THE Roman Catholic Church is currently celebrating the 50th
anniversary of the start of the Second Vatican Council, in October
1962; but the 47 years since its close have been riven with
controversy about its application. Has the Roman Catholic Church
gone far enough in pursuing the spirit of openness that was
experienced in Rome during the Council's three years of debate? Or
does the cultural and social revolution since the mid-'60s require
an approach more deeply rooted in the certainties of the past? The
former is the question asked by most lay Roman Catholics, and,
indeed, most in the hierarchy, when talking in general terms; the
latter question tends to be expressed when it comes to putting any
reforms into practice.
The vernacular liturgy is the most obvious change brought about
by the Council, but more significant, perhaps, has been a thorough
change of attitude. Interviewed in The Tablet, Fr Ladislas Orsy, a
consultant theologian serving in Rome at the time, talks about the
"miracle" of Vatican II. Three thousand bishops and cardinals,
mostly elderly, directed by a Pope who was very elderly, manifested
the Holy Spirit through, first, bolshiness, and, second,
collegiality. It is this spirit of edginess and togetherness that
has kept the flame of reform alive through the ensuing years,
despite the periods when it has been starved of oxygen.
The Irish journalist Mary Kenny has written that Vatican II gave
her contemporaries "a new permission to be friendly with
Protestants". Evidence of this took its time to appear in Irish
politics, but, over the years, and around the globe, the
outworkings of Unitatis Redintegratio have advanced
ecumenical endeavour. The latest fruit was the invitation from Pope
Benedict XVI to Dr Williams to address the Synod of Bishops in
Rome, marking the anniversary of Vatican II with a debate about
"the new evangelization for the transmission of the Christian
faith".
It is tempting to concentrate on the significance of the
invitation, but it is Dr Williams's words that require our
attention. He used the opportunity to speak about "spiritual
ecumenism", not as a conscious goal in itself, but as a natural
outcome of seeking the unveiled face of God's image. "In so far as
the habit of contemplation helps us approach all experience as
gift, we shall always be asking what it is that the brother or
sister has to share with us - even the brother or sister who is in
one way or another separated from us or from what we suppose to be
the fullness of communion." In a judicious contribution to the
Synod's thinking, and speaking from his Anglican experience, he
warned that, without this expectation of learning, and without the
disciplines of self-forgetfulness, the Church succumbs to the fate
of purely human institutions: "anxious, busy, competitive, and
controlling". Anxiety about reform in the Roman Catholic Church,
too much or too little, will drop away, he suggests, if the object
of all is to become a new humanity in communion with God.