“A new council proved to be not only meaningful, but necessary,” the pope said. He was speaking about Vatican II, especially in light of the momentous changes in the world at the rough midpoint of the 20th century.
It wasn’t the first time the Church had needed a rethinking in light of disruption in the world.
He noted how the capture and sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 “profoundly shook the world of that time,” and also affected the thinking of St Augustine.
“[T]he complete spiritualization of the concept of the Church, for its part, misses the realism of faith and its institutions in the world,” he continued. “Thus,” he said, “in Vatican II the question of the Church in the world finally became the real central problem.”
These were, indeed, the words of the pope.
They were not, however, the words of Pope Leo XIV – once the head of the Augustinian order – but came from a 2022 letter Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote to Father Dave Pivonka, the president of the Franciscan University of Steubenville, in 2022.
I thought about those remarks on Wednesday, when Pope Leo began his series on the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, or “The Church: Listening to and Serving the World.”
When Leo XIV began his series of catechetical reflections on the Vatican Council II, Vatican watchers perked up. It was January of this year, and we were still very much getting to know the new pontiff.
A series on the defining ecclesiastical event of the last 100 years would show the new pope’s mind at work in a way we had not yet seen.
From the start, the series has been the very opposite of a disappointment in this regard, but last week’s catechesis afforded an insight of a rare kind, the sort that makes everything snap into focus.
Before getting to that, however, it’s important to look at where Leo started.
At the outset of the still-new Leonine pontificate, observers wondered whether he would continue in the course Francis charted and steered, or whether he would take a different tack. His series on Vatican II has shown, however, that Leo is looking as much to Benedict as to Francis.
That makes a difference.
In his Jan. 7 address introducing the series, Leo quoted Pope Benedict XVI, who had noted – also shortly after his election in 2005 – how “the Conciliar Documents have lost none of their timeliness,” in what were then forty years since the council had closed.
“Indeed,” Benedict also said in 2005, “their teachings are proving particularly relevant to the new situation of the Church and the current globalized society.”
In 2005, the “Vatican II Generation” of bishops was still very much alive and had a firm grip on the reins of power in the Church. Benedict himself had been a peritus, or theological expert, at the Council.
Fast forward to 2026 and – as Leo noted in his opening talk – the generation of bishops, theologians and believers of Vatican II has largely passed on.
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“Therefore,” Leo said in January, “while we hear the call not to let its prophecy fade, and to continue to seek ways and means to implement its insights, it will be important to get to know it again closely.”
Leo warned that it will be important to develop an understanding of the Council “not through ‘hearsay’ or interpretations that have been given, but by rereading its documents and reflecting on their content.”
That emphasis on the documents of Vatican II is crucial.
It suggests, among other things, that Leo is wary of the “Spirit of Vatican II” and of narratives about the Council in general.
This wariness is another thing that puts Leo in line with Benedict XVI, who spoke – mere weeks before his abdication in 2013 – about an alternative way of looking at Vatican II, which he called “the Council of the media.”
“For the media,” Benedict said on Feb. 14, 2013, “the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different trends in the Church,” and the media narrative of Council-as-power-struggle was attractive because it was easy.
“We know that this Council of the media was accessible to everyone,” Benedict also said, and therefore “was the dominant one, the more effective one.”
He said “the Council of the media” was a narrative that “created so many disasters, so many problems, so much suffering: Seminaries closed, convents closed, banal liturgy … and the real Council had difficulty establishing itself and taking shape.”
“The virtual Council was stronger than the real Council,” Benedict said.
It was an admission startling for its frankness, especially at what proved to be the end of an eight-year pontificate dedicated to a “hermeneutic of continuity” that had sought to (re)read the Council in light of Church history and tradition with both a capital T and a lower-case t.
On Aug. 26, Pope Leo said the liturgical reform promoted by the Second Vatican Council is “firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.”
In fact, liturgy has been a major battleground in the post-Conciliar period, especially where tradition – and Tradition – are concerned.
Leo spent weeks on the Council’s liturgical document, Sacrosanctum Concilium, and also frankly acknowledged the abuses that occurred in the decades following the Council and the post-Conciliar reform of the liturgy promulgated by Pope St. Paul VI.
“A correct understanding of [Sacrosanctum Concilium] also enables us to reject the abuses that occurred in certain sectors of the Church during the post-Conciliar period,” Leo said, noting as well how, “unfortunately,” such abuses “still occur from time to time today.”
Leo said these abuses tend to occur “where some of the principles underlying the reform itself have been taken to extremes or misunderstood.”
If the “Spirit of Vatican II” proponents have missed the mark in one direction, more conservative elements in the Church have missed in the opposite direction, one that coalesced around discomfort with liturgical changes but was rooted in concerns about Church teaching.
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Many of the Catholics in that more conservative camp came to think the Council went too far. Some of them even claim the Council taught things contrary to Church dogma.
Much of this side congregated around the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), which refused to use the 1970 Mass of Paul VI and eventually rebelled against Rome.
The August 26 catechesis, in other words, brought a central theme of Leo’s whole series into sharp focus, and a look at some of Leo’s earlier remarks in the series will illustrate how.
On May 27, in the second instalment of his reflections on Sacrosanctum Concilium, Leo praised and endorsed Benedict’s grasp of the problem.
“Pope Benedict XVI grasped in this declaration of intent the ‘reform program’ of the Council Fathers,” Leo said.
To make the point, Leo quoted directly from Benedict’s May 6, 2011, address to participants in the 50th anniversary congress of the Pontifical Athenaeum of Saint Anselm, dedicated to study of the liturgy.
“In their program of reform,” Benedict said, “the Council Fathers wished to maintain an equilibrium between both terms, a balance between the great liturgical tradition of the past and that of the future.”
“Tradition and progress are often clumsily opposed,” Benedict said, but “the two concepts merge: Tradition is a living reality, which therefore includes in itself the principle of development, of progress.”
“It is as if to say that the river of tradition also carries its source in itself and flows towards the outlet,” Benedict said.
It is particularly interesting – perhaps telling – that Leo quoted three popes in his May 27 address: Benedict XVI, Saint John Paul II, and Pius XII, the last pontiff before Vatican II.
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It is interesting, because Pius had made several changes to the Mass before the Council – most visibly during Easter week – and the other two popes broadened the use of the older Mass.
Trying to heal the schism with the SSPX, Pope Saint John Paul II made it easier to use the older Rite of Mass in 1988, a policy Benedict expanded.
Before John Paul II and Benedict made the pre-Conciliar liturgy more widely available, internal debate on the Mass within the conservative camp focused on the “Reform of the Reform,” which sought to incorporate more traditional elements into celebration of the 1970 liturgy.
Many of the abuses Leo mentioned did become less frequent and less prominent, but the growth of the pre-Conciliar liturgy may also have taken some of the wind out of the “Reform of the Reform” sails.
It also happened that lingering hurt and skepticism regarding the Council did not disappear overnight, and many of the people who had been worshipping in the older use continued to read things written by people who refused to accept the teachings of Vatican II.
This became even more visible with the rise of social media, which arguably made the problem appear much more serious than it ever really was.
In any case, observers on both sides of the so-called “liturgy wars” have said it is the main reason Pope Francis abrogated Benedict’s liberalizing reform and placed new restrictions on the use of the older form of the Mass: He thought too many of its adherents rejected the Council in its entirety.
If Leo’s catechetical series on the Vatican Council II is any indication, then he will want the Church to have a good, careful think about the whole matter – in continuity with tradition (and Tradition) – rooted in the documents of the Council itself.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome
