The Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II, took place between the years of 1962 – 1965. Called by Pope John XXIII, the council was seen as a force for modernising liturgical practices (notably in the use of vernacular languages in the performance of Mass) as well as in addressing the relations between the Catholic Church and the modern world.
In this 2012 article by Patrick Comerford, Vatican II is discussed in relation to its impact on both sides of the ‘divide’ – not only in the improved formalised relations between the Anglican and Catholic Churches, but in the changed view of the Anglican and other non-Catholic Churches in Catholic doctrinal approach.
Patrick Comerford is an Anglican priest (Church of Ireland), lecturer in Theology, and author of – and contributor to – numerous publications. More information on Patrick can be found on his website.
Patrick Comerford, ‘An Irish Anglican Response to Vatican II’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 101, No. 404 (Winter, 2012), 441-448. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23333135
When Father Michel Hurley published his collection of essays marking the centenary of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, it was a ground breaking exercise in ecumenism for the middle of the 20th century. Michael assembled a group of Methodist, Presbyterian, Quaker and Roman Catholic scholars to write critical but positive reflections on the role of Anglicanism in Irish life from 1869 to 1969…Today, it would be too easy to dismiss many of the ideas in Michael Hurley’s collection of essays, and some of the ideas expressed by the contributors no longer appear surprising or alarming. But it is also easy to forget the pre-Vatican II climate in Ireland and the suspicions that surrounded any tentative forays into inter-church relations before the 1960s.
…It was as though, for many years, Michael Hurley was ploughing a lonely furrow. Yet, Anglican-Roman Catholic rapprochement began some years before Vatican II opened when, two years earlier in 1960, Pope John XXIII established the Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity (now the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) and welcomed Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of Canterbury on a private visit to the Vatican in the same year. Archbishop Fisher’s visit paved the way for one of the most spectacular innovations at the opening of the Council on 11 October 1962, when observers from Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant churches were invited to attend…The delegates changed over the full course of the council, and in all there were 15 observers from throughout the Anglican Communion.
…The Archbishop of Canterbury was the only Church leader to have a personal representative at the Vatican and no other group of observers had a secretary. Virginia Johnstone, who was Canon Pawley’s secretary in Rome, later recalled how Bernard and Margaret Pawley’s apartment was a focal point for the Anglican observers and others as they reviewed the debates and issues over dinner each week with a variety of bishops, diplomats, other observers and journalists.
When the Council came to an end, Pope Paul VI welcomed Michael Ramsey in 1966 as the second Archbishop of Canterbury to visit to the Vatican and on that occasion described Anglicans as ‘our beloved Sister Church.’ The Council’s deliberations, and the new thaw it created in Anglican-Roman Catholic relations, paved the way for the formation in 1967 of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC-1).
Meanwhile, in 1967, Canon Bernard Pawley brought together eight Anglicans who had been present, at one time or another, as official observers at Vatican II, to contribute to a volume of studies. Their viewpoints represented not only the Church of England but the wider world of Anglicanism, with four of the contributors coming from North America. The book was addressed in the first instance to Anglican readers, but showed an intimate understanding of the Council’s achievements, and offered a shrewd assessment of what these were. Canon Pawley held that Pope John XXIII and Vatican II created ‘an entirely new situation’ and that there had been ‘a change of heart’ in the relations between the two communions or churches.
Perhaps the most important documents from an ecumenical perspective, and particularly from an Anglican point of view, were the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (1964), and the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio (1964). Lumen Gentium teaches that the church ‘exists as a sacrament or instrumental sign of intimate union with God and the unity of all humanity.’ Through the Holy Spirit, the church exists as the sacrament of unity. It is a sign of that unity that God wills and it is also an instrument to realise that unity in each generation and each place. Christ founded one church. The breaking of communion and the disunity throughout church history is a scandal to a world that hopes to find God’s mysterious plan for creation present within the church. It is a failure to live fully God’s call to unity. It is as if Christ himself were divided. The sacramentality of the church is weakened even though the deep and abiding presence of the Spirit calls the church to ever deeper communion.
