Search
-
February 3, 2023By Jaymie Stuart Wolfe, OSV News
They say that you can't take it with you, but I beg to differ. In death, Pope Benedict XVI brought real and significant closure to an important era in the Church -- the era of Vatican II. He was not a Council Father, like his predecessor, but Joseph Ratzinger attended the council as an expert theologian. Even a cursory examination of his writings reveal that the Second Vatican Council remained something personal to Benedict XVI.
Something happens when the last surviving witnesses of a pivotal event pass on. The event transitions from lived experience and fading memories into history. Losing most of the "Greatest Generation" has changed the way we think and talk about the Second World War. Losing the last significant contributors to the Second Vatican Council may do the same in the church.
I saw this process at work as a young teen volunteer at a local Jewish nursing home. At the time, many of the residents were Holocaust survivors; most bore identification tattoos forced upon their forearms as they became concentration camp prisoners. As long as there were living witnesses to the Shoah, Holocaust denialism was a notion confined to the fringes. But as that generation began to die off, the vivid memory of the genocide they had survived did, too. Our world became different without Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl in it. The resolution to "never forget" grew dimmer in their absence.
History doesn't preserve everything because it cannot. That's why we have trouble envisioning what life was like 100 years ago, let alone in colonial, medieval or ancient times. We have access to historical facts, but only the lived experiences of human beings give the context required for those facts to be fully understood and appreciated. "What has been" must be handed down person-to-person.
One of the canticles for Morning Prayer reads, "Think back on the days of old, reflect on the years of age upon age. Ask your father and he will inform you, ask your elders and they will tell you" (Dt 32:7). These words come from the final instruction Moses gives to the Israelites, knowing that he will not accompany them across the Jordan and into the Promised Land. For Catholic Christians, seeking advice from those who went before might seem like a no-brainer. But what happens when our fathers and elders are no longer with us? Whom do we consult?
With Pope Benedict's passing, this is where we find ourselves with respect to the Second Vatican Council. Without direct witnesses, what remains are hearsay, headlines and historical fact. I suspect our approach to interpreting Vatican II will begin to change, evolving from one rooted in lived experience and memory to one of postmortem analysis and historicization. We will transition away from implementing the Council to tweaking, changing or adjusting it. The question of what we might gain from Vatican II will certainly evolve into an examination of what, perhaps, has been lost in its wake or whether some babies tossed out with the bathwater might yet be worth retrieving. Some will see the Council as a triumph now threatened, others as a mess that can finally be "fixed." Both sides will (predictably) find their heroes and villains.
Catholicism is a both/and faith, so nothing of this development is all good or all bad. Like most things, it's a mixed bag that will forever yield debate. Legacies are like that. As the Council's third generation of Catholics, living in the era of "new evangelization," we understand how critically important it is to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the people of our times. Perhaps as we cross the threshold of what Pope Francis has called this "epochal change," we are uniquely poised to finally bring together "ressourcement" and "aggiornamento" -- the blending of what is foundational and what speaks to the times, respectively -- as the Fathers of Vatican II envisioned. May the prayers of Pope Benedict XVI, and the gift of his life, guide us.