An institution that is inspired by Providence cannot easily set out on a programme of reform and modernisation. Changes in dogma and discipline carry with them the implication that God’s mistakes must be corrected or that divine judgements differ with, and therefore are a consequence of, changes in the temporal world. For more than three hundred years the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church – conscious of that obvious truth – increased its strength (and the confidence of its members) by at least appearing to be impervious to attacks on its beliefs or its behaviour. It was not the habit of popes or bishops ever to give an indication that that they found the slightest merit in the arguments advanced by their critics, and most of the proposals for change and ‘improvement’ that came from inside the Church advocated tightening of the bonds that held lay Catholics close to Rome. Attack was always the preferred form of defence.
In response to the Reformation, the bull Exsurge Domine (published in 1520) identified forty-one errors in Martin Luther’s theology. In 1864, the Syllabus of Errors – published by Pius IX – condemned eighty flaws and fallacies in the arguments advanced by sceptics, secularists and schismatics. It confirmed and reiterated the principle that Pope Gregory XVI had laid down in 1832. His encyclical, Mirari Vos, was a guide to the Church’s response to innovation. Now and for ever there was only one way for the Catholic Church to fight the ‘conspiracy of impious men’.1 It would not yield one inch of its territory. ‘Nothing of the things appointed ought to be diminished, nothing changed.’
The encyclical went on to denounce the modern heresies which the Church must, and would, combat and defeat. They included the ‘abominable conspiracy against the celibacy of the clergy’. But rather more significant, given the mood of the time, was the rejection of ‘the absurd and erroneous proposition that claims of freedom of conscience must be maintained for everyone’. Gregory XVI went on to denounce ‘immoderate freedom of speech’ as demanded by ‘shameless lovers of liberty’. The denunciation concluded with the assertion that ‘both divine and human law cry out against those who strive by treason and sedition to drive from people confidence in their princes’. Those sentiments were the Church’s reaction to the wave of revolutions that swept through mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Their endorsement in the Syllabus of Errors was the Church’s timeless response to the social and political liberalism which was manifest in the revolutions of 1848 and took root thereafter – movements which not even the Church of Rome was strong enough to brush aside.
The Vatican was less concerned with the health of the Church in Britain than with its condition in continental Europe, where secular political movements were fast gaining ground. But even in England – where the social hierarchy seemed unchanged and unchangeable, political stability was assured and the oppressive anti-Catholic laws had been repealed – there were still voices raised to proclaim that the Church must respond to the new demands of modern society. The complaint usually concluded that the choice lay between change and decay. Thinking Catholics worried about the Church’s refusal to see itself as part of an increasingly complex world of scientific and political emancipation and its apparent inability to regard men and women of different faiths as anything other than heretics whose sins must be identified and denounced. Perhaps even more damaging was the reluctance to consider the feelings and convictions of those of its own members who were moving with the times, and at least realise that the Church must respond to economic and social changes in an uncertain world.
There were, from time to time, indications that the Church was looking beyond its own boundaries. In the encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII had proclaimed the moral necessity of decent working conditions, a fair wage and protection of the workers’ right to organise themselves in trade unions – highly progressive opinions, when it was published in 1891. But its actual provisions were less important, as an indication of the Church’s changing attitude, than the spirit in which the encyclical was written. It conceded that, sometimes, power should be exercised by the meek and lowly, and it demonstrated that the Roman Catholic Church was beginning to take an interest in the world outside its theological boundaries. Pope Leo confirmed that welcome fact with the publication of Diuturnum, a disquisition on civil power. But since it concluded that ‘it behoves all citizens to submit themselves and to be as obedient to rulers as to God’,2 the growing army of liberal Catholics were not convinced that the Pope’s acknowledgement that Catholicism could not survive in a vacuum had made him an advocate of liberty, equality or fraternity.
Some tentative – perhaps even unintended – gestures of sympathy sustained the liberals’ hope of real change. Inter Sollicitudines encouraged the use of Gregorian chant and, in consequence, the congregations’ vocal participation in the Mass. But in 1907, the Vatican decided to challenge head-on what it called the Modernists Movement, which it defined by identifying the sixty-five heresies to which its members subscribed. They included the denial that the Bible, being inspired, was completely free of error and the proposition that marriage was a sacrament that had only become an article of faith during the Middle Ages. The Modernists’ mistake was, the Vatican concluded, the belief that dogma is not only able but ought to evolve and to be changed. Its fear was that ‘at the head of what the modernists teach is evolution’ and the consequent conclusion that ‘the state, to which learning has progressed, demands a reform of Christian teaching about God, creation, revelation, the person of the Word Incarnate and of redemption’.3 The Church twice denounced such modernist heresies – first in Lamentability and then in Pascendi Dominici Gregis. The second condemnation admitted an important truth. There were ‘partisans of error in the very heart and bosom of the Church’. Only one response was possible. Modernists were to be confronted with the unyielding certainty which had been the strength of the Church in its darkest days. When the First World War broke out, the Church was unchanged and apparently unchangeable.
