The Spirit of Vatican II: Part I

I expect that most people know by now that, for example, the Second Vatican Council, which began 50 years ago today, prescribed no change to religious instruction in Catholic schools, still less the ruinous schemes now in use, and approved no new Rite of Mass, although there is nothing inherently wrong with the normative Latin text of the Modern Roman Rite, the problems being in translation and implementation. There are several other obvious examples of things that the Council simply never said. But what of the things that it did say?

Vatican II certainly did define the Church as the People of God, but that represented no departure from the immutable definition of Her as Societas Perfecta. Rather, the latter is Sacred Tradition’s constant, and thus absolutely authoritative, interpretation of the former, which is of course utterly Biblical. In order to understand whatever Scripture and, following Scripture, the Council have to say about the Church as the People of God, we must refer constantly to whatever Tradition, and thus the Magisterium, says about the Church as Societas Perfecta.

Vatican II certainly did define the Mass as the centre of the Church and as the centre of unity, in accordance with 1 Corinthians 10:17. The Church is the sacrament of the world’s salvation, and ubi Eucharistia, ibi Ecclesia. But it is only where there is the Sacred Priesthood as the Catholic Church defines it that there is at least the certainty of the Mass, it is only where there is the Sacred Episcopate as the Catholic Church defines it that there is the certainty of the Sacred Priesthood, and it is only where there is full visible communion with the Petrine See of Rome that there is at least the certainty of the Sacred Episcopate. Ubi Eucharistia, ibi Ecclesia precisely because ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia.

Vatican II certainly did define the primacy of Scripture in teaching and practice, not that there was anything even vaguely or remotely novel in that. It certainly did not define the primacy, or even the admissibility, of secular and secularising Biblical criticism. The Authorship of God’s Written Word is, like the Person of His Incarnate Word, both fully human and fully divine. The Bible comes only with, in and through the Church that defined its Canon and has preserved it through the ages, and its implications for doctrine, for morality and for future hope are integral to its literal, Authorially original sense. The founders of Protestantism spoke of Scripture’s plain sense, but that sense is in fact canonical and ecclesial, allegorical and typological, tropological and moral, anagogical and eschatological, while also including the historical factuality of the events recorded as such at least from the Call of Abram onwards, with apparent difficulties finding their resolution precisely in Canon and Church, in Tradition and Magisterium. It is that which enjoys priority in faith and practice.

Vatican II certainly did not define either a theological or an ecclesial “pluralism”, but instead affirmed the diversity and pluriformity that have always existed not only within, but on account of, absolute doctrinal and ecclesial unity. It has never been disputed that the Church is a Communion of Particular Churches: insofar as one is ecclesially related, as a Catholic, to a bishop, then one is a member of his Particular Church, be it his Diocese, or his Province, or his Patriarchate, or the Particular Church constituted by the Universal Ordinary and Immediate Episcopal Jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff, the one Particular Church to which a Catholic cannot not belong, and which is always as important as any other for the conduct of his or her Catholic life; and a Particular Church is so precisely because it is made up of members of the Universal Church in union with the Roman Pontiff, and is headed by a bishop in that union. That diverse theological formulations and systems are capable of synthesis is because the Catholic Church uniquely contains all the loci of authority bearing witness to the divine self-disclosure in Jesus Christ, so that they are able to balance, complement and enrich each other, and thus to make possible the same balance, complementarity and mutual enrichment among different schools of thought. The locus with the most active role in this process is the See of Rome. In the very act of stating that there is a hierarchy of truths, one states that everything in that hierarchy is true.

Vatican II, in its Christological theme of the New Adam’s revelation of Man to Man, and in its inauguration of the Justice and Peace movement as we now know it, certainly could not have been further from defining “secular human values” as doctrinally, and thus also morally, authoritative. Those who take that view mean such values as prevalent in the most outspoken sections of the rising generation at the time, never representative and now quite hilariously dated.

And Vatican II certainly did embark the Catholic Church on the journey of ecumenism. But ecumenism with whom? First and above all, ecumenism with those who maintain, as ecclesial bodies and not merely as the opinions or preferences of certain members, the transcendality of Divine Revelation in relation to human understanding, the definitions of the first seven Ecumenical Councils, the dogmatic principle and corpus as the context of day-to-day faith and life, the sense that salvation is more than temporal alone, a classical liturgical life, individual and collective devotion to the Mother of God, individual and collective devotion to the Angels and the Saints, the Threefold Apostolic Order, that Order’s essential maleness, the monastic heart of the Church’s life in the world, and the ascetic heart of all true spirituality. In a word, the Orthodox, of whom we must make ourselves worthy in practice by our return to each and all of those principles.

After and under that, we are called to ecumenism with those who uphold the priority of Scripture in faith and life, the sovereignty of God’s grace in salvation, the sole basis of that grace in the salvific work of Jesus Christ, the experiences of conversion and assurance, the priority and urgency of evangelisation, a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the constant reform of the Church under God through His raising up of minorities at the cutting edge, the reality that every Christian has a vocation, the integrity of the lay vocation and of the vocation to marriage, the need for a continuous succession of Biblical preachers and pastors defined by their sound doctrine from each generation to the next, the need for what those who use the term understand as parachurch activity, the centrality of the Preaching of the Word, the indispensability of a culture in which at least the primary defining narratives are those of the Bible, and the primary role of the family in passing on that culture.

We are called to ecumenism with those who, from the eighteenth century onwards, came to recognise that the righteousness of Jesus Christ was not only imputed, but imparted by Word and Sacraments, with that imparted righteousness issuing in Biblical preaching, sacramental spirituality, missionary zeal, musical excellence, practical social concern, and radical political action. And we are called to ecumenism with those who, arising out of that understanding of human sanctification, have come to a position particularly open to completion by, in, through and as the truth that the whole Church is both Pentecostal and Charismatic, having been baptised with the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, and manifesting that baptism in a wide range of charisms.

Such are the marks of an ecclesial community within the understanding of the Council. Enormous is the number of local congregations thus marked. They are ecclesial communities. So is the worldwide community constituted by them and which they constitute. It, too, is an ecclesial community. So are the communities constituted by numerous parachurch agencies whereby members of the former serve the work of the latter. But the old “mainline Protestant” denominations, as such, in the United States? Or the old Nonconformist bodies, as such? Or whatever it is that is held together by the Anglican Consultative Council and the Lambeth Conference? Or the body, as such, defined by the present British State’s continuing ecclesiastical role in its predecessor-but-two Kingdom of England? Or the Erastian bodies, as such, in Scandinavia? Frankly, no. Probably not in the 1960s. And certainly not today. One need look no further than their adoption of the Open Table Policy, contrary to the teaching of their founders and forebears, and only ever a mark of a body in terminal decline. Our own lawless practitioners of “intercommunion”, whatever that means, take note.