Aggiornamento
John XXIII and the spirit of renewal
The Second Vatican Council is not one event. It is four sessions across three years, over two thousand bishops from one hundred and thirty-three countries, producing sixteen documents that touch everything from the liturgy to the church's relationship with Judaism to the definition of the church itself.
The council changes the mass from Latin to the vernacular languages — making the liturgy accessible to billions of Catholics who had been watching and not understanding for centuries. It changes the posture of the priest at mass — turning him to face the congregation rather than the altar, making the Eucharist a shared meal rather than a clerical act performed on behalf of the people. It affirms the principle of religious freedom — reversing centuries of Catholic teaching that the state has an obligation to support Catholicism against other religions. It produces Nostra Aetate — the document on the church's relationship with non-Christian religions — which repudiates the charge of collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion.
These are not small adjustments. They are fundamental reconsiderations of how the Catholic church understands itself and its place in the world.
The council does not resolve everything. The debates it opens are still running. The reform it began is contested in every subsequent pontificate.
But the room that was sealed is now open. The liturgy that was in Latin is now in a thousand languages.
Tyndale would have recognized it. Wycliffe would have wept.
“The Church is no museum of dead relics but a living spring, pouring out water for a thirsty world.”
— Pope John XXIII, opening the Second Vatican Council, 1962 — paraphrased
“but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”
Wycliffe argued that ordinary people should have the Bible in their own language. Tyndale died for it. Luther translated it. The Council of Trent resisted it. Vatican II granted it — for the mass, at least — five centuries after Wycliffe made the argument.
John XXIII opened the council with the same instinct: the church, he insisted, was no display case of lifeless relics but a living spring still pouring out water for a world dying of thirst.
Five centuries. The church moves slowly.
But it moves. The liturgy that was sealed in Latin for over a thousand years is now in Swahili and Mandarin and Portuguese and Tagalog. The mass that Tyndale's parishioners watched without understanding is now spoken in their language.
The church is not a case of dead relics. It is a living spring.
Sometimes it takes five centuries for the spring to reach the people who are thirsty. The water is still water when it arrives.