PopeWatch: Vatican II as a Relic of the Sixties

Sandro Magister has a fascinating look at Vatican II in a historical context written by Roberto Pertici.  His comments on how Vatican II attempted to address Communism are insightful:

As is well known, Vatican II did not renew the condemnation of communism, which dated at least from “Divini Redemptoris” of 1937. In “Gaudium et spes,” which dealt with the relationship between the Church and the world, the Council essentially remained silent on it: both as a political regime (at a time when more than half the world population of three billion people gravitated in the bloc of Communist countries, where over one hundred million Catholics lived, almost one sixth of the 570 million scattered around the globe), and as an ideology, in those years extremely pervasive in politics and culture in every part of the world. In the “votes” of the bishops in the preparatory phase of the Council, such a condemnation had been repeatedly requested: indeed, some considered it the fundamental purpose of the upcoming assembly. In the last session 454 fathers presented an amendment in this sense to “Gaudium et spes,” which was not taken into consideration, perhaps on account of a procedural irregularity. The silence was of such significance – Andrea Riccardi writes – “as to lend credence to the rumor of an explicit agreement between the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Holy See.”

The long-standing discussion will continue over whether there was such an agreement, but here it is not so much a matter of reopening this question as of examining the ways in which the discourse on communism unfolded in those years in the pontifical documents: from John XXIII’s “Pacem in terris” of April 11 1963 (distinction between error and error-maker; distinction between ideology and historical movements; possibility of a practical rapprochement) to Paul VI’s “Ecclesiam suam” of August 6 1964, which after reiterating the condemnation, but with an indirect argument (“Yet is it really so much we who condemn them? One might say that it is rather they and their politicians who are clearly repudiating us, and for doctrinaire reasons subjecting us to violent oppression. Truth to tell, the voice we raise against them is more the complaint of a victim than the sentence of a judge”), expressed hope in a future dialogue: “We do not therefore give up hope of the eventual possibility of a dialogue between these men and the Church, and a more fruitful one than is possible at present, when we can only express our justifiable complaints and repudiations.”

We now know a lot about how John XXIII’s policy toward the USSR and the communist world developed, and the role that the Italian interlocutors played in it: the environment that revolved around the Christian Democrat Amintore Fanfani and his neo-Atlanticism and the Catholic contacts close to the Italian Communist Party and its leader Palmiro Togliatti (from Fr. Giuseppe De Luca to Franco Rodano). From this point of view, the lecture Togliatti gave on March 20 1963 at the Teatro Duse in Bergamo, on “The destiny of man,” is of great importance.

The communist secretary explicitly entered into the conciliar debate. First of all he envisaged the relationship between Catholics and communists in a new way: “We no longer accept,” he said, ”the naive and erroneous conception that the extension of understanding and the change of social structures would be enough to bring about radical modifications [of religious conscience]. This conception, deriving from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century materialism, has not withstood the test of history. The roots are deeper, the transformations take place in a different way, the reality is more complex.”

Then he took up a few themes that were dear to the Catholic world and to pontifical diplomacy: the need for peace and criticism of the balance of terror. The political consequences that Togliatti drew from these are interesting: “the refusal of our country to participate in any sort of nuclear armament, the explicit condemnation of politics based on the notorious balance of terror, and so on….”

Finally he noted with satisfaction the failure of anti-communism. The anti-communist commitment of the Church of Pius XII – he said – had been the last manifestation of the so-called “age of Constantine,” meaning the alliance between spiritual and temporal power. Here Togliatti made an explicit reference to the famous article by the Dominican theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu that appeared in 1961: one of the basic texts for understanding the motivations of the conciliar majority. And he harshly argued with the leader of the minority, Cardinal Ottaviani, who persisted in his anti-communism: “His,” declared the communist leader, “is the talk of a loser. In fact, is it not true that Cardinal Ottaviani is the one who, having elaborated the preparatory documents of the recent ecumenical Council according to a certain approach, was defeated by the Council itself, because his ecclesiastical policy framework was blatantly rejected by the majority of the council fathers? And he was defeated, if we are not mistaken, precisely because there seems to have been, in the majority, a solicitude in the search for positions that adapt to the new realities of today’s world.” In his opinion the fundamental problem of the Council was that of overcoming “the identification between the Western world and the Catholic world,” which “makes the Church itself lose its universal, ecumenical character.”

