Conciliar Octet: A Concise Commentary on the Eight Key Texts of the Second Vatican Council

By Aidan Nichols

A lively debate continues in the Roman Catholic Church about the character of the teaching provided by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Did it represent a decisive rupture with previous doctrine, or the continuation of its earlier message under new conditions? Much depends on whether the Council texts are read in the light of subsequent events, which shook and sometimes smashed the life, worship and devotion of traditional Catholicism – rather than considered for themselves, in their own right as documents with a prehistory that historians can know.

In this work Dominican scholar and writer Aidan Nichols maintains that the Council texts must be interpreted in the light of their genesis, not their aftermath. They must be seen in the light of the public debates in the Council chamber, not the hopes (or fears) of individuals behind the scenes. On this basis, he provides a concise commentary on the eight most significant documents produced by the Council, documents which cover pretty comprehensively all the major aspects of the Church’s life.

Nichols describes the Council as a gathering where the Conciliar minority – guarded, prudent, and concerned for explicit continuity at all points with the preceding tradition – played a beneficial role in steadying the Conciliar majority, enthused as the latter was by the movements of biblical, patristic and liturgical ‘return to the sources’ and a desire to reach out to the world of the (then) present-day in generosity of heart. The texts that emerged from this often impassioned debate remain susceptible to a reading of a classically Christian kind. That is precisely what Nichols offers in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Aug 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642290943

Aidan Nichols

Aidan Nichols, O.P., is a Dominican friar who has taught theology in England, Italy, the United States, and Ethiopia. He held the John Paul II Memorial Lectureship in Roman Catholic Theology and was for many years a Member of the Cambridge University Faculty of Divinity. He has published over fifity books on a variety of topics in fundamental, historical, and ecumenical theology, as well as on the relation of religion to literature and art. His books include Lovely Like Jerusalem, Conciliar Octet, Figuring Out the Church, Rome and the Eastern Churches, and The Theologian's Enterprise. 

Book preview

PREFACE

Not another book on the Second Vatican Council! Just as progressive Catholics are constantly revisiting the Council so as to tell again the story of their liberation from the ancient pharaoh of the older Catholicism, so it is, alas, incumbent on orthodox Catholics to revisit the texts in a better frame of mind than that of their liberal rivals. This is less often done, and it is too important a task to be left to traditionalist Catholics who can find in the Council nothing more than a damnable debacle.

This, at any rate, is the spirit in which I offer the present short study to the Church public. The reader should note: I have made no attempt to provide a bibliography commensurate with the volume of literature available in various languages. It would be vast.

Blackfriars, Cambridge

Easter 2018

1

On Interpreting the Council

For the Church historian, a study of the Second Vatican Council (1962—1965) inevitably means a contrast between the pre-conciliar and the post-conciliar Church—to use the vocabulary against which Pope Benedict XVI sought to warn Roman Catholic Christians. This is the more so if (as sometimes happens) a course description on the topic emphasizes the event character of the Council: the Event of Vatican II or The Conciliar Event. In this context, event is a term typically invoked by the Bologna School of writers—that is, those associated with the centre of conciliar documentation and research that was founded in that Italian city by the noted Church historian Giuseppe Alberigo (d. 2007).¹

It might seem innocuous to refer to the Second Vatican Council as an event. But in the hermeneutic, or, in plainer English, manner of interpretation, favoured by the Bologna School, the word carries quite a load of ideological baggage.² For that School, to call the Second Vatican Council an event is to say that the texts produced by the Council are not necessarily the most important thing about it. The texts are only one factor, and not the determining one at that. They take their modest place in a complex happening in which is included the reaction of public opinion to the presentation of the texts—and the process that led to the texts. It was, after all, that reaction, media-driven (but that is how the modern world works), which determined the reception of the Council by the wider Church.

