Rebooting Vatican II - The Movementisation of the Church (Part 2)

October 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Second Vatican Council.  Pope Benedict has recently announced two closely-linked events to celebrate that date.  On 17th October 2011, he issued a motu proprio entitled Porta Fidei - the doorway to faith - announcing that 11 October 2012 will be the start of a Year of Faith for the whole of the Catholic Church, echoing a similar event launched by Paul VI in 1967 to mark the end of the Council.  The second event is the Synod on 'The New Evangelisation for the Transmission of the Christian Faith' to be organised by the newly formed Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelisation.  


As I reported in my last post, given the key role both Benedict and his predecessor have given to the Movements in the New Evangelisation, one of the aims of the Synod will be to encourage the reception of the charisms of the Movements by the Church as a whole.  Addressing an international meeting of bishops in Rome in 2008, Pope Benedict extolled the New Movements as 'a gift of the Lord, a valuable resource for enriching the entire Christian Community with their charisms.'  Just as they were for his predecessor John Paul II, for the Pontiff, they are the embodiment of the New Evangelisation with their 'vigorous missionary impetus, motivated by the desire to communicate to all the precious experience of the encounter with Christ, felt and lived as the only adequate response to the human heart's profound thirst for truth and happiness.'   


The New Evangelisation is also to be a basic theme of the Year of Faith which, according to the Pope's motu proprio, is to have a strong missionary impetus: 'Today too there is a need for stronger ecclesial commitment to new evangelisation in order to discover the joy of believing and the enthusiasm for communicating the faith.'  He calls for the kind of public demonstration at which the Movements excel: 'All ecclesial bodies old and new are to find a way, during this year, to make a public demonstration of the Credo.'  Gargantuan events such as the World Youth Day and the Holy Father's Meeting with Families, inspired and animated by the Movements, have become landmarks of the New Evangelisation.  No other organisations in the Church can compete at this level: the Year of Faith will offer them opportunities for such high-profile events on a global scale, compressed within a relatively short time-frame.  They will grab the headlines and dwarf the efforts of more traditional Catholic groups such as religious orders and parishes.


But what has this got to do with the Second Vatican Council?  Vatican II was an epoch-making event in the history of Catholicism.  No matter how much of an embarrassment its liberal tone might be to the Vatican's present incumbents, they could hardly afford to ignore this anniversary.  But Pope Benedict, who has been outspoken in his criticism of the Council's reforms and its negative influence, has gone one better.  With the Synod and the Year of Faith, he is rebooting the Council and making the celebrations into the launching pad for the project closest to his heart - spreading the 'Movement effect' to the whole Church.


Pope Ratzinger is certainly well acquainted  with what the Council was all about.  He attended as a peritus or expert theological adviser to Cardinal Frings of Cologne.  At that time, he was part of the liberal majority.  Since then, due to a number of personal and historical factors, his career and views have followed the classic trajectory of the neo-conservative - from forward-looking liberal to backward-looking traditionalist.   But he has managed to salvage one positive element from the car-crash of the Council.  By some strange alchemy, in Benedict's mind, the New Movements and the Second Vatican Council have become inextricably linked.  'The Ecclesial Movements and New Communities are one of the most important innovations inspired by the Holy Spirit in the Church for the implementation of the Second Vatican Council,' he told the bishops in 2008. 'They spread in the wake of the Council sessions especially in the years that immediately followed it, in a period full of exciting promises but also marked by difficult trials. Paul VI and John Paul II were able to welcome and discern, to encourage and promote the unexpected explosion of the new lay realities which in various and surprising forms have restored vitality, faith and hope to the whole Church.'


In fact this is a re-writing of history because none of the New Movements was actually inspired by the Council.  Of the largest and most influential of these organisations, Focolare began in the forties, CL had its roots in the fifties with the Gioventu Studentesca movement of CL founder Don Giussani, and the Neocatechumenate was started in Madrid in the early Sixties while the Council was still in mid-session.  Opus Dei, which denies being a movement but which strongly resembles those organisations, actually began in Spain as far back as the twenties and reflects the Catholicism of that era.  What all these Movements have in common is their proud boast that they are precursors of Vatican II, that in some way they foresaw it.  Unlike the traditional religious orders, therefore, that recognised the need for radical self-examination and reform in the spirit of the Council, the New Movements complacently decided that had no need to change in the Post-Conciliar period.

It is well known that, as Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict saw the reforms that followed Vatican II as excessive, even erroneous.  In the reign of John Paul II, he spear-headed a process of Restoration,  turning back the clock on some of the Council's key reforms and certainly on its spirit of openness to the world and other Christian denominations.  So bitter were his feelings towards the Council that in one notable interview he pronounced the New Movements 'the only good thing to come out of the Council'.


In reality Benedict's principal concern is to stem the tide of secularisation in the countries of Europe which have been traditionally Christian.  On many occasions he has declared that the rot set in with the Enlightenment - two centuries ago.  This world-view has more in common with that of the First Vatican Council rather than the Second.   The Council of Pio Nono was called to supply 'an adequate remedy to the disorders, intellectual and moral, of Christendom', which sounds very much like what Benedict is seeking today.  The orientation of the Second Vatican Council of Pope John XXIII on the contrary  explicitly set out not to condemn but to find common ground with, and look for the good in, the modern world - of which Pope John saw a great deal such as the desire for peace, equality and tolerance, and such values as freedom of speech and conscience.  To suggest that the conservative New Movements which, together with Benedict XVI, view the modern world, and Europe in particular, as a moral wasteland, are the first fruits of Second Vatican Council is to stand the true meaning of that historic event on its head.


'How is it possible,' Benedict XVI pointed out to the bishops in his 2008 speech, 'not to realize...that [the] newness [of the Movements] is still waiting to be properly understood in the light of God's plan and of the Church's mission in the context of our time?  The important task [is to promote] a more mature communion of all the ecclesial elements, so that all the charisms, with respect for their specificity, may freely and fully contribute to the edification of the one Body of Christ.'   This is Pope Benedict's goal.  The not-so-hidden agenda of the Synod on 'The New Evangelisation for the Transmission of the Christian Faith' and the Year of Faith to be held in its wake, therefore, is a nothing other than a more sweeping Movementisation of the Church?