When the Catholic bishops in 1963 called for the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, they thought they knew what they were doing. In their minds, the inner meaning of the mass and sacraments was one thing, and their outer form was another. Therefore the Latin language and Tridentine shape of Catholic ritual life could be changed while maintaining its spiritual essence.

It took me almost 50 years to realize that the bishops were wrong.

Catholic conservatives recognized this early on, and some, like the Society of St. Pius X, protested by actively departing from the rest of the church. Liberals and moderates were less vocal in their opposition to the changes, but they drifted away in even larger numbers. Today in the United States, the second largest religious group are those who call themselves ex-Catholics.

Both the bishops and the conservatives conceived of the essence of the sacraments in terms that they inherited from the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages. Baptism washes away original sin. Confirmation bestows the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Penance brings about the remission of sins. Extreme unction removes the last remnants of sin. Holy orders conveys priestly powers. Matrimony creates an indissoluble bond between spouses. The mass re-presents Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and the Eucharist is his body and blood.

To maintain their connection to these spiritual realities, many conservatives insisted on retaining the material forms that embodied them, including the Latin mass. Only through the old rites could they encounter what medieval theology had named. Most Catholics, on the other hand, believed with the bishops that those spiritual realities could be perceived through the new material forms of the revised rites. And, for a while, it seemed to work.

Those who had been raised before the Council, who had been taught with the Baltimore Catechism, and whose spirituality had been shaped by women and men in religious orders, were indeed able to transfer those perceptions to the new liturgical forms and sacramental rites, at least for a while. Over time, however, they and the younger generation of Catholics began to lose the ability to see baptism as necessary for salvation, to appreciate the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to feel that going to confession was necessary, to believe in the need for anointing before dying, to perceive priests as having supernatural powers, to think that divorce is impossible, to accept the necessity of weekly mass, or even to experience Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

Conservatives blamed this “loss of faith” on the new rites, but the reason was much deeper and less obvious. The reason is that what Catholics think of as spiritual realities are in fact symbols. In this, they do not differ from other Christians, or indeed from people of other religions. God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, angels and saints, heaven and hell, original sin and supernatural powers are believed to be real, or, if you are an atheist, to be unreal. Because they are not experienced, they have to be believed in. Also, because they are not experienced, they can arouse unbelief.

It was not so in the beginning. For the first two centuries or so, justification meant getting your life straightened out. Salvation meant being saved from suffering and adopting a healthy mindset. Putting on Christ meant behaving the way Jesus did. Baptism meant immersion in a new community and a new lifestyle. A holy spirit was the motivating force to behave well and do good. The kingdom of God was where you found yourself if you did what God commanded and treated others as you wanted to be treated. Without a vocabulary to name the spiritual realities for which we have other words today, writers in the early Jesus movement resorted to such metaphors. By the third century, the experienced realities that gave rise to the metaphors were being forgotten, and the metaphors were mistakenly believed to be unexperienced metaphysical realities. By the fourth century, when Christianity was adopted as the religion of imperial Rome, the transition was complete. The Nicene Creed, drawn up under orders of the Emperor Constantine, says nothing about the way of life that Jesus preached. It talks only about believing in metaphysical entities. In other words, it talks only about symbols.

Notwithstanding, the symbolic rituals we call sacraments point to spiritual realities that were experienced by the followers of Jesus who took his teachings seriously. Acceptance and belonging, immersion in community, conversion and forgiveness, caring about others and being taken care of by them, healing and sharing, fidelity and commitment, self-giving and self-sacrifice, even experiencing the presence of the divine within oneself and among others—all these are experienced realities that are celebrated in the sacraments even when their reality is hidden behind religious symbols.

If ever there were immutable elements to the liturgy, they are these. Such spiritual realities can be named in any language, they are recognized in every human culture, they are the subjects of literature and music, they are depicted in art and drama, and they can be celebrated in rituals both secular and religious.

If such realities are to be celebrated, however, they must first be experienced, they must first be real, they must first be lived. Completing the reforms of Vatican II therefore means reforming more than our rituals. It means reforming the way we live.