Originally published in The Tablet - International Catholic Weekly Newspaper
There’s an old joke about Cardinal
Otaviani, one of the leading conservatives at Vatican Two. Getting into a taxi after
one of the sessions of the Council the driver asked him, “Dove?” (where). His reply ‘Trento!’ As we mark the 50th anniversary of
its beginning, the question ‘Where?’ seems just as urgent now as then. Not only
in theology, but also in discipline and liturgy there is deep struggle within
the Church over the meaning, legacy and future of the Council. For many, its
great promise seems to have been lost in a Church preoccupied by secularism,
ill at ease and mistrustful of contemporary culture and worried about its own
diminishing authority.
We have become accustomed to disputes about
the way in which we understand the event of the Council. Was it one of ‘rupture’ which licenced a
progressive liberalising of the Church’s life and teaching, a perpetual
aggiornamento, or one of continuity?
Continuity here being used to promote a restorationist agenda intent on
asserting hierarchical and priestly authority which it feels has been
undermined in the reforms of the Council and content to live within a smaller,
‘purer’ but more coherent and obedient
Church. The ‘resident alien’ in a confused and dangerous world holding out for
the unchanging verities of Catholic faith and life. Interestingly, and
erroneously, both claim that the failure to follow one way or the other lies at
the heart of the abuse scandals that have so deeply wounded the interior life
of the Church and its public credibility.
In his last interview Cardinal Martini
spoke about the Church weariness.To some extent the cause lies in the struggles
about how to understand the Council. [Of course there have been a number of
wrong turns and cul-de-sacs as well as glorious and lasting achievements since
in the Church’s life since 1962. Like Israel in the desert, the miracle of
liberation can be forgotten in the dust of the journey. There is the temptation
to look back to the idealised past of an Egyptian captivity, lamenting the loss
of an apparent security, ‘at least we knew who we were then’. But the Church
does not journey alone; it also journeys with the culture in which it lives. There
is no doubt that even fifty years ago many of the Church’s positions on personal
and social morality would have found wide acceptance but culture itself is
changing. It has had its own crises – positive developments as well as
confusions. These will determine its
capacity to hear and understand the Church. Has society become more hostile or
simply more doubtful about any answer to the human situation and the enigma of
history? Horrors that we might have hoped ended in the last century are very
much with us and many of our social and economic systems appear broken. Answers look increasingly jaded and any moral
vision or political imagination is reduced to the transitory moment of a
vacuous soundbite. Is it that the Church is weaker now because of this culture
or is it that we can no longer disguise our ownwounded
institutional fragility?]
As we enter the ‘year of faith’ and begin
the synod on the new evangelisation, we need to ask if we have lost the
creative capacity to find a new language and the new intellectual confidence to
speak to contemporary society. These
questions, too, were very much present in the mind of the Council Fathers at
its beginning. They were certainly in the mind of the Pope who summoned it. In
his opening address Pope John XXIII signalled a new attentiveness and
disposition towards the world. He understood that the Church, even when faced
with hostility or incomprehension, achieves more when it prefers to speak with “the
balm of mercy” rather than “the arm of severity.” He also dismissed the
pessimism which underwrote the Church’s sense of being embattled, “We feel that
We must disagree with these prophets of doom, who are always forecasting worse
disasters, as though the end of the world were at hand. Present indications are
that the human family is on the threshold of a new era. We must recognize here
the hand of God, who, as the years roll by, is ever directing men's efforts,
whether they realize it or not, towards the fulfillment of the inscrutable
designs of His providence, wisely arranging everything, even adverse human
fortune, for the Church's good.” A
Church which feels itself embattled and believes it needs to resurrect all the
symbols of its past glory in order to bolster its authority, is a Church which
is living a dangerous illusion. It will have no use for Johannine generosity.
It will fail to see that such generosity springs not from naïvity or weakness,
but from a deep and serene confidence in the triumph of Christ which is quite
different from the triumphalism of an institution. So, how is the Church to
engage contemporary society without ‘going native’ or becoming an embattled and
suspicious religious sect? In the
‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’ (Gaudium et Spes), I
think the Council develops a remarkable answer.