During the twenty years of peace that separated the two World Wars, the pace of social change accelerated. Middle-class women were beginning to assert their rights, and women of all classes discovered that it was possible – easily, safely and cheaply – to avoid annual pregnancies. Sex – its purpose and its consequences – was to involve the Church in a long rearguard action that it is still fighting today. And while its social attitudes at home were forcing the otherwise faithful into disobedience, its attitude towards international affairs was causing a disquiet among liberal Catholics which went to the very heart of what they saw as the fundamental flaw in the Roman philosophy of survival. In 1929, a concordat with Mussolini established the Vatican City as an independent state. And Pius XII – elected Pope in March 1939 – notably failed to condemn the Holocaust. The complaint was not that the Catholic Church was inherently sympathetic to fascism – though it certainly initially welcomed the emergence of Mussolini, who had endeared himself to the Vatican by suppressing the anti-clerical Freemasons’ Lodges. The objectionable feature of all the responses to dictatorship was the apparent reluctance to condemn (and even less a willingness to undermine) regimes that preserved and protected the interests of the Catholic Church. The existence of a small violently anti-clerical faction within the generally agnostic Spanish republican movement – not to mention the murder of priests and the rape of nuns – goes some way towards explaining the Vatican’s sympathetic attitude towards General Franco’s insurrection against the lawfully elected government in Spain. But the moral propriety of its attitude aside, Rome’s response to the events that led up to the outbreak of war in 1939 did create the impression that the Catholic Church was turning in on itself rather than facing the problems of the world.
Opponents of Catholicism believed their criticisms to be justified and reinforced by the creation in 1928 of Opus Dei – an organisation which, while bizarrely unrepresentative of the twentieth-century Church, confirms, by its existence, the need – among at least a small percentage of Catholics – for an uncompromising faith that demands the extreme manifestation of an absolute commitment. Although Opus Dei is not, as its enemies claim, a secret society, it certainly works hard to keep secret some of its beliefs. Among them is the importance of mortifying the flesh – sometimes by fasting or sleeping on a hard mattress without a pillow, sometimes by self-flagellation and wearing a hair shirt (cilice) and a spiked ring worn round the leg to suppresses sexual desire.4 In that particular it can claim to act in a tradition that was sanctified, if not popularised, by Thomas More.
The overt purpose of Opus Dei is to enable its members (93,000 worldwide in 2014, 2,000 of whom were priests) ‘to find God in daily life’. That objective is said to be achieved by regarding work as a sacrament and by observing strict religious disciplines. There are various categories of membership. The largest (70 per cent) has the ambiguous title of Supernumeraries. They devote part of their lives to prayer and much of their income to Opus Dei. Numeraries (20 per cent) follow the same discipline, but are celibate and live in Opus Dei centres. The civilised hostility that Opus Dei attracts was revealed in ‘guidelines’ which, in 1982, Cardinal Hume helpfully suggested should govern its conduct – and which were made available to newspapers. No one under the age of eighteen should be allowed to make ‘a long-term commitment’ to Opus Dei. Young recruits should not be enrolled before they ‘discuss the matter’ with their parents or guardians. The ‘freedom to leave’ must be respected.
It would be wrong to imagine that Opus Dei has any connection with events that feature in The Da Vinci Code. The most often-heard complaint against it is that – at a time when Catholics should be looking to the world beyond Rome – everything about Opus Dei encourages introspection. Yet the existence of the society was endorsed by Pope Pius XII in 1950, and in 1982 Pope John Paul II made it a ‘personal prelature’ under the exclusive jurisdiction of its own bishop. At almost exactly the midpoint between those two dates the Second Vatican Council met to consider how best to face the challenges that Opus Dei chose to ignore.
