Pope Leo and the ‘Gaudium et Spes’ debate
Some want to go back to 'old Thomism', but that's what created the conditions for rancorous debates in the first place.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the end of Vatican Council II. And the last document promulgated by the council on December 7, 1965 was the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” Gaudium et Spes.
Hotly debated on the floor of the council, and controversial from the first moment of its promulgation by Pope Saint Paul VI, the text emerged as a kind of condensed symbol for the deep theological fissures that had begun before the council had started and which would perdure through the council, its immediate aftermath, and which still remain operative today.
I know that a lot of the more tradition-minded Catholics would prefer it if we just ignored Gaudium et Spes altogether as a hopelessly out of date pastoral analysis of the signs of the times. Nevertheless, the document’s weaknesses and strengths mirror unresolved theological issues that are still in need of resolution.
Some of those who want to ignore those issues consider the debates somehow “tired” and argue we should just set them aside and that the Church should now “go back” to a time when Thomism alone was the grammar for all of theology. But they forget that it was precisely the “old Thomism” that had created the conditions for the rancorous debates in the first place.
Like it or not, and regardless of the status of Gaudium et Spes, those issues have to be addressed. And the task of negotiating these disputes will fall on the shoulders of Pope Leo XIV.
The tensions that exist between the differing theological emphases of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the one hand, and Pope Francis on the other, are reflective of the tensions within Gaudium et Spes itself, and indeed of all of the post conciliar era.
And it is worth highlighting what it is that is at stake here.