Vatican Council, Second

I

Introduction

Vatican Council, Second, the 21st ecumenical council recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, which became the symbol of the Church's openness to the modern world. The council was announced by Pope John XXIII on January 25, 1959, and held 178 meetings in the autumn of each of four successive years. The first gathering was on October 11, 1962, and the last on December 8, 1965.

Of 2,908 bishops and others eligible to attend, 2,540 from all parts of the world participated in the opening meeting. Asian and African bishops played a prominent role in the council's deliberations. Only Communist nations were sparsely represented, the result of government pressures. The average attendance at the meetings was 2,200.

Preparations for the council began in May 1959, when the world's Roman Catholic bishops, theological faculties, and universities were asked to make recommendations for the agenda. Thirteen preparatory commissions with more than 1,000 members were appointed to write draft proposals on a wide range of topics. They prepared 67 documents called schemata, a number reduced to 17 by a special commission convoked between the council's 1962 and 1963 sessions. Voting members of the council were Roman Catholic bishops and heads of male religious orders, but, in a radical departure from past practice, Orthodox and Protestant Churches were invited to send official delegate-observers. Male lay Roman Catholic auditors were invited to the 1963 session, during which two of them addressed the council. Women auditors were added in 1964. The agenda was extensive, and topics discussed included modern communications media, relations between Christians and Jews, religious freedom, the role of laity in the Church, liturgical worship, contacts with other Christians and with non-Christians, both theists and atheists, and the role and education of priests and bishops.

II

Major Documents and Conclusions

The council issued 16 documents, notably the constitutions on divine revelation (Dei Verbum, November 18, 1965) and on the Church (Lumen Gentium, November 11, 1964) and the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world (Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965). The constitution on divine revelation was informed by the best modern biblical scholarship. The council explained the Roman Catholic understanding of how the Bible, tradition, and Church authority relate to one another in the exposition of divine revelation.

The constitution on the Church stressed a biblical understanding of the Christian community's organization, rather than the juridical model that had more recently been dominant. Terming the Church the “people of God”, it emphasized the servant nature of offices such as those of priest and bishop, the collegial, or shared, responsibility of all bishops for the entire Church, and the call of all Church members to holiness and to participation in the Church's mission of spreading the gospel of Christ. The tone of the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world was set in its opening words, which declared that the Church shared the “joy and hope, the grief and anguish of contemporary humanity, particularly of the poor and afflicted”. It began with a theological analysis of humanity and the world, then turned to specific areas such as marriage and family, cultural, social, and economic life, the political community, war and peace, and international relations.

A constitution on liturgy promoted more active communal participation in the Mass as the central act of Roman Catholic public worship and was the first step in changes that by 1971 included the replacement of Latin, the ancient language of the service, by vernacular languages. Other documents sought common ground in dealings with Orthodox and Protestant Christians and with those who are not Christians. In a rare departure from its deliberate policy of avoiding condemnations, the council deplored “all hatreds, persecutions, and displays of anti-Semitism levelled at any time or from any source against the Jews”.

Pope John had launched the Second Vatican Council on a positive note, setting as its purposes the updating and renewal (aggiornamento) of the Roman Catholic Church and achievement of Christian and human unity. Pope Paul VI, who continued the council after John's death in 1963, endorsed those purposes and added that of dialogue with the modern world.

III

Reception and Opposition

Initial reaction to the council was generally favourable. One major result was the development of closer relations among Christian Churches. But as currents of change, some of them unrelated to anything that had occurred at the council, continued to sweep through the Church, conservative Roman Catholic groups began to fear that the reforms had become too radical. Organized dissent surfaced, and some critics challenged the authority both of the council and of the popes who carried out its decrees. Opposition to changes in the Church's liturgy became a rallying point for those whose discontent with change ran far deeper.

The most prominent leader of the “Catholic traditionalists” who rejected the doctrinal and disciplinary reforms instituted by Vatican Council II was a retired French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, who in 1970 founded an international group known as the Priestly Fraternity of St Pius X. He declared that the council's reforms “spring from heresy and end in heresy”. Efforts at reconciliation between Rome and Archbishop Lefebvre were unsuccessful. Pope Paul VI suspended him from the exercise of his functions as priest and bishop in 1976, but he continued his activities, including ordination of priests to serve traditionalist churches.