The celebration of the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council represents an invitation to reflect on the importance and relevance of its teaching, as a compass for the journey of the Church today. For Pope Francis, in fact, the four main conciliar Constitutions, as he wrote in the letter addressed to Monsignor Rino Fisichella for the Jubilee 2025, “will continue to orient and guide the holy people of God, so that they may progress in the mission of bringing to all the joyful announcement of the Gospel”.
Animated by this conviction, Bergoglio, the first Pope not to have taken part in the great ecumenical assembly, wished to commemorate that 11 October 1962, when the elderly Pope John XXIII, considered by many to be a transitional Pope, in the presence of about two thousand five hundred bishops from all over the world, opened in the Vatican the largest conciliar assembly called to question the Church, its relationship with the world and modernity. To understand the aims, the spirit of Vatican II and to note a certain continuity between the teaching of Pope Francis and Pope Roncalli, it is necessary to start from the “Gaudet Mater Ecclesia” speech that St. John XXIII gave at the opening of the first conciliar session. An exhortation introduced by the invitation to rejoice at the gift of the Council and to disagree “with these prophets of doom, who always announce the worst, as if the end of the world were looming”.
What interests Vatican II most of all, according to the original intuition of the Good Pope, “is that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine be preserved and taught in a more effective way”. It is not a question of altering or modifying the content of the doctrine, but of preserving it by rethinking how to communicate it to the man of our time, in an understandable and credible way. The Church, in fact, found herself proclaiming the Gospel of Christ in a profoundly changed social and cultural context. In order for the much desired “updating”, a technical term used by Pope John XXIII to indicate the renewal desired for the whole Church, the Council did not intend to break with tradition but tried to find new ways to express the novelty of the proclamation of the Gospel . Compared to previous councils that denounced heresies and condemned errors, for John XXIII the Church, seen more and more as the Bride in love with Christ, changes its approach through the works of Vatican II: “it prefers to use the medicine of mercy instead of taking up the weapons of rigor “. To an attitude of severity and rigidity, she prefers the tenderness of a Church with a motherly face, with an inclusive, welcoming and non-judgmental style. It no longer appears enclosed in itself and perched as in a fortress made up of laws and dogmas, to defend itself and its positions, but it opens up and not only talks, but listens to the men and women of the time of she.
To accept the teaching of Vatican II even today, it is necessary not only to know and understand its teaching but to live its message of charity by following the intuition of Paul VI: “the ancient history of the Samaritan was the paradigm of the spirituality of the Council”. The merciful Church born of the Second Vatican Council, in fact, following the example of Christ the Good Samaritan, stops, bows and takes care of her wounded and abandoned neighbor whom she encounters along the path of life.
Don Walter Insero
Called to be and to act like the Good Samaritan, here is the Church of the Council