Pope John XXIII and Vatican II

I was born in 1967, a few years after the Vatican II last convened, but it’s effect was still felt by the churches that I attended while I was growing up. I was a navy brat, but eventually my family settled in California, and we began attending Our Lady of Peace church in Santa Clara. I had a post Vatican II childhood, so my church had guitars for worship, English masses, and lots of “Peace be with you” handshakes. My mom would make us sit in the front of the church, and I remember one time when we attended a Stations of the Cross, the altar boys didn’t show up and my brothers and I were coralled by the priest into holding the cross and candles. It was a nice memory. Father Sweeney and Father Shesheeta were nice priests, even though they always looked rather exhausted, I suspect from too few priests trying to minister to too many people.

When I took my CCD classes to get confirmed, I began to read a lot of books on the Church and that’s when I first discovered Pope John XXIII and Vatican II. As a fellow Angelo, I immediately grew fond of the Pope John XXIII (formerly Angelo Roncalli) that I read about, his kindness and respect to all the people he met, the humor he showed, and his willingness to visit prisoners and look upon even communists as fellow creations of God. He seemed real to me in ways that the Pope at the time, John Paul II, didn’t. I later changed my mind about John Paul II and grew to admire him, but it is still John XXIII that I most like. One of my favorite quotes was from him: “Christianity is not that complex system of oppressive rules which the unbeliever describes; it is peace, joy, love, and a life which is continually renewed, like the mysterious pulse of nature at the beginning of Spring. We must assert this truth as confidently as the Apostles did, and you… must be convinced of it, for it is your greatest treasure, which alone can give meaning and serenity to your daily life.”

This is the Christianity that I wanted in my life. Vatican II represented for me the personality of Pope John XXIII and his vision of a joyous Catholic Church. I loved reading about the opening of the church that Vatican II promised, our opening up to Protestants and a creating of new relationships with Jews and Muslims and those the Church once looked down. It was a church that would look back on its traditions and find those that would help it reach out to the ordinary people in the pews. It reflected on the role of the Pope in relation to his Cardinals, and looked on ways for the Church to relate to the Modern World. One of my favorite books was “Observer in Rome” by Robert McAfee Brown, about a Presbyterian who was invited by the Catholic Church to Rome to observe the Vatican II proceedings. A few years ago, the library discarded the book and I immediately bought it from the library for myself.

Of the many good things that came out of Vatican II, one of the most important was the document Nostra Aetate. It gave the Church a new relationship with nonchrisitan religions, and it was the first step in a reconciliation between Christianity and Judaism and Islam. I’m not sure if ecumenism started with this document or whether Protestant denominations also were doing ecumenical things, but it influenced my view of looking at other religions in a positive light, rather than seeing them as enemies. It wrote:

“Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing “ways,” comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites. The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself.(4)

The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.”

Nostra Aetate is for me a reflection on the qualities of Vatican II that I most admire: a reaching out and an attempt to understand peoples of diverse experiences and cultures, a willingness to see the God in all peoples, a grounding of all relationships in God’s love. This for me is the Roman Catholic Church at its best, and I feel that’s when it most lives up to its name of being a Catholic, or Universal, Church. I’ll end this post with another quote from Nostra Aetate:

“We cannot truly call on God, the Father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man, created as he is in the image of God. Man’s relation to God the Father and his relation to men his brothers are so linked together that Scripture says: “He who does not love does not know God” (1 John 4:8).

No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned.

The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion. On the contrary, following in the footsteps of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, this sacred synod ardently implores the Christian faithful to “maintain good fellowship among the nations” (1 Peter 2:12), and, if possible, to live for their part in peace with all men,(14) so that they may truly be sons of the Father who is in heaven.(15)”

If you want to read Nostra Aetate, go to http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents…

The later years of Pope John Paul II

It took me a while to respect, then later admire John Paul II.  At first I really didn’t like him.

 Which was kind of strange, because it seemed like everyone else did like him.  He was the first Polish Pope, the first non Italian Pope in over 400 years.  But I began hearing about his more conservative positions on abortion and homosexuality and the roles of women and I began to get wary of him.  As the early 1980s unfolded, he and Joseph Ratzinger began clamping down on dissident theologians and the liberation theologians in South America and my early impressions of this Pope were really not that good.

 My attitudes began to change in the mid 1980s when I saw how involved he was in helping the Solidarity movement in Poland against communist rule.   I’d watch the news and read the newspapers and see how the Polish people looked to John Paul II for inspiration for their quest for freedom and democracy.   In 1986 he also held a prayer conference in Assissi with leaders of most of the major religions and they all prayed together.   And when he visited the Bay Area, he made a point of visiting AIDs patients in San Francisco.  These little surprises slowly chipped away at my earlier stereotypes of him as a rigid conservative authoritarian.

 In the 1990s, as the Pope became more vulnerable, I began to like him more.  I read a biography on him by Tad Szulc and learning about his background helped me to understand why he thought the way he did.  He came out of World War II in Poland and he lost a lot of Jewish friends to the Holocaust, and the horrors of that war really affected him.   So when he visited Synagogues and had dialogue with Jews, when he went out against the two Iraqi wars, when he talked out against the mistreatment of Muslims in the Bosnian Serbian conflict, it made sense to me.  In light of the friends that he lost in the Holocaust, it must’ve really anguished him to see what was happening in the genocide in Rwanda.  

At first it was tough for me to see the Pope in his deteriorated state, especially when I remembered the robust Pope of his earlier years.  But then I read an article in Time where he wanted the world to see him in the state that he was in and to see the dignity in suffering.  This was when I really started admiring his courage.   The Pope John Paul II of his last years was the Pope I liked the best.   He spent the entire year of 2000 apologizing on behalf of the Church for its various sins:  he apologized to the Jews for the Church’s history of persecution, he apologized to the Muslims for the crusades, he apologized posthumously to Galileo.  This was a noble thing that John Paul II did.  

It’s been two years now, and it still seems strange to see Benedict as Pope.  I still disagree with John Paul II on the same issues that I disagreed with in the beginning of his Papacy.  But I agreed on a lot more of the things that he did.  John Paul II was a lot more complex than I originally thought, more nuanced in his thinking.   I didn’t really appreciate him until the later years of his Papacy, but I admire him now like I admire my dad.  I didn’t always agree with him, but I admire him for his integrity and his wisdom.