass. The efforts to proclaim the Gospel in a new idiom to the modern world have been shouted down by an increasingly militant and imposing secularism. The universal call to holiness has been rejected by many Catholics who, without blushing, have flaunted the teachings of the Church on sexual morality while still deeming themselves Catholics in good standing. The greatest statistical documentation of the failed hopes of the Council can be seen in "Christian Europe," where the birth rate among Christians is below replacement level and one out of every three babies is now Muslim.

The reason why the high hopes of the Council have been met with such negative results is not because the Council has failed. It is because, for the most part, the Council has not yet been tried and implemented. In the days after the Council, as Pope Benedict said in a pre-papal interview, "the impression increasingly gained hold that reform consisted in simply jettisoning ballast, in making it easier for ourselves. Reform thus seemed really to consist, not in a deeper rooting of the faith, but in any kind of dilution of the faith." People viewed the Council not as a call to greater discipleship, not as a means to "deny yourself, pick up your Cross and follow" Christ, but to affirm oneself, throw away the cross, and go about, more or less, as one pleased.

Benedict began his pontificate by saying, "As I start in the service that is proper to the Successor of Peter, I wish to affirm with force my decided will to pursue the commitment to enact Vatican Council II, in the wake of my predecessors and in faithful continuity with the millennia-old tradition of the Church. … With the passing of time, the conciliar documents have not lost their timeliness; their teachings have shown themselves to be especially pertinent to the new exigencies of the Church and the present globalized society."

The best way we could mark this anniversary is to join Benedict by making it our decided will to enact Vatican II along with him. The first step in doing that would be to read again — or for the first time — the pertinent and timeless conciliar documents, which are the Council's true treasure.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.