inside america

The apex of all
human activity
The arrival of Pope Francis gives us pause to revisit the core of the Vatican II  Council, which the church has fought to honor over the past 50 years in answer to the threat of the world’s “agenda of progress.” THE WORD “CONTEMPLATION” IS CENTRAL TO UNDERSTANDING THIS MOVEMENT FORWARD.

by lorenzo albacete

Following the election of Pope Francis, many people felt confused at the sudden changes taking place in the highest levels of the Church’s government. But the approved changes that have taken place in the past 50 years or so after the Second Vatican Council have firmly followed a path indicated by the Council itself, in spite of enormous pressures to alter the course traced by the Council.
In my opinion, the best summary of the course set by Vatican II was given by Pope Paul VI at the last session of the Council on December 7, 1965.He begins with what he says is the primary purpose of the Council and indeed of all that we do, namely, to give glory to God.
The modern world, he argues, has exiled God from its agenda of progress, and it is the most urgent task of the Church of today to give witness to “claims which the world will at first judge to be foolish, but which, we hope, it will later come to recognize as being truly human, wise and salutary, namely, God is–and more, He is real, He lives, a personal, provident God, infinitely good; and not only good in Himself, but also immeasurably good to us... so much so that the effort to look on Him, and to center our heart in Him which we call contemplation, is the highest, the most perfect act of the spirit, the act which even today can and must be at the apex of all human activity.”
Contemplation as the highest form of human activity! The Popes after the Council have embraced the post-conciliar agenda as defined by Paul VI, but most Catholics never heard of the priority of contemplation. In fact, it has often seemed that the priority was activism. There is no such thing in the Council’s teachings.
The fear that the post-conciliar Church had weakened the “religious value” of the Council was due to the Council’s realization that contemplation was being considered alienating, taking away the revolutionary anger that should fire up the hearts of the workers against the social structures that created the injustices from which they suffered. But for us Catholics, giving glory to God in contemplation means giving glory to Jesus as the very revelation of God’s glory, particularly reflected in His humanity, which reveals what man is as it reveals God.
Here, in the rejection of the Incarnation, lies the wound in modern man, keeping him away from the infinite beauty of the God who is Love.
And so the Pope and the Council turned their attention to the man of today.
Consider Paul VI’s description of modern man and his time: “…a time which everyone admits is orientated towards the conquest of the kingdom of earth rather than that of heaven;… a time in which the fundamental act of the human person… tends to pronounce in favor of his own absolute autonomy [note how this is the exact opposite of contemplation], in emancipation from every transcendent law; a time in which secularism seems the legitimate consequence of modern thought [Ratzinger would warn about this, calling it “the dictatorship of relativism” 40 years later] and the highest wisdom in the temporal ordering of society; a time, moreover, in which the soul of man has plumbed the depths of irrationality and desolation...”
And still people say the Council was naively optimistic!
In any case, each Pope from Paul to Francis has remained faithful to the task of how to be followers of Christ in such a world, following the “spirituality of the Good Samaritan,” as Paul VI called it in this speech, and which Pope Francis has already displayed in dramatic ways.