Before and after Vatican II
The first graduate course I taught when I went to Catholic University in 1977 was on the Second Vatican Council. As a way of getting students to reflect on what had changed during and after the Council, I gave them the paragraphs that Garry Wills wrote for the editors of Commonweal in response to their questions: Is there such a thing any more as Catholic culture? Would we be better off with it or without it? [Garry Wills on Catholic culture] (It says something already that the questions could have been posed already in 1967, only two years after the close of the Council.) At first, most of the Catholic students knew about the practices that Wills evoked in stream-of-consciousness fashion, but as the years passed, I had to explain more and more of them even to the Catholic students. The problem was even greater when I began to teach the course also to undergraduates. For them I hit upon the idea of having them conduct an interview with one or two Catholics who were old enough to remember the Church as it was before Vatican II, and for the task I prepared a set of questions that I wanted them to pose. Interview about Vatican II
The exercise was pedagogically very effective, and many students wrote that it had made the Council and its aftermath something very alive and personal, and even familial–more than one told me it was the first conversation about their religion that they had had with a parent. Some also, having received some indication of what it was like to be a Catholic before the Council, wondered what markers of identity they might point to today.
If any reader is inclined to answer the questions, please note that I wanted those being interviewed to have to answer not only about their dislikes then and now, but also about what they liked then and like now. (Why is it that we seem always readier to complain than to appreciate?)
The Second Vatican Council was in session as I was entering high school, and its changes were gradually implemented during my college years and later. My children have asked me what it was like being a Catholic prior to Vatican II as compared to now. For me the biggest difference is that back then I had a powerful sense of belonging to two separate and distinct worlds. Part of that was based on the fact that I attended only parochial schools, played sports in the CYO league, and could not eat meat on Fridays. Being a Catholic was a badge that set me apart from the rest of society.
But in a deeper sense there was my belief in the existence of two separate and opposite realities -– what I would call the worlds of the “sacred” and the “secular.” The “sacred” was the world of the Church, as most richly experienced at my parish where as an altar boy I was part of the pageantry of the Mass. Going from the cold, grey streets of the upstate New York town where I grew up into my parish church to serve morning Mass, I would encounter a feast for the senses – the sights of stained glass and the gleaming gold of candlesticks and chalices, the smells of wine and incense, and the sounds of organ, bells, Gregorian chant, and the eternal-sounding cadences of Latin – “Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” What a wondrous world that was!
In contrast to this “sacred” world, there was the “secular” world that had its diversions like TV, sports, and pop music, but mostly consisted of the plain everyday routine of school, daily chores, and jobs.
Between these two realities, I believed that God was present only in the sacred. To find God, to be with God, I had to leave – mentally if not physically – the secular world, and enter into the world of the sacred. We lived in a vale of tears; God was high on the mountaintop.
The bishops at Vatican II, particularly in their pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, offered a whole new way of seeing the world and locating God’s presence within it. Their vision gradually came to replace the attitudes and beliefs I had acquired as a child and young man.
For me now, there is no longer a “sacred” world that exists separate and apart from the “secular.” There is only one world, the world I live in every day, where I cannot help but encounter other people — family members, clients, colleagues, strangers — and am called to respond. Of course, I can ignore them. I can be so distracted or caught up in myself -– or still looking to the horizon, nostalgic for the “sacred” that would take me away from the dull routine and repetition of daily life -– that I may not even notice other people or be aware of their needs. But there is no escaping the call.
I still experience a sense of the sacred, but I find it only in the here-and-now, within my relationships with others and in being present to those whom I encounter in my life. What I call “sacred” now are the moments of grace I experience when I can let go of grudges and resentments, or when I can work through feelings of disappointment or hurt and choose to love. The sacred does not exist as a separate, static world; the sacred happens.
A great post, pierre.
I think many today are moved more and more into the sacred/secular world where behavior is critical to their spirtuality.
In the world today, we endeavor to use reason and evidence to determine the basic nature of reality and try to think well and widely about what’s important and how we should act as we go through our lives. This includes thinking about matters of faith. But that’s not how it has worked for a good part of the past two thousand years. Most Catholics, at least through the mid-twentieth century, if they paid attention to their religion at all, didn’t first use reason and evidence to make up their minds about matters of faith. They simply accepted the nature and meaning of the world as defined by the faith (e.g., the natural and the supernatural, the reality of sin and grace, the importance of the sacraments, morality, worship, etc.). Evidence and reason functioned within the context of faith, or complementary to it. That certainly was the case in the world in which I grew up in the 1950s. Then, in one generation it all changed. Rather than receiving the map of the world as defined by faith, we used reason and evidence to build our own map. Reason and evidence eclipsed faith as the essential means to define reality. Faith still functioned, but it functioned as an aspect of the reality we explored with reason and evidence, not it’s defining framework.
I don’t think we’ve even begun to fathom the impact of this.
I was an undergraduate from Fall semester 1962 to my graduation in May 1966. The Second Vatican Council held its sessions from 1962 to 1965; however, its impact kicked in over a period of several years subsequently.
To this day, I am deeply thankful for my undergraduate education in philosophy at two Jesuit institutions of education. Later in my life, as a Jesuit seminarian, I studied philosophy further. I am also deeply grateful for my further study of philosophy in the post-Vatican II period, especially for the study of Bernard Lonergan’s book INSIGHT: A STUDY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.
In general, I do not admire the pre-Vatican II Catholic subculture in which I grew up. It seems to me that pre-Vatican II Catholics were preoccupied with upholding and policing their understanding of Catholic sexual morality. Remember the Legion of Decency? In the pre-Vatican II era, far too many Catholics excelled at censoriousness and were extremely judgmental.
So I would praise Vatican II for changing the Catholic subculture’s strong tendencies toward being censorious and judgmental about sexual morality. In addition, after Vatican II, the Catholic subculture moved away from the strong preoccupation with sexual morality.
A great post, Pierre. And while I get the difference you describe between the sacred and the secular, I remember experiencing it differently. That constant witnessing to sacred space and time not only recognized the sacred as real, it irrevocably changed the way in which we saw everything else. The very act of worship both signified and created a way to see ordinary reality itself as sacred, placing the entire experience of life in the context of the transcendent. The neighborhood, the city and the world were in a very real way holy.
I’m also not willing to give up that sense of the sacred or think of it as merely nostalgic. While I’m all for seeing God in the world etc. I think this is best done by escaping the ordinary in worship and actively creating sacred space and sacred time with sacred ritual. (We can save our egalitarianism for questions of authority and governance, where it is much more sorely needed.)
I came in as the Council went out, so I cannot speak to the changes.
Pierre, just following up on Jeanne’s thoughts, I was wondering whether and how your spiritual integration might have built upon your early training. I’m concerned that parish liturgy may not provide anything like it. Little kids are stocking up their imaginations and memories with all sorts of things, and I wonder if the kind of early nourishment that you had is widely available nowadays.
I was in my 40′s for V2. It truly was an opening of the window on the world. I feel that closing now. For me , the recent liturgical change from ‘for all’ to ‘for many’ was a death knell for V2 .
As a pre-VaticanII layperson I remember watching and experiencing much more conscious reflection and appreciation for the real presence in the Eucharist before VatII. . Receiving seemed to become more automatic and less reverent after.. Many more received.. confession became much much less to become almost invisible. As a 1956 graduate from a Jesuit U .. I am still stunned we were not exposed to even hint or inkling that it was coming shortly.
I appreciated the ecumenism and the fresh air from the open windows was most welcome.. The lay ministry initiatives changed us from observers to disciples. over all a ++
I took a summer school class in 1961 entitled “The Liturgy of the Latin Church” taught by Gerald Ellard, S.J. His name meant nothing to me at the time and I was looking for what I thought would be an easy 2 credits.
My first day in class I almost quit. I was the only lay person and surrounded by nuns, priests and seminarians – all in full habits, clerics, etc. (This WAS 1961, you know). It became clear to me that a quick skate through THOSE 2 credits was not in the cards.
Very quickly on Fr. Ellard started to not only discuss some of the precursors to Vat II liturgical changes, but also started to drop hints about what might be coming. I was absolutely enthralled.
I had been raised in a rural SW Wisconsin parish in a town that was overwhelming Catholic and virtually knew no easily separable “secular culture.” What was, was.
The liturgical life of my parish was totally pedestrian: the fastest mass was the most popular mass; Marian hymns dominated, irrespective of the liturgical season (a concept that was gleaned via osmosis, not education; a series of curmudgeonly Irish pastors, none of whom was on any fast track to anything, except retirement; “sister school” valiantly taught in oversized classes by extremely young or very old Dominican nuns; etc.
By the time the summer school was over I was absolutely excited about 2 things: (1) the mass that I had been raised to suffer through was not something delivered on stone tablets, and (2) some people were actually serious about making some changes! Changes – but, but, but: the Catholic Church NEVER changed.
Lordy, lordy, I was ready for those changes! BTW I had no inkling that Fr. Ellard would be gone in 1963 before Vat II got underway. Little did I know that he had a large hand in sparking interest within the ranks of US bishops for the kind of change that he had predicted.
Mary Bergan: Aren’t you being a bit apocalyptic? Think of all the respects in which Vatican II’s changes continue to flourish!
Jimmy, how did that so-pedestrian faith life lead you to take such a course?
I graduated Catholic elementary school in 1960. During the 1950s I was an alter boy and my religious education was communicated in terms of absolutes and repetitive dogma. Protestants were somehow second class citizens and did not have the true faith that was only given to the Roman Catholic Church. During most of the 1960s, I attended weekly Mass and went to confession often. In fact, during my college years 1964-1968, I often went to confession once a week because I had a girlfriend and every weekend was a struggle between my natural inclinations and hormones and the guilt of moral sin. I was perplexed and frustrated by made it through my younger years, as most of us did.
As for Vatican II, the changes were mostly cosmetic. The Mass was conducted in English, the priest faced the parishioners, the alter was redesigned. Both the Old and New Testament was read, but the homolies were mostly about “do’s and don’ts”. There was little said about spriituality, prayer, making moral decisions involving conflict, and much less about the Spirit of God in one’s life, or His gifts. The Church seemed to replace the Holy Spirit. All the guidance you needed was to listen to the priest and the pope. There was a lot of “guilt” imparted, perhaps unintentionally, about committing sin, as a failure of something in me. Jesus deserved my love and “I” failed him. Everything depended on my decisions, my abilities. Nothing was said about relying of God’s spirit to guide me, that despite my failings He would lead me to salvation and never abondon me. Nothing about trusting in Him, relying on Him, and rejoicing in His presence, His gifts, His love. If I could not love myself, riddled in guit, how could I love God. After all, it was my fault I was sinning. I could not let God be God and Mike be Mike. It took me many, many years to get a better orientation about my faith and how to live a life pleasing to God. The answer, just keep moving forward, pray, go to Mass, etc. You could not think for yourself, you had to obey all the do’s and don’ts, and struggle with guilt in decades of the dark night of the soul.
Despite all of this, I took my family to Mass with me for 20 years, participated on many retreates, prayed often, etc. In my early married life, I said to my priest “I have 2 children and want no more for good reasons. My wife is taking the pill. Is this permissible? He told me that contraception was controversial, that the Church’s current teaching forbids contraception, but that you can rely on your informed conscious. You have 2 children, you go to Mass each week and receive the sacraments, you pray and read Scripture. If you believe you are being a responsible parent and your conscious is not troubled and you respect the Chruch and try to understand its teachings, don’t worry about it.
More than 30 years later, I asked my cousin who was the Chancellor of a Catholic Diocese, about contraception and my experiences. He told me that I committed no sin despite the fact that my parish priest was wrong in guiding me about conscious and contraception. I could go on and describe a 5 year education in moral theology, but I will stop here.
To get back to the subject of the article and the questions, the pre-concilar Church was much different than the post-Vatical II Church, especially after the issuance of Humanae Vitae (HV). I neve heard, or don’t remember, any homily about HV or contraception from 1968-1998, other than an occasional snipit in the Church bulletin.