For some years there had been indications that Rome was preparing to move with the times. Throughout the Second World War and the twenty years of troubled peace that followed, the Vatican gave out encouraging signals about its attitude towards the spirit of the age. In his 1943 Christmas message Pius XII announced, with apparent approval, that ‘the future belongs to democracy’ – a judgement which would have been too liberal for Pio Nono at his most progressive. During the same year Divino Afflante Spiritu gave papal approval to the historical and philosophical method of biblical study replacing the traditional ‘allegorical’ exegesis. Mystici Corporis Christi conceded that non-Catholics could be saved if they had lived virtuous lives and would have been baptised into the Church of Rome, had they known of its existence. Liberal Catholicism seemed to be gaining ground. Then on August 4th 1950 Humani Generis was published.
In that encyclical Pius XII denounced theologians who, ‘desirous of novelty’, minimised the distinction between Catholics and subscribers to ‘dissident’ faiths. The result of their philosophic ecumenisms was, he claimed, a modification of the central doctrine of transubstantiation, an interpretation of Genesis that allowed for the possibility that Adam was not the solitary begetter of the whole human race – a view with which John Henry Newman had compromised one hundred years earlier – and the denial of the doctrine that ‘the Mystical Body of Christ and Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing’. That definition of the Church was to prove crucial to the historic debate on the nature and future of Roman Catholicism which came to be called the Second Vatican Council.
On October 28th 1958, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected Pope in succession to Pius XII. Fourteen weeks later, having consulted no one and forewarned only Cardinal Domenico Tardini, his Secretary of State, John XXIII, as he had become, announced his intention of calling a Council of the Catholic Church. Councils in the past had most often been called to respond to an external threat or to plan the defeat of persistent heresy. The Council of Trent (1545–61) had been summoned to coordinate opposition to the Reformation, and the First Vatican Council (1869–70) had been assembled to reassert the authority of the Pope in the face of a threat so severe that the assembly had to be abandoned when Italian troops occupied Rome. Vatican I was never officially closed and both Pius XI (in the 1920s) and Pius XII (in the 1950s) had seriously, and secretly, considered completing its work. It was abandoned unfinished. Vatican II was a new Council with a new purpose.
Pope John XXIII had already established his ‘progressive’ credentials with three encyclicals: Princeps Pastorum (an increased role for the laity), Mater et Magistra (the Church’s social obligation) and Pacem in Terris (the hope of peace). His early indication of the Council’s purpose emphasised, as was required of him, the need to reaffirm doctrine and discipline. But he added a more novel objective to his list of intentions. The Council was to promote ‘the enlightenment, edification and joy of the entire Christian people’ and to offer a ‘cordial invitation to the faithful of separated communities to participate with us in this quest for unity and grace, for which so many souls long in all parts of the world’. The Catholic Church – or at least its Pope – was reaching out to the world.
Vatican II, like every Council before it, was called to overcome a crisis in the life of the Church. But, unlike its predecessors, the threat it faced came not from some external enemy or internal subversion. It came from the refusal of its leadership to change with the times – particularly in its attitude towards other faiths. The old certainties had been shaken by the new realities: the risk of nuclear annihilation as much as the determination of free people to take control of their own lives. Pope John XXIII declared himself to be a gardener rather than a museum-keeper.5
That homely image was either misunderstood or ignored by most of the bishops and clergy who were invited to nominate items for the Council agenda. They responded without thinking it necessary to consult either parish priests or their parishioners. A majority of the 1,998 replies to the 2,598 invitations proposed the denunciation of modern evils, the confirmation of established values and the reaffirmation of accepted doctrine. The most frequent request was for a renewed emphasis on the intercessory powers of the Virgin Mary. Only a small minority asked for the opportunity to promote the introduction of the vernacular Mass and the greater involvement of the laity in the affairs of the Church; and a dozen or so letters, all from outside Europe and the Americas, wanted to discuss, and possibly relax, the clergy’s obligation to celibacy.
