Fr Arockia Rayappan –
Vatican II was a time of new hope and real renewal for Catholics throughout the world. Because of the academic resources and favourable political circumstances at the conciliar time, two Asian countries i.e., India and the Philippines, made significant contributions to the Council’s liturgical reform. The altars were turned around. The priests faced the newly recognized people of God — that is, the entire community of Catholic believers (https://www.npr.org/2012/10/11/162594956/vatican-ii-a-half-century-later-a-mixed-legacy) in the Latin Rite. The Church has been receptive to significant and momentous changes inspired by the Council throughout the post-conciliar period.
Some of the Church’s followers namely lay people both women and men, theologians, professors, and formators including the bishops strongly opine that the Church hasn’t yet harvested the fruits of the Council. According to them, the Catholic Church has not yet become a full beneficiary of the richness of the spirit of the Council. The herculean efforts, invested in drafting the Vatican II documents by the Council Fathers, have not witnessed the desired results. The grand vision of Vatican II has not enfleshed in concrete actions and programs in Asia. “This failure was not due to a lack of goodwill, much less to an open Opposition to the Council, as it happened in the West, with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and various ultraconservative groups. Rather it is to be attributed to various factors most of which are beyond the control of the Asian Churches, such as hostile governments e.g., in China and Vietnam.” The fruits of the Council are still in their ‘not yet’ moment. On the post-conciliar developments, Saint Pope Paul VI cautioned, “It was believed that after the Council a sunny day in the Church’s history would dawn, but instead there came a day of clouds, storms, and darkness.” Saint John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who were present at the Council, felt that the Council’s effects went too far (https://www.npr.org/2012/10/11/162594956/vatican-ii-a-half-century-later-a-mixed-legacy).
The Second Vatican Council was the most significant event in the history of Catholicism since the Protestant Reformation. Many Catholics have only the vaguest sense of what the Council accomplished. It was an ecclesial event, a dramatic irruption of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church at a particular time in the Church’s history. It was one of the most extensively documented conciliar events in the history of the Church. The Council was “a significant event, capturing the world’s attention at the very moment that satellite communications became possible, and televisions had become affordable to middle-class families in the developed world. Religious and secular journals included regular chronicles, interviews, and journalistic accounts that traced the progress of conciliar debate.” At the celebration of the 60th Anniversary of Vatican II on Oct. 11, 2022, and in preparation for Jubilee 2025, our beloved Pope Francis sent us a paternal invitation to study the documents of Vatican II in 2023 (https://www.exaudi.org/jubilee-2025/). According to our Pope, the study of the conciliar documents by the Catholics in 2023 is a personal and communitarian preparation to celebrate the Holy Year 2025 (https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2022/06/pope-asks-catholics-to-study-vatican-ii-before-holy-year-2025).
Saint Pope John XXIII articulated the Spirit of the Council well: “Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.” A good place to begin the study of the Council is with the reading of the highly accessible What happened at Vatican II by the Jesuit historian John W. O’Malley (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008). For a shorter introduction, one might consider Giuseppe Alberigo’s A Brief History of Vatican II, trans. Matthew Sherry (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009). These well-researched volumes complement the perspectives reflected in the journalistic articles written for a wider audience from the conciliar period suggested previously.”
Inspired by the invitation of our Pope and the Spirit of the Council, let us invest the resources and time available at our disposal to study the documents of Vatican II in the family, community, formation houses, training centres, our parishes, and our Archdiocese, so that we will be imbibed with the flame of hope, climate of unquenching trust, ever-expanding and borderless renewal setting up ‘tent’ (borrowed from the Document for the Continental Stage, 2022) that is ever-expanding and inclusive and thereby become the living sign of the Risen Lord responding to the signs of the times with the spirit of learning, listening as pilgrim Church always inspired by the Word of God. To make the vision of our Pope resplendent in the sixteen documents of the Council into a concrete reality, the commissions in our dioceses could play a significant and irreplaceable role at diocesan, deanery, and parish levels.
Reference
Congar, Yves. My Journal of the Council. Translated by Denis Minns. Minnesota: ATF Press, 2012.
Daly, Bernard. M. Beyond Secrecy: The Untold Story of Canada and the Second Vatican Council. Ottawa: Novalis, 2003.
de Lubac, Henri. Vatican Council Notebooks: Volume One. Translated by Andrew Stefanelli and Anne Englund Nash. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2015
Vatican Council Notebooks: Volume Two. Translated by Anne Englund Nash. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2016.
Dulles, Avery. Models of the Church. Northport, New York: Image, 2013.
Faggioli, Massimo. Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning. New York: Paulist Press, 2012.
Flannery, Austin. ed. Vatican II Constitutions Decrees Declarations. New York: Costello Publishing Company, 2007.
Gaillardetz, Richard R. Ecclesiology for a Global Church: A People Called and Sent. New York: Orbis Books, 2008 and Hahnenberg, Edward P. eds. A Church with Open Doors: Catholic Ecclesiology for the Third Millennium. Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2015.
The Cambridge Companion to Vatican II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Kasper, Walter. The Catholic Church: Nature, Reality and Mission. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. 2015.
Madges, William. ed. Vatican II Forty Years Later. New York: Orbis Books, 2006.
Rayappan, Arockia. “Conciliar Ecclesiology.” Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection 87, no.11 (November 2023): 843-862.
Shortall, Sarah. Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics. London: Harvard University Press, 2021.
Arockia Rayappan is a priest of Delhi Archdiocese and a Ph.D. student at Concordia University, Canada. His doctoral research explores practical, resourceful, and sustainable ways to foster social and religious harmony through Basic Ecclesial Communities in the contemporary Indian multi-cultural, pluri-religious, social, economic, and political milieu. He dedicates the articles on Vatican II and Jubilee 2025 to the friends, teachers, professors, formators and spiritual guides at College Platon, Jnana Deepa – Institute of Philosophy and Religion, Papal Seminary, Vishwa Jyoti Gurukul, Vinay Gurukul, Saint Jude Thaddeus’ School, to the victims of the Covid-pandemic, particularly to the late Fr. Isaac who died on April 30, 2021 , during the first wave of Covid-19. The author’s contributions have been published in Indian Catholic Matters, The New Leader, The Voice of Delhi, Dilli Vaani, JDV Times, The Indian Currents, The Herald, The Examiner, News and Views, Ishvani, Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection – VJRT, (Vidyajyoti College, Delhi), The Tablet (Brooklyn, USA), Golden Key – GKA, (Atlanta, USA), and Journal of the Council for Research on Religion – JCREOR, (School of Religious Studies, McGill University, Canada).