The Gardener’s Class starts the year-long celebration of the Fiftieth Foundation Anniversary of their Garden.
Sacrosanctum Concilium
One of the first issues considered by the council, which made it immediately most visible world-wide for its immediate effect on the lives of individual Catholics, was, of course, liturgical re-form. The central idea was to allow greater people’s participation in the liturgy alongside greater people’s consciousness.
Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy. Such participation by the Christian people as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people (1 Peter 2:9; cf. 2:4–5), is their right and duty by reason of their baptism.
Sacrosanctum Concilium 14
Even before the start of Vatican II, some Asian bishops were already in the fore front of the movement for liturgical reform. Palo, Leyte Bishop Lino Gonzaga allowed the use of the vernacular in church worship by translating the Latin text of the Christian liturgy to Visayan and using this version in the Diocese of Palo with the approval of his superiors.
Suenens
Before Vatican II, during an international conference in Belgium in 1961 where he became fast friends with Leo Cardinal Suenens, Bishop Gonzaga introduced the concept of the use of the vernacular in conducting the liturgy, an idea which became global church policy.
His good friend, German-born Bishop Wilhelm Josef Duschak, S.V.D., Vicar Apostolic of Calapan, also in the Philippines, expressed his stand during the debates (First and Second Sessions) on the schema De Sacra Liturgia which led to the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium that Latin be completely eliminated from the Mass and that priests should face the people at all times; other bishops had encouraged a greater use of vernacular languages while still retaining some Latin. Duschak proposed a Missa Orbis or Mass of the World.
Duschak was the only bishop ever to propose, in the official Council discussions, an actual reform of the Canon of the Mass, a matter which was considered unthinkable for most Council Fathers — even though that is precisely what they would do “ad experimentum” in many countries as soon as the Council ended, and, permanently, with the creation of the new Ordinary of the Mass, in 1969. He was the only Council Father to voice openly what other bishops and especially many periti said and wrote in the conciliar underworld.
Gonzaga and Duschak were strongly endorsed on the Council floor by Bishop Wilhelm van Beckum, SVD – a Dutch-born Indonesian Prelate.
Interviewed by Vatican Council News Service later, Duschak said: “I haven’t too much hope that my idea will be accepted any time soon. But, as a good Filipino, I say—paciencia!” Of course his “paciencia” was “todo lo alcanza” (all uplifting).
And the truth that manifested fast was that the Liturgy Constitution (Sacrosanctum Concilium) would be the very first Document to be approved because it turned out, amazingly, to be the easiest to agree upon: 130 paragraphs long, dealing not just with the Mass but with all the sacraments, the calendar, the blessings or sacramentals, the liturgy of the hours, and the topics of liturgical music and art. There was, after all, a tremendous consensus among the bishops that the liturgical life of the Church needed serious renewal.
There were two dimensions to this conciliar text, including theological principles of liturgical worship universal to all Catholic rites, Eastern and Western and, secondly, specific directives on liturgical reform that pertained to the Roman Rite alone.
Manila, of course, and what later was named the East Asian Pastoral Institute, the Divine Word School of Theology and the Benedictine Monks of the Abbey of Montserrat, was quite ready for the liturgical changes in-depth and on the surface.
Like the rest of the world, priests started celebrating Mass in the language of the places in which they lived. They faced the congregation, not only to be heard and seen but also to signal to worshippers that they were being included because they were a vital component of the service. Guitar Masses proliferated and the grand organ that Father Herman Schablitzki, SVD, installed at great sacrifice and with the utmost dedication got used less and less. Subject to the strict auditing skills of Father Hermann Graef, SVD, our class went on with both the “usual” and the “experimental” gathering together in our seminary church various communities of nearby barrios (as barangays were then called). This was not difficult as our class had many social activists, to start with, quite amazingly rooted in the peasant communities surrounding our solid seminary structures.
The changes didn’t stop when Mass ended. As time went by, many nuns changed their voluminous habits in favour of clothes similar to those worn by the people they served. And more men and women in religious orders started taking on causes, pioneered by our class in “isolated” Tagaytay, interestingly enough, religious risking arrest, when they spoke out and in other ways acted in favor of farmers’ and workers’ rights and against the scandal of the centuries, viz. our never-dying oligarchy.
