At the start of the year, Pope Leo XIV launched a series of general audience talks on the Second Vatican Council. He plans to talk about each of the 16 documents the Council issued.
He is doing that for a reason. It has been 60 years since the Council, and that generation is passing. Here in America, about 70% of all Catholics were born after Vatican II.
For most Catholics, Vatican II is all they have ever known. But it is probably also true that most Catholics today do not know very much about Vatican II.
That is why Leo says we need to rediscover the Council, “to get to know it again,” not by listening to what others say about it but by reading the documents again ourselves.
In the background is the continuing debate over the changes in the liturgy made after the Council. Some Catholics continue to prefer the earlier, pre-Vatican II form of the liturgy.
But all the popes since the Council agree that the Council was “great grace,” and a work of the Holy Spirit.
St. Pope John Paul said, “the Council has made the Spirit newly ‘present’ in our difficult age,” and that its documents “need to be read correctly, to be widely known and taken to heart as important and normative texts of the Magisterium.”
The popes also agree that Vatican II’s liturgical reforms are an authentic development that has grown organically from the Church’s living tradition.
That does not mean that all these reforms were always carried out with proper care. We need to continue the work of purifying the liturgy. But as Catholics, we can never be tempted to think that Vatican II is somehow not legitimate or that we can choose what we want to believe or how we want to worship.
I love the Mass that we have been given, especially since the new English translation of the Missal we began using in 2011. What a gift to be able to pray in a language that we know and understand. I find that the words of the liturgy go with me during the day — the prefaces, the collects, the Eucharistic prayers. I realize the truth that what we pray becomes how we live.
A few weeks back, the Prayer after Communion was this: “May the working of this heavenly gift, O Lord, we pray, take possession of our minds and bodies, so that its effects, and not our own desires, may always prevail in us.”
This is an example of the power and beauty in our liturgy, the noble simplicity! If we pray the words we are given, with reverence and sacred attention, we can celebrate in any of our native tongues, and these words will lift our hearts to heaven and bring Jesus into our lives here on earth.
And we should not forget: there were strong reasons for the Council’s reforms.
The liturgical reform movement had begun decades before the Council. There was great concern that people were like spectators at the Mass and did not understand the worship they were offering. The old rite could be profound and beautiful, but the reality was often that the priest was doing one thing at the altar and the faithful were disconnected.
Pope Benedict XVI said that in the old rite, it often seemed as if “there were two parallel liturgies: the priest with the altar-servers, who celebrated Mass according to the missal, and the laity, who prayed during Mass using their own prayer books.”
The Mass belongs to the Lord and not to us.
We need to always be rediscovering the beauty and the mystery of the liturgy, in which the heavens are opened and our worship here on earth participates in the liturgy that goes on around the throne of God.
In our worship, the Word becomes flesh once again at the altar, the living God comes to be our food and drink, to dwell within us and make our lives his own, and to give us courage and light for our journey.
What the liturgy demands is our reverence, our submission, our service to the sacred mysteries we celebrate. The words we say, the gestures that we make, are holy and filled with sacred power.
This is Vatican II’s vision for the liturgy.
Leo recently devoted eight public audiences to the Council’s “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.” I recommend reading what the Holy Father has to say and also reading the document, too. If you have not read it, I think it will surprise you.
Pray for me and I will pray for you.
And let us ask holy Mary, Mother of the Church, to help us keep being renewed in our own reception of Vatican II.
