VIDEO REVIEW

Oliver Stone
Meets Vatican II

by Mark Brumley

    You have probably seen those pseudo-documentaries on cable TV. You know, the ones where we find out that John F. Kennedy did not really die in Dallas, in 1963, but was abducted by space aliens. Or where it is “discovered” that the ozone problem is really due to fumes seeping into the atmosphere from the ruins of the Lost City of Atlantis. These “documentaries” sound like the plotline for the next Oliver Stone film, right?

    The documentary, Reflections on Vatican II, slated to appear soon on a PBS station near you, is not quite that bad. In fact, there is much to commend it — for the informed and critical viewer. Nevertheless, it shares the pseudo-documentary’s penchant for highly imaginative interpretations of fact as well as a selective and tendentious use of testimony. Therein lies the problem.

The Positive
    But we should begin with the “pluses.” The documentary is technically well-executed. Vintage footage from the Vatican II, interspersed with recollections of veteran journalists who covered the council, provides an insider’s look at this monumental religious event of the 20th century. For the first time in history, a General Council of the Church has been captured on film. Not the sessions of the Vatican II themselves, of course, but the events surrounding the council — the opening ceremonies; bishops coming and going — and the commentary on what took place. Viewers are left with a sense, however fleeting, of what it was like to be there.

    Moreover, the portrait of Pope John XXIII is overwhelmingly positive. The documentary depicts the Holy Father’s courage and wisdom in calling the council, despite strong opposition among some in the curia and elsewhere, and notwithstanding the Church’s apparent health and vitality at the time. Also, Catholic and non-Catholic affection for John XXIII is obvious; one sees why his death, early in the council, was met with deep sorrow and mourning.

    Furthermore, the documentary represents fairly well the range of Vatican II’s pastoral concern: the sacred liturgy, the role of the laity, episcopal collegiality, ecumenism, and the social aspect of the Church’s mission. Viewers get a real sense of what some of the key issues of the council were — not an inconsequential thing at a time when many people have lost a sense of history, including many Catholics.

The Negative
    That said, the natural enthusiasm a Catholic might have for the subject matter is diminished, if not destroyed, by the ideological spin of the film. From the outset the uninformed viewer is given a wrong impression — that Vatican II sprung out of nowhere, as if it represented a radical break with the past.

    The immediate victim of such a mischaracterization is Pope Pius XII, who is contrasted highly unfavorably with Pope John XXIII. Pius XII is described as “rigid” and what he did to set the stage for Vatican II is utterly neglected. For instance, we hear little or nothing about the preconciliar liturgical movement, which Pius XII strongly encouraged and without which the council’s document on liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, would have been impossible. Nothing is said about Pius XII’s crucial contribution to the recovery of biblical theology through his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. Nor are we told that the idea of calling a general council to address modernity did not originate with John XXIII; Pius XII had contemplated it as well. What we do get is a rehash of slander about Pius XII’s alleged complicity with the Nazis, notwithstanding the research of recent Jewish historians such as William D. Rubinstein (The Myth of Rescue) indicating that a more outspoken Pius XII probably would have saved no more people and might well have made the situation worse.

    Another major problem with the documentary is its hodgepodge commentary on the council. The viewer is deluged with conflicting interpretations. To be sure, the Magisterium’s “perspective” is given, usually by Vatican officials or other institutional clerics. A few well-known orthodox lay Catholics (read: Janet Smith and George Weigel) get to add their two-cents worth here and there. But we also get Vatican II according to infamous dissenters such as Hans Kung, Richard McBrien, Charles Curran, and Andrew Greeley. Absent from the documentary are scholars such as Catholic historian James Hitchcock or sociologist Mgsr. George Kelly, both of whom have written extensively on the dissenting misinterpretations of Vatican II.

    Pope John Paul II appears only in the last quarter of the film — despite his not insignificant role at Vatican II. When the documentary finally does get around to talking about him, it focuses mainly on his postconciliar role in Poland and his struggles with Communism in his native land. About John Paul II’s papacy and Vatican II, we get mainly criticism from the likes of Kung, Greeley and McBrien.

