Dominican Sisters Collaboration Study Day 
Sr. Maureen Sullivan, OP January 19, 2013 
INTRODUCTION 
Good morning to all of you here in Ossining for this event and to those of you watching online. 
I am honored to be with you – and delighted that we Dominican Sisters have chosen to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II by holding this study day. 
We are women of the church and our church was forever marked by that Council. 
We do well to remember it, to learn more about it, and to introduce this moment in church history to those to whom we minister.   
“From the celebration of Mass in the vernacular to the way of expressing the faith, to how the Christian life is lived…the transformations brought about by Vatican II are so profound that it is difficult for younger generations to understand their impact. “  (Alberigo, p. xiii) 
That is why we must continue to tell this story.  As I often say, without us, the story dies.   
As I now look back at a distance of fifty years, I am more convinced than ever that the Council brought to modern life…the hope and optimism of the Gospel.   Do we dare not share this story? 
LIVING IN TWO CHURCHES 
As many of you know, Vatican II has been at the center of my theological research for many years.    
This council has spawned thousands of books, articles, dissertation theses, and many, many theological conferences…all in an attempt to understand what the Council was, what the Council Fathers intended, what the Council documents actually mean. 
And, as interested as I am in all that has occurred since the Council, one could say I am even more fascinated by what happened before Vatican II. 
We know that over 2500 bishops from all over the world were present at the Council, bishops who often disagreed on the most critical issues.   Yet, they managed to produce sixteen documents that touched the very essence of the Catholic faith. 
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Some critical questions arise now as we look back at this moment in church history… 
How is it possible that so much could have been accomplished in four brief council sessions, from 1962-1965?  How did our church move from Pius IX at Vatican I (1869-70) who espoused a rigid, hierarchical model of church, to John XXIII at Vatican II (1962-65) who ushered in a collegial, communion model of church? 
What was it that prompted John XXIII to call this council?  What did the church look like at that time?  What theological developments in the decades just prior to Vatican II made the moment right for what some have called “a faithful revolution”? 
Just as an aside…to use the term “faithful revolution” sounds like a contradiction.  Hopefully by the end of our time together today, it will be clear that this is an apt description when talking about that moment of grace in the life of the church.   
This is because Vatican II was clearly faithful to its 2000 year old history.  The bishops knew that there were elements of the faith that truly were eternal truths, given to us in Revelation.  And Vatican II was faithful to these truths. 
But the bishops also knew that the truths of the faith must be expressed anew in every generation – in a manner that men and women of that era would comprehend.   
Jesuit Father Karl Rahner was one of the great theologians of the twentieth century.  He believed that theology must translate the truths of the faith for every new generation. 
And it would seem that John XXIII knew this as well.  As preparation for today’s meeting, you were invited to read John’s opening speech at the Council.   
One of the quotes John is most remembered for is found in that speech:  “The ancient deposit of the faith is one thing…the way it is articulated in every generation is another.” 
This articulation for a new generation points to the “revolutionary” component.  When theology is attuned to the Spirit of God in the world…the unexpected can occur, the impossible becomes possible…and Vatican II would be the herald of such possibilities. 
For so long – in the years before Vatican II – theology had been a closed, static and – at times – arrogant system.  Its preoccupation with the need for certitude, with having answers for every question, impoverished the theological enterprise… 
…and perhaps, more importantly, it forgot something central to the faith: the object of our study is God who is best defined as Divine Mystery…and as Karl Rahner has claimed:  “Mystery is not that which I cannot understand, it is that which I cannot exhaust.” 
It is the reason why we make an “act of faith”…and not an “act of certitude.” 
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In the decades leading up to the Council, theologians managed to do what great theologians must do: find a way to mediate the gospel to believers in their respective historical context. 
St. Paul did it when he found a way to open the church to the gentiles in the first century.  Thomas Aquinas did it when he managed to introduce Aristotle to Christianity.   
In this same tradition, Yves Congar, MD Chenu, Henry DeLubac, Karl Rahner and others…these great theologians who prepared the way for Vatican II also found a way to tell the Christian story in a way that could transform the contemporary heart and soul.   
There is a lesson in that for each of us - because we too must find a way to be translators and mediators of the Gospel for a new generation. 
LEADING UP TO VATICAN II 
Now let us examine the atmosphere in which John XXIII issued a call for an ecumenical council.   My role today is to bring you to the moment when John XXIII opened his Council.  Vicki will pick up from there with a discussion of the dynamics of the council’s pivotal moments and essential issues. 
