In 1997, the producers of a television documentary asked men and women what Vatican II had meant to them. Answers were mostly euphoric. “If it weren’t for Vatican II, the Church would be a museum,” said a young man named Pablo Roma; “If it weren’t for Vatican II,” said Fr. Virgil Elizondo, pastor of the cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, “you wouldn’t see all those young people around the altar”; “If it weren’t for Vatican II,” said Therese Bonpane, director of the Office of the Americas in Los Angeles, “I might have continued living in the fear of God instead of with enthusiasm and a passion for life”; “If it weren’t for Vatican II,” said Dutch theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx, “I would have missed the most joyous days of my life.”

These people, all Catholics, felt good about the Council because it had given them a new meaning and a new identity based not on prohibitions and fear, but on freedom and responsibility. They understood that their bishops, vicars of Christ in their own Churches, had voted their enthusiastic support to the man who called them together, Pope John XXIII. They resonated to his optimistic, open definitions of what it meant to be on the road to salvation in the latter half of the century. “You do not have to be Catholics,” the Pope once told some Communists from Bologna, “as long as you are helping make a better world.”

In 1962, Pope John XXIII asked some visiting Protestant monks from Taizé why they couldn’t get together. “We have different ideas,” said their leader. “Ideas, ideas!” he said. “What are ideas among friends?” The story was told over and over again around conciliar Rome, because it represented something new in Catholic history: a pope who believed that setting the Church apart from the rest of humankind was divisive, and, in a nuclear world, very dangerous as well. But the message also fell on the negative ears of some embattled Catholics who had imbibed the dreads and the definitions that were fashioned by the gloomy Church they had known as kids. They didn’t take the time and the effort to learn what the new Church stood for. They thought the Council would ruin the Church they had known. And they had some allies in their alarm among many in the Church’s central administration itself, who were still tied down by ways of thinking and acting that were more suited to a Church sitting in dry dock for the past century. They did not understand that the Council had launched the barque of Peter out on to the seas of the world – a world where only Third World dictators exercised autocratic rule.

Instead, John XXIII said he wanted to make “a leap forward” into a place where the Church’s best thinkers could reinterpret the Gospel for their own times because “the substance of the faith is one thing, but the way in which it is presented is another.” This may have been the most important sentence Pope John XXIII ever uttered.

LET’S SET SAIL
In the Autumn of 1962, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council journeyed to Rome from almost every nation on earth, a mixture of more than 2,500 bishops, archbishops, abbots and Eastern patriarchs, comprising a parliamentary body that would meet faithfully and argue freely every Fall for the next four years.

They heard some of the Church’s most senior cardinals speaking more like Nathan Hale than Torquemada, about the Church’s need for selfless service, not their own prerogatives. They heard a learned cardinal from Bologna telling them the Church didn’t have all the answers, that it was on a wandering, sweaty pilgrim-march through history. They heard another learned cardinal from the Roman Curia telling them that their scholars and preachers had to get back to the Church’s scriptural and historic roots. They heard an enlightened archbishop from Belgium telling them about the dangers of clericalism, and a humble archbishop from Brazil asking them to sell their diamond-and-ruby-encrusted chalices and give them to the poor. They heard a bishop from Marseilles telling them that Catholic France had lost the working class, and a Dutch missionary bishop from Indonesia reporting that the age of colonialism was over, even and especially for the Church, and a bishop from Bora Bora telling them that his people understood parables, but didn’t understand (or much care about) papal infallibility. Archbishop T.D. Roberts of Bombay told me: “They were saying things I’d always thought, but never dared utter.”

That gave him, and most of his confrères, the leave to speak out as they never had before, without fear, which never should have had a place in the Church in the first place. Fear didn’t, of course, mark the early Church when it was born – at the first Pentecost.

