reflections, updates and homilies from Deacon Mike Talbot inspired by the following words from my ordination: Receive the Gospel of Christ whose herald you have become. Believe what you read, teach what you believe and practice what you teach...
AI-generated illustration depicting six recent popes above St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
The category of the “just war”—born with Augustine, systematized by Aquinas—was, for centuries, the Christian conscience’s attempt to subject violence to moral criteria.
The magisterium of the recent popes has progressively eroded its ground, down to Leo XIV’s explicit move beyond it.
The turn begins in the atomic era. Pius XII restricted the licit recourse to arms to defense alone. As early as 1944, in his Christmas radio message, in fact, he had declared “now out of date” the theory of war as “an apt and proportionate means of solving international conflicts.” It was “out of date” in Pius XII and “outdated” in Leo XIV: the same word nearly eighty years apart.
John XXIII, in “Pacem in Terris” (1963), declared it alienum a ratione—foreign to reason—to imagine that, in the nuclear age, war could serve as an instrument of justice.
The Council, in “Gaudium et Spes,” called for war to be evaluated “with an entirely new attitude” and condemned total war as a crime against God and against man himself.
John Paul II carried this line down into history: his “never again war” rang out against the Gulf War and, later, against the intervention in Iraq, while “Centesimus Annus” had already called war a “self-destruction of mankind.”
Benedict XVI, more sober in tone, had staked out the position while still a cardinal: asked about the war in Iraq (in an interview with Zenit, on May 2, 2003), he observed that modern weapons strike far beyond combatants, and that therefore “today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war.”
With Francis, the doubt becomes a verdict. In “Fratelli Tutti” (No. 258), he writes that it is “very difficult” to invoke rational criteria elaborated in other centuries to speak of a possible “just war,” and he closes with an imperative: “Never again war!”
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From “Pacem in Terris” to “Magnifica Humanitas,” the Church has never ceased to recognize the right to self-defense; it has ceased to lend war the comfort of an adjective.
In a footnote, he adds that Augustine “forged a concept of ‘just war’ that we no longer uphold.”
This is not merely the diagnosis of a “world war fought piecemeal”; it is doctrinal development: at Hiroshima, in 2019, he declared immoral not only the use but the very possession of nuclear weapons.
And to Patriarch Kirill, in March of 2022, with Ukraine under invasion, he said that one can no longer speak, as was once done, of “holy war” or “just war.”
Leo XIV takes a further step. In the encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” he denounces a “paradigm shift”: the rehabilitation of war as an ordinary instrument of international politics, even as the ethical principles that once limited its use erode.
In this context, he writes, “without prejudice to the right to legitimate defense in the strictest sense,” that the theory of the just war, “too often used to justify any kind of war,” is “now outdated.” Humanity has more effective instruments at its disposal: dialogue, diplomacy, forgiveness.
And he extends the argument to the newest frontier—artificial intelligence applied to weapons, which removes the lethal decision from the reach of conscience. His programmatic formula, proclaimed from the loggia on the day of his election, is a peace that is “disarmed and disarming.”
Not a rupture but maturation: Tradition deepening its self-understanding. From “Pacem in Terris” to “Magnifica Humanitas,” the Church has never ceased to recognize the right to self-defense; it has ceased to lend war the comfort of an adjective.
Paul VI: Dialogue as the antidote to religious marketing and social media outrages
Our Editorial Director reflects on the relevance of Pope St Paul VI’s first encyclical, “Ecclesiam suam,” on the sixtieth anniversary of its publication.
By Andrea Tornielli
Dialogue “is not proud, it is not bitter, it is not offensive. Its authority is intrinsic to the truth it explains, to the charity it communicates, to the example it proposes; it is not a command, it is not an imposition. It is peaceful; it avoids violent methods; it is patient; it is generous”: Thus wrote Pope St Paul VI in his first encyclical, Ecclesiam suam, published sixty years ago on 6 August 1964.
These few words are enough to intuit the extraordinary relevance of Pope Paul’s letter, which came out entirely in manuscript from his pen just over a year after his election to the pontificate, with the council still open.