The Preparatory Commission ‘summarised’ the possible subjects for debate in a document of 2,060 pages. Despite its length, it was highly selective in its choice of potential topics. All the preparatory work was based on the same cautious principle. The initial agenda, and the documents on which the discussions were to be based, were drawn up by members of the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy, and, in consequence, ignored – in both style and substance – anything that might be called modern. But the output of the Council was very different from the input of the men who prepared the schemata on which the discussions were eventually based. Rome did not speak for the Catholic world. It was estimated that 85–90 per cent of the bishops who took part in the Council held opinions that could reasonably be called ‘transalpine’ rather than ‘ultramontane’. They believed that Rome was not the one reliable source of all that was true and holy. They also knew that, historically, they too were inheritors of the Apostolic Succession – a role which had been diminished by Pius IX’s claims to infallibility. They were, therefore, entirely justified in rejecting the accusation that they were ‘modernists’. In their methodology, they pre-dated the traditionalists. Much of their argument rested on the need to relate dogma to the scholarship of the early Christian Fathers rather than to variations imposed upon it by medieval popes. Naturally enough, the arguments were fiercest when they involved the two extremes of opinion. Cardinal Bea (a Professor of Scripture before his elevation) was happy to be linked with Pope John XXIII by their mutual description – ‘the old ones’. In his case the name was meant as a comment on his ideas as well as his age. Cardinal Alfrink, the Archbishop of Utrecht, described himself as ‘the wild man’ of the Council. He did not expect that much notice would be taken of his progressive view.
The mere fact of the Catholic Church coming together to consider its place in the world gave an immense boost to Rome’s reputation – as witness the choice of John XXIII as Time magazine’s 1962 ‘Man of the Year’. The size of the gathering was calculated to inspire awe, as was the cost of the enterprise: £100,000 a week.6 The number of actual participants – that is to say, excluding official observers – made it the biggest deliberative meeting in the history of the world. Its membership included 85 cardinals, 8 patriarchs, 533 archbishops, 2,131 bishops, 26 abbots and 68 superiors of religious Orders. Not surprisingly, for a gathering with an average age of over sixty, 253 members of the Council died during its 168 working sessions; 296 new delegates were added to its number.
The Pope addressed the assembled delegates twice during the first two days that the Council met. His sermon to the inaugural Mass – known by his opening words ‘Gaudet Mater Ecclesia’ (Mother Church Rejoices) – included the hope that the Church would ‘face the future without fear’. He condemned misanthropists who ‘could see nothing but prevarication and ruin in modern times, the prophets of doom who are forever forecasting calamity’, rejoiced in the ‘marvellous progress of the discoveries of human genius’, and committed the Church to making progress by ‘demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than condemnation’. The coded message was not easily deciphered. L’Osservatore Romano’s headline announced, ‘Chief aim of the Council: To Defend and Promote Doctrine’. Le Monde chose a more obscure interpretation of the sermon’s message: ‘Pope Approves Research Methods in Modern Thought.’ Journalists searching for a simple exposition of the Council’s purpose should have quoted the first sentence of the first document that it discussed. The delegates’ task was ‘to adapt to the needs of our age those institutions that are subject to change’.7 Or they could, with a little imagination, have interpreted the message in the Pope’s own words: ‘Today Providence is guiding us toward a new order of human relationship which, thanks to human effort and yet far surpassing human hopes, will bring us to the realization of still higher undreamed of experiences.’ Two words revealed how revolutionary John XXIII’s initial message was meant to be. Popes were not in the habit of demanding something ‘new’. And they usually built their hopes of progress on more spiritual forces than ‘human’ effort.
Pope John XXIII did not live to see the Council’s work concluded. But it was continued – to some surprise, in much the same spirit – by his successor, Paul VI. The closing session was held on December 8th 1965. Three years of spasmodic deliberation had produced a series of documents which, in total, amounted to three hundred pages and contained twice as many words as were thought necessary to challenge the Reformation at the Council of Trent. There were sixteen documents in all. Many of them prefaced their title with the forbidding adjective ‘Dogmatic’ – not as pejorative a description in Rome as it has become in more secular society. To critics of the outcome of Vatican II, its conclusions were nothing like dogmatic enough.
Long after Vatican II was over, Cardinal Heenan told a meeting in his Westminster archdiocese that he had not expected it to amount to much. ‘I must confess that I am never over-confident about hearing God’s voice at conferences.’ He regarded them as little more than opportunities for ‘discussion – putting words before and often instead of deeds’. Cardinal Heenan was a member of the triumphantly orthodox school of Catholic prelates. When he was Bishop of Leeds his reputation for discouraging mixed marriages, by requiring the non-Catholic participant to undergo a period of strict ‘instruction’ and then denying the couple the full ceremonial of the wedding service, had won his see the sobriquet ‘The Cruel See’. The reputation for inflexible application of Church rules probably did him less than justice – as his subsequent conduct suggested. But, at the time, it was no great surprise that he passionately opposed ‘the rising number of sociology students’, which was only likely to ‘bring forth the request for fresh surveys’ into the state of the Church – a dangerous exercise which was also pointless since the answer to the question was ‘known only to God’.8 In any event, the greatest danger facing the Church was obvious enough. ‘The chief heresy,’ Heenan said, ‘is modernism.’
