I was excited to be asked to speak in Canton, Ohio, this week, albeit not in the way I had envisioned while playing high school football. Instead of my Hall of Fame induction, I was participating in a conference at Walsh University with the goal of assessing the impact of the Second Vatican Council, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its opening this year.
The conference brought together an international group of scholars, with participants from Rome, Istanbul, Nigeria, Israel, Canada, Belgium, Australia and Germany, as well as some of the leading universities in our country. Jewish, Muslim non-Catholic Christian, and even a self-professed agnostic-atheist reading of the council’s aftereffects provided fascinating fodder for reflection and dialogues, ones that prove the important global nature of what historian John O’Malley calls the world’s largest ever meeting.
My presentation dealt with the interpretation of the council and its relationship to the postmodern world, especially in the wake of realities such as the sex abuse crisis, a shrinking and ever-more pluralistic planet which has changed a great deal since the 1960s, developments in technology and communication patterns, and the increasingly dominant and shifting vocation of lay theologians. I argued precedence for some of the issues could be seen in Italian Renaissance history, even in the circles surrounding Michelangelo. It was humblingly quite well received.
As well as visiting with former Fordham colleagues Anne-Marie Kirmse and Peter Steinfels, I was able to sneak off to enjoy lunch downtown with my friend George Murry, current bishop of Youngstown and Camden native, where we discussed national politics and Roman architecture and future papabili. We also laughingly realized we both learned Latin from the late Paul Azores at Camden Catholic High School, decades apart (the rhythmic repetition of the conjugational “-o/-m, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt” never quite leaves one’s brain).
Regrettably, I was not yet around during the council. And the number of people who participated shrinks yearly. One speaker this week, 91-year-old Father Robert Pelton of Notre Dame, was Cardinal Suenens’ peritus (or official theological advisor) at the council and I was fascinated to hear his first-hand accounts when we were the earliest two at the bar during one of the cocktail hours — apparently pinot grigio is the elixir of life.
But why should we today care so much about these retired or dead bishops’ talks and their resultant texts from an admittedly different age?
We are an ecclesia viator, a pilgrim church on the road, and so it is interesting to ask what future generations will have to say about the council, and about us. Will it still grip people’s imaginations? Will its vision be seen as naively hopeful, ineffectively applied, or both?
Ettiene Gilson once stated, “History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.” The laboratory of the last half century has truly put the council’s optimism to the test. Disillusionment, unsettling practices brought to light, declining vocations, hierarchical hesitancy to welcome new visions and perspectives, sometimes fantastical liturgical experimentation, a sense of retrenchment and ecclesial “circling the wagons,” and constant bickering over what the council really did/said/meant have dominated the decades since Vatican II.
And yet, we continue to gather to analyze and discuss and toast the moment that was the council.
The group this week was not the first to do so, and we will assuredly not be the last. We are living in intriguing times during which church members are becoming increasingly literate and interconnected in ways heretofore unimagined. How the future will view post-conciliarism, and our achievements and failures as individuals and a community within it, remains to be seen.
The work of interpreting and appropriating Vatican II that has been done, as well as that which still awaits our contribution, gives us even greater impetus to devote ourselves intentionally and wholeheartedly to shaping the church of tomorrow today.
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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