Convened 50 years ago by Pope John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council was an effort to bring the church up to date by drawing on the deepest sources of tradition for inspiration and guidance, said Catherine Clifford, a theologian and Vatican II scholar.
“We always have to go back to the sources to know our fundamental identity,” said Clifford, professor of systematic and historical theology at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Ontario.
Paraphrasing a line from the council’s Decree on Ecumenism, Clifford said that all authentic renewal of the church lies in “being faithful to ourselves.”
“It’s by going back to the Gospels,” she said.
And as Pope John XXIII understood when he convened the council in 1962, the church always needs renewing, she said. “That job didn’t end in 1965,” when the council adjourned.
Informally known as Vatican II, the council was one of the most important events in church history. Yet even many Catholics today do not fully understand the scope of the its teaching, Clifford said. The sheer volume of material produced by the council has made that a challenging task.
In “Keys to the Council: Unlocking the Teaching of Vatican II,” published in February by Liturgical Press, Clifford and her co-author, Richard Gaillardetz, explain some of the council’s major teachings.
Clifford was at Duke University recently to present a lecture on the Second Vatican Council and spoke with Faith & Leadership. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Tell us about the background and context of Vatican II.
Before Pope John XXIII, Pius XII was pope from 1939 until 1958, a time with a lot of tension in the Catholic Church. There were reform and renewal movements, and a ferment of theological reflection and pastoral life and lay engagement.
Pius XII was open to reform but cautious. Many forward-thinking Catholic theologians were silenced and disciplined. After he died, people were fatigued. They wanted a caretaker pope who would just keep things quiet, and they elected Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, then 77.
Almost immediately, as Pope John XXIII, he had this inspiration to call an ecumenical council. The First Vatican Council had met between 1869 and 1870, but was suspended because of the Franco-Prussian War and never reconvened.
Pope John felt that the church had to be more attuned to the world. Since the French Revolution, the Catholic Church had feared modern ideas. It was still traumatized by the Protestant Reformation and suspicious of other Christians. It was a kind of closed society, and John XXIII was saying that the world is not a hostile place; there are good things going on. We need to open up and bring the church up to date so that we can be engaged with modern people.
Q: You’ve written that before Vatican II the church generally considered everything outside itself as devoid of God’s grace.
There was a tendency in some theological reflection to see God’s grace at work only within the institutional Roman Catholic Church.
You see seeds of this in the early church, with people like Cyprian of Carthage, who gave us the expression “Outside the church there is no salvation.” But he was speaking to believers who chose to leave the church. Later, that expression gets applied to nonbelievers and anyone outside the institution.
But there’s also another strand in the tradition that has always recognized that God’s grace is never limited by the institutional boundaries of the church and is at work in all people who live a just life, a life of charity. They can live this life only because of God’s grace.
So there was a recognition that God is at work in mysterious ways. God’s Spirit is free to blow where it wills. And that means we have to recognize that the church isn’t just defined by these visible institutions. The church in its most basic and fundamental sense is the community of redeemed humanity, and so is larger and more extensive than the institutional church.
Q: You’ve described Vatican II as the most important event in Roman Catholic history since the Protestant Reformation. Why?
I think it is, and people from all traditions, even non-Christians, would probably have to recognize Vatican II as the most important moment in the religious history of the past century. It changed the relationships between Catholics and other Christians and with the Jewish community and with people of other faiths.
Instead of being mistrustful, the Catholic Church adopted an attitude of engagement that sought to affirm what we have in common and to build on that and work with all people of goodwill, including nonbelievers.
Q: Yet 50 years later, you say even many Catholics don’t understand what Vatican II was about. How so?
We can’t take it for granted that people know and understand the council. The council’s teaching is a huge body of literature. The 16 documents it produced are one-third of the volume of text from all the 21 ecumenical councils in the history of the church. It’s a massive amount of material, and it takes a lot of work and engagement to read and appropriate it.
Q: What are some of the core teachings that people don’t realize came out of Vatican II?
“Keys to the Council” begins with a chapter on the paschal mystery. That sounds obvious today, but it wasn’t self-evident to Catholics in the 1960s that the heart of our Christian faith is the death and resurrection of Christ.
The whole sacramental life of the church exists so that we can celebrate our participation in the dying and rising of Christ, which begins in baptism, and through that dying and rising with Christ, we enter into the church.
What we celebrate in the Eucharist each Sunday is a return to the death and resurrection of Christ, the self-giving of Christ in the bread and the wine, which should symbolize for us what we’re called to live: the giving of ourselves in love for others.
This thread goes through all the documents from Vatican II. Even the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World calls all humanity to participate in this reality of self-offering, dying and rising for others. It’s quite profound.
We also have a couple of chapters about the renewal and reform of the liturgy. Every mainline Western church renewed its liturgical life on the model of what the Catholic Church did.
The movement of liturgical renewal was, in many ways, an ecumenical undertaking, and the fact today that Christians can go to each other’s churches on Sunday and hear the same readings was a result of Vatican II.
Before that, the lectionary was not shared. The three-year cycle of readings, the pairing of the Old Testament reading and the Epistle with the Gospel were products of Vatican II, which then led to the development of the Common Lectionary.
Q: Your book suggests that one of the teachings from Vatican II that has been forgotten is the commitment to ecumenism.
