

Michael Pakaluk, in his February 2022 essay “Is Vatican II ‘Spent’?”, says that what we now need, precisely in order to advance the aims of Vatican II, is a Vatican III:
We need a new Council. If a couple makes a marriage retreat, and they come up with resolutions, and they find a year later that they kept almost none of them, despite propitious circumstances – the best thing they can do is make another retreat, in which they figure out why. We need another Council that diagnoses, indeed, but also anathematizes, brings to an end an implicit schism by drawing lines as to who belongs and who does not.
I disagree with this assertion, but it must be admitted up front that the idea is not absurd or unreasonable. After all, even the great Nicaea in 325 needed several more councils to hammer out the full theological implications of its dogmatic assertion that Jesus Christ is fully divine.
Likewise, since large numbers of Catholics have misunderstood the teachings of Vatican II or have openly dissented from those teachings—and still others have co-opted and hijacked the council for their own purposes—perhaps now is the time for a new council that will set the record straight. Indeed, Pakaluk asserts that any such council should have some serious disciplinary teeth and issue much needed anathemas in the direction of those who have either rejected or misappropriated Vatican II in order to advance their own agendas.
There is also the fact that even larger numbers of Catholics now view the conciliar project as “yesterday’s news” and have zero interest in whatever its “project” was. So perhaps a Vatican III could help reignite the conciliar agenda and put fire once again in Vatican II’s equations.
However, looking at this concretely and not abstractly, the notion that a new council could in some way be a “disciplinary” council that would issue anathemas strikes me as quite anachronistic. For better or for worse, the Church of anathemas, condemnations, and disciplinary rigor no longer exists and is not likely to return anytime soon. Such a Church might still exist in theory and in the abstract, but in reality even when the Church does exercise her magisterial oversight role and attempts to rein in some errant views or behaviors, she is usually just summarily ignored.
Does anyone remember Ex Corde Ecclesiae? Or the recent CDF document banning the blessing of same-sex “unions”, which was then followed by a bunch of German priests, with episcopal permission, blessing same-sex “unions”—like little kids who do exactly what you told them not to do, all the while looking you in the eye with an impish grin that says, “I am doing this to show you that you ain’t the boss of me!” And speaking of something that is “spent”, how about Humanae Vitae, Evangelium Vitae, Veritatis Splendor, or St. Pope John Paul II’s entire catechesis on the theology of the body?
The point being that arguments from “magisterial authority” carry little weight anymore since one of the key things being theologically contested is precisely the nature and extent of magisterial authority. I think this is lamentable, but it is the current state of theological and ecclesial affairs.
We can stamp our feet in indignation all we want, and lobby for the next pope to be a “syllabus of errors” kind of guy who will rule in a way that would make Torquemada blush. But it will only create more fissures, more debate, more animosity, more resentment, and more dissent. St. Pope John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI both understood this well, which is why neither one adopted the path of whip-cracking disciplinary largesse; they understood that persuasion, not coercion, is the coin of the realm.
Yes, they clarified doctrine, both moral and dogmatic, and set certain limits that have not yet been transgressed (women priests, for example), and “disciplined” three or four noteworthy theologians with the equivalent of a wrist slap. Which by the way, made most of those theologians heroes back home, with some going on to receive prestigious theology awards from the professional guild for their supposed “courage.” For example, theologian Roger Haight, S.J., received the top prize in theology from the U.S. Catholic Press Association for his Jesus Symbol of God, and the Board of the Catholic Theological Society of America expressed “profound distress” because the controversial book received a warning from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, as head of the CDF, because it “contains serious doctrinal errors regarding certain fundamental truths of faith.”
It is therefore laughable that the reputation of both John Paul and Benedict as “hard line right wingers” with a punitive approach to dissent gained so much traction, as it is just so much bilge invented by Catholic Lefties who love to portray themselves as theological Davids fighting the wretched Vatican Goliath. The actual truth is closer to the observation made by Benedict in an interview that his “authority” did not extend beyond the doors to his apartment. The magisterium is in a bind these days because it knows that it must continue its ministry of ecclesial clarity, even as it also understands that its rulings will most likely be met with either an indifferent yawn or a defiant “No”.
I also think that calling for a Vatican III in order to clarify what Vatican II “really” taught is naïve, even very naïve. Given the current state of the Church, who seriously believes that another ecumenical council would be an unproblematic and irenic affair of like-minded prelates getting together to gently, but firmly, “set the record straight”? Ecumenical councils in the modern era are rare—and with good reasons too numerous to mention here. Vatican II itself probably would have required more of an ecclesial justification were it not for the fact that Vatican I was rudely interrupted and remained unfinished.
But even then it took almost a century for it to happen, with pope after pope considering it but each then quietly dismissing the idea as inopportune at the time. Councils are always a delicate and dicey affair since they are usually called to adjudicate some divisive issues, both doctrinal and disciplinary, but must do so with a certain unanimity that the debates involved militate against. It takes a deft hand to pull off, which is why they are only called when circumstances are favorable for potential success. Who today thinks that such conditions now exist in the Church?
And if some think that Vatican II was hamstrung by the presence of so many competing “factions” in the Church, all of them jockeying for conciliar visibility and influence, just imagine what kind of a fractious cage match of warring adversaries a new council would be. Therefore, whence comes this optimism that the Church of today is more ably equipped to deal with ecclesial confusion than she was in 1962?
My own view is that it is not Vatican II that is “spent,” but rather, it is the Church herself that is suffering from a certain exhaustion of will and purpose.
Therefore, instead of a Vatican III what we need is closer to what Peter Seewald, in his biography of Pope Benedict XVI, calls a “Reconquista” of Vatican II. Yes, we have all grown weary of the endless debates over Vatican II, and it is therefore tempting to just say “to heck with it, let’s start again.” But there is no evading the necessity of the hard theological work of continuing the ressourcement theological project of the council. Authoritarian disciplinary measures have their role to play, and magisterial doctrinal clarifications are indeed welcome. But they will remain ineffective so long as the ressourcement project remains unfinished.
Pope Francis is trying, and I am not opposed to him as so many are, but his often ambiguous comments and his regular recourse to the path of motu proprio authority often generate more heat than light. What is needed therefore is not a Vatican III or even a John Paul III. What is needed is rather a frank admission of the irreducible pluralism in the Church today, for good and for ill, and a recognition that the centrifugal forces such pluralism generates are not resolvable through papal or conciliar diktats.
Such things can be helpful, but they will not be determinative. It can only be counteracted with a robust theological and spiritual renewal of the center. That was what the ressourcement project Vatican II sought, and it is a project that we need to double-down on and not abandon as a “spent” effort whose “failure” now requires top-down remediation in a vain effort to force ecclesial unity out of whole cloth.
• Related at CWR: “Is Vatican II “spent”? A reply to Michael Pakaluk: Part I” (March 30, 2022) by Larry Chapp
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