The Pope, born in the Italian province of Brescia, called Jesus’ mission a “dialogue of salvation,” noting that He did not physically oblige anyone to accept him; it was a formidable demand of love, which, if it constituted a tremendous responsibility in those to whom it was addressed, nevertheless “left them free to respond to it or to reject it.” This type of relationship, he said, “indicates a proposal of courteous esteem, of understanding and of goodness on the part of the one who inaugurates the dialogue; it excludes the a priori condemnation, the offensive and time-worn polemic and emptiness of useless conversation.”
One cannot help but notice the stark difference between this approach and that which characterizes so much digital chatter by those who judge everything and everyone, who use derogatory language, and who seem to need an “enemy” to exist.
Dialogue, which for Pope Paul VI is intrinsic in the proclamation of the Gospel, does not have as its goal the immediate conversion of the interlocutor – conversion which, moreover, is always the work of God’s grace, not of the missionary’s dialectical wisdom. Instead, conversion presupposes “the state of mind of one… who realizes that he can no longer separate his own salvation from the endeavour to save others…”
In a word: One is not saved by alone. Nor are we saved by building walls or enclosing ourselves in fortresses separated from the world in order to care for the “pure” and avoid contamination.
Dialogue is “the union of truth and charity, of understanding and love is achieved.” It is not the negation of identity of those who believe that it is necessary to conform to the world and its agendas in order to proclaim the Gospel. Neither is it the exaltation of identity as a kind of separation that makes one look down on “others.” “The Church should enter into dialogue with the world in which it exists and labours. The Church has something to say, the Church has a message to deliver; the Church has a communication to offer” because “even before converting the world, indeed, in order to convert it, we must meet the world and talk to it.” And the world, Paul VI explained, “cannot be saved from the outside.”
But Pope Paul’s first encyclical, from its very first words, contains other valuable insights for the times we are living in. It is "His Church", Ecclesiam suam, that is, the Church is the possession of its founder Jesus Christ. It is not “ours,” it is not built by our hands, it is not the fruit of our ingenuity. Its effectiveness does not depend on marketing, campaigns designed at a desk, ratings, or the ability to fill stadiums. The Church does not exist because it is capable of producing big events, media fireworks, and influencer strategies.
It is in the world to make known – through the daily witness of so many “poor Christs,” forgiven sinners – the beauty of an encounter that saves and gives a horizon of hope. The Church stands before the world to offer everyone the opportunity to come across the gaze of Jesus.
Our Editorial Director reflects on Pope Francis' recent revelation that he has prepared a resignation letter in case a serious illness were to keep him from exercising his ministry, and recalls that Pope Paul VI did the same in 1965.
By Andrea Tornielli
Pope Francis follows in the footsteps of Paul VI. In an interview with the Spanish daily ABC, the Pope revealed on Sunday that he has done like his Brescian predecessor, whom he himself proclaimed a Saint.
The Pope recounts that he gave the then-Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a resignation letter in case of 'health impediment'. We do not know the exact date of this document, but the reference to Cardinal Bertone as Secretary of State places it in the very first months of his pontificate, given that already in October 2013 Cardinal Pietro Parolin had taken over the role of principal collaborator of the Bishop of Rome.
Pope Francis' letter follows the path of Pope Paul VI, as several witnesses in previous decades had spoken of Paul VI's resignation letters, until May 2018 when they were made public by the Regent of the Pontifical Household, Monsignor Leonardo Sapienza.
A Montini scholar and author of many books on Paul VI, who led the Church from 1963 to 1978, bringing the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council and the first 13 years of its implementation to completion, Msgr. Sapienza's book contains these documents of Paul VI in a volume entitled "La barca di Paolo" (The Barque of Paul), published by Edizioni San Paolo.
The 2018 book publishes the declarations in which Paul VI writes that "in the case of infirmity, which is presumed incurable, or of long duration... or in the case of any other serious and prolonged impediment," he resigns the office of pope. The letter is written in Paul VI's very clear handwriting and is dated 2 May 1965. It was therefore handwritten by the Pope from Brescia, not when he was elderly or ill, but just two years after his election with the Second Vatican Council still underway. With these texts, the Pope wished to shelter the Church from a long incapacity, marking a letter of resignation prepared in advance and when necessary to be delivered to the Cardinal Dean so that it could be communicated to the other cardinals in order to declare that pope had stepped down.
