The Churc h-World relationship in Gaudium et Spes still relevavant?

Descrizione

1. A new tone and anthropology

The aim of this paper is to discern to what extent the treatment of the church-world relationship in Gaudium et Spes remains fresh and valid fifty years later and to acknowledge ways in which it has become less relevant for today. Obviously we cannot comment on all the chapters of this longest document in conciliar history. Apart from giving some attention to the chapter on culture, I will remain largely within the first part of the text and therefore little will be said about such topics, present in this document, such as politics, economics, peace and even the theme of the family.

There is no need to revisit in detail the historic significance of this pastoral constitution. It is enough to mention some of its original characteristics. As is well known, a document of this kind was not planned before the Council began. Even though Pope John XXIII had clearly indicated that he wanted a different style of council, not primarily to face a doctrinal crisis but to reflect on new pastoral needs, the proposal for a treatment of the relations of the Church ad extra came only at the end of the first session, supported by such leading figures as Cardinal Suenens and Cardinal Montini. The text that eventually emerged three years later is the product of much debate and represents a different wavelength and style to any conciliar text in previous church history. Are these options of disposition and of method still pertinent today? Certainly yes. It is possible to criticize various sections of this long text as weak in themselves or less relevant fifty years later, but the Council’s choice of an overall theological anthropology is surely a permanent achievement and gift to later generations. And here in the Council’s creation of a new tone and a new anthropology we find the key expression of a different relationship between church and world, seeking to listen to the contemporary situation and to understand it before offering any judgements about it.

Let me mention at this stage a challenging thought from Gilles Routhier: the interpretation of Vatican II is not simply a matter of texts and the intentions of their authors. A third perspective should be mentioned, that of ourselves as receivers in our different moment of church history. Therefore our rereading of conciliar texts has to allow for today’s horizon1. Our context is radically different. Our frontiers are changed. Our receptivity is different from the first audience of half a century ago. Therefore we should not be surprised if some aspects of this text seems less actual than it did to its audience of fifty years ago. The more positive question is to identify what remains rich and relevant, and that will be my principal focus here.

Concerning the question of inactuality, let us admit that it is easy to become impatient with the text of Gaudium et Spes and to find reasons for critique or complaint: it is dangerously long and often diffuse; from section to section it can be uneven in quality; with the passage of time inevitably some parts come across as either dated or just predictable. And yet the fundamental intention of the Council was and is important for the Church, and the essential approach of this constitution remains prophetic fifty years later. I mean its theological methodology for reinterpreting the church’s relationship to the contemporary world and in particular its option for an ascending Christian anthropology. As a symbol of this approach is the oft-commented fact that Christ, while mentioned frequently, enters more explicitly at the end of each of the first four chapters of the text, thus crowning and illuminating the text’s account of the human situation today.

There are those who would have preferred a more descending Christology, or a more explicitly theological account of the human condition. But Gaudium et Spes embodied the Council’s desire not only to speak about modern man but to modern man, and this less predictable approach remains permanently valid. On this point it is worth quoting a warning given by the then Archbishop Wojtyla in the 1964 debate on this text, when he advised the Council to avoid ecclesiastical language: otherwise the intended dialogue with the world would simply be soliloquy. («Caveamus autem, ne schema nostrum soliloquium fiat!»2). Indeed it …