You might think that it’s odd for George Weigel, usually billed as a conservative, to be supporting the Second Vatican Council. Because Vatican II supporters are liberals, no? And its critics conservative? Well, you’d be wrong. George Weigel thinks that the Second Vatican Council was necessary and right, so that’s one prejudice debunked. Actually, he doesn’t have time for the whole progressive/conservative binary divide. “Most of these labels are absurd and ridiculous,” he told me flatly. “The Catholic Church is not about left and right but about true and false.” That’s telling us. George Weigel, a heavyweight intellectual and author of over 25 books, is a fluent mixture of the genial and the combative, and it’s nice to see both sides. His new book on the Council, To Sanctify the World (Basic Books, £25), coincides with its 60th anniversary.
He was speaking in a meeting room at St Patrick’s in Soho Square, to a lively group that included a bishop, a monk, and a friar – and where he was introduced by an old friend, Daniel Johnson, one of the few British journalists who can actually be described as an intellectual. Bracingly, he was challenged during questions by Dom Christopher Jamison, the feisty former Abbot of Worth, who called on him to take back his brusque description of the synodal process as a “masquerade”. Weigel didn’t look terribly penitent. But the point stood, that even if there was agreement on Vatican II, that agreement didn’t extend to what you might call the successors to the Council, or the ways the Holy Spirit may be working now.
George Weigel’s contention is that the Council was necessary for the Church to engage with the new world that followed two world wars: a world that was, for the first time ever, profoundly godless. It put Jesus Christ at the centre of history, which was entirely to the good.
So, why was it that the Council has become equated with a “Vatican Rag” kind of Catholicism – the cultural revolution that meant discarding familiar saints, radically reordering churches, ditching familiar liturgies and losing tens of thousands of priests and religious? Actually, George Weigel doesn’t really buy the notion that the preconciliar Church was wholly exemplary. If it had been, he says, how come so many clergy who were formed in that Church left ministry so abruptly? For the record, he himself is a Novus Ordo kind of Catholic – viz, he attends Latin Mass but not the Tridentine rite – but he sees nothing wrong with those who follow the 1962 rite being allowed to do so.
But, I asked, were the problems that followed the Council to do with the Council, or were they because it happened to conclude with that point in the Sixties when the world was turned upside down? “It’s a common error,” he said, “to say ‘post-hoc, ergo propter hoc’, and I think that’s true of the Council.” In other words, just because radical and alienating changes happened after the Council, it doesn’t follow that they were authorised by the fathers of that Council. Au contraire, in some cases.
So… what happened? One problem was, says Weigel, that “unlike previous councils, Vatican II didn’t give the Church keys to unlock its meaning” – a creed, or a doctrinal formulation or a condemnation of heresy. “No creed, no formulation.” Small wonder, then, that people felt free to project their own agenda onto it. That is, until those two men who attended the Council, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, summed up the meaning of the postconciliar Church as a communion of disciples in mission. That sounds really boring, but it’s actually an important shift from the old, triumphalist model of the Church.
One reason he wrote the book, he says, is because he’s often asked – more by the young than the old – whether the Council was necessary. And it was, he says, because of the challenges the world faced. He quotes John Henry Newman in 1874 that “we are apt to consider no time so perilous as our own”, but it was true: this was the Church’s first encounter with a world that was genuinely irreligious. “Paganism is not irreligious,” he says. “Pagans understood that this reality is bound up in a larger reality. The world was without door and windows. It was a claustrophobic world in which human beings turned in on themselves. Max Weber called it a disenchanted world.”
And in this crisis the Second Vatican Council asked two great questions: “Who is the human person, where does he or she come from, and what is our destiny?” and “What makes for authentic human living?” The answer to both is to be found in Christ.
Remember, he says, it takes time, sometimes centuries, for the meaning of any council to be-come apparent. We’re only two or three generations on from Vatican II. George Weigel is clear that, after 60 years, it’s still a work in progress.
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