Like a lot of others who were with me in the seminary, we were present in Rome when Pope John XXIII was elected. My class in the seminary arrived when Pope Pius XII was dying. As a result, our introduction into university life and Roman life was delayed for about a month while Pope Pius XII was buried and Pope John XXIII was elected. Almost one of the first things John XXIII did was to announce the summoning of an ecumenical council.

It is interesting that many people at that time viewed the ecumenical council as necessary to finish the work of the first Vatican Council, which was forced to adjourn because of the political situation in Europe in 1870. The first council was kind of incomplete, in that it defined the pope’s infallibility and his place in the Magisterium, but never went on to articulate that fact in the context of the powers of the bishops and others in the church. And so, what form the subsequent council would take was very vague at the time and all through my seminary training, 1958-1962, during which the whole church was involved in planning for the Second Vatican Council.

The Council itself opened with great panoply and fanfare and the first session was held in the fall of 1962. Our class was ordained in 1961, finished our theology and came home in 1962.

In this Year of Faith, one of the things we are bidden to do is to reexamine the documents of the Second Vatican Council, all 16 of them. As we take on that task, we should reread them not only in light of what the council wanted, but also our experience of the attempts, successful or not, to implement them in the course of the years that have interceded since the end of the council, in 1965, and the present time. It would be foolish to deny what has happened in that time.

In the run-up to the council, Pope John XXIII told the bishops and others involved with the planning that he didn’t want a council that would issue a lot of anathemata, or prohibitions. Most of the other councils would get down to a series of canons, rules. If anyone shall say that Christ is not the true son of God and God Himself, let him be anathema, that is, out. Pope John XXIII wanted a council that would rather bring the church up to date. The word aggiornamento was used a lot when referring to Vatican II. It means updating, not reform so much as dusting off and adjusting to modern times. That is what the pope wanted.

The Second Vatican Council was useful in helping to break what was kind of an unhealthy reverence for everything past. If you can only do what has been done before, what is new? We don’t live that way. We adapt to conditions; we change. That sense of adaptation helped motivate the Second Vatican Council.

The documents issued from the council are very good and merit the attention of all Catholics in this Year of Faith, but they were not necessarily formulated in a way that, at the time, gave people clear directions to follow. And in our hierarchial institution it is important that the direction be clear. That doesn’t mean that you and I don’t have freedom. I can accept or not accept what the Church teaches — but how am I to know that unless it is clear what the Church teaches? That is where a lot of the trouble started — it became the Letter of Vatican II versus “the spirit” of Vatican II.