The Created Order as Sacrament
When God took on flesh in Jesus Christ, the uncreated and the created, the eternal and the temporal, the divine and the human became united. This unity meant that all that is mortal now points to the immortal, all that is finite now points to the infinite. In and through Jesus all creation has become like a splendid veil, through which the face of God is revealed to us.
This is called the sacramental quality of the created order. All that is is sacred because all that is speaks of God's redeeming love. Seas and winds, mountains and trees, sun, moon, and stars, and all the animals and people have become sacred windows offering us glimpses of God.
Vatican II: The Council of Rapprochement
John W. O’Malley, S.J.
Georgetown University
(This article was published originally in French
in the September 2012 issue of Études)
When the Second Vatican Council ended almost fifty years ago, Catholics were convinced something of great importance had happened. They felt its impact immediately in the changes in the liturgy: mass celebrated in the vernacular, the priest turned to face the congregation, and the first part of the mass, “the liturgy of the word,” risen to new prominence. Even five years earlier such changes would have been unthinkable.
But there was much more. For the first time in history Catholics were encouraged to foster friendly relations with non-Catholic Christians and even to pray with them. The church entered into formal dialogues with other churches and revisited doctrines that had for centuries divided Catholics from both the Orthodox and the Protestants. Breaking with a long-standing tradition, the council affirmed the principle of religious liberty and, in so doing, reaffirmed fidelity to conscience as the norm for moral decision-making. In the long shadow cast by the Holocaust, it categorically repudiated anti-Semitism.
Important though these and similar changes were in their own right, they do not singly or collectively capture the sense pervasive at the time of the council that something further happened, something of which the particulars were but manifestations. The council’s import, that is to say, included but also transcended its specific enactments.
To express this larger import people began to speak of “the spirit of the council.” They did not mean to imply that the “spirit” was at odds with the “letter” of the council’s documents, but, rather, that it, while building on the letter, rose to a higher level of generalization. In so doing it served as a lens in which to interpret the particulars and to fit them into more general patterns.
But questions arose about the expression. What, in this context, did one mean by “spirit”? Was it not a slippery term, susceptible to manipulation? Your “spirit of Vatican II” may not be my “spirit of Vatican II”! The expression became suspect, and in some quarters it was contemptuously dismissed as frothy and unsubstantial, unworthy of the council. It distorted the council’s true meaning, which was to be found exclusively in its specific enactments.
There are, certainly, problems with the expression, but we should be loathe to abandon it. After all, the distinction between spirit and letter is venerable in the Christian tradition. Based loosely on 2 Corinthians 3:6 (“the letter kills, the spirit gives life”), it for centuries served theologians and exegetes as a standard and indispensable category of interpretation. It is, moreover, a distinction often made in everyday speech, which suggests a certain cognitive validity. I here argue that, in fact, it (or some equivalent) is not only useful for understanding Vatican II but indispensable.
“The spirit of Vatican II” properly understood points to a set of basic orientations that are clearly expressed not simply in one or two documents of the council but that run through them almost from the first to the last. In so doing, it points also to the style in which those orientations are formulated. It is therefore solidly based on “the letter” in the fullest sense, which includes both form and content. If understood in this way, the expression emerges as a key for unlocking the council’s larger meaning.
In comparison with other councils, Vatican II is special because its documents considered as a single corpus evince such orientations. As a set of issues-under-the issues or issues-across-the-issues or even leitmotifs, the orientations imbue the council with a coherence unique in the history of such meetings. In other words, the documents of Vatican II are not a grab-bag of discreet units. When examined not one by one but as a single, though complex, corpus, the pervasiveness of certain issues clearly emerges and vindicates the intuition that the council had a message to deliver to the church and to the world that was bigger than any document considered in isolation.
Among such issues was rapprochement—or reconciliation. How was the church to deal with certain realities it had for long considered anathema? Could it and should it seek reconciliation with them? Pope John XXIII placed the problem before the council on the day it opened, October 11, 1962, in his remarkable address to the prelates assembled in Saint Peter’s. In it he tried to provide the council with its orientation. He distanced it from the scolding and suspicious attitude toward “the world” that had pervaded official Catholic thinking for over a century, as if everything modern was bad. The council, according to the pope, should not simply wring its hands and deplore what was wrong but engage with the world so as to work with it for a positive outcome. It should, more generally, “make use of the medicine of mercy rather than of severity” in dealing with everyone. It should eschew as far as possible the language of condemnation.