“Ite, missa est,” now meant that after going to Communion at Mass people would go to have communion with the masses. “The times, they were a changin’…” including the very venues for celebration of Mass – in the protest demonstration site, in private houses, in market places.
Lefebvre
After a while, matters became confusing. Catholics were told that the Council had forbidden the use of Latin in the liturgy. The LeFebvreist Movement which is named for a French Archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre went against the abolition of Latin in the Mass. The Council, of course, never outlawed Latin nor mandated the vernacular. In addition the Conciliar Father Lefebvre had signed all Vatican documents in approval. So, there should have been no problem with a marginal group less than 100.000 in number, like the LeFevreist group was.
After all, there really are two Latin Masses – one used before the Council and the other, the Novus Ordo – mandated in the aftermath of Vatican II but which can be celebrated in Latin as well as in the vernacular. The Novus Ordo, the new order of the Mass, does not automatically mean vernacular. Turn on the TV even now and see the Pope saying the Novus Ordo in Latin.
Thus, Archbishop Lefebvre was later excommunicated not for saying or encouraging Latin Masses but for violating a fundamental rule in the Catholic Church, a rule that has been there for several centuries that no bishop anywhere may be appointed or consecrated without the express mandate of the Holy See. Archbishop Lefebvre went ahead and consecrated three bishops of his own choosing – an act that may have been valid but certainly was not licit.
Then, too, Catholics were told that the Council had mandated that the altar be turned around so that the priest would face the people when he celebrated Mass. Untrue: it said nothing about that. It just became more practical. In this regard, perhaps, nothing beats the circular Chapel of the Holy Sacrifice at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, QC. Remember, though, that it was early 1950s pre-Vatican II action, to the everlasting credit of Father John P. Delaney, SJ.
Quetchenbach
Thirdly, Catholics were told that the Council had mandated the suppression of popular devotions. They were told the Council had in effect mandated what we sometimes call the guitar Mass and had outlawed Gregorian chant. Again, untrue. And again, interestingly enough, some in my class clearly and fondly remember how Father Ray Quetchenbach, SVD was teaching seminarians in the mid-1950s in Palo Leyte to chant the Psalms for Vespers and Compline in English.
Catholics were told that the Council had forbidden nuns to wear habits and had told them that they should dress in secular clothes.
People were even told sometimes that the Council had changed the moral teachings of the Church. They were told that the Council now allowed birth control, for example, which was not true and therefore could and did lead to real crises when Humanae Vitae was written not long afterward.
Many of these statements arose from genuine ignorance and confusion, because the number of people who carefully studied the documents of the Council was quite small. But some feared that there was always the possibility of a deliberate effort to deceive. On whose part?
Pope Benedict has suggested that from the very start there were really two parallel councils in place: the council of the fathers and the council of the media; the perspective of faith and the perspective of politics; the real council and the virtual council.
A mythology developed, with surprising speed, concerning what the Catholic world was before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. It was pictured (in varying degrees of accuracy?) as a world where the priest’s word, and even the nun’s word, was accepted with unthinking obedience; where Scripture was shunned; where little existed in the way of a lay apostolate; where rules and regulations reigned supreme; where the laity were passive at Mass; where intolerance towards non-Catholics was part of the typical Catholic’s mentality.
Then followed a divisive and humanly destructive practice of dividing all Catholics (clergy, religious, and laity) into that all embracing distinction of “liberal” versus “conservative”. In almost every case, the “conservative” could be, and were, safely derided, mocked, or perhaps condescendingly tolerated till they “progressed and matured”. If they persisted in their “pre-Vatican II” mentality the dread word “rigid” was used and even psychological help might be suggested. It was assumed that they would eventually pass away or out; and then “the new Church” would come to birth.
The perspective of power politics and media fancied a context of rupture and revolution where the truth may have been quite different altogether.
Pope Benedict XVI
Father Ratzinger Benedict XVI observed earlier this year that the council of the media “had no interest in the liturgy as an act of faith, but as something to be made understandable, similar to a community activity, something profane.”
Benedict explained: “The media saw the Council as a political struggle, a struggle for power between different currents within the Church…There was this triple issue: the power of the Pope then transferred to the power of the bishops and then the power of all … popular sovereignty. Naturally they saw this as the part to be approved, to promulgate, and to help.”