The world in the 1950s and early 1960s consisted of two worlds. The Catholic Church and everything else. After 1968, the Church was different. The authority of the pope was questioned, the morality of sexual ethics issues was being disputed by priests, theologians and the laity, all in tension with the hierarchy and Magisterium. There became a profound crisis of truth and a feeling that Rome was not listening to the laity or the clergy. Human experience was not an issue in the development of doctrine. Suffering and conflict were subordinate to moral teachings and the answers to complex cases were to suck it up and practice “heroic virtue”.
There is a significant difference between the teachings on what I would define as the “desposit of faith”, those teachings of Jesus, the basic tenants of our faith, versus the teachings about sexual ethics as moral norms and moral absolutes. There has been an expansion of the desposit of faith to include any teaching that would justify the moral absolutes of the post-conciliar Church.
Despite the meaning of Church, in Gaudium et spes, that the Church is the laity, theologians and the hierarchy, the Church continues to operate as a one-dimensional Church, a top-down teacher with the laity the receiver of the truth as professed by the papal magisterium. In this regard, the pre-and-post conciiar Churches did not change. Most importantly, the answers to complex ethical cases such as: the divorsed and remarried, seropositive couples, individucals with same-sex attraction, young married women whose lives are threatened by another pregrnancy (and must practice risky PC or celibacy), a mother whose life is threatened by a fetus that cannot survive under any circumstances…..conflict with the hierarchy of values, human experience and the informed conscious……they are not answers, but a tragedy.
There was much promise after Vatican II. However, HV and the papacy of JP II sent the Church back to pre-conciliar orthodoxy. There are tons of books written about what Vatican II meant. Howeve, JP II and now Benedict XVI do not see Vatican II very differently. There is too much risk in change and re-thinking, despite words used, but never practiced.
Mary, in spite of the patient explanations that I have heard, I also find the “for many” a stumbling block. So, at every Mass since since November 27, when the priest says “for many”, I correct him by interjecting: “for all”. With that, I am at relative peace at Mass. So far no one has made any comments (only my close neighbors can hear my interjection).
Claire: If I could get 4 credits at summer school, I could graduate mid-senior year.
Selfishness sometimes leads to life-changing events.
JAK: “Aren’t you being a bit apocalyptic? Think of all the respects in which Vatican II’s changes continue to flourish!”
I disagree, sadly. The fresh air is replaced by a closing in again. The changes may exist in form, but not in true substance. Yes, pastoral councils, diocesan senates, finance councils and various consultative structures were established, but the norms that would have allowed them to function with true power-sharing died a-borning.
There was no independent body outside the curia to implement the work of Vatican II, and the curia filled the vacuum for its own obstructionist purposes.
Commissions and synods meet in Rome, may have good deliberations, but their reports are passed through the curia for the final word. One priest I know gave up serving after his first term 5-year term, because so many countries sent their more powerful bishops as reps, as opposed to those with the expertise. And in the end, their work was effectively neutered by curial influence anyway. Waste of time, when the powers that be have actual control behind the scenes.
In parallel fashion, John Robert Page can tell us of the painful liturgy disputes, and how the restoration agenda is prevailing. More latin and bells again, at the least, with cappa magna’s reappearing, of all things.
I graduated from college as the Council opened, and I remember the excitement, the hope, a coming aliveness of the time. My experience of the pre-Vatican II church is mostly very negative, as I’ve indicated before. I would not have brought up my children in that suffocating, rigid environment.
The bishop of my diocese at the time worked on the prep commissions for two years or so, as well as 1962-65 four sessions. He won much publicity for declaring at the Council that “lay people today…will not allow themselves to be treated as in past times as merely passive members of the Church, blindly bowing to authority, or as mute sheep…Let this constant talk of their duty of subjection and reverence cease – as if their only duty be stated in these terms: believe, pray, pay and obey.”
This great man said later that the era of renewal was over in less than ten years. After much opposition from some clergy, religious and laity, he resigned as bishop a broken man at 64. His efforts to bring renewal had led to emotional and physical exhaustion. Those who held the conservative position were in control as the dust settled. That has been the case since.
Maybe the hope is that once the first hundred years after the Council have passed, the substantive changes that never materialized will grow out of the pro forma structures that were established.
The problem again may be that the pressure for reform will be so compacted someday that once a slight opening occurs (and it must), a dam will burst creating problems that could have been avoided with more moderated change. That is what happened before to some extent.
The need for “the change of mindset the Council sought” is clearly manifested in the clericalism of the sexual abuse crisis. Ratzinger got spooked in 1968, and could not see through the unrest to the broader horizon.
http://www-test.commonwealmagazine.org/ratzinger-vatican-ii?comments_per_page=999?comments_per_page=999
Ottaviani won.
How sad. How very, very sad, most of these remembrances. Made all the sadder because it is almost entirely self-inflicted. And not withstanding the many attempts to dissuade and implore otherwise, the preference is still to continue wandering in the desert 40 years later. Well, the rad-trads aren’t any better, singing essentially the same tune with slightly different words.
But either way, the solution is the same — love. All you gotta do is love. Love the Lord, love His Virgin Spouse, love their children, love every part of the Body, love the Spirit of Love and Truth which inspires and guides that Body. Love — a radical letting go and emptying of the self, making a gift of that self, unconditionally, regardless of whether the other(s) deserves it or not, truly seeking to be one with the other(s) — that is how one is fulfilled and made happy.
If you can’t love, or won’t love, insisting that this is lousy about the Church and that is lousy, then you will be truly empty and forever unhappy. Let it go, and choose love instead.
Did the second Vatican Council establish any kind of timeline for future Councils? It seems like we should have them periodically to fully implement the vision.
Before the changes, the Church was beautiful and peaceful. Since, it’s intelligent and noisy.
My mother was in her thirties during Vatican II. In her childhood in rural France, everybody was Catholic. Not everyone went to church on Sundays (the cafe was across the street from the church, so that some family members could wait at the cafe while other family members went to Mass), but everyone was baptized, had religious education, and got married in the church. During the war a couple of Jewish kids were hiding in the village, and they, too, went to church, received communion, and had religious education like everybody else: it would have been dangerous to stand out by not doing it. My reluctant mother was volunteered by my grandmother to serve at low Mass (but not at high Mass, where they only used boys). She didn’t care for the task, and said the responses at only roughly the right times during Mass because she couldn’t be bothered to make the effort to listen attentively, but the priest never complained about it (now I wonder if maybe he knew that he wouldn’t have any server at that early Mass if she stopped coming.)
The priest had a special place in the village. He was held in high respect. There was one that my mother was particularly fond of. He didn’t have a woman (mother or sister) at the rectory to help out, so, since in those days it was unthinkable that he could cook for himself, everyday my grandmother set aside for him some of the food that she was preparing for lunch, and sent one of the kids to the rectory with his lunch. One of my aunts, who was charged with that chore, got into trouble for occasionally nibbling on the meat along the way, but the priest said: “Don’t punish her. She was just hungry; it doesn’t matter!” Everyone loved that priest. In the summer, they went on vacation to some relatives’ farm, in a hamlet where the parish church was farther away. On Sundays, rain or shine, the whole family would walk two kilometers to go to Mass, and two kilometers again to come back home afterwards. My mother’s Sunday chore was to polish everyone’s Sunday shoes.
My mother loved the processions at Assumption, the music, the architecture, the incense, the litanies, the high Mass liturgy. She told me that it was the one place in their lives where they were exposed to art. She said that they looked forward to going to Mass on Sunday, because it was beautiful. They did not have TV or computers, and only few books, so the liturgy was their window to a world other than farm life. She apparently never bothered to stop and think about the meaning of the Mass (I bet that the fact that it was in Latin was a hindrance), but even as a possibly meaningless ritual she loved it anyway. She said words without wondering about the meaning, but she enjoyed the sound.
When Vatican II came, the big change for her was the revolution in the liturgy. It could hardly have been more drastic: when I grew up, the nearest church to us was a cinderblock building with a worker-priest, recordings of Andean flute music played during communion, and homilies given by a nun. Although we also went to some less resolutely modern places, something did get lost along the way in all of them. My mother always had nostalgia for the liturgies of her childhood. Not the prayers, to which she was quite happily indifferent, but the aesthetics. Once during the last year of her life, I went with her to a Benedictine monastery for a weekend, but even there, all the psalms were in French, and, whether at Vespers or at Sunday Mass, we did not hear a single word of Latin, not a single prayer or hymn that would have been the same as from her childhood. Beautiful French liturgies, but a big disappointment for me.
As to the other changes of Vatican II, it is my impression that my mother embraced them. For example, she took it as a matter of course that women were equal to men; that priests were not little kings in their parish kingdom; that Jews deserved respect equally to Catholics; and that each person could make up their own mind as to what they did and did not believe in, regardless of official pronouncements. I think that she already held those opinions long before Vatican II, so perhaps the main difference was that afterwards she was free to express them.
“Before the changes, the Church was beautiful and peaceful. Since, it’s intelligent and noisy.”
Ummmm…?
Claire:
My response to your comment, “I also find the “for many” a stumbling block. So, at every Mass since since November 27, when the priest says “for many”, I correct him by interjecting: “for all.”
I am “also with you.”
Claire:
Thanks for your reminiscences about your mother, which are reminding me of stories about my parents, pre-Vatican II. My father would go to the house of his orthodox Jewish neighbors during the winter and shovel the coal for them on the Sabbath. My mother took me to the wedding of our next door neighbor, in a Protestant church, no less. (I believe that she may have gotten some flak for entering a Protestant church and attending their service.). Our neighbor was a widow and lost two sons in World War II.
Great post, Clare. “My mother loved the processions at Assumption, the music, the architecture, the incense, the litanies, the high Mass liturgy. She told me that it was the one place in their lives where they were exposed to art.” That sounds very similar to the experience of the immigrant churches dotting the neighborhoods (sometimes literally every four blocks) all over Chicago.
The church of my youth was a church of rules. You followed the rules and you got the benefits. So imagine the reaction when the Church, with it’s power to make laws coming down in a straight line from God, started making new rules that were the exact opposite of the old rules we had come to know our entire lives (no fish on friday, no latin, no benediction, communion in the hand, etc.). We learned that change could happen in an unchanging Church. We also learned that since the new Mass was developed by the papal commission charged with revising existing liturgical practices to reflect the will of the Council, changes to even deeply sacred acts could happen by committee. We began to see the Church as a creature of history and of bureaucracy, which could develop and change over time as a result of human action. And we learned that human mistakes, with Humanae Vitae following shortly thereafter. That called everything into question.
Vatican II and the events that followed collapsed rules-based authority. First, the fact of change at all in an unchanging church called all Church laws into question. Second, the exercise of collegial power by the bishops during the Council diminished the power of the papacy, yet the collegial power of the bishops was not implemented in an ongoing manner after the Council. Third, the Pope’s stand on birth control in Humanae Vitae broke the trust of the faithful in the authority of the hierarchy to define sin. As a result, the rules that had previously glued us psychologically to the institution no longer held. Finally, the huge mind-shift of Vatican II was followed by nothing: no way to deal collegially with decisions about birth control, celibacy and other issues left off the agenda of Vatican II, no reform of the Roman Curia, and no independent, viable structure for ongoing councils of bishops. The people’s faith in the Church’s rules-based authority fizzled, yet no trusted institutional authority took its place. For all intents and purposes, we were on our own. The definition of faith passed from the institution to the believer.
I think today we’re in the neutral zone—the old ways of defining what it means to be Catholic don’t work anymore but we have yet to arrive at new forms of governance that make sense in a modern world. We also haven’t really re-imagined good ways to do liturgy that capture mystery and better reflect the tradition.
Carolyn Disco: What I called “apocalyptic” was taking a single issue and turning it into the “death-knell” of Vatican II.
I could agree with a good deal of what you say, but certainly not with the idea that the changes were mostly matters of form and not of substance. And I am struck by two things: 1) that almost all of your comments have to do with what the clergy, or hierarchy, are (or are not) doing, and 2) that your comments about the Church back then and the Church today are so negative. Was there nothing good? Is there nothing good?
