Vatican II: The TV Show
McConnell, Frank
~ ear the end of the two-hour documentary, "Reflections on Vatican I I ' - - w h i c h airs on PBS on September 18 and which is splendid--George Weigel, the former president of the Ethics...
...His generous spirit--big and little "S"--informed all the deliberations of the council, even though he died only a year after it convened, to be replaced by the rather more dour, and cautious Paul VI...
...If it weren't for Vatican II...," the speaker begins...
...The show establishes, if nothing else, that John XXIII was, as one of the speakers says, the best pope we've ever had, period...
...The church officially condemned anti-Semitism: better late, I guess, than never...
...But, thirty years after the fact, and under the dispensation of an essentially repressive pope, the church-the real church, the one midwifed by the council--goes on, doing good and ill, quarreling with itself, and speaking, in Karl Rahner's marvelous phrase, into "the endless desert of God's silence...
...And the church declared that the role of the laity was equally important with that of the priesthood...
...I, however, find the analogy inescapable...
...Its value cannot be overestimated...
...And depending upon who the speaker is, it turns out that if it weren't for Vatican II women would not feel as authenticated (pfui on the word "empowered") in the church...
...It was Paul, the show reminds us, who took the question of birth control out of the hands of the council--the bishops probably would have relaxed the r u l e s - - thereby perpetuating one of the truly silly controversies in modern Catholicism...
...we would not be as tantalizingly close as we are to a spiritual rapprochement with the entire community--heavy on the "entire"---of those who wish to love God and serve one another...
...A lot of discussion, in fact, by veterans of the council, is directed toward what the "Spirit of Vatican II" really was--is?--and, trenchantly, whether or not the present pontiff, for all his good intentions, has betrayed it...
...Joachim, early in the twelfth century, argued that after the age of the Father (the Old Testament) and the age of the Son (the New Testament), we were now entering the age of the Spirit, when the true freedom of God would establish itself on earth...
...Reflections" makes it clear that, among other things, Vatican II's liberalism generated the not inconsiderable Catholic conservative movement: a movement of which John Paul II seems heartily to approve...
...Conservative Catholics will not really like this show very much...
...ear the end of the two-hour documentary, "Reflections on Vatican I I ' - - w h i c h airs on PBS on September 18 and which is splendid--George Weigel, the former president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in D.C., observes that "Vatican II was arguably the most important religious event in the twentieth century...
...John XXIII was one, at any rate...
...And over both words, hearts and sometime heads were broken...
...But the main thrust of "Reflections" is simply, joyously, to celebrate this gorgeously unlooked-for event and its enduring, endearing aftermath...
...Vatican II--2,500 bishops and assorted periti (theologians, mavens, apparatchiks)--opened in 1962 and began, to everyone's surprise, to redefine what it meant to be a Catholic--which meant, and no imperialism here, what it meant to be a Christian...
...Pope John XXIII announced his intention to summon a council in 1959...
...I mentioned Joachim of Fiore earlier, and not by chance...
...The show portrays John's predecessor, Pius XII, as arrogant, austere, and coldly silent about the Holocaust...
...And it's to the show's great credit that it treats the conservatives, even the reactionary Archbishop LeFebvre, with dignity...
...Others will quarrel, and others should, for what "Reflections" makes wonderfully clear is that the council matters so much not for its official pronouncements--epochal as some of them were---as for its spirit...
...the liturgy would not range gloriously from plainsong to rap...
...Psychically, though, the concept of aggiornamento carried the same liberating force that, twenty-five years later, the word perestroika would, in another authoritarian context...
...And I can't disagree with that...
...But the papacy, after all, is essentially a bureaucratic gig: and how often do you come across a prophetic bureaucrat...
...The catch-phrase during Vatican II, the first Italian I learned, was aggiornamento, which literally means something like "modernization" or "bringing upto-date...
...Now the makers of "Reflections" never suggest a connection between the aggiornamento of the twelfth century and that of Vatican II...
...Without Vatican II," as one of the speakers sums it up, "God help us all...
...That, at any rate, is my own, admittedly idiosyncratic view of what the council was all about...
...There's one phrase you hear again and again from Commonweal 3 | September 11, 1998 the interviewees, until it becomes almost a mantra...
...Triumphantly and sadly, he couldn't be more right...
...If I'm a Catholic today--and some would dispute that--it's because my faith and my doubt were formed by the council...
...It was my freshman/sophomore year at Notre Dame, and I can still remember the exhilaration of it all: it wasn't, it seemed, all about scapulars, incense, and Latin, but rather about engagement with the world, about the faith as a constant habit of attention toward Christian history, about not being in the church, but rather being the church...
...And I could not imagine a better, more articulate testament to its value than this very, very fine documentary...
...Loony/gnostic, you bet: but also a major impetus for the explosion of the Franciscan spirit that, during the thirteenth century, revived and transformed Christianity...
...was actually not the devil's music...
...And their way is to talk seriously about serious things...
...The "revolution" of Vatican II was, of course--as all revolutions--a failed one: Women still can't be ordained, the clergy are still in the driver's seat, and blah, blah, blah...
...That is what John XXIII and the makers of Vatican lI did for us...
...Commonweal 3 ~ September 11, 1998...
...The priest now faced the congregation as he said Mass, and the Mass was now said in the vernacular...
...Such simple, sensible things: But nobody born after the council can imagine how astonishingly fine those changes felt to us...
...And it came as close as it could to admitting that the romantic individualism of Luther, Calvin & Co...
...Certainly, the sixteen documents ultimately issued by the council all pointed toward a vastly more open, you-can-breathe-here church...
...And like Saint Francis of Assisi he made being Catholic both more fun and more dangerous...
...the church would not be as deeply involved as it is in the cause of the wretched of the earth...
...Reflections on Vatican II" is, first of all, maybe the sharpest, most serious documentary about religion ever done on TV, a grand example of what the medium can accomplish if you just let brilliant folks like Producer/Director Mark Birnbaum and Executive Producer Sherry Revord have their way...
...John's successors have not really lived up to his visionary standard...
...And "spirit," with a big or a little "S"--check out Joachim of Fiore---is a famously exciting but ambiguous thing...
Vol. 125 • September 1998 • No. 15
