The church since Vatican II

The Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II, which took place from 1962 to 1965, was one of the most important councils in church history, and it profoundly changed the structures and practices of the church. It sought, in the words of Pope John XXIII, aggiornaménto, “to bring the church up to date,” and many of the council’s decrees did bring the church into the modern world. Although the reforms were welcomed by many, they produced internal disruptions greater than any the church has known since the Protestant Reformation. Some have argued that the council did not go far enough, while others have maintained that its reforms went too far, too fast. In the decades following the council, liberal and conservative Catholics were divided over interpretation of its decrees. Although such disunity posed a real threat of schism, there were only a few group departures. The number of departures of individual members of the laity and clergy, however, was large enough to cause concern and remained an important matter for the church long after the council ended.

In accordance with Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church officially abandoned its “one true church” position and formally ended the thousand-year schism with the Greek Orthodox Church. It also entered into ecumenical conversations with other churches with the hope of establishing greater Christian unity. The church has assumed observer status in the World Council of Churches and has participated in groups associated with the World Council. Representatives of the church participated in the discussions sponsored by the World Council that led to the publication of the important document Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (1982), which identified areas of agreement between the churches on several core teachings; the church responded positively, though with qualification, to the text. Steps to improve relations with non-Christian religions were made at Vatican II and by the popes of the later 20th century. The council’s declaration Nostra aetate (October 28, 1965; “In Our Era”) rejected the traditional accusation that the Jews killed Christ, recognized the legitimacy of Judaism, and condemned anti-Semitism. Efforts at improving relations with other religions, especially Judaism, were pivotal to the papacy of St. John Paul II, who prayed with world religious leaders in 1986, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and prayed in a mosque and a synagogue.

The openness of the Catholic church following Vatican II took surprising forms in places such as Latin America, where many local church leaders supported liberation theology (the Latin American movement that sought to aid the poor as a religious duty and criticized existing socioeconomic structures) in the 1970s. For a time, the church adopted a less confrontational approach to communist governments in the hope of improving the lives of Catholics in those countries. Following the election of John Paul II, however, the church supported opposition movements in communist eastern Europe and suppressed liberation theology; at the same time, it remained keenly involved in international affairs, as the pope undertook numerous pastoral visits throughout the world.

Problems, however, have been more in evidence than progress. The church faced the challenge of resolving the long-latent conflict between the hierarchy and the lower clergy over the tradition of total obedience in lifestyle and ministry. This conflict has come to a head on the issue of clerical celibacy; although there are no sure statistics, there are estimates that as many as one-half of Catholic clergy wish celibacy to be optional. The issue of clerical celibacy was raised anew in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when members of the clergy, as discussed earlier, were accused of sexually abusing minors. However, some have argued that pedophilia is unrelated to the celibacy requirement, claiming that the root of the sex abuse lies in the infiltration of the clergy by sexual predators seeking to exploit priests’ easy access to children.

There was also discontent among the clergy regarding the nature of the church’s ministry. Many religious workers felt that the conventional ministries were not reaching enough people and were not meeting their most urgent needs. The desire to work “in the world,” while hardly alien to the New Testament ministry, was not easily satisfied within the traditional roles assigned to the clergy. And what might have appeared to be a minor issue in some places became a major issue in others; many priests and religious (women religious in particular, who have had more of a problem) no longer wished to wear the identifying garb, because they believed it to be an obstacle to personal relations. The discontent with life and ministry led to a large number of departures from the priesthood, most dramatically following Paul VI’s encyclical Sacerdotalis caelibatus (June 24, 1967; “Priestly Celibacy”), which confirmed the necessity of celibacy. The laity too became more restive, and many left the church for a variety of reasons, including the church’s teachings on artificial birth control. Some left because they believed the reforms of Vatican II were too liberal. More generally, there was a widespread but not explicit rejection of the traditional uses of authority and obedience in Roman Catholic clergy and religious communities.

Vatican II also made profound changes in the liturgical practices of the Roman rite. It approved the translation of the liturgy into vernacular languages to permit greater participation in the worship service and to make the sacraments more intelligible to the vast majority of the laity. The change, a sharp break with the older tradition of using Latin in worship, caused discomfort for some but allowed for adaptation of the liturgy according to the needs and desires of many throughout the world.

Perhaps the most significant change brought about by Vatican II was the beginning of what the German theologian Karl Rahner (1904–1984) called the emergence of the Weltkirche (German: “world church”). Vatican II was not dominated by the churches of Europe and the Americas, the traditional centers of Catholic strength. The Weltkirche continued to develop during the rest of the 20th century, as the Catholic church established a vigorous presence in Africa and parts of Asia and became a more prominent and outspoken church in Central and Latin America.

The shifting demographics of contemporary Roman Catholicism have presented the church with a number of challenges. How should it respond to declining church attendance, declining numbers of religious, and the increasing secularism in the West and in the traditionally Catholic countries of Europe in particular? Would the ordination of women and married men check these trends? How should the church respond to the growing numbers of Muslims in some of these countries? How should it adapt its message and its practice in non-Western regions of the world, especially Africa? How should it balance papal authority over the entire church and the rights of the bishops over the local churches so as to avoid centralized authoritarianism on the one hand and the loss of unity on the other? What pastoral strategies should be used to combat the aggressive evangelization by fundamentalist groups in Latin America? Such challenges are among many that will face the church in the new millennium as it tries to be faithful to that Gospel dictum of “bringing forth old things and new.”