Receiving Vatican II: the Australian experience.

I

Reception is a deceptively simple concept. Susceptible of a clear definition--'the process through which an ecclesial community incorporates into its own life a particular custom, decision, liturgical practice, or teaching'--reception is nonetheless a complex phenomenon. (1) While that complexity derives ultimately from the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the church, there are two more immediate reasons for it: since the material that the community is to receive is often multi-layered, which is particularly the case when the object of reception is the teaching of an ecumenical council, authentic reception will always involve something other than cosmetic or one-dimensional changes; the ever-changing dynamics of the ecclesial community mean that the material will need to be 're-received' as the circumstances of the community alter. Taken together, those two factors mean that the reception of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) is best understood as an ongoing process, one that continues even today. (2)

The process nature of reception means that this paper makes no claims to being a definitive account of the reception of Vatican II in Australia. What the paper will attempt is to sketch the shape of the Australian church before the Council, the involvement of Australia's bishops in Vatican II, the nature of Vatican II, and some features of Catholic life in Australia since the Council. The aim in so doing is to indicate some of the influences on the reception of the Council.

A final introductory remark: since reception is essentially a theological concept, this paper is as much an exercise in theological reflection as it is a review of historical developments. The concern of the paper, then, is not simply with what happened and why, but also with the mutuality between theology and history, between our understanding of 'the church' and the shape of ecclesial life at particular moments and in particular cultures.

II

Prior to Vatican II, the primary influence on the dynamics of Catholic life in Australia, as elsewhere in the Catholic world, was the piety and practices that flowed either directly or indirectly from the Council of Trent (1545-63)--'[Trent] had a direct and long-term impact on modern Catholicism that in its pervasiveness transcended the immediate influence of any single person or any other happening in the period.' (3) Although Trent sought to reform manifold aspects of Catholic life, its primary theological aim was to highlight the gulf between the true faith of Catholics and the heretical diversions of the Reformers. That emphasis ensured that Catholics, for generations after Trent, tended to define themselves over against those whom they knew to be wandering in the paths of error. Australian Catholics shared with their sisters and brothers in other parts of the world a sense of living within a faith that was certain, clear, and comprehensive. (4)

On the other hand, the sense of certainty and finality that characterised the Tridentine settlement meant that Catholics tended to lack 'a sense of history and a dynamic openness to change'. (5) Such features also were as much a part of Catholic life in Australia as elsewhere:

   In its religious life in the early 1960s the church seemed stable
   and undisturbed, its authority structures, conservatism and piety
   little changed since the 1920s, firmly anchored in a clear and
   unquestioning faith, content to be self-contained. (6)

The settled nature of Australian Catholic life, as well as the fact that the energy of Australian Catholics was primarily absorbed by issues such as 'state-aid' for Catholic schools--witness the fact that Vatican II began in the same year as the Goulburn 'strike'--might well account for the fact that preparations for Vatican II by the Australian bishops were less than spectacular. Indeed, in response to the Vatican's request that the world's bishops submit their ideas on proposed subjects for the Council, one Australian bishop replied--in six lines, submitted six months after the request was made--that he had nothing to suggest, except that it might be worthwhile to consider the power and authority of bishops. (7) While that example might be the extreme, it would be difficult to gainsay the claim that the Australian church was under-prepared for the Council:

   In Australia's case ... bishops and faithful here tended toward a
   minimalist view of the Council's aims and did not, in the end,
   submit enough responses to the preparatory commission, in enough
   detail, or with enough promptitude. What ebbed out of the
   Australian Church lacked intellectual and theological profundity,
   something which distance only exacerbated. (8)

Although their preparation for Vatican II might have been poor, the Australian bishops were generally keen to engage with the processes of the Council once it began. Indeed, Jeffrey Murphy, who has authored a detailed study of the Australian participation at Vatican H, gives the Australian bishops more than a passing grade for their willingness to involve themselves with the process, their own limitations not withstanding, and for their lack of intransigent opposition to initiatives aimed at reform and renewal.

