Newman Lecture: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II presented by George Weigel

0:11Good evening. Welcome, everyone. My name is doctor Steven Gremlin. I'm the director of integrative studies in our doctorate in clinical psychology program here at Divine Mercy University. I'll be your MC this evening. The Newman Lecture Series now in its twenty fourth year is sponsored by Divine Mercy University and aims at building a body of learning discussion that is Catholic both in its breadth of research and in its dialogue with contemporary Catholic Christian thought. We are pleased to offer tonight's lecture both on campus and online. And so just a few words to our audiences about submitting questions for our speaker following the lecture. If you're joining us online, as questions occur to you, please type them in the chat box or the question and answer box in Zoom.

1:02For technical reasons, online questions will be accepted only until the end of the talk. If you're joining us here on campus, we have two microphones. One in each of the outer aisles. You can queue up behind those, and, ask your questions in person. Thank you. And now I invite our president, father Charles Sikorsky, to open us in prayer and to introduce tonight's distinguished speaker. Father Charles. Thank you, Doctor. Goenan. And before I start the prayer, a little commercial about DMU. I know most of you here are students. We have 80 or 90 here present, but we have another 500 who are on live stream. Just a little bit about who we are, what our mission is. We face a mental health crisis in our world today.

2:00Past three years, the rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide, great sense of the loss of identity, purpose is rendered. And the epidemic is kind of a perfect storm. It has tremendous, track once in a book of physical and spiritual levels. We see it in the breakdown of family. We see it in the weakening of institutions and even attempts to redefine reality, redefine the human person. Secondly, modern science and the mental health professions are for large part dominated by our optimistic, and secular world view that at times exacerbates some of these problems we believe. Nonetheless, close to seventy percent of those who seek mental health treatment say their values and their faith are important to them in their treatment.

2:54And a growing body of research demonstrates how effective integrating faith and virtue into therapy is. So Divine Mercy University is doing something about it. Our mission is to blend the best of science with a view of the human person shaped by the wisdom of the church. We do it in two ways. We are forming an army of elite Catholic mental health professionals, many of them in the room today or future. Right? They're here, who will serve all over the country and and even all over the world. We currently have over 600, students and 700 alumni. We've also become thought leaders, but we have published a textbook that sets forth the truth about the human person. And we've had a copy over here. It's not here.

3:40That's okay. Don't worry. Okay. We have partnerships for research and faculty formation with 16 different universities around the world. So our goal, we wanna put alumni in every city, every diocese, every every parish, if we could, every Catholic school. And so, wanna learn more about our mission, you can check us out divinemercy.edu on the on the web. So begin now with our prayer. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen. Merciful father, in your son, Jesus Christ, you revealed your love and poured it out upon us. As we celebrate the joy of Easter, may his triumph over evil, suffering, and death itself. Fill us with peace and hope in the midst of the challenges of today's world and our own personal process.

4:32Saint John Paul II reminded us, Jesus Christ is the answer to the question posed by every human life. The love of Christ compels us to share that good news with everyone. We believe that the death and resurrection of Christ reveal the true meaning of human existence. Therefore, nothing generally human fails to find an echo in our hearts. Christ died for all, so we must be at the service of all. So the grant has the courage to be faithful and persevering witnesses as we serve our brothers and sisters especially those suffering with emotional and mental health difficulties. As as second Timothy reminds us, the spirit of God has given us no cowardly spirit. Therefore, never be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord.

5:18Eternal father, by the passion and resurrection of your son, have mercy on us and upon the whole world. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen. Now the privilege of honor, first, I wanna thank George Wigle for being with us tonight. We're looking very forward to his his talk. He currently is the distinguished senior fellow and William e Simon chair in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center here in Washington DC. Catholic theologian, one of America's leading public intellectuals. He actually led the, Ethics and Public Policy Center from '8 1989 to 1996. He's perhaps best known for his widely translated internationally acclaimed two volume biography opposing John Paul the second in the New York Times bestseller, Witness to Hope back in 1999.

6:15He's written more than 30 other books, many of which have been translated into other languages. The most recent book which some of you have here to sanctify the world, the vital legacy of Vatican II will be the subject of this talk tonight. But as many essays, op ed columns and reviews appear regularly in major journals and newspapers across The United States. He has a weekly column called the Catholic Difference that's syndicated to over 80 newspapers and magazines in seven countries. He received his BA from Saint Mary's Seminary and University Baltimore and an MA from University of St. Michael's College in Toronto. The recipient of 19 honorary doctorates in fields including divinity philosophy law and social science and has been awarded the papal cross pro ekklesia at Pontificia, Poland's Gloria Arts Gold Medal and Lithuania's diplomacy star.

7:15I mentioned his talk tonight will be on the vital legacy of Vatican two and I, when I was seminary in early two thousand, I I, we studied theology. It was more about how do you interpret Vatican two. Right? There was the one side saying what the spirit of Vatican two versus the letter and what it actually say. And people like we study people like John Paul the second and Cardinal Ratzinger at the time who gave meaning to it. I'm sure we we were supposed to study why the council was called in the first place and we did. But the focus is so much on how to interpret it that I forgot a lot of that. And so when I first read this book, I was like fascinated by the depth of of what led up to that and why it's so important.

7:59I think today, more and more people some people have questions about this and I think it's good for us all to understand better the council of what it said and how it can help us in today's challenges, in today's world, today's the context of what other than we do here at DMU and everything each one of you are gonna be doing. So you can compare to me hearing my speech. So with further ado, mister George Weidl. Thank you very much, father. Good evening, everyone. It's a great, pleasure to be here, see all this wonderful work, going on here and to see some old friends, whom I've known since the days of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. As father Sikorsky mentioned, there is really nothing, more urgent from a pastoral point of view than dealing with the mental health crisis that is obvious throughout the Western world.

