A Conciliar Revolution? (A.M.W.)

The Second Vatican Council was the 20th century’s most significant spiritual event, which expressed a genuine need for the renewal of the Church. However, its intention was not an ahistoric reconstruction, carried out without taking into account the long and diverse history of the Church, both glorious and complicated. Instead, the Council was to begin a pastoral operation, conceived of as preaching the Gospel to modern man.
This objective was reflected already in the concept of aggiornamento, so willingly adopted by Blessed John XXIII, the Pope who astonished the Church and the world by successfully convening the Council. Yet understanding aggiornamento as merely adaptation to the demands of modernity would be much too shallow, as it might denote simply a series of technical solutions, such as those constantly invented and applied in any institution for the sake of its efficient and smooth functioning. Indeed, the concept of aggiornamento has a deeper sense that brings to the foreground the belief in the inexhaustible novelty of Christianity. The reason why the Church changes throughout history and why she undertakes reform is precisely her not being a merely historical reality: the genuine essence of the Church is her being the sacrament of salvation that reaches the human being in culturally and historically determined forms. It is not groundless to perceive the Second Vatican Council in terms of a leap, a breakthrough or a «spiritual revolution.» Descriptions of this kind attempt to grasp the visible post-Conciliar transformations in the Church as regards her relations with Christians of other denominations, with non-Christian religions, in particular with Judaism (which is determined by the historical identity of Christianity), and with atheistic culture, its main currents being inspired by the ideas of the Age of Reason. The Council replaced the attitude of condemnation on the part of the Church with that of dialogue.
Being in dialogue presupposes diversity and encounter. Although the attitude of dialogue already had precedents, it was essentially a new experience which the Council «presented» as a gift to the Church and humanity. Yet this experience turned out difficult and was subject to various trials, causing enthusiasm as well as discouragement and disappointment. The anthropological depth of the concept of dialogue still needs to be explored. By initiating the practice of wide-open dialogue, the Council gave the Church the task to elaborate the 456 Christian philosophy of dialogue, just like the Councils of the first millennium inspired Christian thinkers to develop the philosophy of person. In fact, the philosophy of person and the philosophy of dialogue are interdependent and complementary, being like the two sides of a coin.
In his speech given on the Vatican Radio during the third Session of the Council, Archbishop Karol Wojtyła emphasized the relation of the category of dialogue to that of the person and the person’s dignity. He said: “We can see why the matter of the dignity of the human person constitutes one of the fundamental elements of the thought of the Council. It is certainly an ecumenical element: an element common for all people of truly good will. Unless this element is grasped one cannot speak of true progress.” While Christianity cannot be reduced to humanism, it is its humanistic content, a consequence of the Incarnation of God, that determines its universalism, expressed in the ecumenical pursuits seeking community with all the human beings in the name of the truth about man and for the sake of his well-being. By evoking humanism, the Council referred to the attitude characteristic of modernity, which praises the greatness of the human being, but it simultaneously remained faithful to the truth of the message of Christianity.
Proclaiming the principle or religious freedom by the Council was tantamount to breaking with the earlier practices of the Church conditioned by her past. The Church, which was first recognized as an institution by Emperor Constantine, struggled to secure her freedom in the modern times responding to the aspirations to hegemony voiced by Protestant and then secular states. Finally, she had to defend herself from radically atheistic totalitarian regimes. Thus, throughout history, the situation of the Church was predominantly that of inevitable confrontation. The change of the philosophy of the Church in this respect, which came with the Second Vatican Council, did not, however, result from her weakness or from her concessions to the spirit of the time. Rather, it was the response of the Church to her better grasp of the Christian truth about the dignity of the human being and to its implication: the freedom of conscience. Thus, one might say that the aspirations of the modern world, despite their anti-Christian sentiment, were coherent with Christian anthropology.
Although numerous Conciliar Fathers were representatives of the neoscholastic variety of Thomism, the Council did not choose any particular, already existing philosophy as the foundation of its teaching. Instead, the Conciliar Fathers, as it were, made room for a new philosophical synthesis that would be compatible with the heritage of the Catholic thought and simultaneously open to the questions which had appeared throughout modernity and determined its philosophical horizons.
A research project with a goal to show the impact of the latest councils on the development of Catholic philosophy would be an interesting task to undertake. A project of this kind was attempted already during the Second Vatican Council by Augusto Del Noce, who, in his dissertation on the philosophy of Descartes, 1 Quoted after http://www.angelfire.com/ca4/hyoomik/lublin/ZNAK031.TXT. See also Karol W o j t y ł a, Człowiek jest osobą, in: Karol Wojtyła, Osoba i czyn oraz inne studia antropologiczne (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Towarzystwa Naukowego KUL 1994), 420. Abstracts 457 argued that the proper context of its interpretation is the Catholic Reformation introduced by the Council of Trent . According to Del Noce, „modern philosophy is born neither from the Reformation nor from the Renaissance, but from the Catholic Reformation.” Modern philosophy is the response to the crisis caused by the tension between the naturalistic humanism of the Renaissance, continued by libertinism, and the antihumanism of the Reformation, which called into question the positive sense of the human nature. Yet the thought of Descartes turns out an inadequate answer to the scale of the problem: due to its point of departure, which lies in the intellectual culture of its times, it is informed with ambivalence which affects the further development of modern philosophy. Del Noce stresses that one may not consider modern philosophy as the way to overcome the crisis, since this philosophy itself is its product and manifestation.