So-called Reception Theory is crucial to the Bologna School approach. Originally, reception was a concept used by legal historians seeking to explain, among other things, why some laws fall into desuetude while others remain in vigour, notwithstanding the equal status of all laws at some given time and in some given place. For some years before the Council the issue of reception had preoccupied historians of the councils of the patristic Church. It helped to explain, for instance, the long delay before the First Council of Nicaea was recognized universally (except by Arians, of course). The idea of reception also resonated with the Eastern Orthodox, who needed to find an explanation for the eventual rejection of the Union Council of Florence—despite the latter’s meeting the criteria for conciliar validity used in the Byzantine Church. In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council additional models of reception were co-opted, such as how receiving works in an artistic or literary tradition. Reception—it would seem—is what really counts where councils and their teaching are concerned.

This ignores a crucial distinction. In regard to councils, validity is one thing, fruitfulness is another. If a council has authority to teach, then its promulgation of doctrine is valid. Reception does not confer validity on what councils teach. Yet, no council can guarantee that its message will be heard, treasured, interiorized, and acted upon—in a word, that it will bear fruit. Reception shows what fruit a council’s teaching has subsequently achieved—or not achieved, as the case may be.³

Not by chance do the associates of the Bologna School use Reception Theory to underpin their account of the Second Vatican Council as primarily event, rather than (as we might otherwise have supposed) as producer of texts. Belonging as they do to the progressive wing of modern Catholicism, they want to emphasize those features of the teaching of Vatican II which best cohere with the innovatory features developing in Church life from the mid-1960s onwards.

Consequently, the argument not infrequently encountered runs something like this. Those elements in the texts which possessed a controversial or unexpected character are the ones that made the most difference in Church life. By appeal to Reception Theory, the elements in question can be regarded, then, as the preeminent elements in the documents, the conciliar texts. They are the really essential things. A retrospective judgment can say of them: those are the elements in which the spirit of the Council made itself most felt.

What of the remaining elements, the ones that belong to common doctrine or were conceded to the conservative minority in the conciliar assembly? Relatively speaking, they can safely be disregarded. Indifference to the careful expression of common doctrine is the result. In recent years, such indifference appears to have gained ground even at the highest level.

Yet, even if progressive writers were correct in judging that the comparatively innovatory elements in the conciliar texts have been the most fruitful for Church policy or Christian existence (and that would require demonstration), they would still not be justified in treating those elements as more valid than the rest. To repeat, validity is one thing, fruitfulness quite another.

The only proper way to approach the conciliar texts is, therefore, to take them as they stand, in their integral character as documents and without reference to the use that may or may not have been made of them afterwards. Where extratextual considerations can appropriately be brought in, however, is with regard to the process of devising and revising the texts in the conciliar aula.⁴ Their prehistory (and this might appropriately include perusal of the vota on various topics sent in by the bishops before the Council opened⁵) throws light on how those who composed and voted for these texts understood them and wanted them to be understood. The posthistory of the texts, by contrast, does nothing of the kind. In the words of Gavin D’Costa:

The text’s genesis is important, as is the debate on the Council floor, but ultimately the agreed text is the agreed teaching. The former factors illuminate the final text. No historical method can discount this, unless there is an ideological concern behind the historical method.⁶

And of course as with all Catholic theological reflection, the entire corpus of texts must be seen ultimately from the standpoint of Tradition as a whole. This is the point of the so-called hermeneutic of continuity associated with the reflections on this topic of Pope Benedict XVI.⁷ Here the Franciscan of the Immaculate Father Serafino Lanzetta, in his massive survey of the hermeneutics of the Council, is helpful both in urging this claim and in drawing to the attention of his readers two relatively simple schemes for interpreting the documents.⁸

But first I must underline, and it can hardly be too often repeated, the claim itself. The primary hermeneutical criterion for interpreting the Second Vatican Council must be perennis traditio Ecclesiae, the perennial tradition of the Church. Any other criteria must be governed by that. If one is a Catholic Christian, belonging to the Church of all the ages, the perennial Tradition of the Church has to be the principal vantage point in assessing these texts.

