What is Vatican II's Relevance Today?

 In our journey of faith, we all have these moments which to the outside observer seem weird and inconsequential, but for us are eye opening.  It is one of the ways in which God speaks to us as one who is known by name.  Different things are tailored to different people. I'd like to share a brief story which I hope will become more  apparent by the end.

The year is 2012.   The parish is Assumption Grotto in Detroit, Michigan.  Due to some unfortunate local Church politics (known by residents of the Detroit scene and interesting to them only), your not so humble correspondent had relocated parishes, and was attending the TLM at Assumption Grotto.  The Grotto had the reputation of being the "diehard" trad parish in the Archdiocese.  If you weren't SSPX, you were Grotto.  That's where the realest of the real trads hung out, because they were viewed as a TLM parish that offered the Novus Ordo on the side.  (Wasn't true but anyways!)  

Cognizant of this reputation, the pastoral team at the Grotto decided to spend the year educating the congregation about the documents of Vatican II, and why they were capable of being read in harmony with tradition.  For about 5-10 minutes each homily, they'd take a section from a document and talk about it, and then go into the regular homily.  Within 5 months the program was dead, yet not for the reasons you'd think. Most would think that the congregation rebelled against the idea Vatican II could be harmonized.  Instead, the opposite happened.  Most of the congregation was willing to concede the documents could be read in line with tradition.  They just..... did not care.  A majority of the several hundred parishioners were below the age of 40, and grew up during the pontificate of John Paul II.  Vatican II had zero salience for their daily Christian lives.  The pastors might as well have given their homilies in Greek, and they might have made more of an impact just for the curiosity of it all.

These results did not surprise me, but they did make me start paying a lot more attention to it.   A year or so later, I wrote "Closing the Door on Vatican II", in which I said the following:

A lot of this is new territory that appeals to Vatican II cannot directly answer.  While we might not need a Third Vatican Council, we can no longer treat the Council as some “Super-Council” from which a new Church is built.  Rather, Vatican II must join the 20 other Ecumenical Councils which had orthodox teaching when it specifically dealt with doctrine (read in line with tradition), some good ideas for reform, and others that were best left either untried or jettisoned.

This landscape isn’t perfect, but it is a landscape far more favorable to traditionalists (especially here in America) then what existed before.  Within this framework we can put forth our principles as the ones which will best bring about the reform of the Church we all desperately seek.  It is also a harder terrain for those who are active foes of traditionalists.  Their goal has been to marginalize the movement by impugning heretical thoughts and “quasi-schismatic” motives and intentions to traditionalist concerns.  This is not the landscape of the generations immediately before us, and for that we should be eternally grateful.  This is not only a terrain we can fight on, this is a terrain we can win real victories on.

Years later, I wrote "Vatican II and the Case for Not Caring" in which I said the following:

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 

If one is looking for a clearer case of bromides and rhetoric without really doing anything, look no further than the debate  about Vatican II between Crisis Magazine and Professor Larry Chapp.  I know people want to read the debate for themselves, but please, save yourself the time and do something productive instead.  What's that?  We want to hear about it?  Okay, but I warned you!

Why should we care about Vatican II?  Professor Chapp says BUT MUH CHRISTOCENTRIC ECCLESIOLIOGY!  If you're wondering what "Christocentric Ecclesiology" is, what are some examples of it, what it shows that the Church before 1962 allegedly did not, and why that matters today, look, just take his word for it.  He has a Ph.D he got writing about one of the big theological influences at the Council, okay?  In the article, the Professor is clearly delivering a lecture to students who have long stopped caring what the teacher is saying, and he views it really important they care about the material, not in a "this will be on the test" way, but in a "this will change your life" way. Yet the students aren't listening.  Or worse, they are listening, and they're cracking jokes about their boomer professor.  The professor knows, and is getting very mad about it.  Which just makes the students laugh and snicker harder.  

Go ahead and read the piece at Crisis.  It isn't some grand challenge to the Council.  Contra what Chapp says (entirely for the purpose of his own narrative construction, not as honest academic analysis), it isn't a polemic for the time before 1962.  It is instead a recognition that most debates about Vatican II aren't debates about Vatican II, but about something else.  Often, its something Vatican II is silent on, or the insight it offers is very little and not terribly enlightening.

What are the things that matter most in the Church today?  What does an ecumenical Council written 60 years ago in a different time say about them?  This idea that ecumenical councils are these grand documents that speak to all ages is absurd.  Nicaea doesn't speak to the 21st century Christian, even if its doctrinal definitions and pronouncements about the person of Christ are super important.  But every debate at the council or word put to pen?  That's for academics.  For everyone else, in time Nicaea faded from relevance, and became just another ecumenical council that solved some really important things, but you don't actually have to think about.  This is one of the important councils.  There are other ecumenical councils that probably didn't accomplish anything in their age, and were immediately forgotten about, and aren't even an academic curiosity for the bourgeois like Professor Chapp.  (That's okay!)

To some (such as Mark Brumley at Ignatius Press), what they want is "moving on with Vatican II, not moving on from Vatican II."  But what does this mean?  I can tell you what moving on with Trent and Nicaea does.  Can I with Vatican II?  Maybe!  I could talk about the inclusion of things like a clear renunciation of Anti-Semitism, or the beginning of the process (very much unfinished) of how to deal with a dramatically more educated laity who now have the resources (and free time) to take part in the governance of the Church on a scale simply not possible before the Industrial and Communications Revolutions.  What are those like Professor Chapp going to go to the mattresses for on Vatican II, and say this is why it mattered, and more importantly, this is why it still matters today?  "Christocentric Ecclesiology" or the Council Fathers "had in view the ongoing relevance of the God of Jesus Christ in a world gone mad" isn't going to cut it.  

The beautiful part about this debate is time is on the side of those who say its time to move on.  All we have to do is ask why it still matters.  In time, we're going to be proven right.