This latter point is also illustrated in several other comments. To repeat my last question above: “Why is it that we seem always readier to complain than to appreciate?” In their interviews I urged my students to try to separate description from evaluation. Growing up Catholic today is different from what it was before the Council. In what ways? What are the differences, changes? The first set of questions are necessary in order to get some sense of the Council as an event whose impact went far beyond what was intended or desired by its protagonists. I was hoping to prompt some reflection on the difference the Council meant, not a new round of complaints about the present. There’s room, and need, for the complaints, but the historian in me regrets that there is so little interest in trying to grasp what was going on before, during, and right after the Council. I’m glad that some have made the effort here.
“If you can’t love, or won’t love, insisting that this is lousy about the Church and that is lousy, then you will be truly empty and forever unhappy. Let it go, and choose love instead.”
Bender – what a marvelous comment. I couldn’t agree more.
I am too young to know what it was like before the Council. I do know my parents, particularly my father, mourn for the old culture that Garry Wills described so well.
But here is an interesting thing: some years ago (perhaps fifteen or so), in the town where my parents now live, one of those old-Latin-Mass ‘Ecclesia Dei’ religious orders established itself. They took over (in a non-hostile way) a church whose parish, because of demographic shifts, was nearly moribund, and began celebrating the old Latin mass regularly. They attracted many adherents. I am told that they are popular with young conservative families who home-school. And it isn’t just mass; they offer devotionals, catechism classes, Latin mass choirs, etc. This order is building, to the extent possible, a pre-Vatican-II cultural bubble. And it seems some folks have found a comfortable home there.
My father, in particular, was quite excited about this development. He attended the Latin Masses enthusiastically. My mother went with him from time to time, but fairly soon reverted to their normal, mainline, neighborhood parish, where she is a member of the choir and has many friends.
After a while, my father did the same. He is still grateful that the religious order is there for him, but I think it became a little too unreal after a while. The world has changed, and the church has changed. And the intra-church conflict is omnipresent in such places; they seem to exist as a sort of refuge for those who have lost a battle and harbor dreams of reconquest on some hazy, far-off future. I think he has decided that his heart is with the church, not just the church in one particular expression.
My mother’s take is quite a bit like Claire’s mom: she likes a number of the things that have changed since Vatican II, and she wouldn’t want to give them up.
Istm that, as evocative as Wills’ first paragraph is, it makes his 2nd paragraph almost venomous. Who were these men who rose up to change that world who did not love it?
I think it’s shortsighted to lay all the changes that have occurred in the Church at the feet of Vatican II. Good Lord, look how much has changed! We’ve been transformed by events and inventions that are nothing short of astonishing: television, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, feminism, space flight (and that world-changing picture of Earth from space), the explosion of the digital world including computers, the Internet, the Web and cell phones, the booming of capitalism, and the world-flattening effects of globalization.
And most of it happened AFTER Vatican II, which ended in 1965, three years before it all really broke loose in the summer of 1968. Woodstock was in 1969. Those are the things that changed the world. I don’t discount Vatican II; without it the Church would now be pure anachronism. It is still very much alive, if impaired by loony governance and often flabby liturgies. But those are things we can do something about, once we realize just how much we have to do. The real action took place in the world; the Church is in need of a huge catching up with God’s creation. But if Catholics can do anything they ought to be able to resolve faith and reason.
Garry Wills says, “Men rose up to change this [Catholic ghetto] world who did not love it — demented teachers, ready to improve a student’s mind by destroying his body.”
But Wills does not explicitly name any of the men who rose up who supposedly did not love the Catholic ghetto, or any of the supposedly “demented teachers.”
I guess that Wills is referring to the guys at the Second Vatican Council who initiated changes in the Roman Catholic Church, changes that impacted the Catholic ghetto in the United States.
However, the customs of the Catholic ghetto in the U.S. that Wills does explicitly name were man-made customs.
Now, if the older set of man-made customs of the Catholic ghetto were destroyed, couldn’t new customs emerge to replace the older customs?
In the years following the Second Vatican Council, liturgists were working to introduce new customs at Mass, for example.
I do think however that after Vatican II we had our own mini spasm of iconoclasm that we still suffer from today.
John O’Malley describes it in his book The Four Cultures of the West:
“Iconoclasm, which first flared up in an organized way in the East in the eighth century, erupted again in the West in the sixteenth, with cries of idolatry, paganism, and superstition hurled at those who venerated images and who seemed to put trust in ‘ceremonies.’ … Not only did most Protestant groups attack the use of images and then often the images themselves, but they also abolished the Liturgy of Hours and tended to strip the Eucharistic liturgy down to bare table and words, if not to abolish it altogether.”
It’s not like all the old sacred images, statues and objects were ripped out of our churches by rampaging mobs of guitar-wielding, bell-bottomed, hippies. Yet the parallels are telling. The “updating” of what had previously been considered objects of great beauty bore no small resemblance to what went on during the Protestant Reformation, as again noted by John O’Malley in The Four Cultures of the West:
“For sixteenth-century reformers of ‘ceremonies,’ correct understanding was the prerequisite to acceptable participation in worship. … Not only images were under attack but also the traditional rites and rituals of worship itself, including of course the vessels, furnishings, and vestments that were an integral part of them. The war against ‘idolatry’ and the war against ‘ceremonies’ were just two aspects of the same onslaught. … The attack was ultimately an attack on the sacramental principle of the invisible being mediated through visible objects and performance.”
He also says that “… the violence against the images … was sideways anger, an expression of frustration at other grievances long festering … to smash the images was to smash the status quo.”
Given the anti-modernist lunacies abounding in the Church before Vatican II, one can understand the sideways anger at work after the Council.
There’s room, and need, for the complaints, but the historian in me regrets that there is so little interest in trying to grasp what was going on before, during, and right after the Council. I’m glad that some have made the effort here.
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Why heap contumely on those unable or unwilling “to grasp” your view of the Church?
I remember vividly and in detail “what was going on before, during, and right after the Council”, particularly in women’s religious communities.
(I wrote a novel and a non-fiction book about that. Links on my web page: http://gerelynhollingsworth.com )
Before? The post-war vocation boom was at its peak. Over threee-thousand young women entered American convents every year.
During? The Sister Formation movement continued its efforts to educate nuns. Cardinal Suenens’ book, The Nun in the World, was read in refectories and discussed. His recommendations were implemented.
After? The exodus from religious life. A hundred thousand nuns left their convents, two out of every three, usually by the back door, with no money, no thanks for years of service, no letters of recommendation. And those left behind continued to express anger and resentment at those who left for decades.
How were those who stayed rewarded by the Church? With an investigation. Old women, who gave their lives to the Church, were probed and interrogated.
A friend of mine tells the story of talking to a construction worker “updating” a local church who was told to remove the statues during dinner time, to improve the odds that no one would see him carrying them out.
And this, from the Chicago Trib a while back:
“… when the cathedral closed between Easter 1968 and Christmas 1969, much of what had been added was taken away. The pulpit, stained-glass windows and murals were discarded to create a sleeker, more modern look — the trend of the time. Duncan Stroik, director of the Institute for Sacred Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, said many pastors stripped down worship spaces on the basis that traditional iconography distracted worshipers from Christ.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/religion/chi-bd_rigali-holy-nameaug02,0,3704926.story
I think it’s hard to appreciate just how much Vatican II did accomplish because it’s become the norm. We forget how loony and world-fearing the papacy was before Vatican II.
Prior to Vatican II: Condemned modernity and democracy, free speech and freedom of the press
After: Advocated for the dignity and freedom of the human person
Prior to Vatican II: Condemned freedom of religion (i.e., maintained that Catholicism should be the established religion of the state); condemned freedom of conscience
After: Embraced freedom of religion, separation of church and state and freedom of conscience, resolving over four Council sessions a church-state issue that went back over a thousand years
Prior to Vatican II: Condemned historical scholarship and biblical criticism
After: Revived the importance of Scripture in the life of the Church
Prior to Vatican II: Condemned ecumenism and behaved in a hostile way towards other faiths
After: Embraced ecumenism and condemned anti-semitism
Prior to Vatican II: Viewed liturgy as unchangeable
After: Addressed principles and practices of liturgy and opened it to the vernacular
Prior to Vatican II: Viewed Councils as mechanisms for condemning error
After: Took up a pastoral rather than dogmatic way of speaking
Prior to Vatican II: Saw the papacy as the sole authority in the church
After: Addressed the relationship of bishops to the papacy, aiming for collegiality
Prior to Vatican II: Saw the Church as a hierarchical, authoritarian organization
After: Saw the Church as the People of God, recognizing the dignity of the laity
“Before the changes, the Church was beautiful and peaceful.”
Sleep is peaceful. Being comatose may also be peaceful.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I do not find any significant command in scriptures that the purpose of the church, individually or collectively, is to be beautiful. The end results of her efforts should be beautiful, i.e, the beatific vision, but the trip along the way (as we all know) can be anything BUT beautiful.
As far as the noisy part: Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise. (Ps 98:4)
“Contumely,” no less! Wow! Sorry, don’t see it in my comments. I simply was asking that there be some effort at understanding what was going on before contumely is heaped upon the pre- or post-conciliar Church, and that people not in effect reduce the Church to the hierarchy when discussing the merits or faults of the Church, then or now.
I know the dry bones metaphor from Ezekiel is tempting, but it wasn’t all scattered and very dry bones before the Council, and I would ask those who think it was where did the impetus for the conciliar reforms come from–Do you think that they dropped directly down from heaven? Or were they prepared in the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of Catholics during the previous decades? M.-D. Chenu thought that it all began in the 1930′s. Read Irene Zotti’s book on the Young Christian Workers or hunt up some issues of “Jubilee-magazine,” and you’ll get some idea that there were very creative, beautiful, and spiritually enriching currents in Catholicism before Vatican II. I have the impression that some people think it was not possible to encounter God before the Council!
While Jeanne is correxct about the”loony” pre VII era, I support wholeheartedly Carolyn’s view that the fresh air is being replaced by a closing in and that’s the point.
It’s not just then and now but prospectively where we are headed.
When I read”just love” and themn read many of the comments on blogs here, I see the division that not only exists but continues to be fostered as ominous.
Yes, many of”the pople of God’ hang on centered by a notion of Eucharist and community(BTW, America has a new In All Things thread on the Catholic Aliance For the Common Good voter guide which stresses our loss of community) but their voices are muted as”people of God -despite recognition of the dignity of the laity, various structural changes,subsidiarity, colegiality, etc.
When I was an undergraduate at Loyola in Chicago, in the early ’80′s, an extensive renovation of its chapel, Madonna Della Strada, was undertaken. A large mural of saints behind the altar was painted over, in a general whitening of the entire worship space. Pews were removed and replaced with cushioned chairs, which permitted a number of different worship orientations, which could change with the liturgical season (e.g. the altar could be in the center, with the chairs arranged behind it), or for other events such as classical music concerts. The sanctuary itself was walled off by a carved screen and no longer used for community masses – it became a separate chapel.
Now, I read that another renovation has taken place within the last few years. The coat of white paint has been stripped from the mural. I don’t think pews have been restored, but I understand that the altar again resides in the sanctuary. There are lots of pictures on the web of how it looks now, but I haven’t found any from the 1984-2007 period.
Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical titled “Divino Afflante Spiritu” in 1943. It was a major turning point in the church’s formal acceptance of historical scholarship and biblical criticism.
Jeanne Follman makes the very important point that the Council and its aftermath shouldn’t be considered in abstraction from what was going on in the wider world at the time. The Council took place in The Sixties so that at the same time that a good deal of liberal modernity was being called into question, the Catholic Church, that professedly immutable bastion, was changing remarkably. What many Catholics thought was a rock now seemed more like a raft, being tossed hither and yon by the waves of societal and cultural change. That’s why many converts had special difficulty with the changes. All this needs to be taken into account in any effort to assess the Council’s impact.
The very fact that the popes themselves were calling for significant, deep- and far-reaching self-examination was itself a shock to the social system of Catholicism.
