This year marks the 60th anniversary of the promulgation of Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world — and the last text issued by the Council.  

Many in the Church today, especially in traditional circles, think this document should be ignored and set aside as an outdated pastoral analysis of the “signs of the times.” There is merit in their critique.  

But the text foreshadows debates that arose in the post-conciliar Church. And many of those debates remain with us still and are the source of much of the lack of unity, and even rancor, in the Church today.  

This warrants another look at the text and the debates that created it. It includes a deeply insightful essay by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a conciliar peritus (theological adviser), written a mere 10 years after the Council and 18 years before he became Pope Benedict XVI.  

Gaudium et Spes was the last text promulgated because it was the most contentious, both in content and style. Internally known as “Schema XIII,” it struggled to the finish line as theological fissures emerged during debates. 

One issue was the topic itself, since no ecumenical council had ever written an entire text on the Church’s relationship with “the world,” much less one addressed to the “whole of humanity.” 

A further complicating factor was the promulgation of the last encyclical of Pope St. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris. The encyclical avoided specifically Catholic modes of theological discourse in favor of allegedly “neutral” language thought to be more conducive to dialogue with the non-Catholic world. Pope John specifically addressed the encyclical to members of the Catholic Church, but then extended his audience to all “people of good will.”  

Therefore, many Council fathers desired that “Schema XIII” adopt this form of discourse and eschew dense theological language and categories. The goal was a Church open to the modern world, repudiating the “syllabus of errors” rejection of all things modern.  

Thus did the text come to be viewed by the more progressive Council fathers as a manifesto and capstone of the entire Council. As with Pacem in Terris, they said, we must open the windows of the Church and let in the fresh air of aggiornamento — total openness to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the world of today.  

However, as Cardinal Ratzinger notes, this spirit of irenic dialogue raised several troubling questions that were never adequately addressed. First, there was the problem that in analyzing “the world” of “today,” the text had to make use of sociological and political categories that may not withstand the test of time. Why tie the conciliar reforms to modes of secular academic analysis that are as stable as sand dunes at the beach in a hurricane?  

Furthermore, does not this turn to sociological and political analysis inherently privilege post-Enlightenment thought patterns, since these are what currently dominate the academic world? The progressive Catholic mind is all too prone to the mentality of those who, like international relations scholar Francis Fukuyama, believe that there is a point to history, and that point is us. 

Cardinal Ratzinger notes that this attitude infected the progressive wing of the Council. In Principles of Catholic Theology, he states: 

“Something of the Kennedy era pervaded the Council, something of the naïve optimism of the concept of the great society. We can do everything we want to do if only we employ the right means.  It was precisely the break in historical consciousness, the self-tormenting rejection of the past, that produced the concept of a zero hour in which everything would begin again and all those things that had formerly been done badly would now be done well” (372). 

Second, what is the Council referring to when it says we must dialogue with “the world?” 

Cardinal Ratzinger states: 

“A first characteristic seems to me to reside in the concept of ‘world,’ which, despite many attempts to clarify it … continues to be used in a pretheological stage but which, in that very form, has exercised its special influence. By ‘world’ the Council means the counterpart of the Church. … To that extent, we must admit, the text represents a kind of ghetto-mentality.” 

This is a critical point, since after the Council, the mantra of Catholic progressives was that we needed to modify Church teaching and practice to be more in conformity with this “world.” Left undefined is which world they were talking about, but it was clear that by the “world,” they really meant “contemporary, Western, secular modernity.” And therein lies the problem in speaking of dialogue with an abstraction called the “world.”  

This approach expresses the sense that the Church has existed in an intellectual and cultural “ghetto,” in a posture of pure reaction against modernity, for far too long. In this kind of Catholic progressivism, there is an air of embarrassment over this ghetto and an exaggerated self-flagellation over the Church’s past sins — sins that are used as reasons for why the Church cannot be trusted and must be chastened by modern democracy and enlightenment.  

Finally, as Cardinal Ratzinger notes, there is in Gaudium et Spes far too little critique of the intellectual deficiencies within modernity or of the sins of modern secularity and the nation-states since the French Revolution of 1789. An optimistic irenicism was in the air, and any attempt at a critical appraisal of the deficiencies of modernity would not be allowed. 

Therefore, Ratzinger concludes, “If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text as a whole, we might say that … it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus” (381). The result is that, for many Catholic progressives, Gaudium et Spes represents the final evolution of the entirety of a conciliar “process” that began with more traditional dogmatic affirmations in Lumen Gentium and Dei Verbum, but culminated in an entirely new theological methodology and ecclesial mentality.  

This forms the backbone of what came to be known as “the spirit of Vatican II,” which, far from being a vague “ethos” devoid of content, was a specific and radical theological proposal: that the Council had initiated a process placing the Church, in the words of the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, in a “permanent state of revolution.” 