Gaudium et Spes was the fruit of a long
and arduous process but it can be seen as the synthesis of the Council’s
theological perception of the Church and its mission. Still the source of some controversy,
it can be easily misread. It falls into two parts: the first establishes the
theological vision and principles which inform the treatment of the issues
addressed in the second. It would be easy for pragmatists or those with
particular social agendas to ignore the first part and concentrate on the
second. It deals with the creation of a genuinely human culture, the dignity of
marriage and family life, economic development in the service of humanity, political
and public life and the urgent need to develop the structures which support and
sustain peace. Today, much of it will
sound overly optimistic, theoretically weak or underdeveloped. But Gaudium et Spes does not intend to
provide either definitive analyses or solutions to these questions it singles
out, instead it indicates a Catholic orientation and approach. In this sense,
the Constitution is unique. It does not mark an end but a beginning. Indeed, in all of the fields which it
discusses, together with new questions which have emerged since 1962, the
Church’s thinking and teaching has been in continuous developed. One can see
this not only in the work of theologians but in the teaching of the Popes and
the national episcopal conferences over fifty years. This is especially marked
with John Paul II whose full intellectual legacy the Church has yet to absorb. It
is a witness to the fact that the Council allowed us to be a responsive and
learning Church not an embattled one. Yet in all of these areas, the principles
are derived largely from part one of the Constitution. Here I believe the Church
can still find a theological and spiritual vision which continues to be a resource,
a task and an inspiration for a weary Church today.
There are at least three aspects of the theological vision in part one that are
important for us. Undoubtedly, the first is its Christ-centred humanism. Christ
is the lens through which the mystery of the human person may be grasped and
the darkness of history illuminated. In other words, the Council places Christ
at the centre and refuses to read humanity, society, history or culture apart
from him. This may seem rather obvious and expected but it represents a magnificent
theological reclamation of the secular. It also places the Church at the heart
of humanity and the creation of a truly human and humane culture. Many of the tensions with contemporary
culture that engage the Church often have at their centre a defence of this vision
of the human person, human dignity and ultimate purpose. In the philosophies and political systems of a
secular society, Gaudium et Spes sees
something that risks a reductive and instrumental understanding of the human
person. Only when we are prepared to
acknowledge that human beings have also an intrinsic spiritual reality –
however that may be expressed – can we do justice to human flourishing. Where this is not acknowledged or honoured
then there can be no lasting progress, only a deep impoverishment and
disfiguring of human life. If society is truly to serve human flourishing then
it must also find those values and structures which do justice to the totality
of the human life: Human nature is so lofty that we need God to reach it.
The Christian humanism of Gaudium et Spes reclaims the secular as
the proper realm of God’s dynamic and salvific love; it reorients the Church to
the world and vice versa. It outlines a theology of ‘graced immanence’ so that
the Church’s presence in the world is not only integral to the Church’s own
mission but to good that both long for. With astonishing depth and clarity,
Vatican II grasped that in living out of the mystery of Christ’s own person,
the Church can only have an unquenchable love for humanity. It is its defender
and servant. (GS 3)
The second aspect takes up the central
themes of the secular Enlightenment, especially freedom. It shows how only in Christ
can the emancipatory desire at the heart of the Enlightenment be realised. In
sense, Gaudium et Spes (along with other texts) begins to outline what a
Catholic Enlightenment or a Catholic modernity might look like. It thinks
through the great positive values and insights of ‘secular’ Enlightenment,
deepens and integrates them into the fullness of the Catholic metaphysical and
sacramental vision. Unlike other previous attempts – Catholic and Protestant -
it in no way comprises Christian truth or sacrifices it on the altar of
relevance to the cultural zeitgeist. Rather, it integrates secular humanism
into the Incarnation and its hope in the emancipatory progress of history into
the dynamic of salvation history.
