VATICAN (CNS): The Second Vatican Council was “not only meaningful, but necessary,” Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI said in a letter to the October 20 to 21 conference titled, Joseph Ratzinger’s Vision of the Church and Its Relevance for Contemporary Challenges. Held at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, the US, the conference was sponsored by the Vatican-based Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Foundation.
The retired pope wrote in the October 20 message that a theological understanding of the world’s different religions, the relationship between faith and reason and, especially, the nature and mission of the church in the modern world were challenges the Catholic Church needed to face.
In his letter to conference participants, Pope Benedict said he hoped their discussions and an understanding of his theological work before, during and after Vatican II would “be helpful in the struggle for a right understanding of the Church and the world in our time.”
As a theologian, then-Father Joseph Ratzinger attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council as a theological adviser—a “peritus”—to the archbishop of Cologne, Germany.
…the need to reformulate the question of the nature and mission of the Church has gradually become apparent. In this way, the positive power of the council is also slowly emerging
Emeritus Pope Benedict
He said that Pope St. John XXIII’s decision to call the council was a surprise to everyone and that many people initially thought it would “unsettle and shake the Church more than to give her a new clarity for her mission.”
But “the need to reformulate the question of the nature and mission of the Church has gradually become apparent. In this way, the positive power of the council is also slowly emerging,” Pope Benedict wrote.
Explaining his focus on ecclesiology, the theological study of the Church, the retired pope said it had long focused on the Church as an institution, but after the First World War “the wider spiritual dimension of the concept of the Church was now joyfully perceived” in the work of influential theologians.
On the other hand, “the complete spiritualisation of the concept of the Church, for its part, misses the realism of faith and its institutions in the world,” he wrote. “Thus, in Vatican II the question of the Church in the world finally became the real central problem.”