Within the two decades which followed the Council, more detailed schemes not necessarily in any conflict with the primary claim surfaced from time to time.⁹ Thus, the French Jesuit Georges Dejaifve, a professor at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, proposed that evaluation should always bear in mind the historical context, the intention of the Council Fathers, and the theological conditioning of their choice of words—here the author referred to the 1973 declaration Mysterium ecclesiae of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which had admitted this could render a teaching incomplete, without, however, eviscerating its dogmatic importance.¹⁰ The future Cardinal Walter Kasper settled on a total of four rules of thumb:¹¹ integral understanding of the texts, rather than picking and choosing; the unity of their letter and their spirit, to be discovered by pursuing the textual history in detail and from this extracting the council’s intention;¹² the uninterrupted Tradition of the Church (but, as Lanzetta remarks, this should be the superordinate criterion, not one of the subordinate criteria), and lastly—here Kasper ventures a formulation that is open to abuse—a unity between tradition and a living, relevant interpretation in the light of the current situation.¹³

Contrast a decision to take as the superordinate criterion in judging the conciliar texts the signs of the times—that phrase wrenched from its Messianic context in the Gospels. Here, as in its most celebrated corporate example, the School of Bologna, the aim is to historicise the Council, so that as ‘event’ it might now enter into the history of the Church and represent an epoch-making change, manifested above all in the renunciation of anathemas and the embracing of an open-ended ecumenism.¹⁴

But even when event interpretation of this abusive sort is eliminated, there still remains a degree of confusion about the normative magisterial value of the conciliar texts. To recognize Vatican II as a legitimate council of the universal (Catholic) Church is not yet to come to terms with the variation in its teaching in the different typology of its documents and the different tenor of its teaching.¹⁵ But recognizing those distinctions is precisely what the Council’s own Doctrinal Commission asked for in a note of March 6, 1964. There we read:

Taking into account conciliar practice and the pastoral purpose of the present council, the sacred synod defined as binding on the church only those matters of faith and morals which it has expressly put forward as such. Whatever else it proposes as the teaching of the supreme Magisterium of the church is to be acknowledged and accepted by each and every member of the faithful according to the mind of the council which is clear from the subject-matter and its formulation, following the norms of theological investigation.¹⁶

The distinction between constitutions, decrees, and declarations, as well as the description of two constitutions as dogmatic, is certainly pertinent here. Also helpful as a guide to the relative weight of teaching authority is the use by the Council Fathers of such locutions as This holy synod teaches or We believe such and such (in the sense of such and such is the faith of the Catholic Church). A third, more complex, test concerns the gravity accorded the discussion by participants, the narrative of a text’s development, and any cases where a pope intervened with a view to resolving some disputed issue.

Basically, what emerges from such a triage is that, for the great majority of the Council’s statements, what is involved is not fides divina et Catholica, divine and Catholic faith. For the most part, it is not claimed for the propositions put forward that they can be known to be true on the authority of the Word of God revealing. Chiefly, what is asked for them is the fides ecclesiastica—ecclesiastical faith—as given to the word of the official Magisterium when formal revelation is not at stake.¹⁷ Rejection of statements made at this level would not be heresy, though it would estrange one from the mainstream thinking of the contemporary Church. If the last phrase be thought a somewhat indeterminate formulation, I can say in extenuation that the conciliar peritus (expert) Otto Semmelroth, in a thorough discussion of the doctrinal qualification of the Council’s utterances, felt able only to lay out, with occasional comment, the viewpoints of a number of writers on the topic—both maximalists and minimalists—rather than adjudicate between them.¹⁸

A task of discrimination is evidently recommended. In this context, Serafino Lanzetta makes a plea for the reintroduction of the vocabulary of theological notes which help identify the variable degree of authority claimed by some proposition, and the corresponding censures which indicate the equally variable gravity attached to some proposition’s rejection.¹⁹ It is a work which Roman Catholic theologians should be doing now for the sake of the future of their tradition, after the hiatus caused by the pontificate of Pope Francis with its sponsorship of paradigm shifts, classic expression as this is of a