This openness of the Australian bishops was evident in the fact that they were one of the first English-speaking conferences to accept, during the Council, the vernacular breviary and to introduce guidelines for liturgy in both English and Latin--it is, however, worth noting Murphy's claim that acceptance of the new liturgical guidelines was, perhaps, made easier by the fact that the Victorian bishops were absent from the vote; they were attending the funeral of Archbishop Marmix. (9) In short, the Australian contingent at Vatican II, even though it lacked a de Smedt, a Suenens, or a Konig, was far more than a bemused bystander overawed by the grandeur of the occasion:

   [The Australian bishops] were more generous than many Council
   Fathers on Religious, more knowledgeable than the French on
   schools and more hardheaded and realistic than the Germans
   (and others) on matrimonial questions. (10)

The fact that most of the bishops brought home to Australia the same openness they displayed during the Council proved invaluable for at least the first phase of the process of reception:

   The excesses that have befallen some national Churches have been
   avoided [in Australia], as has the tendency towards an
   ultramontanist (and culturally-infantilising) over-emphasis on the
   ordinary jurisdiction of the papacy. This middle-way was a tradition
   modernised (but safeguarded) by the Australian Council Fathers and
   is probably their greatest cultural bequest to the contemporary
   Church, however unglamorous. (11)

In order to understand something of that achievement, and of what it was that the Australian bishops brought home to be received by their local churches, we need to appreciate the particular nature of Vatican II.

III

In the assessment of Karl Ratner, himself a significant peritus (Vatican II's term for its theological consultants at the Council), Vatican II was unique in the church's history as it was the first manifestation of the 'world-church'. In employing such a description, Rahner was referring not simply to the fact that the churches of Africa and Asia were represented by their nationals, rather than, as would once have been the case, by expatriate European bishops, but, more significantly, to the fact that the church saw itself as part of the world and as having a responsibility for the world. In other words, unlike Trent or Vatican I, where suspicion towards Protestantism or post-Enlightenment cultures, respectively, had dominated, Vatican II sought to engage creatively with contemporary culture. (12)

At the heart of Vatican II's methodology for its engagement with the contemporary world was the interplay of its two great themes: ressourcement and aggiornamento. The former promoted a recovery of the most ancient, and often neglected, strata of the Christian tradition, while the latter sought to use the riches of that tradition in order to respond to modern questions and needs. Through their methodology, the Council Fathers recognised that the fixed Tridentine worldview, no less than the neo-scholastic approach to theology that buttressed it, was not coterminous with authentic Catholic faith. Emblematic of Vatican II's commitment to both the living tradition of the church and to a broader view of that tradition than had dominated the centuries after the Reformation was its recovery of the primacy of Scripture, which was to take its place in the forefront of the liturgical and pastoral renewal that the Council advocated.

Vatican II's openness to both the ancient tradition and new circumstances and challenges underpins the view of the Council propagated by the American historian John O'Malley, who speaks of the 'style' of the Council, its opening of a new way of being church, as its primary contribution to the life of the church. Thus, Vatican II was the first of the church's Councils not to condemn anyone, the first called to do something other than respond to a crisis in belief or governance, the first to formulate a 'pastoral constitution' as distinct from merely dogmatic ones, and the first to speak in what O'Malley refers to as 'the style of the homilies and treatises of the fathers' rather than in terms of defined dogma, which always carried an anathema against those who rejected its teaching. (13) O'Malley's emphasis on the style of Vatican II meshes well with Rahner's stress on the importance of recognising Vatican II as a beginning rather than an end. (14) In other words, Vatican II opened the way for the engagement between the church's faith and the contemporary, but did not seek to impose a single method or set of outcomes for that engagement.

