by Father Richard Cipolla
The papacy of Francis was indeed inevitable. The person of Jorge Mario Bergoglio was formed by the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council, by the event of the Council itself and the three decades following the Council. He has been described as a complex man with a complex history. Surely a part of this complexity was a result of being a Jesuit at a time of great upheavals in the Jesuit order during the 1960s and 1970s that followed the Second Vatican Council. It is now commonplace to point out that the main effects of Vatican II on the Catholic Church were not merely on what the documents of that Council said, but also, and much more to the point, on the appearance of what became known as the “spirit” of Vatican II. This “spirit” was claimed to be the authentic reading of the Council documents that in many cases contradicted the documents themselves. The most obvious example is the revision of the Liturgy that was carried out by a group of liturgical periti, the experts,some of whom held well known negative feelings towards the Traditional Roman Mass as shown in their publications even before the Council. The frank and detailed history of the proceedings of the Concilium is readily available in Annibale Bunigni’s published account of the proceedings of the Concilium in his book The Reform of the Liturgy: 1948-1975. It is there that one sees quite clearly the phenomenon of the “spirit” of Vatican II, where what the Council document on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, asked for, and the liturgical form that came out of the Concilium were quite different, where the “spirit” of Vatican II voided the letter and import of Vatican II. These liturgical “spiritists” still roam the corridors of the liturgical academic center of Sant’ Anselmo in Rome and elsewhere, though silver threads are showing among their golden heads.
This same “spirit” of Vatican II manifested itself in other places in the Church, not the least in the Religious Orders. One of the Orders most affected by this “spirit” was indeed the Jesuits, who for a time abandoned their religious, missionary and intellectual heritage and fled to the peripheries to be “men for others” --as if they had never been called to this before-- abandoning their important role in the intellectual and missionary life of the Church and instead, in the name of the “spirit” of Vatican II, devoted themselves to writing sentimental sacro-pop that became the soma of Catholic worship in the Mass for at least two decades. They never asked themselves what St Ignatius of Loyola would say about this new “spirit” they had adopted as their guide and mascot.
And so, this is the history and the milieu in which Jorge Mario Bergoglio lived and functioned through his years as a Jesuit. There is evidence that he fought the worst of this “spirit”, but eventually he succumbed, and the rest is history, summed up in one of the most famous quotes uttered on an airplane of the past decade: “Who am I to judge?”--one of the quintessential quotes of the “spirit” of Vatican II. There is, on the other hand, no doubt that his love for the poor and the down trodden was real and came from his love of Christ. But he was imbued with the “spirit” of Vatican II that does not suffer opposition gladly, and his record of government was marked by autocracy and a failure to call out corruption in the highest levels in the Church. With respect to the Liturgy of the Church, he had little interest in it, and never understood the innate relationship between worship and beauty. In this, he was typical of many bishops and priests, for whom the Mass is something to do as part of their role instead of entering into the icon of the heavenly liturgy.
And so Pope Francis was inevitable, the apotheosis of the “spirit of Vatican II. His history is the history of that “spirit” that has brought us to where we are now in the history of the Catholic Church. And with his death, the “spirit” of Vatican II has died. And with it has died that radical denial of the freedom of the children of God to worship God in the Mass both in the Novus Ordo form of St. Paul VI and also in the Traditional Roman Mass of nearly two millennia. Of course, there are those who still believe that the “spirit” of Vatican II is the future and write editorials about the glories of the “liberal spirit of enlightenment” against which St. John Henry Newman fought until his death, those who long for a Church that fits in with the contemporary secular word view, who talk more about acceptance than morality founded on the teaching of Christ and his Church.
But time is not on their side. The inevitable Pope-- may he rest in peace-- will soon be replaced by a Pope who is not carrying the baggage of the “spirit” of Vatican II. There are still “progressives” who carry the banner of liberalism--which has nothing to do with freedom-- within the Church, but they lack the personal history that made up the “spirit” of Vatican II. They are those who now espouse a progressivism that is already “indeitrism”, that marvelous word invented by Pope Francis that means looking backwards. The next Pope is not inevitable. We cannot guarantee that whoever is chosen to be the next Pope is the anointed one of the Holy Spirit. But we can say that the freedom that is now accessible to the cardinals in the conclave because of the death of the “spirit” of Vatican II has its foundation in the infinite freedom of the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who is Truth, Goodness and Beauty.