Although Pope John did not use the word reconciliation, that was what he was speaking of. He asked for reconciliation with “the world” —with the world as it is, not as it was supposed to be according to the fantasy of an idealized “Christian Middle Ages” that still held many Catholics in thrall. He wanted to end the siege mentality that had gripped Catholic officialdom in the wake of the French Revolution and the subsequent seizure of the Papal States, a mentality that feared all things modern.
John XXIII, we must remember, had a unique experience of “the world,” wider than any pope for centuries. As a young priest he had served as a medical orderly and then as chaplain in the Italian army during World War I. He afterward spent decades as a papal diplomat among either predominantly Orthodox or predominantly Muslim populations. While stationed in Istanbul during World War II he at first-hand experienced the plight of refugees from Nazi persecution and did his best to help them. He later performed well as nuncio in Paris at a most delicate moment for the church in the immediate post-war years. Then, just before his election as pope, he served with distinction as bishop (technically, patriarch) of Venice.
We should not be surprised, therefore, that at the crucial moment of the council’s opening he introduced the theme of reconciliation. It was not a new theme with him. When he three and half years earlier, in 1959, announced his intention to convoke the council, he gave as one of the its two principal aims the extension of a “cordial invitation to the faithful of the separated communities to participate with us in this quest for unity and peace, for which so many long in all parts of the world.” His invitation found response from other Christian bodies that was as positive as it was unanticipated, and it resulted in the extraordinary phenomenon of the presence at the council of sometimes as many as a hundred or more representatives of the Protestant and Orthodox churches. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
Thus, even before the council opened reconciliation had begun to take hold as an issue and goal. During the council its scope broadened. The first document the council approved, the decree On the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium, implicitly asked the church to break out of its Eurocentrism and to admit other cultures as partners. The church had of course consistently presented itself as catholic in the sense of embracing all peoples and cultures. Although there was considerable truth in that claim,Catholicism was so strongly imprinted with the culture of the West as to seem identical with it. With the voyages of discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came the shock of large populations and altogether different cultures that had not heard of Christianity. The discoveries severely challenged the claim of universality.
A vigorous program of evangelization followed, which in virtually every case entailed the simultaneous introduction of Western traditions and values, as if these were inseparable from the gospel message. There were important exceptions, as with the Jesuits in China led by Matteo Ricci. Out of respect for their hosts the Jesuits in Beijing tried in their life-style and mind-sets to become Chinese. They even won permission to celebrate mass in Chinese, and they published a Chinese missal. The Jesuits undertook similar experiments in Japan and in parts of India.
In the eighteenth century the Holy See condemned such experiments. Then, during the great surge of missionary activity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both Catholic and Protestant missionaries saw themselves as bearing “the white man’s burden” of bringing Western ways to their flocks. It was this approach the council gently but firmly repudiated.
Sacrosanctum concilium set the council on its course when it affirmed, “The Church cultivates and fosters the qualities and talents of different races and nations” and admits their customs “into the liturgy itself, provided they harmonize with its true and authentic spirit.” (37) In subsequent documents the council repeatedly took upthe theme of reconciliation with cultures other than Western, most notably in the decree on the church’s missionary activity.
Of course, the most obvious and direct act of reconciliation were the decrees On Ecumenism and On Non-Christian Religions. The former opens, “The restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council.” (1) It bids Catholics to respect the beliefs of those not in communion with the church, and, as mentioned, sets in motion a process of respectful dialogue with them. These steps might seem cautious and minimal, but they constituted a dramatic reversal of course from condemning all other Christian bodies and counseling Catholics to avoid as far as possible all contact with them. The Code of Canon Law of 1918 forbade Catholic participation in any non-Catholic religious service, even weddings and funerals.
In the middle of the seventeenth century the conclusion of the catastrophic Thirty Years’ War brought to a close a century of wars between differentChristian churches waged in the name of the God of love. From that point forward the church eschewed violence as a means of settling religious differences, but until the eve of the council Catholic theologians and apologists denigrated other churches and cast them in the worst possible light. On a higher and less contemptuous level, Pope Pius XI in 1928 in his encyclical Mortalium animos forbade all Catholic participation in the ecumenical movement.
The decree On Ecumenism signaled a change of 180 degrees, so much so that a small minority during and after the council denounced it as heretical. As the result, however, of decades of study and conversation carried on semi-officially and behind the scenes, the council accepted it with unexpected ease. After centuries of alienation, the time had arrived for seeking common ground and reconciliation.