It was assumed that Cardinal Heenan must have felt particularly offended by the one document that was produced during, and by, the Council itself without any preparation by officers of the Curia. Gaudium et Spes was subtitled Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. It was prepared as a result of an intervention in the scheduled proceedings by Cardinal Leo-Joseph Suenens, who complained – to loud applause – that too much time and energy was being spent on internal affairs of the Church and too little on the great moral issues which faced the world: the pursuit of peace, the alleviation of poverty and the campaign for social justice. The Church, he argued, should enter into triple dialogue – consultations with its own members, with other Christians and with ‘the modern world’. The next day, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini – who was to become Pope Paul VI – endorsed the proposal on behalf of the Council as a whole. There is no way of knowing the strength and nature of the opposition to the paper being prepared. But the opposition to endorsing its conclusions was passionate and wholly predictable. Schema 13, the rearguard claimed, ignored or contradicted much that, up to its publication, had been undisputed Catholic teaching.
The main text dealt more with the nature of the debate that must follow than with the topics which it proposed should be debated. But that in itself was profoundly significant, since it argued for dialogue rather than the didactic assertion that the Church, being divinely inspired, had no need even to consider the views of the heretics outside its theological walls or the ‘Modernists’ within. The substance of the schema was to be found in five appendices: the human in society, marriage and the family, culture, economic issues and peace. Two of the appendices dominated the time allowed for discussion. One dealt with the hopes of world peace. (The Council met in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis.) The other was marriage and the family. The discussion of sex, in one form or another, always stimulated the Catholic Church’s enthusiasm for denouncing pleasures of the flesh. The Council disposed of both topics by agreeing to compromise.
There was a disposition to abandon the ancient concept of a ‘just war’ on the grounds that weapons of mass destruction – the use of which invariably caused the death of innocent civilians – made nonsense of the idea. But even bishops feel the pressures of politics and patriotism. Representatives of Britain and the United States, the nuclear powers, argued against outright condemnation of all wars. Instead the Council described the death of non-combatants and the destruction of cities as ‘a crime against God and humanity’9 but defended the right of nations to take up arms in their own defence. When, on October 4th 1965, he addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations, Paul VI provided a more fundamental interpretation of the Vatican Council’s conclusion. ‘No more war! War never again! It is peace, peace that must guide the people of the world and all humanity.’
Differences over the marriage-and-family appendix were not so easily resolved. Great offence was caused to some delegates by the failure to make the traditional distinction between the primary and secondary purposes of marriage: the procreation of the next generation and the companionship of man and wife. Even greater outrage was caused by the failure of the draft – in a misguided attempt to avoid bitter divisions within the Council – to condemn birth control outright. Statements that are open to several interpretations rarely satisfy either of the parties they are intended to placate. None of the delegates could argue with the assertion that ‘there cannot be a contradiction between the divine laws of transmitting life and of promoting genuine married love’. But the anodyne wording was taken, by conservative delegates, as a concession to the claim that decisions about contraception should be determined by personal conscience rather than by obedience to Roman edict. Liberals feared that it signified the Vatican’s refusal even to consider a modification of the traditional prohibition. The uproar was so great that the Pope thought it necessary to bring the discussion to a premature end by promising that a special commission would study and report on the true nature of a Catholic marriage. The result was the publication, four years later, of Humanae Vitae.
One section of the document that dealt with the Church in the modern world was contested for reasons which, in themselves, made clear how wide was the gulf that separated the modern world from the Church’s traditionalists. Dignitatis Humanae – the Declaration on Religious Freedom – included the revolutionary proposal that the Church should respect freedom of conscience and the right of men and women who followed other faiths to worship as they chose – even when they chose something other than Catholicism. In AD 313, Constantine the Great had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, and from then on the Church had assumed that Catholic monarchs would uphold the view that, since other religions were ‘in error’, they possessed no automatic right to propagate their faith.