And as for the Pope, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, John XXIII, well, they saw a jolly fellow who did not much believe in condemning the world, or crying havoc over it, but, rather, in loving it and trying to make it a better place for his nieces and nephews. He didn’t want to keep the barque of Peter in dry dock much longer. “Scrape the barnacles of history off the bottom of this ship,” he said, “and let’s set sail and get the saving message of salvation out on to the seas of the world.” In the root sense of the word ecumenical, that is, worldwide, this may have been the first truly ecumenical Council in history. The ancient councils had not drawn delegates from the whole world, but from a tight circle of peoples clustered around the Mediterranean pond. Those councils had been councils of exclusion, called mostly to condemn or set aside those who would not submit to the Church’s authority. There were, to be sure, bishops from Africa and Asia at Vatican I (1869-70). But they were missionary bishops from Europe, not native clergy. Vatican II marked the Church’s first great discovery of itself as a world-Church. Exclusion was no longer the order of the day. The Church was expanding. It was inclusive. This Council could not have been in any sharper contrast to the two councils that preceded it, Vatican I and Council of Trent (1545-1563).

At Vatican II, Pope John XXIII himself checked the seating arrangements, and he found the Protestant observers stuck in a far corner of the conciliar aula inside St. Peter’s Basilica. He moved them up to the best seats in the house and supplied each of them with personal mentors to whisper translations of the Latin speeches in their ears, and insisted that they not be called heretics and schismatics, but “separated brethren.” By the end of the Council, they were not even as separated as many had believed, but members of the Church, by reason of their baptism. Some of the Council Fathers even suggested the Church canonize Martin Luther, a man just a little ahead of his time, because, 400 years before, he had called for many of the reforms then being considered at Vatican II. Some said this Council marked the end of the Counter Reformation. The Pope even invited some Jews to come and observe and talk to him about what they were seeing and hearing.

INCARNATIONAL THEOLOGY
Early in the Council, Bishop Emile Josef DeSmedt of Bruges, Belgium, voiced a popular consensus concerning a plan for the overhaul. This Council should repeal the “clericalism, triumphalism and juridicism” that had marked the hierarchical Church for much of the Second Millennium. His speech late in the first session drew the loudest and longest applause at the Council. The Council Fathers applauded DeSmedt because his ideas hit so close to the pope’s prime intent, to bring the Church into the 20th century, which, if it was about anything, was about the passing of power, from old elite institutions to the people. Some may recall that “Power to the People” was a rallying cry during U.S. civil rights marches in the 1960s. But this idea wasn’t conceived by Martin Luther King. It was planted early in the century during the bloody struggles of the U.S. labor movement, it germinated in the Bolshevik revolution, was watered in India by Mohandas Gandhi, and took root during World War II in the mind of a Lutheran minister named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who saw what the Nazis were doing to his country and told his people they had to resist, because they were part of “a world coming of age.” When people come of age, they pass from one culture to another, from slavery where they have been the unthinking pawns of others, to freedom where they are acting persons in their own right. That is when power passes to the people as it did in the 20th century.

The Fathers of Vatican II were leaning on a theology that was called “incarnational,” something worked out by four of the Council’s brightest theologians, Yves Congar, M.D. Chenu, Edward Schillebeeckx (all Dominicans), and the Jesuit Karl Rahner. These men were coming to see that the Church was always growing, and must grow, in all modesty, if it was going to carry Christ’s message to the people of our time. History was speaking to the Fathers of the Council, if they cared to listen “to the signs of the times” (as Pope John XXIII had suggested they do). That kind of listening would not only help the Church update itself in the early 1960s, but it would set a new style of thinking that would make it easier for the Church to keep doing so in the future.

