A brief story from Vatican Radio notes that a meeting of Catholics and Orthodox will take place this week in Istanbul to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the so-called Edict of Milan in which the emperors Constantine and Licinius ordered that all citizens be permitted to worship God as they saw fit. The instruction freed Christianity from the threat and reality of persecution and ordered that confiscated Christian buildings be restored. A translation is provided below. It will be noted that the toleration is granted to all religions. It does not represent an establishment of Christianity, which would come later in the century with the edict of Theodosius I, also given below.

Constantine himself, however, certainly favored the Church with his patronage; and before the year 313 was over, he would be asked by Donatist bishops in northern Africa to intervene in their disputes with Catholic bishops, and he showed no reluctance to include arbitrating such disputes among his imperial duties and rights. A fatal entanglement ensued. Read the rest of this entry »

During the period of preparations for the Council (November 1960 – Summer 1962), ten commissions drafted texts for the bishops to consider. When finished, they were brought before the Central Commission [CPC], a body that was supposed to have certain supervisory functions and in particular to review the prepared texts, propose amendments to them, and decide whether to recommend to Pope John XXIII that they be placed on the conciliar agenda. That they came to the CPC simply as they were completed, in no particular order, reinforced the impression that no unifying purpose had guided the preparation of the Council. Because most of them were practical and flew very close to the ground, the criticism began to be heard that if these texts were representative of what the Council would do and say, it would greatly disappoint expectations. As for the doctrinal texts prepared by the Theological Commission, they provoked rather lively discussions in the CPC that anticipated the debates of the first session of the Council in 1962. All in all, many people began to ask Hans Küng’s question: “Can the Council Fail?” (His article with that title was translated and published in, 12 (1962) 269-76; if you make use of Questia, it can be found here.)

Here are pages taken from my chapter in volume I of the History of Vatican II, on the last stages in determining the conciliar agenda and on spreading apprehension about what it might accomplish or fail to accomplish. Cardinal Suenen’s plan for the Council, drawn up at the direction of Pope John can be found here, and here is the radio address that Pope John gave exactly a month before the Council was to open, a text in which the influence of Suenens’s proposal seems evident.

From the Editors:

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s recent censure of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious for “serious doctrinal problems” raises a number of familiar, if troubling, questions. The LCWR, which represents most American nuns, exists to provide support for the work sisters do for the poor, the imprisoned, the ill, and the marginalized, and to give the various religious communities a corporate voice. As part of the CDF’s action, the LCWR will be put into a kind of receivership under Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain—essentially suppressing what little autonomy the group has had. Its statutes will be rewritten and speakers for LCWR meetings will now be vetted. The sisters were specifically reprimanded for speaking out in opposition to positions taken by the U.S. bishops but also for keeping “silent” about church teachings on ordination and same-sex marriage. Is silence now considered a form of dissent? Are women religious not even allowed to determine the priorities of their own ministries?

Read the whole thing here.

While going through my library in order to decide which books to keep when I move back to New York, I cam across American Catholic Exodus, edited by John O’Connor (Washington: Corpus Books, 1968). Eleven chapters, written by Catholic “progressives” (the one exception, the Protestant Robert McAfee Brown) describe what the editor calls “a gigantic walkaway” of people who are not so much leaving the Church as “taking the Church with them. They feel they are the Church. What they are leaving behind, for the most part, are old forms, old structures, some old ideas and prejudices and postures, and, sad to say, some old men in moldy mitres…. Rather than being certain that they had God cornered in a tabernacle, guarded by canon lawyers and the flashing blades of those plumed samurai, the Knights of Columbus, they set out in search of him…. The result has been a breakthrough into a new and unknown land.”

A place-marker brought me to William Birmingham’s description of this land’s new style of liturgy. It’s worth reading as a reminder of the chaos that in more than one place erupted after the Council (this is within a couple of years of its close!, and before the promulgation of the New Order) and that made more than one person cling to the traditional rite of Mass.

Experimental liturgies….are meeting a need that is deeply felt; to give thanks in community. At one such liturgy in which I took part, the priest was twenty-eight. The liturgy of the Word had been prepared by a boy and girl of sixteen and seventeen. The opening was unfortunate: a Donovan song which could not be understood because the record player was momentarily broken. The readings which followed were taken from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Heinrich Hesse’s Damien, Ezra Pound’s ‘The Ballad of the Goodly Fere’, and the first epistle of John. It closed with the playing of “Suzanne’ sung by Judy Collins. The eucharistic prayer, composed for the occasion, though not by the teenagers, reflected the content of the readings. It was read seriatim by those present. The priest recited the narrative of institution and all together said the words of institution over the loaf of Italian bread and common wine. Following communion the celebration dissolved slowly into conversation among the thirty or so people who had taken part.

This kind of liturgy is not rare among the new generation. Ones like it can be found on many college campuses. I see the problems involved, of course. But I also see among the best of these young people an insistence on valid religious experience that has for a long time been rare in the Roman Church. And this is a sign of hope, of very great hope indeed.