Life will become intolerable if the Church doesn’t embrace the missionary impulse of the Second Vatican Council, Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron told The Great Grace Conference in Sydney last month.
One of the conference’s keynote speakers, Archbishop Vigneron said the Second Vatican Council was a “brave step forward” in reminding the Church that its message was one which God wanted it to share with the modern world; and that modernity itself was not inherently disordered.
Answering questions after his address on May 22, Archbishop Vigneron said it was only the Church, somewhat ironically, that could fulfil the freedom Enlightenment thinkers thought they could obtain by discarding ‘superstition’ and tradition.
“This is a daring project but we have to do it for two motives: One, because we love our neighbours; and in fact without this project life will become intolerable,” Archbishop Vigneron said.
“Where people seem content to act, prescinding from any point about truth, that cannot continue for very long …
“We will either fall into this terribly burdensome collectivism or a kind of radical individualism of the war of each against all …
“In the city where I live, there are parts of the city that are miserable … the fruit of actions which are not thoughtful, actions which are simply about the acting out of passion.
“No civilisation, no culture can continue that way,” Archbishop Vigneron said.
The Council was both paradoxically new and ancient in its openness to the good in modernity.
Pope John XXIII’s opening address confirmed both that the Council was to be consistent with all the prior ecumenical councils, particularly those of the modern era (Trent, 1545–63 and Vatican I, 1869–70), but also that he had expected God to be “doing something new” in their midst.
The late Pope, who died less than eight months after the Council began on October 11, 1962, explicitly contradicted those who said the modern age was inherently degenerate, saying the human family was “on the threshold” of a new era.
“This unpessimistic assessment of the modern age, this assessment which is required for evangelisation, often goes by the name of ‘reading the signs of the times’ … performing acts of discernment about the modern world,” Archbishop Vigneron said.
There was great danger in the Church conforming itself too closely to modernity, he said, but the Council sanctioned a discernment of modernity’s “light and shadows”, with Christ as the paradigm of what it meant to be authentically human.
“If it were not that we had something distinct to prevent the total conformity of the Church to the modern world, she would lose her identity; she would not have anything specific to offer the world. In fact, she would lose Christ himself.
“The world would be left to sink into ideology; the world does not need total ‘amen’ to what it is.”
Nevertheless, he said, the Council saw that there was much good about the modern age: its focus on freedom and natural rights among them.
“The Council Fathers affirmed that everything in the world, as it had been shaped by the French revolution, is not bad.
“The Council made the Church’s peace with the French revolution and marked a moment in the life of the Church saying that we would not try to undo the world … Western culture after the Enlightenment is not irretrievably evil.”
The revolutionary slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” was a case in point, the Archbishop said. Whereas there were many evils which had been carried out in the name of the Enlightenment, there was much that was “healthy and wholesome” and the Church needed to assess the “lights and shadows” in deciding what to incorporate into its missionary strategy.
The Archbishop was emphatic in saying there was nothing new in the Church wanting to speak most effectively to the present age:
“What John XXIII and the council fathers decided to do was profoundly traditional, it was not revolutionary, and I make that assertion on the basis of the Church’s perennial doctrine about creation and the new creation established in the new Adam, Jesus Christ.
“It has always been the Church’s mission to think anew about the meaning of the world in the light of understanding the world as created. God created the world by the pronouncement of his Word and so it is always legitimate for the Church to try to understand the word that is impressed in creation …
“This missionary strategy of the Council is the Church being faithful to her conviction about the world as God’s creation and the world as recreated in Jesus Christ.”
Archbishop Vigneron nominated two major characteristics of modernity with which the Church had to grapple if it was to successfully engage with contemporary people: the turn to subjectivity – how the truth is conceived of, and felt, by the individual; and secondly, a redefinition of nature such that it is no longer seen as gracious to human persons.
Instead, it is seen simply as neutral theatre for choices of autonomous individuals, to be exploited at will.
“Truth [in the modern understanding] is not given gratuitously to the thinker, but the mind has to, almost in some way, construct the truth.”
The Council also identified several ‘dead ends’ of modernity, Archbishop Vigneron said, including a belief “that the human person is an autonomous self, an imperial self, with no capacity for solidarity or communion”.
Archbishop Vigneron said there had been many positive developments in the Church in the wake of the Council: the Theology of the Body; moral theology focused on virtue; a clear sense of every lay person’s call, particularly in relation to marriage and family; the new movements; and ecumenism, among many others.
Archbishop Vigneron proposed three “touchstones” for use in discerning what was worthwhile in modernity and worthy of appropriating in the Church’s strategy of missioning to (post-) modern people.
“Jesus, a divine person in two natures … shows us that there is a harmony between nature and grace.
“In any attempt to embrace what is modern, if in some way we jeopardise Christ, we can be confident that the strategy is erroneous. We cannot lose Christ.
“Secondly, the Eucharist [shows us] that what is necessary and true about the world is disclosed in history.
“Thirdly … the Church needs to continue to be the faith of martyrs, confessing the faith of martyrs.
“If some element of modernity were to take us down the road where martyrdom would no longer make sense, we can be sure that we have followed a dead end.
“The measure of martyrdom is a sure sign, a measure of any element of modernity, about whether or not it can be taken into this new cultural synthesis and included into the life of the Church,” Archbishop Vigneron said.