Vatican II: The Church and "The Others" - Turning Point of Catholic Teaching¹

Gregory Baum

Abstract: Reflections on 3 Vatican II documents representing moments of discontinuity in the Church's official teaching. On Ecumenism: that separated Christians are truly Christians. On the church's Relationship to Judaism and Other Non-Christian Religions: that there exists a "common spiritual patrimony.". On Religious Liberty: that no one may be compelled to believe. Theological and Sociological Reflections: the role of prophetic voices, and the growth of trust in the Spirit as expressed through "the others."

The invitation to give a paper at this colloquium on Vatican Council II has prompted me to recall the events of my own participation as "peritus" at the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. Since I had written a doctoral dissertation on an ecumenical topic, later published as a book², I had the great honour of being invited by Cardinal Bea to join the Secretariat as a theologian. The members met for the first time in 1960. At that occasion Cardinal Bea told us that we had to acquaint the bishops and their people with the ecumenical movement and urge them to be more welcoming to 'separated Christians' and their Churches. Use public talks, radio interviews and newspaper articles to promote the ecumenical idea in the Church. He himself, the Cardinal added, would travel from country to country giving public lectures 'at the open window,' as he called it, to be heard far and wide. His texts would be published in La documentation catholique, which we were to use, he said, to defend ourselves when accused of deviating from Catholic teaching. Cardinal Bea's team, bishops and priests, became very active in those years.

It is not my intention to tell the story of my involvement in the Unity Secretariat. Nor shall I analyze the conciliar drafts we produced or explain the role we played during the four sessions of the Council. In the first place, I made the decision, possibly a foolish one, not to keep any of my papers. There exist, moreover, many commentaries on the work of the Secretariat which give more precise information than I would be able to offer.

What I shall do in this paper is something different. One of the profound theological experiences I had at the Unity Secretariat was the recognition that there are moments of discontinuity in the Church's official teaching. The Church is able to change its mind. The three controversial conciliar drafts we had prepared were eventually, after a lengthy debate and some rewriting, approved by the entire Council. Looking back over my work as a theologian I now realize how important this recognition was for me, and how much it influenced my theological approach after the Council.³

The Unity Secretariat was charged with the preparation of three innovative conciliar documents: Unitatis redintegratio, the decree on ecumenism, Nostra aetate, the declaration on the Church's relation to Jews and other non-Christians and Dignitatis humanae, the declaration on religious liberty. They all dealt in one way or another with the Church's relation to 'the other' or 'the outsiders.' In preparing the draft documents and replying to the objections made by bishops on the council floor or in private appeals, we came to realize that we were participating in a conciliar process that constituted a turning point of the Church's magisterium.

In this paper I shall first present the change of mind that occurred at the Vatican Council through the service of the Secretariat and then offer a brief sociological reflection on the creativity of conciliar process.

The Decree on Ecumenism

According to the decree on ecumenism, 'separated Christians' (Protestants, Anglicans and Orthodox) are truly Christians: through faith and baptism they are living members of Christ. Their Churches and communities participate in the ecclesial mystery, that is to say, they are used by the Holy Spirit to save and sanctify their members, even if the Catholic Church remains in some (not clearly defined) sense the true Church of Christ. Moreover, the decree interprets the ecumenical movement of Protestant and Anglican origin as the work of the Holy Spirit. In it the Catholic Church now wants to participate. Catholic and non-Catholic Christians are now already enjoying a true, if incomplete, spiritual communion.

At the time this was bold teaching. It contradicted the Church's lex orandi. Catholics whose spiritual outlook had been shaped by the Church's liturgy, especially the Roman Missal, believed that their solidarity in faith was confined to the Catholic Church. In the Roman Missal were repeated prayers for the Church, but no prayer for the world, i.e. the people beyond the Church's borders, except on one day, Good Friday, when we offered the great prayers for universal redemption. Because the lex orandi has such an impact on Catholic consciousness, let me give the full text of the prayer for non-Catholic Christians and their Churches.