The strategy of Gaudium et Spes is to
reject the atheistic construction of the secular. It out thinks it by showing
not only that it relies on a false notion of the human person, but actually
works with a false notion of itself. The secular does not have to be a ‘God-free’
zone in order to be secular. In fact, it cannot banish or limit the range of
God’s action. Yes, there is a legitimate separation of the Church and the State
but there are no moral, intellectual, or geographical borderswhichcan deny
grace its citizenship in the world. God is in the world he created and at home
with us whether we acknowledge him or not. To accept the secular narrative
would not only limit the mission of the Church but imprison the human spirit in
a self-constructed cage masquerading as liberty. Gaudium et Spes rightly perceives that the greatest danger to
Christianity is to internalise the secular narrative, huddle in the space of
the private and resign itself as a curiosity lingering with diminishing
relevance on the margins of a vibrant
secular world.
Taking up the modern concern with freedom, Gaudium et Spes asks what is the purpose
of human freedom and agency? This is
surely a critical issue for political as well as moral and social life in every
age but especially our own. It is precisely here, in the drama of our freedom,
that we need to know what our vocation is. That freedom is not a way of
claiming our self-grounding, self-sufficiency – our absolute autonomy – as if
in this only do we have our dignity. Rather our dignity and true value lies
precisely in the recognition freedom calls us beyond our selves to choose and
create in justice and in love for others. For freedom opens us to relationship,
to the ‘we’ – so often stressed by Pope
Benedict – which is the basis of society and the gratuity without which human
flourishing could not be sustained. (GS 23-32) It is no accident, therefore,
that in the cultural and intellectual demi monde of the postmodern, among the
strongest defenders of the values of modernity - responsible freedom, being,
beauty, truth, reason, solidarity, etc. - have been John Paul II and Benedict
XVI.
The third dimension has been less appreciated in recent years but is no less
important. Even though the secular may
still continue to misunderstand itself, believing that it can only exist as
‘secular’ by denying God’s action in it, the Church does not have this option.
If we have truly understood the meaning of God who is redemptively immanent in every
aspect of the human aspiration to seek and realise what is good, then we must also
recognise that precisely out of this secular world God can and does speak too.
And, in obedience to the Word that it serves, the Church must listen and learn
from the good the Spirit brings to light there as well. Dialogue is only the
servant of truth when it is two way. In recognising this the Church celebrates
God’s reality, it does not compromise
its own.
In Gaudium
et Spes we see the first gestures of this discerning attentiveness to the
‘signs of the times.’ (GS, 44) Even through the ‘secular’ world God shapes his Church
and purifies it.. It was the ‘secular’ world that helped the Church address the
wound of abuse. It is the same secular world that also needs the Church; it
does not need another institution which pays lip service to the Values of
dignity, justice, transparency, truth and compassion. It needs a Church which
lives these, and in living them manifests the genuine freedom that faith
confers.
Finally, throughout the foundational texts
of the Council but especially in Gaudium
et Spes, one finds the leitmotif of a Church that understands its own
poverty and the evangelical beauty of the humility in which Christ calls it to
service of the world. Opening the
Council Pope John expressed this hope. As we mark its anniversary can we also
renew it? “The great desire, therefore, of the Catholic Church in raising aloft
at this Council the torch of truth, is to show herself to the world as the
loving mother of all mankind; gentle, patient, and full of tenderness and
sympathy for her separated children. To the human race oppressed by so many
difficulties, she says what Peter once said to the poor man who begged alms:
"Silver and gold I have none; but what I have, that I give thee. In the
name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, arise and walk." In other words it is
not corruptible wealth, nor the promise of earthly happiness, that the Church
offers the world today, but the gifts of divine grace which, since they raise
men up to the dignity of being sons of God, are powerful assistance and support
for the living of a more fully human life”.
James Hanvey SJ
Lo Schiavo Chair in Catholic Social Thought
University of San Francisco.
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/issue/1000334