I think it fair to say that the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958 marked the end of an era in church history.  His papacy had provided the church with a strong and conservative leadership.   
At the conclave to elect his successor, we are told that the cardinals had some difficulty coming to an agreement but, ultimately, reached a compromise. 
They elected Angelo Roncalli, just a few weeks shy of his 77th birthday.  It was believed that he would serve as an interim pope, a transitional pope.  No one at the time could ever have imagined what this new pope, John XXIII, would leave as his legacy. 
Just three months after his election, John XXIII announced his decision to convene an ecumenical council.  His announcement provoked a broad range of responses. 
But, overall, the response of most people could be summed up in one word:  WHY? 
Most of us remember the church before Vatican II.  And at the time, Catholicism looked to be in pretty good shape.  Catholic schools were filled, vocations to religious life and the priesthood were plentiful, and – thanks to the catechism – most Catholics knew their faith. 
So…why a council?  The question was important for a number of reasons…first of all, ecumenical councils do not occur with any frequency.  There had been only 20 such councils prior to Vatican II in the 2000 year history of the church.   
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But even more to the point, after the articulation of the teaching on papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council almost 100 years earlier, no one thought there would ever be a need for another council.   
What was John XXIII thinking?  What prompted him to make such an incredible decision? 
As we would come to know, John credited the Holy Spirit as the inspiration for this announcement.  It would appear that this great man took seriously the words of Jesus in John’s gospel: “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, will teach you everything.”   
On January 25, 1959, John XXIII made his announcement about convening a council to a group of cardinals who were with him for an event at one of Rome’s major basilicas.   
Genuine surprise, in fact - shocked silence -was the response of those cardinals.  After all, they had grown used to the notion that nothing needed changing in the church.   
For many of them, the church was a perfect society – not perfect in the sense of sinless but in the sense that the Catholic Church had all it needed within itself to sustain itself.   
This thinking can be traced back to the First Vatican Council where the church came to be understood as a hierarchical society in which some of the members are clergy and others are laity.  The clergy received a divinely instituted power to teach and govern…the laity did not.  
When asked about the role of the laity in the mid-nineteenth century…an English Curia official who had served as secretary to Pope Pius IX responded:  “To hunt, to shoot, to entertain, these matters the laity understand, but to meddle in ecclesiastical matters, they have no right at all.” 
Vatican II would seek to correct this notion when it issued the Decree on the Laity, the first time that an official church document was dedicated to role of the laity in the church. 
In addition to this conception of church, there were three other elements which contributed to a desire to keep the church the way it always was… 
1).  First, there was the philosophy of dualism…which understood the world as the product of two forces – good and evil:  The good was connected to “spiritual” realities and the evil to “non- spiritual” realities. 
Though never officially espoused by the Catholic Church, dualism did leave its mark early on in Christian history.  We see hints of it in the writings of some of the early church fathers with regard to their teaching on sexuality. 
Over the years, certain dualistic distinctions crept into our theological language as well.  We would talk about the sacred vs the secular, the eternal vs the temporal the supernatural vs
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the natural…implying that somehow the things of this world were less important than those of the next world.   
Of course, contemporary theology has addressed this problem with its theology of creation – if this world is the creation of God then God is indeed present in this world– this creation of God is good in and of itself. 
2).  Secondly, there is no doubt that in the one hundred years leading up to Vatican II, the prevailing attitude of the church toward the world could be referred to as a defensive mentality.  We have the evidence of countless authors who use such terms as fortress, defensive, and ghetto to describe the church’s attitude during those years. 
The church came to believe that the way to avoid confrontation with modernity would be to insulate itself behind a power structure that would claim to have all the answers. 
This kind of thinking led to the third element affecting the church before Vatican II – classicist thinking. 
3).  The classicist worldview is static and not open to the possibility of genuine development.  One of Vatican II’s leading conservative voices, Cardinal Ottavani, chose “Semper Idem” as his episcopal motto.  It means “always the same.” 
In this worldview, truth is truth, the same today as yesterday – both in its content and in its articulation.  This kind of thinking can lead to a deadly arrogance and authoritarianism…a closed system that has little, if any, meaning for those who live outside the system. 
How then can the mission of the church to transform all things in Christ be accomplished if we refuse to speak to and listen to those outside the walls, walls that we ourselves erected? 
