Spirit of Vatican II

By the spirit of Vatican II is meant the teaching and intentions of the Second Vatican Council interpreted in a way that is not limited to a literal reading of its documents, or even interpreted in a way that contradicts the "letter" of the Council (cf. phrase, "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life"). This has led to a great diversity of understanding of the phrase.
19621967
According to peritus Yves Congar, in an address to the council on 3 December 1962, Cardinal Léger "wishes that the spirit of renewal be protected by a committee that will authoritatively protect the spirit of the council in the period between the two sessions".
In an address at Milan Cathedral on 7 June 1963, before the opening of the papal conclave of 1963, papabile Cardinal Montini said of Pope John XXIII who had died four days earlier, "If we still wanted to fix our gaze on the tomb, now sealed, we could speak about his legacy which that tomb cannot contain, about the spirit which he infused into our era and which death cannot suffocate".
On 25 July 1967, Pope Paul VI said in a sermon to the Catholics of Istanbul at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit:
1974-1982
Traditionalist Catholics such as Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre distinguish between "Catholic Rome" and the actually existing Rome, as he declares in 1974 that, while he and his followers are faithful to "Catholic Rome", they refuse to follow "the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies which were clearly evident in the Second Vatican Council and, after the Council, in all the reforms which issued from it".
1985-2013
In the 1985 book The Ratzinger Report, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger distinguishes the true spirit of the Council from false interpretations, blaming the disappointed hopes for renewal on "those who have gone far beyond both the letter and the spirit of Vatican II", and calling for a "return to the authentic texts of the original Vatican II".
Pope John Paul II calls in 1994 for what he describes as the authentic spirit of the Council to be respected.
In November 2003, Michael Novak describes what has been called the "spirit" of the Second Vatican Council as something that:
In 2005, in a speech to the Roman Curia, Pope Benedict XVI says:
According to this view of Pope Benedict XVI, the correct view of the Council is that which interprets it "within the context of tradition, not as a rupture with tradition, and the false view is that which "only accepted as authentic the 'spirit' or progressive thrust of the documents and so rejected any elements of the older tradition found in the texts, which were regarded as compromises and so not binding".
It has been suggested that the expression "spirit of Vatican II" and also the polarity "continuity" or "discontinuity" have both been found unhelpful in describing the "authentic communal shifts" that can be traced to the Council documents.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis frequently speaks about a spirit of renewal that is in continuity with Vatican II, even as Pope John XXIII proposed in calling the Council to "throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through.” Francis speaks of "reviving the spirit of the church," even as Vatican II called for "audacious change in order to preserve, at a higher level and from a superior viewpoint, inherited values." This is seen, for instance, in his call for mercy in the application of rigid moral principles, arrived at through a spirit of collegiality called for by Vatican II. The secular media report "a quiet intra-Church struggle between anti-Vatican II diehards and clerics who prefer John XXIII’s (and Francis’s) generosity of spirit."
In the wake of the Synod of the Amazon called by Pope Francis in 2019, a suggestion put forth in The Tablet but criticized in the National Review, saw the Council's importance as an "event" that unleashed a spirit of renewal in a time when “our culture has become old, our churches and our religious houses are big and empty, the bureaucratic apparatus of the church grows, our rites and our dress are pompous”.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu