Concilium

2005 / 4

Vatican II: A Forgotten Future

Introduction

Alberto Melloni and Christoph Theobald

Could things have been different? Perhaps not: they have certainly not been different in the aftermath of the great councils, and so in the aftermath of a council as great as Vatican II the jury remains out, still debating within and between generations. Councils — and so 'the Council' — are the touchstone: for the experience of faith, for theological reflection, for pastoral ministry, including the Petrine ministry. After Vatican II it is impossible to be — nor would anyone want to be — what we are without taking a clear stand on what the late Pope John Paul II called 'the grace event of the twentieth century' and which in his testament appears as the horizon opened on to the future of a new generation, one that neither celebrates nor remembers the Council but can still only discern its own sensibilities in the light of a hope that is wholly and solely post-conciliar.

For this generation too, so the late Pope's testamentary notes said, the Council will offer a future — even if it is a future that seems to be quickly forgotten: as early as 1965 the young theologian Joseph Ratzinger, a new member of the Board of Concilium, to be elected to the papal throne precisely forty years after the birth of this 'conciliar endeavour, was stigmatizing simplifications of Vatican II, which almost made it out to be the threshold of a new 'You have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . .'; then less than ten years later Paul VI reacted by breaking communion with the noisy Lefebvre minority, rather than accepting any relativization of the obedience due to Vatican II. Today the tendencies, tensions, and vital concerns that move the planetary body of the Church are not these: the tumultuous phase of the Council's reception no longer recognizes the polemical issues of the first two post-conciliar decades; and the phobic obsession that seeks at all costs to 'fix' Vatican II in an absolute and unchangeable continuity (historical irony: this was just the objection the Protestants made to Trent) resurfaces wherever the indecipherable logical processes of ecclesiastical power try to find the casus belli for an improbable season of historical-theological revisionism.

Nevertheless, the new generation — the one that comes after John Paul II, the last Bishop of Rome to have been a Council Father — runs the risk of seeing the future that belongs to it go up in smoke: the many voices pointing to Vatican II and the fortieth anniversary of its closure as the subject-matter for Benedict XVI's first encyclical seem to support this concern, to which this volume of Concilium offers its own choral and polyphonic response.

It has seemed necessary to us to venture into the tangle of the historicization of Vatican II: the work of elaborating a 'History of the Council', to which Cardinal Tucci in La Civiltà Cattolica and Fr Vallin in Recherches de sciences religieuses have devoted impassioned critical comments, has in fact opened up a route that remains essential if the hermeneutic of the Council is not to be allowed to slip into a virtual whirl of fragments, out-of-context quotations, glosses, and case-histories, at the end of which the Council can be accused of anything — including the 'fact' that, by 'only' deploring and not condemning anti-Semitism, it sanctioned its legitimization, to the advantage of those who, lurking in whatever corner of the ecclesial framework, love to flirt with minimizing the Council for the sake of their own rehabilitation.

In second place, it appeared essential to solicit reflection on the ways in which the balances of Christian experience intuited by Vatican II have been re-assessed: this is a reflection that in recent years has seen the emergence of many contributions as the anniversaries of the Council's Constitutions and Decrees have called for annotations and analyses — and which here, far from any pretence at completeness, is addressed only in reference to certain sensitive, delicate, or ambiguous issues.

Finally, there is the problem of discussions on hermeneutics and on the basic theological options for Christian experience and the life of faith: because if the Council was truly an event, then it would really be unpardonable arrogance to suppose that what Catholics (and not only they) have seen in the light of that event does not constitute an essential element in situating Vatican II in its true place in the development of the life of the Church.

Two profound and different voices —- one of a theologian bishop of the post-conciliar era and the other of a pastor who was an observer at Vatican II — close this volume, almost as an invitation to each one of us to formulate and find our own position in relation to the event that as such is history and therefore living tissue of the way in which the Church becomes itself.

Translated by Paul Burns