There's fascinating timing tonight--2 Catholic candidates for the vice presidency are debating on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. It's fitting that it's occurring on that anniversary, as the incumbent and the challenger are, roughly speaking, on the opposite sides of that epochal event. Biden's approach is basically consistent w/ the approach of Pope John XXIII, who sought to open up the windows and let some air into the church. Ryan's approach, roughly speaking, is consistent w/ the foes of this reform movement.
The always estimable Charles Pierce offers the following shorthand of Vatican II:
With that the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church was opened. The pope — Blessed John XXIII, as he is reckoned today, and Good Pope John, as far as I'm concerned, because if Peggy Noonan can have John Paul The Great, I can have Good Pope John — was not a well man. In fact, he'd be dead in less than a year. But he knew full well what he was doing. He was, as he said he would, throwing open the windows, and letting sunlight and fresh air into the Church for the first time in nearly 2000 years. More than that — and I suspect he knew this, too — Good Pope John was setting freedom itself loose within the Church. He stated flatly that the days of the Holy Office and of doctrinal witch-hunting should come to an end and even that, while the basic doctrines should remain the same, the means of expressing them should change. Mercy and not severity would be the rule. By then, the conservative members of the Roman Curia — most notably, the reactionary Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who, eight years earlier, had silenced the great American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, only to find that Murray would now be a power at this council on the subject of religious liberty — were looking at him as though the pope had sprouted a second head. As Father Francis Murphy — who, as "Xavier Rynne," covered the council from the inside for The New Yorker — later wrote:
Insisting that history is the greatest teacher, John had opened Vatican Council II with the observation that the church "no longer needs to confront the world with severity." Without repudiating the past, he said that the time had come for a re-evaluation of the church's inner structure and a consequent updating in its dealings with the world.
And Good Pope John did it smiling. This would be a joyful revolution and nothing would ever be the same again.
"Vatican II" is now the shorthand for the council and everything that came after it. The primary dispute between conservative and liberal Catholics has been for half a century over what "Vatican II" really means. To the people whose primary attraction seems to be to the Church's authoritarian institutional structure, "Vatican II" is something that was saved by Good Pope John's death before we all became Methodists, and its legacy is that we should cling more closely to the institutions he sought to reform. That seems little more than wishful thinking. Once the council declared that the Church was not, in fact, the clerical bureaucrats and the Clan of the Red Beanie, but was, as the council fathers said, "the entire people of God," then all bets were truly off. The fresh air and sunlight that came pouring in when they opened those great bronze doors spread quickly to all parts of the Church. Tocite only one obvious modern example, the uprising in the Boston archdiocese among the laity — and among a group of very courageous parish priests — against the crimes and malfeasance of Bernard Cardinal Law, well, those would have been unthinkable without the council's simple acknowledgement that the church was the entire people of God.
During the past half century, a series of Vatican II Democrats have held high office. They include O'Neill, Pelsosi, Biden, Brown, and Ted Kennedy. My poltical idol exemplified that spirt when, at a Mass where Cesar Chavez broke a fast, he proudly told
farmworkers:
No man will ever stand taller than when you say, I marched with Cesar
This
WaPo piece sums up the differences tonight:
Both not only practice their common faith but have been shaped in important ways by it. "My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my faith,'' Biden said in his book "Promises to Keep.'' The vice president, whose mother once counseled him to put off any decision about the priesthood until after he'd gone on some dates, brought the rosary he prays with daily to the Situation Room as the Navy SEALs closed in on Osama bin Laden. He never misses Mass. His trip planners regularly scout for parishes where there'd be no big fuss over him - and no risk of him being denied Communion over his pro-choice politics.
Ryan, a former altar boy, is just as serious in his practice, and on the day his vice presidential nomination was announced he was introduced by Mitt Romney as such: "A faithful Catholic, Paul believes in the worth and dignity of every human life." The congressman and his wife, Janna, send their kids to their parish school in Janesville, Wis., and he has many friends in the clergy, including Cardinal Tim Dolan of New York.
Having grown up in the same culture, the two men almost certainly understand each other on a level no amount of briefing could provide. Yet they also almost perfectly embody the split in the American church, as well as in American politics, with Biden representing the old-school, union-tied, Vatican II generation of Kennedy-loving Catholics whose focus is social justice and who are comfortable with questioning. He was praised for being the only kid in his ninth-grade theology class who copped to doubts about transubstantiation, and his mother famously instructed him, when she heard he was meeting the pope, "Don't you kiss his ring!"
Ryan, meanwhile, upholds the younger, more conservative, John Paul II-era, anti-abortion-focused Catholicism of the sonogram generation.
While there will be many other subtexts tonight, the dramatic differences between the 2 candidates in their respective approaches to their faith will likely be a central subtext. One man supports the openness, the flexibility, and the social justice concerns of the Council, while the other man is clearly on the other side of that divide. Sadly, the internal debate w/in Catholicism has not always gone well for the spirit of Vatican II. Hopefully, it will go well for that spirit tonight.