November Reading On the 44th anniversary of Lumen Gentium promulgated in 1964 and the fourth anniversary of the launch of this website, we ask "Where is the Church?" See Where is the Church? – A Conversation where we also ask “Who is in Step?” in 2008 with the teaching of Vatican II in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.

Vatican II Was Essential

“… there [in the Council] we find a sure compass by which to take our bearings in the century now beginning” wrote Pope John Paul II (ref).

Welcome to Vatican II–Voice of The Church. The purpose of this website is to explain and promote the teachings of the Second Vatican Council during which The Church examined itself, took note of, and opened itself to a changing world. Elected in 1958, Pope John XXIII saw the need for an updating (aggiornamento) and to seek Christian Unity. He called a Council in 1959, but died before it ended. His death-bed message included the moment has come to discern the signs of the times, to seize the opportunity and to look far ahead. Pope John epitomized individual holiness in the Church. Widely experienced, he knew both Church and people’s needs. Preparing for the Council, he used homely phrases like opening windows, and that we are not museum-keepers but gardeners to help things grow.

After a long period of relative rigidity, the only Englishman with the scholarship to grasp Pope John’s vision was Dom Christopher Butler OSB, our principal guide in this website. Studying Pope John's speech which opened the Council, Butler found it full of hope. But there remained four years of communal discernment, debate and sheer hard work ahead to produce the renewal of the Catholic faith for a new era.

Today, therefore, the teachings of Vatican II are the current, the most recent and the most solemn  expression of the Mind of the Church. Consequently, it is clearly evident that understanding the teachings, observing and carrying them forward is a serious matter. This is underlined by four Popes in The Need for Vatican II. This section also contains the "Voices of some Council Fathers" and, in particular, the perceptions of Abbot, later Bishop, B.C. Butler OSB. His insights are of particular value for the English-speaking world. The solemn significance of an ecumenical, or general Council is explored further in Vatican II in Focus.

Three major themes, or theses, will emerge from the website.

Major Theses of this Website

• The Second Vatican Council is the most important Christian event since the schism between the Churches of East and West in 1054 AD. Vatican II opens the way forward to heal that schism. It also aims to heal the rifts of the sixteenth century Reformation. By means of the Council Pope John sought to promote unity between Christians, greater openness and Aggiornamento (updating) within the Catholic Church itself. His hope also was for dialogue with other religions, and to relate better to the whole world, which the Church serves. The website expands this theme.

• Abbot - later Bishop Christopher Butler OSB was, and remains, of considerable importance for the English-speaking Christian world. (See About Bishop Butler). After the Council - certainly in English - he was one of the major and most consistent proponents of Vatican II teaching. He warned that a failure to implement Pope John's aggiornamento could risk making the future Church irrelevant, thus echoing Pope John himself.

• The Council as ongoing process is the third theme: this process is implicit from the words of the two Council Popes: John XXIII and Paul VI. Pope John's opening speech to the Council included: The Church should never depart from the sacred treasure of truth inherited from the Fathers. But at the same time she must ever look to the present, to the new conditions and the new forms of life introduced into the modern world. (ref) The third theme, therefore, includes consideration of how that initial vision was converted by the Fathers into the teachings of Vatican II. Continuing traditional doctrine, it sought to take the Church towards a more relevant service to an increasingly difficult and dangerous world. The resulting Council documents are readily available via the website and the spirit and intent which governed the fathers is explained in the commentaries.

What is the Second Vatican Council?

It bears regular repetition that Vatican II is the most solemn articulation of the Catholic Tradition available today. The event took place in Rome in four sessions between 1962 and 1965. Some 2,500 Bishops took part and the Council produced 16 documents. A diagram of the documents can be seen here.

Until another Council is convoked, providing a renewed expression of the faith within the Catholic Tradition, Vatican II remains a vital on-going process of renewal in the Catholic Church. A few years after the Council closed Butler wrote My purpose here is not retrospective. If I look back on The Council, it is not in order to contemplate it as an end achieved, but to understand it as a step toward the future (ref). At the Council, the young Bishop Wojtyla from Krakow, Poland, tended, it seems, to be a listening figure. Forty years later, however, as Pope John Paul II, he confirmed the earlier views of Vatican II from Butler and other major figures. As Pope John Paul II he wrote that Vatican II is ...a sure compass by which to take our bearings in the century now beginning.

