Future Challenges - Preface

The website is designed to concentrate on the contents and teachings of Vatican II, with some reference to commentaries on the teachings, how they were achieved and how far they have been implemented, forty years after the Council closed. This section links closely with “The Need for Vatican II” as certain concerns which led Pope John to convene the Council remain unresolved.

In addition, further problems have arisen which need attention. These difficulties, additional to a scene which was already taxing for the Church in the World in the mid-twentieth century, are indeed challenging in the twenty-first century. The Second Vatican Council is a “sure compass”, said Pope John Paul II, (Novo Millennio Adveniente, 2001), but today many of the reduced resources of the Church are engaged in managing decline, rather than in spreading the teaching of the Gospel, let alone the teachings of the Council.

Concerns for the present Church and visions of the future Church by some great men of the Council, who have left appropriate writings can be found on the website; more will be posted. Apart from these articles, this section on ‘Future Challenges‘ deliberately consists, pro tem, of the broad categories under which particular challenges fall. They will be considered at a later date. Many matters to be listed need attention in the near future by the Church: that is, by the magisterium as properly understood and therefore involving in some way, the whole People of God. Further comment at this stage is omitted because straight dissemination of the teachings of the Council is of prior importance for this site. It is a continuous thread throughout the site - and experience shows - that Council teachings are not well understood. Forty years after its close, the fact that so many aspects of the Council teachings have neither been widely taught nor implemented amounts to a grave neglect which began to appear shortly after the Council. The clear teaching on Collegiality, for example, is but one example and the article by Bishop Christopher Butler draws attention to this failure in implementation. (A Grave Issue in the Church; The Tablet 29 March 1969, to be posted in 2006 in The Need for Vatican II). Furthermore, the centralised management of the many Synods to date is hardly more than a veneer of the collegial principle. The point is not laboured at this stage.

What is important to emphasise is the great significance of what happened and what was achieved at Vatican II. For the first time since the Church’s foundation a Council examined the Church itself. See the About Vatican II section. But it went further and also related the Church to the world which it serves (ref, ibid). Vatican I had been incomplete and was suspended after some seven months, leaving the Church unbalanced ecclesially. Vatican I was formally closed by Pope John XXIII. Trent had been both necessary and was decades overdue when it was finally called in 1543. It did not conclude until 1563. Four hundred years after Trent, Vatican II was important in itself but was also an essential beginning for further progress after such a long static period. Inevitably, therefore, during the four year period of Vatican II itself, many matters could be touched upon only obliquely and some not at all. Other problems have intensified or have arisen since the Council ended. In the time between 1965 and now, the great German theologian Karl Rahner SJ is reported to have spoken of ‘..a “wintertime” that had fallen on the Church’ before he died in 1984 (H. Vorgrimler in Vatican II by those who were there, A. Stacpoole ed., Geoffrey Chapman,1986, p.46). Rahner had described Vatican II as “the beginning of the beginning” which was also the way that Bishop Butler saw it - the two men had worked closely in the Council‘s Theology Commission. For his part, Butler emphasised that Christ had assured the Church of his presence to the end of time, but stressed that Our Lord gave no guarantee of the shape or relevance of the Church. Butler saw reform as essential. This section of the website, therefore, will attempt to pick up the threads of matters left incomplete when the Council ended in 1965 and to resume a consideration of unfinished business.

The challenges will be named and described in future updates of the website and will generally fall within one of the following broad categories:

• The Community of Humankind
• Fostering Peace, Avoiding War
• Ecclesiology
• Ministry and Co-Responsibility

• Science and Religion

Two articles by Cardinal König are reproduced which relate to some of the challenges facing the Church, namely, the issue of collegiality in relation to internal governance of the Church and the Church’s stance to other religions. The latter theme was covered in an interview article following publication of the declaration Dominus Iesus issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This document was perceived to be a regressive statement in many quarters especially those concerned with ecumenism, where steady progress had been made in the couple of decades after Vatican II, and interreligious dialogue, a matter of increasingly urgent importance. The latter is a subject which Vatican II  merely initiated through its encouraging but brief declaration Nostra Aetate and where theology is very much ‘in progress’, it needs the space to develop before any precipitous definitive statements are made.

A third and later article by Cardinal König, Let the Spirit Breathe, spells out the importance of dialogue between religions for world peace with its roots in Vatican II as far as the Catholic Church is concerned and a plea for freedom for sincere theological development in this area. The cardinal illustrates this latter point by recounting the proceedings which took place following the publication of Fr. Jacques Dupuis' seminal work on this area of theology, Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.

Challenges Described in Published Material

The provisional list of contributions chosen from major Council figures now follows, some of these may appear in the section The Need for Vatican II:

Co-responsibility for all The People of God, Leon Josef Cardinal Suenens (Extracts from Co-responsibility in the Church, Burns and Oates/ Herder and Herder, 1968)

The Church I want, Life in the Spirit, Fr Bernard Haering C.S.S.R.
(The Tablet 28 July 1990 p.944 / 4 Aug 1990, p978) Fr Haering was a respected moral theologian and a senior expert (peritus) at Vatican II.

A Grave Issue facing the Church, Bishop B C Butler
(The Tablet 29 March 1969, p. 331.) This article is concerned with the doctrine of Collegiality, which Butler and most other senior Fathers saw as one of the key features of Vatican II.

Dangers Facing an Unreformed Church, Bishop Christopher Butler
(Extracts from various works by Butler, 1965 - 75)

The All-Important Dialogue with God, Franz Cardinal König
(Open to God, Open to The World, König , Ed. Pongratz-Lippit, Burns and Oates 2005)

Freedom of Scholarship in Inter-religious Theology: “In Defence of Jacques Dupuis”, Franz Cardinal König,
The Tablet, 16 Jan 1999, p. 76).