Stand Up 4 Vatican 2

A few weeks after writing this piece I shall celebrate my seventy-sixth birthday. Since the invention of the custom that bishops tender their resignation on reaching seventy-five (a custom from which the bishops of Rome seem curiously exempt), I am therefore older than almost all the active bishops in the Catholic Church. There are, therefore, very few bishops still in office who were adults during Vatican II. For almost all of them, Vatican II is, like Nicea and Trent, merely an historical event – an event of which they read in books. It follows that, if the programme of renewal and reform which the Council initiated is to be prosecuted with success, it is of paramount importance that what it did and aimed to do is accurately remembered. And here we have a problem.

Between 1995 and 2006, the English edition appeared of the five volume History of Vatican II, edited by the late Giuseppe Alberigo of Bologna, and written by an outstanding team of twenty-seven scholars, including Roger Aubert, Henry Chadwick, Cardinal Avery Dulles, Cardinal Roberto Tucci and Joseph Komonchak. It has been generally agreed to be an outstanding work of sound historical scholarship.

            Agreed: except by the Roman Curia. A curial official named Agostino Marchetto has made it his business to discredit and denounce the Alberigo History as “ideological” and as purporting to claim (in a lecture which he gave in 2007) that the Council marked the emergence of a “new Church”, a transition to “another Catholicism”, “un altro cattolicesimo”. Marchetto’s book-length attempt to destroy the reputation of the Alberigo volumes - The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council: A Counterpoint for the History of the Council – was launched in Rome in 2005 in the presence of Cardinal Ruini, the Vicar General of Rome. A news agency present at the launch described the book as giving “the Holy See’s point of view on that milestone event” (for details, see my Theology for Pilgrims, pp. 245-263).

            “The Holy See’s point of view”. From the moment that John XXIII first announced his calling of a Council, throughout the years of its duration, and in its aftermath, the handful of Catholic bishops strenuously resisting the conciliar programme of reform has been led by, and largely consisted of, officials of the Roman Curia. To describe the Curia’s resolute opposition to the conciliar programme as “the Holy See’s point of view” may cloak it with apparent papal approval, but this does nothing to improve its thoroughly “ideological” lack of historical justification.

            The struggle for the decentralisation of power in the Church, for the restoration of appropriate authority to bishops and to bishops’ conferences, for liturgical reform, for lay ministries, and for so much else is, amongst other things, a struggle for the memory of what was said and done and dreamed between 1962 and 1965.