The Council's documents had multiple, interweaving themes, few of which could properly be detached from the rest, without misunderstanding the whole. In brief: if the whole Christian Church is to matter in the world and not decline into irrelevance, church teachings must be capable of being understood and applied so that they can be a necessary force for good in - to repeat - a rapidly changing, fractured and increasingly dangerous world.

Who was Basil Christopher Butler?

Butler was Benedictine monk, a Scripture scholar, who became a distinguished theologian. Born (1902) into a devoted Anglican family, he died in 1986. After a brilliant career as an undergraduate at Oxford University, with high prospects in the Church of England, he became a Roman Catholic, then entered Downside Abbey in 1929 as a novice monk. He was first elected Abbot of Downside in 1946 and remained Abbot for twenty years. In 1961 he was elected Abbot-President of the English Benedictine Congregation and in that capacity he was called to Rome to take part in the Council. Butler had the rare privilege of influencing a general Council of the Church in his own life-time; his work is evident in three of the four major decrees. He was a polymath and aspects of his own original thinking in scripture and ecclesiology pre-figured much of Vatican II.

Contributors and Sources

Authors from cardinals to lay people have contributed to this site. The contributions extend from before the Council to the present day. Contributors are listed in the Table of Contents.

The three Council Fathers mentioned here in the Home Page have all written ‘benchmark’ books about the Second Vatican Council:

Co-responsibility in the Church (1968) by Cardinal Leon-Joseph Suenens is long out of print. Newly available is what might be described as Cardinal Franz König’s world-view. It embraces Vatican II, the Church and the world and was completed only just before the end of his long life in 2004 (Open to God, Open to The World, Continuum, 2005 (English Ed.); Offen für Gott – offen für die Welt: Kirche im Dialog, Herder (German Ed.)). Born in 1905, König, like Suenens and Butler, knew the Church before, during and after the Council. The three were major figures in Rome at the Council and - while it will be greatly elaborated later and it is not unique to them - the close coincidence of their focus on unity and on the ‘rediscovery’ of the ‘People of God’ is striking.

“ .....the Constitution sees the Church, in her earthly pilgrimage, first and foremost as the spiritual fellowship of her baptised members, and only secondarily, and as it were consequentially, as a hierarchized communion.”
(B C Butler in De Ecclesia, DLT, 1964, p.9)

“..... that seed of life deriving from the council which is most fruitful in pastoral consequences...... : is the rediscovery of the people of God as a whole, as a single reality; and then by way of consequence, the co-responsibility thus implied for every member of the church.”
(J-L Suenens in Co-responsibility in the Church, Burns & Oates, 1968, p. 30)

“ The Church’s universality“, (p.6)..... “...the Council’s support for ecumenism.” (p.8)... “.... the Council’s emphasis on the importance of the lay apostolate. “(p. 10)
(F. König in Open to God, Open to the World, Continuuum, 2005)

Cardinal König

Much of Butler’s published work is out of print - like Suenens’s - but it is posted on this website. More from them and other important figures, e.g. Doepfner, Frings, Lercaro, and Hurley, will be posted.

Unique to this website are extracts from unpublished letters from Butler to his monastic community at Downside, to his family and to friends.

Dom Daniel Rees, a monk of Downside wrote "Christopher Butler and the Second Vatican Council were made for each other. There must have been few among the Council Fathers who could have felt, as he did, that in the conciliar theology and the spirit which it engendered, they were breathing their native air at last. It has become a commonplace that the invisible father at Vatican II was John Henry Newman. But....Newman had in Abbot Butler a mouthpiece who knew his master’s voice probably better than anyone else in the conciliar aula.” (See full article.)

The Vatican II Symposium of 2002 is a major section of the website. It marked the twin anniversaries of the centenary of Butler’s birth and the fortieth anniversary of the opening of The Council. It was a rare privilege that two surviving Council Fathers were present and contributed.

Vatican II - Looking Forward with both Spirit and Letter

A sine qua non for any work or commentary about Vatican II, is to offer reference and access to all the Council documents. The site’s link to the Vatican archives, in the main menu, has proved to be useful to visitors. Any aspect of the site can be checked against the relevant document.

The Spirit in which the documents were forged by those 2,500 fathers - supported by theologians - and their intention over four intensive years, must be borne in mind along with the actual letter of the documents. So much is interlinked that neither letter nor Spirit must be separated. Widely accepted as a pivotal document is that “On the Church“. (Lumen Gentium). This website was originally launched on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Lumen Gentium. The launch of this enlarged edition of the site marks the 40th anniversary of the end of the Council in 1965.

 

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Page last updated 21-Nov-2008