Jim, I wonder whether it isn’t the “culture” so much that they miss as the quiet consensus, the lack of constant bickering and uncertainty. Most Catholics, I’d guess, really care little about the ideological arguing that so obsesses commenters on the “left” and the “right”.
Also, I imagine, they miss the beauty that was so unceremoniously discarded. Beauty is both impossible to define and easy to destroy.
One never, I suspect, misses everything about the golden past – just the things one remembers with most fondness. There was a great deal good about the pre-Council Church that has been lost. There was much that should have gone, of course, but much that should have been cherished and saved. Revolutionaries, unfortunately, are bulls in China shops – single-minded, insensitive, ruthless.
The Church was closed; now, it’s open. I don’t think you can praise or blame the Council too much for that, though. Change was simply in the air – much in the world changed at about that time. The Church couldn’t not have changed. It was simply caught up in the prevailing wind. Everything was blown open, not just the Church.
So maybe the question can be, how did the Church deal with this change that it could not resist? Negativity alert: Not so well. Fatalism alert: Maybe that couldn’t be helped. Maybe it was time for organized religion to be toppled from a pedestal on which it had been sitting for too long.
“Contumely,” no less! Wow! Sorry, don’t see it in my comments. I simply was asking that there be some effort at understanding what was going on before contumely is heaped upon the pre- or post-conciliar Church, and that people not in effect reduce the Church to the hierarchy when discussing the merits or faults of the Church, then or now.
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Hi, Joseph:
It seemed like contumely to me when you said to Carolyn: “And I am struck by two things: 1) that almost all of your comments have to do with what the clergy, or hierarchy, are (or are not) doing, and 2) that your comments about the Church back then and the Church today are so negative. Was there nothing good? Is there nothing good?”
Unfair to expect any Catholic to write about the Church without mentioning the ordained men who ARE the Church, in spite of the limp claims that the Church is all of us.
To criticize a woman who is as knowledgeable about ordained men as Carolyn is does not fortify your claims or weaken her informed opinion.
———
I know the dry bones metaphor from Ezekiel is tempting, but it wasn’t all scattered and very dry bones before the Council, and I would ask those who think it was where did the impetus for the conciliar reforms come from–
From the laity! That’s why lay-women and -men occupied the seats at the big meeting, made the speeches, wrote the documents, issued the decrees! (There were a few token ordained men there as observers, of course.)
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. . . hunt up some issues of “Jubilee-magazine,” and you’ll get some idea that there were very creative, beautiful, and spiritually enriching currents in Catholicism before Vatican II. I have the impression that some people think it was not possible to encounter God before the Council!
Loved Jubilee, and no one thinks “it was not possible to encounter God before the Council”.
One of the attractions of Aquinas for me is that he lived in times much like ours:
As Richard E. Rubenstein describes it in his book Aristotle’s Children: “Imagine, more than four centuries before Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes proclaimed the Scientific Revolution, a recognizably modern perspective—rationalist, this-worldly, humanistic and empirical—ignited cultural warfare throughout Western Europe, challenging traditional religious and social beliefs at their core. The struggle between faith and reason did not begin, as is so often supposed, with Copernicus’s challenge to earth-centered cosmology or Galileo’s trial by the Inquisition but with the controversy over Aristotle’s ideas during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. … The controversy was really about the extent to which European intellectuals would commit themselves to the quest for rational understanding, and how they could do so without losing their religious and cultural identity. … Theologians, scientists, and humanists of diverse backgrounds and views are again wrestling with the issues that made Europe’s universities and churches and intellectual (and sometimes physical) battleground in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”
While conservatives may get annoyed at progressives because progressives want to have reasons for everything rather than just accepting things based on authority, I think that top-down authority is pretty “toppled” these days. If we want to have legitimate institutional authority, a good part of it will have to come from the bottom up through dialog rather than fiat (which doesn’t bode well for the 18th century royal court style of monarchical governance in practice today).
That’s a caricature of conservatives, Jean. People on the left want their authorities as much as conservatives want theirs.
People on the left want their authorities as much as conservatives want theirs.
Just yesterday I was thinking about how much I was yearning for a human authority that I would be able to follow with trust. How good it would be if I could simply listen to my parish priest and take what he said with joy, instead of listening suspiciously for signs of clericalism, authoritarianism, etc. ! (He’s brand new, so I have no reason to have that attitude, except that it is now my default expectation.)
Claire, why would you not have justifiable suspicions about your new cleric? I ask only because of James Davidson & Dean Hoge’s description of our newer clergy as “JPII priests”. If anecdotal information is any indication, I think Catholics may have good reason to look for signs of clericalism, authoritarianism, paternalism, “ontological” superiority in their newer clergy. (Since I don’t know your new presbyter, I am understandably writing in general terms.)
Joseph, just think about how much harder his job must be (than it would have been, say, in my mother’s days) if we watch everything he says and does, and mentally measure him according to our most and least favorite characteristics. Right now, he is brand new, and we have zero reason, with respect to him personally, to be so negative. It’s almost as if we expected him to fail to connect to the parish, and were waiting for him to fall. Then we will be able to say: “I knew nothing good could come out of that appointment!” – a bitter victory.
If that’s how he starts, then how can he succeed?
That attitude, on the part of us parishioners, is new. I don’t know how many parishes are like that. It’s as though the reform-of-the-reform was met, on the other side, with corresponding retrenchment. However justified our worries may be in general, it’s not a good way to start.
All new “bosses” are suspect by those over whom they have authority until they prove that they have personal and institutional integrity, relevant experience, respect for their subordinates’ experience and ideas, etc.
To assume the best in a newly ordained priest is contrary to human experience. A good test of him will be how he handles that situation and culture into which he is being interjected and whether or not he assumes the “father knows best” attitude.
Claire: You make a very valid point. The good functioning of authority in any organization relies basically on trust. Trustworthiness is another word for authority, and trust for the basic attitude towards authority as distinct from mere power. Things go well when trustworthy people occupy the positions of trustworthiness, and people trust them. Things go poorly (1) when the positions of trustworthiness are occupied by people who can’t or shouldn’t be trusted and (2) when people who can and should be trusted are not being trusted by other people. The relationship requires authenticity both in those who occupy positions of trustworthiness and in those expected to trust the trustworthy. On the one hand, no system can guarantee authenticity; on the other, lack of trust indicates something radically wrong at either end of the relationship.
“just think about how much harder his job must be (than it would have been, say, in my mother’s days) if we watch everything he says and does, and mentally measure him according to our most and least favorite characteristics. Right now, he is brand new, and we have zero reason, with respect to him personally, to be so negative. It’s almost as if we expected him to fail to connect to the parish, and were waiting for him to fall. Then we will be able to say: “I knew nothing good could come out of that appointment!” – a bitter victory.”
Hi, Claire, I am not sure how to say this in an inoffensive way, but I will do my best. What you describe here reminds me of what we used to see in American corporations 30 years ago, when many, many corporate departments were all white, and a person of color would come in for the first time. (Or, if you will, when many departments were all male, and a woman would come in for the first time). The expectation was that the new person would fail, simply because she was a woman, or he was black. I am told that many persons of color and many women in those situations felt the need to be super-human. And then, when, inevitably, the person made a mistake, it would simply reconfirm everyone else’s expectations.
I guess I would suggest that we take new parish priests on their own merits and demerits. I think it’s extremely hard for a new priest to come into a parish under almost any circumstances. I don’t think it’s fair to them to burden them with the failings of their brother priests. (Unless there is a good reason to think they were complicit in something. In the Age of Google, such things are frequently discoverable.)
Jeanne @ 11:19: Your “before and after” scenarios need a 3rd arm: now. As I look at what you outlined, I see some of the “before” being reborn in the “now.”
It must be wicked hard to be a parish priest. I go to Mass and look at how diverse everybody is and think how challenging it must be to pull it all together. There are very traditional people, and then there are people like me who think the more New Age-y the better, then there are people I have no idea what they’re doing (like the man who occasionally at the end of the Mass walks to the front of the pews and prostrates himself). My pastor, I think, might be very conservative (and I’m not) but that’s okay because he’s also very pastoral.
I’m sure we all have different ideas about how the Church should be run, yet somehow we muddle through and all worship together. And I really, really like that.
Did that sort of diversity exist back in the 50s?
Father K Read THE MARYKNOLL CATHOLIC MISSION IN PERU. 1943-1989 by Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens (University of Notre Dame Press) and then tell me about being apocaliptic.
JAK –
You ask why there are so many complaints about the Church and so little appreciation of the Church’s improvements since Vatican II. You seem to think an explanation of the complaints can be found in a comparison of the Church pre-and post- 1963-65. You seem to think that descriptions of those times will make us see that a there are jewels as yet to be uncovered which can inspire the praises of the laity.
But your lens is too narrow to discover the *main reason* for the complaints, a reason which has little to do with Vatican II. You lens doesn’t present that a second momentous event since 1963, the great sex scandal. You’re looking at the Church through binoculars — looking well at a narrow area and losing the wider reality.
Pre-Vatican II we respected our bishops, and even after HV I’d say that most Catholics still had some hope of significant change with respect to its most troubling teachings, those regarding sexual matters. That was true, I’d say, until 1984 when literally all Hell broke loose with the discovery that a the highly respected Bishop Frey (whom I myself had known as a child) had covered up and abetted the activities of the notorious Fr. Gauthe. The mushrooming of that scandal across the country and now the world has destroyed the laity’s respect for the bishops. The situations in Ireland and Poland, those bastions of Catholicism, are even worse than here.
Further, now that the scales having dropped from our eyes, we can look at everything the bishops do more objectivity. Vatican II has even given us permission to criticize the bishops when needed. Sadly, our new estimation ot them has let us see clearly how even the best of them are too timid to talk back to Rome even when they have need and a right and duty to do so. And don’t even hope that one of them might criticize the doings of a brother bishop. But let’s not start on that. Too depressing.
In a nutshell, we are too distracted by the major problems in the Church to consider in detail whatever good has happened since VII. Concentrating on the good would help about as much as counting up the virtues of an adulterous husband while ignoring his betrayal.
The Church is dying in the West, JAK. And that is the third momentous event occuring in the Church since 1963-65. Better to spend our energy looking at the (unpleasant) causes of its dying, and better to try to see what might be done to save it.
Fr. K – if this helps – graduated from 8th grade a few months after the close of VII. Don’t think that I would have entered the seminary and done formation work for almost 10 years if not for Vatican II and the spirit, changes, movements, inspirations that it inspired in my parish, archdiocese, etc. I was graced to be a part of a parish led by an order.
That order influenced many things in my primary education – from social needs (we supported a couple of families who were exiled from Cuba in 1962); learning how to be a lay leader and to make your own commitment to be responsible for the parish life; learning about diverse group – whether religious, economic, or educational – we had a growing investment in ecumenism and learning about other religions in our neighborhood; a desire to continue/increase my pursuit of biblical, theological studies.
The Daughters of Charity pushed me to learn about the changes; to be involved (not passive) – they completely changed the “old” pray, pay, and obey through their example and teaching. My high school quickly implemented VII – it was part of our theology classes; part of our school liturgies; remember again social outreach, choir, week of Christian Unity, interaction with a rabbi during Holy Week.
My freshman college theology textbook was Kung’s, The Church and later years involved texts from Karl Rahner, Schillebeeckx, Baum, deChardin, Bonhoeffer to name a few.
College pushed me via social outreach to pick up spanish, travel to Guatemala to do mission work and Mexico. What I learned there was brought back and used in my seminary formation job and in parishes where I lived.
Eventually, this led to investing in catholic education for my children – both learned spanish; one has worked in Honduras; one sang in her catholic high school choir for three years and toured churches in Canada; one sings at Loyola and the campus chapel that Jim Pauwels writes about above (Jim, the renovation was finished last summer – it is beautiful); one kid got into tutoring and did service projects for the mentally handicapped. One continues to study theology in college.
