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Last fall, the Archdiocese of Boston released an ambitious plan designed to stem the decline it has experienced—in priests, Mass attendance, and treasure—since the 2002 wave of sexual-abuse scandals.
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Beginning in Advent of this year, the language of the Mass will be very different. A new translation of the Roman Missal—the book of prayers used in the Mass—will be put into use in all Catholic churches in the English-speaking world. Some who have...
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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who’s guarding the guards? It’s a question that exasperated members of a credibility-challenged organization have long asked about their leaders. How can we trust that the people who got us into a bad situation can get...
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Stanley Hauerwas is the most immediately likable bombthrower I have ever met. I first encountered him and his essays during that part of the 1970s I spent in the newly hatched field of bioethics.
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Late in her life, the Vermont historian Abby Maria Hemenway recalled that, while she was a young girl in the early 1840s, she had a vision of Our Lady in a field behind her house in Ludlow. Not a common occurrence for a Yankee Baptist girl, you...
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Is religious conscience special? And what kinds of claims (if any) does conscience warrant? These are two of the many questions Brian Leiter raises in his provocative book Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, $24.95, 192 pp.).
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Forty years ago this month, the Second Vatican Council concluded its work in Rome. The first document it promulgated was the constitution on the liturgy. It was a trailblazer for what followed, harbinger of a new era for the church.
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With so many scientists, beekeepers, and agricultural stakeholders in a lather over “colony collapse disorder”—the mysterious phenomenon that is causing the disappearance of millions of honeybees around the world-everyone should welcome some good...
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In winning election as Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio defied the papal pundits, even though they should have seen him coming. His rise marks the decisive shift within Roman Catholicism toward Latin America and the developing world. In...
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On October 11, 1963, Bishop Luigi Bettazzi addressed the Second Vatican Council on the need for collegiality. He was the newest bishop participant, having been consecrated only a week before, and, at thirty-nine, he was also one of the youngest.
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I went to a Catholic school where everyone went to daily Mass.
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It was a Mass celebrating a major anniversary of the parish and I was right in the middle of the homily. It was also one of those exquisite moments when the message and the congregation connected to such a degree that you could hear a pin drop. I...
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1963: Vatican II allowed the use of “the mother tongue” in the liturgy, entrusting bishops conferences with overseeing translations, which Rome would then approve. Bishops conferences throughout the English-speaking world established the...
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"By way of promoting active participation, the people should be encouraged to take part by means of acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons, and songs, as well as by actions, gestures, and bodily attitudes.
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The election of Joseph Ratzinger as pope has evoked reactions of both satisfaction and of dismay. For some, the dismay was quickly reinforced by news of the removal of Fr. Thomas Reese as editor of America magazine.
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Complaining about the liturgy is a favorite—and probably healthy—pastime of Catholics, lay and clerical alike. Few dispute the fact that the liturgical reforms of Vatican II have been implemented with mixed results. There is a widespread sense that...
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I think by now it's safe to say that altar girls are a positive part of Catholic life. Young women who serve the priest at Mass benefit from taking an active role in the liturgy, and the parish benefits from their service. There's nothing...
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Much is being made of rumors that the Vatican will soon issue a decree mandating that the priest celebrate the Mass ad orientem (“toward the East” and, presumably, with his back to the people). I would like to support that, but only if we take the...
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While I took Lent and Easter more seriously than ever this year—in terms of prayer, Scriptural reading, reflection, and discipline—I didn’t go to Mass. In fact, I haven’t been since Christmas.
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I bought my first rosary in 1960. It was plastic and pink, and it cost a dime. Our Catholic school had mandated that all first-graders purchase a rosary from the principal’s office on a certain day. But when that day came, only three of us arrived...
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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This article originally appeared in the February 26, 1965, issue of Commonweal.
It is difficult to write about something in flux as if it were something fixed; probably by the time this essay appears my view of what mattered in the past—even of...
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I’m tired of being nice about it, tired of being politically correct when this issue comes up. So I’ll be blunt. Someone just left my parish to join one that has an altar on wheels, and I’m angry about it.
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In the fall of 1965, I worked in the final session of the Second Vatican Council. A young priest and doctoral candidate, I was tasked with distributing documents and collecting votes and amendments from my assigned section of bishops.
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Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Mary Lou Williams, the jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. There are few women in the pantheon of great jazz instrumentalists, and even fewer jazz performers in the pantheon of great...