9:01And to do that, in a Catholic perspective, addresses that crisis at its roots, which brings us to the topic of tonight's lecture, which is really in three parts. What why was Vatican two necessary? What did it actually teach? And how was it given its authoritative interpretation by John Paul the second and Benedict the sixteenth. But let's begin by rolling back the videotape, to 10/11/1962, when an extraordinary pageant played out in Rome as 2,500 Catholic bishops, all dressed in white hopes and mitres, processed out of the Apostolic Palace through Saint Peter's Square into the basilica, which had been turned into a huge auditorium called an Ella. There were 20 tiers of bleachers, we would call them in American Sports Stadium terms, on either side of Saint Peter's from the Narthex to the Baldacchino Of Of Bernini over the tomb of Saint Peter's.

10:26And, at the end of that enormous procession came, pope John the twenty third carried on the Sadia Justatoria, this portable throne. They had the ostrich feathers on the side, Swiss guards with halberds, all of this stuff. And in an era of great technicolor biblical movies, right, you know, the 10 Commandments, Ben Hur, all of this business, this was fantastic visuals. It wouldn't and it was, we now can see the last great pageant of the Catholicism that had been formed in the counter reformation largely by the influence of the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century in response to the various Protestant reformations, of that of that century. But that did not seem to be what Vatican two was going to be about, at the time.

11:36It it was not clear at that moment that we were at a hinge point in in the history of the church. That drama would unfold over the next four years. I do find today that young people in particular, including some of our most, vibrant, pious, intellectually engaged young Catholics, constantly asked me why was all of that necessary? That's not a bad question. Councils have generally been a mess in the history of the church. Here is Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, doctor of the church, one of the three great Cappadocian fathers, explaining why he was not going to go to a meeting of bishops in March that was aimed at sorting out the work of the First Council of Constantinople. Saint Gregory wrote, to tell the truth, I am convinced that every assembly of bishops is to be avoided.

12:48That's okay. For I have never experienced a happy ending to any such council, not even the abolition of abuses, but only ambition or wrangling about what was taking place. Thank god there has only been 21 of these things in two thousand years of Christian history. However, in order to grasp the true meaning of Vatican two, we have to get straight why John the twenty third elected as a transitional pope in 1958 at a moment when the Catholic church looked from the outside to be a kind of impregnable fortress, took the decision within four months of his election, three months of his election, to summon the twenty first ecumenical council in in the history of of the church. And actually, the reason why Vatican two was necessary, which John the twenty third grasped in a singular way, had been given almost ninety years before the council by the saint in whose honor this lecture series is named.

14:14It was 10/02/1873, and a new English seminary was being opened, in Oulton outside of Birmingham, Saint Bernard's Seminary. It's a great moment of satisfaction for men and women who had living memories of the anti Catholic penal laws in England. And Newman, who was, of course, the all star theologian of the English church, was invited to preach the homily at the dedication mass of this new seminar. And you might have expected, that they might have expected at the time that he would give this rousing, hey, we're back, homily, at the opening of a new seminary, which seemed to promise a very bright future for the church in England. That is not what Newman did. Here is what he said on that occasion.

15:20I know that all times are perilous, and that in every time, serious and anxious minds alive to the honor of god and the needs of man are apt to consider no times so perilous as their own. Still, I think that the trials which lay before us are such as would a call and make dizzy even such courageous hearts as Saint Athanasius, Saint Gregory the Great, or Saint Gregory the Seventh. And they would confess that dark as the prospect of their own day was to them, ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it. For Christianity has never yet had experience of a world simply irreligious. Now note that John Henry Newman did not say a world become pagan. Christianity had, in that point, eighteen hundred years of experience dealing with paganism.

16:36This was something different. Pagan religiosity, however bizarre, weird, cruel, It may have seemed and it seems to us in the retrospective time. Pagan religiosity at least acknowledged that this reality of ours was in globe within a larger transcendent reality. This was not all there is. The answer to Peggy Lee's song, is that all there is, was no. Even pagan religiosity figured that out. This was something quite different. This was a world that some thirty years after Newman's sermon at the Olton Seminary, the one of the founding fathers of the discipline of sociology, Max Weber, would call a disenchanted world, A world that had lost the capacity to imagine that this reality was in globe within a larger transcendent reality that in fact gave this world meaning.

17:59Evelyn Waugh, the great, English Catholic novelist, caught the character of this disenchanted world very well in a statement he put into the mouth of his hero, Charles Ryder, in the novel Brideshead Revisited. And at one point in that novel, Ryder had this to say, which I think perfectly captures the state of affairs, the disenchanted state of affairs in, upper class, England of the nineteen twenties. Here's what he said. I had no religion. The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it. Religion was a hobby, which some people professed and others did not.

19:07At the best, it was slightly ornamental. At the worst, it was the province of complexes and inhibitions, catchwords of the decade, and of the intolerance, hypocrisy, and shared stupidity attributed it to it for centuries. No one had ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent philosophical system and in transigent historical claims, nor had they done would I have been much interested. That's a disenchanted world. It's not a pagan world. That's an irreligious world. That kind of a world is a claustrophobic world. It it's like a house without windows or doors or skylights. It's dark. It's silent. And what happens to people in those circumstances? Here we are right in the wheelhouse of Divine Mercy University.

