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Today we begin exploring the implications of Vatican II in Chapter Three of Professor Swidler's series of talks on the need for democratic governance in the Catholic Church. He argues that the Second Vatican Council introduced five "Copernican turns" that we need to re-discover. As this Chapter is packed with information and insight we will split it into three sections and run it over the coming three weeks. This week we look at the first three "Copernican turns".

The five "Copernican" Turns of Vatican II

In this chapter I want to make the argument that the world re-shaping event of the 1962-65 Vatican Council II provided the theological re-visioning at the basis of Democratic Catholic Church Governance Movement of today.

It must be recalled that the 1960s were a momentous turning point for the world:

• U.S. Catholics broke out of their ghetto in the election of President Kennedy;
• the American civil rights movement began a transformation of the Western psyche;
• the anti-war, environmentalist, anti-Establishment and related movements throughout the West brought the transformation to a fever pitch;
• through Vatican Council II the Catholic Church leapt into modernity, and edged even beyond.

The literal "revolution" in the Catholic Church can be described as a "Copernican Turn," just as the thought of Copernicus led to a revolution in astronomy. This occurred in the Catholic Church at Vatican II in five major ways:

The Turn Toward Freedom,

The Turn Toward the Historic-Dynamic,

The Turn Toward This World,

The Turn Toward Inner Church Reform,

The Turn Toward Dialogue.

Unfortunately, the papacy has resisted this five-fold Copernican turn as is inevitable in every major paradigm shift.[1]

I. THE TURN TOWARD FREEDOM

The image Catholicism projected at the end of the 1950s was that of a giant monolith, a community of hundreds of millions who held obedience in both action and thought as the highest virtue. With the Second Vatican Council, however, this very unfree image, and reality, was utterly transformed. Suddenly it seemed humanity, including Catholics, became aware of their "coming of age," as Pope St. John XXIII (1958-63) put it, and hence, their freedom and responsibility. This was clearly expressed in many places, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in The Declaration on Religious Liberty. If one were asked to put the most central, burning issue of the decade of Vatican II, the 1960s, into one word, that word would be "freedom". In fact, for the last two hundred years it has been the central word in one or other of its variant forms from "liberté" of the French Revolution, or "Give me liberty or give me death" of the American Revolution.

John F Kennedy

The 1950s in Germany were the days of the Wirtshaftswunder and in America of the "Organization Man", of conformity and complacency. But that era ended with the demise of the 1950s, and a new era was inaugurated in a preeminent way by two men named John — John F. Kennedy and John XXIII. One treated the secular as sacred, the other the sacred as secular. Kennedy treated his human tasks as a sacred trust and thereby helped lift politics out of self-centeredness to a service of others. In his inaugural address he wrote: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." John XXIII embraced the world as he symbolically did in his response to a life-long convict who asked him if God could ever forgive a murderer — Pope John threw his arms around him. He embraced the world, with all its joys and miseries, as God's gift to, and task for, humanity.

These two men – each with his own approach – saw that only by freeing the secular from a cramped sort of selfish secularism, and the sacred from a twisted sort of Manicheistic sacralism, could the secular and the sacred really be fully secular and sacred, that is, when they were seen to be the same reality viewed from two different aspects.

Pope John XXIII

Not accidentally, both men, one for the secular world and one for the Church, were also deeply committed to an openness to, and concern for, others, to freedom and responsibility, for they saw that contemporary men and women could no longer continue to exist in a closed ghetto, unconcerned about their neighbor, that they would not live without freedom, and responsibility. These two men symbolized, and partly inspired, the new concerns of the sixties: freedom and responsibility, which also are two aspects of a single reality-human life.

Even before the beginning of Vatican II the cry of freedom in the Catholic Church was raised: freedom for Catholics from restrictive ecclesiastical traditions to fulfill their true Gospel-centered tradition of service to God's world. American Catholics lived in the "land of the free" and were nurtured in a religious tradition which stated that "the truth will make you free". They maintained that they are free, or that they had a right to be free.

If a religion is what it should be, it will help free women and men from the tyranny of the mountain of meaningless moments and experiences that life can appear to be. It can, in a preeminent fashion, help to open men and women to their neighbor, to all reality, and to its Source. It can give them an explanation of the meaning of life, help them to bring some sort of order into, to make sense out of, the day-to-day and year-to-year events.

A religion can, however, and often has been, a very restrictive, unfree influence in women and men's lives. Far too often religions have weighed them down with a myriad of religious, ecclesiastical traditions that may have had some meaning at one time, but which have long since lost any significance. Of course, the challenging of constrictive traditions does not mean that all traditions are to be eliminated, but where possible, preserved and updated, made effective and meaningful.

