The History of Vatican II

Lecture 6: The Effects of Council Part II

James Hitchcock

In the previous lecture we talked about the
aftermath of the Council, some of the reactions to it, and that's the
subject that I want to continue with today and perhaps give a little
bit of prognosis about the future. At the end of the last lecture I was
making the distinction between two approaches to the Council, there are
two approaches to the subject of renewal. The one which is called
resourcement, going back to the sources, going back to the early
Church. The other is modernism, that is, looking to contemporary
culture for a way of renewing the Church. Those who advocate the
second, the modernist agenda, can point to some limited places in the
Council documents which seem to support their position. Inmoney under false
pretenses. We can make that analogy: the Church can listen, it can
dialog with the modern world, but always with the understanding that
the Church has a wisdom which the modern world lacks and which the
modern world badly needs.

No one can understand the Council and the effect it had, it seems to
me, who was not alive at the time, for the simple reason that the
psychology of it, the mood of the time, was so important, similar to
what I said in the first lecture about the tone and the mood of the
Pontificate of John XXIII, beyond what it is he may have actually said
or done. Things were moving with such speed, unexpected things were
happening. The Church which had seemed to be immobile for centuries,
which had seemed to be a