The forgotten Vatican council

I’m going to date myself and admit that I was born after the Second Vatican Council. It is said that if you remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there. Well, I don’t remember them because I wasn’t at all there. I was just as non-existent during the Second Vatican Council as I was during the First Vatican Council, and during the Council of Trent before it, and all the other Councils. Thus I was never as excited about the Second Vatican Council as its contemporaries expected me to be. Today it is still discussed with breathless excitement as if, like Woodstock, it happened just yesterday, and what a shame we kids missed it.

Any discussion of the Second Vatican Council without a close reading of its documents, reference to its controversies and acknowledgment of its critics is in danger of falling prey to Spirit-of-VaticanII-ism. Spirit-of-Vatican-II-ism is a belief that the council was, more than any other council in the history of the Church, a “New Pentecost” and that its documents are less important than the changes that followed in its wake, with or without their sanction.
Spirit-of-Vatican-II-ism sets up “Vatican II” as an idol, synonymous with change and innovation, and condemns anything that happened in the Church between Constantine and Vatican II as bad and any papal document issued since as dangerous to what is called its spirit.

I am not a Spirit-of-Vatican-II-ist, so I welcome this Year of Faith as an opportunity to examine not only the documents of the Second Vatican Council but the documents of the 20 general councils from which it descended. For example, the very name Second Vatican Council implies a First Vatican Council. I doubt it received the same attention as Vatican II.

This is a pity for the First Vatican Council was the first general council after the Council of Trent, which is to say, in more than 300 years. The Council of Trent opened in 1545 and was finally adjourned in 1563, after several interruptions due to war. The First Vatican Council opened on Dec. 8, 1869, was suspended due to war on Oct. 20, 1870, and was formally closed 90 years later, in 1960, when plans for the Second Vatican Council were under way.

The First Vatican Council was mother to the second.

The Council of Trent dealt with the religious philosophies then dividing Western European Christianity, embracing those developments consistent with the Catholic faith and rejecting those innovations that were not. The First Vatican Council dealt with irreligious philosophies which directly attacked Christianity itself. These included uncritical rationalism, materialism and liberalism. Trent had to meet the challenges of the early Renaissance; opened 10 years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Vatican I proposed to meet the challenges of the modern world.

It did so under perilous circumstances. Blessed Pius IX was not only pope but the temporal ruler of what was left of the papal states, including the city of Rome. As the wars for Italian territory raged, it appeared that the city could be annexed at any time. European leaders feared that Pius IX might use the council to define dogmatically the temporal authority of the pope to rule the papal states, thus enlisting Catholics worldwide to restore them. However, Pius IX had widespread personal popularlity, and most European powers decided not to interfere with the council. As a result, more than 700 bishops, superiors and generals of orders and abbots were able to attend.

Unlike Trent, there were representatives from every continent at Vatican I, and 120 of the bishops were from English-speaking countries. English-speaking bishops had an influence in Church matters they had not had at Trent; one of the most influential voices of Vatican I belonged to the English Cardinal Manning. The temporal rulers of Catholic states were not invited, as they had been to Trent: this reflected the 19th-century movement towards a stricter separation of Church and state. And, quite unlike Trent, there were also journalists.

As it would regarding the Second Vatican Council, the world took an interest in the deliberations of Vatican I, and newspapers concentrated on attention-grabbing controversies. The principal controversy was papal infallibility, which was dogmatically defined in the document Pastor Aeternus. The document, however, was not as much fun for the papers as their misleading narratives of conflict and power.

It is not enough to hear popular narratives about a council; to be truly informed, we must read the actual documents. Thus, to truly grasp the First Vatican Council, read Dei Filius and Pastor Aeternus. They are both online.