20:15People turn against each other because they're frightened or because they believe incredibly weird and stupid things. And that claustrophobic world of European high culture had indeed led to a civilizational crisis. It is very striking from the retrospective now almost a century and a quarter to look at books, articles, magazines, etcetera from the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, things published in 1899, 1900. There is this remarkable optimism about the future. A maturing humanity tutored by science, having rid itself of mythologies like religious conviction would rise to ever greater heights of prosperity, knowledge, freedom, human fraternity, etcetera. That was the mood in the high culture of Western civilization at the turn into the twentieth century.

21:34Then what happened? Two world wars, three totalitarian systems, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, the greatest persecution of the church in history, the holocaust of European jewelry, the, Ukrainian holodomor, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And that's only in the first fifty years. That was the civilizational crisis that the church had to address and had to find a way to address that was different than its proposal, which had manifestly not been heard by that civilization in crisis from probably the mid nineteenth century on. John the twenty third grasped that reality, in a way that reflected his distinctive biography. Unlike his immediate papal predecessors, he was not the son of Italian aristocrats or well established Italian Catholic professionals.

22:54He was the son of dirt poor subsistence farmers in a little village called Sato El Monte near the town of Bergamo in in Northern Italy. He had been an army chaplain, an Italian army chaplain in the First World War, so he knew that horror show, that first European attempt to commit civilizational suicide, up close and personal. He entered the diplomatic service of the Vatican after, that military service, and his postings as a Vatican representative were on the peripheries of Europe, the non Catholic peripheries of Europe, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey. He was a rescuer of Jews during the second World War. He was by necessity involved with the majority Orthodox population of the areas in which he was the papal representative.

23:58And he was processing all that, if you'll permit me the term, through a different kind of education. Most of his papal predecessors had been trained in either theology or canon law or both. He had been trained as a historian. And his particular interest as a historian was the reforming papacy reforming episcopate of Saint Charles Borromeo in Milan in the decades after the Council of Trent. After the second World War, he's appointed the Vatican nuncio to France, and what does he find there? There seems to be a kind of Catholic crust, but beneath it is a church which has had, in fact, a not very glorious second World War with far too many Catholic leaders and people, aligning themselves with the collaborationist Vichy regime.

25:05He found a church that was that was in a hundred and fifty year long civil war between monarchists and small r French Republicans. The monarchists wanted to refight the French revolution and the small r Republicans saying that's done. Let's get on with the future here. And a church paralyzed publicly because of that. A church that was losing losing huge number of congregants in the working classes to communist trade unions and among intellectuals to the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Then at the end of that period of his life, he has given the Vatican equivalent of the gold watch after fifty years of service to the company and made the patriarch of Venice and a cardinal.

26:02What does he find in Venice? Well, Venice looks very Catholic, but there's no energy. There's no evangelical energy. The church has lost its edge as a culture forming reality in Italian life. So when he comes to the papacy in October 1958 as a 76 year old man expected to keep the seat warm for a few years, and then the church will make the generational jump after that. He knows that what was being said of the church at the time was not really true. Here, for example, is the influential German magazine Der Spiegel stating what I think was the widespread view of the Catholic situation in the early nineteen sixties. There's Spiegel Road in an editorial, currently, the Roman Catholic church after a two thousand year long, history has achieved a unity and consistency in teaching and structure never seen before.

27:23Today, it presents an unprecedented example of a spiritual community. It possesses a single truth and a single custodian of that truth. Because of that unity of truth and authority, Catholicism is superior to its only opponent today with similar mass impact, world communism. Well, that's what it might have looked like from the outside. But and it may have seemed that way here in The US where we were still in the institution building phase of our Catholic life. But John the twenty third from that very distinctive experience, going back over the fifty years of his adult life, knew that that was not the case and that something different was required. Something that would revitalize the church as a church of evangelization and mission.

28:22Interestingly enough, someone else who had that idea was a very young 40 year old auxiliary bishop of Krakow named Karol Wojtyla. John the twenty third announced his attention to summon the second Vatican council on 01/25/1959 at the Basilica Of Saint Paul outside the walls, which I'm sure many of you visited. There's great shock, then the bureaucracy gets into the game and what was called the anti, a n t e, preparatory commission for the second Vatican council was formed. What that means is if there was some it was the preparatory commission for the preparatory commission Right. For the council. I mean, it is a preparatory commission before the preparatory commission. So these guys send a letter to all the bishops of the world and all of the superiors of men's religious congregations, sorry, sister Marie Patrice, essentially saying the pope has had this curious idea that we should bring all you chaps together.

29:41What do you wanna talk about? What's the agenda? Well, the answers that came in form the first eight volumes of what are dozens of volumes of the series called the acts and documents of the second Vatican counts. And to read through those submissions from the bishops is to understand that about sixty, sixty five, maybe, and 70% of them had that view of, you know, everything is fine. Because what they wanna talk about is quick canon law here, little less dependence on Rome for local episcopal decision making. Maybe we could celebrate the sacraments or some of the sacraments in the vernacular. It's church housekeeping. That's 70% of these things, of which my favorite came from the then archbishop of Washington, the gentleman by the name of Patrick j O'Boyle, who, had eight items in his letter, seven of which were this kind of housekeeping stuff.

30:49And then somebody at Catholic University, whose distinguished provost is with us tonight, must have said him, and I think I know who this was. I think it was the then dean of theology. Cindy, look. You're gonna look better if you put a big think item in here. So after these seven housekeeping, boring, ecclesiastical, bric a bracs things. O'Boyle's last agenda item for Vatican two is the church or the council should pronounce in light of the doctrines of creation and redemption on the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. So I'm reading this in a Vatican archive in the mid mid nineties. I just burst out there. And the archivist says, what's so funny? I said, well, I've list lived in the town for twenty years.

