What are ECUMENICAL COUNCILS? They are formal gatherings of all the bishops of the universal church, named after the cities in which they occur. Vatican Council II was the 21st ecumenical council in the history of the Catholic Church. The 20th century ecumenical movement seeks the unity of Christians throughout the world.

One of the characteristic terms used in describing this council was  AGGIORNAMENTO, meaning “to up-date.”

The council was called by Pope John XXIII in 1959 and opened on October 11, 1962. Up to 2600 bishops from around the word attended the council.

It was unique in its intended purpose. On the one hand, it was not called 

to confront serious attacks on the doctrinal or organizational integrity of the Church; nor to repeat ancient formulas or to condemn dissidents and heretics. John’s goal was to eradicate the seeds of discord and promote peace and unity of all humankind; to keep in mind the distinction between the substance of doctrine and the way in which it is presented to prepare “the path toward that unity of mankind which is required . . . in order that the earthly city may be brought to the resemblance of the heavenly city.”

Pope John had a passion to bring people together. He was open to and allowed dialogue and was okay with that. His openness to change was rooted in his deep faith. People of deep faith do not fear change. He believed that truth revealed itself through conversation in the community.

 In the Pope’s words: “As I go about my daily work as pope, I sometimes have to listen, with much regret, to voices of persons… not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure.” John’s resolve then shows itself when he says, “I feel I must disagree with these prophets of gloom who are always forecasting disaster as though the end of the world was at hand.”[O]ur approach to this will be a thoroughly pastoral one….”  In his opening sermon, he refused the way of condemnation, “[T]oday we prefer to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity.”

The Council produced 16 documents:

4 CONSTITUTIONS (A document that declares a teaching that is of a substantial nature, one that is central to the entire Church)

9 DECREES (Give a significant teaching but one that requires further discussion)

3 DECLARATIONS (Address areas that may be, by its nature, controversial and in need of further doctrinal development)

 

THE JEWISH QUESTION

 

Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, one of the three Declarations, promulgated near the end of the Council (October 28, 1965), was primarily intended as a statement about the Jews. Read from the context of 1939 to 1945, it was intended to be a response to anti-Semitism throughout the ages and to the Holocaust in particular.

As it was written within the 1960s context of Israeli-Palestinian strife, however, it needed to include a statement about Islam as well. In the end, it also briefly took account of Hinduism and Buddhism.

As a result, by taking the “big questions” of religion as its starting point, this brief document curiously become a revolutionary one.

It posed the question “What is religion?” in the broadest manner possible and affirmed truth and holiness in all places.

This magnanimity made the Church’s earlier stances – opposition to Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism, not to mention non-Christian religions – seem very small by contrast.

With the publication of Nostra aetate, the Church and the papacy had finally come to terms with modernity.

(Taken from Vatican II: Did Anything Happen? Continuum Press 2011)