Arguments in favour of respecting ‘the dignity of conscience’ had been aired for a hundred years. But it was not until Vatican II that they received enough support to become a threat to the established order. In 1962, they were advanced in the Council by the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and by Cardinal Spellman of New York, who announced that the bishops of the United States of America were unanimous in their support of the Declaration. The American bishops could have claimed a special interest in Dignitatis Humanae. In 1899, the Vatican had condemned what it called ‘Americanism’, which – because of what they believed was a more casual view of family obligations – they defined as the liberty that becomes licence. Most of the preparatory work on the Declaration on Religious Freedom had been done by John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit who, in 1960, had published We Hold These Truths, an exposition of the relationship between the American model of representative democracy and the Catholic Church. Bishops from countries that were occupied by the Soviet Union – some of them, no doubt, envying the freedom enjoyed by their American colleagues – based their support for Dignitatis Humanae on the argument that they could not, convincingly, demand their own freedom of worship while they argued that it should be denied to others. The most determined opposition came from the Italian and Spanish bishops and one Frenchman. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre relied on the undoubtedly true assertion that bedevilled all Church reform. ‘If what is being taught is true, then what the Church has taught is false.’10 Application of that simple logic made him so opposed to the toleration of deviations from the true faith that he set up his own branch of the Roman Catholic Church and demanded that his particular deviation be tolerated.
The debate was so heated and lasted for so long that the American bishops accused the Spaniards of a filibuster. Much concern was expressed about that part of the freedom clause which defended the right of ‘like-minded erroneous people to congregate in order to propagate their error’. The anxiety was swept aside by a series of speeches which amounted to apologies for the historic failure to recognise the rights of conscience. Some of them were delivered in such penitential language that Bishop Muldoon of Ireland suggested that the speakers should make their admissions of guilt at confession rather than in the Council.11 The wrangling went on until the chairman of the last session proposed to bring the discussion to an end without a vote, and appeals to the Pope to overturn his ruling were rejected with the promise to return to the subject before the Council ended. On December 7th 1965 a new document was approved. It asserted that religious freedom was a recognition of the dignity of man and implied – it could do no other – that the Church’s teaching on the subject was changing with the times. Rome seemed to be edging its belated way into the twentieth century.
Even though a fleeting reference to Islam appears in the final text, the discussion of Nostra Aetate – the Declaration on the Church’s Relation to Non-Christian Religions – was essentially a debate about Jews and Judaism. Historically, the Catholic Church had been antipathetic to the Jewish race. Nostra Aetate, the medieval denunciation of Jews as ‘Christ Killers’, had remained part of Catholic doctrine into the second half of the twentieth century. As a result, the only relationship between the two faiths that Rome would allow was a Catholic campaign to convert Jews to Christianity. But the Holocaust – and Pius XII’s unheroic response to the rise of Nazi Germany – cast a long shadow over Vatican II. Even so, one delegate argued, ‘We don’t need to be told to love the Jews. They need to be told to love us.’12 And the initial draft, considered by the Council, asserted that, although the death of Jesus was the responsibility of the Romans and half a dozen Jewish leaders, his rejection – by the whole Jewish race – prepared the way. The final Declaration agreed unanimously to absolve the Jews from guilt ‘before and after’ – though, by implication, not at the time of – the Crucifixion. Despite that concession to ancient prejudice, it went further than condemning anti-Semitism and discrimination in all its forms. The Declaration recalled the spiritual ties between Christians and Jews and acknowledged the existence of a covenant between God and the people of Israel. The Council approved Nostra Aetate by 2,221 votes to 88.
Many of the delegates who travelled to Rome for Vatican II mistakenly took it for granted that, whatever the Pope’s intention, the Council’s lasting achievement would be the completion of the work that was begun in Vatican I almost a century earlier. Pius IX had meant to produce a comprehensive statement on no less a subject than the true nature of the Church. Thanks to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the deliberations had got no further than an assertion and definition of papal infallibility. The Doctrinal Commission’s draft – around which the debates were to take place – incorporated some modern (as distinct from modernist) thinking. But it was written in defensive language and therefore reflected the besieged spirit of the nineteenth century – the Church of Christ versus the world.
A new draft was prepared. Its intention was made clear by the revised title of its first chapter. ‘On the Mystery of the Church’ became ‘On the Nature of the Church’, and the ‘nature’ (or ‘mystery’, if mysteries are capable of definition) was redefined. Pope Pius XII’s notion that the Church was ‘the mystical body of Christ’ remained, but an additional definition broke new ground. The Church was ‘the People of God’ – that is to say, all its members. For the first time the laity was given a status equal to the clergy and was always expected, rather than sometimes allowed, to play a part in the work of their parishes. What amounted to religious emancipation was accepted without much disagreement. Princes of the Church being human, it was the proposals that touched the life and work of bishops that caused most controversy, particularly the relationship of territorial bishops to the most important bishop of all – the Bishop of Rome, the Pope.