Let us pray for heretics and schismatics. May our God and Lord save them from all errors. May he be pleased to call them back to our holy Mother, the Catholic and Apostolic Church. Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you save all men. You will that none shall be lost. Look down on those who are deceived by the wiles of the devil. With the evil of error removed from their hearts, may the erring repent and return to the unity of your truth.

Lex orandi is lex credendi. Catholics did not believe that through faith and baptism Protestants were living members of Christ. They were brought up to think of Protestants, not as brothers and sisters in Christ, but as people deceived by false teaching and belonging to false churches. Catholics regarded it a sin to participate in Protestant worship. These beliefs and practices were confirmed by the theological texts used in the schools and seminaries. Pope Leo XIII still regarded Protestantism as a destructive movement, the source of all unrest and upheaval in European society, including rationalism, secularism, materialism and socialism.⁴

At the same time, beginning with Leo XIII, the popes began to speak to Protestants in more respectful terms, no longer calling them heretics and instead honouring their virtues. In my dissertation on papal teaching, published in book form in 1958, I showed that beginning with Leo XIII the popes were gradually moving towards a polite recognition of Protestant Christians. But I could not find a single text in their teaching that recognized that Protestants had 'supernatural' faith, i.e. the faith that saves. The most positive thing I could then say was that unlike many theological treatises at the time, papal teaching never denied the possibility that Protestants could have faith.⁵ Nor did the popes ever acknowledge Protestant Churches as Churches in a theological sense.⁶

When I wrote my dissertation in the fifties, I thought of myself as sympathetic to ecumenism within the Catholic framework, yet reading the book today, I recognize that I still had the Catholic mind-set of the pre-conciliar period. I still concluded that "the last end of ecumenism is the return of the separated Christians to the Church of Christ, that is, to the Roman Catholic Church." And I added, "About this there can be neither doubt nor difficulty in the mind of a Catholic."⁷

This conclusion was based on important texts of the Roman magisterium. Catholic participation in movements for Christian unity had been forbidden several times. First, there was a set of letters written in 1864 and 1865 by the Holy Office and republished in 1919 in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, after Pope Benedict XV had rejected an invitation by Protestant churchmen to participate in the emerging ecumenical movement. Second, in response to ecumenical assemblies at Stockholm (1925) and Lausanne (1927), the Holy Office published a letter in 1927 forbidding Catholics to participate in ecumenical gatherings, followed in 1928 by Pius XI's encyclical Mortalium animos which, for doctrinal reasons, condemned the ecumenical movement. Ecumenical movements, wrote the Pope, falsely believe that the unity of the Church has been lost, while this unity exists, in theory and in fact, in the Roman Catholic Church.⁸ The foundation of the World Council of Churches in 1948 was greeted by a monitum of the Holy Office forbidding Catholics to attend ecumenical assemblies without the permission of the Vatican. An instructio published by in 1949 was more positive: it recognized that the Spirit moved these Christians to seek the unity they lost, a search that gives joy to the children of the true Church.⁹

When the first draft of the decree on ecumenism was submitted to the Council, many bishops were deeply disturbed by its bold teaching. Some of them told us personally that they had always taught the very opposite in their dioceses. If this draft were accepted by the Council, they said, the faithful will think the Church is reversing its teaching. Some of the opposition to the draft came from bishops in Catholic countries where the law still restricted the freedom of Protestants. Opposition also came from bishops in English-speaking countries, where Catholics had been persecuted in the past and were still exposed to some discrimination. I recall that the Australian bishops were so upset that even after the decree had been approved by the Council, they approached Pope Paul VI with the request not to promulgate it. This is not the place to analyze the long debate that took place on the council floor. Eventually, after some rewriting, the great majority of bishops gave their approval to the decree. They were ready to return to their dioceses, alter their pastoral practice and support the ecumenical movement.

