Rino Fisichella

"The examination of the conscience cannot but also look at the reception of the Council, this great gift of the Spirit to the Church on the end of the second millennium." These are the words of John Paul II in Tertio Millennio Adveniente that provoked more direct reflection on the Second Vatican Council and to compose the pages that will follow.

Whoever is thirty years old today, did not experience in person what the event of the Council was and what its significance was for generations of people who saw in it a time of strong renewal for the personal life and for the entire Christian community. In some way, it was obligatory to find a way to make these young people understand what the Council meant. Certainly, it was like spring. And, as with every season, there is the risk that once the first moment of enthusiasm passes, everything else is resolved with a fleeting reference, or worse, it ends with the forgetting of it.

The teachings that emerge from those documents express such a richness that only progressively will it be able to be acquired and experimented in full in its profoundness. Returning with particular emphasis to the four fundamental constitutions of the Council: Dei Verbum, Lumen Gentium, Sacrosanctum Concilium and Gaudium et Spes, does not mean completing an archeological operation or simply interpretative as though looking at the future and trying to find out in what way its possible to communicate with those who would follow us, the treasures of grace and knowledge which have marked this epoch.

Vatican II is inserted in that part of history of tradition that for two thousand years the Church lives and transmits in obedience at the command of its Lord. There was no division in the past that preceded it, just as there was no attempt to modify all that belonged to the long-lived faith, just the desire to re-propose Christ and his Church in a way to not leave our contemporaries indifferent. The Message to the young people at the conclusion of the Council can still today throw some light on its significance: "The Church for four years, has worked to rejuvenate its own face, to better correspond with the design of its own founder, the great Living, the Christ, eternally young. And at the end of this impressive "revision of life" he turns to you: it is for you young people, mostly and above all for you, with which it, with its Council has turned on a light, one that brightens the future."

TERTIO MILLENIO ADVENIENTE N. 18

(...)We can affirm that the Second Vatican Council was a providential event, whereby the Church began the more immediate preparation for the Jubilee of the Second Millennium. It was a Council similar to earlier ones, yet very different; it was a Council focused on the mystery of Christ and his Church and at the same time open to the world. This openness was an evangelical response to recent changes in the world, including the profoundly disturbing experiences of the Twentieth Century, a century scarred by the First and Second World Wars, by the experience of concentration camps and by horrendous massacres. All these events demonstrate most vividly that the world needs purification; it needs to be converted.

(...)The best preparation for the new millennium, therefore, can only be expressed in a renewed commitment to apply, as faithfully as possible, the teachings of Vatican II to the life of every individual and of the whole Church. It was with the Second Vatican Council that, in the broadest sense of the term, the immediate preparations for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 were really begun. If we look for an analogy in the liturgy, it could be said that the yearly Advent liturgy is the season nearest to the spirit of the Council. For Advent prepares us to be the One who was, who is and who is to come (cf Rev 4,8).