“Our paths within the Church have been completely different. He and I represent two different ways of being Catholics, one in the sense of the Roman Curia, one in the sense of the Second Vatican Council…”, this is what Hans Küng said of Joseph Ratzinger in an interview with Giancarlo Bosetti. Just like duellists in a film, at times it seems that the two grand old men of international theology, the Pope and the rebel, are the only ones in the Church still addressing the Second Vatican Council, while the rest of the ecclesial community, overcome by the greyness of the times, is indifferent as far as this debate is concerned. Küng addresses the Second Vatican Council demanding that it be acknowledged as a “betrayed revolution”, like so many others in history. Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, does likewise so as to correct, to attenuate and to restrict. Almost fifty years after John XXIII summoned the counciliar assembly, it is almost as if the Second Vatican Council still instils fear, still shaking the very foundations of the Church in its relations with the modern world, leading God’s people on paths that the highest hierarchies obviously consider to be dangerous ones.

The then Cardinal Ratzinger started to question the Second Vatican Council’s conclusions in 1986, when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a famous book-interview with Vittorio Messori. “It is undisputable that the past twenty years have been decidedly unfavourable for the Catholic Church”, declared the panzer-kardinal with no diplomatic prudence. “The results that followed the Second Vatican Council seem cruelly opposed to everyone’s expectations, starting with those of Pope John XXIII and Paul VI”. He also added, with a touch of sarcasm, “Cardinal Julius Döpfner used to say that after the Second Vatican Council, the Church had become a large building site. A critical spirit however added, that it is a building site for which the plans have been lost and everyone continues to build according to their own taste. The results are obvious”. And he concluded by saying “The Second Vatican Council is a reality that must be fully accepted. On condition that it is not considered as a starting point to be run away from, from rather the basis upon which one should built solidly… There is not a “pre” and a “post Council Church; the Second Vatican Council did not intend to introduce a division within the time of the Church”.

This established once and for all the question over which the duel would be fought. Was the Second Vatican Council a point of arrival or departure? Was it a real fracture in the history of the Church or should it be categorised within the context of the Ecclesia societas perfecta that cannot be reformed and should never be questioned? Did it, after a long period of Western Christianity, establish a different way of passing down the faith from one generation to the next and experiencing spirituality? Twenty years after his sensational interview, Ratzinger returned to this subject so dear to him with a lengthy and important speech made on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council, on December 22nd 2005. “Why has the implementation of the Council, in large parts of the Church, thus far been so difficult?” Pope Benedict XVI asked himself. And this was his answer “The problems in its implementation arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call "a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture"; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the "hermeneutic of reform", of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit”.

According to Ratzinger’s Church, the enemy to be defeated is the Second Vatican Council, or a distorted vision of it, seen as the origin of all that is evil and uncertainty, as the cause of the ethical relativism. One could object to this viewpoint, stating that in recent years it has certainly not been the liberal vision of the Second Vatican Council that has enjoyed good press reports and valiant curial lobbies, also with secular characteristics, ready to pay homage. On the contrary, the Second Vatican Council and its defenders, increasingly intimidated by the force of ecclesiastic repression and press campaigns, have in turn ended up in the dock, both within and outside the Church. Aggressive ecclesial movements such as Comunione e Liberazione in Italy, have almost reached the point of challenging its legitimacy. Important secular figures such as Marcello Pera or Ernesto Galli della Loggia have pointed at the counciliar Church and its absurd expectation of offering the world the medicine of mercy rather than the condemnation so extensively used during previous centuries.