Now, on the other hand, what I have experienced since the mid-1980′s is a turn back to a former style of clericalism in many parishes; no longer a focus on the two excellent pastorals in the 1980′s but a re-focus on single issues (that mimic the cultural wars of US society). What I have experienced is no longer a church turned outwards to serve but a church that has turned inwards and focused on purely “identity” issues. This feels like a shift from what some call the “First” Spirit of Vatican II to a “Second” Spirit of Vatican II – a second spirit built on re-writing the history of VII by focusing on a few bits and pieces; by a desire to avoid change; a desire to just coast along; a parish that seems to focus on kids and catholic schools but little else. As a result, I do not see my kids looking to the church for leadership; looking to the church on moral issues; looking to the church for liturgies that make them feel at home or accepted. In fact, too often I must explain and defend this “new” church. It pains me to see that my kids do not experience the church as I did in the late 1960′s, through the 1970′s.
Mary B. This is the comment in your first post that I thought was a bit apocalyptic: “For me , the recent liturgical change from ‘for all’ to ‘for many’ was a death knell for V2.” You said nothing about the book you now refer me to.
Ann: You wrote: “You ask why there are so many complaints about the Church and so little appreciation of the Church’s improvements since Vatican II. You seem to think an explanation of the complaints can be found in a comparison of the Church pre-and post- 1963-65. You seem to think that descriptions of those times will make us see that a there are jewels as yet to be uncovered which can inspire the praises of the laity.”
This does not represent what I said, and meant. I was hoping that people would take the questions I suggested my students ask their interviewees seriously: asking about what was good and what was bad both before the Council and after. I was struck that, for both eras, people seemed to comment only on what was bad.
You continue: “But your lens is too narrow to discover the *main reason* for the complaints, a reason which has little to do with Vatican II. You lens doesn’t present that a second momentous event since 1963, the great sex scandal. You’re looking at the Church through binoculars — looking well at a narrow area and losing the wider reality.”
You presume to you know what my “lens” is…. In fact, I have been engaged in a series of posts prompted by the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II. They have addressed or described various moments since Pope John’s announcement of his intention to convoke an ecumenical council. My latest post fits within this perspective, and if it asks a question you consider narrow, it is because, pedagogically, I thought, and think, it necessary to proceed step-by-step toward an understanding of the Council. My question does not by any means preclude an assessment and evaluation of the Council itself or of the five decades that have elapsed since it began–in fact, if you will look at the questions in my interview paper, you will see that there is ample room given for evaluation. Now, it may be that people are so upset about what has happened during those five decades, and especially since the explosion of the sex-abuse scandal, that they are not interested in my questions, but I have a right to be disappointed by this reaction and to say so. I incline to the view that one of the ways of understanding where we are is to ask where we’ve been, and that explains my interest in trying to understand what happened at Vatican II and after Vatican II. I’m sorry that more people are not interested in that. It is odd that I have to repeat this: but I neither idealize nor demonize the pre-conciliar Church, but neither do I demonize or idealize the Church today.
Later you write: “In a nutshell, we are too distracted by the major problems in the Church to consider in detail whatever good has happened since VII. Concentrating on the good would help about as much as counting up the virtues of an adulterous husband while ignoring his betrayal.”
First, I didn’t suggest concentrating on the good, but simply acknowledging that there is some. Second, I think that people should be outraged by the conduct of priests and bishops in the great scandal, and I have no problem whatsoever in people’s criticizing the hierarchy or in declaring their distrust in anything the hierarchy does. But the hierarchy is not the Church–I repeat for the umpteenth time!–and any assessment of what might be done to save the Church ought to include some acknowledgment of what is alive in the Church. Do you want to ignore this? If so, why? Isn’t it better to build upon what are strengths? Or is it that you think there are no strengths, nothing to build on, nothing good in the life of the Church, even in the West? Are we starting ex nihilo?
It is easy to discuss the negative and not the positive. Nevertheless, the Church as a whole does good and this can be demonstrated in its social theology especially during the papacy of JP II. While many Catholics have left the Church, or do not participate in the Church or attend weekly Mass, many have not turned their back on Christ even if they are profoundly disappointed in how His Church is being managed.
IMO you do justice to the Spirit of the Church to remain in the Church and work for reform in a most respectful way. Disagreements about certain Church teachings should never be an excuse to turn one’s back of their relationship with Christ.
While the questions raised in Joe’s article are important, I get the impression that the problem implied by these questions is that Catholics are too focused on the negative and therefore, lose sight of the great strides of good that the Church has accomphished after Vatical II. This might unintentionally cause us to miss the bigger picture.
There is something to be said for the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit guides us to the truth and the good. However, there is truth in Spirit-guided disagreement and in obedience, in the negative and the positive. We are all called to make perfect what is imperfect. This will never happen in this life, but this does not mean we must not strive for perfection in all things and that includes our role in Church. We should celibrate both the good and never forget the contributions the Church has made in the modern era. We should also celibrate the Spirit who moves us to rectifiy what in our hearts are teachings that are given too much certitude and universality for its specific conclusions. The Catholic tradition is a living tradition and the work of Catholic theology involves on-going revision. If the spirit of truth is given to the laity, theologians and the hierarchy, as a whole, then each of us must have a role in truth.
So, our disgreements and criticisms, our negative peroccupations with some Church teachings, does not negate what we also know as God’s postive light in our lives and in His Church. What happen in Vatican II and in its aftermath has a meaning that we are still trying to understand.
Jim Pauwels: I agree, but it’s easier said than done once basic trust is no longer there. Right now, in my imagination we are like the little prince and the wild, shy fox: if the little prince makes one false move, the fox will run away and be gone for good…
Bill de Haas: Wow. Congratulations! You must be one proud parent. I am envious.
Ann: Concentrating on the good would help about as much as counting up the virtues of an adulterous husband while ignoring his betrayal. – Actually that’s one thing that therapists do with couples in trouble: ask them to take a step back from their conflict and to try to remember how they felt when they first met, and what they most like about each other. As the theory goes, it can help steer them away from being stuck in a negative rut and later, once they remember how much they used to be in love, use the goodwill thus generated to find ways to resolve their conflicts. And please, please do not say that the Church is dying in the West! Ouch!
One reason for the negativity here is probably the nature of the forum. Comments on weblogs tend to be debates, for or against the main idea of the blog entry. If the entry is a question, as it is in this case, commenters may want, out of habit or inclination, to try to turn it into a proposition they can attack or defend. To both attack and defend – offer pros and cons or, worse, only pros – may feel unnatural.
Also, the Council is for older Catholics a watermark representing good and bad – the bad or good pre-revolutionary period and the good or bad post-revolutionary period. For the “revolutionaries”, no change can go far enough and any sign of weakening is deplorable. For the “monarchists”, the revolution was wrong from the beginning. Both those things – the failing and the error – are so overwhelmingly negative that it’s hard to see any positives.
I have an aunt and uncle who are roughly Bill deHaas’ age – they were in Catholic grammar school during the Council sessions. They tell me that the Council itself was tremendously exciting for the teachers (who were religious sisters) and that, as part of their religion classes, the students in this school studied what the Council was up to and wrote reports about it. Folks were pretty conscious that something historic was taking place.
I don’t think they foresaw the deep and disruptive changes that were in the offing for the church – the sharp changes in liturgy, the exodus of religious sisters, the controversy around Humanae Vitae, the fissures within the church. My impression is that even though the Council took place in the ’60′s, it took place, in a sense, in the pre-Vatican-II era of the church – at least in the US.
JAK -
I’m sorry that you thought that I was responding to your whole view of the Church. I was actually just responding to the questions you raise in your initial post qnd the fact that you also seemed to be wondering why the laity seemed to find no good in the Church. (You say, “I was struck that, for both eras, people seemed to comment only on what was bad”.)
Of course it is a good thing to study Vatican II and the times before and after it. But my point was that centering attention on the antecedents and early aftermath of Vatican II will yield no special insight into why the laity criticizes the bishops so much. Notice: it’s not the whole Church we criticize so much, it’s the bishops, whether they’re garden variety, curial or popes, and most of our criticism has stemmed from their behavior in the sex scandal and their total lack of reform of the monarchial structure of the Church and related clericalism which enabled the scandal to happen in the first place.
And, No, the laity are not one bit responsible or the sex scandal, except those rare lay people who reap9zed what was going on and did nothing about it.
It’s true that the hierarchy is not the Church, but since they have ALL the power in it, they might as well be considered as “the Church-as-actor” in t his wold. And do notice that in common usage of the phrase does mean just that: the hierarchy. There has to be a reason for that.
It’s also true that the Church is not dead yet in the West. There is the Dallas Agreement (which three bishops refuse to sign). When push comes to shove it has no teeth. The Pope does seem to be trying to change the Curia a bit, financially anyway. The Irish are being very courageous in naming names. Some of the Far Eastern bishops also are speak up on occasion. A few lay Catholic newspapers continue to be the loyal opposition. But what else in the West indicates that things are looking up? The neo-conservative renaissance with its priests who “transubstantiate” into Christ?
What good *do* you see that encourages you? Oh, yes, the nuns, God bless them, they keep plodding along and still maintain the respect they have always been due — this IN SPITE OF the bishops who found it necessary to investigate their loyalty. Sheesh.
I quit. The whole subject is too depressing.
Claire –
Since when are the bishops in therapy? When will they EVER get the therapy they need??? Their culture is sick.
Thank you, Ann and Gerelyn, as always. You do understand.
Ann, the whole thrust of the sixties was about rejecting the authority of old men. That’s more than “special” – it’s essential, fundamental. It explains it in spades.
Ann — One of my Lent resolutions is to avoid thinking about bishops and about all the problems of church governance, just for these 40 days.
To appeal to Godwin’s law: even if I was living under the Vichy government, I could still love France and think about all the ways in which it is lovable. Even if I felt in an impasse, unable to accept the government and unable to change it, I still would not want anyone – and a fellow citizen, with that! – to state that France was dying. It’s defeatist, and it’s hurtful.
As the Philadelphia trial proceeds, I trust that we’re going to get threads on the sexual abuse scandal. We’ll have chances to look at the crimes squarely. But not everything in the church is about that. I understand the obsession, and I suppose that by staying fixated on it, you might come up with an idea of a way forward, but I am not in the same place right now. (When I see that one big reason why our new parish pastor is greeted with suspicion is that he’s been assigned by Bishop Tobin, whom everyone in my parish dislikes, I think that the obsession with bishops is going too far.) In addition, it is also possible that an idea of a way forward will come, not from spending all of our brain cycles on episcopal malfeasance, but by changing perspective. So, even for the specific purpose of fighting the roots of sexual abuse, taking a breather might turn out to be helpful!
But once again, and most importantly, don’t say that the Church in the West is dying!! Sheesh.
Ann, here is a small example of how the obsession can go too far. Usually for communion the priest has a large cup that he lifts at consecration and drinks from, plus two smaller cups for the congregation. Last Sunday “the new guy” (as we call him), instead of keeping the larger cup for himself only, shared it with the congregation (along with just one smaller cup instead of two). That detail, which, perhaps, no one else noticed, made me absurdly happy. Why? Because I saw it as a change towards decreasing the separation between presider and congregation. Without even realizing it consciously, I had been looking for signs of clericalism, expecting to see things that would point in that direction, and was surprised to see something pointing in the opposite direction! It’s not as if that particular detail had been a big concern of mine: I had never before paid any thought to who drank from what. So it was a bit strange to be so thrilled. Not quite normal. When the worry about clericalism permeates our every thought, and we see everything through that lens, then I think that the obsession has gone too far.
I think that people are attributing to VII changes that are much more attributable to larger social forces. The small German Catholic parish and school my mother attended closed by 1960. The ugly suburban monstrosity that I attended as a child was finished by 1964. My hometown had CYO all through my post VII high school years, and it probably would still be there, except that the Church never built high schools in the suburbs, so even most Catholics went to public high schools, and socialized across religious lines, which then made building a bunch of new high schools seem unnecessary. A lot of distinctive Catholic culture wasn’t grounded in liturgy, but in the existence of distinctive Catholic immigrant neighborhoods. Suburbanization changed all of it.
I do think that for many, VII probably instituted too many changes — but for many others, not enough. Still, I do believe that the VII specific changes were mostly linguistic and aesthetic. I know for my own family, my parents utterly and completely rejected HV and were notable probably only for their determination to follow their conscience and exit the building without apologizing.
