Renewal and Adaptation

by Bishop B.C. Butler

from Chapter 1 "Renewal and Adaptation" of Butler's book
The Theology of Vatican II pages 4-9 (ref)

“…..ecumenical councils entered the history of the Church not as a spontaneous development but in obedience to a secular statesman [Constantine]. Through the Byzantine centuries and on into the Middle Ages secular influence upon them was great. It was happily almost entirely absent from Vatican II. It is, however, impossible to affirm that they [councils] are a necessary feature of her [the Church’s] existence, like the episcopal college and the papacy. They are a way, originally indicated by an unbaptised Roman emperor, of discovering the mind of the Church or of the universal episcopate on doctrinal or disciplinary issues. Theology, walking the footsteps of Athanasius and the Roman See, judges that the doctrinal definitions of ecumenical councils are guaranteed by the infallibility ‘wherewith Christ willed to endow his Church in defining teaching on faith or morals’. From the historian’s point of view it might be said that such definitions are judged to be infallible because the Church has irrevocably committed herself to them. They are milestones in the development of the Church’s articulate mind. Like milestones, the do not merely assess the extent of a road already covered; they point forwards to a further journey to be pursued, and are themselves subject to the interpretations of subsequent theology, and to possible complementation by subsequent definitions.

Before Vatican II there had been only two ecumenical councils since the Reformation. The counter-Reformation was ratified by the Council of Trent, and the last hesitations about the role of the papacy were laid to rest by Vatican I. To some it seemed that henceforth there would be no need for ecumenical councils. The Pope, now known to hold universal supreme authority over the Church and to be competent to issue infallible definitions without reference to their subsequent acceptance by the Church at large, could, it seemed, manage for himself. Why should resort ever again be had to the expensive, inconvenient and unnecessary device of an ecumenical council? It had become a fixed principle of roman canon law that none but the Pope could convene such a council. Would any Pope wish to run the risk of inviting his fellow bishops to exercise—though subject to his final ratification—powers that might appear to be incompatible with this own? The Roman curia, or permanent civil service of the Holy See, found its own status enhanced and its position fortified by the decisions of Vatican I. For nearly a century after 1870 it directed the Church through crises both political and doctrinal, and during the latter half of that period it implemented a far-sighted papal strategy in the important field of the Asian and African missions. It could silence or outlaw criticism, and had behind it not only the formidable authority of the vicar of Christ but the national sentiment of Italian Catholicism. The Pope himself had for centuries always been an Italian; and the college of cardinals which elected him, was, till quite recent years, predominantly Italian in its composition. It was easy for an Italian to feel that the true religion was in a special sense an Italian privilege, and that German or French theologians were provincial. Indeed, any western Catholic as he walks the streets of Rome and passes by the Flavian amphitheatre and the forum, the basilica of San Clemente (with its subterranean Mithraeum and remains of pre-republican Roman walls) and the Pantheon to the superb church that marks the confession of St Peter, can hardly escape the sense that here, in this city, is the capital, the bastion and the criterion of all that he holds most dear.

It was therefore more than a little sensational when John XXIII, almost casually, announced that he would summon an ecumenical council; the more so since he seemed to link this project with the prospect of Christian, not merely Catholic, unity.

Joseph [Angelo Giuseppe] Roncalli became, before his death, so universally respected and loved that we have to remind ourselves that, when he was chosen to succeed his great predecessor Pius XII in November 1958, he seemed to many of us to represent the makeshift decision of a college of cardinals that, for the moment, found itself unable to agree on a candidate of an age and a quality that would make him a worthy successor of one who had steered the Church through the hazards of the Second World War and had opened up fresh horizons to catholic scholarship and thought. Roncalli was already in his late seventies, a former papal diplomat who had seen little of the workings of the Roman curia from within, though he had, as was natural, suffered somewhat at its hands from without. He was not a scholar, nor, so far as we knew, a fighter. An honourable career at Belgrade, Istanbul, and Paris had taken him to the dignity of the sacred purple and to the patriarchal see of Venice. We knew he was old and portly, and we soon discovered that he was a ‘character’ and a wit. We could be forgiven for not having suspected that he was a saint and a man prepared to trust and act on his grace-enlightened intuitions.

Butler at the Vatican

So there was to be a second Vatican Council. What would be its business? Nothing in particular, it would appear; or perhaps it would be truer to say: everything. The Pope soon found it necessary to explain that he did not suppose that one short Roman council could bring to an end the age-old divisions of Christendom. A fresh emphasis began to come into the forefront. Christian unity was the Pope’s distant goal, no doubt, but his immediate aim was to ‘let some fresh air into the Church’ and to promote within her an aggiornamento. Meanwhile, let bishops and Catholic centres of higher studies send in their suggestions for the council’s agenda. Preparatory commissions would work through these suggestions, and in due course there would appear draft documents for the council to approve and enact; in the end it was said that sixty-eight such documents had been prepared or were in preparation.