31:42And if I was its archbishop, the first thing I would wanna know about is the possibility of intelligent life in my own diocese before I started bragging about intelligent life on other planets, which is even funnier in Latin because all of this stuff was, of course, done in Latin. Anyway, in the midst of all that comes a very different kind of letter from this young auxiliary bishop of Krakow, whom I'm sure no one had thought of in Rome for a nanosecond since his appointment, was signed by Pius the twelfth on July 4, interesting coincidence, 1958. And Karol Wojtyla does not send a laundry list of stuff. He sends a kind of philosophical essay attempting to get at the question, what happened?

32:40Here's this century which began with with all of these great hopes for the human future, and it's turned into a train wreck. What happened? By a train wreck, he knew person from his five years under the Nazi occupation and the communist business and all the rest. What happened? And then he offered an answer. What happened was that the great project of Western humanism had gone off the rails over the previous three hundred years. And therefore, the council's first job was to address the question, who are we? What is the human person? Who is the human person? Origin, nature, destiny, community, and then he offered the answer. The council has to lift up the person of Jesus Christ as he who reveals the truth about us.

33:43The truth about us. John the twenty third may or may not, probably did not, read that letter from this obscure Polish auxiliary bishop. But in his opening address to the second Vatican Council on 10/11/1962 after that procession I described at the beginning, In that opening address, which is known by the Latin title, Gedet Mater Ecclesia, mother church rejoices, he took a voituan approach to what the council should be doing. The first thing he said in doubted modern ecclesia is that we are not here to reinvent the Catholic church or the faith of the Catholic church. Like, the first thing he says is we are here to defend and preserve his phrase, the sacred deposit of our faith. But we have to deploy that sacred deposit of our faith in a way that can be grasped by and engaged by the people who are living in this disenchanted world.

35:09People who are living in this world becomes simply irreligious. Therefore, the council should be a new experience of Pentecost that would generate a fresh presentation of ancient truths for the sake of mission. It's often said and quite accurately, that John twenty third wanted Vatican two to be a new experience of Pentecost, a new Pentecost. Well, why would you want that? We'll look at the acts of the apostles, which we're reading in daily mass these days, and we'll continue to read until the celebration of of Pentecost, fifty days after Easter. What happened in Pentecost? There's this profound experience of the holy spirit, and then what? They don't sit there and say, gee, that was cool. Can we have some more of that?

36:19Few more tongues of fire, please? No. They go out and in mission. They go out and evangelize. Pentecost and evangelization go together. And at the center of that evangelization, John the twenty third insists in Gaudet Mauryklesia has to be in the person of Christ. Christ as he who reveals the truth about us, Christ who is the center of both history and the cosmos. Gaudet Madre akklesia is a very Pauline Christological text. It attempts to recapture what Paul talks about in the pastoral epistles and those particularly those Christological hymns at the beginning of Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians. He, it was through whom all things were made, for whom all things exist. In him, everything continues in being, etcetera, etcetera.

37:27Christ is the center, and he should be at the center of the council. Now I believe that if you read Vatican two through the prism of John the twenty third's opening address, the council comes into clearer focus. It's not unlike what legal scholars called originalism in reading the constitution. You have to understand what it meant at the time in order to give it an authoritative interpretation. And if you read Vatican two's documents through the prism of Gaudet, Mater, Ecclesia, a number of things come in it come into focus. First of all, while there are 16 documents of Vatican two, they are not all of equivalent magisterial weight or heft, if you will. That's actually indicated by their very titles.

38:35There are two dogmatic constitutions in the documents of Vatican II, the dogmatic constitution on the church and the dogmatic constitution on divine revelation. That is the highest or weightiest form of conciliar teaching. There is a further constitution on the sacred liturgy, and then there is a pastoral constitution on the church in pastoral constitution on the church in modern world. Then there are decrees, and then there are declarations. If you read that material through the prism of both Gaudet and Mater ecclesia and those two dogmatic constitutions, you begin to see, one, revelation, I believe, is the fundamental text of Vatican two. You can make an argument for the dogmatic constitution of the church, and it's not a bad argument.

39:36But I think the dogmatic constitution on divine revelation addresses this question of the disenchanted world, the irreligious world, head on by boldly and very firmly insisting that we do not live in that claustrophobic house. We live in a world with windows, doors, and skylights. God has spoken into that world, which is his creation. All of this we see they didn't have the Hubble Space Telescope or the Webb Space Telescope in those days, so we know there's a lot of stuff out there. All of that is not an accident. It's a creation, and that impregnates it with a meaning. And god has spoken about the meaning of all of that by entering the history of his creation. First of all, in the person of the son, the second person of eternity.

40:49No. First of all, in the in the revelation to the people of Israel, and then finally, definitively, in the in his self revelation in the second person of the trinity. So we are not alone. We are not alone. Secondly, in the dogmatic constitution of the church, the the other great question thrown up by modernity, how do you form authentic human community? And a question that had been given so many bad answers. The German national socialist answer, you form a racial community. The communist answer, the proletary community of the proletariat. Vatican two says, if you want to see what authentic human community looks like, look at the body of Christ. That's why Lumen Gentzian, the dogmatic constitution on the church, teaches that the church is a sacrament or sign of the unity of the human family.

