TIME ESSAY 1965: VATICAN II: TURNING THE CHURCH TOWARD THE WORLD

VATICAN II: TURNING THE CHURCH TOWARD THE WORLD

"THE whole world expects a step forward," said John XXIII as he opened the Second Vatican Council in October 1962. When Pope Paul VI formally closed it last week, he heralded it as "among the greatest events of the church." Whatever the future's judgment, there can be little doubt that the council indeed represents a momentous step forward in carrying Christendom's oldest, largest body into modern times and bringing it into closer contact with all men—religious or not.

Vatican II was strikingly different from the 20 other ecclesiastical assemblies that Roman Catholicism ranks as ecumenical. It is the first council that did not face, or leave in its wake, heresy or schism. Councils have always been the church's last-resort response to crisis—from the First Council of Nicaea, summoned by Emperor Constantine in 325 to combat the Arian heresy, to the abortive Vatican I (1869-70), which faced the bewildering effects of the ever-widening industrial revolution.

At the time Vatican II convened, there were few obvious threats, few violent complaints among its 560 million members. Yet the church was scarcely facing up to the growing secularization of life, the explosion of science, the bitter claims to social justice in old nations and new. Catholic theology, dominated by a textbook scholasticism, appeared to have stopped in the 13th century. Except by a few pioneer ecumenists, Protestants were unhesitatingly regarded as heretics.

Today this sort of thinking seems almost as remote in the church as the sale of indulgences—and this is perhaps the strongest single measure of the council's achievements. The essentials of Catholic dogma stand, of course, as does Rome's claim of universality. What has changed drastically is atmosphere and attitudes. "Before, the church looked like an immense and immovable colossus, the city set on a hill, the stable bulwark against the revolutionary change," says the English Benedictine abbot, Dom Christopher Butler. "Now it has become a people on the march—or at least a people which is packing its bags for a pilgrimage."

In all, more than 2,400 patriarchs, cardinals, bishops and religious superiors took part in the council's deliberations. For the first time in history, observers from Protestant and Orthodox churches not only sat in attendance at the debates, but were also consulted.

The 16 promulgated decrees, constitutions and declarations that are the council's legacy divide roughly into two categories. The majority are aimed at the internal renewal and reform of Catholicism, but at least four may profoundly affect the relationship between the church and the non-Catholic world.

One document that has already changed the spiritual life of the church is the constitution On the Liturgy, which led to widespread introduction of vernacular languages in the Mass. Another constitution, On the Church, asserting that bishops collectively share ruling power over the church with the Pope, is the charter for what many theologians feel will be a slow but unstoppable democratization.