The ambivalence inherent in Cartesian philosophy consists in the fact that it combines two opposite currents of thought, one of them leading towards rationalism, which arbitrarily negates the supernatural and advocates atheism, while the other, favoring ontologism, reveals man’s existential dependence on God and is open to philosophy pursued in the context of faith. Thus one of the main currents of modern philosophy leads from Descartes to Hegel, and the other from Descartes to Rosmini. Modernity cannot be then interpreted as an intellectual process leading definitely towards immanentism and secularization; rather, it needs to be interpreted as a controversy over man. Needless to say, this controversy stigmatized the relations between the Church and the world in the time after the Council of Trent.
Christian anthropology was capable of renewal due to its immersion in the truth of the Revelation on the one hand, and its rigorous concern for rationality on the other. The problem discerned by Descartes, yet one he formulated wrongly, is actually identical with the one the Second Vatican Council faced once it decided to follow the way of dialogue with the modern world. Briefly speaking, it was the problem of how to understand Christian humanism. This issue comes to light already in the anthropological presuppositions of the Constitution Gaudium et Spes, which was the crown of the entire work of the Council. As the document says, there are two ways of knowing man, provided, respectively, by the Revelation and by experience, the latter encompassing history and social life, both of them being subject to change.
Disregarding one of these elements in the vision of man, as well as considering either of them in isolation from the other, is a methodological fallacy, since it «lessens» the truth about the human being by depriving it of one of its essential aspects. From the point of view of the Church, it would be also a pastoral error. Two Catholic philosophers, Jacques Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand, who otherwise welcomed the reforms initiated by the Council and became important voices in the post-Conciliar debate, tackled this problem in their works, in 2 See Augusto D e l N o c e, Riforma cattolica e fi losofi a moderna, vol. I: Cartesio (Bologna: Il Mulino 1965). 3 D e l N o c e, Riforma cattolica e filosofia moderna, vol. I: Cartesio, 387. 4 See D e l N o c e, Riforma cattolica e fi losofi a moderna, vol. I: Cartesio, 387f. Abstracts 458 which they expressed a painful disappointment with the implementation of the teaching of the Council that was unfaithful to the attitude of dialogue with the world and abandoned this dialogue for the sake of a one-sided listening to the world and imitating it.5 The root of this error was a hasty identification of the progress in the world with the growth of the Kingdom of God, which obscured the supernatural dimension of Christian humanism. This attitude, instead of causing a renewal of Christianity, resulted in its corruption.
Another issue that must not be overlooked is the hermeneutic of the Council. In fact, it provides the key to resolving the controversy about the proper reception of its teaching. This problem is all the more important since the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council has prompted the question about its fruitage, and inspired Pope Benedict XVI to declare 2012 a Year of Faith.
The “hermeneutic of reform” and the “hermeneutic of rupture” start with two different visions of the sense of the changes introduced by the Council. The “hermeneutic of reform” does not reject the tradition of the Church or consider it merely an element of her past. Consequently, it perceives the post-Conciliar changes precisely in the context of the tradition, as a result of a «live» message received today and valid for the future of the Church. The “hermeneutic of rupture,” in turn, demonstrates an absolute severance from the past and privileges the present moment the way all philosophies of progress do. Among the consequences of such an intellectual attitude were the revolutions the world experienced in modern times. Thus the question of the proper hermeneutic of the Council reaches an even deeper level of reflection, where the problem is no longer the approach to the post-Conciliar changes as such or stating whether they were a rupture or a continuation by way of reform. What we tackle here is a more fundamental question, namely, the one of the relation between the Divine and the human factors in the Church. While the main theological debate of the time of the Council of Trent was that about the relation between grace and nature, the Second Vatican Council, in particular due to the conflicting interpretations of this event, brings to the foreground the question of the relation between grace and history.
There is, however, another piece of evidence against understanding the Second Vatican Council as a rupture, namely, the fact that the main ideas of which the Council approved had been maturing in the Catholic thought, and is some sense also in the life of the Church, already in the pre-Conciliar period. For instance, one cannot overestimate the significance of the liturgical and biblical movements for the shaping of the teaching of the Council.