42:03This is what authentic human community looks like. And if you want a template for building authentic human community in the world, here is this here is the template that has been divinely revealed. If everything else in Vatican two from the dogmatic from the constitution on sacred liturgy to the pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world, the deck the decrees, the declarations, what do bishops do, what do priests do, what is consecrated life like, what is Catholic education, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. If those texts are read through Gaudet, Mader, Ecclesia, de verbum, the dogmatic constitution on divine revelation, and Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution of the church, then then you begin to see the pattern here, in a way that cannot be quite seen if you just take these 16 documents one at a time and don't deal with them in their proper order.

43:15So then the question becomes, why wasn't that clear in 1965 at the end of the council on 12/08/1965? Well, excuse me, that the answer to that has to do with another distinguishing characteristic of the second Vatican council. Put aside for a moment the fact that the council ended and its teaching landed at a moment in modern Western history when the Western world was just about to lose its mind. Okay? Late sixties, not exactly the calmest cultural moment in which to receive this this teaching. Put put that aside. And and look at at the council itself and note that it's it has a distinction among the 21, ecumenical councils in that it's the only one that doesn't tell you itself this is what we mean.

44:29That did not provide a key to its own authentic interpretation. Councils had done that in a variety of ways. You wanna know what the Council of Nicaea in 03/25, the First Council of Nicaea was about, you'd encounter it every Sunday. The Nicene Creed is the key to the council of Nicene. Two great Christological councils of the early fifth century, Ephesus and Chalcedon, told you what they were about through their dogmatic definitions. Mary is Theotokos, mother of god, god bearer, Chalcedon, two natures of the one person of Christ. Other councils told you what they were about by condemning heresies or heretics, by writing new canons into the church's legal system. Council of Trent did a lot of that and then commissioned a catechism, written largely by Saint Charles of Barremio.

45:39Vatican two did none of it. No creed, no definitions, no condemnations, no canons, no catechism. So a twenty year free for all about what did all of this mean. Now it is very important to recognize that that argument, what is this all about, began during that Vatican two itself. Between Vatican two met during four autumnal months in 6263, '64, and '65. So the council would meet in September, October, and end before Christmas in '62, '63, '64, and '64. Between '63 and '64 and certainly by the third period of the council in '64, it was clear that there were two tendencies at Vatican II. They were not the stereotypical liberals versus conservatives. There were two tendencies within the reformist super majority at the council.

46:52One missed the message of doubt at moderate closing and said, we are here to reinvent the Catholic church. And the other tendency within the reformist camp, super majority, led by men like Joseph Ratzinger, was no. We are here to give a fresh presentation of what John the twenty third called the sacred deposit of our faith. That fight started while the council was going on. And because the council did not give you the keys, give us its own keys, that fight continued for decades until really 1985. At that point, John Paul the second, who had been a vigorous participant in Vatican two as the archbishop of Krakow, had, decided that it was time to sort this out and summoned a special meeting of the senate of bishops on the twentieth anniversary of the council's conclusion to do that.

48:02The key figure in that sorting out during that synod was the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger. And after five weeks of deliberation in Rome, the Senate of nineteen eighty five, in its final report, came up with what I like to describe as the thread that binds those 16 council documents, imagine them as 16 pieces of cloth, binds them into a beautiful and coherent tapestry or quilt if you're a quilter. And that is that thread is what the fathers of the senate of nineteen eighty five said about the church, that the church is a communion of disciples in mission. All three nouns of which are equally important. First, discipleship. Go back to John the 20.

49:14Christ is the center. There is no Christianity without a personal relationship with the lord Jesus Christ. That's where everything begins. But in the Catholic understanding of discipleship, it's not just me and Jesus as it is in some forms of Protestantism. To be a friend of the lord Jesus Christ is to be automatically inserted into the body of his friends, which the Senate of 1985 said is best described as a communio, as a communion. It's like the relationship of cells to each other within a living body, and it's very unique. This is a set of relationships like nothing else in our lives. It's not it feels like a family, but it's not biologically generated. It has a public life, but it's not a political party.

50:19Has an economic life as the fundraisers here know, but it's not a business or a trade game. You can call it a voluntary association, but that is to empty it of all of its supernatural reality. It's a communion. And if we go back to the pope who in many respects set the stage for Vatican two, Pius the twelfth, and his image of the church as the mystical body of Christ, we get this sense of cells in a living body. Then the third point, mission. The body does not exist for itself. The body exists in order to offer others the gift it has been given. Friendship with the incarnate son of God. So to be in the body is to be in mission. A communion of disciples in mission. Now this notion seems to me to have come just in time.

51:33As grim as things looked John Henry Newman in 1873 or as they seemed to look, to Wojtyla at the time of his letter to the Anti Preparatory Commission, things had gotten even more challenging twenty years after the council when it was clear that there was going to be no more ethnic or national or even familial transmission of the face. As I've often put it to people here in The US, thirty years from now, maybe twenty years from now, maybe even right now, no one is going to be able no adult, is going to be able to answer the question, why are you a Catholic? By saying, well, it's because my grandmother came from County Cork or Krakow or the South Of France or Palermo or Guadalajar or Munich. That's over.

52:42It's even over in Poland right now, which I have been trying to explain to the Polish bishops without much success for the last ten years. Being Polish is not gonna automatically make you Catholic in 2030 or 2130 or 2030. Therefore, we need what John Paul the second called the new evangelization, which is summed up in two simple statements. Everyone is a missionary. On the day of your baptism, you were given the great commission of Matthew 28, and everywhere is mission territory. Mission territory is not just exotic places. It's like right here. That's an authentic interpretation of Vatican 2, it seems to me. And, indeed, I think we can look at those two pontificates, 1978 to 2013, as one continuous thirty five year arc of giving Vatican II its authentic interpretation by two men of genius who were themselves fathers of the council.

