Personal Memories: CommentsAn Image: A group of North American College seminarians throwing their bowler style hats into the Tiber River from a Roman bridge. A feeling: excitement at the renewal, revitalization that (I thought) was taking place in the Church. The Church was no longer to be the "extra quam nulla salus" but the people of God. We were being called to be a community in which the saving grace of Jesus was the most real experience that we shared together and which motivated us to serve. The end of innocence: 1968 and Pope Paul VI seemed to shrink back from leadership. The difficulty of reform became apparent. Within ten years of the Council's closing the momentum was dying. When I saw that the Church leadership (not just Rome, but many local bishops and priests) were not accepting ("reception") the ideals they proclaimed in the Council, the distance between what the Church claims to be and the reality of its governing practices created for me a sense of distrust which is still with me. The importance of theologians When I returned to America after my theological studies in Louvain (Leuven), I saw that many American Catholics had no idea of the vast amount of scholarship that had gone into the various documents and decrees from Vatican II. Some said that nothing had changed. On the other hand, others held that everything had changed. There were more disputes about liturgy and celibacy than anything else. The biggest impact for most people was the fact that the Catholic Latin Mass had now become a Protestant English service, with singing all over the place. It was not the documents of Vatican II that changed American Catholic life, but it was the interpretation of these documents. It was the implementation committees that followed Vatican II that had the greatest impact on Catholic life. Meanwhile the liturgical wars and the sex wars have continued unabated in the United States for over 50 years. Many pressing questions In reference to the recently concluded synod of bishops: Are the changes being asked for today shaped by the concerns of the laity and not by the ordained? Can this explain the very noticeable divisions among the synod participants who have openly disagreed with the pastoral changes being called for? Or could the dissent among the synod participants be understood as consistent with what a multicultural and globalized church truly looks like? Have we gotten so used to a conforming church that claimed to be 'catholic' (universal) when it was really a mono-cultural church (Christendom) that when we begin to encounter and listen to the experiences, hermeneutics, and insights of the cultural other in their unmediated alterity, we suddenly lack the insights needed to embrace our catholicity?
Amazed by the Vatican II documents And if you look at the architecture of Catholic churches being designed and built today you will see our churches are built not for the believing worshiping community who make Jesus present but for the less than 1% ontologically different men with the magic words. Our liturgies are not for worship but as a primer to make certain those in attendance can recite, if not believe, those statements written for the most part in the 4th century CE and deemed important to that same 1%. Our readings and prayers and homilies are dependent on the writings of faith-filled communities that lived some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago and who believed in a flat earth, gods who lived somewhere above that earth etc., whilst we believe God has been present to us (and never separated from us) since the Big Bang some 13+ billion years ago… Times of exhilarating change After some years working as a TV news anchor and reporter I came back to the Diocese as Director of Communications and more recently, after doctoral work and teaching, as Director of the Lay Ministry Program. None of this would have happened had my life not coincided with the proliferation of television and the momentous event of an Ecumenical Council, one I actually lived through, one which managed to actually touch my life with changes which altered my life and thinking and believing. Talking about paradigm shifts is easy; living through one can be threatening and exhilarating at the same time. It may be time for another Council, but as John O'Malley says, he hopes it will not be VATICAN III, but perhaps Buenos Aires I, or Nairobi I, or dare I hope Orlando I. In fact, as Francis tries to water and grow the seed of synodality dormant in the Roman church these 50 years we may find ourselves in ever new ecumenical and inter-faith ways of being which may shake up and exhilarate some 18 year olds of today in their worlds of social media and avatars! It would be exciting.
Vatican II as independent rite After 50 years, might it finally be time to focus on raising Vatican II from Council to full status as Rite/Church alongside the 20+ other inter-independent Rites in union with Rome? If the Catholic Church can have 23 Eastern inter-independent Eastern rites in union with Rome, surely there is room for a Vatican II Rite within her bosom. These rites have different perspectives on theology and different practices in governance and liturgy. Reconstructing the past and the present In a great reversal, in 2013 Pope Francis took the modest title of “bishop of Rome.” It was a new beginning but not a return to Vatican II except rhetorically. In 1965-1968 the council was expected to lead to renewal in 1) the liturgy 2) sexual morality 3) active participation of the laity 4) ecumenism 5) liberation theology, 6) public dissent in the church, and more. In these six areas, the creative spirit of Vatican II is gone. The new beginning is about the environment, compassion for the poor, mercy, and synodality. There seems to be a great theological vacuum in the church, e.g. in the six areas just mentioned – but there is HOPE – a theological virtue that makes possible new beginnings. Hope in times of crisis When I read the history of such persons as Martin Luther and those our church has tagged as heretics in the past and today, I am grateful to them because they are the media for grace by which we grow as church. If we come to this realization then the name calling in our church (liberals, progressives, conservatives, neo-liberals, modernists, etc.) becomes distractions. Was it not our Lord who said, "In my Father's house there are many mansions"? Then why do we exclude? Why do we label those who embody alterity in their mode of being? Perhaps, the crisis we experience today which we all must engage is the lack of patience to encounter diversity in all its expressions. |