Although “the Council that immediately, effectively, got through to the people was that of the media, not that of the Fathers… the Council of the Fathers evolved [the past 50 years] within the faith; it was a Council of the faith that sought the intellect, that sought to understand and try to understand the signs of God at that moment…So while the whole council moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of Journalists [took place] outside of the faith, with different hermeneutics. It was a hermeneutic of [contemporary] politics.”
DEI VERBUM
The next topic Bishop Bastes discussed was The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, “Dei Verbum (DV,)” which some have characterized as like the stem which roots the council in the rich soil of Scripture and Tradition and draws up the necessary nutrients to make the full flower of the council blossom, which is the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, “Lumen Gentium” (LG).
The 26 paragraphs of Dei Verbum are divided up into 6 short chapters. The Council Fathers thought that regardless of degree of biblical literacy, all Catholics would find themselves on familiar ground here as they read God’s self-revelation through words and deeds passed on by means of both Scripture and Tradition. Here is the basic story of salvation history beginning in the days of the old covenant and leading up to Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.
In Dei Verbum (DV) the Council clarifies points and establishes norms of Scripture study for the sake of guiding her faithful in the way of truth, conscious that the commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God has been entrusted to the Church.
Paragraph 11 states that the Church “accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author, and have been handed on as such to the Church herself.”
To explain the inspired process in the composition of the sacred books, DV says: “God chose certain men who, all the while He employed them in this task, made full use of their powers and faculties so that, though He acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever He wanted written and no more” (Para. 11). Thus, Sacred Scripture presents “firmly, faithfully, and without error” all the truths God wished to convey to humankind for the sake of its salvation.
DV explains that the Old Testament was a preparation for the New. God’s election of Israel, beginning with His promise to Abraham, and the entire history of His dealings with this chosen people, was a “preparation for the salvation of the whole human race,” accomplished through and in Christ as recorded in the New Testament.
Lumen Gentium (LG)
Equally biblical as the shorter Dei Verbum is the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church – Lumen Gentium (LG), a much longer document, 69 paragraphs in eight chapters with several more explanatory notes tacked on afterwards.
“The Mystery of the Church,” its first chapter, meditates on the many images of the Church in the New Testament. It reaffirms the teaching of the Council of Trent that the Church is organized in this world as a visible society while emphasizing that the Church is likewise an invisible “communio” or “koinonia” – a communion of persons whose many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside her visible confines.
This idea of communio then leads to Chapter 2, “the People of God,” which develops the theme of the Church’s catholicity and universality. All people are called to enter into this unity of the Church. This unity, however, is quite diverse, and this chapter describes the different ways people belong or are related to it.
Chapters then follow on the hierarchical structure of the Church, the Laity, the Clergy and Religious and their respective roles. Cutting through it all is chapter 5 on “the Universal Call to Holiness,” which some have ranked as one of the most important chapters of all conciliar texts, constituting as it does one of the central themes of the Council. The document closes with a meditation on the pilgrim church on earth. The people of God in via are always in need of purification and renewal. But there is one in whom the Church already exists without spot or blemish, the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Some have compared LG to the hub of a wheel–with other council documents like spokes from the hub as they spring directly out of a chapter or paragraph of LG and provide directives for pastoral action based on this Constitution’s teaching.
For example, the Decree on the “Apostolate of the Laity” (Apostolicam Actuositatem – AA) flows directly from LG’s teaching on the universal call to holiness, the laity, and the charisms.
In LG, the Council was quite clear: “The Sacred Power in the church is vested in the entire people of God through the all-pervading presence of the Spirit. It is present and operative in the ordained and non-ordained[who]unfailingly adhere to the faith, penetrate it more deeply through right judgment, and apply it in daily life” (cf. LG12).
The characteristic of the lay state is that “being a life led in the midst of the world and of secular affairs, laymen are called by God to make of their apostolate, through the vigour of their Christian spirit, a leaven in the world” (AA 2). For this they need a deep spirituality and proper training, and thus AA deals with both topics.
It also identifies the key areas where the laity are to make their most distinctive contribution: evangelization through example and word (which includes apologetics) and the renewal of the temporal order, which means influencing and bringing political and economic structures in society to a more human and Christian direction based on justice and the dignity of the human person. This is precisely what some gardeners are now about in their newly established LSSAJ or Lay Society of St. Arnold Janssen.