The ideas of O'Malley and Rahner point to the fact that the reception of Vatican II was always going to require more than the adoption of new liturgical forms or expressions of piety, even though such changes, particularly those involving significant alterations in liturgical practices, were far from minor. Vatican II had altered the church's self-understanding, especially those elements of its self-understanding that included the clear identification of its enemies. It is worth noting, therefore, Jeffrey Murphy's descriptions of the difficulty that some Australian bishops had with the Council's embrace of religious liberty, ecumenism, and openness to world religions. (15) That difficulty suggests that the introduction into Australia of a new--albeit radically traditional--way of 'being church' was not going to be without its challenges.

Having sketched the broad outlines of Vatican II's methodology and outcomes, the next task is to survey the reception of the Council in Australia. In attempting that task, the following section will situate the dynamics of the Australian reception within a three-phase analysis of the Council's reception in the whole church; that analysis comes from Walter Kasper, who is a leading contemporary German theologian and the current head of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity.

IV

First, Kasper argues that the period immediately after the Council was the phase of exuberance, characteristic of which was enthusiasm for change 'in the Spirit of the Council'. (16) During this phase, which manifested a widespread desire in the church for movement and possibility, there was a sense that the Council had licensed every imaginable change.

The phase of exuberance had its particular manifestations in Australia. It was the era of burgeoning parish councils, large-scale reform of religious life, the emergence of new forms of lay spirituality, changes in the forms of piety, especially in penitential practices, and the development of new approaches to catechesis. (17) The Australian expression of this era in Australia is captured vividly by Patrick O'Farrell:

   Until the late 1960s Australian Catholicism seemed to be in the grip
   of a kind of liberated euphoria, deriving not only from the
   extraordinary changes and spiritual revival associated with the
   Council, but also from the remarkable surge of public interest in
   the affairs of the church. (18)

Secondly, Kasper suggests that exuberance was followed by disappointment. (19) This disappointment was the product of multiple factors that expressed differing perspectives: the realisation that not everything in the church was about to change; concern that the immediate post-conciliar period was a time of confusion--'like a spaceship that had lost contact with ground control'; (20) the desire for change separating itself from anything the Council had said or imagined; the impact of Humanae vitae (1968); the decline in numbers of priests and religious; and a lack of knowledge and experience about how to negotiate change, which produced, often, a polarisation between those for and against change.

In addition, the struggle to realise ways of being church that involved something other than all-powerful, even if benign, leaders, and passive laity, often produced casualties on both sides of the expanding divide between clergy and laity. In Australia, the widening gap between new and old forms of 'being church' generated significant anxiety for those who believed all 'the old ways' were simply being abandoned. In light of the emphasis on schooling in the history of the Catholic Church in Australia, it is not surprising that this anxiety found its outlet in disputes over religious education, especially throughout the 1970s. Similarly, there was concern that the Australian focus on 'the missions' and 'the propagation of the faith', the historical prominence of which reflected the fact that Australia remained a 'mission' country until 1976, were being overlooked in favour of issues of social justice. (21)

O'Farrell notes that a particular feature of the Australian church during this phase of disappointment was the prevailing desire to move away from 'progressive' tendencies and active engagement with the wider culture. At a time of rapid social change--the ebbing of Australia's relative economic and geographical isolation and the advent of cultural upheaval precipitated by conflicts during Australia's involvement in Vietnam and, later, the social policies of the Whitlam government--the dominant spirit of Australian Catholic life tended towards the rejection of anything likely to produce further uncertainty:

   [The] hierarchy naturally tended to gravitate, despite its own
   reforming efforts, towards the dominant inclinations of the mass of
   the ordinary laity--that of retreat from engagement with the
   complexities of the modern religious and secular worlds, and
   reversion towards the old and secure forms of piety and procedure,
   albeit in renewed form. (22)

The overall effect of the phase of disappointment, in Australia as elsewhere, was to cast doubt on the value of what flowed from the Council:

