Vatican II was a gathering of Christian thinkers called by the Pope in the early sixties that aimed to document and set the direction for the churches involved (it was ecumenical so involved the Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian etc… churches). It brought about some huge changes in the Catholic Church which hadn’t seen anything like it for 400 years or so.

For most of us in the pews, the changes we saw most were a result of a document called Sacrosanctum Concilium which is a bit dense to read but sets out the philosophy behind what should be going on in a church service. On understanding this document I would guess that most people would say “well that’s a far cry from what goes on at my church”. The language of the document is ideological and almost mystical:

In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, a minister of the holies and of the true tabernacle; we sing a hymn to the Lord’s glory with all the warriors of the heavenly army; venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them; we eagerly await the Saviour, Our Lord Jesus Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in glory. (Sacrosanctum Concilium 1.8)

The main thrust of the document is that Liturgy is not something that Christians are supposed to endure or just watch from the pews but that the congregation (that’s the people in the pews) are supposed to be the centre of what’s going on, the idea is that the Spirit manifests in the congregation and they become the body of Christ. The peak of the Liturgy (according to Sancrosanctum Concilium) is the Eucharist or Holy Communion (depending on your denomination) but the rest of the liturgy is like the build up to this moment of sharing in the community.

However, most people probably never get exposed to most of the ideas in Sacrosanctum Concilium, instead if you ask an old person (i.e. someone who was a Catholic Church goer in the sixties) what happened at Vatican II, they’ll tell you that one day they turned up to church and without explanation the whole service was in English instead of Latin, the altar at the front had been abandoned and a little one had been placed nearer to the seats, the altar rails were gone, the priest was facing the people and there was some guy with a guitar singing kumbaya instead of the pipe organ.

These changes were spread through the churches as a result of Vatican II in order to reflect the new understanding of Liturgy. If you think about it, most of these changes were about reflecting a change in the nature of God being presented. Instead of seeing God as an external supernatural being in the sky who delivered judgement from afar, God was to be presented as immanent, amongst the people, dwelling in the hearts of Christians and present in their lives.

Probably one of the failings of Vatican II has been that of communicating its ideology to the people that matter. While the new priests coming through the seminaries were taught the principles of Vatican II, many other priests in parishes were far removed from it all and just received it as a bunch of instructions rather than a change of attitudes.

However the legacy of Vatican II is still resonating in the churches. There have been changes in the way that priesthood is understood in the church: as a representative of the people in Christ and Christ in the people rather than merely a “go between”. This has opened the way for women priests and bishops and in some parts of the world, gay priests and bishops. There have also been movements towards changing the hierarchical nature of the church and making it more democratic which draws on the ideas that God dwells directly in the people that make up the church rather than the Roman imperial model which needs to feed orders from God down through the chain of command. And of course all of this rapid change has created a retroactive movement that is evident in the conservative branches of the churches and can be seen expressed in the subjects of my previous posts on GAFCon and Lambeth.

References: See Bibliography in my assignment on this topic: assignment-1-c51050-introduction-to-christian-liturgy