Steeped in that tradition, some cardinals believed that, once papal infallibility had been articulated at Vatican I, the church had no further need of councils.  The pope, with God’s help, could do everything the church needed. 
But John XXIII believed that God’s help, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, often came through the mediation of others.  In this case, he hoped it would come through the world’s bishops. 
And despite this long history of hostility to the modern world, John XXIII believed his council could be an aggiornamento, a bringing-up-to-date of the Catholic faith. 
And he expressed his hope that this council would be predominantly pastoral…which would focus on the needs of the day, showing the validity of doctrines instead of issuing condemnations. 
John XXIII wanted a council that marked the end of an era…one that would usher the church into a phase of witness and proclamation.
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In fact, early on, John began to refer to the council as a “new Pentecost.”   
PREPARATION FOR VATICAN II 
Preparations for the council lasted about three and a half years.  And this would be a particularly difficult time for John XXIII.   
It was bitterly clear that an “institutional isolation” would characterize the preparatory period for Pope John XXIII…when the pope’s institutional collaborators, and above all certain members of the Curia, would create opposition to the pope’s intentions to open this council. (Alberigo, p. 5)   
Many members of the Curia wanted no part of this council – fearing a loss of their control, their authority in the church.  And, when one reads accounts of this period prior to the opening of Vatican II, it is hard not to be saddened by the efforts of many of the pope’s own advisors who would have preferred to sabotage this council rather than open it. 
When it became clear that John was adamant in holding the council, the Curia tried another tact.  If they could not stop the council, then they would gain – so they thought – control of the council by developing the various drafts that would be given out to the world’s bishops once the council opened. 
In their minds, they believed the bishops would come to Rome, review these drafts, sign them and go home to their respective dioceses.  These members of the Curia actually thought the council would be over before December of the first session. 
Obviously, the Holy Spirit had other plans.   
In a speech given in the first session during a preliminary debate on the document on the church, Bishop DeSmedt of Belgium criticized the draft prepared by the Curia – urging the church to leave behind its juridicism, clericalism, and triumphalism. 
In response to this criticism, the bishop received the loudest and most sustained applause of the entire council. 
DeSmedt was referring to a pompous and overbearing attitude that had little relation to the message of the New Testament.  He claimed that clericalism was equally offensive…that the church is not a pyramid of pope, bishops, priest, nuns and finally…the laity.  Rather the church is the people of God. 
And instead of a juridical mentality, quite prevalent before the council, DeSmedt claimed that the church should be placed before the world as the mother of humankind.  His words would set the tone for many of the council’s future debates. 
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This was an indeed an important moment because even though there had not been any voting as such, no one could deny the general impression that a new way of understanding church had been manifested, that a new ecclesiology was beginning to appear at the council. 
Actually, it was not a new ecclesiology…rather a re-discovered ecclesiology….an understanding of church rooted in the New Testament. 
CONCLUSION 
A few concluding thoughts before Vicki continues with our program… 
When I read the documents of Vatican II so many years after they were written, I wonder if the council fathers could have ever imagined the far-reaching implications of the words they put on paper as the legacy of Vatican II.   
There are many examples of my “wonderment” but one will suffice.  In article 44 of Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, we read: 
With the help of the Holy Spirit, it is the task of the entire people of God, especially  Pastors and theologians, to hear, distinguish, and interpret the many voices of our age, and to judge them in the light of the divine Word, so that revealed truth can always be more deeply penetrated, better understood, and set forth to greater advantage. 
This is a remarkable paragraph in that in contains so much…that the whole people of God are involved in this process, that we need to “hear” the many voices of our age, that truth can be “more deeply penetrated” and better understood. 
The council fathers could not possibly have foreseen the emergence of the Voice of the Faithful movement or questions about the role of women in the church, so controversial today. 
And yet their words have provided a genuine opening for a discussion of such issues.  Can anyone doubt the presence of the Holy Spirit in the council’s deliberations? 
At the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, our brother in St. Dominic, Yves Congar, wrote: “The future is open for an advance to new stages.  The Lord who has begun this great work will know how to complete it.” 
Five decades have passed since the council opened and – of course – God continues to “complete” the great work begun there. 
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John XXIII hoped and prayed that the Second Vatican Council would be a new “Pentecost”…when the Holy Spirit would again bring new life to the church.  I believe it is fair to say that John’s prayer was indeed answered. 
His absolute trust in the Spirit of God is perhaps John’s greatest legacy. 
That legacy is now in our hands… 
Thank you.