The Church is similar to the parent and teacher. In fact, the Church is often referred to as "Holy Mother Church". Then at least one of the major goals of the Church must also be that of the parent and the teacher, namely, the development of maturity in those for whom it has concern. In many ways the Church in the past has worked vigorously toward this goal. For example, it fostered learning in the Middle Ages when no other institution could. However, in recent centuries, as the masses of men and women have advanced in learning, and commensurate maturity, the Church often tended not to allow them their proportional freedom. It tended to continue to treat them like children who cannot be trusted to make responsible decisions. However, such a situation cannot continue indefinitely. Mature adults will either find a way to act freely and responsibly within the institution, or in their eventual frustration and embitterment will withdraw from it.

Fortunately, with Vatican II, Catholics began to find ways for increasing numbers of the faithful to act as free, responsible adults in the Church. This was epitomized in its Declaration on Religious Freedom. Recall that religious freedom had been condemned by two popes exactly a century earlier as "madness" — deliramentum![2] -and theologians were silenced for writing about such madness right up to the beginning of Vatican II. Then, totally reversing the pope who had declared himself infallible, all the bishops of the world, including the then pope, Paul VI, solemnly declared that "The human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion … in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his beliefs."

II. THE TURN TOWARD THE HISTORICAL/DYNAMIC

For centuries the thinking of official Catholicism was dominated by a static understanding of reality; it resisted not only the democratic and human rights movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, but also the growing historical, dynamic way of understanding the world, including religious thought. That changed dramatically with Vatican II where the historical, dynamic view of reality and doctrine was officially fully embraced (unfortunately the just-ended very long pontificate of Pope John Paul II largely resisted that radical turn).

One of the most powerful forces within Western civilization in the last two centuries has been the burgeoning sense of history, the growing awareness of change, dynamism, evolution, in all of reality and, most particularly, in humanity — individually and communally. The impact of this new sense of history only relatively recently began to be felt within the Catholic Church, but the delayed impact rapidly effected wondrous changes, including the setting free of manifold forces of Church renewal. Hence, to understand adequately the dynamics of freedom at work in the Catholic Church today, one must analyze the bases of the turn toward a sense of history and its relationship to the Church.

History is a kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the past of the human community. As the knowledge of history spreads in a community, it becomes a sort of communal self-awareness. This self-awareness of each individual person includes, not only a consciousness of her/his own unique being, but also an ever-expanding knowledge of things that are not him/herself. In fact, the knowledge of the two – the self and the other – are bound together by an indissoluble and proportionately developing dialogue.

Everyone, of course, lives in a community, or rather, many communities, and these communities also provide some kind of collective memories. Since the Church is one of the communities the Christian lives in it also has a communal memory. It manifests itself in an almost limitless variety of ways: doctrines, functional relationships of offices, liturgies, alleged recollections of the past, postures toward all other aspects of life. The Church's memory embraces all of life and if it is functioning rightly it will provide a vital integrating overview of all reality for its members.

It is dramatically apparent how this sense of history, this awareness of growth in all things, has influenced the Church in its liturgy. The very act of learning how we had arrived at the various rigid forms of the liturgy was sufficient to release us from a bondage to these forms. The past experiences could then be evaluated for what they really were and placed in proper perspective and integrated into all the rest of the Church's experience-proper to the Church's current needs. The Church, like all living communities, must be constantly "updated", "aggiornamento-ized" to fulfill its proper function. Good history has here de-absolutized historical reality, e.g., the Latin silent canon did not pre-exist in some pseudo-Platonic world of ideas and wait until the ninth century to incarnate itself forever thereafter. It developed out of concrete, temporal circumstances, and must be evaluated accordingly.

In the area of doctrine, the Vatican II "coming of age" of the Church began to produce even more spectacular results. First of all, the Catholic community began to acquire a new awareness of how important it is to know the whole history of a dogmatic formula in order to interpret it accurately. Where before an analytic, scholastic approach was often used exclusively, the problems of theology were then first placed in historical perspective, with the result that many of the old impasses dissolved. Instead of merely taking a dogmatic formula and analyzing it, as it were, on the table in front of them, contemporary Catholic theologians – who are also half historians – now study the original documents bearing on the problem.

One of the most deep-going changes of the modern sense of history is the growing acceptance that doctrine grows or develops in a much more profound way than was previously thought. Development of doctrine is not just a making explicit of what was previously implicit. It certainly is not a simple, always progressive, "organic" growth as from the acorn into the oak tree – to use Newman's image – for there have been some obvious complete reversals, such as in the teaching on religious freedom in the last one hundred and fifty years. Nor is it sufficient to say that the substance of the doctrine remains the same in each age, but the formulation of it can be changed and perhaps improved, as good Pope John stated in such quiet revolutionary fashion. What is demanded as the community of the Church attains a greater knowledge of itself and the other is not just a reformulation of the mysteries of the faith, but also a reconceptualization, at times, the restatement of the questions.