The argument concerned the concept known as ‘collegiality’ – the notion that the Pope (heir to St Peter) shares power with the bishops (heirs to the Apostles). The disagreement went to the heart of the debate about the source of Church authority. Opponents of the idea claimed that it contradicted the decisions of Vatican I and undermined the power of the Pope. Supporters insisted that they asked no more than a return to the idea of governance laid down by the ancient Church. The Pope came down on the side of ‘collegiality’ – very largely because he saw it as his duty to support the Council’s majority view. But he also felt an obligation to heal the wounded feelings of the minority. So, after Lumen Gentium had been approved, with only five dissenting votes, he composed a definition of ‘collegiality’ which gave the bishops far less power than proponents of the idea believed had been the Council’s intention. The definition was written without advice and was published without consultation. The Pope was clearly still in charge. Not all the bishops and clergy who attended Vatican II were scholars. But Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, required them to come to a conclusion on a highly scholarly branch of Christian scholarship: the origins of revelation. The Protestant answer to the question – scripture alone – had been rejected at the Council of Trent. The Catholic alternative was tradition – a word that, in its more common usage, does not do justice to the idea that the truth was revealed to the Apostles and the early Christian Fathers. The draft text, which was presented to the Council, offered a ‘two source solution’ to the conundrum. It satisfied the proponents of neither alternative. Many of the delegates found the language of Dei Verbum suitable only for a document that was prepared for a Church under siege. A motion to reject it out of hand was carried by 1,368 votes to 882. A two-thirds majority was needed for outright rejection. The Council was left to discuss a document with which most of its members disagreed.
It was again time for the Pope to intervene. He ordered the document to be withdrawn and a new text prepared by the Council itself. What amounted to a drafting committee, 2,000 members strong, argued for weeks. It eventually concluded that revelation is God’s wish to communicate with the world through two sources – the Bible and apostolic revelation. The resurrection of the old formula was made acceptable to the reformers by the inclusion of the assertion that the scriptures should be made more widely available and that Catholics should be encouraged to read them for themselves. For almost 2,000 years the Church had resisted giving laymen and women direct access to the Testaments. By not so much cancelling as reversing that policy, Vatican II gave life and meaning to the idea that the Church was the whole ‘People of God’.
The Council had begun with the discussion of what – on the face of it – seemed a far more esoteric subject than birth control, the power of bishops, the role of the laity or even the origin of revelation. Sacrosanctum Concilium concerned the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. But although four of the five points that the Liturgical Commission set out for discussion were unlikely to change the nature of Catholic worship, the fifth had a practical and direct bearing on the conduct of the Church that was crucial to its future growth. Point five invited the Council to examine ways in which it was possible to ‘promote a more active participation of the faithful in the liturgy’. The Commission made some suggestions of its own. They included the greater use of vernacular liturgy and the right of national bishops’ conferences to regulate reforms of the liturgy in the diocese of their episcopates. Point five proved to be as controversial as it was crucial.
Opponents of vernacular liturgy did not underestimate the importance of the proposed changes. The rhetorical question ‘What now, are we dealing here with a revolution regarding the whole Mass?’ could only be answered with the admission that the upheaval would be greater than even that cri de coeur suggested. The Auxiliary Bishop of Cambrai asked, ‘How do the people understand what Jesus says if the Gospel is read in incomprehensible language?’ Since its foundation the Church had not wanted the people to understand the Gospels without the guidance of their priests. Laymen had never been trusted to read the Bible and interpret its message for themselves. Men had been burned for possessing copies of the scriptures. Even when the printing press and indomitable human curiosity had made the prohibition unworkable, Latin was part of the barrier that divided priests from people. The secretary of the Sacred College of Rites described the acceptance of the vernacular liturgy as a revolution in itself: ‘Everything has been ordained by tradition and now you want to change it all.’ Yet the Church itself, while proposing its formal retention of the Latin Mass, was, in effect, promoting its actual extinction:
Latin is to be retained in the liturgies of the Western Church. Since, however, in some rites it is clear that the vernacular has proved very useful for the people, it should be given a wide role in liturgy, especially in reading, announcements, certain prayers and music. Let it be left to episcopal conferences in different parts of the world, in consultation if need be with bishops of nearby regions speaking the same language, to propose to the Holy See the degree and modes of admitting vernacular languages into the liturgy.
Not only was the vernacular to be admitted into the Mass. The principle of liturgical uniformity – which had helped to hold the Church together for 2,000 years – was to be replaced by regional variations.
