Catholics for a Changing Church

The idea of calling a General Council came to John XXIII as he prayed, in the weeks after he became Pope, in 1958. John was a deeply traditional, devout, and obedient churchman – as he had to be, to attract votes at the conclave. But there was another side to him – he was not a Roman, not a Vatican man. From 1925 until 1953, he had lived in Bulgaria, Turkey, and France, representing the Pope abroad and becoming familiar with outsiders – Orthodox, Muslims, unbelievers... The experience left him unusually open-minded, sympathetic to the world outside the Catholic Church, ready to relate cordially to anyone and everyone of good will. John was also a historian: he knew what great changes there have been in the past.

For the first thousand years the Catholic Church was, broadly speaking, run by councils; then for the second thousand years, by popes. For most of the fourteenth century there was a breakdown of papal government. For a time there were two, and even three, ‘rival popes’. It required all the efforts of a Council, that of Konstanz in 1414-1418, to re-establish orderly government in the Church.

The scene was set for a battle between papalists and conciliarists to govern the Church. The Roman Curia with a vested interest in a papal victory naturally felt threatened and gave ’Conciliarism’ a bad name, as a sort of militant tendency conspiring to take over the Pope’s powers.

Extremists on both sides reduced complex issues to the level of a football match, where one side wins and the other loses. Pope John XXIII in convening the Second Vatican Council, was not thinking along these lines at all. He was concerned for the general good and the pastoral effectiveness of the Church as a whole - and assumed that the bishops shared his concern. Vatican II was a papal council, and John XXIII was a conciliar pope. Pope and bishops together aimed to re-vitalise the Church through ‘conciliarity’ -discussion, consultation, shared responsibility, joint decisions. The cautious term Vatican II hit upon was ‘collegiality’ - the effective participation of all the bishops as colleagues, with the Pope, in the government of the Church.

This name attaches to the central bureaucracy of the Catholic Church, whose buildings and personnel are located mostly in Rome. All large organisations - the T.U.C for example - require some sort of central organisation and the Curia does for the Church what the London based civil service does for the government. The main difference is that whereas the officials in Whitehall are accountable to a regularly elected parliament, the Curia is answerable only to the Pope, who has the job for life, and who is elected by a numerically minute oligarchy - the cardinals.

The Curia consists of the Secretariat of State (foreign affairs), nine congregations, like the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples - formerly called Propaganda Fidei, and three tribunals, among which is the Rota which is the supreme court of appeal for matrimonial nullities.

by Nicholas Lash,  America Magazine

When the Second Vatican Council ended, several of the bishops who took part told me that the most important lesson they had learned through the conciliar process had been a renewed recognition that the church exists to be, for all its members, a lifelong school of holiness and wisdom, a lifelong school of friendship (a better rendering of caritas than “charity” would be). It follows that the most fundamental truth about the structure of Christian teaching cannot lie in distinctions between teachers and pupils—although such distinctions are not unimportant—but in the recognition that all Christians are called to lifelong learning in the Spirit, and all of us are called" />hen the Second Vatican Council ended, several of the bishops who took part told me that the most important lesson they had learned through the conciliar process had been a renewed recognition that the church exists to be, for all its members, a lifelong school of holiness and wisdom, a lifelong school of friendship (a better rendering of caritas than “charity” would be). It follows that the most fundamental truth about the structure of Christian teaching cannot lie in distinctions between teachers and pupils—although such distinctions are not unimportant—but in the recognition that all Christians are called to lifelong learning in the Spirit, and all of us are called to embody, communicate and protect what we have learned. Much of what is said about the office of “teachership” or magisterium seems dangerously forgetful of this fact.

Read more