Thoughts on the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Closure of the Second Vatican Council
Back in my Anglican days, I never gave a second thought to the serious historical study of Roman Catholicism in general or of the latest instalment of its series of General Councils in particular; Anglican ecclesial culture in its homeland was at that time still smugly self-sufficient. I had thus imbibed the attitude expressed in George Herbert’s poem The British Church, in which he saw the Church of England as a comely yet modest woman set in between overdressed, haughty, hussy-like Rome, on the one hand, and Plain Jane drab Geneva on the other. I can still recite the opening stanza from memory:
I joy, deare Mother, when I view
Thy perfect lineaments and hue
Both sweet and bright.
Beautie in thee takes up her place,
And dates her letters from thy face,
When she doth write.
Rome gets it right between the eyes, pow!:
She on the hills, which wantonly
Allureth all in hope to be
By her preferr’d,
Hath kiss’d so long her painted shrines,
That ev’n her face by kissing shines,
For her reward.
Geneva meanwhile suffers a pitying glance:
She in the valley is so shie
Of dressing, that her hair doth lie
About her eares:
While she avoids her neighbours pride,
She wholly goes on th’ other side,
And nothing wears.
In the final stanza, Herbert praises the English Church for observing the ‘mean’ (via media already!) between her two ecclesial Ugly Sisters, building up to this crescendo, which finds somewhat of a Lutheran parallel in certain paragraphs of Löhe’s Three Books on the Church:
Blessed be God whose love it was
To double-moat thee with his grace,
And none but thee.
Early in my time at Oxford, the weekly University Sermon (these days, apparently, reduced to twice a term at Cambridge but a more frequent occurrence at Oxford, though not invariable held in the University church) was once delivered by Léon-Joseph Cardinal Suenens (1904-1996), archbishop of Malines-Mechelen in Belgium. Suenens was at that time held in high esteem as leader of the ‘progressive’ forces at and after the Second Vatican Council. The tall and broad-shouldered scarlet-clad cardinal struck an impressive figure in the pulpit of St Mary the Virgin, the church where John Henry Newman served as Vicar for fifteen years, and I recall his delivering a well put-together extempore sermon in fluent English, never seeming to look down at a manuscript. I also remember the Bidding Prayer’s being read by an Anglican cleric, departing from the practice of this intercession’s being offered by the preacher of the day from the pulpit: how could a cardinal in the service of the ‘Bishop of Rome [who] hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England’ pray a formula that acknowledged ‘the Queen’s Majesty, supreme in all causes spiritual as well as temporal’? At that time the royal Supreme Governorship was to me an article of faith, Henry VIII’s ecclesial Brexit an inspired work. Contemporary devout Scandinavian Lutherans would surely have automatically acknowledged a kindred status for their Sovereigns of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; I know of one who still does! Moreover, the bottom line of Suenens’ homily also sticks in my memory. He must have preached at Eastertide, likely on Quasimodogeniti Sunday, since he used the text of the day to make the point that, just as Jesus breached the walls of the upper room to appear to the Twelve, so Anglicans and Roman Catholics already enjoyed a deep communion with each other despite the walls’ restricting full church fellowship still standing. Despite the emergence of lady archbishops etc. etc., that line is still being plugged by those at the head of church officialdom. Plus ça change, as they say.