For Togliatti this overcoming meant above all the acknowledgment that there existed in the world a “new multiple articulation of social systems and the system of states,” in practice a vast field of socialist countries with which the Church had to deal. There was no need to fear: “Today in the Soviet Union there is no more talk of dictatorship, but of the state of all the people,” and the very experience of the Italian communists showed that it was possible to combine democracy and socialism: “The campaigns of lies are falling apart, going to pieces. Those who travel to the villages of the famous ‘Church of silence’ find that there are churches, sometimes more crowded than among us.” Togliatti perceived that the Council was marking the end of Catholic anti-communism and identified several themes that could form the framework for a dialogue between Communists and Catholics: the end of Westernism, the problem of peace, the opposition to the blocs, the criticism of nuclear deterrence.

This was the communism with which the Vatican leaders had an environmental contiguity: historians today know that, ironically, the persecution of the Churches and Christian communities in the USSR increased in the early 1960s, just when the Vatican was setting its new course with respect to communism. According to the testimony of his son-in-law Alexei Adjubei, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev did not have a particular sensitivity for religious issues, on the contrary it can be said that on the inside he adopted the anti-religious attitude of the party: the detente with the Vatican represented only one piece of a far broader question of international relations.

I believe it can said that the problem of communism is the one on which the decisions of Vatican II were more influenced by historical contingencies and the subsequent historical dynamic corresponded less to its expectations. In the early 1960s, real socialism in Europe was already in a phase of decline: most historians judge 1956, the year of the 20th congress and the invasion of Hungary, as the turning point, the beginning of the downward spiral that in the span of thirty years would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR. But few perceived this situation at the time. What was striking, instead, was the dynamic aspect of Khrushchevite reformism: the less oppressive character of censorship, the cautious economic reforms, the successes in the field of missiles and early space explorations. Above all, Khrushchev abandoned Stalin’s old thesis on the inevitability of war between capitalism and communism and launched the idea of ​​”coexistence” and peaceful “competition.” And he too said he was against (because he sensed the USSR could not compete in the long run with an American rearmament policy) what Togliatti called the “notorious balance of terror,” and in May 1958, in a clever propaganda move, had even announced a unilateral moratorium on aboveground nuclear tests. While the balance of terror was instead the fulcrum of American politics: only nuclear war, therefore no war.

On the latter strategy the condemnation of “Gaudium et spes” (81) was resolute: “Since the defensive strength of any nation is considered to be dependent upon its capacity for immediate retaliation, this accumulation of arms, which increases each year, likewise serves, in a way heretofore unknown, as deterrent to possible enemy attack. Many regard this procedure as the most effective way by which peace of a sort can be maintained between nations at the present time. Whatever be the facts about this method of deterrence, men should be convinced that the arms race in which an already considerable number of countries are engaged is not a safe way to preserve a steady peace, nor is the so-called balance resulting from this race a sure and authentic peace.” It was therefore an objectively anti-American position.

An element of Realpolitik emerges in Vatican II’s positions on communism, which would continue even after the fall of Khrushchev in the suffocating climate of the Brezhnev era. A Realpolitik, similar to that of Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s. Diplomacy does not have to imagine a different world, but to deal with the world as it is (or as it seems to be): its vocation is to negotiate always and regardless, and to reach some sort of agreement. In the Vatican leadership, but I would say in the majority of the conciliar and post-conciliar Catholic world, there was a widespread certainty that communism in Europe would stand the test of time. Indeed, there was perhaps something more: the belief that the world was going in that direction and that it was therefore necessary to enter that trend to “Christianize” it. It would take a Polish pope to radically change the situation in the span of a few years.

Go here to read the rest.  This misinterpretation of Communism at Vatican II casts a glaring light on the main weakness of Vatican II.  Religious dogma is timeless.  That Christ died for the sins of all is as true now as it was at the time of the Crucifixion. The way that men react to the times in which they live is an ongoing and ever changing kaleidoscope.  The intent of Vatican II to throw the windows of the Church open to the modern world, made sure that council would remain anchored to that moment of time and that as the years passed its decisions would become increasingly irrelevant.  Nothing is more ephemeral than the phrase contemporary times, since the times are always changing.  To have a religion like the Catholic Church, with a huge body of dogmas, doctrines and teachings amassed over twenty centuries, to moor itself to the view of the world taken by senior churchmen and their advisors circa 1958-1965 is simply farcial.   Traditionally Catholics have been taught to renounce the world, the flesh and the Devil, and to embrace the Eternity of God.  With Vatican II Eternity was traded for Earthly relevance, and Earthly relevance vanishes as swiftly as water in a desert.  Vatican II was doomed from the start due to its attempt to make the Church amenable to the world of over half a century ago.