Vatican Council II “didn’t give new truths but articulated older truths in a new way”, recovering truths that had become traditions along the times, according to Mgr Luigi Bettazzi.
Mgr Bettazzi, now Bishop of Ivrea, was an active participant in Vatican Council II, considered to have changed the face of the Catholic Church worldwide.
Calling it a “great grace from God”, Mgr Bettazzi told Discern’s annual lecture no one really knew what the Council would do until it was actually under way.
Pope John XXIII knew how important the Council was. His predecessor, Pope Pius XII, wanted a Council but his collaborators told him it wasn’t necessary. So Pope John only communicated his decision to his Secretary of State under the secret of confession and his collaborators, the cardinals, only got to know about the Council when he told them in St Paul’s church and they had to prepare for it, the bishop said.
“In the second session in 1963, I then realised what the Council really was – it was the whole Catholic Church, the first time the Council was really ecumenical. This Council had real Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. It was humanly ecumenical,” the 87-year-old bishop said.
The strong point of Vatican Council II, Mgr Bettazzi said, was that, instead of focusing on dogma, which the Vatican Council I had done, it had a people-oriented pastoral side. It shifted its emphasis from dogma to how to meet people where they were and draw them to the Catholic faith, whatever their situation. It also saw the Church move ahead with the times.
“Popes had previously condemned democracy and religious freedom. In Vatican Council II, the Church saw democracy and religious freedom in a new light. It looked at them as a personal aspect of how a person could arrive to religion,” Mgr Bettazzi said.
One of the major shifts that took place in Vatican Council II was that the Bible became accessible to everyone in the belief it was God’s living word. This, he said, countered the tendency to create God in our own image as the Romans did and, instead, presented God as revealed in the Bible.
Another major shift that took place was that the Church started acknowledging that good things could also come from outside it.
“Before we used to say ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’, that no salvation could come outside of the Church, but now we have learnt to look with sympathy at all the good in the world, even if it doesn’t come from the Church,” Mgr Bettazzi said, saying Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem In Terris was the first step in this direction.
The Church’s structure was also seen in a new way through the Council, with the people of God being placed first instead of the hierarchy; the laity became co-responsible in the life of the Church. This, in practice meant Mass became a prayer for the congregation instead of a prayer only the priest said and lay people had more of a role in the Church’s activities.
“The hierarchy still has the last word but before a last word there have to be other words,” the bishop told the audience, which included Malta’s Bishops and many top Curia clergymen.