The Text on the Church's Relation to Jews and Judaism

The moment of discontinuity in the Church's teaching was even more dramatic in Nostra aetate, the Declaration on the Church's Relationship to Non-Christian Religions, in particular to Jews and Judaism. Since this topic has been dealt with in many commentaries, I shall mention only a few ecclesiastical texts to reveal the extraordinary leap of the magisterium.

The lex orandi on Jews and followers of other non-Christian religions was quite specific. In the Roman Missal we prayed for these 'outsiders' only once a year, on Good Friday. These were the prayers.

Let us pray for the (perfidious) Jews.¹⁰ May the Lord our God tear the veil from their hearts so that they may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ. Almighty and everlasting God, you do not refuse your mercy to the Jews. Hear the prayers we offer for that people. May they acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ, and be brought out of all darkness.

Let us also pray for the pagans. May almighty God take away the evil from their hearts. May they give up their idols and be converted to the living and true God and his only Son, Jesus Christ. Almighty and everlasting God, you always desire not the death but the life of sinners. In your goodness hear our prayer. Deliver them from idol worship. Unite them to your only Church, to the praise and glory of your name.

The lex orandi was in keeping with the lex credendi, the Church's official teaching: outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation. Catholic teaching did not normally offer a harsh interpretation of this dictum. Only rarely did the Church teach as it did at the Council of Florence (1442) that all non-Catholics went to hell immediately after they died¹¹. Even in the prayers just cited, presenting Jews as blinded by a veil and pagans as surrendered to idols, there is the reference to God's gracious universal will to save. Because the Church acknowledged this divine will, it did not exclude the possibility that some outsiders would be saved, yet their prospects were not seen to be good. Against this background, the conciliar declaration Nostra aetate was quite extraordinary.

In this paper I shall only deal with section 4 of Nostra aetate, on the Church's relation to Jews and Judaism. The text tells us that the Church greatly honours the Jews as the people who received God's revelation, brought forth the prophets and eventually gave birth to Jesus Christ. The Church, it says, continues to draw strength from its rootedness in the ancient biblical tradition. Even though the majority of Jews did not accept Jesus, and some even worked against the spread of the gospel, the Jewish people remain most dear to God because of the fathers. Their divine election has not been withdrawn. The Church regrets that its past preaching did great harm to the Jews. It deplores antisemitism in all its forms. Because of "the spiritual patrimony" between Christians and Jews, the Church now wants to relate itself to Jews and Judaism with respect, asking for dialogue, cooperation and mutual understanding.

While the final version of the declaration was more cautious than the original one and hence has been criticized by some observers, it is still a remarkable document, a break with traditional teaching, a testimony to the Church's ability to change its mind.

Nothing in the Church's past had prepared the Vatican Council's acknowledgment of "a common spiritual patrimony" between Christians and religious Jews who do not accept Christ. The Pauline passage (Romans 11: 29) that the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable and that, therefore, the Jews remain God's chosen people has never before been understood as an assurance that God's grace is now present in Jewish worship and Jewish life. On the contrary, the Apostle Paul believed that apart from a remnant, the Jews had now been "hardened" and become "blind", thus excluding themselves from the community of salvation. Their continued divine election meant that they would not lose themselves in the world, but be preserved until the day of God's choosing when they shall again receive their eyesight, recognize Jesus as their savior and be re-integrated into the Church, the community of salvation. To read the Pauline passage as a promise of grace operative now among the Jewish people is unprecedented. Yet Nostra aetate was not the only conciliar document that introduced this new interpretation. In Lumen gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the Church (paragraph 16), we also read with the same reference to Romans 11 that the Jews, because of the promise made to their fathers, remain a people most dear to God in accordance with their election; populus secundum electionem Deo carissimus propter patres.

There exists today an extensive literature on the anti-Jewish current in Christian teaching and practice, beginning in the first century.¹² Against this millennial background, the teaching of the Council represents a leap. How differently the Church still thought about these matters in the 1930s is revealed in a recent book, L'encyclique cachée de Pie XI, which examines the draft of an encyclical on racism prepared for Pope Pius XI by three learned and highly respected Jesuits.¹³ The encyclical was never published, and the draft had been lost until it was recently discovered in a dark corner of an ecclesiastical library.

