COMMENTARY: Chapter 7 of Lumen Gentium presents the Council’s teaching on some essential aspects of the Church’s teaching: judgment, the souls in purgatory, and our union with the saints in heaven.
The Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, offers a compelling portrait of the Church as People of God.
As the Council reflected on this truth, it realized that its description of the Church would be incomplete without reference to those members of this People who no longer belong to the present world — namely, the saints in heaven and those souls experiencing their final purification in purgatory. The Council would eventually include this material in Chapter 7 of Lumen Gentium, entitled “The Eschatological Nature of the Pilgrim Church and its Union with the Church in Heaven.”
We might wonder why such key topics were not part of the original plan for a constitution on the Church. For the sake of clarity, the Preparatory Theological Commission — which produced the original draft with the help of a special subcommission — decided to focus on the Catholic Church in its form here on earth, that is, what is traditionally known as the “militant Church,” that part of the Church struggling toward its final end of heavenly glory.
Such a focus made it easier to explain the identity of the Catholic Church as both the Mystical Body of Christ and a visible society governed by the pope and the bishops. Still, as the Council reflected on the Church’s mystery, some Council Fathers thought a document that focused exclusively on the pilgrim Church on earth would be lacking. For example, Bishop John Edward Petit, a bishop in Wales, argued that the constitution’s teaching about the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ would be incomplete if there were no mention of the entire Church — not just the militant Church, but also, even more eminently, the “triumphant Church,” that is, those who have reached the glory of heaven.
As the British bishop pointed out, St. Paul’s image of the Church as a “body” conveys the unity of all the faithful in Christ, whether on earth, in purgatory or in heaven. In this context, he recalled the way the saints in heaven help the rest of the Church through their example and prayer. Citing a new growth in the devotion to saints in England and elsewhere, he rejected the idea that such devotions had lost their significance in the present day or were unsuited to the people of Northern Europe. He proposed that the Council add to the constitution on the Church a special chapter on the triumphant Church that might propose the Catholic doctrine on authentic veneration of the saints.
Many other Council Fathers shared this sentiment, along with Pope St. John XXIII, whose specific indication was at the origin of this chapter. A special subcommission was entrusted with elaborating the text and composed a draft chapter that, after extensive revision, was presented to the Council Fathers in September 1964. With some further minor adjustments, this text would become the final text of Chapter 7 of Lumen Gentium.
As the title of the chapter indicates, the Council desired not simply to deal with devotion to the saints and other heavenly realities. Rather, the constitution focuses on the eschatological or ultimate realities to which the life of the Church is oriented. After chapters that recalled specific vocations in the Church — ordained ministry, the laity, the religious — as well as a chapter on the universal call to holiness, Vatican II desired to recall that the final culmination of all of these vocations will occur only in the next life. As the chapter notes in its opening words:
“The Church … will attain its full perfection only in the glory of heaven, when there will come the time of the restoration of all things.”
With these words, the Council introduces a description of what is traditionally known as the “Last Things,” which many Council Fathers had wanted the text to mention: the reality of judgment, the “eternal fire” of hell, the need for souls to be purified in purgatory, the hope of heaven and the resurrection of the body.
At the same time, the Council Fathers did not want to portray these truths as completely bound up with the next life. The conciliar assembly was deeply aware that the Risen and Glorious Christ “is continually active in the world” so as to lead them to the Church, through which he “might make them partakers of His glorious life by nourishing them with His own Body and Blood” (48).
After this portrayal of the Church in its present state, with its hope in the life to come, the chapter moves on to describe the union of the pilgrim Church with those in both purgatory and heaven. The Council expresses its conviction that all the members of the Church, in this world and beyond this world, exist in one intimate communion of grace:
“All in various ways and degrees are in communion in the same charity of God and neighbor and all sing the same hymn of glory to our God.”
This sense of the solidarity among the entire Church prepares the way for a commentary on the essential role of devotion to the saints in the Church’s life. While many Council Fathers had desired to deal with this topic, several of them were concerned that certain excesses in devotion could take away from the centrality of Christ and make it difficult for the Church’s efforts at unity with separated Christian brethren.
In light of such concerns, Chapter 7 of Lumen Gentium places a strong emphasis on how the Church’s union with the saints is rooted in and directed to Christ. The efficacy of the saints in strengthening the Church in holiness comes from the fact that they “are more closely united with Christ” and their merits come also from him who is “the one Mediator between God and man.” With an awareness of the unity of the entire Mystical Body, the chapter also makes mention of the practice of prayer for the dead, a practice present in the Church “from the very first ages of the Christian religion.”
The chapter closes with a profession of faith in the Church’s tradition of devotion to the saints and the souls in purgatory, with reference to earlier councils. While holding fast to these precedents, the Council did not want to merely repeat the teachings of the past. Rather, the dogmatic constitution wanted to give a new vitality to these traditional practices, exhorting the Church to remove or correct “any abuses, excesses or defects” in this area, and at the same time to appreciate more deeply the true basis of such customs.
As the Council affirms, authentic devotion to the saints “consists not so much in the multiplying of external acts, but rather in the greater intensity of our love.” Such veneration never takes away from, but rather “more thoroughly enriches the latreutic worship,” or adoration, which “we give to God the Father, through Christ, in the Spirit.”
With this text on the Church’s eschatological and heavenly dimension, the Council articulated an essential aspect of that mystery of the Church that it desired to present to the world in its constitution on the Church. The chapter continues to vividly remind us of those ultimate realities that, while lying beyond this present world, shape and direct the Church in her pilgrim journey through history.