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The Second Vatican Council is 60 years old and although it is approximately a decade younger than me, it is not clear which of us has aged worse – the competition is close.
It is commonplace to distinguish between the Council itself and the “spirit of the Council”. But it is equally clear that there are people on both wings of the Church who are unwilling to compromise on the question of rupture or continuity.
One of the greatest difficulties for those who desire a hermeneutic of continuity was Pope Francis himself. His outright assault on the Latin Mass amounted to perhaps the most audacious and focused attempt to drive a wedge between the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Church – by severing what is arguably its most vital arterial connection: the liturgy.
Unsurprisingly, at the opposite wing of the Church, this very rupture of the liturgy represents the supreme break in ecclesial continuity. And so we find two groups, both unwilling to compromise about the significance of the Council, and both – though for entirely different reasons – pursuing an interpretation of rupture.
I am much more accustomed to the company of conservatives who feel discomfort with the Council than to those who engage in enthusiastic endorsement of it. So it was an eye-opener for me when I was invited to dinner with a French bishop and one of his leading clergy. Both are eminent men of integrity, spirituality and Catholic commitment, and I admire them deeply. We ended the evening saying and singing Compline around the parish priest’s fire.
It was therefore a surprise, as we discussed issues of common interest, to discover two areas in which they were almost aggressively unsympathetic to people and movements I respect.
The first concerned the former Bishop of Fréjus-Toulon. For years I have been hearing from people I trust what a wonderful Catholic bishop he is. He is respected for the extraordinary growth of his diocese. He has a reputation for providing a haven for sincere Catholics – ranging from charismatics at one end to supporters of the Mass of the Ages at the other.
So it was a shock to hear him described by my hosts in an entirely different light. To them, he is a bishop of indiscriminate, incoherent spirituality, who welcomes such a variety of eccentrics that the result, in their view, is anarchy.
Who was I to argue? But I was genuinely surprised at the animosity his name provoked.
I should therefore have realised at that point that when we began discussing signs of hope in the Church – specifically the numbers of young people flooding back into Catholicism – my mentioning the Chartres pilgrimage wouldn’t actually be received with the enthusiasm I expected.
When I saw their expression of disdain, I asked why. The response was direct and uncompromising:
“Because these are people whose central characteristic is the repudiation of the authority of the Council.”
I expect it is true that among the 20,000 young pilgrims who turn up for this inspiring event, there are some who believe the Council was a mistake. But I think it more likely that, having encountered the Mass of the Ages, they are bewildered that the generation before them instituted a rupture that prevents them worshipping as Catholics did for centuries.
It is not the Council itself they question, but the clergy who have invoked the Council to abolish a liturgy rooted as deeply in time as any aspect of Catholic Faith and practice.
If there is a sense of rupture among them, it was not initiated by them. Rather, it is a reaction to having the Mass – the transcendence, the awe, the miracle that challenges the hegemony of empirical secularism – repudiated by a generation of clergy who misunderstood the Council’s intentions.
For the Latin Mass was the Mass of the Fathers of the Council. Whatever greater pastoral engagement they envisaged, they did not foresee abandoning their own liturgical inheritance.
When I asked my hosts if their suspicion of the Chartres youth stemmed from the use of Latin, they replied, “Not at all.” They had no objection to celebrating the Mass of Paul VI in Latin; indeed, they thought it a charming and valuable exercise. Everything depended, rather, on the perceived connection between the Mass of the Ages and a repudiation of conciliar authority.
Whether one blames the “anti-rigid” generation – of which Pope Francis was a passionate exemplar – the abolition of the Latin Mass was an outcome the Fathers of the Council neither envisaged nor desired. It was their Mass.
Perhaps each side has mistaken who the enemy is? Perhaps it is not the Council that is the determinative factor, but people who we might call manipulators of the Council?
How might we then reassure those faithful to tradition that the Council is not the enemy of the Church? How do we invoke an alternative cause? Cardinal Ratzinger offered one: the concept of the “para-Council” or “Council of the media” – a crucial distinction and, for many of us, the most hopeful resource for resisting accusations from both poles of the emerging schism.
The background to this concept of the “para-Council” is as follows. Ratzinger foresaw the difficulties that were developing when in a 1985 report he observed:
“The real problem of the Council was not in the texts, but in the way they were understood. The real reception of the Council has not yet begun. What has predominated instead is a tendency to dissolve the Council into the present, interpreting it according to a hermeneutic of rupture.”
