The Church faces a pivotal moment as the papal conclave begins — a moment that sets course for how we continue to receive the Second Vatican Council. Let me say up front that I take reception of the Council as a necessary fact for a Catholic. It is part of the Church’s history. While one can argue over particular aspects of its implementation, I hold that no Catholic can pretend that ecumenical Council was not an act of the Holy Spirit and thus can ignore.

Whoever is elected pope, unless he is over age 70-75, will have few memories of Vatican II. None of the cardinals has personal experience of it.

A revisionist history has arisen about Pope Francis; to wit, that he had “recaptured” or “restored” the implementation of Vatican II. That misrepresentation needs to be challenged. Why a misrepresentation? Because to say that a pope (JPII) for 26 years who was himself a Council Father and a pope (BXVI) for 8 years who was a conciliar peritus sidelined something that was central in their priestly lives and works, which was only then restored by a pope who had no personal participatory experience in that Council is, frankly, laughable. Anybody aware of these basic facts must admit how risible such a claim is.

What we see is the further installment of the battle between the Council and the “meta-Council,” the pseudo-Council, the “spirit” of the Council. It’s been engaged since the Council itself. The ambiguity of various conciliar texts early on gave us the Council itself versus the “living Council,” an interpretation of what the Council “called for” based not on what it wrote but — to borrow an American phrase — the “emanations and penumbrae” of those texts and their “history.”

The usual pushback against Catholics who challenged “reforms” by demanding the textual warrant for them was that the “spirit” of the Council called for them. Under Pope Paul VI, that “spirit” was allowed to push the envelope if there was no explicit prohibition against them or they didn’t bother papal sensibilities. Lack of prohibition was taken as permission; circumvention of prohibition could take a little longer and occasionally ran into a papal roadblock. The most obvious example of the latter was, of course, Humanae vitae, where a whole theological cottage industry sprang up with the claim that the encyclical derailed the “spirit” of the Council. It also produced a whole bogus set of claims about the right of “responsible dissent” and claims of “conscience” that, arguably, were baseless in solid Catholic theology.

John Paul II saw the trajectory inherited from Paul VI and soon began putting appropriate guardrails in place, a process supported under him and continued after him by Benedict XVI. Benedict also gave clear expression to the stakes in his famous contrast between a “hermeneutic of continuity” and a “hermeneutic of rupture.” Was Vatican II part of the Church’s history that had to be interpreted and fit within that history in a continuous manner? Or was it something so unique that the Church began anew in 1965 and we need not worry about what came before? It’s clear the latter position — sketched sharply to make its implications clear — is ultimately not Catholic.

Sixty years after the Council ended and with a hierarchy for whom Vatican II is as much an historical fact as Nicaea and Trent (a hierarchy increasingly composed of fewer and fewer theologians) the current conclave represents a challenge: how do we go forward with the Council? Do we recognize it as part of the Church’s history and recognize that whatever is done in its name or the name of “reform” must fit into that larger tradition, or do we pretend that doesn’t matter? Do we claim affinities that any honest man would have to say — like the Emperor’s new cassocks — aren’t there? 

This conclave is a last ditch effort for the “spirit of the Council” enthusiasts to graft their Council-independent-of-Conciliar-documents onto the Church. The most likely vehicle of that grafting is the “synodal” process, a questionable successor to the Council for various reasons. First, a synod is not a Council. Second, the Francis synods are arguably not like synods as the Church in the West and especially in the East (to which affinity is claimed) have understood them. Third, the idea that non-bishops participate or vote in synods — much less have a key voting bloc — is alien to Catholic synodal understandings and erodes the notion of bishop. Fourth, the “ecclesial assembly” with which a deathbed Francis sought to bind his successor is a wholly novel, hitherto unknown, hybrid entity springing ex nihilo from the mind of Francis.

Again, claiming the lack of an explicit prohibition as a warrant of permission, the “synodality” that remains to be defined poses as a bureaucratic institutionalization of the “spirit” of Conciliar revolution, a permanent structure to question settled ecclesiastical doctrine, morality, and discipline in the name of some “spirit,” be it Vatican II or the even more presumptuous arrogation of the “Holy Spirit” as a “conversation” partner in this ongoing ecclesial destabilization.

As they vote for the successor of Peter — not of Francis — they need to bear in mind these stakes. While Michelangelo’s vision of the Last Judgment may remind them of their personal stakes in this decision, I would hope they went to St. Peter’s Basilica before being locked away. Why? Because there in black letters about seven feet high on a gold background is the mandate for the man they will pick: “Confirm the faith of your brothers.”