The pope opens the windows
Vatican II begins
Pope John XXIII is seventy-eight years old, dying of stomach cancer, and he has called the most significant council in the Catholic church since Trent.
His stated intention is aggiornamento — an Italian word meaning bringing up to date, updating, opening the windows and letting in fresh air. He wants the church to engage the modern world as it actually is, not as the church wishes it were.
Cardinals and bishops who have been running the Roman Curia for decades are not enthusiastic. They have prepared carefully, producing a series of draft documents that represent the established positions.
John XXIII opens the council on October 11, 1962 with a speech that surprises everyone. He is optimistic. He is warm. He refuses the prophets of doom — those who see only catastrophe and decline in the modern world. He insists that the council should engage the world with the medicine of mercy rather than the weapons of condemnation.
The council runs for four sessions over three years — John XXIII dies in June 1963 and Paul VI completes his work. Its documents on liturgy, the church, ecumenism, religious freedom, and the church's relationship to the modern world reshape Catholic practice and self-understanding in ways that are still being worked out.
Aggiornamento. Fresh air.
Some found it a gift. Some found it a catastrophe. Most found it both.
“I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in.”
— Pope John XXIII, attributed, c. 1962 AD
“Suddenly there came from the sky a sound like the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.”
John XXIII wanted to open the windows. The church had been sealed against modernity for so long that the question of what fresh air would do to the interior was genuinely unpredictable.
What it did was complicated: renewal and confusion, rediscovery and loss, engagement with the world and, in some places, absorption by it. The council did not produce a simple result. It produced a church more honestly engaged with its actual situation.
Every institution faces its version of this choice: seal the windows and maintain the interior climate, or open them and accept that the air will mix.
The sealed room preserves what is inside. It also suffocates it.
What windows in your community need opening? And what are you afraid the fresh air will do?