These, of course, are not the building blocks of a mechanistic kind of system which can produce the eternal verities in concepts and formularies eternally valid for all people, times, and places. They are more like the living tissues which in vital organic interaction can transcend themselves.

Here we fumble with the latest gift of the new sense of history; the past leads to the present but it also implies the future, which contains the radically unknown; for history shows us that because of human freedom the present is not limited to an unfolding of the potential of the past. Human freedom, despite all its restrictions, places in our hands the power of creativity. This has always been potentially available, but now that the new sense of history has made the Christian more profoundly aware of it, its operation on the communal level of the Church will be the more profound.

III. THE TURN TOWARD THIS WORLD

Until very recently the term "salvation" was understood exclusively to mean going to heaven after death; its root meaning from salus, of a "full, healthy life," was largely lost in Christianity after the third century.[3] Marx was not far from the mark when he claimed that Christianity (and religion in general) was mainly concerned about "pie in the sky bye and bye". But that focus shifted radically with Vatican II, especially as reflected in the document The Church in the Modern World, which in effect, though without the name, launched Liberation Theology.

With Vatican II there was a decided Copernican "turn toward this world," a renewing of the effort to overcome the destructive dualism that has plagued Christianity (and many other religions) from its very first century. During the Middle Ages the Church was very much involved in this world, with bishops and abbots being secular as well as spiritual princes. However, in many ways even the concern for the neighbor's physical well-being of the medieval feudal world, which the Church helped construct, began to turn inward as that feudal world gave way to modernity.

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution plans on how to shape and re shape the disappearing feudal structures were laid and tested, adjusted, and re-tested. Such awareness, planning, and action also took place within Western religions. One need only recall the large number of Jews involved in the history of socialism (starting with Marx) and the labor movement, including Jewish social justice organizations from the Jüdischer Bund to Israeli Kibbutzim. Christian Socialism started in England with people like Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872) and in Germany with people like Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler (1811-1877); in France religious social justice work was led by activists like Count Albert de Mun (1841-1914), Count René de la Tour du Pin (1834-1925) and Marc Sagnier (1873-1950); in America there were Terence Powderley (1849-1924) and the Knights of Labor, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) and his highly influential "Social Gospel" message. Even the popes moved in this direction: Leo XIII issued the first papal social encyclical Rerum novarum in 1893, followed by Pius XI's Quadragesimo anno in 1933, John XXIII's Pacem in terris (1963) and Paul VI's Populorum progressio (1968).

The more recent developments include European Political Theology, Latin American Liberation Theology, North American Black Theology and Feminist Theology, and Korean Minjung or People's Theology. Around the globe Christian churches spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on social justice issues, a significant portion of which is aimed at changing the structures of society to benefit more people. The notion is spreading among Christians that the mission of the Church is to preach the Good News of the Gospel to all humanity, not just quantitatively in terms of individual persons, but also qualitatively in terms of every portion of the human beings-and the human structures one lives in are an essential part of one's humanity.

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part VII
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PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI | PART VII | PART VIII | PART IX
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Footnotes:
1. See, e.g., Leonard Swidler and Hans Küng, eds., The Church in Anguish: Has the Vatican Betrayed Vatican II? (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); Bernard Häring, My Witness for the Church, Translation and Introduction by Leonard Swidler (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992); Heinrich Fries, Suffering From the Church, Translation and Introduction Arlene and Leonard Swidler (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995).
2. Horrific words written by Pope Gregory XVI in his encyclical Mirari vos in 1832 and repeated in Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors in 1864. Quoted in Roger Aubert, "Religious Liberty from 'Mirari vos' to the 'Syllabus,'" Historical Problems of Church Renewal, Concilium, VII (Glen Rock, NJ, 1965), pp. 91f.: "From this poisonous spring of indifferentism flows the false and absurd, or rather the mad principle [deliramentum] that we must secure and guarantee to each one liberty of conscience [italics added]; this is one of the most contagious of errors; it smooths the way for that absolute and unbridled freedom of thought, which, to the ruin of Church and State, is now spreading everywhere, and which certain men, with outrageous impudence, do not fear to represent as advantageous to religion."
3. For a discussion of "salvation" and other key terms about the ultimate goal of life see, Leonard Swidler, The Meaning of Life At the Edge of the Third Millennium, (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1992).

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©2007 Leonard Swidler

[Index of Commentaries by Prof Len Swidler]