Second Vatican Council
The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly known as the or, was the 21st and most recent ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. The council met each autumn from 1962 to 1965 in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City for sessions of 8 and 12 weeks.
Pope John XXIII convened the council because he felt the Church needed "updating". He believed that to better connect with people in an increasingly secularized world, some of the Church's practices needed to be improved and presented in a more understandable and relevant way.
Support for aggiornamento won out over resistance to change, and as a result 16 magisterial documents were produced by the council, including four "constitutions":
- Dei verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation emphasized the study of scripture as "the soul of theology".
- Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, concerned the promotion of peace, the gift of self, and the Church's mission to non-Catholics.
- Lumen gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church on "the universal call to holiness"
- Sacrosanctum concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy to restore "the full and active participation by all the people".
- Apostolicam actuositatem, a decree on The Apostolate of the Laity
- Dignitatis humanae, a declaration on religious freedom
- Nostra aetate, a declaration about non-Christian religions
- Orientalium Ecclesiarum, a decree On Eastern Catholic Churches
- Unitatis redintegratio, a decree on Christian ecumenism
Background
Biblical movement
's 1943 encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu gave a renewed impetus to Catholic Bible studies and encouraged the production of new Bible translations from the original languages. This led to a pastoral attempt to get ordinary Catholics to re-discover the Bible, to read it and to make it a source of their spiritual life. This found a response in very limited circles. By 1960, the movement was still progressing slowly.and
By the 1930s, mainstream theology based on neo-scholasticism and papal encyclicals was being rejected by some theologians as dry and uninspiring. Thus was the movement, called ressourcement, the return to the sources: basing theology directly on the Bible and the Church Fathers. Some theologians also began to discuss new topics, such as the history of theology, the theology of work, ecumenism, the theology of the laity, and the theology of "earthly realities".The writings, whose new style came to be called la nouvelle théologie, attracted Rome's attention, and in 1950 Pius XII published Humani generis, an encyclical "concerning some false opinions threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine". Without citing specific people, he criticized those who advocated new schools of theology. It was generally understood that the encyclical was directly against the nouvelle théologie as well as developments in ecumenism and Bible studies. Some works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, and some of the authors were forbidden to teach or to publish. Those who suffered most were Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar, who were unable to teach or publish until the death of Pius XII in 1958. By the early 1960s, other theologians under suspicion included Karl Rahner and the young Hans Küng.
In addition, there was the unfinished business of the First Vatican Council. When it had been cut short by the Italian Army's entry into Rome at the end of Italian unification, the only topics that had been completed were the theology of the papacy and the relationship of faith and reason, while the theology of the episcopate and of the laity were left unaddressed. The task of the Second Vatican Council in continuing and completing the work of the first was noted by Pope Paul VI in his encyclical letter Ecclesiam Suam.
At the same time, the world's bishops were challenged by political, social, economic, and technological change. Some of those bishops were seeking new ways of addressing those challenges.
Beginnings
Announcement and expectations
gave notice of his intention to convene a diocesan synod for Rome and an ecumenical council for the universal church on 25 January 1959, less than three months after his election in October 1958. His announcement, in the chapter hall of the Benedictine monastery attached to the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, came as a surprise to the cardinals present.He had tested the idea only ten days before with one of them, his Cardinal Secretary of State Domenico Tardini, who gave enthusiastic support to the idea. Although the pope later said the idea came to him in a flash in his conversation with Tardini, two cardinals had earlier attempted to interest him in the idea. They were two of the most conservative, Ernesto Ruffini and Alfredo Ottaviani, who had already in 1948 proposed the idea to Pius XII and who put it before John XXIII on 27 October 1958.
Over the next 3 years, the Pope would make many statements describing the results he expected from the council. They formed something like 3 concentric circles:
- For the Catholic Church, he expected a renewal which he described variously as a "new Pentecost", a "new Springtime", a new "blossoming", "a rejuvenation with greater vigour of the Body of Christ that is the Church". This would be achieved by the "updating" or "adapting" of Church practices to new circumstances and a restatement of her beliefs in a way that would connect with modern man.
