Pope St. John XXIII first announced his intention of convoking the Second Vatican Council on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul on January 25th, 1959. He addressed seventeen Cardinals in the Basilica of St. Paul-Outside-the-Walls of Rome to share his intentions of convoking the Church’s twenty first ecumenical council.
Preparation for the council took three years, from the summer of 1959 to the autumn of 1962. The council met in St. Peter’s Basilica for four sessions each lasting between 8 and 12 weeks, in the autumn of each of the four years from 1962 to 1965. The council was finally opened on October 11th, 1962 by Pope John XXIII. The council was closed on December 8th, 1965 by Pope Paul VI.
In order to better understand the Second Vatican Council and the intentions that Pope John XXIII had when starting it, it is important to begin at the very beginning and understand why Pope John XXIII chose the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul to announce his intention of convoking the Second Vatican Council.
Well, my own reading of the coincidence of the council being convoked on the 25th of January is because Pope John wanted the whole church to renew its missionary endeavor. And that meant, in some ways to think things through from beginning to end, to think you might say what the church’s situation is, what the church’s mission is, what is the role of each and every person within the church. In other words, it was a renewal, with a view to making sure that the evangelization could take place in a more effective way. I mean, he was very aware that it for many people, over the previous two centuries, two or three centuries and at least in the Western world, the faith was being lost by a lot of people. So, he realized that there had to be a renewed form of evangelization. And I think that’s what the council attempted to do to try to make sure that the Word of God, the power of God would reach all the faithful. As many people as possible in the whole world.
What can we make of the importance for the Church of the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul? Pope John XXIII opened the historic Second Vatican Council, fully convinced that it was time to “throw open the windows of the Church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through.” And as he announced his intentions of convoking this ecumenical council as supreme pontiff of the Church, he chose to highlight the direction he wanted it to go in by choosing the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul as the date he would announce this to the world.
2000 years are not playing a great role, because we believe in the present: Jesus Christ is the risen Lord. And therefore, the distance of the time and the space is not so decisive. But closeness to God in Jesus Christ, the Word of God, who became flesh. And the conversion of a Saint Paul is a very important date in the history of salvation, the history of the church, because he was coming out from the great Jewish tradition in the Old Testament, which forms a part, also, of our Christian identity, a basic part of our Christian identity. And by the grace of the Lord, he converted from the persecutor of the Christians. Jesus said, “You persecuted me in the Christians”, because the church is the body of Jesus Christ. And he was converted by the grace of the Lord, and he became one of the most important apostles of the pagans, of the people in the world. And we have in the Holy Scripture, the New Testament, the letters of St. Paul, the Corpus Paulinum, [including] the letter to the Hebrews, are 14 great documents of the evolution of the Christianity in the first stage of the growing church. But it’s not only the literature of the first Christianity, but it’s also the Word of God expressed in the human words of the apostles and of the Early Church. And, this date is also important as the beginning of the Second Vatican Council. But it’s not as important as the New Testament, and the church, and its origin, because Ecumenical Councils are not the refoundation of the church, but they are only an interpretation and the presentation of the Word of God, and with this value for all the times. But it is really a coincidence of two elementary dates in the history of the church. But we are not only historians looking in the past: they were also looking in the future because God called everybody, all the coming generations, to become sons and daughters of God. That’s the most important reality: that we are not the result of some accidental events, in the evolution in the human history of nature, history, society, but we are the creatures of the love of God, who wanted with his will, his eternal will, to make us persons in correspondence to him, expressed in the biblical terms: sons and daughters of God in Jesus Christ, who is eternal Son of God in the Holy Trinity, and also to become friends of God, in the Holy Spirit, who is the love between the father and the son in the Holy Trinity. That is our great vision. We have a deep vocation. This makes it worthy to exist as a Christian, to believe as a Christian, to work as a Christian, to live and to die as a Christian.
With the desire of using the Council as an impetus for making the global Church renew its global missionary efforts, what did the Church learn from St. Paul and his missionary efforts?
As we reflect on the important Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul and how it has served as a catalyst for renewing the Church’s efforts to share the Good News, let us also remember that it is at the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and to continue to pray for further unity amongst our Christian brothers.
