Today marks the 50th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council. Compared to the four sessions of the council, nothing else was more significant in the entire twentieth century life of the Church. It would take a year of blog posts to share my thoughts upon the council, but today I would like to look at the reception of the council over the past fifty years and touch on what I perceive as some of the major challenges in the on-going reception of that seismic, historic and grace-filled event. A book, actually several books, could be written on this topic too, but what follows are some of the highlights.
Conciliar documents, and the same could be said for the written constitution of a state, are not self-interpreting documents. I recently received a book on Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, by David Schindler and Nicholas Healy, Jr., that carefully examines the developing drafts of that important text, and also offers an interpretation of why the drafts changed in each iteration, as well as an interpretative essay about how we should understand the final document. The Schindler-Healy view is quite different from the Murray view, and in the main I tend to side with Schindler. Earlier this fall, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville have a keynote address at a Notre Dame conference on Dignitatis Humanae and he roped in the thought of Jacques Maritain to explain his thoughts on the correct meaning of the highly ambivalent word “freedom.” And, in addition to textual analysis of the document itself, and relating that one text to the many others issued by the Council, the issue of religious liberty is subject to change because it is lived in different cultures and at different times, with different threats to human dignity and to the rights of the religious believer manifesting themselves. In sum, Vatican II did not so much “settle” large issues like religious liberty, but pointed the Church in a direction.
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