In the council Nostra aetate, the decree On Non-Christian Religions, did not enjoy the same easy course. The opposition to it was so severe that at one point it was almost withdrawn from the agenda. John XXIII himself had been responsible for putting it there. Out of his deep concern about anti-Semitism and Christian responsibility regarding the Holocaust, he mandated that the council consider a document On the Jews. In its early drafts, therefore, Nostra aetate dealt exclusively with them. Objections were raised against it on theological grounds—were not the Jews an accursed race?—but also on political. The prospect of a document On the Jews stirred up fear in Arab countries that this was a step toward Vatican recognition of the state of Israel, which up to that point it had not done. Those countries made their objections well known to the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.
The council was finally able to convince them that Nostra aetate had nothing to do with Israel. Exegetes and theologians were able to convince virtually all the bishops of the theological acceptability of the document. With such problems resolved, Nostra aetate won approval, but only after it was expanded to include other non-Christian believers, most notably the Muslims. The small minority that rejected the decree On Ecumenism rejected this one even more adamantly.
Nostra aetate treats the Muslims at much greater length than any of the other religious group, except the Jews. No longer were they “our eternal and godless enemy,” as Pope Paul III described them in 1542 in his bull convoking the Council of Trent, but people deserving respect, who shared with Christians many of the same religious traditions going back to the common patriarch, Abraham.
Few decrees of the council seem more timely today in our post-9/11 era. Nostra aetate sounds a note of reason and compassion. It is the diametrical opposite of hate-inspired polemics, and it invests Catholics with a special role as agents of reconciliation in the present tense international situation. In this regard Pope John Paul II performed a marvelous service. His gestures of reconciliation with the Jews are well known. Less well known but today perhaps more important were the many times he met with Muslim groups in attempts to increase mutual understanding and decrease tensions.
The council’s final document was entitled “The Church in the Modern World.”
Although the church-world relationship was not on the agenda when the council opened, it had clearly emerged by the end of the council’s first year. No wonder, for it in fact took up the theme of reconciliation with the modern world that John XXIII proposed in his address opening the council. The title is significant: not the church for the modern world; not the church against the modern world; not the church either above or below the modern world, but simply in the modern world. The title is a simple recognition of fact. Every member of the church lives, perforce, “in the world.” There is no alternative, even for cloistered religious. We mere mortals cannot escape from time and space.
Beyond recognizing the fact that the church is now and ever has been “in the world,” the document goes the further step of recognizing the consequences of that fact: church and world are reciprocally dependent and interdependent, “The church, which is both a visible organization and a spiritual community, travels the same journey as does all humanity and shares the same earthly lot with it.”(40) The church is to act as a leaven, but it also receives from the world as well as gives to it. Obvious though such an affirmation might seem, it was unprecedented in official church documents, most especially since rampant suspicion of modernity began to dominate Catholic officialdom.
By being addressed to all men and women of good will, whether believers or not, the document extended the reconciliation theme to its ultimate limits. The council, “as witness and guide to the faith of all God’s people, [wants to express] this people’s solidarity, respect, and love for the whole human family.” It “offers the human family the sincere cooperation of the church in fostering a sense of sisterhood and brotherhood.” (3)
John XXIII’s speech opening the council sounded the theme of reconciliation but in an understated and altogether generic way. The council took it up as a fundamental orientation and imbued it with a remarkable scope. It extended it to the church’s relationship to non-Western cultures, to non-Catholic Christians, to non-Christian believers, and, in this final document, to “all humanity.” (became Catholic)
There is, however, an even more pervasive level at which the theme operated so as to substantiate the intrinsic relationship between spirit and letter. We must return to John’s opening address. When he asked to council to refrain from condemnations, he introduced the question of the style of discourse the council was to adopt. On the very first working day of the council, October 22, 1962, Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne explicitly brought that question to the floor of the council. Other prelates subsequently took it up. By the end of that first period of the council, the question had become a major issue and was already on the way to a remarkable resolution.
As the second period opened in the fall of the next year, discussion began on a drastically revised draft of On the Church, now titled Lumen gentium. With that document the council had found its distinctive voice. The first chapter was strikingly different from the earlier version in that it was filled with biblical images and patristic allusions. This feature intensified by the time the document achieved its final form, which almost overflows with images of the church and its members that suggest fecundity, dignity, abundance, charism, goodness, safe haven, welcome, tenderness, warmth, communion, and reconciliation.
The council began to speak in a new style. It began to speak through a literary form and a vocabulary that was new for councils. The most common literary form for councils up to that point had been the canon, that is, a short ordinance prescribing or proscribing some action, to which penalties were generally attached for non-compliance. Most canons ended with anathema. The Roman Synod of 1960 was an assembly of the clergy of the diocese of Rome, which was considered at the time the “dress rehearsal” for Vatican II. The Synod issued 755 canons.