53:57One, an Episcopal father of the council. The other, I came to understand during work on this book. Ratzinger was one of the three most influential theologians at Vatican two, at which time he was, like, 34 years old. So, so they knew this personally as well as as conceptually. Now final thought. If you look at the history of the councils, particularly the most important ones, it generally takes the church a hundred years to digest an ecumenical council. The notion that the Council of Trent ended in the late sixteenth century and everybody snapped a salute and said, okay. That's the way we're gonna be Catholics is a complete historical fiction. It took another hundred years to work that teaching, whether it was, Tridentine liturgy or the Tridentine reform of religious life.

55:07Certainly, the Tridentine reform of seminaries, which took a very long time to to get in. But it took a hundred years for that to to happen. So, whether you regard this as good news or bad news, we are only three fifths of the way through the digestion process of Vatican two. But I think there are already signals of where that road is going to end. And that has to do with looking at the living versus dying parts of the world church. The living parts of the world church, whether they're in vibrant dioceses like the Diocese of Arlington or in living religious communities or in great families or in Catholic universities, wherever you or here, and then you look at the fantastic growth of the church in Sub Saharan Africa.

56:06You look at the few springs of life coming up from the dry soil of the church in Western Europe. These are all without exception. Parts of the world church that have embraced the interpretation of Vatican two given by John Paul II and Benedict the sixteenth. And the dying parts of the world church, Germany being exhibit a, Belgium running a close second, are those that continue to insist that Vatican two was about reinventing Catholicism according to the spirit of the age. It just doesn't work. As some of you who follow my writing know, I've been talking about this for twenty years as Catholic light. Catholic light is of no interest to really anyone except people with a lot of gray in their hair or people who really had not seemed not to have been given the gift of supernatural faith.

57:14Catholic light works nowhere. And as I have now taken into saying in a way that runs the risk of my being sued by the Coca Cola company, Catholic lite inevitably leads to Catholic zero. Excuse me. As Coke light or Diet Coke led to Catholic led to Coke zero, well, we got, you know, 2% mass attendance on Sunday in German cities. That's Catholic zero, and it's the product of Catholic life. Whereas these vibrant and living parts of the world church are those who do things like your textbook and bring this vision of a communion of disciples submission to the world today. Final final thought, for those who are disturbed and many are by, the air turbulence in the church today, I've often said, and this is a good season of the church year to ponder this, There are libraries of books of church history.

58:30There is only one divinely inspired book of churches. It's the acts of the apostles. How does it end? It ends with a shipwreck, and the shipwreck becomes the occasion to extend the mission where it had not been before. That's not just something that happened to Saint Paul and his gang in the Eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago. I think that's a permanent metaphor, biblical metaphor for the church in the world. But if we can see what seems to be shipwrecked as the occasion to extend mission, then we'll get on doing it, and we'll be happy in doing so. Thank you. So now we'll proceed to the question and answer period. We'll begin with a few questions that were submitted during the lecture, from the online, audience.

59:35And then we'll begin taking questions from our attendees here on campus. There are five questions. You can pick a few and then open the floor as you would like. Mister Weinbaugh. Thank you. Vatican two emphasized the role of the laity in the church. As a psychology student, what is the best way to integrate the experience of faith in an increasingly secular world? Well, that's what this university is about. So I'm gonna leave that question to the faculty of Divine Mercy University. Some argue that the promise of Vatican two remains unfulfilled, from your perspective, key areas where the church can further embrace the legacy of the council, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I think I've I've touched on those.

1:00:22It's taken a while for Catholics to get used to the idea that they are missionaries. I mean, this is perhaps the single biggest change of perspective that we need. When I was a boy, some of you may remember this, during Lent, we got these little holy childhood society cardboard cups. Anybody else remember this? And you would if you've got $5 in it during Lent, which was a lot of money in those days, you got to name a pagan baby. We actually use that language. You know, we have to name a pagan baby. I have had the privilege of working with a lot of great African bishops at the last three synods, and I'm desperate to ask one of them, are you my pagan baby? But that was admissions were out there.

1:01:28You know, missions were out there somewhere. And those people who went out there, they were missionaries. Well, that's not what the second Vatican council and the new evangelization that it produced, ask us to think about. So I think that's the, that is the, the big hump we need we need to get over here. And the living parts of the world church, as I say, are those that have embraced that. I mean, you look at something like the FOCUS missionary program. This is inconceivable without the second Vatican council and indeed without World Youth Day in in Denver 1993. Young people in a kind of Catholic Peace Corps giving two or three years of their immediate post collegiate life to being missionaries, and then going on to grad school or raising families or othering religious life or seminaries or whatever.

1:02:26So we're beginning to get this. We need to think about this at the parish level, I think, a bit more. Most dioceses still measure church growth or church decline or whatever the case may be by counting the heads in church on a particular Sunday, usually in October. That's the wrong measure. The measure is how many people come into the church at the Easter vigil. Whether baptized or or, full communion, that's the measure. And we need to start we need to be thinking parish life through that way or, you know, through institutions like this where I'm sure those processes, go on. Vatican two aimed to open the church to the modern world. In your view, how successful has church been in adapting its teachings and practices to engage with contemporary social cultural currents?

