Vatican II at 50: It's debatable

‘Tis the season for debates.   Viewers in the United States are tuning in to watch the presidential  candidates wrestle, wrangle and dispute each other’s past while portraying their plans for a brighter future.  Meanwhile, political-psychoanalyst commentators attempt to shed their light by watching every gesture, listening to every inflection, and tracking every truth as tweets and facebook posts light up the broadband.  At the end of every debate it seems it all comes down to one question:  who won?

The debates at the Second Vatican Council some fifty years ago were no less fiery than the Obama-Romney,  Biden-Ryan contests.  Council Fathers had hot and heavy arguments over whether the Church should change or stay the same, over religious liberty, over the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, and so on.  One debate left one Cardinal feeling so humiliated that he boycotted the Council for the next two weeks! 

Many would argue that it wasn’t the liberals or the conservatives who ultimately won the debates at Vatican II, but the “People of God.”  But, victory is short-lived.    Fifty years later, we find many of the debates seemingly settled at Vatican II still being discussed as open questions today.   We would do well to remember the quote used consistently at the Council by Pope John XXIII who convened it:  “In essential things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.”  This sums up the essential elements of Vatican II:  That the “People of God” who truly know themselves as freed and forgiven can authentically embrace the world, including those across the political divide, with charity and love.  In that there is no debate.