This is one reason Gaudium et Spes remains significant: It forms the interpretive matrix for judging the Church to be in a constant state of flux as it responds to the dynamic movements of historical consciousness. This establishes within the heart of the Church a principle of constant fluidity as the very hallmark of its fidelity to the Gospel. 

This is, of course, absurd, but it is a mentality that, in one form or another, still dominates large swaths of the landscape of ecclesial leadership. Cardinal Ratzinger sums this up as follows in a quote worthy of full citation: 

“An interpretation of the Council that understands its dogmatic texts as mere preludes to a still unattained conciliar spirit, that regards the whole as just a preparation for Gaudium et Spes and that looks upon the latter text as just the beginning of an unswerving course toward an ever greater union with what is called progress — such an interpretation is not only contrary to what the Council Fathers intended and meant, it has been reduced ad absurdum by the course of events. Where the spirit of the Council is turned against the word of the Council and is vaguely regarded as a distillation from the development that evolved from the ‘Pastoral Constitution,’ this spirit becomes a specter and leads to meaninglessness.” 

Cardinal Ratzinger is clear that, as simplistic and naïvely optimistic as its view of modernity may be, there really was a need to overcome the problematic ecclesial atmosphere marked by an almost complete rejection of the modern world. There was indeed a need for the Church to open itself to genuine dialogue with the intellectual currents of modernity — not all of which are in error and from which it might learn.  

Therefore, as Cardinal Ratzinger states in Principles of Catholic Theology, “In the long run, neither embrace nor ghetto can solve for Christians the problem of the modern world” (391). He adds, regarding the hardline traditionalist forces of his day: “Without a doubt, they represent a sectarian zealotry that is the antithesis of Catholicity. We cannot resist them too firmly” (389-90). 

But this dialogue with modern forms of thought and life must be grounded, from the Church’s perspective, in a solid theological foundation, especially in the area of theological anthropology, which focuses on how the Church is the home of the deeper and more liberative humanism. In other words, a world obsessed with “freedom” will learn from the Church’s deeper sense of what freedom actually is. It will learn that what Gaudium et Spes calls its “joys and hopes, griefs and anguish” can find their ultimate resolution only in Christ.  

Part I of Gaudium et Spes, written primarily by the Jesuit Cardinal Jean Daniélou and the Dominican Yves Congar, provides the Christocentric anthropological foundation essential to understanding Part II. Its high point is Section 22, with its now-famous affirmation: “In reality, it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear.” 

This “Christocentric bombshell,” as Cardinal Ratzinger called it, is the interpretive key to the entire Council, not just Gaudium et Spes. It makes clear that the “autonomy” of the world is purely relative and no true autonomy at all — indeed, it is a form of enslavement — unless the deep theological orientation of human nature to Christ is affirmed as its foundation.  

In the light of Part I’s Christocentric theological anthropology, Part II of Gaudium et Spes is a profoundly realistic assessment of the sad and fragile predicament of the human condition. None of the “progress” in human solidarity and well-being can ever be achieved without Christ — a reality that Gaudium et Spes, despite its deficiencies, makes abundantly clear. Only those who seek to pit Part II against Part I, and therefore to read the text as internally contradictory, can miss the fact that Section 22 is the glue that holds the document together and that this was the intention of the Council fathers themselves.  

This is why Pope St. John Paul II made this quote from Gaudium et Spes almost the anthem of his entire papacy. He quoted it in almost all of his encyclicals, and his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, was nothing short of a prolonged meditation on the full meaning of the human person in the light of Christ.  

And this is still what is at stake today. This is why the theological legacies of Popes John Paul and Benedict are still so deeply important. One can lament the sad fruits that followed Vatican II. One can desire that we simply go back to the Church as it was before. But the questions that embroiled the Council would remain, because they are questions that go to the very heart of the Gospel and the progressive narrative of a Church stuck in perpetual “debate mode” would still be with us.  

What is at stake, if the progressives are correct, is this: Is the Church destined to become one religion among many equally valid ones, in a world viewed as already so full of grace that it requires no conversion? Indeed, is it perhaps not the Church itself that needs “converting” to the world instead? Does the Church need to relinquish its claims to an “absolute truth in Christ” in favor of a new “globalist” spirituality? And is Gaudium et Spes to be viewed as a kind of magna carta for a definitive rupture with every council and doctrine that came before?  

In other words, is this last text of the Council to be interpreted as a kind of institutional ecclesial suicide, in a perversion of the very idea of death-to-the-old and resurrection-to-something-new? 

No. And only an emphasis on Gaudium et Spes 22 — “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear” — can save us from this false progressive narrative. This is the stark reality that Pope Leo must face.