   Twenty years after the Vatican Council, its Australian legacy was
   being revealed as not merely the challenges, discomforts and
   disruptions of creative change, but the dubious quality of the new
   religious habitation. Especially to the young and to the old, it
   appears as jerry-built, tawdry, insubstantial, cluttered with the
   shoddy, silly and second-rate; not attractive accommodation. (23)

Indeed, O'Farrell characterises the 1980s as a period of Catholic nostalgia, in which a desire for the way the church had been in the past had replaced the commitment to reform and renewal. (24) While it is impossible to quantify what percentage of the Catholics championed such nostalgia, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that there was also a sense that reform and renewal had not gone far enough and that the church was lagging behind the world, especially in terms of the impact of feminism and growth of democratic and collegial decision-making.

Thirdly, Kasper identifies the present stage in the reception of Vatican II as the time when there is a need to re-engage with the Council, with both its letter and spirit. (25) Such engagement would need to begin with an acknowledgment of the Council as the work of the Holy Spirit. It would need, therefore, to avoid the revisionism that disavows any intention by the Council to change anything and sees all that has happened since the 1960s as lacking any basis in the teaching of the Council.

In place of the often spiteful, and rarely fruitful, division between 'progressives' and 'conservatives', authentic reception of Vatican II requires all members of the church to appropriate the implications of Kasper's claim that those who are usually labelled the 'progressives' at Vatican II were actually the true 'conservatives'. This was so, suggests Kasper, because authentic conservatives wanted to do more than merely preserve the forms that derived from the post-Reformation era--'with all their narrowness and encrustations'; they wanted to preserve the richness of the whole tradition, especially what derived from Scripture and the Fathers. (26)

The re-engagement with Vatican II that Kasper advocates requires a re-engagement with the Council's emphasis on the 'mystery' of God and the existence of the church, in Christ and through the Holy Spirit, as the sign and instrument of God's communion with humanity and the communion between all peoples (Lumen gentium, #1). The re-engagement requires also the willingness to wrestle, in the spirit of Gaudium et spes, with how a church constituted by such a mission ought to act in relationship with the wider culture.

More specifically, Australian Catholics need to wrestle with what the reception of Vatican II requires of them both in the context of a multi-cultural and multi-faith society and in the context of a church that is not only experiencing significant tensions around issues of ministry and leadership, but whose place in the culture is not as secure as it once was. In a climate of division and tension, Australian Catholics might profitably learn from the experience of their divided sisters and brothers in the United States of America to affirm the importance of accepting that no single view of the church contains all truth and that no single group within the church--be it on 'the right' or 'the left'--is alone able to determine what is conducive to the authentic living of Christian faith in the present moment of history. (27)

V

This paper has sought to highlight the complexity inseparable from the process of reception. It has tried to show that the reception of Vatican II has involved something other than the superficial adoption of particular practices in response to specific teachings of the Council. More than anything else, it has attempted to portray the reception of Vatican II as an ongoing project in the life of the contemporary Catholic Church. While we have been 'receiving' Vatican II for a generation, the reception of the Council is far from complete. Indeed, the history of the Catholic Church since Vatican II, in Australia no less than elsewhere, suggests that the one certainty about the reception of Vatican II is that there are still more phases to come, which suggests that the Spirit continues to speak through the documents of the Council:

   Although some, despite their protestations to the contrary, might
   wish to snuff out the light on the hill that Vatican II was and is,
   the wind of the Spirit of the Council will not allow its beacon to
   be extinguished. The gentle breeze continues to flicker the flame
   and make it alive. The Holy Spirit was with them; the same Holy
   Spirit is with us. (28)

(1) Lucien Richard, 'Reception, Dissent' in Pierre Hegy (ed.), The Church in the Nineties: Its Legacy, Its Future, Liturgical Press, Collegeville MN, 1993, p.6.

