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Vatican II: The Council of Rapprochement

John W. O’Malley, S.J.

(This article was published originally in French

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
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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
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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
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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 up the theme of reconciliation with cultures
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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 different Christian 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
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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, “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
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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.”

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
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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
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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
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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
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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.