Interesting ad at the top right. “All priests are invited . . . ” I wonder if there will be any lay celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Vatica II.
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Agree, Barbara, about “larger social forces”. The civil rights movement, specifically, inspired many women (including nuns) to remove themselves from situations where they were debased, infantilized, etc., etc.
Interesting ad at the top right. “All priests are invited . . . ” I wonder if there will be any lay celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Vatican II.
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Agree, Barbara, about “larger social forces”. The civil rights movement, specifically, inspired many women (including nuns) to remove themselves from situations where they were debased, infantilized, etc., etc.
And, obviously, the women’s movement made it possible for women to remove themselves from the authority of men, earn a living, etc.
(The Church, of course, continues to denounce “radical feminists”. Interesting in the past few weeks to see how eagerly men whom some women considered liberal rushed to the barricades.)
(Oops, sorry. Sent first before completing it.)
Ann: You got Carolyn right, but you sure haven’t got me right yet.
First, I do not believe that I mentioned either laity or bishops in any of my posts on this thread. It had nothing to do with clergy-laity concerns.
Second, I have never had a problem with lay people (or anyone else) criticizing bishops. The latter often deserve it.
Third, the interview-questions I proposed for my students were balanced: they asked about things people liked and things they didn’t both in the pre-conciliar period and in the post-conciliar period. I did in my post include the warning, only too well justified by many of the responses here, not to forget to mention the good things, both then and now, since for some reason we tend to overlook them or take them for granted in order to rush to what we prefer: criticism of the bad. In saying that I had in mind a moment in a priests’ study week in which a facilitator had arranged small group discussions, first, of the things that priests enjoyed about their work and ministry and, on the next night, of the things they had to complain about. She told us that many of the priests had a lot of difficulty expressing the good things about their ministry on the first night, and wanted instead to get into the complaints. “No,” she had to keep telling them, “tomorrow evening is for bitching.” Why do we do that? I asked.
I do not think that things were all rosy in the pre-conciliar Church, but some of the posts simply dismissed it as if it was all wretched. There were also questions about whether there were any things about pre-conciliar Catholicism that they missed, and I’m glad that other posts made a point of mentioning them. My questions about the post-conciliar Church also left room for comments about both the good and the bad, and some made an effort to mention both, while other posts mentioned only the bad.
Fourth, I never suggested that the laity were “one bit responsible for the sex scandal,” and I have no idea why you thought it fit to make the point.
Fifth, I could not disagree more with this statement of yours: “It’s true that the hierarchy is not the Church, but since they have ALL the power in it, they might as well be considered as ‘the Church-as-actor’ in this world.” In fact, it’s a classic petitio principii: “Acting in this world” is to be measured by what leaders of a group do; bishops are the leaders of the Church; therefore, it is bishops who are “the Church-as-actor in this world.” Your major premise is what needs to be established.
This leads, sixth, to the question whether the Church is dying or already dead in the West. I do not believe that the answer is Yes, even if measured and judged by sole reference to the clergy. Were I asked that question I would not first, and certainly not exclusively, look to what the pope or the bishops or priests or religious are doing. I would look to what believers are doing in the world, all of them, laity, religious, and clergy. There are some in whom the Church is dying or is already dead. There are others in whom it is quite alive. There are the tens of millions who have just begun to keep Lent, who are fasting and praying and doing the works of charity. There are the many, many who do that all year long. There are the believers who are devoting themselves to the promotion of justice and freedom and to the alleviation of hunger, disease, poverty, and ignorance. There are the many, many who are working for reform and renewal within the Church. There are the millions of people who were utterly appalled by what some of their priests and some of their bishops did, but who did not confuse the Church with the clergy and did not cease to believe in God and in Christ or to abandon the sacraments. There are the many, many people who are doing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. There are the teachers who are working to hand on the faith to a new generation. There are the scholars who are trying to bring from the storehouse things new and old. There are the thinkers trying to think through and think out the relationship between faith and reason. Believe it or not, there are even some women and men religious, there are even some priests, there are even some bishops, there even is a pope, who are trying to live the Gospel by their best lights.
I simply do not understand why all these people should be left out of an assessment of the life of the Church in the West today. All of these contribute to constituting “‘the Church-as-actor’ in this world,” and in them the Church is not dead.
But a little reminder: The topic of the thread was not: “The State of the Catholic Church Today.” It was, and is, part of an effort to understand and appreciate the Second Vatican Council.
Barbara’s point is well-taken, and goes along with the one made by Jeanne Follman earlier on. You can’t abstract the Council itself and its impact from larger socio-cultural, economic and political developments. Another example would be the relationship between vocations to the priesthood and religious life and the socio-economic status of Catholic families, and for women religious, the opportunities open to women.
I thought Jim P.’s coment on the aftermath detraced from the push back by the curia to VII and the continued window closing referred to by some here.
I also think prospectively that as man yVII retrospectives as we may have this year -and some may be excellent – the closing of thw indow wil continue on given the popuklation of policy makers.
As someone sadid, ‘depressing.” Really.
David S, –
I agree that among the young the 60s was about rejecting authority — everyone over 30, remember?
Why do you think they did so and so very loudly and emphatically? It was as if they had been saving up their anger since infancy.
Claire –
I agree with much you say. Constant complaint can be corrosive. But if we stop our complaints, isn’t that what the power-grabbers among the bishops *want* to happen — they want a passive, apparently content Faithul.
At this point I don’t put all of the bishops into one big bin marked “bad men”. Some seem to be trying very hard to eliminate the injury of children. But at least in the U.S. none of them seem to be working on changing the sick monarchical culture that enabled the scandal in the first place.
The basic problem seems to be in the Curia, which doesn’t take the authority of bishops and collegiality seriously. It’s time for the bishops to talk back to the Curia, and the Pope himself if necessary, and demand they be allowed to make more of thier own decisions without Roman approval. Until they stop being altar boys, as Cardinal Bernadin put it years ago, they are all guilty of maintaining the status quo. And some of them are still power-grabbers. (They’re the worst, with a special box for them marked “hypocrites”.
With all of this being the case, I just don’t think we should remain silent.
(I want you to know that I have restrained myself this week — more is happening in Philadelphia that intensifies that situation, but I didn’t even bring it up. It can wait till the trial.)
JAK –
I’m really not taking issue with what you *did* say but with what you didn’t say. You want to get a picture of a stretch of history centering around Vatican II. Fine. Had you asked the older folks in the 70s about the Church before and after the Council, you could have gotten an objective picture of their feelings and thoughts. But you have asked us about old times *after* the sex scandal has changed our view of the hierarchy so radically that I doubt you’ll get a true picture at this point of what we used to feel.
Another thing about what you don’t ask. Yes, your questions are very general, allowing for all sorts of reflections on all sorts of topics. But I note that the Garry Wills paragraph, which you seem to think would be a good stimulus to get at what you’re trying to get at, is almost exclusively about relatively trivial matters. it’s about the inessentials of our beliefs and practice, not the essentials. Having them read the Nicene Creed might have gotten them closer to what you were looking for.
I apologize if I confused the implication by somebody that the laity was also responsible for the sex scandal in parat.
As to the meaning of “the Church”, sure, we all know that the Church is the whole organization, the whole process, the whole Kingdom of God. But in ordinary language “the Church” means just the hierarchy. And that is my evidence for saying that the power of the hierarchy is THE ONLY REAL POWER OF ECCLESIAL DECISIONS MAKING. The bishops have the veto in their dioceses, and Rome has veto power over the bishops. Sure, there are clergy, religious and laity doing good works and making decisions about their ministries. But even within their ministries, there are huge exceptions — see theh nun hospital director who was excommunicated for her decision about the dying woman and child.
lUntil that old boys system is dismantled and given a better structure, “the Church” will de facto in the general culture continue to mean the hierarchy and its official decisions.
As to the Church (in your sense) dying, just look at the figures. Millions have left and are leaving. Hundreds of parishes have been closed, and the closures are continuing. After the category “Catholic”, “ex-Catholic” is now the largest sub-group of Christians in the U. S. And for all the good works of the nuns, they are not being replaced. The situation is so bad in some orders that there aren’t even enough young nuns to care for the few old ones who are left. In the schools, for a time lay people replaced the nuns and brothers and priests as teachers, but there was usually a clerical head of the school. Now lay people run many, many schools. So, yes, there are many devoted lay people in the Church. But they too are becoming fewer and fewer, and this is what I mean by saying “the Church is dying”.
How yould you define “dying Church in the West”? It’s death throes?
I don’t think that across the world the Church is dying. In Africa it is doing well, and in some of the countries of the East (e.g., China) it is doing so well that some powers-that-be are seeing fit to persecute the Christians/Catholics, and martyrdom does seem to lead to accelerated growth. But South America, that old bastion of the Faith (like those three paradigms Ireland, Poland and Spain) is fast going Protestant fundamentalist
The least we can do in the West is not put our heads in the sand about the facts here: the Church is withering on the vine.
I only recall Church things from the mid-70’s forward, but I do recall my folks and other adults discussing the results of Vatican II.
Vatican II of course was called by the Pope and its work inspired by the Holy Spirit.
One cannot however, say the same of the subsequent interpretation of Vatican II.
From what I have heard and read, sadly, in America anyway, the apparently long standing cultural split among American Catholics became glaring clear after Vatican II. Traditional Catholics fell back on their notions of obedience and since Rome authorized all of it, begrudgingly but predictably fell in line. Liberals wildy overreached and constantly claimed – as they removed statures and back altars and did a hundred other things – that everything they were doing as “per Vatican II”, which of course was not always the case.
In general, we lay people – especially us Americans – do not take as deep a view of things as the Roman curia does. We Americans are also not as patient as the Church is.
One sad result of how liberal Catholics interpreted Vatican II is how their faulty interpretation tended to allow them to maintain (for decades) a sad state of cognitive dissonance regarding things like contraception, abortion, women priests and homosexuality.
Other manifestations of the American misinterpretation of the Vatican II pertained to liturgical things less serious that the cognitive dissonance, silly but very distracting; big banners that looked like advertisements masquerading as worship aids, lame music from preening choirs who clamored their way from the balcony up to the front right next to the altar, adults prancing around the altar to the point where there was hardly room for the servers, polka masses (in SD), to the time I saw (in CA) a truly lame display of worshipful dancing my some middle aged women up and down the main isle of the church – ugh.
Pope John Paul II saw this problem and with his rejection of the gender-neutral 1998 English translation of the mass and other steps, began to set about correcting the errors made during the 1970’s and 80′s. However he was blindsided by the sex abuse scandal which (correctly) demand his attention. Now, Pope Benedict has continued to work on the proper implementation of Vatican II reforms and while emphasizing the idea of continuity and unity, has taken real steps toward the correct interpretation of the reforms of Vatican II.
The Church is not dead because God/Jessu/HolySpirit is not dead, but alive. What we have is not a crisis of faith, but a crisis of truth. I define faith as our relationship with Christ and his Gospel, not necessarily what is defined as the deposit of faith, as expanded in the post-Vatican II era. The crisis of truth is about moral norms, as moral absolutes. It is also about an top-down, isolated ecclesiology, a one dimensional authority and the conflict between the word, as in moral norms and absolutes, and pastoral practices. It is about the hierarchy taking responsiblity for error and weakness, especially in the sex abuse scandal, as well as recognizing that the Church is human, and does err.
Ann is spot on.
JAK
Ann Oliver said it much better than I. I think she may be over optimistic about Africa.
The book I referenced broke my heart.
Oops — I didn’t mean that Ireland, Spain and Poland are fast becoming Protestant fundamentals. I meant they are running frm Rome as fast as their legs can carry them. (If they were becoming Protestants no doubt some in the Curia would become extremely alarmed :-)
What’s the old French joke? Pierre meets jean. Jean is dejected. Pierre asks why. Jean says “I have lost my faith”. Pierre exclaims, “You have become Protestant?” “Of course not,” says Jean, “I said I have lost my faith, not my rreason”.
That was the stereotype we had of Protestants before V2.