He added: “ … the only legitimate interpretation of the Council is that of continuity. The Council must be understood in the great tradition of the Church, not as rupture and a new beginning, but as one chapter in a single ongoing history.”
Then, as Benedict XVI, in his address to the Roman Curia on 22 December 2005, he sharpened the point:
“There is an interpretation I would call a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture; it risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church.
“The Church, both before and after the Council, is the same Church … one that grows in time and develops; it remains the same subject, the one people of God. The hermeneutic of reform or renewal in continuity is the only correct interpretation.”
How do we describe what many people call “the spirit of Vatican II”? As mentioned above, Cardinal Ratzinger preferred the term para-Council. In an interview with Vittorio Messori in 1985 he said:
“Alongside the real Council, a para-Council was born, claiming that everything in the Church must be changed, as though the Council signified a radical break with the past. The true Council does not bear such an interpretation.”
If, as most sensible commentators agree, the Council’s texts are unproblematic in terms of Catholic dogma – but have been used for divergent purposes – then any evaluation of the post-conciliar period must explain what this “para-Council” was and why it developed.
The Council took place during a period of profound cultural instability and volatility. The Fathers could not have anticipated that their work would unfold within a cultural environment increasingly hostile to the supernatural worldview they presupposed.
Two of the most obvious catalysts of this hostility were modernity and secularisation.
Perhaps it is only now, sixty years later, that we can properly assess the aggressive and corrosive nature of secular modernity’s impact on the Council’s ambitions to engage with contemporary culture.
In his closing address at Vatican II, Pope Paul VI spoke warmly to intellectuals and scientists:
“A very special greeting to you, seekers after truth … explorers of man, of the universe and of history.”
He encouraged them in their dedication to seeking truth. There was nothing naïve in imagining that the ambassadors of modernity might share the Church’s quest.
What Pope Paul could not foresee was that, sixty years later, science itself would capitulate to ideological demands – such as those driven by third-wave feminism and gender ideology – and cede biological judgment to political pressure, even over the question, “What is a woman?”
Yet the early warning signs were there. Modernity and secularism were already energetically opposed to the Catholic worldview, which integrated the supernatural with the natural.
Empiricism, reductionism, scepticism and antipathy to hierarchy created a volatile compound which, when applied to the Council’s inheritance, catalysed the chemistry of corruption that Ratzinger so perceptively identified as the para-Council.
Alongside this marginalisation of the supernatural came the cult of the “authentic self” and the rise of subjectivism in the 1960s.
So who is responsible for the para-Council that created a trajectory of rupture the Council never intended? The answer must be: inauthentically catechised clergy who, over two generations, gained sufficient influence to engineer a break.
My French bishop and his curé, I think, have the wrong target. It is not the traditionalist youth who threaten schism by questioning conciliar authority. It is clergy shaped more by the “spirit of the age” than by the Holy Spirit who have taken much of the Church hostage and used the energies unleashed by the Council to do so.
And on the Right, the same principle applies. It is not the Council – which envisaged the Mass of the Ages as a permanent liturgical centrepiece, enriched by vernacular accessibility – that has severed the liturgy from the saints. The crisis stems from a recent tranche of clergy, moulded by their culture rather than by their tradition, and unwilling or unable to resist the siren call of politicised modernity.
The good news is that this generation of sub-Catholic clergy spans only about forty years: men between forty and eighty. Those under forty have seen the decayed teeth behind the smile of the spirit of the age. Those over eighty now face death and judgment.
The present situation for the Church means that we now find ourselves compelled to speak more of the conflict between the cultural context and the Council, than of the Council’s own aspirations.
We recognise – too late perhaps – the dangers of the spirit of the age and of the seductions of egalitarian utopianism that threatened the integrity of Catholicism.
We must name the para-Council for what it was, rather than failing to distinguish it and thereby continuing to allow Catholics with differing priorities to unnecessarily attack and misunderstand one another – and when they need to, instead, be recognising and resisting our common enemy.
How does the Council look sixty years on? Stiff and numb from being held hostage for so long.
It is time to turn on the hostage-takers – to free our past from being used as a weapon against us, and reformulate what being Catholic always has been and always will be.
Long live the Magisterium.