A last-ditch battle was fought by conservatives who argued that while the use of the vernacular had been approved in principle, it could not apply in practice until a special commission, charged with the revision of biblical texts, had done its work. The French Hierarchy cut the Gordian knot by announcing, as soon as the Council closed, that henceforth epistles and gospels would be read in French, and that French – already used in part during the administration of the sacraments – would, in future, be used throughout the Mass. As the Catholic Church had previously understood, liberalism – once it is allowed to advance a few tentative steps – picks up speed and races away.
Evelyn Waugh – who admired the humble priest as craftsman and claimed to be unimpressed by the ornate ceremonies of the High Mass – nevertheless regretted the popularisation of the liturgy and expressed his regret to Nancy Mitford in pungent language: ‘The buggering up of the Church is a great sorrow to me.’13 Before that expression of grief is dismissed as a typical example of Waugh’s attention-seeking linguistic excess, it is important to understand how far, in some places, the ‘buggering up’ went. George Patrick Dwyer, Archbishop of Birmingham, removed Pugin’s rood screen – one of the glories of the Gothic revival – from St Chad’s Cathedral as he regarded it as the physical manifestation of the division between priest and people.
The relaxation in discipline for which Vatican II was directly responsible, and the changes in liturgical practice that were its inevitable consequence, did not have the same effect on every Catholic community. The ‘opening up’ of the Mass – priests facing the people, rather than turning away during the most sacred moments of the service, being at least as important as the abandonment of Latin – had different effects in different countries. In Britain they may not have been entirely benign. Changes in the formality of worship probably had less effect on the Catholic persona than the relaxation of daily obligation. The duty to abstain from eating meat on a Friday had become a proclamation of Catholic identity. Once the fasting was made optional, it was ‘a symbol of expiation and atonement no longer’ and, as a result, ‘English Catholics were like everyone else.’14 The anthropologist who came to the conclusion that less discipline was followed by loss of identity and lack of confidence thought that the problem would be greatest among ‘bog Irish’ immigrants and their insecure descendants. But complaints about the liberalisation were not confined to one class or stratum of society.
A study of the effects of the reforms on one Catholic parish suggests that Vatican II and its consequences extended social distinctions within the Church. The working-class congregation of St Dominic’s in Newcastle had always believed that they ‘participated’ in the Mass by witnessing the elevation of the host, and by crossing themselves and kneeling. Once participation was defined as verbal activity, they felt excluded. Charismatic Catholicism – at least in the less unified society of the 1960s – ‘did not attract working-class people’.15 Participation appealed to the educated, the self-confident and the secure. On the evidence of the next two decades, not even their hopes were realised.
In the decade that followed Vatican II, a plethora of committees and commissions examined the role of the laity within the Church. All of them advocated (and some claimed to have initiated) greater participation and continual dialogue. The most practical as well as the most imaginative was the work of the National Pastoral Congress – not an unexpected outcome, as the study was led by Derek Worlock, Archbishop of Liverpool and the most dynamic figure in the post-war Catholic Church. The collection of reports received a neutral interim response – The Easter People – from the bishops. It may have been intended to prepare the modernists for the disappointment of the following year. In 1982, In the House of the Living God set out the bishops’ considered conclusions on the day-to-day management of Church business. There would be three commissions, made up entirely of bishops.
The laity will contribute nationally as experts in the secretariat and Commissions and in the ad hoc working parties to be set up by the Commissions. They will have their voices [heard] nationally through the lay liaison groups and the agencies. But like priests and religious the laity are the Church primarily when they are gathered round their bishops.16
The idea of ‘participation’ had been killed stone dead.
That notwithstanding, Vatican II was rightly heralded at the time as the Catholic Church’s recognition that the reality of the modern Western world – a more self-confident people enjoying the material benefits of a society in which science seemed often to be at odds with faith – could not be ignored or brushed aside. The proponents of ‘reform’ argued that, as well as being right in themselves, changes were necessary to prevent, or at least slow down, the haemorrhage of the once-faithful to other Churches or to no Church at all. Opponents feared that ‘modernisation’ would be the death of the old certainties – the body of doctrine that, since it was unchanging and unchangeable, gave Catholics a confidence in their religion which intellectual doubt and moral compromise could not provide. Whichever view is correct, one thing is certain. In the second half of the twentieth century the world changed so fast that the gap between modern mores and Catholic thinking widened, rather than narrowed as Vatican II had intended.