There were actually two letters from Pope Paul VI, because together with the resignation letter there is an accompanying document addressed to the Secretary of State that is certainly the strongest text. And it is significant that that document was also commented upon by Pope Francis, who in his own words published in Msgr. Sapienza's book writes: "I read with amazement these letters of Paul VI that I see as a humble and prophetic testimony of love for Christ and his Church; and further proof of the holiness of this great Pope... What matters to him are the needs of the Church and the world. And a Pope prevented by serious illness would not be able to exercise his apostolic ministry effectively enough."
The text of the main letter, marked as "confidential" and addressed to the Dean of the Sacred College on letterhead with the papal coat of arms, opens with these words: 'We Paul the Sixth, by divine Providence Bishop of Rome and Pontiff of the universal Church, in the presence of the Most Holy Trinity Father, Son and Holy Spirit, - invoking the name of Jesus Christ, our Master, our Lord and our Saviour...'. This is followed by an entrustment to Mary and Joseph. Then come the formulation of the resignation with the details. "We declare: in the case of infirmity, which is presumed to be incurable, or of long duration, and which prevents us from sufficiently exercising the functions of our apostolic ministry; or in the case that other grave and prolonged impediment to this is likewise an obstacle, to renounce our sacred and canonical office, both as Bishop of Rome, and as Head of the same Holy Catholic Church, in the hands of the Lord Cardinal Dean... Leaving to him, together at least with the Cardinals in charge of the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia and our Cardinal Vicar for the city of Rome... the faculty of accepting and putting into effect this resignation of ours, which only the higher good of Holy Church calls upon us." At the bottom are the handwritten signature and date, "at Saint Peter's, on Good Shepherd Sunday, the second after Easter, 2 May 1965, the second of our Pontificate".
It is interesting to note that Paul VI does not only refer to an illness, but also to the possibility of "another serious and prolonged impediment". According to those close to Pope Paul VI, these circumstances could relate to what some authoritative witnesses of Pius XII had established at the time, when his resignation could have been invoked in the event of his abduction by Hitler at the height of the Second World War. This would have allowed the cardinals to meet, perhaps in a neutral and safe country, to elect a new Bishop of Rome to replace the one who had become a prisoner of the Nazi dictator.
Lastly, it is worth noting that in the case of both Paul VI and Francis, we are dealing with a "preventive" letter, one that refers to situations in which the Pope finds himself unable to step down from his office freely and in full conscience. These are therefore letters that are for different circumstances, compared to the one for Benedict XVI's resignation that took place almost ten years ago.
ROME — The Second Vatican Council was of great interest to the Orthodox world, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople wrote in an article published in the Vatican newspaper.
The article published Oct. 11 marked the anniversary of the opening of the first session of the Second Vatican Council Oct. 11, 1962, which set in motion major reforms of the church, its structure, liturgy and relations with other Christians and other religions.
After only three months as pontiff, St. John XXIII announced he was convening the council, speaking of the need to update the church and promote Christian unity.
When St. John made the announcement, Patriarch Bartholomew wrote, “hope arose in the Orthodox world, especially in our blessed predecessor Patriarch Athenagoras,” that the event could find new ways toward Christian unity.
However, there was “a certain amount of disappointment” when it was learned the gathering would pertain only to the Roman Catholic Church, he wrote.
Orthodox churches were invited to send observers to the council and would not have voting rights. It was not until St. Paul VI met with Patriarch Athenagoras during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1964 that observers representing the Ecumenical Patriarchate were sent to attend the last two sessions of the council.
Many of the issues the council addressed “aroused keen interest” among the Orthodox, Patriarch Bartholomew wrote. But the one that seemed most important was “the constitution on the sacred liturgy and its appeal to tradition,” not as some relic from the past, “but as a living expression of the church” and its “return to the most ancient sources of the church’s various liturgies.”
The patriarch wrote that St. John XXIII “loved the liturgy, as the church’s highest form of prayer; the liturgy is a sign of unity between God and humanity and between humanity and God. In every rite of the liturgy we find that which unites above everything and for everything.”
“The Second Vatican Council restored this centrality to the Roman liturgy,” he wrote.
All Christians today have “the duty to work to find our unity in that one bread and one chalice, Christ … ‘who is broken but not divided; always eaten, yet never consumed, but sanctifying those who partake,'” he wrote, quoting St. John Chrysostom.