From the outset of my time at the St Catharines seminary, I was responsible for the Religious Bodies course that Jonathan Grothe and I thought should optimally be a study of Comparative Symbolics. Given overwhelming, often invincible ignorance of the needed background church-historical data, Comparative Symbolics must mainly be left to STM and doctoral curricula. Much reading and research were needed for me to put post-Reformation Roman Catholicism on the map. There is no point in opening one’s mouth on the Roman Church of today without gaining a grasp of how the inherited Augustinianism still alive and well at Trent was dented by the censure of Louvain’s Michael Baius in 1567 and by the emergence around the turn of the seventeenth century of the at least semi-Pelagian Jesuit doctrine of grace (I used to venture the dry remark that this Order founded Fuller Seminary) against which the Jansenists were ultimately unable to prevail; instead, Jansenism itself became a proscribed heresy, henceforth living an underground existence among French and Italian priests until well into the twentieth century (the novelist François Mauriac was an unabashed sympathizer). On the ecclesiological front, French Gallicanism and German Febronianism conceived the papacy, along the lines of fifteenth-century Conciliarism, as the wider Church’s CEO, responsible to the higher authority of a General Council, whose decisions he should dutifully enforce. The shock of the French Revolution and the upheavals of Napoleon’s reign produced the mighty reaction of nineteenth-century Ultramontanism, which at the First Vatican Council of 1869-1870 defined the pope as a monarch unanswerable to any earthly forum, vested as he was with the authority to issue infallible definitions ex sese, non autem ex consensu ecclesiae, off his own bat, as it were, not depending on the consent of the Church. In his shallow but hard-hitting volume Infallibility (he was against it, in case you are in suspense), Hans Kűng recalled how a preacher at Vatican I spoke of the three Incarnations of the Son of God: in the Man Jesus of Nazareth, in the Sacrament of the Altar, and in the old man of the Vatican. The Incarnate Lord is certainly most intimately and wondrously present with us in His Sacrament of the Altar but the pope’s exemption from the scrutiny of any earthly authority—prima sedes a nemine iudicatur, ‘the First See can be judged of none’, was, according to the eminent historian Henry Chadwick, a forgery of around AD 500 concocted to get a reigning bishop of Rome out of a tight spot—is an anathematizable blasphemy, full stop. I recall a stellar performance on the topic of the papacy delivered by the late Fr Thomas Hopko of St Vladimir’s seminary in the Senate Chamber of Brock University in which he pulverized the notion of infallibility with the devastating one-liner, ‘No one ever is.’
I used to think that Luther’s remark, in On the Councils and the Church of 1539, singling out the first four General Councils as of special authority, deeming ‘all the rest of lesser status—alle andere will ich geringer halten’, a distinctively reformational statement. Note well, though, that he does not cavalierly dismiss all subsequent councils, but simply subordinates them to the first four while pledging to sort wheat from chaff. Again, Henry Chadwick comes to my aid as he points out that the notion of the unique and unrepeatable value of the first Four General Councils (Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon) was definitively articulated by Gregory the Great who said that the Four Councils correspond to the Four Gospels in not admitting a fifth of equal status. Hence Luther was speaking as a good medieval Catholic in highlighting the blessed chain of Dogmenbildung (formation of dogma) that led from Nicea to Chalcedon. Of course, acceptance of Ephesus in AD 431 entails acquiescence in the condemnation of the Nestorianizing Three Chapters at Justinian’s Council of AD 552-553; Martin Chemnitz looks at Chalcedon through the same pair of spectacles. And by the same token, acceptance of the Definition of Chalcedon of AD 451 brings with it consent to the condemnation of Monotheletism at Constantinople III in AD 681. The Fifth and Sixth Councils offer extended clarificatory footnotes to the Third and Fourth.
For the Christian East there have thus far been no fewer and no less than seven authoritative General Councils: while classical Lutheranism does not sign up to the veneration of icons dogmatized at Nicea II in AD 787, we do follow the Libri Carolini in rejecting, at least formally if not, alas, practically, iconoclasm itself.
And for our Roman separated brethren meanwhile, the list of authentic General Councils extends to the dizzying number of twenty-one, Trent being the nineteenth, Vatican I the twentieth, Vatican II (1962-1965) the twenty-first in the series. The Councils held between #VII and #XXI are of course a mixed bag, with a host of good things being said along the way. Innocent III’s Fourth Lateran Council begins by expounding the analogical nature of theological language in a manner later duly reflected in a footnote in Pieper’s first volume (I:432, n. 62, to be exact). Pieper traces the point he makes to Quenstedt, forbearing to acknowledge Lateran IV and its exposition by Aquinas. In his study of the Consecration, Bjarne Teigen pointed out the occasions on which Chemnitz expresses agreement with the Council of Trent.
Sixty years ago this coming Monday, 8 December 2025, Paul VI (1963-1978) closed the Council that his predecessor, John XXIII (1958-1963), had opened on 11 October 1962. Historians of Vatican II have recorded how Pope Roncalli intended to convene a ‘pastoral council’ that would leave dogma, the depositum fidei, untouched, In his televised opening address, Roncalli laid aside the Johannine definition of ‘world’ to embrace with a gentle hug the saeculum present inside and outside St Peter’s as a well-meaning interlocutor with which he could do business for the benefit of mankind: ‘But at the present time, the spouse of Christ prefers to use the medicine of mercy rather than the weapons of severity; and, she thinks she meets today's needs by explaining the validity of her doctrine more fully rather than by condemning.’ By Council’s end, its closing document Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, deliberately forsook proclamation and catechesis to embark on the path of seeking ‘dialogue’ (!) with the entity that the Beloved Disciple in his quaint naivety believed to ‘lie in the evil one’: ‘And so the Council …can find no more eloquent expression of its solidarity and respectful affection for the whole human family …than to enter into dialogue with it about all these different problems. …The Sacred Synod, in proclaiming the noble destiny of man and affirming an element of the divine in him, offers to co-operate unreservedly with mankind in fostering a sense of brotherhood to correspond to this destiny of theirs.’ Truly, you can’t make this stuff up. ‘Good Pope John’ got as drunk as a lord on the heady brew of 1960s optimism, from which our generation has been suffering a painful hangover.