“Relativism”, declared the then President of the Senate, Pera, on May 12th 2004 at a lecture at the Lateran University, “has seeped into Christian theology and from there it has spread subtly among the believers. But weak Christians, just like weak thinkers, in the end become acquiescent Christians”. The ideology in vogue during the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, 1968 and thereabouts, when Christ without the Church was fashionable, has been replaced, often with the benediction of the highest ecclesiastic authorities, with a spectacular about-turn, by Christianity reduced to a Western ideology. The Theo-cons, the devote atheists, and VIPs converted live on a worldwide telecast have become enthusiastic about a Church without Christ. They are in everlasting adoration of a Church without sanctity, without beatitude, without Magnificat, without hope for the poor and the weak, for the humble and the afflicted. They love a Church that safeguards order, traditions, the Western identity and above all their own wellbeing. A Church without resurrection and hence an atheist one.
The Church described by Galli della Loggia, in the Italian daily newspaper “Il Corriere della Sera”, after a speech by the Pope in October 2006 at the Conference of the Italian Church in Verona, emphasising that Benedict XVI “could have for example, insisted on the subject of peace, or spoken of immigrants, of the elderly, of the role played by women and laity within the Church. But he did not”. This is true, unfortunately, although one would like to ask Professor Galli, pleased on that occasion, what remains of Christianity without those words of peace, forgiveness, listening, welcoming, and conversion?

The real objection one could make against the weakness in the analysis presented by the enemies of the Second Vatican Council, or the supporters of “good” hermeneutics on one hand against “bad” hermeneutics”, is another. There is no part of Catholicism that has remained untouched by the “Copernican revolution”, as it was named by the Dominican Dominique Chenu, that involved the Catholic Church, or the “new Pentecost”, according to an expression used by Pope John. Everything is now interwoven; the liturgy, relations with the world, relations with individual and collective morals, religious practice and freedom of conscience. Not even the most clerical and conservative movements can disregard these subjects. Not even the People of God organised among devotees of Padre Pio, or among the pilgrims of the Lourdes-Fatima-Medjugorje circuit. People who grew-up during the twenty-seven years of Pope Wojtyla’s papacy, among the mega-mass gatherings, the great celebrations, meetings as the only expressive form for the “new Catholics”. This with all the resulting consequences, such as a levelling out of the faith on excitement, the sense of belonging to a community prevailing over a personal path, pastoral care becoming pure organisation, called upon to fill the time between one great event and another. But, like it or not, these phenomena too would never have occurred without the Second Vatican Council. They cannot be separated from an assumed positive flow of Tradition, which has never existed and in any case would be anti-historical.

The battle that has divided the Church from the very beginning is fought over the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, the wind of novelty that continues to blow. A battle, with on one side those perceiving the Christian faith as an intangible legacy and the Church as an immutable, absolute institution that cannot be changed. On the other side, there are those who on the contrary, see the community of believers as within and not separate from the history of humankind, as stated in the introduction of the Council’s Constitution “Gaudium et Spes” (“The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts”), as the People of God on the same path as all human beings with all their greatness, and misery, doubts, anxieties, failures and successes. On the one hand the primacy of the doctrine, undisputed but totally embraced, with no questioning; on the other the primacy of inner life, which is not a yielding to intellectual weakness because it does not require less intellectual and moral rigour, quite the opposite in fact. During the years of the Second Vatican Council the issue consisted in taking note that Christianity was finished and that from then on Christianity would only survive “in spirit and in truth”. Today’s challenge is a different one. On the one hand it is necessary to avoid Catholicism becoming the sect of those redeemed; on the other that the Christian difference, the shame of the cross and the hope for resurrection, should be lost in the media fair, in the marketplace of opinion where all ideas are good and none really worth very much at all.

To achieve this, one must return to the primacy of the conscience. The conscience, so badly forgotten in these hypocritical times, is the word that the Second Vatican Council made once again fashionable in a Church accustomed for centuries to only literally addressing the teachings and the Scriptures. The conscience, that does not enlist in any form of extremism, not even that of the new Christian movements, in any perfect doctrine, in any society founded on a presumed natural right, is the stone one trips up on whenever returning to the past. Because the conscience is free, and like the spirit, blows where it wishes. The next few years, after this season of ecclesial winter, will tell us whether the wind of the Second Vatican Council will return to blow freely.

Marco Damilano, journalist for L’Espresso magazine, is the author of “Il partito di Dio. La nuova galassia dei cattolici italiani” (Einaudi 2006) [God’s Party. A New Galaxy for Italian Catholics].

Translation by Francesca Simmons