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History & Mystery: John C. Cavadini reviews the second volume of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth
Ratzinger at Vatican II, by John Wilkins
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Bernard P. Prusak, Joseph A. Komonchak, Peter Jeffery, Rita Ferrone
With the release of the document Summorum pontificum in July 2007, Pope Benedict XVI extended permission for the old Tridentine Mass to be celebrated as "an extraordinary form of the Roman rite." Commonweal asked four writers to respond to the pope'...
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Catholics have been arguing about the Second Vatican Council—about what it did and didn’t do, about what it meant and still means or what it never meant and could never mean—for half a century.
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St. Pius X, in his encyclical Vehementer (1902), wrote: “By its very nature the church is a society of unequals; it is composed of two categories of persons: the pastors and the flocks.
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This year marks the fifth anniversary of a Vatican document about which most Catholics know very little, Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. It was signed on July 20, 2001, but...
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Pope Benedict XVI has put ecumenism high on his agenda. Right from the start of his papacy, he has reached out to other churches and stressed the unity of all Christians. Yet despite good intentions, fault lines in his approach are beginning to show...
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Controversy need not be a symptom of institutional weakness, decay, or even disunity; it is often a sign of intellectual vitality and passionate attachment. Much depends on how the parties involved in any dispute conduct themselves. Are they willing...
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I have been celebrating the Eucharist in German since moving to Münster from Louvain, Belgium, in December 2006. I came to improve my German and to do research for my New Testament studies.
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I am a child of Vatican II. Without it, I doubt I would be a Catholic today. Brought up as an Anglican, I would surely never have found my way into the church that in a special way stands in the tradition of St. Peter and St. Paul. To me, knowing...
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The late Methodist liturgical scholar James White once said: “Why teach ecumenism when you can teach liturgy?” White knew whereof he spoke, having taught for decades at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, and then at the...
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Whenever I read an article that advocates refusing the Eucharist to people whose public politics conflict with church teachings, it worries me. I find I have a lot of questions. Why, for instance, does the controversy seem to center only on one hot-...
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Pope Benedict’s Summorum pontificum and its accompanying “Letter to the Bishops,” issued last month, will theoretically make the so-cal
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One is tempted to begin, Parturiebant montes, so great were the fears on one side and the expectations on the other concerning Pope Benedict’s long-awaited motu proprio on the Tridentine Mass.
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Che Guevara once wrote that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. For some—especially those over fifty—that remark will call up the illusions of the 1960s, when many a callow undergraduate succumbed to the charms of revolution...
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This year, thanks to the adoption of the new translation of the Roman Missal, the First Sunday of Advent is looming like a date with a root canal. As I mentioned in my recent lament on this topic (“Up against the Wall,” July 15), the new missal is...
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Anyone who followed media coverage of the papal conclave that elected the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, couldn’t help noticing that the same breathless questions were raised again and again by commentators assessing the future...
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Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum pontificum, issued motu proprio (as an executive order), universally permits celebrating the sacrifice of the Mass according to the Roman liturgy that was in existence prior to the reform of 1970.
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The last four popes all participated in the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) either as bishop or peritus (theological adviser), and it is clear that their legacies will be distinctively tied to that epochal event.
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Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum pontificum gives broad permission for the celebration of the Tridentine Mass. The motu proprio also permits use of preconciliar liturgical rites for all the sacraments, with the exception of ordination.
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A couple of years ago I received two requests. The first: to preside at a Latin novus ordo Mass, the post–Vatican II rite in Latin. The second: to say a funeral Mass from the Missale Romanum of 1570.
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Even by modern standards, 2008 was a cacophonous year. The high-stakes presidential election brought constant and clamorous media coverage, and anxiety over the mounting economic crisis dominated national and global news.
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When I’m at Mass, I often find myself at the edge of sleep and occasionally right over it into a twenty-second burst of shallow, eye-closing, neck-relaxing sleep.
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The Gospels describe a characteristic of Jesus that really got the attention of his contemporaries. He was evidently rather surprising in his choice of table companions. He seemed willing to share table fellowship with anyone, no matter the person’s...
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Many years ago I started looking for a copy of Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Highlights of Vatican II, then long out of print. Copies were as rare and as prized as gold dust, but eventually I found one in Chicago, among the office bookshelves of a...
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Read Peter Steinfels's dotCommonweal post--along with the comment thread in which Steinfels participates--here.