    Kung claims John Paul II has a backward-looking view of the council; Greeley, that episcopal collegiality — a major theme of Vatican II — is “in practice a myth” because the pope treats bishops as lower functionaries which the Roman curia has to supervise. He tells viewers that the Church should “see which way the wave of history is going and ride it,” which sounds like the old bromide about ersatz leaders who figure out which way a crowd is moving and then jump in front of it. Meanwhile, Fr. Richard McBrien— sans clerical attire—argues that John Paul II may have followed “the letter of Vatican II,” but he has missed its “spirit.” Or, if “he’s caught it, he’s decided it was harmful to the Church.”
   
    That opinion, of course, is rejected by Janet Smith and George Weigel. But their “sound-bites” are drowned out by the cacaphony of differing opinions and interpretation. The utterly false impression is left that John Paul II’s fidelity to Vatican II is a highly debatable proposition. Here Reflections on Vatican II is more noteworthy for what is not there: there is nothing about how John Paul II draws from Vatican II repeatedly in his teaching and pastoral administration. The revised Code of Canon Law is mentioned in passing, but John Paul II gets no credit for carrying through its revision, as the council sought. Nor is there anything about his promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is in many ways the “Catechism of Vatican II.”
   
    Reflections on Vatican II also errs by greatly oversimplifying or misstating what the council actually did. For example, peace activist Jim Douglas says that the only “condemnation” Vatican II pronounced concerned the indiscriminate destruction of cities and civilians in war. Yet the very document that included that condemnation, Gaudium et spes, also denounced such contemporary social ills as abortion (calling it an abominable crime, GS 51) and euthanasia (GS, no. 57).
   
    The documentary also fails in its discussion of the sacred liturgy. For example, various clerics and laymen are quoted to the effect that Vatican II mandated the vernacular in the liturgy and abolished all use of Latin. Only Francis Cardinal Arinze gets it right. “The Vatican Council didn’t send Latin on holiday or dismiss it altogether,” he states. “Unfortunately, some people in the Church have done just that. They behave as if Vatican II said no more Latin; only look [at] modern languages. Vatican II did not say that. It wanted that flexibility so that sometimes there would be celebration in Latin.”
   
    According to article no. 36, § 1 and 2 of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium: “Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites. But since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, frequently may be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended. This will apply in the first place to the readings and directives, and to some of the prayers and chants ...” (see also no. 54).
   
    The council fathers assumed Latin would remain normative for the liturgy and made exception for the vernacular, not the other way around. Post-conciliar liturgical law has legitimately extended the use of the vernacular well beyond what the council called for, yet without banning or outlawing Latin. By quoting so many people to the effect that the council did away with Latin and established the vernacular, Reflections on Vatican II gives a false impression of what really happened.
   
    Misrepresenting the council’s norms for the vernacular is not the documentary’s only liturgical error. Martin Sheen (yes, the movie actor) informs viewers that Mass “facing the people” “was like this very bright light had been shown into this dark place.” Which makes one wonder how the Church ever got along for so long “in the dark.”
   
    Others interviewed in the film—including some diocesan officials—seem to imply that Mass “facing the people” was mandated by the council. In truth, the novus ordo of Paul VI, promulgated half a decade after the council and still in effect today, allows the priest to celebrate Mass “facing the Lord,” that is, where the people and the priest face the same direction in offering the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Son to the Father in the Spirit, as well as “facing the people,” in a dialogue format.
   
    Then there is the treatment of multiculturalism in liturgy. On the one hand, we have the balanced, moderate views of someone like the African Cardinal Arize. On the other, we have this statement from Olivia Hill, the African-American director of the diocesan Office of Black Ministry in Birmingham, Alabama, about the “oppressiveness” of a “Eurocentric” way of worshipping: “What happened was with Vatican II, we had the possibility of our spirits being freed. Vatican II indeed prompted the urgings of our spirits that has been oppressed because of a Eurocentric way of worshipping. It gave us the possibility of experiencing God in terms we knew him. We began to express ourselves in liturgical dance.”
   
    Once again, what is not said is as important as what is. While changes in the liturgy are stressed, nowhere does the documentary mention liturgical abuses or a widespread loss of a sense of the sacred in the celebration of the liturgy today. One layman interviewed, in 1960s “rap session” style, opines that in the post-Vatican II liturgy, “instead of being kind of told what to do, you are invited to live the gospel message and challenged in an intellectual sense and in a moral sense to live out your values.” The implication is that before the council people were not challenged to live the gospel.
   