The principal section of this draft repudiates the racist theories of the 19^th century adopted by empires in regard to their colonies or their slaves and, in the present century, by the political Right in Europe and in an extreme form by German fascism. Theories assigning differing degrees of dignity to racial families, we read, contradict the divinely revealed teaching of the unity of the human race, created and redeemed by God. For doctrinal reasons, racism is for Catholics wholly unacceptable. Yet another section of the draft reveals that the elite Catholic milieu in Rome and other parts of Europe was still unable to free itself from the ancient anti-Jewish theological prejudice, even at the time when the Jews were already persecuted in Germany. The draft repudiates antisemitism and discrimination against Jews based on biological or racist grounds, yet defends laws restricting the influence of Jews in society on theological grounds. The clerical circles at the Church's administrative centre were still caught in the traditional belief, supported by a few New Testament passages (see Romans 11: 28), that the Jews were enemies of the gospel. Their influence in society, according to this draft document, fostered secularism, materialism, liberalism and socialism.

The leap to the recognition of "a common spiritual patrimony" was the fruit of the Church's penitential reflection on the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi-Germany. The bishops acknowledged with great sorrow that in the past the Church had never critically examined the human consequences of its teaching, asking whether it promoted love or hatred. The Council now recognized that only if we have love for 'the others' and 'the outsiders' are we able to discern the truth about them.

The Declaration on Religious Liberty

The difficulties in preparing the declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis humanae, and having it passed by the Council have been described in books on the Council, beginning with the volumes of Xavier Rynne. Even though Pope John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in terris (1963) had already recognized the human rights tradition from a Catholic perspective, the opposition at the Council to the freedom of religion was very strong, especially in the Roman Curia. The popes had condemned the freedom of worship many times in the past. Since the Church had rejected liberalism, popular sovereignty and the modern, secular state in the 19^th century, it is not surprising that this included opposition to civil liberties and the condemnation of the freedom of worship. In Mirari vos of 1832, Gregory XVI wrote: " Indifferentism is the fetid source that gives rise to the mistaken view, or rather madness, that everyone is entitled to freedom of conscience."¹⁴ Pius IX endorsed this position when he condemned as an error the idea that "every man is free to embrace and to profess the religion which, by the light of reason, he believes to be true."¹⁵ Leo XIII reaffirmed this teaching in Libertas praestantissimum (1888) when called false "the widely proclaimed freedom of conscience, as they call it, based on the principle that every person may profess the religion that appeals to him or even to profess no religion at all."¹⁶

At the same time, Leo XIII declared in his Immortali Dei (1886) that while the Church cannot approve of governments that refuse to protect the true religion, i.e. the Catholic Church, and instead grant all forms of worship the same legal rights, the Church does not condemn those governments which, under special circumstances, do this for the sake of fostering the public good or avoiding social unrest.¹⁷ The Pope alludes here to the curiously-named distinction between 'thesis' and 'hypothesis,' where the thesis asserts that in Catholic countries, deemed the normative situation, the Church opposes religious liberty, while the hypothesis concedes that in countries where Catholics are a minority, the Church favours religious liberty. The thesis-hypothesis formula was widely used by Catholics in countries such as France and America which allowed them to follow the Church's official teaching in theory but favour pluralism in practice.

That it demanded great courage to challenge this two-edged doctrine even in 1940s and 50s is demonstrated by the attacks delivered by canonists and theologians in the United States and the Roman authorities against John Courtney Murray who defended religious liberty as a universal principle on Catholic grounds.¹⁸

The new approach taken by Dignitatis humanae, adopted also by Gaudium et spes, the Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, begins with theological reflection on the human vocation, the vocation of all human beings, and not with the status of the ecclesiastical institution in society. In the third session of the Council, the Unity Secretariat invited Murray to become a member of the team responsible for redrafting the text. Because humans are called to follow their way to the transcendent, the freedom to do this, i.e. religious liberty, is a human right and must be protected by government. This was new teaching. To show that despite this doctrinal change there existed a deeper, underlying continuity in Catholic teaching, the declaration emphasized the principle, repeatedly defended by Church authority, that no one may be compelled to believe.