Church celebrates 60th anniversary of opening of Second Vatican Council
Pope John XXIII officially opened the Second Vatican Council on 11 October 1962 during a solemn ceremony inside St. Peter's Basilica, setting in motion a 4-year event which would see the Church open her doors to the world in a process of “updating” (in Italian: "aggiornamento") for the contemporary age.
By Lisa Zengarini
Pope John XXIII opened Vatican II by delivering his famous 'Gaudet Mater Ecclesiae' speech, in which he indicated the main purpose of the Council.
The Second Vatican Council, marked a milestone in Church history, setting off a process of deep transformation within the Church itself, and in its relations with the modern world, other Christian Churches and non-Christian religions. The process is still ongoing.
The 21st Ecumenical Council in Church history
Vatican II was the 21st ecumenical council to be convened in the Church's bimillennial history, and gathered nearly a century after Pope Pius IX convoked Vatican I (1869-70) which defined the dogmas of papal infallibility and the primacy of papal jurisdiction.
Pope St. John XXIII announced the convocation on 25 January 1959 only three months after his election to the Petrine ministry in October 1958, as he addressed the cardinals gathered in the in Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul in Rome.
Offering the modern world the "medicine of mercy"
In his unexpected announcement, Pope John explained that his decision was born from the ascertainment of the spiritual impoverishment of modern society resulting from the deep social and political transformations it had been undergoing over the previous decades, which demanded a new response from the Church. He also mentioned the centuries-old divisions in the Christian family.
In his first Encyclical ‘Ad Petri Cathedram’, on 29 June 1959, and at a preparatory meeting on the next day, the late Pope further clarified that the Council was meant primarily to revitalize the Christian faith in an increasingly secularized world, to give new vigour to the Catholic Church’s mission, and to adapt Church practices to new circumstances.
Pope John wanted a pastoral Council and one of renovation, so that the Catholic teachings could be better understood and accepted in 20th-century society. As he said at the opening speech of the Council, while preserving the integrity of its doctrine, the Church wanted to offer the modern world the "medicine of mercy", and not severe condemnations.
Four sessions and 169 General Congregations
The Vatican II solemnly opened on 11 October 1962 in St. Peter's Basilica, after over three years of preparations. The Council met in four sessions between 1962 and 1965 each lasting between 8 and 12 weeks, in the autumn of each of the four years, for a total of 169 General Congregations. It was shortly interrupted after Pope John’s death on 3 June 1963, and resumed after Pope Pope VI’s election, on 11 June that year. It closed on 8 December 1965.
Non-Catholic observers invited to attend
Between 2,000 and 2,500 Catholic cardinals, patriarchs and bishops from all over the world, assisted by 460 theological experts (periti), attended each session. For the first time Protestants, Orthodox and other non-Catholic observers were invited to assist. 42 lay and religious listeners, men and women, also attended.
16 documents
Overall, the Council issued 16 documents, including four Constitutions (on the Church's structure and nature, on divine Revelation, on the Church in the modern world, and on the liturgy,); nine Decrees (on the Church and the media, ecumenism, Eastern Catholic Churches, bishops, priestly formation, religious life, the laity, priestly ministry and missionary activity. Three Declarations (on non-Christian religions, Christian education and religious freedom were also issued.
The four Constitutions: ‘Lumen Gentium’
One of the most important documents produced by Vatican II is the Dogmatic Constitution ‘Lumen Gentium’ on the Church's structure and nature. It presents the Church as a Mystery and a Communion of baptized believers (the “People of God”) who are called to holiness and who each have specific roles and responsibilities. It reaffirms the missionary character of the Church and confirms the collegiality of the Episcopate "with and under the successor of St. Peter". It establishes, among other things, the faculty for the local Episcopates to restore the permanent diaconate for married men. The role of the laity and their participation in the life and mission of the Church is also emphasized, while the vocation to religious life is considered in relation to the spiritual life of the whole Church.
‘Dei Verbum’
The Dogmatic Constitution ‘Dei Verbum’ on Divine Revelation is another fundamental document of the Council. Its purpose is to spell out the Church’s understanding of the nature of Revelation, that is, the process whereby God communicates with human beings. It is especially relevant for ecumenism, as it touches on questions about Scripture, tradition and the teaching authority of the Church.
