Paola Pruett-Vergara | A Student Perspective on Gaudium et Spes: 60 Years Later

DSPT student Paola Pruett-Vergara offers a student perspective on the history and application of Gaudium et Spes at the 2024 DSPT Convocation of the College of Fellows on "The Church in the Modern World...And in These Times."
This portion of the Convocation was moderated by DSPT student, Andrew DiCrisi.
The Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes (1965) was a somewhat novel kind of constitution, devoted not to doctrine strictly understood, but to a discernment of what had changed in the world, the great vineyard. It was deemed pastoral to denote our understanding of changeable things for the sake of accomplishing Christ’s great commission to his apostles.
Its purpose (not its end or goal) therefore was open-ended, requiring continual discernment of spiritual, moral, political, cultural, and economic challenges faced by men and women in mundo huius temporis. In their own time, the conciliar fathers considered a wide array of factors influencing the hopes and anxieties of the post-war generation, the animorum appetitiones (desires of the soul) that must be understood in time and place.
Sixty years later, we know in the course of lived experience that these hopes and anxieties, and the social relationships for which they once existed, have profoundly changed. So much so that it is not uncommon for us to think that we are living in a very different time, or a different world, so to speak. The challenges of family life, work, political community, human rights, communications, and perhaps most importantly, technological domination of ordinary community life - indeed, even disbelief in the majesty of both God and his created images are in a new phase.