One of the signs of the times at this Council: the presence of hundreds of reporters, representing newspapers and magazines and radio and television stations from around the world. This startled the bishops. They were making news, and it wasn’t news for the Saturday Church page, it was front page news. They weren’t quite sure why. Was it the rarity of a council? The fact that ecumenical councils happened so infrequently? Yes. But that wasn’t enough to draw this kind of press crowd. Was it the revolutionary nature of their message? No. So far, the bishops had not come up with any calls, explicit or implicit, for revolution. Maybe it was the spectacle itself, of an institution once thought unchangeable setting out quite deliberately to update itself to a world which, since Vatican I, had undergone more changes than it had in the entire history of the planet. If this ancient Church was trying to get in step with that world, then this might be a show worth watching. That is what I told my editors at Time and that is what many of them came to believe. That belief had a resonance inside the Vatican and inside the Council as well. The Fathers of the Council knew their words and their ways were being watched – primarily by the world press, and, more importantly, through the press – by the people of the world. Time magazine (hardly a Catholic magazine) took an early lead in delivering those expectations through a series of stories on the Council, beginning with a cover story on Pope John XXIII that praised him for the aggiornamento he had set in motion. Time expected these bishops to do something, and, largely unconscious that they were reacting to Time (or, indeed, to any press organ), they set to the task of doing it. On Wednesdays, we were told, the bishops were seen passing copies of that week’s Time up and down the aisles of the stadium seats that had been erected in the middle of St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Council soon became an open affair, thanks mainly to some hard working reporters and their allies among theology professors and men and women from missionary orders stationed in Rome, and from the liberal theologians who had come to the Council with their bishops. One ambitious missionary type, Ralph Wiltgen, an American from the Society of the Divine Word, scurried about Rome after every Council session and was able to collect complete texts of the day’s most important speeches from the bishops who delivered them, mimeograph them, and distribute them to the reporters – in six languages. Reporting from the secular press soon told the world the hitherto hidden truth: that the pope and the bishops made up their minds through discussion and debate and compromise and consensus – like any parliamentary body anywhere. This stunned Catholics around the world. All their lives, they had believed that Catholic truth came directly from God to the pope on a special hotline. When the myth was broken, the people began to grow up. The process took some time. (In some places, the demythologization of the papacy is still going on.) The Council was almost over before much of the Catholic press, which had had priest-reporters inside the Council all along, got over their surprise sufficiently to start reporting the facts, that the pope’s presumed direct line to God didn’t exist. As far as they could see, the pope was getting his revelations from his bishops, who, presumably, were more in touch with their people than he was. In that sense, the most revolutionary thing about the Council was the presence of the press, which needed to know what was happening inside the walls of St. Peter’s and would do so, despite the best efforts of the Roman Curia to keep them uninformed.

THE NEW COLLEGIALITY
Editors of the conciliar texts contented themselves with a Latin term that might sell better than the word democracy, because it did not carry any political connotations. They used the obscure Latin communio, and a Greek word, diakonia, terms which, taken together, come closer to the concept of “a family whose primary function is to serve.” Quite rightly, the Council theologians were not thinking of the Church as any kind of government, much less a temporal power. Their Church was a community of loving persons, “a radically different kind of community from the state, different in origin, purpose, history, identity, inner dynamic and destiny,” says Fr. James A. Coriden, former president of the Canon Law Society of America. Through history, that community of loving persons had gone through a variety of incarnations, and it now had a structure of governance that needed updating, like practically everything else in the panoply of the Church’s rules and regulations. The Council found another word to describe the kind of joint power-sharing that would occur within this family-in-service: it was a concept called collegiality, one that also needed a good deal of explanation.

In its prime conciliar sense, collegiality at Vatican II referred to the cooperative, collaborative, consultative relationship that should mark the relationship between the pope and the bishops. In an extended sense, that collaborative style should also extend to all the members of the Church: bishops with their priests, and priests with their people so that a geometer would no longer imagine this new communio/diakonia as a pyramid, but a circle. The Fathers of Vatican II found various ways of tearing down that old pyramidal structure. They would try to deal with DeSmedt’s charge that the Church was too clerical; for instance, by insisting on the radical equality of all believers in a way other councils never dreamed of doing. They said there is one basic priesthood in the Church that everyone receives in baptism, and that both ordained and baptismal priesthoods share in this one priesthood. In fact, if we read carefully in the Acts of the Apostles, we can see that the notion of the priesthood of the community is older than the concept of an ordained ministry. As a result, ministry could well become more inclusive in its exercise as the Church’s members plunge into collaborative ministries together, each exercising his own gifts.