The Decree on Ecumenism no longer refers to the Orthodox, Anglicans and Protestants as ‘schismatics’ and ‘heretics’ but as ‘separated brethren’ (fratres seiuncti), who share the same baptism. It concedes too that the causes for separation and division lay with all. The Anglican observers later recalled how the term ‘separated brethren’ was used politely and how Pope Paul VI had said: ‘If we are in any way to blame for that separation, we humbly beg God’s forgiveness and ask pardon too of our brethren who feel themselves to have been injured by us.’
(…)
By [the 1970s], Roman Catholics and Anglicans had come to accept each other mutually as the primary partner in any ecumenical dialogue. Old suspicions were fast fading, and an atmosphere of trust was evolving with haste. The potential for that trust spreading to Ireland was enhanced by Henry McAdoo’s positive engagement in the new structures of dialogue and by the replacement of the Ne Temere decree on marriage by the motu propio on marriage, Matrimonia Mixta, in 1970. That motu propio was promulgated in the same year as Michael Hurley published his book on the centenary of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, a year he describes as longus et unus annus. The Irish School of Ecumenics was inaugurated that same year.
Within a short few years, the ecumenical landscape had changed internationally, and had changed in Ireland too. Memories of Vatican II would now dominate the agenda for dialogue, rather than memories of the Fethard-on Sea boycott. From the Anglican perspective, Vatican II can be seen as realising and owning many of the primary demands and expectations of the Anglican Reformers of the 16th century and the Caroline Divines of the 17th century, most noticeably the use of the language of the people in the liturgy and reading the Bible, and the reception of Communion under both kinds.
(…)
An unexpected fruit of the new climate of dialogue created by Vatican II was the way in which Catholics and Evangelicals within Anglicanism began talking to each other after generations and centuries of mutual suspicion and distrust. An unfortunate consequence of this, though, has been the way in which conservative Anglo-Catholics and fundamentalist Evangelicals from the movement known as Reform conspired last November to defeat the proposed legislation on women bishops in the General Synod of the Church of England.
Outside England, many Anglicans are concerned that the Vatican is interested in dialogue with the Church of England alone, and not with the other member churches of the Anglican Communion. These suspicions appeared to find confirmation in the Vatican responses to the debates in the General Synod of the Church of England on the ordination of women to the priesthood in the 1990s and women to the episcopate in more recent years. Similar responses were not heard, for example, when the Church of Ireland agreed 23 years ago to the ordination of women as priests and bishops, or for that matter, when the Episcopal Church in the US, acted unilaterally on these issues decades ago despite objections from within the Church of England.
(…)
The reality on the ground is that, from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective the majority of Roman Catholic laity in Ireland today accept the Catholic nature of sacramental and pastoral ministry of bishops, priests and deacons in the Church of Ireland, and this is most noticeable when one observes the practices of the laity when it comes to sacramental reception at baptisms, weddings and funerals. We may joke as clergy about these rites of passage being moments of ‘hatch, match and dispatch.’ In reality, however, they have become the ground-breaking moments for ecumenical practice and convergence.
But is this any different from the appearances of acceptance when it comes to Vatican protocol? Every Archbishop of Canterbury who has visited the Vatican since the Council – from Michel Ramsey to Rowan Williams – has been received with the courtesy and protocol appropriate for a visiting patriarch. In 1966, Pope Paul VI gave Archbishop Ramsey the episcopal ring he wore as Archbishop of Milan, and each Archbishop of Canterbury has received an episcopal ring or episcopal cross from the pope of the day during a visit to the Vatican. These are inappropriate gifts for a pope to offer to a lay person, and are hardly given as items of decorative jewellery; they remain unspoken and unofficial recognition not only of the archbishops’ episcopal ministry, but of their primatial and presiding ministry throughout the Anglican Communion.
In a similar spirit, the director of the Anglican Centre in Rome is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s permanent representative to the Holy See, and the Anglican Communion is the only Christian denomination to have such an institutional presence in Rome.
(…)
In recent years, it has to be admitted new difficulties have been encountered on this shared ecumenical pilgrimage…We are a long way from mutual recognition of orders and an even longer way from talking once again about setting a goal of full and visible unity. But there can be no going back. Vatican II changed the agenda for dialogue between Anglicans and Roman Catholics – not only at a senior level, but at grassroots level in Ireland too – to the point that there can be no return to the ‘bad old days,’…and we can never again think of ourselves as other than sisters and brothers seeking to restore the unity of the family.