1:03:34Well, let me let me make a friendly challenge to the premise. Vatican two aimed to convert the modern work. They can't convert it without engaging it, so you can't just say no, no, no, no, no and pretend that technological change, political change, economic change hasn't happened. But the question was not to let modernity into the church to change the church. It was to revitalize the church to go out and change a modernity, which had shown itself to have, frankly, suicidal tendencies in in the civilizational sense. And now as you all know, here in a very in a very personal sense. We've not done a particularly good job of that engagement through the media except now. I think we're beginning to get this.

1:04:34And things like the Word on Fire Institute and and that Augustine Institute of Denver, these are really important, efforts to to seize the opportunities presented by new technologies, etcetera. I thought we were doing rather well in challenging the many bad things that have come out of the sexual revolution with John Paul the second's theology of the body. Now we seem to have hit something of a skid in the road on that in, recent years, but I think we're gonna we'll be back to that in due course, because that is, I think, the most effective, response to this dumbing down of the human condition that ever, ever has been developed. Two, see a move away from institutional expressions of faith to a free flowing postmodern spirituality.

1:05:45How can we bridge this divide and proclaim a bruised but beautiful institution to a generation suspicious of incumbent institutional structures? That's a good question, but, again, I would reframe it a bit. We're not proclaiming an institution. We're proclaiming Jesus Christ. And through that proclamation, inviting people into his body, which has this institutional form called the Catholic church. This is another thing that that Catholics are gonna have to get used to. Evangelical Protestants, frankly, do this better than we do. Now they tend to lack the ecclesiastical ballast that we have, but they're much more comfortable talking about a personal relationship with the Lord, etcetera. This is thirty five years ago, at least now.

1:06:47I started working with evangelical Protestants on religious freedom issues, behind the iron curtain. And this is my first experience with this chunk of humanity. And I found it fascinating because, you know, if you get 12 Americans who don't know each other into a room and they start to introduce each other, how do people do that? Well, I'm Joe Smith, and I'm a lawyer. I'm Jane Doe, and I'm a doctor. You know, people introduce by themselves by what they do. It's not what these guys did. They would say, I'm Joe Smith, and I was born again on such and such a date, manifestly when they were adult. Brian Jane Doe, and I was born again on such and such a date. Well, if this would come around to me, and I would say, well, I'm George Weigel, and I was born again on 04/29/1951 when I was 12 old.

1:07:49That would get some interesting conversations going about Sacramento regeneration, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But there was something impressive here. These people thought of their fundamental identity in terms of when they had, as they would put it, met the Lord. And we need to understand that that's that's what we're inviting people into. I mean, ultimately, we're inviting them into the body of Christ, but we have to do that by inviting them to meet the Lord. That can be done in many ways, but I think that's how we need to re rejigger our minds, on that. So thank you, livestream people, for those questions, And I think we got time for a few more from the living audience. Hi. Kind of a more traditional mindset when Davis wasn't a real counsel or a real ecumenical counsel.

1:09:01Can you explain what make an ecumenical commitment in you bet, is there any truth in that statement? Why do you want to say anything? Well, people are saying that because they're a bit confused. A council that was summoned by a canonized pope, led by a canonized pope, and given its authoritative interpretation by a canonized pope, if that is not authentic, then there is no authenticity in the church. I mean, this is just silliness. The fact that the council did not, as I indicated, make dogmatic definitions does not make it less of a council. It it had a different purpose and a different intention. But that does not make it any less an authority. When you get the entire body of the world to piss it together and they vote by supermajorities that are beyond comprehension, I think the the one the document, Vatican two, that got the least positive votes got 70 negative votes out of 2,500.

1:10:14Now if that is not an authoritative expression of of Catholic faith, I don't know what is. So, I I think that just doesn't make any sense historically or theologically, and I would invite people who have that point of view to read, for example, Dave Verebaum, The Dogmatic Constitution on the on divine revelation, and tell me what's wrong with it. It's a robust defense of the reality of divine revelation and its binding authority over time. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. My question is actually, it's more connected, I think, to say one possibility that comes to my mind is the group that seems to be trying to live this model, conscious community and liberation. I I guess, reading a very compelling autobiography of not doing anything with GJ Asani who works very closely with whom spoke brand of obviously John Hope back in the 1916.

1:11:15And the latest trends of price in the world, in work, in everyone and me, you know, see the price in the other, seems like a hallmark of that movement. I guess I was just wondering your thoughts on that, maybe strengths, weaknesses, limitations. But I think we can count the same as I know the bill response to them. Yeah. I they're not the only one. I mean, Opus Dei would say that that was Monsignor Escobar's teaching, etcetera, etcetera. One of the, unfortunately, unremarked, great events in the, pontificate of John Paul the second. I think this was 1998. It's in the book, so you can check that. The book meaning my book. But it was Pentecost, and it was a gathering of all of these new Catholic renewal movements and communities in Rome.

1:12:10There were half a million people in in Saint Peter's Square. And the pope gave a terrific, homily in which he talked about this being, in the broadest sense of the term, the charismatic element of the church gathered together as a fruit of the second Vatican count. And over time, the charismatic element as it always had been, say, in consecrated religious life, had to be incorporated into the larger institutional framework of the church. But you don't need to rush that. Time will test these things. And the ways in which these expressions, whether that's community and liberation, Opus Dei, Focal Arini, Reagan Christie, I mean, go through the list, are incorporated into the normal structures of Catholic life, parish, diocese, school, etcetera.

