<em>Hugh Somerville Knapman OSB takes the long view of Vatican II</em>
<br>As surely we all know by now, 11 October was the 60th anniversary of the opening of the<br>Second Vatican Council. In the context of the current synodal process through which the<br>Church is going, the anniversary has sparked renewed reflection and debate on the<br>significance of the Council and the course of its implementation. Debate seems to have<br>moved beyond the question of the rightness or otherwise of the conciliar decrees.<br>Questions remain over their implementation, certainly but some also even ask if the Council<br>was truly needful, and if so, was the 1960s the right time for it. For those of us born after the<br>Council’s sessions concluded it is a difficult task to understand the ambience and mindset of<br>the Church in the years leading up to 1962. However, there is ample contemporary testimony<br>that many saw a real problem facing the Church in the wake of the Second World War.<br>The century was not half over, and the nations of the world had already endured the trauma of<br>two world wars on a scale never before seen, a likewise traumatic global economic<br>depression, and stunningly rapid advances in science, technology, and communications both<br>for good and ill. Government, and authority more generally, came to be viewed with<br>suspicion, seen as largely responsible for the cyclonic course of the early 20 th century.<br>Society had been violently reshaped before the Church, ever more snail than hare, had had<br>time to catch up. Its rhetoric, its methods, and its invincible self-confidence were no longer<br>suited to the mood and mind of the masses. While the edifice looked sound, many detected an<br>increasingly stale air within its walls. The fortress needed to open some windows and engage<br>with the world outside afresh.<br>The rate of Mass attendance was beginning to fall. Communism especially was gaining a<br>better hearing among those who longed, often inarticulately and without direction, for a<br>global social order that would prevent the traumas of the last few decades. Many were asking,<br>as they looked back on the wreckage of a century barely half gone: where was God in all<br>this? Abetted by clerics such as the Anglican bishop John Robinson, many replaced a<br>personal God with deity as an impersonal ground of personal being.<br>Humanity turned to itself and its new material achievements to find solutions. Is it any<br>wonder that people increasingly sought to flee the cold logic of socio-political and<br>ecclesiastical dynamics and turn instead to feeling, to move from head to heart, to let the<br>sunshine in as they welcomed the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, to make love not war?<br>Reason gave way to feelings, and feelings became identified with conscience.<br>In all this we lost sight of God and saw only ourselves. There had been movements in the<br>Church that had sought to adapt to the changes on the battlefield for the human soul, such as<br>Cardinal Joseph Cardijn’s Young Christian Workers and Dorothy Day’s Christian Worker<br>Movement, though they proved unable to produce sufficiently wide effect. Another<br>movement, seeking to win Catholics back to the lively and enlivening practice of their faith in<br>communal worship, was the Liturgical Movement.<br>These movements had noble aims and sound origins, and all sought to engage with a rapidly<br>changing world in order that the gospel might touch the lives of men and women with new<br>force and effect. Alas, in time some of these movements were themselves converted to the<br>world they had originally sought to convert to Christ, a tragedy repeated even to our day.<br>Pope John XXIII saw the problem and in January 1959 proposed an ecumenical council to<br>find a solution. It would take some time to organise, and in the three and half years it took to<br>open the first session, the world had changed further still. Pope John and his council sought to recognise the signs of the times, but the times were a-changing, and quickly. Therein lies<br>what might possibly be the real fatal flaw of the council, if taken on its own terms: its decrees<br>sought to address a situation that had changed even before their ink was dry.<br>Gaudium et Spes, the council’s decree on the Church in the modern world, and its longest<br>document, was irrelevant by the end of the decade. The world was in perpetual and rapid<br>flux. As the decrees lost their relevance, their implementation moved from their fixed letter to<br>their malleable spirit, as changeable as everything else in the modern world. Invariably, the<br>spirit of the council is in the eye of the beholder, not in its decrees.<br>This might partly explain the current ecclesial phenomenon of synodality, a novelty that is<br>intended to be a “constitutive dimension of the Church”. The Church seems set to be as<br>changeable, unstable, and insecure as the world it is meant to convert. The tragedy of the<br>Council is that its documents have become irrelevant even as its “spirit” endures as a totem to<br>legitimise each and every change, and to which every knee must bow.<br>The bitter fruit is that not only has the Church’s method changed, but also her message. We<br>have become a Church of perpetual initiatives, built not on rock but shifting sands.<br>Synodality seems set to institutionalise flux as determining the life of the Church as she<br>becomes never ancient, ever new. There is a question that underlies, largely unrecognised, the<br>flux of the Church today: is her mission to serve our happiness or our holiness?<br>Does Holy Church answer to the restless human heart, or to the eternal call of Christ? The<br>answer determines both her method and message, for she cannot serve two masters.
<em><br>Dom Hugh Somerville Knapman is a monk of Douai Abbey</em>
