Vatican II

Impact

Scholars remain divided over the extent to which the Second Vatican Council reflected continuity with existing tradition and practice and how much it departed from it, yet any account of the visible aspects of changes effected by the council cannot fail to note that the Church did not act in the same fashion after 1965 as previously. Exceeded in length only by the ecumenical councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Trent, Vatican II involved far more preparatory planning than any earlier council and witnessed an attendance of 2,400 bishops at any one time, with participants from every continent and almost every nation.

For the Roman Catholic Church, Vatican II marked a final acknowledgment that the era of establishment (the privileged status accorded by the state to a particular church) was over. Its deliberations also reflected a growing desire to reconcile with what were termed the “separated churches” (the products of the Protestant Reformation) and to at least modify the harsh rhetoric the Church had employed against secular modernity since at least the 1870s. It was no longer enough simply to identify and condemn the failings of secular society; rather, Catholics were obliged to become involved in the process of devising solutions. Such an approach had implications not only for laypeople but also for priests and even bishops.

When Pope Paul VI closed the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the future course for the Catholic Church seemed propitious. Lay Catholics were encouraged to study the conciliar documents and work with clergy and bishops to ensure Vatican II’s effectual implementation at the provincial, diocesan, and parish levels. Catholic life promised to be invigorated by the active participation of the laity, Catholic relations with fellow Christians would henceforth be governed by a sense of mutual respect, and the Catholic Church’s commitment to the upbuilding of the secular world was firmly delineated. The ensuing turmoil of the late 1960s, however, demonstrated that the council had raised excessively high expectations on the part of some, and at the same it elicited alarm from many who still looked to the Church as a bulwark against modernity. Within a few short years, activist laypeople and clergy would find themselves opposed to the episcopal hierarchy whose interventions at the council had given rise to the documents on which the more radical elements claimed to base their interpretation of the new Catholicism. The refusal of successive popes to abandon opposition to artificial birth control and concern about the extent of liturgical diversity provoked a reaction among the hierarchy that culminated in the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978. While dubbed by some a conservative reaction, however, it did not represent a repudiation of Vatican II in its entirety but rather was an attempt to restore the balance between change and tradition.