COMPLETING CREATION
The Council’s first session began as very much a churchy affair, but changed course late in its first session in 1962 when Leo Josef Suenens, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, proposed that the Church had to find new ways of relating to the real world. Those writing a new document on the Church’s internal governance began the unprecedented task of writing another on the Church’s relationship to the world outside. The texts of both documents themselves reflected a new view of Church. If there was a radically equal relationship now between all Christians, by reason of their baptism, then the Church was not to be defined as clerical, much less hierarchical.

The Church was “the people of God” and they would not only pursue their work as Christians inside the walls of this church or that cathedral. They would be men and women in the world, at the service of the world. They would “complete Creation.” This was an idea that first came flashing across the Catholic world in 1950, expressed first in “Growth or Decline,” a pastoral letter written by Emmanuel Suhard, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris. Suenens and a team of theologians from Western Europe had been meditating on it ever since. Suhard wrote:

“Being an apostle means taking on everything and penetrating everything belonging to man and the world he has made… to extend the benefits of the Redemption to the whole created world. The Christian has not only the right but the duty to complete Creation and then make of that an offering to the Creator. To convert the world, it is not enough to be a saint and to preach the Gospel; or rather, it is not possible to be a saint and invoke the Gospel we preach without doing all we can to assure, for all men, conditions of work, housing, food, rest and human culture without which life ceases to be human.”

“Completing Creation.” Such a task, said Cardinal Suhard, would not be easy, nor could it be done in a generation or two. But it would have to be done by men and women who not only had faith, but competence as well, because their job was to help remake society, to join the world’s movers and shakers in the task of making life more free, more responsible, more loving, more human. It was a new definition of holiness, and Christians couldn’t put it on as easily as a priest puts on his Roman collar, or a monk, his habit. Everyone in the Church was called to holiness (or to use a less pious word, to service). But it wasn’t a formula, or a set of belief-propositions, or a matter of taking a vow, or even an oath, like Pius X’s oath against Modernism. The Church, as “the people of God,” didn’t always have all the answers, but they dared to search for them, as members of a Church that was now less stuffy, less mysterious. Now it was “a pilgrim Church.” Two conciliar documents contain the outlines of this idea: Lumen Gentium, Chapter Two, on the people of God, and the entire text of Gaudium et Spes, on the Church in the modern world. Quite a reversal. Before the Council, many Catholics imagined that the Church (i.e., the official, hierarchical Church) made its always unchallengeable, if not infallible, decisions after God spoke to the pope and the pope spoke to the bishops and the bishops spoke to the priests and the priests spoke to the nuns and the nuns spoke to the people. And always with certainty.

This once-Godly pyramid, with an absolute monarch sitting on its apex, couldn’t work any longer. Alain Woodrow put it eloquently: This theological vision of the pope as an absolute monarch is not only contrary to the Gospel, it is impossible to put into practice. Contrary to the Gospel, because it leads to an excessively centralized, bureaucratic Church, which tries to control every aspect of Christian life from a narrow European, and even Roman, point of view. Born in the Middle East, the Gospel is increasingly imprisoned in the narrow confines of a Western, Latin vision of the world… and the juridical strait-jacket of Roman Canon Law. Impossible to put in practice, because a single man cannot run a worldwide Church of 976 million people [now more than a billion] and, as in all autocratic, non-democratic institutions, the pope’s administration (the Curia) is tempted to speak in his name, often without his knowledge. (From a 1998 essay by Alain Woodrow, “Superstar or Servant”). A monarchical Church cannot complete Creation. One pope cannot do it. A billion Catholics working together might be able to chip away at it, each in his own way, in his own community, in his own time – if they were encouraged to think about their shared responsibilities for history and for one another. The U.S. journalist, John Cogley, summed up the new spirit in one of his famous “Poems on Postcards”:
Who Is The Church?
Who?
You.

