George Weigel on Vatican II and the Berlin Wall

"Hstory sometimes displays the happy capacity to arrange anniversaries so that one sheds light on another. On Nov. 21, 1964, Pope Paul VI solemnly promulgated the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, which began by proclaiming Christ the 'light of the nations' and is thus known as Lumen Gentium. Twenty-five years later, on the night of Nov. 9-10, 1989, the Berlin Wall was breached and the communist project in Europe collapsed, reduced to rubble like the masonry that divided Germany for decades. Fifty years after Lumen Gentium and twenty-five years after the Revolution of 1989, we can see more clearly that the Council had something to do with the communist crack-up.

"Not in the way senior Vatican diplomats imagined, however. In the post-Council euphoria, it was thought that Vatican II's 'openness' would help facilitate a 'convergence' between East and West, such that the Wall, and the post-war division of Europe, would eventually melt away. What actually happened was far more dramatic, and illustrates the way in which salvation history, working inside what the world sees as 'history,' can bend history in a more humane direction.

In a recent essay, George Weigel (columnist and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, DC) reflected on Vatican II, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and how salvation history ("God's liberating providence") is at work in human history, sometimes in hidden ways and sometimes more clearly

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First Things: Vatican II and the Berlin Wall (19 NOV 14)