I attended the first session of Vatican II as an assitant to the bishops. Three months earlier my friend, Bill, another Phila. priest, who was appointed a Council "scribe," visited Pope John XXIII along with our archbishop. When Bill told the Pope he was studying Scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the Pope became visibly upset and almost cried, "What are they teaching you over there?! They've taken away Adam and Eve and now even the Magi. What shall we tell the children?" (Two professors at the "Biblicum" had recently been fired.) In my own doctoral studies in Spirituality at the Pontifical Gregorian University, I was secretely taught about Teilhard de Chardin, for fear that the Vatican officials would fire anyone who taught his spirituality. Then, on the Council's opening day, when John XXIII delivered his famous speach about being surrounded by prophets of doom, it was with special joy that Bill and I felt the "breeze" of the Holy Spirit from the window that John had opened.
One day, Bill came back from a meeting at the Vatican and told me, "I heard some Curia bishops talking. They were saying that when the Council fathers go home, they are going to take back the Church." In how many ways have they succeeded?
I believe that the American bishops returned home from the Council filled with good will and ready to implement the Council's teachings, but pressure from the Vatican derailed them and they became unable to change the general spiritual mindset of the American church. They were especially unable to create a laity of spiritually mature adult faith, who could engage our society and culture in the grace of Christ, to elevate them and where necessary correct them, without imposing our religion on anyone. I believe that, at heart, today's political and economic collapse is one result of this sad failure.
The bishops dutifully changed the liturgy into English but failed to create the necessary new sense of the sacred that would permit the laity to see themselves as Church, and as 20th, and now 21st century expressions of Christ in a graced marketplace that has great spiritual potential while it suffers from an internal corrosive influence that has to be grappled with and converted on a daily basis. Instead, the liturgy generally got stuck in a casual '60's type, "homey," strumming culture, that is lacking in a serious sense of the sacred, and the Church lost any truly effective spiritual influence within our evolving and devolving culture.
P. S. When Bill and I returned home from Rome, we talked about Vatican II everyplace we could. We were both silenced from public speaking and fired from our positions as seminary professors. In 1971 I resigned from the clergy, received a dispensation from Pope Paul VI, and began a career as a laymen in our society and culture. Today I am working to instill the lay spirituality taught by Vatican II into the people of my parish and diocese.
I am personally and deeply grateful for John Wilkins's retrieval of the Josef Ratzinger whom I met and heard as a young student of theology at the Gregorian University during the years of the Council. It confirms a story that I have often told and that most people find hard to believe. During the sessions of the Council, the periti in town would give evening lectures around the city. They were listed in the morning Il Messagero, and we would have to choose between going to hear Küng, Rahner, Congar, Schillebeeckx, Danielou -- and that young peritus for Cardinal Frings, Josef Ratzinger. The talk of his I remember was given, I believe, at the press office off the Via della Conciliazione (I can't remember which session). I was shaken then, and emboldened now, by what he told us. Quoting loosely from my memory: "The bishops have on occasion fallen so far from the spirit of the Gospel that it becomes incumbent upon the laity to exercise the prophetic role given to them in Baptism and to resist, even to the point of disobedience. -- Ratzinger was talking here not about episcopal collegiality, but about the responsibility given in the "sensus fidelium" (sense of the faithful) -- a responsibility which, in view of the present cover-ups of sexual abuse, is all the more relevant and urgent.
Vital article, with deep gratitude to John Wilkins, and also to Paul Kittner, for his comment.
I would welcome a side by side comparison of texts by Ratzinger then and Benedict now, highlighting how excitement over the spirit of the Council evolved into necessity for reform of the reform.
I believe we have lost 100 years in the genuine implementation of Vatican II, since the current direction is very much in the opposite direction, despite clever word-smithing to the contrary. 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.
The need for "the change of mindset the Council sought" is clearly manifested in the clericalism of the sexual abuse crisis.
Again, an outstanding article.
Ratzinger's drift toward papal centralism can be viewed in at least two ways. As Wilkins would have it, it involved a certain growing infidelity not only to his original views of the Council and the issues before it but to the vision of John XXIII of a church breaking through the encrustations of a millennium to new forms of life in a new era. The other side of the story of Ratzinger is of a man and a leader maturing spiritually and intellectually in reaction to crises that threatened the life of the church. Ratzinger probably views it this way. But there is another possible interpretation that must be considered by both sides of the argument, an argument already designated as a struggle between the hermeneutics of continuity and discontinuity by Ratzinger himnself. That third fact is huge socializing force of the clerical/papal bureaucracy from which Ratzinger has benefitted. Without evidencing so personal a vice as ambition, Ratzinger floated easily and apparently happily into that force-field called "service to the church" which has no Dark Side that is noticeable to those who are all-to-gently sucked up by it. That force-field has been in operation for some fifteen hundred years. I am ready to believe that no one, least of all Ratzinger, becomes pope without having been re-made or fitted to the principles of papal monarchy. Although many would say that this is fairly obviously a matter of Divine Providence, I believe that it is is either perfectly natural or, if I am pushed to it, a manifestation of the Dark Side.