Aggiornamento means ‘bringing up to date’, something which any human institution may need from time to time. There is an inevitable lag in human affairs between the spirit and needs of the age and their clothing in institutional forms. Charters of political parties, even the foundation documents of national states or federations, cannot fail to reflect, in some measure, the special urgencies of the date of their composition; and a change of situation eventually presents the party or the nation with an option between archaism and aggiornamento. So, too, in the Church, diocesan and parochial organisation, general administration, canon law, liturgical forms, and theological and dogmatic expression all tend to reflect the needs and insights of an age that is always just previous, sometimes long previous, to that in which she is actually living. …

Ed: Butler then wrote briefly about aspects of the preparations for the Council, and continued:

If … aggiornamento was to mean some really radical reappraisal of the whole bearing of the Church in the world of the twentieth century; if it meant raising fundamental questions; if, above all, it might seem to involve a threat to the curia itself or an, even implicit, criticism of its competence, then the establishment could with some justice feel that this was a most alarming prospect, fraught with danger not only to curialists but to the Church as a whole. As the months passed by after the first announcement of the intention to hold a council a suspicion began to take shape in the minds of some observers that a determined effort was on foot to tailor John XXIII’s rather vague plan down to a manageable size, and to ‘contain’ his intuitions within the framework of existing procedures and canon law. The Pope is in one western theory the very fount of ecclesiastical law, and the curia a pliant instrument for the expression and execution of his will. But in fact, of course, he rules normally within the limits of a long and crystallised tradition. The instrument which exists to serve him can, in fact, enmesh him in an almost unbreakable web. Even his power to change the personnel of the curia is hampered by the difficulty of finding replacements who can make the machine work. Despite his vast theoretical liberty of action, the Pope is in some ways more restricted even than many lesser rulers.

A case could, in fact, be made out for radical adaptations in the Church. If we accept the theory of evolution of species, natural history has been the story of adaptations which have profoundly changed and in some respects enormously increased the capacities of living phyla. ‘Here below’, Newman observed, ‘to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’ [The Development of Doctrine , p.40]. A species which is incapable of such radical adaptation and transformation may perish altogether in an environment to which it is no longer adjusted. The Church is not a species. But she is a living entity composed of intelligent members, each of which is ‘not just a higher system but a source of higher systems’ [B. Lonergan, Insight, p.267]. Catholics believe that the Church cannot perish, not because of any inherent power of ultimate survival, but in virtue of the guaranteed assistance of God. However, besides evolution or extinction, there is a third possibility for a natural species: it may manage to survive in the backwaters of natural history, in some straitened milieu remote from the main currents of onward-moving life. And the question could have been asked, in the years before Vatican II, whether the fate of the coelacanthus was not likely to become the fate of the Catholic Church.

There are those who hold that modern man’s total environment is changing so rapidly and so fundamentally, above all through technological developments made possible by physical science, that man himself is responding to its challenge by what amounts to something analogous to a biological mutation. Not that his physical structure is being radically altered, but that his psychological pattern is becoming almost fundamentally different from that of earlier generations. It would be hazardous to attempt a brief description of this change. But it is characterised by two pervasive features: the horizon of each of us is tending to expand so as to embrace the whole of contemporary humanity, so that we are coming to share a common, socialised, human experience; and we are shifting from a static to a dynamic outlook – we are becoming more reflectively aware of the positive significance of duration both in human affairs and in our subhuman surrounding. If science and technology are largely responsible for the expansion of our horizons and for the sense that man himself carries the burden of creating his own future, it is evolutionary theory and scientific history that partly cause and partly express the new sense of the universality of orientated change. We are experiencing along our nerves and in our profound psychological reaction the truth of Heraclitus’ great intuition: All things are in flux, and you cannot step twice into the same stream. This experience is reflected in a sceptical reaction to all propositions claiming to relate to an unchangeable reality. Metaphysics is at a discount; there is a reluctance to make any final self-commitment or to give, as some might say, a blank cheque to fate or chance – while, at the same time, there remains a despairing hunger for an absolute that seems to be contradicted by all the evidence of our exterior and interior senses.

The prelates who marched in procession into St Peter’s on that autumn day in 1962 represented a society which, for all its acceptance of the aeroplane, television and internal communication systems, was still, it might be said, living on what survived of the great medieval synthesis.

Ed: The above amounts to one-fifth of the opening chapter of Butler’s Theology of Vatican II. He then gives extensive and valuable consideration to aspects of the Church which were due for “Renewal and Adaptation”. The second chapter, “Revelation and Inspiration” deals with the subject dearest to him: Sacred Scripture. But Chapter 1 concluded:

There is a great deal of teaching scattered through the Acts of the council which, while it lacks the deliberate application of the impressive phrase: “The council teaches”, is plainly carefully considered and intentionally didactic. All such teaching is bound to be normative for future theological developments . Elsewhere the council merely repeats or assumes, without special emphasis, current or traditional opinions. Broadly speaking, one may assume that teaching in exposition of a main theme in a dogmatic constitution has per se a greater authority than doctrinal statements in pastoral constitutions, decrees, or declarations."

Ed: It should be noted that of the sixteen documents of the council, the four most significant were granted the status of “Constitution”. But only two were “Dogmatic Constitutions”: Dei Verbum and Lumen Gentium. It was to those which Butler as a full member of the council and of the central Theology Commission made his greatest contributions.

The Theology of Vatican II, Christopher Butler, Darton Longman & Todd, London, 1967, revised and enlarged 1981.