‘Sacrosanctum Concilium’
The Constitution ‘Sacrosanctum Concilium’ on the Sacred Liturgy is remembered by many for having allowed vernacular languages in the liturgy, or for having emphasized the importance of community prayer recognizing the value and richness of the various rites in the Church according to the different traditions.
‘Gaudium et Spes’
The Pastoral Constitution ‘Gaudium et Spes’ on the Church in the Modern World, called on the Church to engage in dialogue with contemporary society and its problems, bringing church teaching and moral values to bear on a world too often torn by hatred, war and injustice. The document acknowledged that science and culture have things to teach the Church, but also said the Church has a mission to sanctify the world around it.
Landmark changes in the Church, in ecumenical and interreligious relations
In the years after Vatican II the Church witnessed several landmark changes:
- The new Roman Missal was issued in 1970, with a new cycle of readings designed to offer a richer selection of Scripture. The liturgical calendar was simplified. The rites for sacraments were revised, emphasizing the communal aspects of their celebration. The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults was revived and reformed. As the changes took places, active liturgical participation increased dramatically in many local church communities.
- Lay ministries multiplied. Lay readers and lay ministers of Communion appeared during Mass. Laity were represented on parish councils and diocesan boards, and lay men and women, many with theology degrees, replaced clerics in a number of administrative church positions.
- Throughout the church, there was a renewed attention to Scriptures, in liturgy and in individual spirituality.
- Eastern Catholic churches were encouraged to return to their own traditions, ending a period of Latinization and opening a new appreciation of variety within the universal church.
- Ecumenism flourished, in formal dialogue between Catholic officials and other Christian churches, and in prayer and fellowship encounters at the local level.
- After the council acknowledged the possibility of salvation for non-Christians, dialogue also began with other religions.
- Religious life changed dramatically, as religious orders adopted Vatican norms and rewrote their own constitutions, taking a new look at issues of authority, community and identity.
- The council restored the permanent diaconate as a ministry and allowed married men to be ordained deacons. Today, there are more than 29,000 permanent deacons around the world.
- The council's teaching that the pope and bishops together form a single collegial body led to a new appreciation for bishops and bishops' conferences. The Synod of Bishops was formed to meet regularly and advise the pope.
- Theology was revitalized, especially moral theology, which focused increasingly on biblical sources and the individual conscience, and less on church law or authority.
- The council underlined the church's solidarity with humanity instead of its separation from the secular world, and this led to a mushrooming of social and charitable activities. Church leaders spoke frequently about the church's identification with the poor and suffering, and the pope became a strong human rights advocate.
At the same time, the church experienced some worrisome developments, including a dramatic drop in vocations and an increase in the number of priests and religious seeking laicization. Mass attendance fell in many places, many Catholics abandoned the sacrament of penance, and dissent on certain teachings, such as birth control, was widespread.
The Catholic Church’s historic council is misunderstood today by both progressives and nostalgic traditionalists. Its true message endures.
By George Weigel
The Second Vatican Council, which opened 60 years ago on Oct. 11, 1962, was the most important Catholic event in half a millennium. Its achievements were many and notable; it was also followed by ecclesiastical upheavals that continue to roil the Church today.
After Vatican II, Catholics worshiped in their own languages, rather than in Latin. By urging Catholics to become more biblically literate, the council inspired lay communities of spiritual renewal, some of them robustly charismatic. It also led to greater lay participation in all aspects of Church life: liturgical, educational, managerial, evangelical. The council fully inserted Catholicism into the ecumenical movement’s quest for Christian unity, even as it dramatically reconfigured the Church’s relationship to its religious parent, Judaism.
Vatican II was also the moment in which Catholicism fully realized its claim to be a global (“catholic”) institution, as churchmen from outside the Church’s historic European core began to take prominent roles in shaping the Catholic future. The extraordinary growth of the Catholic Church in sub-Saharan Africa—where Catholicism now counts hundreds of millions of adherents, many of them first- or second-generation Christians—was accelerated by the council’s promotion of native African clergy and religious orders, its disentanglement of Catholicism from colonialism and its insistence on the Church’s essentially missionary character.