VERNACULAR VALUES
We saw that new spirit enlivening many of the conciliar documents. The Council’s first debate, on the liturgy, highlighted the notion that the sacraments were for the people, even that most solemn part of Mass (actually then called the Secret) that the priest had, up to now, been saying quietly to himself. Since the days of its early history in Rome, the Western Church had administered the sacraments in Latin. Now, the Fathers of the Council were asked to consider allowing the Mass in the vernacular – in everything from English to Urdu to Swahili. That put the traditionalists on the attack. How could the universal Church turn its back on tradition? It had celebrated Mass in Latin for 2,000 years. Those seeking change stood their ground: only the Western or Roman Church used Latin. The Mass was meant for all; it should be understood by all.

The Fathers debated the question for more than a month. When the Council presidents finally added up a preliminary vote, members of the press who had been following the debate by reading releases by the Vatican Press Office, were stunned. The traditionalists had less than 200 votes, the liberals more than 2,000. I call them traditionalist and not conservative, because they were self-styled conservatives who were on a course that wouldn’t conserve much, except the recent and corrosive traditions of the past century.

The Council had struck a blow for the people, because, as one of the theologians had pointed out, Latin was the language of the elite, and the vernacular was the language of the people. But this wasn’t simply a debate over language. “Vernacular” has a larger philosophical and sociological meaning. It is a concept that can also stand for whatever is homebred, homespun, homegrown, and homemade – which is one reason why the centralizing Roman minds opposed the vernacular. For centuries, the Church had been engaged in a centralizing and expropriating control – and it was a process that had only gotten more outrageous over time. Allowing the Church’s worship in the vernacular would reverse that centralizing process, of not only worship, but of power in many other areas as well. Those who resisted the vernacular were implicitly resisting a shift of power in the Church, power to the people. The late Msgr. Ivan Illich, one of the 20th century’s most original minds, pointed this out in a book of essays entitled Shadow Work. In one of those essays, “Vernacular Values,” he discussed the role of a Spanish grammarian, Elio Antonio de Nebrija who, in 1492, presented to Queen Isabella a grammar of the Castilian language, with the express purpose of providing her with a new instrument of imperial domination.

Empowering people everywhere to worship in their own language was, then, a revolutionary move very much in keeping with other liberations of the century. It was revolutionary because the hierarchical Church was abdicating a long-presumed right to impose its dominance over the people in the provinces. Some said the bishops had joined the human race.

NEW INTERPRETIVE POWER
The debate on the liturgy foreshadowed other conciliar debates dealing with the key question of how much power the center would continue to exercise over the periphery. In the Council’s second debate, on Revelation, the people won again when a majority of the Fathers voted to let the Church’s biblical scholars do their work. This meant they could now help the people of God understand how radical a document the Bible really was. Many modern scriptural scholars believe that the Bible takes a principled stand against the domination of the many by the few. More than anything else, the Bible is about liberation. As a young scholar in Harvard’s School of Divinity wrote to me: “But biblical scholarship can help in that struggle – our struggle, I think – for the recovery of Jesus’ mission of freedom and liberation. It can unmask the misrepresentations that are used every day by the hierarchs as a kind of hermeneutical shield for their eternal scheme, which is, of course, maximizing their own power and deflecting the power of the rest of the Church.”

For years, Catholic biblical scholars were forbidden to use the modern methods of literary research to help them understand the entire canon of Scripture (which, of course, was written by men from ancient cultures for people of their own time and place). In 1943, Pope Pius XII removed those restrictions, thereby freeing up the scholars to help people understand the Bible in all the variety of its literary forms. Fortunately, Pope John XXIII understood what was afoot. In his opening keynote speech to the Council on October 11, 1962, John told the bishops he would have the Council “take a step forward toward a deeper penetration and developing realization of the faith… through modern research and scholarly disciplines.”

