Spirit of Vatican II

By the spirit of Vatican II is meant the teaching and intentions of the Second Vatican Council interpreted in a way that is not limited to a literal reading of its documents, or even interpreted in a way that contradicts the "letter" of the Council (cf. Saint Paul's phrase, "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life"). This has led to a great diversity of understanding of the phrase.

Variety of significance

The spirit of Vatican II is invoked for a great variety of ideas and attitudes. Bishop John Tong Hon of Hong Kong used it with regard merely to an openness to dialogue with others, saying: "We are guided by the spirit of Vatican II: only dialogue and negotiation can solve conflicts." Michael Novak described it instead as a spirit that "sometimes soared far beyond the actual, hard-won documents and decisions of Vatican II. ... It was as though the world (or at least the history of the Church) were now to be divided into only two periods, pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II. Everything 'pre' was then pretty much dismissed, so far as its authority mattered. For the most extreme, to be a Catholic now meant to believe more or less anything one wished to believe, or at least in the sense in which one personally interpreted it. One could be a Catholic 'in spirit'. One could take Catholic to mean the 'culture' in which one was born, rather than to mean a creed making objective and rigorous demands. One could imagine Rome as a distant and irrelevant anachronism, embarrassment, even adversary. Rome as 'them'."

Spirit of the Council as interpreted by the Popes

In a 1994 document Pope John Paul II called for what he called the authentic spirit of the Council to be respected. In the book, The Ratzinger Report, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger also distinguished the true spirit of the Council from false interpretations, blaming the disappointed hopes for renewal on "those who have gone far beyond both the letter and the spirit of Vatican II", and calling for a "return to the authentic texts of the original Vatican II".

Years later, when he had become Pope Benedict XVI, he decried the "hermeneutic of discontinuity" according to which the Council texts do not express the true spirit of the Council, so that "it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the Council but its spirit." He added: "In this way, obviously, a vast margin was left open for the question on how this spirit should subsequently be defined and room was consequently made for every whim."

Legacy of the Second Vatican Council

The Council's legacy has been a topic of fierce debate since the 1970s, with roughly three camps disputing among themselves on the correct hermeneutic of conciliar teachings : Liberals, Traditionalists and Conservatives.

Liberals

Liberal Catholics have written of their expectation that the Council would mark a new springtime for the Church, their hope "that priorities and practices within the church could be radically different as we returned to the roots of our faith--to the early centuries, not the add-ons of the last 300 years." They have spoken not of the spirit of the Council, but of its actual reforms, which, they say, "today, crafty, sometimes vengeful conservatives are rolling back".

Traditionalists

Many traditionalist Catholics hold that the Council and subsequent interpretations of its documents moved the Church away from important principles of the historic Catholic faith; these principles include the following:^{[citation needed]}

• the belief that the Catholic Church is the one and only true Christian church founded by Jesus Christ;
• the belief that the modern idea of religious liberty is to be condemned;
• an appropriate emphasis on the "Four last things" (Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell);
• a devotion to scholastic theology and
• an organically grown apostolic Roman liturgy, as they define the Tridentine Mass.^{[citation needed]}

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre distinguished between "Catholic Rome" and the actually existing Rome, declaring that, while he and his followers were faithful to "Catholic Rome", they refused to follow "the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies which were clearly evident in the Second Vatican Council and, after the Council, in all the reforms which issued from it". A priest of the Lefebvre-founded Society of St. Pius X similarly declared that "Rome is now the headquarters, not only of the Catholic Church, but of the Modernist Mafia which has invaded and subjected it", and that "the multitudes of ex-Catholic shepherds and their sheep who have either defected or drifted into a new religion" might well be called "Roman Protestants".

Conservatives

Conservative Catholics respond to Traditionalists' complaints by pointing out that the unauthorized radical changes made in the name of "the spirit of Vatican II" are contrary not only to canon law and Church tradition but also to the actual teachings of the Council and its official interpretations.

An example concerns unauthorized and in some cases arguably un-Catholic elements introduced into celebration of Mass. These violate the Council's decree on the sacred liturgy and official Church documents on the matter, which state: "It is not possible to be silent about the abuses, even quite grave ones, against the nature of the Liturgy and the Sacraments as well as the tradition and the authority of the Church, which in our day not infrequently plague liturgical celebrations in one ecclesial environment or another. In some places the perpetration of liturgical abuses has become almost habitual, a fact which obviously cannot be allowed and must cease."

Hermeneutic of continuity

In the understanding of the Second Vatican Council propounded by the Popes, it is wrong to interpret the Council, as the above groups do, in terms of "discontinuity and rupture", a hermeneutic that, he said, "has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology". To this interpretation he opposed "the hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God." Pope Benedict XVI set forth this view in a 2005 speech to the Roman Curia and described it as the view proposed also at the start and at the close of the Council by Popes John XXIII and Paul VI.

Further reading

• Sinke Guimarães, Atila (1997) (in English). In the Murky Waters of Vatican II. Metairie: MAETA. ISBN 1889168068. 
• Amerio, Romano (1996) (in English). Iota Unum. Kansas City: Sarto House. ISBN 0963903217.