In any field when a person is unwilling to stand for principle the status quo always wins. The young Ratzinger saw clearly the need to renew a stagnant, corrupt church. At thetime he had a lot of company in that quest. Once he had to defend those principles against changing tides he buckled as did so many others. That is the case of so many liberals of that era who came back to empire as the waters became turbulent. Crises do not create character. They reveal it. That is the case with Cardinal law, Ratzinger and so many others, resulting in a vacuous Vatican and gutless bishops.
I was totally engrossed by the cover photo of Pope Benedict XVI in your June 4th issue. Was this a real photo or was it one that was airbrushed? After reading the article that was very informative & of course biased I concluded that the photo was indeed meant to convey a message that was not endearing to his Holiness & of course no one would want to send such photo home to a loved one. Yet, I saw in this something positve in that the photo as I see it shows a brighter right side that is enlightened to which the present Pope evolved from the dark left side of the past because of all the poppycock that gushed forth from the progressive clergy at the Council. If the Pope's photo represents the present polity of the Church then the subject being photgraphed must move further to the right so that the light may completely encompass his face. Long live Pope Benedict & thanks to Mr. Wilkins for bringing up such an important subject.
Harry D. Carrozza,MD.FACS Tucson,ARIZONA
I almost didn't read this article. When I saw it, I thought, "Oh, geez, here we go again -- yet another article about the pope." (I love Commonweal in general, but I think there are way too many articles about papal stuff. After all, one way to help bring about a church less centralized around the pope would be to quit talking about him so much.) But I gave it a try, and it actually ended up interesting and worthwhile. I agree with the comments above by Carolyn Disco and William Shea (and specifically, the force field/Dark Side explanation).
Having finished Hans Kung's "My Struggle for Freedom...memoirs" I feel rather washed out over Vatican II. Darn, Bill Huebsch 3 volume set "Vatican II in Plain English" really got me going to the extent I am writing folks trying to stir renewed focus on Vatican II's 50th Anniversary (2012).
This article ....wow, Help. Our Church needs encouragement big time to read and discuss Vatican II documents...who will lead this?
I attended the first session of Vatican II as an assitant to the bishops. Three months earlier my friend, Bill, another Phila. priest, who was appointed a Council "scribe," visited Pope John XXIII along with our archbishop. When Bill told the Pope he was studying Scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the Pope became visibly upset and almost cried, "What are they teaching you over there?! They've taken away Adam and Eve and now even the Magi. What shall we tell the children?" (Two professors at the "Biblicum" had recently been fired.) In my own doctoral studies in Spirituality at the Pontifical Gregorian University, I was secretely taught about Teilhard de Chardin, for fear that the Vatican officials would fire anyone who taught his spirituality. Then, on the Council's opening day, when John XXIII delivered his famous speach about being surrounded by prophets of doom, it was with special joy that Bill and I felt the "breeze" of the Holy Spirit from the window that John had opened.
One day, Bill came back from a meeting at the Vatican and told me, "I heard some Curia bishops talking. They were saying that when the Council fathers go home, they are going to take back the Church." In how many ways have they succeeded?
I believe that the American bishops returned home from the Council filled with good will and ready to implement the Council's teachings, but pressure from the Vatican derailed them and they became unable to change the general spiritual mindset of the American church. They were especially unable to create a laity of spiritually mature adult faith, who could engage our society and culture in the grace of Christ, to elevate them and where necessary correct them, without imposing our religion on anyone. I believe that, at heart, today's political and economic collapse is one result of this sad failure.
The bishops dutifully changed the liturgy into English but failed to create the necessary new sense of the sacred that would permit the laity to see themselves as Church, and as 20th, and now 21st century expressions of Christ in a graced marketplace that has great spiritual potential while it suffers from an internal corrosive influence that has to be grappled with and converted on a daily basis. Instead, the liturgy generally got stuck in a casual '60's type, "homey," strumming culture, that is lacking in a serious sense of the sacred, and the Church lost any truly effective spiritual influence within our evolving and devolving culture.
P. S. When Bill and I returned home from Rome, we talked about Vatican II everyplace we could. We were both silenced from public speaking and fired from our positions as seminary professors. In 1971 I resigned from the clergy, received a dispensation from Pope Paul VI, and began a career as a laymen in our society and culture. Today I am working to instill the lay spirituality taught by Vatican II into the people of my parish and diocese.