60 Years After Vatican II: Setting the Stage

Sometimes, I don't know why I don't think out certain things sooner. 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council; arguably, the most important event in modern religious history. I thought for my blog posts in the coming months that I would give a short synopsis and some modest insight in relation to the final documents; i.e., those that were issued in 1965. But before I do that, I thought I would offer some "big picture" thoughts about the Council documents as a whole. And, as usual, I shan't be original. My thoughts come largely from Pope Saint John XXIII, who summoned the Council, and Pope Benedict XVI, who attended the Council as a theological expert or peritus.

Pope Benedict thought that the crux of the Council lay in the hermeneutic with which one read its documents. In other words, it depended on one's lens, upon the existing perspective of the reader, in reading the 16 documents of the Second Vatican Council. For the more worldly accommodating Catholics, the documents seemed to accommodate the secular culture like no magisterial documents prior. For the more traditional Catholics, the documents seemed to affirm the perennial teachings of the Church but in contemporary language (see this important document from Pope Benedict XVI).

Building upon this insight, and perhaps most poignantly, Pope Benedict warns against reading the documents through the hermeneutic of “discontinuity and rupture” with the historic Church and her teachings. This hermeneutic can be found on “both sides of aisle,” as it were, and sees the Council as a definitive split marking the pre-Conciliar and post-Conciliar Church – either for good or ill – as if the entire history of the Church were not “the one subject of the journeying people of God.” The proper hermeneutic for interpreting the Council and its documents, Pope Benedict insists, is that of “continuity and reform.” The Council, at one and the same time, sought to be dynamic, to proclaim the teachings of the Church in a way that makes evangelization in and for the modern world more intelligible and, hopefully, effective. Yet this reform is conducted in fidelity to the historic magisterium of the entire Church.

Quoting Pope St. John XXIII’s famous speech inaugurating the Council, Pope Benedict cites his predecessor’s own way of viewing the impending Council and the teachings that would emerge from it. “[T]he Council wishes ‘to transmit the doctrine, pure and integral, without any attenuation or distortion.’ And he continues: ‘Our duty is not only to guard this precious treasure, as if we were concerned only with antiquity, but to dedicate ourselves with an earnest will and without fear to that work which our era demands of us… The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.’” “Continuity and Reform,” “Faithful and Dynamic,” are the proper ways to interpret the Council according to these Holy Fathers.

Many who are reading this post might be familiar with another paring of words to describe the Council: Ressourcement and Aggiornamento. The former means “going back to the source(s),” while the latter means “bringing up-to-date.” In the humble opinion of this author, one can easily fall into a “hermeneutic of rupture” if these twin themes – like those pairing of words mentioned by Pope Benedict – are not maintained intact and together. Ultimately, the source that the Council wished to return to is Christ Himself and the goal of evangelization is to proclaim him afresh to people in every age.