Had there been no Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church of the 21st century would look rather different. So would world politics. The council’s seminal Declaration on Religious Freedom, which recognized that the altar-and-throne alliances of the past were not possible under modern political conditions, helped to transform the Church from a bulwark of the status quo into one of the world’s foremost institutional defenders of basic human rights. Absent Vatican II, it is difficult to think of a pope coming from Poland or to imagine that pope playing a pivotal role in one of contemporary history’s great transformations: the self-liberation of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1989 collapse of European communism.
On this 60th anniversary, however, critics of Vatican II and its implementation will emphasize other realities of post-conciliar Catholic life. In the decade after the council concluded on Dec. 8, 1965, tens of thousands of priests and religious sisters abandoned their rectories and convents, in the largest such exodus since the 16th-century Reformations. The council wanted the Mass, the central act of Catholic worship, to be more accessible and participatory, thereby giving Catholics a deeper sense of the spiritual amplitude within which this world exists. Instead, the Mass was too often dumbed down into banality, if not downright silliness.
Catholic activists, especially in Latin America, tried to concoct an impossible synthesis between Christianity and Marxism, with disastrous political, economic and social results still evident in places like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Peru and even Mexico. The once-thriving Catholicism of Western Europe—countries whose theologians and bishops were the principal movers-and-shakers at Vatican II—has largely disappeared since the council, replaced by a Church of the Zeitgeist that seems far more liberal-Protestant and woke-progressive than Catholic. Post-conciliar breakdowns in seminary training and the discipline of the clergy were major contributors to the crimes of clerical sexual abuse. And then there is the scandal of Catholic public officials who, inaccurately claiming the warrant of Vatican II’s call for a dialogue with the world of political power, promote public policies that contradict both Catholic teachings and the moral truths the Church holds we can know by reason.
Given that mixed picture over the past six decades, the question inevitably poses itself on this diamond anniversary: Was Vatican II really necessary?
It was.
Understanding why means coming to grips with the full truth about Pope John XXIII and his purposes for the council he summoned. And that requires getting beyond the mythology of Pope John as a jolly old Italian nonno (grandfather) who wanted to let a thousand ecclesiastical flowers bloom.
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, elected Bishop of Rome on Oct. 28, 1958, as an elderly placeholder, took a different path to the papacy than many of his predecessors. They were the sons of aristocrats or socially well-placed professionals; his people were dirt-poor northern Italian peasants. Rather than being a theologian or a canon lawyer, his intellectual interest was history, and especially the Church-reforming work of St. Charles Borromeo in 16th-century Milan—a previous moment of social, political and ecclesiastical turmoil.
An Italian army chaplain in World War I, Roncalli was a Vatican diplomat in the Balkans, Greece and Turkey during the cataclysm of World War II. In those largely non-Catholic European peripheries, he provided Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust with false baptismal certificates and helped facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine. Immediately after the war, he was sent as Vatican representative to a shattered, demoralized France. There, he witnessed a local Church, bitterly divided between royalists and republicans since the French Revolution, struggle to reignite Christian faith among alienated workers and existentialist intellectuals.
Promoted to Patriarch of Venice and given the cardinal’s red hat as the Catholic equivalent of the faithful employee’s gold watch, Roncalli experienced the Italian Church’s weaknesses beneath what seemed to be its rock-solid position in society and culture. All this gave him a distinctive optic on the mid-20th-century pathologies of world civilization and convinced this conservative man of traditional piety that the Church’s approach had to change.
In 1962, the influential German magazine Der Spiegel editorialized admiringly that, after 2,000 years, the Catholic Church “had achieved a unity and consistency in teaching and structure never seen before… It possesses ‘a single truth’ and a single custodian of that truth.” The “custodian” knew better. From his historical studies and pastoral experience, John XXIII knew that the defensive Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, however successful a salvage operation, had run its course. It was time to raze the bastions that Catholicism had erected and turn its robust institutions into platforms for evangelization and mission in order to engage a deeply troubled modern world. The Church, he believed, existed to proclaim and compassionately witness to Christian truth for the world’s healing and sanctification. It could not hide that truth like the frightened servant in Christ’s parable of the talents (Luke 19:12-28).
