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How Should We Remember Vatican II?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

James Sweeney CP
James Sweeney CP*
Affiliation:
Heythrop College
*
Kensington Square, London, W8 5HQ. Email: j.sweeney@heythrop.ac.uk
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Abstract

What happened at Vatican II and the significance of its decisions is strongly contested in the Church today. There is a struggle over the memory of the Council. It is suggested that two hermeneutics are in use, continuity versus discontinuity. On the one hand, it is said that privileging the ‘event’ of the Council as the interpretative key for reading its documents leads to an ideological distortion and introduces discontinuity with tradition. On the other hand, it is held that the continuity thesis plays down the real changes the Council introduced and, while unexceptional as a theological principle, it is being deployed as a polemical ideology, restricting necessary change. This article distinguishes between theological principle and experience in relation to continuity/discontinuity. It argues that the event of the Council is to be found as much in its effects in the Church at large as what took place in Rome. It analyses the phenomenology of change at both levels and concludes that the tensions between the need for continuity and the impulses of discontinuity need to be recognised and worked with rather than repressed.

Keywords

Vatican IIMemoryHermeneuticsContinuityDiscontinuity
Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 90 , Issue 1026 , March 2009 , pp. 251 - 260
Copyright
© The author 2009. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009

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References

1 Rahner, Karl, Das Konzil – ein neuer Beginn (Freiburg-Basel-Wien, Herder, 1966) p. 2Google Scholar; quoted in Schenk, Richard ‘Officium signa temporum perscrutandi: New encounters of Gospel and culture in the context of the New Evangelization’, in Verstraeten, Johann (ed), Scrutinizing the Signs of the Times in the Light of the Gospel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007), p. 167Google Scholar.

2 See the website of the Holy See for the Italian text. Quoted in Lash, Nicholas, Theology for Pilgrims (London: DLT, 2008) p. 259Google Scholar.

3 Lash, Nicholas, Theology for Pilgrims (London: DLT, 2008)Google Scholar. On the topic of this article I follow Nicholas's very full and dramatic account in chapter 18, ‘In the Spirit of Vatican II?’.

4 English version edited by Joseph Komonchak and published by Peeters of Leuven (1995, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006).

5 Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travellers.

6 Quoted by Lash, Op. cit. p. 263.

7 For example, in the Bishop of Lancaster's Fit for Mission? Church (2008).

8 Alberigo maintains that there was a similar restrictive interpretative move by the Roman authorities after Trent. See Alberigo, Giuseppe, ‘From the Council of Trent to “Tridentinism”‘ in Bulman, R.F. and Parrella, F.J., From Trent to Vatican II: Historical and Theological Investigations (Oxford: OUP, 2006) pp. 19–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Wilde, Melissa, Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 A criticism of Wilde's thesis is that it underplays the progressive majority's greater intellectual firepower; their programme for renewal was underpinned by the extensive theological, biblical and liturgical research of the twentieth-century.

11 The ‘progressive’ network was organised from the Domus Mariae while its ‘conservative’ counterpart was the Coetus Internationalis Patrum or CIP.

12 See Komonchak, Joseph A., ‘The Council of Trent at the Second Vatican Council’, in Bulman, R.F. and Parrella, F.J., From Trent to Vatican II: Historical and Theological Investigations (Oxford: OUP, 2006) pp. 61–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.