- Within the wider Christian family, he sought progress toward reunion of all Christians.
- For the whole human family, he expected the council to contribute toward resolving major social and economic problems, such as war, hunger, underdevelopment.
Once the officials of the Curia had recovered from their shock at the Pope's announcement of a Council, they realized that it could be the culmination of the Church's program of resistance to Protestantism, the Enlightenment and all the other perceived errors of the modern world. It was also seen as an opportunity to give the stamp of conciliar infallibility to the teachings of the most recent popes and to the Curia's vision of the role of the Church in the modern world, provided the Pope could be convinced to forget about aggiornamento.
On the other side were those theologians and bishops who had been working towards a new way of doing things, some of whom had been silenced and humiliated by the Curia in the 1940s and 1950s. For them, the council came as a "divine surprise", the opportunity to convince the bishops of the world to turn away from a fortress-like defensive attitude to the modern world and set off in a new direction towards a renewed theology of the Church and of the laity, ecumenism and the reform of the liturgy.
The council was officially summoned by the apostolic constitution Humanae Salutis on 25 December 1961.
Preparation
Preparation for the council took over three years, from the summer of 1959 to the autumn of 1962.The first year was known officially as the "antepreparatory period". On 17 May 1959, Pope John appointed an Antepreparatory Commission to conduct a vast consultation of the Catholic world concerning topics to be examined at the council. Three groups of people were consulted: the bishops of the world, the Catholic universities and faculties of theology, and the departments of the Curia. By the following summer, 2,049 individuals and institutions had replied with 9,438 individual vota. Some were typical of past ways of doing things, asking for new dogmatic definitions or condemnations of errors. Others were in the spirit of aggiornamento, asking for reforms and new ways of doing things.
The next two years were occupied with preparing the drafts, called schemas, that would be submitted to the bishops for discussion at the council. On 5 June 1960, ten Preparatory Commissions were created, to which a total of 871 bishops and experts were appointed. Each preparatory commission had the same area of responsibility as one of the main departments of the Curia and was chaired by the cardinal who headed that department. From the 9,438 proposals, a list of topics was created, and these topics were parcelled out to these commissions according to their area of competence.
Some commissions prepared a separate schema for each topic they were asked to treat, others a single schema encompassing all the topics they were handed. These were the preparatory commissions and the number of schemas they prepared:
| Preparatory Commission | Schemas |
| Theology | 9 |
| Bishops and Dioceses | 7 |
| Discipline of Clergy and Faithful | 17 |
| Religious | 1 |
| Eastern Catholic Churches | 11 |
| Liturgy | 1 |
| Discipline of Sacraments | 10 |
| Studies and Seminaries | 6 |
| Missions | 1 |
| Apostolate of the Laity | 1 |
Two secretariats – one the offshoot of an existing Vatican office, the other a new body – also had a part in drafting schemas:
| Secretariat | Schemas |
| Modern Means of Communication | 1 |
| Promotion of Christian Unity | 5 |
The total number of schemas was 70. As most of these preparatory bodies were predominantly conservative, the schemas they produced showed only modest signs of updating. The schemas drafted by the preparatory commission for theology, dominated by officials of the Holy Office showed no signs of aggiornamento at all. The two notable exceptions were the preparatory commission for liturgy and the Secretariat for Christian unity, whose schemas were very much in the spirit of renewal.
In addition to these specialist commissions and secretariats, there was a Central Preparatory Commission, to which all the schemas had to be submitted for final approval. It was a large body of 108 members from 57 countries, including two thirds of the cardinals. As a result of its work, 22 schemas were eliminated from the conciliar agenda, mainly because they could be dealt with during a planned revision of the 1917 Code of Canon Law after the council, and a number of schemas were consolidated and merged, with the result that the total number of schemas was whittled down from 70 to 22.