The conclusion was clear: Catholic scholars had a duty to be relevant to their own culture, speaking to men and women in language they could understand. Catholic intellectuals, who were amazed and delighted to hear words like this from a pope, drew an unmistakable corollary that the meaning of any statement of doctrine is always open to interpretation, never finally captured in any particular form of expression for all times and for all cultures. In a real sense, then, the Council accorded legitimacy to the subjective interpretation of religious truth.

In the Council’s Constitution on Revelation, the Fathers said: “There is growth in understanding the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure things in their hearts, through the intimate understanding of spiritual things they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received, through episcopal succession, the sure gift of truth. For a full century before the Council, there was no room in the Church for any interpretation at all, not even by those bishops who received “the sure gift of truth… by episcopal succession.” Now the Council was showing the faithful a tolerance toward different theological approaches that were once forbidden.

That same Constitution on Revelation had this passage regarding the inerrancy of Scripture: “Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation.” Michael Cuneo, a Catholic scholar from Fordham, noted, “At first glance, this seems entirely unremarkable… If we look again, however, a more complex scenario comes into view. The Bible apparently teaches ‘without error,’ but only does so compellingly when dealing with matters vital to salvation. But… who is to decide (and by what criteria) what is essential for salvation?” The practical effect, said Cuneo, provided Catholic theologians interpretive power over scriptural texts already enjoyed by their Protestant counterparts. In effect, the Council was saluting traditional theological positions, but it also suggested “rich possibilities for theological innovation.” To Cuneo, the Council’s take on Scripture was “the Church’s passport to the modern world.”

THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS
In the Council’s third major debate, the Fathers had to confront what they called “the unfinished business of Vatican I” to try to right the overbalanced, embarrassing and unhistorical declaration made by the Fathers of Vatican I that when popes speak solemnly on matters of faith and morals, they do so infallibly, and have always done so. Those representing the majority wing at Vatican II told themselves they could best complete the work of Vatican I by defining the infallibility of the Church, rather than the infallibility of the pope. And they made a very good stab at it with their Chapter Three of the schema De Ecclesia, a document that would later be called Lumen Gentium.

It was a redefinition that could have led to a further power shift, from the center to the periphery, with every member of the Church getting into a more collaborative mode. At Vatican II, some of the Fathers were quoting Cardinal John Henry Newman’s brilliant essay, written in 1859 for Lord Acton’s Rambler, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.” In that essay, Newman asserted a long Christian tradition that, through the centuries, God guides and preserves the whole Church, and that prophetic lay voices often guide the Church as it pursues its way through time. Newman recalled the celebrated history of the Arian controversy in the early Church, when the pope and the bishops were off in heresy on the question of the divinity of Christ, while the people were faithful. In effect, the teaching on the divinity of Christ was maintained and preserved far more by the laity of the time than by the pope and the bishops at the Council of Nicaea. Wrote Newman: “I think certainly that the Ecclesia docens [the teaching Church] is more happy when she has such enthusiastic partisans about her… than when she cuts off the faithful from the study of her divine doctrines and the sympathy of her divine contemplations, and requires from them a fides implicita in her word, which in the educated classes will terminate in indifference and, in the poorer, in superstition.”

To the Council’s credit, it even cited Newman, the Church’s most famous convert of the 19th century, in Chapter Two of Lumen Gentium, on the people of God. In the general voting for Lumen Gentium, more than 90% of the 2,200 bishops were lined up to go with the majority’s view of collegiality, namely, that “the College of Bishops, whose head is the Supreme Pontiff and whose members are the bishops, is also the subject of supreme and full power over the universal Church. The College of Bishops exercises power over the Universal Church in a solemn manner in an ecumenical council.”