The discipline of historical theology needs to pay due attention to the sixteen officially promulgated Documents of Vatican II, since without them it is impossible to understand the course charted by the post-conciliar popes or to have any clue where the Roman Catholic Church of the last sixty years has been and is coming from. Except for a tiny minority of clergy and laity, today’s Rome has the mindset not of Trent but of Vatican II. Should a North American confessional Lutheran find himself or himself sitting in audience with Pope Leo and start venting about the Tridentine formulae found most offensive among us, the Chicago-born and -educated pontiff would probably have to look up the references: the template from which he carries out his ministry and does business from day to day is the whole world of Vatican II, with what all preceded it an unfamiliar image available in family scrapbooks kept in the attic. With respect to the topic of Justification an erudite and friendly US bishop once remarked to me, ‘The Church is no longer at Trent.’ Sadly, though he was a scripturally literate man at home in the sacred languages, he did not specify precisely where the Church of Vatican II is at on this matter.
There is of course much good in the Documents of Vatican II, with Yea and Amen being able to be said to whole paragraphs of the Council’s two Dogmatic Constitutions, Lumen Gentium on the Church and Dei Verbum on Divine Revelation. But there is no reason to suppose that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit was given to the more than two thousand bishops from across the world to be found in the aula of St Peter’s Basilica on any given day of the autumns between 1962 and 1965. To be blunt, many of them had little clue what they were voting for or against, the conduct of the Council having descended after the first month or so into a determined tug of war between the Curia and the progressive majority, with Paul VI usually wavering between the two. To cut a long story short, most bishops who overcame whatever misgivings they might have by voting a dutiful Placet at the nod of the pope had no idea that they were injecting a blatantly universalist virus into the bloodstream of the Church. Readers of chapter 16 of Lumen Gentium must realize by now that the bishops made it hard nay well-nigh impossible for an atheist who manifests a modicum of civic virtue to go to hell. Chapter 15 made Roman participation in inner-Christian ecumenism possible by acknowledging ecclesial reality outside the boundaries of the Roman Church, but as the Council defined the Church through the little used biblical image of the ‘people of God’, acknowledging the Orthodox and Protestants of many varieties as also belonging to this people, it went on in the following chapter to recognize Judaism, Islam, and even pagan religions as ‘related to’ (ordinantur ad) the people of God, a point that Elijah failed to concede on the occasion of his contest with the prophets of Baal. Bishop Robert Barron of Rochester MN, a media personality with a somewhat ‘conservative’ profile, and even Pope Benedict XVI in his retirement (or was it imprisonment?) have floated the notion that Almighty God was displeased with Elijah’s recourse to lethal violence through his slaughter of the prophets of Baal. See my review of Ratzinger’s posthumously published final essays in Touchstone magazine.
