Over 400 people gathered April 17 at the University of St. Thomas campus in St. Paul to hear a lecture given by world-renowned author and Catholic intellectual George Weigel about the importance of the Second Vatican Council.
The lecture, which was part of The St. Paul Seminary’s Archbishop Ireland Memorial Library Lecture Series, detailed the historical build-up to the council and offered a way to understand and contextualize the controversy that sometimes surrounds it.
Weigel said that he was inspired to write his recent book “To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II” and to speak about the topic after he heard young people question the necessity of the council.
“About 10 years ago, I began to notice as I went around to college campuses, universities and seminaries, that some of our most intelligent, fervent and committed young Catholics were deeply confused, if not deeply concerned, about the Second Vatican Council,” Weigel said.
Vatican II came about after the world wars, when Europe had fallen into “indifference” and “metaphysical boredom,” he said. The situation merited an ecclesiastical response.
“The more alert minds in the Catholic world were beginning to understand this (need for a response) in those middle decades of the 20th century,” Weigel said.
One of those minds, Weigel said, was Pope John XXIII, who “shocked the whole ecumenical world, and the whole world for that matter,” by announcing an ecumenical council — the first in nearly a century.
John XXIII hoped the council “would be a new experience of Pentecost” and would give “ancient truths … a fresh articulation,” Weigel said, so that the truths of the faith could be received by a world that was largely irreligious.
But in the opening document of the council, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, John XXIII emphasized that the council was to defend the faith and not to change it.
In the beginning of Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, “(John XXIII) immediately said, ‘We are not here to reinvent the Catholic Church,’” said Weidel, summarizing the document. “Christ gave the Church its essential constitution … the council’s imperative (was) to defend the sacred deposit of the faith.”
“I believe Gaudet Mater Ecclesia is the most appropriate prism through which to read the work of the Second Vatican Council because it defines what John XXIII thought the council was supposed to do,” Weigel added.
Read through the lens of Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, the council documents moved “from an ecclesio-centric Church to a Christo-centric Church,” Weigel said.
Confusion arose after the council for at least three reasons.
The first was that the council ended “just as the Western world was losing its mind,” Weigel said, referring to the cultural revolution that ensued in the latter half of the 20th century.
Another reason was that unlike previous councils, Vatican II made no formal declarations that could serve as a “key” for interpretation.
In the past, “councils had provided keys by condemning heresies (or) writing canons into the Church’s legal system. Trent did a lot of those things and added a catechism,” Weigel said. But “Vatican II did none of that. No creed, definitions, no condemnations, no canons and no catechism.”
To find the interpretive key of Vatican II, then-Pope John Paul II convened a special synod in 1985 with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later known as Pope Benedict XVI.
“The master key they came up with,” Weigel said, was “describing the Church as a communion of disciples in mission.”
This key understands the church to be intrinsically evangelistic, Weigel said.
“The Church does not exist for itself, it exists to offer others the gift it has been given, which is friendship with the incarnate son of God, so the body is inherently evangelical in mission,” he said.
A third reason for the contemporary confusion around the council is simply due to modern society’s proximity to it.
“All of the great councils took at least 100 years to work themselves into the fabric of the Church,” he said. “We are only three-fifths of the way there …. we are still in the digestion phase, and the people who are calling for a Vatican III seem to me to be the people who have not understood Vatican II.”
Weigel noted that the Acts of the Apostles ended in a shipwreck.
“The shipwreck becomes the occasion to extend the mission of the proclamation of the Gospel to where it has not been heard before,” he said. “If we learn to see the points of shipwreck, trouble or contention (in the Church) as invitations … then we will be faithful to the true intention of John the XXIII in summoning the council and the truths that the council taught.”
“The authentic Christian attitude towards the future is hope,” Weigel said. “God will get what he wants at the end of the story.”
John Froula, Ph.D., who has served as an associate professor of dogmatic theology at The Saint Paul Seminary since 2014, said that Weigel’s call for an evangelistic church is congruent with the mission of the seminary.
“While Weigel does not speak for the seminary, I think he does amplify the real spirit that we have here of missionary discipleship and communion,” Froula said.
Amelia Tallarrini, 23, attended Weigel’s lecture to learn more about the council, which she has sometimes experienced as a source of contention among Catholics.
“I was just thinking a lot about the shipwreck analogy,” said Tallarrini, who attends St. Joseph in West St. Paul. “It is an invitation to realize that things going wrong in the Church is how it always has been. And this idea that if you go back far enough, everything was wonderful, it just not true … the fact that Vatican II hasn’t fixed everything is not showing that Vatican II failed.”
Adam Husser, 22, a former Lutheran who entered into the Church at this year’s Easter Vigil and now attends St. Thomas the Apostle in Corcoran, said that the council “had always been proposed to me as an area of contention among Catholics, so it was really refreshing to hear a very hopeful perspective.”
Husser’s friend Marcus Miner, who also came into the Church on Easter after having been an atheist, said that the lecture helped him understand the council in its historical context.
“We had 20 previous ecumenical councils prior to Vatican II, and all of them had keys … and then to have Vatican II to not really follow in that suit definitely gives some explanation as to how we saw some of the oddities that occurred after Vatican II,” said Miner, who also attends St. Thomas the Apostle.
Hannah White, 24, who is originally from Guam and is now working toward a Catholic Studies Master’s degree and is a parishioner at St. Mark in St. Paul, said that she came to the lecture to understand the council’s legacy.
“Ever since college, I’ve wanted to know more about Vatican II because it seemed like such a divisive council, but I knew that couldn’t be the whole truth. Either side (saying), ‘Vatican II was a spirit of reform and that is great’ or ‘Vatican II was a spirit of reform and that is bad,’ I just knew those (statements) couldn’t be the whole truth,” White said.
White said that after the lecture, she both understood the council better and felt inspired by its evangelistic mission.
“I feel more empowered to speak about the council with others, but also to speak about Christ with others,” White said.
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