1:13:11That's happening now, and I think generally in a quite, fruitful way. But, certainly, the notion that, Monsignor Giussani promoted that Christianity is not a hour and a half a week thing. I mean, that it's it's your whole life, and you have to find ways to express that in all of the aspects of your life is very much a fruit of of Vatican two. Now that has always been a truce of Catholic faith. But in the late counter reformation church, I think that had become attenuated to some degree in in parts of the church. Catholicism became, as I say, a member of a matter of ethnic habit. This is this is quite different. This is all in Catholicism, and a variety of these renewal movements seem to me to be very helpful in doing that as our more traditional form of Catholic associational life, Knights of Columbus, sidelities and parishes.

1:14:32These Catholic men's conferences that are springing up all over the country that are quite striking, These are all expressions of this intuition that it can't be just about Sunday morning or my daily prayers. There has to be some infusing of all of my life, intellectual, spiritual, familial, professional, etcetera, with the fact that I have been baptized into a missionary vocation. Yes, sir. Yeah. My question is about the tension that sometimes you find between maybe a pastor and a parish. I'm a small, like, a men's conference room. But a pastor in the parish who has family or people in their parish who wanna live that missionary discipleship. And yet there's, like, a tension because there's a I don't know if it's a fear of, of losing control or if you're a parish, you're misguiding people.

1:15:32So sometimes that spirit of of Michigan gets squashed in the church. And in my experience and people that I've talked to, it seems that in more conservative traditional churches that seems to happen more often. Whereas in more well, traditionally, left leaning churches, there's more of, like, an openness to that even though the people that maybe wanna have that mission and discipleship would actually lean more on the traditional side. So I don't know if you can speak to, like, that tension or not, and it's not necessarily directly related to Vatican two. But, you know, there's this call permission and discipleships, and, you know, sometimes I think pastors are originally Well, if if your pastor is resisting that, whether he's left, right, center, or whatever, go find a new parish.

1:16:11I mean, that's the simple answer to the question, and there are plenty of them around who who welcome people doing this. You know, a pastor is is juggling a million balls in the air at once. And, you know, sometimes people can get a little imprudent in trying to push stuff. But no serious pastor that I know is going to say to people who want to, you know, be, real missionary disciples. No. You know, just sit in the pew and pay, pray, and obey. I I just I don't run into that. Now, you know, I I will frankly say bureaucracy, post conciliar bureaucracy is a big problem in the church. That's not generally a problem with pastors. That's a problem with time card departures. And that was not an intention of Vatican two, was to further bureaucratize the church.

1:17:15And that is gonna have to be addressed over the next ten, twenty, thirty years as this missionary discipleship, model, comes more and more, to the fore. I will not name the diocese of the bishop, but a close friend of mine was installed as the bishop of the Midwestern diocese, about eight or nine years ago, I guess. And, about two weeks later, I called him up to see how he was doing. And he said, well, I didn't know. I didn't realize that I was being left with this big financial problem. And I said to him, send me the organization chart. I will eliminate 60% of it, and nobody will notice because this stuff really doesn't do anything. Another friend of mine became the bishop of the diocese a bit further west.

1:18:23And one of the first things he did was eliminate the diocese and liturgy committee. He said, according to the second Vatican council, I'm the chief liturgist in this diocese. If I need help, I'll ask for it, but we're not gonna waste time in in meetings. Today's gospel, that wonderful I think probably the the literary gem in the New Testament. The the road, the diapers two guys on the road to Emmaus. It's just magnificently constructed. What's the lesson there? The lesson is they're walking in the wrong direction. Okay? And it's only when they meet the risen lord that they're no longer walking in the wrong direction, which is away from Jerusalem, away from the cross, away from this, that they run back to Jerusalem and confess Easter feasts.

1:19:35Walking together has to be walking somewhere has to be walking somewhere. And that somewhere is missionary discipleship on the road to the new Jerusalem. And the parts of the church that grasp that, which has obviously been true for two thousand years, are the living parts of the world church today. I I mentioned these what some of these wonderful African bishops I've been working with for some time now, And one of them said over lunch during this synod of last October, he said, you know, in Africa, we really do not like this image of enlarge your tent. If you are living in a tent, it means you're wandering around and you have no idea where you're going. That's good. Why don't you bring that up next week at this thing?

1:20:35Okay? Listen. Wonderful to see everybody. Thank you, father, for the invitation. Where am I gonna do some books after this, Steve? Or are they So so what we'll do is we'll bring the last few books that we have up to this table on your right Very good. Here. Okay. You can sign sign books. I was wondering whether this is the prophet Elijah and this was the phrase Melchizedek here. Yeah. So you can you can choose. You can choose. Okay. Just a couple of small closing announcements if I have the bank. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much, mister Weidl. We we really appreciate you coming in and, unpacking, your wonderful book. We do have a few more. I'll invite father Thomas to bring those to the front now so that we can, make those available to you before before time runs out this evening.

1:21:32It is also my duty to, draw to your attention our next Newman lecture, which will take place in three weeks on Tuesday, April 23, again at 7PM. The title is current status and future directions in couples therapy part one, main research lines and evidence based models, challenges and future research lines. It will be presented by doctor Martino Rodriguez Gonzales, a professor in clinicians in the University of Navara in Spain. And this lecture will also be delivered both on campus and online as well. And so, thank you to our online community for coming, and we will have some some book signings. May I tell a quick story about the University of Navarre Which means we are which is in which is in Pamplona.

1:22:20It's a wonderful part of the world. I was giving a lecture there maybe ten or fifteen years ago, and the rector, as we're walking into the for the lecture, says to me, just, we had a terrorist bombing here three weeks ago, but we're we're not too worried this time. That's my experience in Navarre.