Fifty years ago this October, the event of the century for the church began. Vatican II, following upon Vatican I of 1869-70, opened the windows under the leadership of good Pope John. His stated hope was that he and the council fathers, all 2,400 of them, would bring aggiornamento, or updating, to the community of Christ’s followers called Catholics. He had announced his grand plan in January of 1959, and church members and media alike buzzed with expectancy from the start. St. Peter’s Basilica would house the epic effort, only the 21st ecumenical council in our history. The medium of exchange would be spoken and written Latin.
Teaching theology across town at the Gregorian University was Canadian Jesuit Father Bernard Lonergan. Well respected in his field, he side-stepped many of the projections about the meeting as it got under way. It gathered each autumn until 1965, before the world’s attention. While media and other commentators opined about things such as married priests, reviving the permanent diaconate, introducing the vernacular into worship, marriage law reform and many such controversies, he watched the hand of 19th century Anglican convert, Cardinal John Henry Newman, govern perhaps the greatest change as the council fathers recognized the New Testament teaching that the people are the church.
We the people live in history. We are used to, if not totally accepting of, changes that occur in the secular areas of economics, society, diplomacy, not to mention what two recent world wars had done to life. Lonergan drew attention to two greatly differing world views becoming evident in and outside the church: the classicist and the historicist.
The classicist way of viewing the church and the world sees reality as composed of unchanging, static values that have purposely remained fixed in place. It draws upon Plato’s conception of the world that he elucidated in “The Cave.” According to this, we humans are fated to sit, chained for all our lives, facing the wall of a cave. All we see is what is ahead of us: shadows cast upon the wall by real bodies out of our view, at the cave’s mouth. Our limited experiences compared to the real world of ideas which he postulated are weak as dreams compared to what really exists: unchanging realities.
Concepts like “human nature” and “ethical behavior” and “natural law” rested on eternal foundation, accurate and true, and so could not be changed. To attempt to improve upon or otherwise adjust them would defy the Creator. Lesser things such as language or seasons could change, but not the bedrock concepts. God does not change. God is immutable.
But the historicist way of viewing reality sees a dynamic evolution and development, notions that thinkers like Marx, Darwin and Freud had propounded. Those names alone would caution students of philosophy because of some of the changes they advanced. Could people forcibly redistribute wealth in the name of fairness? Could humans evolve from simian life forms in spite of Genesis? Could strong psychosexual energy be posited in humans, made in God’s image?
The study of comparative religions convincingly showed worldwide throughout history that religions along with their cultural matrixes have changed, ours included. We Catholics now outlaw slavery: Pope John Paul II called it intrinsically evil. But there was a time fairly recently when we saw it as moral if distasteful.
We no longer burn heretics at the stake. But we used to, with full ecclesiastical approval. We once prohibited taking even a half percent of interest on a loan, until the rise of capitalism and its argument that the lender should be compensated for risking not getting full or timely return. Even the ancient Israelites noticed that early in their history as a people, monogamy replaced polygamy. Jacob, also called Israel, legitimately had 13 sons and a daughter by four women.
The discerning mind concludes that church leaders, whether at Vatican II or long before, would be bound to maintain central tenets of the faith while retiring lesser practices as no longer serving the church. Remember how our present pope retired the theologians’ postulation of Limbo? What is basic stays. What only seems basic can be retired. Here was the basis for most of the liberal-conservative friction during and since Vatican II: traditionalists object to the lessening of the importance of Latin in the Mass, thinking that this is what united Catholics worldwide. But councils have participants from everywhere, even places where they had never used Latin at their Masses.
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