At the same time, the declaration did not wrestle with the question of why the popes had chosen to condem religious freedom in the past. Since the principal opposition to the proposed declaration was that it contradicted the Roman magisterium, it would have been useful to clarify the evolution of the Church's teaching and reveal the contextual character of ecclesiastical pronouncements. I recall a large meeting of English-speaking bishops and theologians that dealt with the questions raised by the draft, including the delicate issue of the papal magisterium. At that occasion Bishop Young from Australia had the nerve to suggest, "Why can't we simply say that the popes were wrong?" The other bishops did not think that this was a good idea. It is probably more correct to say that in the 19^th century, the popes were still identified with traditional European culture and society defined in the 17^th century, after a hundred years of religious wars, by the principle of cuius regio, eius religio. The union of throne and altar belonged to the commonly-accepted wisdom of that period. What the popes failed to see was that this traditional order was about to be overthrown by the arrival of modernity and creation of the liberal state. In this, the present situation, the Church must foster commitment to Christian faith and resistance to the secular spirit by religious education, not by legal protection.

Theological and Sociological Reflections

What happened to the Church that it was able to change its mind in regard to Protestants, Jews and followers of other religions and come to affirm the freedom of worship? I hesitate to take a 'moral' point of view, judging the Church of the past and claiming that we are more virtuous today. One has to admit that the attitude of the Christian community towards 'the others' and 'the outsiders' remains unresolved in the New Testament. The Catholic principle of incarnation or inculturation allowed the Church to identify itself with the culture in which it lived, and even if it criticized this culture from the perspective of the Gospel, it was and is nonetheless unable to transcend altogether the cultural mind-set of the age. European feudal society was tiered; and while it celebrated the plurality of cultures within Christendom, it saw the people outside of Christendom mainly in dark colours. Apart from a few prophets, Christians - including ourselves - are caught in their age. It was only when, in this century, the secular state became the norm, when society became marked by religious pluralism, and when liberal ideas critical of imperialism, domination and social inequality acquired cultural power, that Christians discovered that many of their attitudes were sources of prejudice, social injustice and contempt for outsiders. Christians acknowledged their guilt for having promoted hostility among one another, contempt for the Jews, and justification of colonial conquest. At first a few Christians and then very many asked themselves what love, caritas, Christ's great commandment, meant in their present situation. What, in the Spirit, should be their relation to 'the others' and 'the outsiders'? This was a topic on which Christians living in earlier periods had not reflected. Now the answer to this question became the testing stone of the Gospel.

The discontinuity of the Church's teaching at Vatican II preserves and even enhances an abiding continuity of its teaching, namely the primacy of love and God's universal will to save.

How does a Church, the Catholic Church in particular, change its perspective? The process begins with a few prophetic voices, which are ignored or even silenced. As critical Christians become more numerous, they found associations, study centres, scholarly reviews and popular publications and create a countervailing current in the Church, often under the frowns of popes and bishops. These Christians take certain risks. On the three topics discussed in this paper, the reversal of church teaching on Protestants, on Jews and on religious liberty, the countervailing currents were substantial. This is not the place to retell the history of these counter-trends, naming the theologians involved in them, the clerical and lay associations promoting them, the books and reviews published in support of them, the few bishops who favoured them, and the victims punished by the magisterium for their outspokenness. At the Vatican Council, convoked by the good Pope John, these countervailing currents were allowed to come to the surface and influence the assembly of decision-makers.

