Question 4.60

4.60 At the end of his pontificate, in 2012, Benedict XVI insisted on celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II. Why are there so many divisions over the last Council, even today?

ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH

Indeed, on the subject of Vatican Council II, we will never be able to thank Pope Benedict XVI enough for his hermeneutical work and his authentic interpretation of the will of the Council Fathers. The fact that I refer to his analysis goes to show that the intention of the Council has not been understood fully.

Joseph Ratzinger grasped quite accurately the fact that John XXIII wanted first of all to respond to a major challenge for the modern world: receiving God as he manifested himself in Jesus Christ. Here are the words of Pope John at the opening of Vatican Council II: “The serious problems confronting the world after almost two thousand years remain unchanged. Jesus Christ is ever resplendent as the center of history and of life. Men are either with Him and His Church, and then they enjoy light, goodness, order, and peace. Or else they are without Him, or against Him, and deliberately opposed to His Church, and then they experience confusion, bitterness in human relations, and the danger of fratricidal wars.”

From the start of Vatican II, although concerned about aggiornamento, the renewal of the Church, and the reunion of Christians, the pope had strongly emphasized that the Council’s chief task was to reveal God to the world, to defend and promote doctrine. That is why the Church, while rejoicing in the admirable inventions of human genius and in the progress of science and technology, had to remind mankind that beyond the visible aspect of things the primordial duty remains to turn to God. For John XXIII, the Council was first of all an encounter with God in prayer, with Mary, like the apostles in the upper room on the eve of Pentecost.

As he announced in that same opening speech, the Holy Father also wanted to determine what place was still reserved for God in the hearts of men and to “examine more fully and in greater depth the modern conditions of faith and religious practice and of Christian and Catholic vitality”.

At the end of the Council, on December 7, 1965, Paul VI also declared: “And so this council can be summed up in its ultimate religious meaning, which is none other than a pressing and friendly invitation to mankind of today to rediscover in fraternal love the God ‘to turn away from whom is to fall, to turn to whom is to rise again, to remain in whom is to be secure. . . to return to whom is to be born again, in whom to dwell is to live.’”

God therefore came first in all the conciliar reflection. This view of the Council remained central to the concerns of Benedict XVI until the final days of his pontificate. On February 14, 2013, he presented to the clergy of Rome a lectio divina (spiritual reading) that will always be one of the fundamental documents of his theological and pastoral legacy. In it he distinguished the true Council of the Fathers from that of the journalists and media. Now what does it mean to implement the Council if not to show that the Church’s first preoccupation was to restore God’s primacy in the hearts of men and of societies? Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus caritas est, has no other explanation than that.

Given the worldwide economic and financial crisis, Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in veritate, his second encyclical: “Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is” (78). The crisis involves not just the economy, but mankind. The social question has become a radically anthropological question; it also touches on the serious question of “the eclipse of God”.

In order to help us see that everything at the heart of the conciliar documents was centered on and oriented toward God, Benedict XVI invited us to focus our attention on the way in which they are ordered. He says that the architecture of these documents has an essentially theocentric orientation. Let us begin with the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum concilium. The fact that it is the first document to be published indicates that there were dogmatic and pastoral reasons of the utmost importance. Before all else, in the Church, there is adoration; and therefore God. This beginning, says Benedict XVI, corresponds to the first and chief concern of the Rule of Saint Benedict: “Nihil operi Dei praeponatur” (Nothing should be preferred to the work of God). Now, if there is one reality too often left out of consideration, it is certainly the consubstantial relation between the liturgy and God. The foundation of the liturgy must remain the search for God. We can only be dismayed by the fact that this intention of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and of the Council Fathers as well, is often obscured and, worse yet, betrayed. …