Opinion Articles

*The Second Vatican Council - Forty Years On
By Fr Richard Lennan
Richard Lennan, a priest of the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle, teaches theology at the Catholic Institute of Sydney.

Comparisons between different eras of our cultural and social history arouse endless debate: Has the technological revolution improved our quality of life or simply generated levels of stress unknown when computers were no more than the stuff of fantasy? Has the era of professional sport delivered heaven on a stick or inflicted on us displays of petulance unimaginable when people played 'for the love of the game'?

Vatican II features often when such debates focus on the life of the church: Was it more enriching to be a Catholic before the Council than after it? Did Vatican II disrupt unnecessarily the harmony of the church or did it position Catholics to face the challenges of a world in flux? Implicit in such debates is the recognition that Vatican II was certainly a watershed in the life of the church.

While the bishops at the Council were aware of the ripples they were setting into motion, they did not intend to create a 'new' church or even a 'different' church. What they sought was not a new set of structures, doctrines, or policies, but a renewal of every aspect of the church's life in the light of the Gospel. To do this, the bishops relied on the most ancient strata of the Christian Tradition.

The Council sought to renew in the contemporary church the vitality of the first Christian communities, to recapture something of that ancient passion for the Gospel and, its corollary, a commitment to building up a community of faith. For this to happen, every member of the church, as well as all of the church's structures and agencies, had to be attentive to the Word of God in Scripture.

Embedded in the documents of Vatican II is the wonderful paradox that faithfulness to what was most ancient in the church - the life of the Holy Spirit received in our common baptism - would best equip us to meet the challenges of the modern world. Only a church attentive to the Spirit could be, like Jesus, 'the light of the nations' - the phrase that, in its Latin form (Lumen gentium), the Council chose as the opening for its document on the church.

Vatican II did not reject the church of the 1940s or '50s but it did seek a broader vision of the church than that which dominated the first half of the twentieth century. To achieve this, it went back beyond a church scarred by the divisions between Catholics and Protestants, beyond a church too often at war with the modern world, to the vision of the first Christian communities, to find a model for a united and missionary church.

In those early communities, Vatican II found a model to challenge the church in every age: a church enlivened by its dependence on the Spirit; a church growing from the gifts of all of its members; a church recognising its own need for conversion; and a church open to the world around it, the world in which it was to preach the Gospel.

One of the most significant aspects of the Council was its desire to promote among Catholics a deeper commitment to being good news, a source of joy and hope for the world. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the Catholic Church had become increasingly estranged from the larger society, but the Council sought to reverse that process. Vatican II's approach to the world was neither condemnatory nor didactic. In fact, it encouraged Catholics to use the human sciences to learn more about the world and to enter into dialogue with all people of good will, irrespective of their religious or political persuasions.

The desire of the Council was to renew the church in its faith, hope, and love. It sought to retrieve the notion of the church as a pilgrim. In recent decades, life within that pilgrim church has not always embodied the neatness or comfort characteristic of the era before Vatican II. As a result, some Catholics have wanted to turn back, to close out the world, or to abandon the Tradition. We can, however, honour the contribution of Vatican II only if we continue the pilgrimage, if we remain open to the God who meets us not only in what is new, but also in what we have received from those who preceded us on the pilgrimage of faith.

* This article was published in The Newcastle Herald, 29th October 2002.