In a book written long time ago, I tried to show that Max Weber's theory of social change, explaining the role of countervailing trends in social and political transformations, illuminates as well the evolution of Catholic teaching and practice at the Vatican Council.¹⁹ In my opinion a second social phenomenon deserves attention. At the Council, Catholic bishops and theologians engaged in open conversation about the meaning of the Gospel in today's world. They began to trust one another, reveal their deep convictions, and express ideas they had carried in their hearts but had never dared to articulate. The bishops were open to theologians who represented the countervailing currents. Some of these theologians, though previously censured, were invited to participate in the discussions and the drafting of the conciliar documents. The bishops were willing to listen to the Spirit speaking in the midst of the believing community. At the Council, the bishops experienced themselves as empowered to change the inherited doctrine on the Church's relation to 'the others' and 'the outsiders,' and in doing so discovered a deeper continuity with the teaching of Jesus Christ. The Council recognized that only when we have love for 'the others' and 'the outsiders' are we able to discern the truth about them.

I am tempted to introduce a sociological term to describe what, according to my experience, took place at the Vatican Council. Emile Durkheim has called "effervescence"²⁰the heightened consciousness, increased vitality and unanticipated creativity that occur at solemn gatherings of communities whose members are united by bonds of solidarity and yet live dispersed over a wide territory. While Durkheim introduced this term in his study of tribal religion, he used it later on to interpret periods of collective innovation and creativity in contemporary communities. Durkheim's theory explains why bishops known to be cautious at home, once gathered at wider, possibly intercontinental, ecclesiastical assemblies, are often deeply stirred and willing to adopt, in fidelity to Jesus and his Spirit, unconventional and bold ideas. The countervailing currents presently flourishing in the Church, especially the women's movement, has remained powerless because, thanks to a monarchical style of governance, there have been few occasions for "effervescence" among the ecclesiastical decision-makers. Yet I am convinced that as the countervailing trends continue to spread, the Catholic Church, urged by the Spirit, will come to define in a new and possibly radical manner the Christian attitude toward 'the other,' the outsider, the excluded and the despised.

^1.This lecture was given at the Newman Centre of the University of Toronto on May 13, 1996, and presented, in French, at a symposium on Vatican Council II of Canadian Catholic Historical Society, held in Montreal on October 25.

^2. Gregory Baum, That They May Be One: A Study of Papal Doctrine, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1958.

^3. I became aware of how important this insight has been in my work through an article by the Protestant theologian, Donald Schweitzer, soon to appear in Horizons, on the Holy Spirit in Baum's theory of the development of doctrine.

^4. Gregory Baum, op. cit., p. 53

^5. Op. cit., p. 41

^6. Op. cit., p. 72. .

^7. Op. cit., p. 98.

^8. Op. cit., p. 103

^9. Op. cit., p. 150

^10. The word 'perfidious,' also translated as 'faithless,' was removed from the liturgy in 1959 by Pope John XXIII.

^11.. See Denzinger: Enchiridion symbolorum, 32^nd edition, Freiburg Br.: Herder, 1962, page 342, no. 1351. When in 1949 the doctrine of the Council of Florence was preached by an American priest, Leonard Feeney, his teaching was formally reproved by Rome: see Denzinger, no. 3866-3873.

^12. See, for instance, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: the Theological Roots of Antisemitism, New York: Seabury Press, 1974.

^13. Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, L'encyclique cachée de Pie XI: Une occasion manquée de l'Église face à l'antisémitisme, preface by Émile Poulat, Paris: La Découverte, 1995. For a discussion of the book, see Pierre Anctil, "L'Église et la question juive durant la guerre," Relations (Montréal), July-August, 1996, pp 185-187.

^14. Denzinger, no. 2730.

^15. Denzinger, no. 2915.

^16. Denzinger, no. 3250.

^17. See Denzinger, no. 3176

^18. See Thomas Love, John Courtney Murray: Contemporary Church-State Theory, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965; D.P. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, New York: Paulist Press, 1976.

^19. Gregory Baum, Religion and Alienation, New York: Paulist Press, 1975, pp 176-177.

^20. See Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work, London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1973, p. 422.