Anne: Ok. Let’s not argue. We can resume the discussion when there is a thread about one of the problems of church governance. Peace!
Ken: I see that you took to heart Fr K.’s pleading for us to be less negative. Way to go!
Bob: If I remember correctly, you’re old enough to have know the times before Vatican II. Don’t you have some anecdotes to tell us about what it was like to be Catholic right before Vatican II and whether it made a difference? I didn’t know the good or bad old days, and I personally find those stories quite interesting, especially the little details.
A brief summary of the pros and cons of the pre-V2 church:
Pro – it was comfortable: it always was, always will be and always remains the same.
Con – it was delusional: it always was, always will be and always remains the same.
Of course, that was supposed to refer to God, but, you know —-
Charlie Curran said it best when he described the difference between Catholic social teachings and sexual teachings. This is a good example of the difference between the pre and post Vatical II church.
Conservative Catholics often agree with papal sexual teaching but have difficulty with the social teaching. Many liberal Catholics have the opposite reaction. Catholic social teaching changed quite a bit over the course of the 20th century, whereas there has been little or no change in official Catholic sexual teaching. The changes in Catholic social teaching involved a change in methodology as well as in content. This stands in contrast to hierarchical sexual teaching, where the metholodogy has not changed.
Interestingly, Catholic social teaching that evolved in the 20th century was a shift to historical consciousness, to the person, and to the relationality-responsibility ethical model. Sexual teaching still employes a classicist rather than an historical consciousness method,, emphases nature and natural facilities rather than the person, and follows a deontological or legal-moral rather than a relationality-responsibility model.
The dicotomy is a fundamental problem because Catholic social teaching gives rise to guidelines for social moral behavior; while sexual teaching gives rise to moral absolutes that are universal and immutable, without remainder.
The problem of governance is that it has not changed either and neither corrects or acknowledges a contradiction and inconsistancy between sexual teaching and pastoral practice. Where is the moral truth under these circumstances where many Church teachings, taught for centuries, were eventually reformed?
Because I was quite young when Vatican II took place (I recall learning the Latin responses to the Mass as a precocious first grader and not needing them anymore by the time of my first communion in grade two) I remember the world before the Council, the world of my parents and grandparents, by their stories and material culture.
I have a small, stamped metal, stations of the cross inside a leather cover that belonged to my maternal grandmother, and I remember in her house there hung a large picture of the Sacred Heart on one wall, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the other. There were holy water stoops in my grandmother’s house. I loved all these things. She and my grandfather were immigrants; the Church was not something apart from them, it was their life. They had the calendar of the saints memorized. My grandmother never put a loaf of bread in the oven to bake without first making the sign of the cross over it. I envy them the way in which devotion saturated their lives, and the way in which divine order was brought into everyday life from the realm of the sacred.
We still have a sense of sacred order today, my family and I, although the devotional palate has changed. The church year, the unfolding of time through the liturgy, is still our constant companion. But it is more “chosen” in the way that all personal life is bound up with private choice in today’s world. We have many options now — it is a blessing, but also it makes for uncertainty. Vatican II has given us new reasons to love the seasons of the Church year, the flow of time, the grace-filled prayer of the people of God. If it is harder, it is because so much of it one has to do, and think through, for one’s self. Yet Catholicism after Vatican II, for me, has been a rich experience of community. The realization that together we are so much greater than we are alone, the corporate sense of the celebration of the liturgy–these are incomparable treasures.
Positive comment alert:
The Council period and early aftermath was the most exciting time ever for me in the Church. The opening up and moving ahead with reform, the liturgy changes, Pope John the lovable, the possibility of changes in birth control prohibitions, those were the days when my heart burned.
I was the first woman to be a lector at mass in my parish, served on the pastoral council, taught religious ed, became involved in Re-membering Church to reach out to those hurt by the church, volunteered at Birthright, and in a program that brought unwed mothers to live with us during their pregnancies. Our pastor led renewal programs; active participation was widespread and meaningful.
Sounds small, but actually having a pastor survey parishioners as to our choices for mass times, an unheard of consultation in my circles, signaled a new day of actually being someone other than to whom orders were issued. Can you believe another survey actually asked if there should be changes in obligatory holy days?
No more need to rush to confession for fear of going to hell for some nothing reason. The sense of release was marked. One could breathe for a change. Adult ed courses even left behind literal interpretations of all things scriptural. Later, my daughters became altar servers, and loved participating.
Backlash begins:
The adult ed classes resulted in complaints of heresy to the chancery. I organized a letter and petition with numerous signatures to defend the good sisters. To little avail, it turned out.
Conservatives wrote another complaint to the chancery, charging violations of this, that and the other about girl servers. All girls were removed, and mine left in tears, knowing it was because of their gender.
The auxiliary bishop’s letter of response quoting church sources was my first personal taste of Vaticanese. Everyone who read it understood the altar girls had to stop serving, per his order, including the priest who started the program. Another parent told me some time afterwards that the bishop denied removing the girls; all he did was simply quote church documents about acolytes.
One apparently had to parse the text very, very carefully, to discern that literally, no, he did not banish altar girls, despite the whole thrust of the quotes implying that. Not surprising then that the NH AG decades later was ready to charge the Diocese with perjury because of this bishop’s statements under oath about his handling of abuse complaints for 19 years.
At daily mass, most of us were women (not that I was a regular attendee). One morning, another pastor asked for men to be available to serve at funeral masses. Women did not qualify.
Lastly, the sexual abuse crisis is a travesty of complicit bishops lying, endangering children, covering up crimes, and getting away with repulsive dissembling about their culpability. Truthful communication is beyond their competence. Predators have their own sick traumas; such bishops have no excuses for being risk managers first, instead of shepherds.
Why stay?
The Eucharist, God’s grace, private prayer and reading, DNA, a lifetime’s impact of participation, a niche of like-minded friends, and maybe cussedness. Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
As the windows close, the witness of the few V II priests still hanging in there is a saving grace for me. They too see the reality, but are not going to let “those turkeys” ruin their chances for joy.
The Long Goodbye by Prof. Kaveny describes the landscape well.
It might be worth noting that there are several things in the church today that have grown from Vatican II that are positive developments – that are instances of the window not only being opened, but perhaps being opened wider.
One that is near and dear to my heart is liturgical music. Looking back on the state of parish liturgical music in 1975, vs. how it is now, can only lead to the conclusion that it’s *way* better now. It seems to me that musicians – both composers and parish-based music ministers – understand the ritual and its demands much better now. Also, there has been an uplift in professional competency on the part of music directors and other musical leaders, such as cantors and instrumentalists. And the people themselves understand to a greater extent that they are supposed to sing the liturgy. FWIW – my personal experience is that the implementation of the 3rd edition of the Roman Missal, which was pretty smooth in our parish, would have been a lot rockier if we hadn’t been taught to *sing* the new prayers.
Although I have no recollection of pre-Vatican-II preaching, I think it’s commonly acknowledged that the quality of preaching driven by the New Homiletics has also been a success.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the recovery of the stable, permanent diaconate. Amid the decline in the number of priests and the seeming disappearance of religious sisters from parish life, the diaconate in the US has been a major, and arguably unlooked-for, success story. There are something like 15,000 permanent deacons in the US, helping the poor, assisting at liturgy, baptizing, burying, and doing an almost endless list of ministries, some of which frees up priests and religious sisters to focus on other things, and some of which fills previously-unaddressed pastoral needs.
Thanks to Bill de Haas, Rita Ferrone, Carolyn Disco, and Jim Pauwels for their latest comments. I want to pick up on something that Rita said when she spoke of the need today for families to work out for themselves how to celebrate and live the seasons of the Christian year. The kinds of things Rita remembers from her grandmother’s house, as well as the ones which Garry Wills tried to evoke, were tokens of a common culture (or sub-culture) that many people drank in with their mother’s milk. None of them was essential, of course, but they embodied something held and lived in common. (Think of the Lenten regulations on fast and abstinence.)
A sociology colleague at Catholic University was on research-leave at Princeton when the news hit the papers that Catholics would no longer be obliged to abstain from meat on Fridays. A Jewish sociologist there said that this was the most significant change the Catholic Church had made, and that it would have a tremendous impact on Catholic consciousness. My colleague scoffed at the idea: theologically and canonically, it was a simple matter of “discipline” and involved no doctrinal change. Later he was to admit that something that from a canonical standpoint was a mere “reform” might have revolutionary consequences psychologically and sociologically. I remember a Catholic layman, not at all conservative, saying to me at the time: If that can change, what can’t?
A young professor of theology I know is, with his wife, trying to create a “thick” Catholic culture in their home: prayers before meals; keeping saints’ days and the liturgical seasons; hymns before night-prayers; etc. Their effort is harder, as Rita remarked, “because so much of it one has to do, and think through, for one’s self.” Fortunately, they know of other families that are trying to do something similar, and so they have the assistance of community, too.
Soon after the Council, there was a debate in Germany about the value of Volkskatholizismus, which might be translated as “popular Catholicism,” and was often dismissed as inferior to a Catholicism that was chosen against cultural or subcultural norms. I found that attitude oddly Kantian.
When Emile Poulat said that the Catholic Church changed more in the ten years after Vatican II than it had in the previous hundred years, I think he was pointing to the near collapse of that common Catholic subculture. Much of my original historical work on the Council was an effort to understand why that happened, especially since I don’t think the popes and bishops of the Council expected or desired it to happen. So I sought to figure out how and why the social form of modern Catholicism developed as it did, what its major structural and cultural elements were, and then what the Council might have done that, apart from all intentions, had as its consequence the weakening or even disappearance of that social form.
In 1982 or 1984, a congress was held in Rome on the theology of the Holy Spirit. Yves Congar gave one of his last major talks at it. Congar and his Dominican colleague, Marie-Dominique Chenu, were not only great historians and fine theologians, but also active participants in the many movements of theological and pastoral reform that were going on in France and elsewhere in the 1930′s and especially in the second half of the 1940′s, of which Congar remarked: “Anyone who did not live through the years 1946 and 1947 in the history of French Catholicism has missed one of the finest moments in the life of the Church.” At the Roman Congress, held twenty years after the Council, Congar’s voice cracked as he said how difficult it had been to see so many of the initiatives, movements, institutions that he believed were inspired by the Holy Spirit wither away. But he had the faith and courage to add, voice once again thick with emotion, that it was wonderful to see other initiatives, movements, institutions arising in the years after Vatican II, and he used a metaphor I’ve never forgotten: of the Holy Spirit as an aquifer, the steady enduring source of the springs of new life that bubble up from below, here and there and there, too, in the life of the Church.
Pope John XXIII began his opening address to the assembled bishops by declaring his disagreement with the “prophets of doom” who considered the modern world one great apostasy from the Christian faith and life, described so gloomily that one might fear that the end of the world was near. Later in the talk he mentioned something he often insisted on: that Christ had not abandoned the Church for which he died, but remained present and powerful in it through his Holy Spirit. This is sometimes dismissed as Pope John’s “naive optimism,” but I do not think it should be scorned as simply his personal attitude, but should be recognized as a profound Christian faith and hope.
I think a big difference between pre VII and post has to do with both liturgy and women.
Pre VII, women were merely servile, and now they have some roles in worship including serving, eucharistic ministry and lectors.
But as Cathy pointed out on the daily show, still big questions today on the status of women -which don’t seem to be going anywhere/
In fact, I just read John Allen’s post on three”myths” all of which I not only disagree with but think it’s pretendin gwe don’yt have real problems to face.
That’s an aftermath of VII to be looked at closely.
“ …revolutionary consequences psychologically and sociologically … If that can change, what can’t?” Indeed. That to my mind is the crux of it.
I grew up in a world created by a rules-based authority. The rules shaped our interaction with Catholicism. The Baltimore Catechism explained it like this: “The Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses. Our Lord handed on these commandments to His Church and gave it power to make new laws as time went on.” It was all of a piece. We did what God wanted by paying attention to the laws that the Church set down. So when the rules changed, all bets were off. That straight line from God through which we received the rules of faith was starting to look a bit sketchy; we began to see the Church as a creature of history and of bureaucracy, which could develop and change over time as a result of human action.
