Documenting a revolution

Commonweal, Sept 11, 1998 by Frank McConnell

Near the end of the two-hour documentary, "Reflections on Vatican II" - which airs on PBS on September 18 and which is splendid - George Weigel, the former president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in D.C., observes that "Vatican II was arguably the most important religious event in the twentieth century."

Triumphantly and sadly, he couldn't be more right.

"Reflections on Vatican II" is, first of all, maybe the sharpest, most serious documentary about religion ever done on TV, a grand example of what the medium can accomplish if you just let brilliant folks like Producer/Director Mark Birnbaum and Executive Producer Sherry Revord have their way. And their way is to talk seriously about serious things.

Pope John XXIII announced his intention to summon a council in 1959. Vatican II - 2,500 bishops and assorted periti (theologians, mavens, apparatchiks) - opened in 1962 and began, to everyone's surprise, to redefine what it meant to be a Catholic - which meant, and no imperialism here, what it meant to be a Christian. It was my freshman/sophomore year at Notre Dame, and I can still remember the exhilaration of it all: it wasn't, it seemed, all about scapulars, incense, and Latin, but rather about engagement with the world, about the faith as a constant habit of attention toward Christian history, about not being in the church, but rather being the church.

That, at any rate, is my own, admittedly idiosyncratic view of what the council was all about. Others will quarrel, and others should, for what "Reflections" makes wonderfully clear is that the council matters so much not for its official pronouncements epochal as some of them were - as for its spirit. And "spirit," with a big or a little "S" - check out Joachim of Fiore - is a famously exciting but ambiguous thing.

A lot of discussion, in fact, by veterans of the council, is directed toward what the "Spirit of Vatican II" really was - is? - and, trenchantly, whether or not the present pontiff, for all his good intentions, has betrayed it. (Conservative Catholics will not really like this show very much.) Certainly, the sixteen documents ultimately issued by the council all pointed toward a vastly more open, you-can-breathe-here church. The priest now faced the congregation as he said Mass, and the Mass was now said in the vernacular. Such simple, sensible things: But nobody born after the council can imagine how astonishingly fine those changes felt to us. The church officially condemned anti-Semitism: better late, I guess, than never. And it came as close as it could to admitting that the romantic individualism of Luther, Calvin & Co. was actually not the devil's music. And the church declared that the role of the laity was equally important with that of the priesthood. And; and; and....

The catch-phrase during Vatican II, the first Italian I learned, was aggiornamento, which literally means something like "modernization" or "bringing up-to-date." Psychically, though, the concept of aggiornamento carried the same liberating force that, twenty-five years later, the word perestroika would, in another authoritarian context.

And over both words, hearts and sometime heads were broken. "Reflections" makes it clear that, among other things, Vatican II's liberalism generated the not inconsiderable Catholic conservative movement: a movement of which John Paul II seems heartily to approve. And it's to the show's great credit that it treats the conservatives, even the reactionary Archbishop LeFebvre, with dignity.

But the main thrust of "Reflections" is simply, joyously, to celebrate this gorgeously unlooked-for event and its enduring, endearing aftermath. There's one phrase you hear again and again from the interviewees, until it becomes almost a mantra. "If it weren't for Vatican II...," the speaker begins. And depending upon who the speaker is, it turns out that if it weren't for Vatican II women would not feel as authenticated (pfui on the word "empowered") in the church; the liturgy would not range gloriously from plainsong to rap; the church would not be as deeply involved as it is in the cause of the wretched of the earth; we would not be as tantalizingly close as we are to a spiritual rapprochement with the entire community - heavy on the "entire" - of those who wish to love God and serve one another. "Without Vatican II," as one of the speakers sums it up, "God help us all."

And I can't disagree with that. If I'm a Catholic today - and some would dispute that - it's because my faith and my doubt were formed by the council. I mentioned Joachim of Fiore earlier, and not by chance. Joachim, early in the twelfth century, argued that after the age of the Father (the Old Testament) and the age of the Son (the New Testament), we were now entering the age of the Spirit, when the true freedom of God would establish itself on earth. Loony/gnostic, you bet: but also a major impetus for the explosion of the Franciscan spirit that, during the thirteenth century, revived and transformed Christianity.