In Pope John’s adult lifetime, that world had come close to committing civilizational suicide twice, in two global wars that took perhaps 80 million lives. The world was now precariously balanced on the razor’s edge of an even greater catastrophe, nuclear war. Such a world, materially rich but spiritually impoverished, needed a positive, ennobling vision of human nature, human community and human destiny. The dangers confronting humanity, John XXIII believed, were the byproducts of false ideas about who we are, how we ought to live together and where the human story was going. By re-energizing the Church for a mission of proclaiming the truths about our humanity revealed in the person, teaching and work of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, Vatican II would help the world rediscover humanity’s true “dignity [and] purposes,” as the pope put it in the document solemnly convoking the council.
In his opening address to Vatican II, John XXIII suggested how ecclesiastical renewal would take place. The council, he said, should rekindle the evangelical fire of Christocentric faith that had animated the first Christians and their bold mission. “Christ Jesus,” the octogenarian pope boldly claimed, “still stands at the center of history and life.” Reanimated by that conviction, the Church would develop the means to express ancient and enduring truths in ways that modernity could hear.
Contrary to the claims of those votaries of Pope Francis who claim that the council instituted a “paradigm shift” in the Church’s self-understanding, John XXIII did not convoke Vatican II to reinvent Catholicism. As he put it in his opening address, the council’s “greatest concern” must be the more effective presentation of Catholic truth in full, what the pope called “the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine.”
That would not happen, however, if the Church merely guarded this “precious treasure…as if we were only concerned with an antiquity.” Nor would it suffice to repeat familiar formulas of faith, like those in the simple, question-and-answer catechisms that Catholics had long known. The Church had to do more, and Pope John borrowed from the work of the great English theologian, John Henry Newman, to describe a truly Catholic development of doctrine: “What…is necessary today is that the whole of Christian doctrine…be more fully and profoundly known…[and] presented in the way demanded by our times. For the deposit of faith, the truths contained in our venerable doctrine, are one thing; the fashion in which they are expressed, but with the same meaning and the same judgment, is another thing.”
So the Church would propose, and in a vocabulary that the people of the modern world could hear and engage. The council was not summoned, however, to discard the essential truths that the Church had proposed for two millennia. For as the pope went on to say, “it is clearer than ever before that the truth of the Lord remains forever” (Psalm 116:2). Moreover, that “truth of the Lord” is, in fact, the Lord himself: “To the human race, laboring under so many difficulties, [the Church] says, as Peter once did to the unfortunate man who begged him for alms, ‘Silver and gold have I none, but what I have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, rise and walk’” (Acts 3:6). Jesus Christ, not the Church, must be the center of the Catholic proclamation.
Thoughtful assessments of Vatican II and its legacy must acknowledge that the pre-conciliar Catholic past was more brittle and fragile after two world wars, and more vulnerable to the cultural tsunami of the 1960s, than some nostalgic traditionalists imagine. Moreover, bunker Catholicism is a betrayal of the great commission that was central to John XXIII’s original intention for Vatican II: “Go…and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).
Sixty years after Pope John opened the council by proposing a Christ-centered humanism capable of animating just and humane societies, an empirical fact is worth noting: Amid crises, challenges and persecutions, the flourishing parts of the world Church today are those that have accepted his call to a mission that offers friendship with Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life, and that live that mission compassionately in the fullness of Catholic faith.
By contrast, those sectors of the world Church that have taken Vatican II as an invitation to teach and live Catholic Lite are demonstrating that Catholic Lite leads inevitably to Catholic Zero. In 2022, the vibrant parts of a globalized Catholicism are those living John XXIII’s original intention for Vatican II as a council that would renew the Church for its mission of sanctifying an often claustrophobic, self-absorbed and frightened world. Those that misconstrue Vatican II as a call to embrace secular modernity uncritically rather than to engage and convert it are dying, because they fail to offer the world a Christ-centered medicine for its ills.
John XXIII often spoke of his hope that Vatican II would be a “new Pentecost,” recalling the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles. The council he imagined was not a business meeting in which the branch officers of a global enterprise discussed ways to increase market share in a stable cultural and social environment. Pope John intended Vatican II to be an event in the realm of the spirit: an experience of the love of God breaking into the world anew. That experience, this man of deep faith hoped, would not only console but re-enliven a world beset by the fear that is the corrosive byproduct of spiritual emptiness.
Realizing that intention remains a noble and urgent task for Catholics today.
This essay is adapted from Mr. Weigel’s new book, “To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II,” which will be published by Basic Books on Oct. 4.