(2) Ormond Rush's Still Interpreting Vatican II: Some Hermeneutical Principles, Paulist, Mahwab, 2004, is a most valuable introduction to the processes of reception, especially as they apply to our reception of Vatican II.

(3) For an analysis of the impact of the Council of Trent on later centuries of Catholic life see John O'Malley, Trent and all That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000, p.135.

(4) For a depiction of Catholic life in Australia prior to Vatican 11 see Edmund Campion, Australian Catholics, Penguin Books,Melbourne, 1988, pp.93-156.

(5) Edward Braxton, The Wisdom Community, Paulist Press, New York, 1980, p.28.

(6) Patrick O'Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community: An Australian History, 3rd rev. ed, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995, p.407.

(7) See Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph Komonchak (eds), History of Vatican H (vol 1), Orbis/Peeters, Maryknoll/ Leuven, 1995, p.99.

(8) Jeffrey Murphy, 'Developing Perceptions about the Council and the Preparatory Phase: 1960-62', The Australasian Catholic Record, vol. 79, 2002, p.82.

(9) Jeffrey Murphy, 'Romanita Mark II: Australian Bishops at Vatican II (The Second Session: 1963)', The Australasian Catholic Record, vol. 79, 2002, pp.361-62.

(10) Jeffrey Murphy, '"Sane, Advanced Conservatism": Australian Bishops at Vatican II (The Third Session Continues: 1964)', The Australasian Catholic Record, vol. 80, 2003, p.243.

(11) Jeffrey Murphy, 'The Far Milieu Called Home: Australian Bishops at Vatican II (The Final Session Continues: 1965)', The Australasian Catholic Record, vol. 80, 2003, p.366.

(12) For Ralmer's assessment of the Council see his 'The Abiding Significance of the Second Vatican Council', Theological Investigations-20, tr. E Quinn, Crossroad, New York, 1986, pp. 90-109.

(13) John O'Malley, 'The Style of Vatican II', America 188 (24 Feb 2003), 13. See also O'Malley's The Four Cultures of the West, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass: 2004.

(14) See, for example, Karl Rahner, 'The New Image of the Church', Theological Investigations-10, tr. D Bourke Seabury, New York, 1977, p.3-29.

(15) Jeffrey Murphy, 'On the Threshold of Modernity: Australian Bishops at Vatican II (The Third Session: 1964)', The Australasian Catholic Record, vol. 79, 2002, pp. 448-50.

(16) Walter Kasper, Theology and Church, tr. M Kohl SCM, London, 1989, pp.166-67.

(17) For a survey of the changed landscape of Australian Catholic life after Vatican II see, Naomi Turner, Catholics in Australia: A Social History (vol 2), Collins Dove, Melbourne, 1992, p.241 ff.

(18) O'Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community, p.411.

(19) Kasper, Theology and Church, p.167.

(20) Walter Kasper, 'The Council's Vision for a Renewal of the Church', Communio, vol 17, 1990. p.476.

(21) For changing perceptions about 'the missions' see, James Waldersee, A Grain of Mustard Seed: The Society for the Propagation of the Faith and Australia 1837-1977, Chevalier Press, Sydney, 2000, pp.417-19.

(22) O'Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community, p.411.

(23) O'Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community, p.431.

(24) O'Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community, p.431.

(25) Kasper, Theology and Church, p.168.

(26) Kasper, 'The Council's Vision', pp.481-82.

(27) For an analysis of the polarised state of the American church, as well as for alternatives to it, see Joseph Bernadin and Oscar Lipscomb, Catholic Common Ground Initiative: Foundational Documents Crossroad Herder, New York, 1997.

(28) Rush, Still Interpreting Vatican 11, p.85.

Richard Lennan, a priest of the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle, holds a Masters degree from the University of Oxford and a doctorate from the University of Innsbruck. He is Deputy President of the Catholic Institute of Sydney and his most recent book is Risking the Church: The Challenges of Catholic Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). This paper was delivered to the Society on 12 September 2004.