The bottom line here is that Vatican II opened the door to John Paul II’s presiding over successive acts of syncretistic worship and to the Polish pope’s conviction that each person conceived starts out and lives from a condition of objective justification. Again, I can prove these startling assertions, which if untrue would involve severe breach of the Eighth Commandment. Which means that even the worst excesses of the late Pope Francis can be justified through appeal to the ‘Spirit of Vatican II’. We might understand Leo’s immediate predecessor as one who remorselessly dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of Lumen Gentium 16. Quite the worst aspect of the rotten legacy of the late pope is that he regarded our Lord Jesus Christ as an embarrassment to be skirted around, a stumbling block to be avoided as he frantically pursed the goal of the widest possible, Christ-dodging human fraternity. This very charge was brought at the end of October this year by a journalist of ‘conservative’ but not traditionalist Roman Catholic persuasion who worked for some years at the Vatican itself. According to Daniel B. Gallagher, ‘At [the] core [of Bergoglio’s programmatic encyclical Fratelli tutti] is a highly dubious and risky enterprise: namely, the bracketing of Christ from Christianity in the attempt to enter into dialogue with the world about the meaning of “fraternity and social friendship” (see Where Did Francis Go Awry? - The Catholic Thing). Leo XIV Prevost, downhome ‘Bob from Chicago’, is clearly a much nicer man than was Francis Bergoglio (a very low bar to surmount!) and he chants well, but given his theological formation in 1970s Chicago (which won’t have been much different from Oxford in the same years), it is going to be an uphill task to have Jn 14:6 resound in the depths of his soul. While the Polish pontiff was restrained from time to time by his German cardinal prefect of the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as Leo continues to enjoy the services of the prefect of the renamed Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith summoned by Bergoglio from his Argentinian homeland, he is unlikely to benefit from any sound theological counsel. For as the British-born Baptist theologian now teaching in Pennsylvania, Carl Trueman, has pointed out in a sentence of delicious sarcastic wit, having Manuel Fernandez sit in the chair once occupied by Joseph Ratzinger ‘is as if Aquinas had been succeeded by John Tetzel’ (see Pope Francis, My Worst Protestant Nightmare).
Recollection of Vatican II as an assembly to whose Documents we may cheerfully offer a quatenus subscription prompts consideration of the phenomenon and ongoing meaning of General Councils as such. In a paper recently delivered in Florida on the topic of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea which he kindly shared with me, my friend Muhlenberg College’s emeritus professor of history William J. Tighe points out how, as Nicea’s homoousion proved too hot a potato for the Origenist majority of Eastern bishops to touch (were these worthies ‘Semi-Arians’, as John Henry Newman set forth, or ‘Semi-Nicenes’, as I used to intimate in class?), a series of emperors starting with Constantine himself and running through the sole rule of his son Constantius II convened no fewer than fourteen episcopal assemblies each of which deemed its own dogmatic draft superior to Nicea and hence worthy of adoption by the whole Church. What factor causes Nicea to stand seventeen centuries later while its rival formulae rightly belong in the waste baskets of historical theology? In other words, what makes a Council (of which there have been a multitude) Oecumenical/General? For our Roman separated brethren, a Council must rightly be summoned by the Roman pontiff of the day, its resolutions gaining universal authority through their being issued by those bishops ‘in communion with the Successor of Peter’.
The clinching factor that confers universal authority on Nicea is that its core decision, manifest in the attached anathemas and in its selection of the non-biblical term homoousion to pinpoint the Deity that the Son shares with the Father, is that its teaching happens to be true. Inherent authority lay not in the assembled bishops as such and certainly not in the emperor who took up their decision into imperial law, but in the truth of their proclamation. For many years the overwhelmingly rejected position on artificial birth control adopted by Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae of 1968 has struck me as purely and simply true and hence as binding on consciences, and much the same can be said of the thrust and main substance of Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism in Pascendi and of John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae on the Life issues. But intrinsic authority does not attach to such words in virtue of their being spoken by the ‘Successor of Peter’ with or without the consent of the bishops in communion with him. The truthfulness of the dogmatic decisions of the First Four General Councils (and hence of the Fifth and Sixth also) resides in their consonance with Sacred Scripture, with the Rule of Faith as articulated from the outset of the Church, and above all with the mind of Christ our Lord Himself, a factor that became manifest in their earning the widespread (though sometimes not unanimous—let’s not forget the Assyrians and the non-Chalcedonians!) consent of the Church—doch, Pio Nono/Pius IX, ex consensu ecclesiae!
Acceptance of General Councils and openness to the possibility of there being another at some future point in time demands an ecclesiology that does not reside exclusively in the mental terrain of the Invisible Church. Such an ecclesiology lies ready to hand in Lutheran Orthodoxy’s biblically and confessionally based notion of the ecclesia synthetica, the Church dominically founded to exist in the communion and union of laity and clergy. Almost two decades ago, Lutheran Church—Canada’s CTCR document Pastor and People Together in Christ’s Church (written by a friend of mine and available for download from the Theological Documents section of LCC’s website) generated a bout of fierce controversy, with demands being made in some quarters for its withdrawal. Looking back these years later, one wonders what the fuss was all about: the ecclesia synthetica can be irrefutably proved to any Bible class in less than five minutes using only the opening address of Philippians and the words from 1 The 5 taken by Luther into his Table of Duties. In addition to the self-evident reality of the ‘collective-composite’ Church we need to recover another ingredient of the doctrine of Lutheran Orthodoxy that is even less well known among North American Lutherans than the ecclesia synthetica motif, namely, that of the ecclesia repraesentativa or the ‘representative Church’. Until I unexpectedly became Registrar at CLTS, I used to spend a portion of each summer dipping into my personal copy of the dogmatics of David Hollaz (+1713), a figure of late Lutheran Orthodoxy who exercised a decisive influence on the dogmatic formation of Wilhelm Löhe. Hollaz is truly a fun old bird on whose distinctive Ecclesiology some doctoral candidate might write his treatise one day. It was from Hollaz that I first picked up the old Lutheran teaching on ecclesia synthetica and ecclesia repraesentativa.