The Council clearly did not view lay people as mere spectators to priests and religious who are supposedly doing the real Catholic work; rather, the Council viewed lay people as the front lines of the Church’s effort to sanctify the world.
You can say that, while important, what happens inside church walls is really not the be-all and end-all of Christian life. The Mass is the source and summit of a faith life, surely, but one that is mostly lived elsewhere. Simply put: Vatican II sent lay people to take the Gospel to the great wide mission field outside church walls.
It has taken both clergy and laity the past fifty years to really understand and live out this central message of the Council regarding this change in paradigm. Whenever the Church called for more lay involvement, the comfortable tendency was to go back to the pre-Vatican II paradigm and assume it meant more lay involvement inside the church walls. As a result we have, for instance, the continuing anomaly of Philippine Christianity.
It sometimes seems like it’s really hard to find a nation less Christian than ours despite the fact that we are nominally and Hispano-culturally the only such country in all Asia. You can start anywhere – the Comelec, the Congress, the economy, anywhere you will, and you may find very little evidence of Christianity at all, as if Vatican II never was.
The Church “Ad Extra”
Cardinal Suenens talked of two sets of issues that the Council tackled: issues of Renewal or topics relating to those dwelling within the visible boundaries of the Church–the Church “ad-intra,”—and, secondly, issues of how the Catholic Church is related to those outside its visible boundaries–the Church “ad-extra.”
LG’s paragraph 15 became quite a starter when the Council declared that “baptized members of Christian Churches and ecclesial communities who have not retained full communion with the successor of Peter and in many cases not preserved the fullness of Catholic faith, are nonetheless joined to us in the Holy Spirit.” The Decree on Ecumenism logically followed, which provided an orientation on how to understand and view non-Catholic Christians from both East (the Orthodox) and West (Protestants) and on how to hasten the day when we can celebrate the Eucharist together “as one flock under one shepherd.”
In the next paragraph (LG16), the council considers the situation of people who have not yet received the gospel and therefore do not confess Christ. It categorically stated that there is truth present in the religion of Jews, Moslems, and others and honoured such truth as “preparation for the gospel.” It would even go deeper and state that “those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience–those too may achieve eternal salvation.”
But equally clearly the Council noted that often, “deceived by the Evil One,” such people come to serve creatures rather than the creator or fall into despair. Therefore the preaching of the Gospel remains an urgent task and the Church shall never cease nor neglect to foster the missions.
In fact, taking off from that paragraph, the Council came up with The Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity (Ad Gentes Divinitum) which “makes it impossible for any Catholic to conclude that since it is a technical possibility for those who never hear the gospel to be saved, we ought to forget about missionary activity.” Although the document focuses on the duty of the entire Church to bring the gospel to unevangelized regions of the earth, much of what it has to say has direct bearing on the ‘new evangelization’ or re-evangelization of the Western world in which all Europeans and North and South Americans are called to be directly involved.” Father Superior General John Schuette, SVD and Father Joseph Ratzinger spent many hours together at the SVD complex in Nemi as periti for this Decree.
Then there is the Declaration on Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate), which is among the shortest and most pithy of council documents. Here the council lays aside once and for all the idea that Jews throughout history carry the guilt of the crucifixion of Christ. The Council then unequivocally condemns all forms of anti-Semitism.
It also contains important reflections on Islam:
3. The Church also regards the Moslems with esteem. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honour Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the Day of Judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.
4. Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.
Could you put it any better?
As for the major living faiths of the East the Council was brief and to the point:
Religions that are bound up with an advanced culture have struggled to [the profound questions of humanity] by means of more refined concepts and a more developed language.
Thus in Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust.
Again, Buddhism, in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world; it teaches a way by which men, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination.
Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing “ways,” comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites.
The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself.
Following these conciliar points, some gardeners founded the ACFOD or Asian Cultural forum on Development in 1974 in Bangkok, Thailand and gathered together representatives of Asia’s major living faiths in common concerns over issues identified in Gaudium et Spes. It has done a great job of training animators in some 18 countries of Asia-Pacific towards development from the energies generated by ecumenism and inter-faith dialogue – and all this within the initiative of the laity.