    Worse still is the documentary’s presentation of the laity’s role in the Church after Vatican II. Last year, the Vatican had to issue its Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry. After viewing Reflections on Vatican II’s treatment of the subject, one can understand why. Janet Smith’s balanced and accurate statement that Vatican II put the burden on the laity to take the gospel into the world is undermined by a distorted picture painted by others.
   
    For example, Charlene Collora, identified as the “pastoral administrator for Our Lady of Mt. Virgin” parish in Washington State, speaks as if she were the pastor. “Now I sign the checks, I pay the bills, I make the decisions when we have to buy a new furnace or sell the plot of land next door to make needs meet. I’m the one who runs the parish council. And none of this would have happened before Vatican II.”
      
    In fact, it is not supposed to happen after Vatican II, either. Canon Law restricts the role of parish administrator to priests (Canon 539).
   
    But the trouble does not stop there. The film repeatedly casts the laity’s role in terms of them doing now what heretofore was done only by clerics. In other words, there is an implicit clericization of the laity. The underlying attitude seems to be that for lay people to really take part in the Church’s mission, they must do clerical things. That is a tacit rejection of what Vatican II actually says about the apostolate of the laity and the universal call to holiness.
   
    A corollary to this “clericization of the laity” is a tendency to present what the laity do by way of exception as if it were normative. Asked what lay people can do in the Church today, one priest (the vicar general of his diocese) lists the following: 1) help give out Communion; 2) do the readings; and 3) under certain circumstances, “preach . . . give a sermon . . . witness marriages.” But except for reading at Mass, these tasks are done by laity by way of exception. Why, then, point to them as if they were typical ways lay people participate in the Church’s mission?
   
    The documentary spends much time discussing Vatican II’s emphasis on the social mission of the Church. Viewers learn a great deal about the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 1960s, including Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan and the other members of the so-called Catonsville Nine burning draft files. There is also a 1980s clip of actor Martin Sheen and other protesters getting arrested for chaining themselves to a federal building to protest America’s El Savador policy. Sheen later opines, “There’s great demand that is made of us that are Catholic and take the faith seriously, not always the Church, but the faith seriously . . .”

    What we do not see is any reference to the pro-life movement, perhaps the greatest social activist movement of this century in which Catholics took the lead. Janet Smith manages to squeeze in a reference to abortion in one of her brief clips elsewhere. But there is no mention in the film of the right to life as such or of the hundreds of thousands of Catholic pro-life activists across the country, nor sympathetic scenes of non-violent civil disobedience in defense of unborn children. It is as if the pro-life movement never existed.

Conclusion
    Those familiar with Vatican II’s history know of the divisions among the council fathers; with some so-called “conservatives” (such as Cardinal Ottavianni) cool to, if not opposed to, Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento, and the so-called “progressives” (including Bishop Karol Wojtyla and Fr. Joseph Ratzinger) who embraced it as the work of the Spirit. Ironically, Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger are today often labeled “conservative” (an inadequate and misleading term) merely because they follow the council itself, not what dissenters wish the council had said.

    In his recent book, What Went Wrong with Vatican II, Catholic philosopher Ralph McInerny observes:
Whatever wrangling went on outside St. Peter’s, however much a partisan spirit might have been carried within, when the various schemata were argued over and revised, once they received a majority of the votes of the Fathers of the Council and were promulgated by Paul VI, they could no longer be looked upon as the product or property of some party within the Church. Now they were regulative of the Faith of all Catholics.

    The post-conciliar years have seen other divisions in the Church, with dissenters (and a handful of extreme Traditionalists) unwilling to accept the final, duly promulgated texts of Vatican II as normative and binding. Instead, they appeal to the “spirit of Vatican” somehow divorced from what the council actually said.
    For those who knowingly distort Vatican II, there is little hope, except that God’s grace will touch their hearts and minds to repent. But for the many others who are genuinely ignorant of the council, the problem is primarily one of education, catechesis and formation. In that regard the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the sixteen council documents themselves are extremely helpful.

    What is not helpful is an agenda-driven, revisionist interpretation of the council such as Reflections on Vatican II. In the final analysis, the overarching pastoral problem with this documentary is how it will inevitably be used: in parish catechesis and RCIA sessions as a handy overview of the council. There, unfortunately, it will do much harm, giving Catholics and prospective Catholics a distorted notion of what Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento and Vatican II itself sought to accomplish.

Mark Brumley is the Managing Editor of The Catholic Faith magazine.