Vatican II and the Case for Not Caring

In the latest installment of “Some Things Never Change”, Bishop Robert Barron has given a lecture to the Napa Institute in which he lays out why Vatican II is so important today. This is meant as a barely veiled corrective to his brother bishop Carlo Maria Vigano who has grown increasingly hostile to The Second Vatican Council. It is not my intent to say who is right. It is my intent to say that nobody should care.

Wait, did a Catholic just say you shouldn’t care about an Ecumenical Council? Did I just forfeit my Catholic card? To get it out of the way, Vatican II is a lawful and valid ecumenical council, called by a valid, lawful, and reigning Pope. There is nothing in the Council that explicitly contradicts previous Church teaching. In areas where it could be argued it implicitly does, this is nothing new for Church history, and the Church has attempted (sometimes productively, sometimes not so productively) to provide a synthesis. Nothing I have said above or will say below is meant to contradict this.

What I am saying is that the dominant debate about Vatican II is mostly a waste of time, and Catholics need not concern ourselves with it. There’s a lot of nuance to this debate, but a brief summation should suffice. Everyone agrees that at a pivotal moment of the Council deliberations, most of the original plans for the council were scrapped, and instead everyone went in a different direction. Almost everyone at the council (save a few “conservatives”) favored this change. After the Council, a debate among theologians erupted about the nature of this change. One group felt that while the original change was justified, the direction people were claiming “Vatican II” required them to take was a bad idea, and not actually part of the text itself. These are typically called “conservatives” or “orthodox Catholics” in mainstream parlance. They were opposed by those who viewed the initial change as a down payment on a far larger agenda of reform. They didn’t view themselves as betraying the Council, they were its spiritual children. These are known as “progressives”, “liberals”, and a variety of other names.

Who is right? Who is wrong? Do we honestly have to care? There may be some esoteric distinction between “What the council said” and “how the council was implemented”, but its mostly a distinction for purposes of narrative. The most visible change the Council ushered in was the liturgy, and the documents on the liturgical reform that became Sacrosanctum Concillium were almost verbatim the same before and after the change in direction. Second, Paul VI closed the Council, and Paul VI oversaw its implementation. At no point did he view his work being a fundamental change or a hijacking. Quite the contrary, he viewed the work most associate with the “liberal” understanding as the fruits of Vatican II. He also strongly disagreed with many of those voices when they tried to change Church teaching on contraception. We are attempting to read into the immediate post-concilliar era a factionalism that was nowhere near as crystallized as it is now or 15 years later, even if it involved many of the same players.

Finally, Barron and Vigano are debating attitudes about Vatican II. They are not debating teachings. Barron doesn’t mention a specific teaching that is rejected that Vigano is required to accept. Vigano is not calling on Catholics to reject an explicit thing Vatican II taught. Instead, we are debating what Vatican II should look like in an idealized universe.

Yet we can’t say what Vatican II would look like properly implemented, because, spoiler alert, there is no authoritative guide to what Vatican II’s implementation was supposed to look like. The documents were often compromises that would be worked out later, and that “working out later” is very fluid and always in motion. You may think tone policing is a productive part of debate, and there’s no doubt temperatures should be lowered. Yet this is very much a debate tailor made to our social media age: a lot of bromides and rhetoric without really doing anything

To those who would disagree, what do we traditionalists need to “accept” from Vatican II in regards to teachings? Trent had synods and far greater lay involvement than the current Church. Pre and Post Tridentine Catholicism fluctuated between being more and less centralized than the Church today. (Today the Church is considerably more centralized) This would seem to cut against the idea that Vatican II requires x or y when it comes to how the Church is governed. The only serious question is about religious liberty, and the Church has itself allowed far more liberty on this subject than people wish. What she requires people to accept from Dignitatis Humanae is actually quite small.

Sometimes we just need a blunt reminder: the world is not stuck in the 1960’s anymore, and the solutions to the problems facing the Church 60 years later are not necessarily in those documents, for good or ill. We also run the risk of a debate about navel gazing when the Church is facing a post-pandemic and post-abuse crisis world that ravages every faction, and cares little if its still 1968 in Napa Institute lectures. 

Yet in this we reach the real reason everyone is obsessed with debates over Vatican II: the more we debate that, the less we have to take a hard look at the reality that leaders of every faction failed us, and probably deserve being swept to irrelevance by future generations, except as a reminder of what not to do. Faced with that reality, Barron and Vigano would love to debate Vatican II for eternity. At least they are both relevant to history in such a world.