Vatican II, which concluded five years later, issued not a single one. Instead of issuing such ordinances it held up ideals for emulation. For instance, in the decree On Bishops, Christus Dominus, it painted the picture of the ideal bishop and proposed goals for him. Through its new language the council wanted to touch consciences to strive for positive goals. It tried to present the church in all its aspects in accord with John XXIII’s description of it in his opening address, “the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of goodness and mercy.” The council chose to praise the positive aspects of Catholicism and establish the church’s identity on that basis rather than by trying to make the church look good by making others look bad.
A most remarkable feature of Lumen gentium, little commented upon, is “the call to holiness,” the subject of the fifth chapter in the final version. That call then became a leitmotif of the council recurring again and again in the documents. Holiness, the council said, is what the church is about. This is an old truth, of course, and in itself not remarkable. Yet previous councils, intent on exterior compliance with regulations, had never explicitly asserted this ideal and certainly never developed it so repeatedly and at length as did Vatican II.
The literary forms and vocabulary of those councils, arising from the assumption that councils were judicial-legislative bodies, inhibited the emergence of such a theme, just as the form and vocabulary of Vatican II encouraged it. The call to holiness is something more than external conformity to an enforceable code of conduct. It is a call of conscience that, though it must have external forms, originates in the God-given higher impulses of the human spirit, which in the council often got specified in commitment to the service of others and to the search for communion with them.
The shift in form required adopting a vocabulary that was new to councils, in which the theme of reconciliation, though expressed in a variety of terms, emerged with dominant force.
Instead of words consisting primarily in anathemas and verdicts of guilty-as-charged, the council spoke most characteristically in words of friendship, partnership, kinship, brotherhood, sisterhood, reciprocity, dialogue, collegiality, conscience, and a call to interiority—a call to holiness.
Such words occur too frequently and too consistently in the documents of the council to be dismissed as mere window-dressing or casual asides. They imbue Vatican II with a literary and, hence, thematic unity unique among church councils. They express an overall orientation and a coherence in outlook. They are central to understanding the council.
They express values. The values are anything but new to the Christian tradition. They are as common in Christian discourse, or more common, than their opposite numbers. But they are not common in councils, nor did they up to that time play such a determinative role in official church pronouncements. Vatican II did not invent the words or imply they were not already fundamental in a Christian way of life. Yet, taken as a whole, they convey the sweep of a newly formulated and forcefully specified way of proceeding that Vatican II held up for contemplation, admiration, and actualization. That way of proceeding was the most pervasive of the issues-under-the-issues or the issues-across-the-issues at Vatican II. It was the essence of the “spirit of Vatican II.”
A simple pairing of the model implied by this vocabulary with the model it wanted to replace or balance conveys the vocabulary’s import: from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from suspicion to trust, from rivalry to partnership, from fault-finding to appreciation, and from behavior-modification to inner appropriation.
In promoting the values implicit in this model, the council did not deny the validity of the contrasting values. No institution can, for instance, be simply open-ended. Sooner or later decision is required. No institution can be all-inclusive and not in the process lose its identity. Certainly, no institution whose very reason for existence is proclaiming the gospel message can be so committed to reconciliation as to compromise that message. Yet, what is more constitutive of the message than love of neighbor?
The opening words of Gaudium et spes encapsulate the message and take us to the heart of Vatican II: “The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men and women of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and affliction of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts.” (1)
The council was a rich and complex event, in which it is easy to get lost in the trees and lose sight of the forest. If it is important to reflect on how the council changed us in certain particulars, it is even more important to grasp the new orientation the council envisaged for the church and, in so doing, for every Catholic. Despite the way leaders in the council sometimes expressed themselves, they fully realized that Vatican II as a self-proclaimed pastoral council was for that reason also a teaching council. Vatican II taught many things but few more important than the style of relationships that was to prevail in the church. It did not “define” that teaching but taught it on virtually every page though the form and vocabulary it adopted. By examining the form and vocabulary, the “letter,” we arrive at the “spirit,” which is not a momentary effervescence but a consistent and verifiable reorientation.
The council therefore issued a message bigger than any particular. Bold yet soft-spoken, the message was meant to find resonance in the hearts of all persons sensitive to the call of conscience. It inculcated reconciliation with others and a search for communion. It inculcated those goods, we must remember, not only in relationships with those outside the church but also with those within.
Today, in a world increasingly wracked with discord, rancor, name-calling, hate-spewing blogs, pre-emptive strikes, war and the threat of war, the message could not be more timely. It is a message counter-cultural while at the same time responsive to the deepest yearnings of the human heart. Peace on earth. Good will to men. ###
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