Ecumenism, in turn, had been developing since late 19th century, having begun outside the Catholic world. Yet there were also Catholics who experienced an urgent need for the unity of all Christians and made efforts to advance this cause, using the means accessible to them in their time, although they received no support from the institutional Church. Also the painful experience 5 See Jacques M a r i t a i n, Le paysan de la Garonne. Un vieux laïc s’interroge à propos du temps present (Paris: Desclée 1966); Dietrich v o n H i l d e b r a n d, The Trojan Horse in the City of God. The Catholic Crisis Explained (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press 1967). Abstracts 459 of the second world war contributed to the feeling of unity among Christians of various denominations. Numerous individual initiatives started by charismatic individuals in the Catholic milieus at that time showed that ecumenism had been already deeply rooted in their spirituality. The impulse which made it bloom came from the Council and spread onto the entire Church.
Another factor that was not without significance for preparing the Council was the new theology developed according to the principle of resourcement, or return to the sources. In the decades that preceded the Council the new theology was disapproved by the Holy Office, which was considered the guardian of the Catholic orthodoxy in the Roman Curia. In most cases, its objections against theological publications resulted from the fact that their authors did not follow the so-called Roman School of Theology, which came into being after the First Vatican Council, ended in 1870. The Second Vatican Council provided an opportunity for a creative, while not infrequently violent, debate between theologians representing the Roman School and those pursuing the new theology. Following the Conciliar tradition, John XXIII, as well as Paul VI, appointed theological experts who were supposed to work in special commissions, which enabled a deep and thorough theological debate throughout the process of drafting the Conciliar documents. The case of Yves Congar may be considered as emblematic of the change. In the 1950’s Congar was removed by the Holy Office from teaching and publishing, but throughout the Council he was among the most hard-working experts and contributed to the drafting of almost all the documents of the Council. The teaching of the Second Vatican Council turned out to be largely a fruit of the new theology. On the one hand, it drew on the sources, but on the other, it addressed new problems, unknown to the 19th century theology, as well as retrieved the forgotten elements of the tradition, purified them and articulated their modern meaning, simultaneously pointing to their presence in new contexts of the life of the Church.
The pontificate of John Paul II was the time of an advanced reception of the Council along the lines of the hermeneutic of continuity and reform. The same approach to the post-Conciliar reform can be observed throughout the pontificate of Benedict XVI. The Council definitely rejected the fear of modernity and, with it, the nostalgia for an allegedly lost golden age of the presence of the Church in the world. In this way, the idea of new evangelization was made possible, and even rendered necessary: it was to rest on a deeper experience of the Church as a communion and testimony. The Second Vatican Council had a pastoral character and the reason it was convened was not doctrinal controversies: following the intention of John XXIII, it was focused on working out the «tools» of preaching the Gospel at the present moment of history, and it turned out that that task involved also doctrinal reflection.
Right are those who stress that the pressing issues experienced at the threshold of the third millennium of Christianity radically differ from those the world was facing in the 1960’s, at the time when the Second Vatican Council was in session. However, the fact that the world is changing does not mean that its paths have diverged from those of the Church. It is indeed true that postmodernism, the dictatorship of relativism, aggressive forms of new atheism, biosociology and biotechnology which involves experimenting on human beings, globalizaAbstracts 460 tion and the new forms of economic crises are among the essential elements of the overall picture of the contemporary world, which thus seems inherently anti-Christian and anti-humanist. Yet the optimism that nourishes Christianity does not rest barely upon sociological presumptions, its essential source being faith in God, from which it also derives its rationality. It is precisely this rationality that prevents the Church from becoming alienated from the world or from adopting the attitude of indifference to the fate of the humankind.
In his book Sources of Renewal: Study on the Implementation of the Second Vatican Council, written soon after the closing of the Council, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła focused on the “Conciliar initiation,” which he considered the essence of the implementation of the Council. “Conciliar initiation” consists in shaping the consciousness and the attitudes of the faithful, so it is marked by personalism. The communion of the Church and her maturing are accomplished through people maturing in a community, through the growth of their awareness and through their lived experience of the Church. Thus “Conciliar initiation” creates the culture in which the Mystery of the Church radiates.
While the period of fifty years which has passed since the inauguration of the Council may make it seem a very distant reality, the problem of “conciliar initiation” in Poland remains open not only due to the fact that it could not be carried out fully in the communist Poland, but also – and above all – because the initiation in question is a challenge for each generation and it needs to be faced continuously.
While pondering the truth the Council succeeded in giving to the world, it is worthwhile recalling also its beauty which was grasped in the paintings made by Jean Guitton. Images of some of them, courtesy of the foundation Opera per l’Educazione Cristiana, accompany the extract from Guitton’s memoir published in the present volume. In the context of intellectual beauty, one should also see the post-Conciliar debates in Poland discussed in some of the articles. They prove that honest and genuine personal concern for the Church is a fact and that it involves asking difficult questions which are a challenge to human reason.

Translated by Dorota Chabrajska