“Keeping the World Awake to God”: The Challenge of Vatican II

This special Spring-Summer 2012 double issue of Communio is devoted to commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the convocation of the Second Vatican Council. . . .

“The promise of the council and the promise of a new evangelization can be realized when the ‘splendor of Christ’ truly radiates from millions of Christian families.”

"The Church should use her own internal unity as a leaven in order to restore the unity of the human race."

“Jesus Christ not only is the ultimate meaning of things, but at the same time truly gives meaning to things, and perhaps the most radical form of this gift is to receive meaning from them.”

"Love is 'the meaning of being.'"

“The Church is catholic because she has the fullness of Christ’s revelation and self-communication; she can heal the sins of all human beings and adorn them with all the virtues and charisms.”

“Christ embraces everyone (Col 3:11) because he is the truth of God and man in person, the destiny of man’s history.”

“Even the most active Christian action does not spring from a totally autonomous center, because our autonomy is rooted in responding as much as in initiating. We must act without ultimate control on the modality of the outcome.”

“The integration between the human and divine sides of the human vocation can fail on one side or the other. The hope for integration is always in via. Historically unstable rather than once for all, it requires the pursuit of holiness in the world in every generation.”

“Wojtyła . . . managed to divert the text of Dignitatis humanae from political deliberations about the proper relation between Church and the state . . . to a deep anthropological reflection about the necessary conditions of actus fidei , and the relation of the human person to his own conscience and to the truth.”

“If personal identity is not simply reducible to familial relations, it nevertheless is substantially rooted in them. If we are to ‘see’ or to ‘know’ the new marriage and the new family, the fleshly one must make its contribution precisely in its visibility.”

“Spousal love involves a total gift of self that, by its very nature, founds a form and is itself a form.”

“It is through the family that the Church bestows form to a world that otherwise risks losing its symbolism and, therefore, its ordered unity.”

“Having received the revelation of the Mystery for which the world was made, but does not yet possess, the Church bears a responsibility for the world.”

“Dialectical realism demands that we take the Christian faith seriously as a truth claim and, therefore, that we take seriously the further claim that Christianity can create a metaphysical worldview capable of indirectly influencing the course of particular scientific research projects.”

“ Aggiornamento toward the sciences cannot mean ceding sole authority over nature to science, but must instead mean bringing science and nature within the ambit of Christ’s revelation of man to himself as a creature given to himself by God, created in and destined for communion.”

“The council, according to Wojtyła, should elaborate a firmly-grounded truth about man that testifies to how the religious aptitude is the fullness of man’s rationality, his fulfillment, and by no means his alienation.”