But the traditionalists in the minority couldn’t abide any lessening of the pope’s absolute authority – even though, if one went back far enough in history, one could find a time when the pope was hardly the absolute ruler he became in the 19th century. Toward the very end of the Council’s Third Session, they prevailed upon Pope Paul VI, who had taken over the helm of Peter’s barque from John XXIII to bring the Council to a close. At that moment, in mid-November 1964, just before the final vote on Lumen Gentium, principals from the Roman Curia brought to the pope a draft of a document laced with juridical specificity – four points, a kind of pre-note, that added up to this: that the bishops were never a college without the pope, and could never act without the pope as their head. Paul VI listened to the minority opinion–no more than 328 votes against 1907 on the other side – because he wanted unanimity on this issue. He had no doubt about the rightness of the majority opinion. The Church’s move toward collegiality was, thus, blunted by supporters of the old absolutism many of whom had hitched their ecclesiastic careers to an all-powerful pope. Leonard Swidler commented: “Papal supporters, because they are in possession of power, will be impervious to all theoretical arguments against papal power; this is not to accuse them of being evil men – only of being men.”

THE CROWNING DOCUMENT
In the last days of the Council, despite all the politicking in the corridors of the Vatican, the Council liberals came up smiling. The Fathers of Vatican II had been able to move the Church into the mainstream of history. They got the declarations they wanted on religious liberty, putting the Church’s blessings not only on religious freedom, but on freedom of conscience as well. They repealed Pio Nono’s “error has no rights,” not by talking about error, which was an abstraction, but by talking about real people who certainly did have rights – among those rights, the right to worship God (or not to worship God) according to their own inspirations. They got their decree on ecumenism, pointing out that the truth of Christ should make men and women free and open to whatever was good in every legitimate religion, because all paths lead to God. To be authentically Christian, Christians had to stop being enslaved by their tribal forms of Christianity. In particular, they had to recall their Jewish roots and remember that Jews are still God’s chosen people. And they needed to turn aside from their old militant missionary mindset, that they were called to convert people of other religions to “the one, true faith.” If Catholics could only bear witness to Jesus Christ in their own lives, and encourage Moslems and Hindus, for example, to be better Moslems and Hindus, the world would be a more peaceful place.

And they won virtually unanimous endorsement of the Council’s last crowning document, Gaudium et Spes, which challenged Catholics to drop holdover beliefs that came more from an ancient heresy called Manichaeism than from Jesus. The Council Fathers rejected the old distinction between a supernatural world and a natural world. Rather, the whole world was graced, because it was redeemed by Christ. And, because the Redemption was supposed to go on, in time, through the mediation of “other Christs,” i.e., His followers, then Christians should get to work, stop fleeing the world, and/or fretting because it was evil. Rather, they should roll up their sleeves and make it good, i.e., complete the work of Redemption.

This, the Council said in effect, would be a new way, a new truth, and a new life for the people of God, who would be guided as much by the unpredictable winds of the Holy Spirit as by the strict orders of a hierarchical Church.

In a way, the Council was getting us ready for a new kind of world, one in which the official Church would cease to be an answering machine, but a place where people could come together and inspire one another in a new global community.

Gaudium et Spes was echoing Pope John XXIII, when he said that if the Church was going to be at the service of the world, it had to go through an aggiornamento. Only then could the Church speak the life-giving, freedom-message of Jesus to people in language they could understand. Only then could it put its blessing on a world that was basically good, because God had made it and because it was redeemed by His Incarnate presence.

To understand how radical that move was, we should look back over the last hundred years, when three successive popes saw the world as basically bad. No wonder, then, that 20th-century Europe took shape without the help of the Church’s better thinkers. Two horrible world wars later, some of those thinkers (many of whom had themselves been ordered to stay out of the intellectual mainstream) realized that the Church, now verging on one billion strong, could not stand apart from the world any longer to condemn it; instead, they must get involved in it, in order to redeem it. www.americancatholiccouncil.org

*Excerpts from a large essay on Vatican II. Robert Blair Kaiser covered Vatican II for Time magazine and, in 1962, his reporting earned him the Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for the “best magazine reporting from abroad.” Journalist and writer, he is the author of 13 books, five of them dealing with Church reform.