Understanding Our Faith

Does Vatican II Matter?

Looking at the new era in which we are living and seeking a way ahead, we carry with us the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). 

The entry of the Church into a new age was ‘fought out’ at that Council and a new direction was set. The Council brought about changes but more importantly, it read the changes that were happening in the society in which the Church was living. So much that has happened since that time has been the playing out of the societal changes that the Council saw had been happening for a long time before it, which it saw were continuing and were not likely to change direction into the past.

Vatican II is the formal and official watershed between the age that was closing and the one that was opening up. A lot of work has happened as a result of Vatican II, much of it seeking to develop its insights. 

There are some people in the Church who see the Council as having caused more trouble than it solved. Often people who feel like that are caught up in nostalgia for what the Church was like in the past. What we have to realize is that the Church as it was preceding Vatican II was itself responding to the situation in which it found itself in that earlier time – and that time has passed. We cannot restore the past! If we look at the historical attempts to restore past historical situations, we will see that they never work. The restoration after the French Revolution is a typical example.

Even though much has happened in developing the insights of the Council since its closure, the documents we have from it are of capital importance because they set a path for us into the future. 

There were two fundamental thrusts to the Council which influenced all of its documents. Firstly, there was the study of the whole Christian tradition – not just the recent past, but the whole long Catholic tradition in all its different phases and moods.  And then secondly, there was what Pope John XXIII called ‘aggiornamento’, that is keeping an eye on the times in which we live and how they differ or not with the past times in which the faith was lived and given expression.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin