I am especially happy intellectually, pastorally and personally to see the Council still taken so seriously today.  In connection with a course I taught at Assumption College entitled “Catholicism Today,” I continued reading again documents that I found and still find ground breaking:  Dignitatis humanae, Nostra aetate and the decree on ecumenism.  I’ve read over and over the section on the episcopacy in Lumen gentium [#18-25] and sections on the papacy in that and other documents. The documents are as fresh today as they were when I read them fifty years ago, and as challenging.  Vatican II was certainly the ecclesial “event” and “experience” of my Catholic lifetime.

I have been disappointed by the aftermath of the Council and especially by the papal undermining of some key elements of its teaching.   I am not disappointed with the church but I am with the leadership since 1978.  Thank God Catholics go about leading their lives in faith and hope no matter what the pope and bishops may be up to.

Starting now with that disappointment I read the documents with an eye to understanding both its success and failure.  Its success is its definitive recognition that the church is the Catholic people.  The Council’s failure (monarchism) has led to the perilous state in which the church continues its journey today: the Council insists that the pope is infallible, is the church’s head, its monarchical administrator  with universal jurisdiction over all Catholics and, in the absurd proposition of Innocent III and Benedict VIII, over every creature.   The pope, in simple and mythic terms, is Peter redivivus.  The papal monarchy was celebrated by Vatican II rather than curbed by it.

 So far as I can see, at this late date in my work and life, the pope isn’t Peter or even a reasonable facsimile . And the bishops are not successors to the Twelve.  Neither Jesus nor the Christ established the hierarchy; it is in my view a perfectly natural development from the egg laid by Constantine and Theodosius and their friends in the hierarchy.  The Council, in other words, failed to reform the Church, digging its own grave with its repetition of ultramontane doctrines which were likely seen to be untrue by many of the bishops who voted for them.  The Council quite deliberately left us in the quagmire of hierarchical Christendom in order to slip in the redefinition of the church. No genuine and thorough reform of the church will take place until the bishops become in fact a collegium and the pope becomes a servant of the church rather than its master.   Many of the council fathers could, perhaps on alternate days, see that the church is a horizontal reality, a community of communities, but they clung to the Church as a vertical reality. Please don’t tell me that it’s both.  It isn’t both either in ideal or in hard, cold reality.    

The fathers made a crippling mistake, the same mistake made by the great Leo and his successors, repeated inexcusably by the post-Vatican II popes (they ought to have known better) who have with varying degrees of intensity espoused the by now inexcusable “tradition” of Leo the Great,  Gregory, Innocent, Boniface and the whole row of  imperial popes.  As admirable as each of these men were in other respects, as soon as they are elected they cease to be in the mix with the rest of us. Verticality is the name of the hierarchical game. They are bred to it. I fondly hope that the cause of this is a viral ingredient in the Vatican water system.  There are wonderful filter systems these days!  I certainly hope the papal monarchy has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit, and should it I’m hopeful that She has learned Her lesson by now.  So let us keep an eye on the horizon. Maybe these times will have signs after all, and there may be a thorough reform in spite of the water problem.

Yes, I agree, I should be more respectful and appreciative of those who sit on the chair of Moses but I am old enough to recognize self-deception when I see it and old enough to make a little noise without worrying about consequences.