If you asked most Catholics who lived through the Second Vatican Council what it represented for them, they would say, “Oh, the Mass. The Mass changed. The Eucharist is now celebrated in English or French or Spanish, and the priest turned around and faced the people.”
But if you ask them what the church has done ecumenically, many would be in the dark. If Catholic social teaching is our best-kept secret, then our second-best-kept secret is our commitment to ecumenism.
There have been more than 15 official international commissions of dialogue between the Catholic Church and other Christian families. At the national and at the diocesan levels, groups of Catholic and Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and other leaders meet regularly to share on questions of mutual concern.
That work is not well-known, and it hasn’t changed a lot of our practice. But one area where there’s been progress on pastoral issues is interchurch marriage.
If you ask people of a certain age the difference between before the council and after, they would tell you stories. I have stories from my family. My aunt married a Protestant. When they were dating, the priest threatened to withhold communion from my grandparents because their daughter was dating a Protestant.
She married him, but not in the Catholic Church, and so my aunt was excluded from the sacramental life of the Catholic Church. That meant a lot of grief in our family.
Every family has stories like this, but that’s changed. Interchurch marriage is common today. In North America, more than 40 percent of Christian marriages are between a man and a woman from different Christian churches.
Q: What does Vatican II mean going forward?
It’s worth recalling the two principal goals of the Second Vatican Council as spelled out by John XXIII.
The first was that the Catholic Church needs to bring itself up to date. That job didn’t end in 1965. The council embraced an understanding of church as a community, the community of redeemed humanity. But we’re redeemed sinners, so the church always needs to be renewed and purified.
As the church has always done, we need to be conscious about taking the gospel message and making it comprehensible for our contemporaries. We always need to think about how to make the gospel alive today so people can hear the message, and so that our living will be credible.
The other goal is the search for Christian unity. The reason for the Catholic Church to reform itself and bring itself up to date was to bring it closer to other Christian churches. The modern ecumenical movement has been about recognizing that division undermines our ability to be authentic witnesses to the gospel.
We can’t give a credible witness to a message of love and reconciliation if we don’t live that reconciliation among ourselves.
Q: You’ve written that Vatican II was an effort in aggiornamento, or an updating, that looked back to neglected aspects of the tradition, ressourcement, for inspiration and guidance. What do you mean?
The council sought to renew and reform the church, to bring it up to date, by going back to the sources of tradition.
We always have to go back to the sources to know our fundamental identity. We find it in the Gospels.
There’s a lovely line in the Decree on Ecumenism that says something like, “All authentic renewal of the church consists in being faithful to ourselves.” So it’s by going back to the Gospels.
This is exactly what the Protestant Reformation was about: return to the Gospels.
Also, this idea of the church as a communion is something we find in seed form in the New Testament. We see it in the writings of the early church fathers and in the behavior of the churches, the way they support one another even though they are quite diverse, self-governing churches.
The church in Jerusalem is not identical to the church in Antioch, or Alexandria, or Constantinople, or Rome. They all evolved in different cultural contexts, and their theology and spirituality are marked by that, but they were able to recognize a common faith and remain in communion with one another. Those models grounded the theology of the Second Vatican Council.
Q: To what extent was Vatican II an updating or a rethinking about leadership? An article in America said the council changed the church from a pyramid to a circle.
If you think of the bishops as leaders, one of the important theological questions that the council had to grapple with was the unfinished business of Vatican I, which defined papal primacy, papal infallibility and papal jurisdiction. They had to spend time talking about the office of bishop.
Well, bishops discovered their ministry. After the First Vatican Council, bishops were often seen as branch managers, the pope’s delegates, functioning as administrators in each of the different dioceses around the world.
But when we go back and look at the tradition, we understand that, no, in fact a bishop is really the boss. A bishop is a leader, and that’s where the buck stops in every local church.
Bishops had to rediscover that and take ownership. First, they affirmed it theologically in the teaching of the council, which says it’s not just the bishop of Rome who’s the vicar of Christ. It’s every bishop who’s the vicar and representative of Christ.
But the council itself also became a school for the bishops, where they were engaged with each other, listening to theologians and to the experience of the churches in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia.
They rediscovered who they were and what their call was as pastoral leaders. The most effective leaders at the Second Vatican Council were bishops who listened to their people. There was this great four-year conversation, where the bishops listened to the living faith, the lived experience of people in all corners of the church.
Q: What are the broader lessons for all institutional churches in Vatican II and the process by which they came together and rethought everything?
It’s important to hang on to the experience of what we call conciliarity, or what some people call synodality, which is this exchange. “Synodality” literally means “walking on the road together.”
I love the image of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They’re in conversation the whole journey, and they discover Christ in their midst.
This engagement in conversation, in listening and speaking, is important for leaders. Some of the challenges in Catholicism today stem from an underdeveloped experience of conciliarity and of functioning synodal structures. It’s important that we create spaces to keep us open to the Spirit.
We need to be intentional about cultivating these habits. The council’s Decree on Ecumenism says that when we enter into dialogue with others, we do so with an attitude of humility, not looking to point out what’s wrong with the other guy, but to say what it is in my household that needs to be put in order, and then to commit to doing that.
We -- our culture, our world -- need people with those habits of dialogue today.