IT’S A daunting task to encompass in 1,000 words the content and
impact of the Second Vatican Council.
As I reflect on their combined
efforts to convey the message from Rome – my respect for journalists has
never been higher.
There can be no doubt that in 1962 the Irish
church leadership was anything but ready for a council of the kind
embarked upon.
A senior Maynooth professor declared that nine of the 10
Commandments were grand, but that a real debate was needed on the
question of servile work on Sundays.
Combine this statement with
that of John Charles McQuaid after the council, that “no change will
worry the tranquility of your Christian lives”, and it is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that the Irish church leadership was out of touch
with more than the latest trends in European theology.
Well, all
that was about to change, change utterly.
Whether it liked it or not,
the Irish church was to have the scales removed from its eyes, like
Bartimaeus, the man famously cured of blindness by Jesus.
Vatican
II constituted a great opening of the Catholic Church. The first
manifestation of this was the arrival of the vernacular Mass: Mass would
now be said in the native tongue of the congregation rather than the
Latin, which had previously perpetuated a false idea of universality.
Almost
as significant as this change, and one on which every architect in
Ireland had an opinion, was the turning of the priest to face the
people.
The ancien regime saw the priest huddled over the bread and
wine, whispering the Te Igitur – the predecessor of today’s Eucharistic
Prayers – while the people read their prayer books.
This, in theory,
created a heightened sense of mystery. In practice, it served to deepen
the divide between clergy and laity to crevasse-like proportions.
The
growing feeling among Irish people that “this will just not do!” led to
the church gaining an increased sense of itself as the entire “people
of God”. It no longer saw itself as a caste-based system where a tiny –
in numeric terms – clerical caste ruled all.
The words “We, the people”
suddenly became an Irish ecclesiastical reference point.
With this
came a huge transformation of the ecumenical movement.
In fact, you
might say that with this came the ecumenical movement, as prior to
Vatican II all too few were prepared to utter “that ‘which’ for
‘who’/And risk eternal doom”, in the words of Austin Clarke in Burial of
an Irish President.
The poem recounts how the Catholic members of
government, obeying directions from their clergy, declined to enter St
Patrick’s Cathedral for the funeral of former president Douglas Hyde.
It
is often a measure of the success of an idea that one finds the
preceding state of affairs difficult to envisage. It is indeed difficult
to imagine an Ireland where the vast majority of the population
agonised over their relationship with their separated brethren, not to
mention non-Christians.
Yet two documents of the Second Vatican
Council changed all that or, more accurately, served to crystallise a
process of change that had been ongoing. Unitatis Redintegratio (the
council’s decree on ecumenism) and Nostra Aetate (on the relation of the
Catholic Church to non-Christian religions) marked a sea-change – for
the better, especially when you consider the shameful history of
anti-Semitism – in Irish Catholic attitudes towards Protestant
traditions and non-Christian religions.
But perhaps the most
significant change, though sadly it has not always endured, is the
spirit of joy which the convenor of the Second Vatican Council brought
to that role. The document Pope John XXIII used to open the council was
Gaudet Mater Ecclesia – “Mother Church Rejoices”.
The great
concluding document was Gaudium et Spes – “Joy and Hope”. Writing almost
a century earlier, John Henry Newman expressed dismay about the
circumstances in which the First Vatican Council (1870) was convened:
“Only a weak, fearful organisation, which has lost confidence in what it
stands for, shuts down exploration and silences debate . . . As Jesus
warns us, it is the faithless anxious servant who keeps his master’s
money safe by burying it in the ground.”
Finally, we should
remember that Vatican II was part of the 1960s when, globally, the
attitude towards authority changed: the default position became one of
questioning, as opposed to deference.
It is arguable that the
great failure of Vatican II was the inability of progressive forces to
recognise this.
Ironic too perhaps that, in hindsight, the most powerful
positive forces of dissemination in Ireland were journalists such as
John Horgan, Seán Mac Réamoinn and Louis McRedmond.
But then again,
maybe not so ironic at all.
Dr Pádraic Conway is director of the
UCD International Centre for Newman Studies and a vice-president of UCD.
The Newman centre is organising the one-day conference, “Vatican II: 50
Years On”, on Thursday, October 11th to mark the 50th anniversary of
the opening of the council.