- Feb 5, 2002
- 166,520
- 56,190
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
Pope Francis has spoken of his respect for the Council. Yet the present pontificate has diverged from the Council’s teaching in several ways.
On the morning of October 17, 1978, the newly-elected Pope John Paul II concelebrated Mass with the College of Cardinals and pledged that the program of his papacy would be the full implementation of the Second Vatican Council. That was his “definitive duty,” for the Council had been “an event of utmost importance” in the two millennia of Christian history. As I explain in To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books), the next 26-and-a-half years saw John Paul II fulfill that pledge, for his pontificate was an epic of teaching and witness that helped provide the Council the interpretive keys it had not given itself.
Unlike the previous 20 ecumenical councils, Vatican II did not articulate or identify a definitive key to its proper interpretation: something that made clear that “This is what we mean.” Other councils had written creeds, defined dogmas, condemned heresies, legislated canons into Church law and commissioned catechisms. Vatican II did none of those things, which was one reason why a donnybrook over the Council’s intention and meaning ensued.
In the 1975 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi(Announcing the Gospel), Pope Paul VI began the process of giving the Council-without-keys an authoritative interpretation by recalling John XXIII’s original intention for the Council: Vatican II was to launch the Church on a revitalized mission of Christ-centered evangelization. John Paul II filled in the blanks of what that new evangelization would involve with his voluminous magisterium — and by his pastoral visit to the Holy Land in March 2000, which reminded the Church that Christianity began with a personal encounter with the Risen Lord Jesus, who must be ever at the center of the Church’s proposal and proclamation to the world.
Continued below.
Three pontificates and Vatican II
On the morning of October 17, 1978, the newly-elected Pope John Paul II concelebrated Mass with the College of Cardinals and pledged that the program of his papacy would be the full implementation of the Second Vatican Council. That was his “definitive duty,” for the Council had been “an event of utmost importance” in the two millennia of Christian history. As I explain in To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books), the next 26-and-a-half years saw John Paul II fulfill that pledge, for his pontificate was an epic of teaching and witness that helped provide the Council the interpretive keys it had not given itself.
Unlike the previous 20 ecumenical councils, Vatican II did not articulate or identify a definitive key to its proper interpretation: something that made clear that “This is what we mean.” Other councils had written creeds, defined dogmas, condemned heresies, legislated canons into Church law and commissioned catechisms. Vatican II did none of those things, which was one reason why a donnybrook over the Council’s intention and meaning ensued.
In the 1975 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi(Announcing the Gospel), Pope Paul VI began the process of giving the Council-without-keys an authoritative interpretation by recalling John XXIII’s original intention for the Council: Vatican II was to launch the Church on a revitalized mission of Christ-centered evangelization. John Paul II filled in the blanks of what that new evangelization would involve with his voluminous magisterium — and by his pastoral visit to the Holy Land in March 2000, which reminded the Church that Christianity began with a personal encounter with the Risen Lord Jesus, who must be ever at the center of the Church’s proposal and proclamation to the world.
Continued below.
Three pontificates and Vatican II