Heinrich Schmid summarizes the notions of the synthetic and the representative Church in words that help us understand how, in the Providence of God, Councils can at times resolve doctrinal disputes and authoritatively articulate dogma that is binding for the whole Church:
‘The entire number of those who are called to salvation in Christ cannot equally participate in all the affairs of the Church by giving counsel, direction, or decision; it seeks, therefore, an instrumentality through which it can be represented and to which it assigns this business, and it finds this in the Ministry, which is, therefore, not only entrusted with the business of publicly proclaiming the faith of the Church, but also of leading the Church, and of discussing and deciding all the questions that may arise in it. The Ministry is therefore called the representative Church, as distinguished from the collective Church, by which we mean the whole number of the members of the Church. This Ministry, then, assembles in a council, whenever special occasions call for consultation, from which council laymen are not excluded if they prove themselves experienced in ecclesiastical affairs, and the conclusions there adopted serve as a rule for the Church. …The more unanimously adopted the decrees of a council are, and the greater the number of particular churches that agree in adopting them, the greater weight do they have; although even then they are not infallible, and therefore even then not of absolutely binding authority’ (Heinrich Schmid, Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 599f.)
Generations are now arising in the Roman Catholic Church for whom the Second Vatican Council is no longer a matter of living memory. A certain pope of our times was one of the youngest bishops at the assembly, while his successor exercised not a little discreet influence as the peritus or accompanying theological expert of the cardinal archbishop of Cologne. Meanwhile, Pope Bergoglio was a still non-ordained trainee Jesuit of not yet thirty years of age when the Council came to its close. To his mind, the new orientations taken at the Council as interpreted by the progressive majority were an unchallengeable framework to be accepted and followed without demur. Looking back over the past sixty years, we can see how the Council was caught up by the superficial optimism of the 1960s, hoping to befriend the modern world by offering a ‘lite’ version of Roman Catholicism that fell short of Sacred Scripture and the best of mainline tradition East and West. John XXIII’s well-meaning ‘pastoral’ approach turned out to be a devastating pastoral failure as it misread the signs of the times and flattered modern man without calling him to repentance. The thought has occurred to me over the years that, had the Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople called together an ecumenical gathering of non-Roman Catholic church leaders sometime in the mid-1950s and said, ‘Well, boys—at that time there were few ordained females in Christendom—even though we have major differences among ourselves, let’s brainstorm about how we can well and truly shaft those Romans who think so highly of themselves,’ he and his fellow leading ecclesiastics could have dreamt up no surer way of wreaking havoc within the largest Church of Christendom than by planting the seeds of the assembly that John XXIII convened on 12 October 1962. But any such plot hatched by the bigwigs of non-Roman Christendom would have turned out to be a terrible own goal for, as Hermann Sasse once remarked, the several components of Christendom, though sorely divided among themselves, stand and fall together, succumbing to the same viruses and benefitting from the same winds of the Spirit. As Bishop Pittelko used to say, ‘When the Pope sneezes, Lutherans catch cold.’ While our theology can benefit from the scholarship of the late Pope Benedict, our church life has been negatively impact by the Second Vatican Council and by its effects that may or may not have been explicitly intended by the Council Fathers. Think of the man-centered, entertainment-style worship that flows from widespread adoption of ad populum celebration. Consider the often-unconscious shift towards universalism that shies away from the dread but inescapable reality of enemies of the Faith heading into eternal perdition. And think of the downplaying of the reality of serious sin that has paved the way for the situation ethics that Francis Bergoglio endeavored to make de fide. The effects of the Second Vatican Council have been felt far outside the bounds of the Roman Catholic Church, for which reason we too have a stake in the exposition of the Council’s pronouncements and, please God, in Rome’s firm reorientation to Christ the King Who is Lord of all who profess His Name here below.