Changing the rules also made us feel a little stupid for following them in the first place. All that fish on Friday and fasting from midnight before Communion, for what? It also inclined us to make sure we weren’t diddled again. When considering Church prohibitions, we calculated the odds of the Church changing its mind in the future. If a prohibition might change later, why abide by it now? If a rule could change, we assumed that it might change and eventually would, even though it hadn’t.
Trust collapsed so authority collapsed. We were on our own to figure stuff out, with mixed results. That, to me, is the biggest story: the collapse of trust in the institution to define sin and therefore to define everything else, leaving the faithful on our own.
Please save this article with all of its comments in a safe place. It is a many faceted and variegated snapshot of our church at this point in time.
I’m sorry but the integrist position is not a good or healthy position. The rhetorical question “If that can change, what can’t?” is very much the fruit of a false consciousness set up by an inadequate religious education and, in a broad sense, the failure to grapple with history long after the rest of the world was coming to terms with it.
The sort of religious education which puts everything on a par with everything else is downright pernicious. In that mode, if you remove or question anything you destroy the “trust” to which Jeanne refers. But this is insane. Things do change. And for good and sufficient reasons, we have to cope with change in the religious realm as we do everywhere else. In fact, not everybody felt lost or betrayed by the relaxation of the fasting and abstinance rules. For many people (I count my parents among them) this change was a validation of charity and common sense, despite the fact that they kept the rules. Good and holy people were not going to go to hell if they ate meat on Friday.
If people really did count eating meat on Friday as an event that would send a person to hell as much as murder would — and this was how it played at the grassroots — it’s wrong, it’s a terrible distortion. To put it in the strongest terms: This is unworthy of the gospel of Christ, who upbraided the Pharisees for holding to the letter of the law but losing sight of its spirit, and who said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. If this kind of distortion — the pain of hell threatened for minor infractions — is what is needed to maintain a thick sub-culture, then we’ve bought our subculture too dearly. And I say this appreciating full well the gift and benefit of a strong religious identity and shared praxis.
But then, I feel I’ve had a strong religious identity and praxis without those “markers” of the immediate pre-conciliar period. I believe that a new culture is in the making (if we don’t kill each other before then) but it will, very reasonably, take a few generations to jell. I see signs of it emerging around me every day.
Joseph, above you said:
“Much of my original historical work on the Council was an effort to understand why that happened [the near collapse of that common Catholic subculture], especially since I don’t think the popes and bishops of the Council expected or desired it to happen. So I sought to figure out how and why the social form of modern Catholicism developed as it did, what its major structural and cultural elements were, and then what the Council might have done that, apart from all intentions, had as its consequence the weakening or even disappearance of that social form.”
What a fascinating subject for investigation. Where have you published the results of your work on these questions? I would find it very interesting to learn what you discovered and the conclusions you drew, but I realize this goes well beyond a blog discussion.
JAK:
Here arfe some signifcant changes in the Post Vatican II Church, worth further reflection.
1. The Make up of Theologians: In the pre-Vatican II Church, theologians were mostly clergy, male and educated based on the moral manuals that did not change since the 1500s. In the post-Vatican II Church, theologians are mostly non-clergy, many are female, and educated in post Vatican II moral theology, emphasizing many different moral methods as well as Church teachings. This change is significant and it represented a different perspective an argumentation. The Church was not ready for and form of challenge; not from a philosophical and theological perspective, not from clergy and bishops, and not from the laity. In the pre-Vatican II Church the issues were different. They touch the lives of both men and women more directly and deeply: contraception, abortion, in vitro fertililzation, the role of women in the Church, people with same-sex attraction, seropostive couples, the list goes on.
2. Another issue in the post Vatical II Church is the degree of suffering, moral dilemma, and conflict of conscious that characterize many people today. Such complexity and tension existed in the pre Vatican II Church, but not anywhere with the reach and depth of modern times. In the pre-Vatican II Church of the 1800s, the issues were Papal Infallibility, Slavery, and Social Issues. By 1930, the issue was birth control and Casti Cannubii, even though periodic continence (PC), the deliberate limiting of sexual intercourse to infertile times, was not permitted until 1951 (Pius XII’s Address to the Mid Wives). The result was large families but after WW II this became an issue. PC did not work. Then came the pill, then HV, which was not received.
What was significantly different in the post Vatican II Church were the answers to complex cases that impacted many, many Catholics. Imposed celibacy for seropositive married couples, and for married women whose lives are threathened by another pregnancy (risky PC is not prudent as a means to safeguard one’s life), was viewed by most theologians and the laity, and many bishops, as unreasonable and stoic insensibility. To most, these Church teachings endanger marriage, deminish Church authority, and in some cases are in tension with the hierarchy of values. The insistance on faith and the teachings of the magisterium as the absolute moral truth was under siege. This did not exist in the pre Vatican II Church.
3. Finally, another signifcant issue in the post-Vatican II Church was teaching about the divorced and remarried. One notable priest and theologian once said if he had to pick one issue that the post Vatican II Church should adequately address is to the answer to divorced and remarried Catholics. Today, the divorce rate of Catholic are not significantly different from the general population, 50%. These Catholics are standing on the outside of the Church looking in and hoping to be called to celibrate and receive the Eucharist. What is salvation without the Eucharist? This was not a significant issue in the pre-Vatical II Church.
Rita: The chief result of my research was an essay, which you can find here: http://jakomonchak.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/jak-modernity-rcism.pdf
IMO the biggest change in the Church in the last century came at its very beginning: Pius X pushed for children to receive the Eucharist at a younger age. This dissociated the Eucharist from the more intellectualized catechetics and instead made the family the central focus of first communion.
Sixty years later a group of men, mostly over 60, met at the Vatican Council and institutionalized the change in perspective. Lumen Gentium defined a fully incorporated Catholic as one who accepts all the rules etc., but “He is not saved, however, who, though part of the body of the Church, does not persevere in charity. He remains indeed in the bosom of the Church, but, as it were, only in a “bodily” manner and not “in his heart.”" The childhood acceptance of the loving Eucharistic family found its way into the definition of who is Catholic, the old rules and heresy based understanding withered. ‘Communio’ became the chief concept for understanding the Council.
We are stil grappling with the implications of this. Thankfully we are not trying to implement other proposals from Pius X, like hour long adult catechesis by the priest after the sermon. The early first communion was received by the Church as a blessing and it has made us stronger in ways Pius never imagined.
Thank you to Jeanne, whose thoughtful comments above helped me better understand this.
The two principles that guided the renewal of the Second Vatican Council was ressourcemt and aggiornamento. Ressourcement called for a return to the sources of scripture and tradition, whereas aggiornamento called for bringing the church up to date. The tension between these two principles became more evident ove time. Adherents of both principles rejected neoscholastic theology of the old manuals. The ressourcement group was made up of mostly patristic scholars; the aggriornamento camp relied on theological Thomism.
What did change? Vatical II departed from past practices in implicitly recognizing a pluralist approach to theology. Interestingly, JP II insisted that Catholic theology does not endorse one particular philosophical or theological method, even while in practice he often accepted only the neoscholastic method.
I have done much research and wrote a jointly authored essay with a prominent theologian, that demonstrates that Humanae Vitae was the philosophy and theology of one person, and the conclusion of a 2nd birth control commission in Krakow limited to Polish clergy and theologians (lead by one person), namely Karol Wojtyla. The impact of this conclusion is that Paul VI not only rejected the 75% majority opinion of a 72 member birth control commission, representing a cross-section of world-wide clergy, theologians, et al, but that he embraced the philosophy and theology of one person and one-country commission in Krakow. The inseparability principle found in HV, that changed sexual ethics for the next 44 years, was taken word-for-word from Wojtyla’s 1960 book, Love and Responsibility, as well as his Krakow Memorandum sent to Paul VI five months before HV was issued. Unfortunately, no bishop or theologian has every written anything, or proposed as a teaching, an inseparability principle. It was a novel assertion that is not found in revelation, so how could it be Divine Law as HV has proclaimed? It was based on symbolism and theological speculation. However, symbolism is a weak moral theory because no on knows God’s procreative plan.
It was these events that profoundly characterized the post Vaican II Church and caused a Crisis of Truth and a sharp division with the Catholic Church, like no other pre-era. You may call this another negative focus, but if you ask the question “What are the differences, the changes between the pre and post Vatican II Churches?”, then you must accept many facts that are, unfortunately, negative. This does not mean that there were no positive contributions, but the positive contributions did not make a profound impact on the lives of all Catholics as did the negative factors. The positive contributions did not cause a crisis of truth that rocks our Church to this very day. Fortunately, most Catholics have not turned their backss on the Catholic “faith and their relationship with Christ”. They simply lost confidence in His Church’s authority and structure, at least for the present time.
Amen, Michael Barberi. (Fascinating that even the NFP approach was not sanctioned until 1951. As Patty Crowley quipped, God is unlikely to have consigned to hell all who practiced any approach before a pope approved of it.)
Seeing bald power considerations override the merits of an issue like marital intercourse, so intimate a part of people’s lives, reinforces what Jeanne F. noted about not being diddled with again. I was gullible and stupid to swallow the hierarchy’s distortions before, but no longer.
Thank you for even more detailed background, Michael B. In addition, here is a sharp letter in the Tablet from a neurologist who was on the original BC commission about political power over substance: http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2008/08/humanae-vitae-r.html
And one is asked to trust?
Let me also thank Rita F. for noting that the markers of the old subculture no longer persuade, and were bought at too dear a price. Yes, a new culture is emerging, thank God, that requires a more active focus by the laity, far above passive obedience, or the Opus Dei or similar models. It’s evolving, hopefully from that aquifer Congar and JAK mentioned.
Is it possible the Holy Spirit’s hand is in the priest shortage in the West? One can hardly speak for the Divine, yet my heart welcomes the opportunities such a diminution of clerical, centralized power represent. The prospects of a new paradigm are so, so hopeful.
Carolyn: Thank you for your kind comments.
JAK: I quickly read you essay and largely agree with you. In the period 1815-1914, there was many things that impacted Roman Catholicism. If I may have some license, this period saw great conflict: political disruptions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wera, Italy’s Unification in 1870 and the dissolution of the Papal States, Darwin’s Theory, the Aboluton of Slavery in the U.S. (leading to a change in Church and Papal teachings), American Social Theories…..all of these threaten the authority and power of the Church….it was the secular world versus the Spiritual World (as in Church), God versus Satan. The Church withdrew into itself while ensuring that their authority was secure (the Syllabus of Errors, the Infallibility of the Pope, the Growth of Marian piety and Devotion, etc.
When in battle, consolidate your forces! That is exactly why the Church consolditated more power in the papacy and Rome. Synods of Bishops were greatly reduced in significance, and a Canon Law was instituted as a universal obligatory code and a return to Thomism. The Church condemned the idea that Church structures and dogmas could develop! It was universal, unchanging and immutable. This so-calle offical Church world view, unfortunately, continued after Vatican II, despite the council’s call to a broader, deeper view of the importance of history, the person and his/her relationships, etc.
The essay suggested that the Church, nevertheless, was changing in many ways during this era, but I failed to grasp the significance of the mentioned changes to what most people considered an anti-modern Roman Catholicism that was indeed, as you asserted, very modern. I concluded that cultural conflict existed in the pre and post Vatican II Churches. What was not mentioned was the degree of profound divisiveness in our Church before and after Vatican II. IMO, this divisiveness, causes et al, shines a brighter light on the positive and negative changes that ocurred. Unfortunately, what we now have is a clash of interpretations of the meaning of Vatican II, namely those of JP II and now Benedict XVI, and most theologians, many bishops and of course, the laity. The result is ambiguity especially for the laity and when one poses the question “What was the meaning of Vatican II?”, you get a big Ho-Hum from most Catholics. That is the tragedy.
I just puchased “Vatican II, The Battle for Meaning” by Massimo Faggioli. It is my philosophy that to understand an issue, you must study and be knowledgable about the scholarly work of theologians on both ends of theological spectrum.