The universal call to holiness is a signature teaching of the Second Vatican Council. The topic forms the subject of the fifth chapter of Lumen Gentium, the Council’s dogmatic constitution on the Church.
With this text, Vatican II stated decisively that “all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity …”
The teaching was a radically new pronouncement, at least in the context of solemn declarations by the Church. The topic also had a certain novelty within the Council itself. A chapter dedicated to the call to holiness was not present in the initial draft of Lumen Gentium presented at the beginning of the Council. This earlier text, after describing the hierarchy of the Church, dedicated a chapter to the “states for acquiring Evangelical Perfection,” that is, the religious life.
In the spring of 1963, in a meeting of the commission for coordinating the Council’s work, Belgian Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens presented the suggestion for a specific chapter dedicated to the topic of holiness in the Church. He took as his starting pointing the earlier text on the “state of perfection,” understood in the sense of the religious life.
The Belgian prelate felt that this earlier chapter had put too much emphasis on the superiority of the religious state and that a wider vision was needed. He proposed that the constitution on the Church might first describe the vocation to holiness that is directed to all Christians and then move on to portray that which is proper to the state of perfection specific to the religious.
The proposal would result in a new chapter that was presented to the Council Fathers in the fall of 1963, entitled “On the Vocation to Holiness in the Church,” which covered both the call to holiness in general and the specific call to holiness within religious life. Recalling Christ’s call to be “perfect” in charity (Matthew 5:48) and the teaching of Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales, this draft affirmed that all Christians, of whichever state, are called to the common goal of Christian holiness, as a fruit of the action of God’s grace.
During the debates on this text, the Council Fathers were in agreement on the need to proclaim the call to holiness among all the baptized. Cardinal Norman Gilroy of Sydney noted this consensus within the Council and further argued the Council would only have “success” if it effectively led all of the Church’s members to a higher degree of holiness.
At the same time, numerous Council Fathers would call on the text to better express the meaning of Christian holiness. Archbishop Angelo Fernandes, coadjutor of New Delhi, commented that the text was not profound enough in describing the meaning of Christian holiness as a perfect growth of the grace of adoption and transformation in the Holy Spirit brought about in baptism.
Furthermore, he observed that the text gave disproportionate space — almost 70% — to matters related to the religious life. While recognizing the special role of the religious in giving testimony to the Church’s unstained holiness, he called on the Council to give more attention to the call to holiness of bishops, priests and the laity, in addition to a clearer articulation of the essential meaning of the religious vocation.
These and other similar suggestions were in no way intended to take away from the Council’s veneration for the religious life. As Croatian Bishop Stjepan Bauerlein pointed out, the diocesan priest’s dedication to God differs from that of the religious, “like one star from another differs in splendor,” yet the difference in splendor would not be a reason for denying the existence of a star.
The various suggestions of the Council Fathers were reflected in an extensively revised text on the call to holiness, presented to the Council in the fall of 1964. Here, for the first time, the Council Fathers were presented with a text on the “Universal Call to Holiness in the Church,” which could potentially be a chapter unto itself. The assembly would later vote to approve this text as a specific chapter, while also deciding in favor of another chapter on the special role of religious life in the Church.
In this revised text, the Doctrinal Commission — the committee with the responsibility for revising the text — greatly enhanced the description of the meaning of that call to holiness directed to all Christians. The chapter has a new beginning, which recognized that the Church is “indefectibly holy.”
In this way, the Council text responded to the request of many Council Fathers that the document might better express the way the call to holiness is rooted in the very identity of the Church.
The new draft also contained a description of the way holiness is made a living reality in the life of the Christian.
As the final text of Lumen Gentium would affirm, through baptism and faith, that the followers of Christ “truly become sons of God and sharers in the divine nature. In this way they are really made holy.” At the request of still other Council Fathers, so as to avoid falling into pure idealism, the text would go on to recognize the reality of sin: “Truly we all offend in many things … and we all must daily pray: ‘Forgive us our debts.’”
The chapter would also avoid such idealism by a much more detailed description of the manner in which the various members of the Church are called to live out holiness through their personal circumstances: as bishops, priests, deacons, “married couples and Christian parents,” as well as “widows and single people.”
The Council wanted to make particular mention of those “who engage in labor — and frequently it is of a heavy nature,” “all those who are weighed down with poverty, infirmity and sickness, as well as those who must bear various hardships or who suffer persecution for justice sake.” This panorama of holiness in the Church particularly manifests the renewed consciousness of the role of the laity in the Church, the subject of the previous chapter of Lumen Gentium.
Within such great variety, the members of the Church seek a common denominator, charity. The Doctrinal Commission was aware, as it noted in presenting the revised draft to the Council, that charity “is the principal and necessary way to holiness … in which all other ways are included and surpassed.”
The Council wanted to emphasis, first of all, that charity is a gift infused into humanity by God, as well as a command. As Lumen Gentium affirms, “in order that love, as good seed may grow and bring forth fruit in the soul, each one of the faithful must willingly hear the Word of God and accept His Will.”
The text goes on to describe the ways in which Christians allow this divine charity to act in their life and thus “complete” the work begun by God: the sacraments and especially the Eucharist, the liturgy, prayer, self-denial, along with “lively fraternal service and the constant exercise of all the virtues.” Among the various manners in which Christians manifest this charity, the Council wanted to make special reference to the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and in particular to those religious who live celibacy, “a precious gift of divine grace.”
This historic chapter comes to a close with a final invitation to all the faithful to seek holiness and perfection in their own proper state. This call, the Council noted, is in fact, an “obligation,” deriving from that mystery of the Church that is so powerfully presented in Lumen Gentium. The exhortation continues to resonate today as a summons to Christians to live according to grace they have received, each one according to the particular vocation they have received, and in this way make Christ present in the world.