Post-Vatican II era: CommentsThe bishops and our collective responsibility For this dysfunction I would like to blame the bishops, the pastors who had the responsibility to make sure that the flock was fed at the pastures that would provide the nourishment needed for this journey of renewal... My first and only exhibit will be Laudato si. If care for the environment is the most pressing moral concern of the day, Catholics need to learn how to respond to this reality. We have to learn how—because we don't know how—to be a Church that responds to the most urgent moral demand of the day. If environmental degradation, devaluation, and destruction are caused not only be polluters, but by "global indifference," we must ask ourselves how much that indifference inhabits the culture of our parishes, of our dioceses and Church. The Church is always the reality of people identified as Catholic and claiming “to be,” tangibly in the world, a witness to what Christ meant by the Kingdom of God. These people don’t “become” a corporate witness to the Gospel or its demands (in this case the environment and global warming) simply because a Pope or theologian says that the Church is committed to caring for our common home. We need to go through a learning process, a transformational experience, a conversion. That is a pastoral task, a bishop’s responsibility. The Pentecostaliation of the Latin American churches Until the papacy of Francis, Charismatic Catholicism and what remained of the progressive Church in Latin America seemed to be competing movements with very distinct visions of the path that the Church should follow. However, the Argentine pontiff seems to be pulling off a remarkable synthesis of Liberation Theology's concern for the poor and oppressed with the CCR's emphasis on the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. I will be in Mexico next month covering Francis's visit and am looking forward to see how he applies his innovative synthesis in a country that has suffered so much during the past decade. There are about 70 million Catholic charismatics in Latin America, more than the whole US Catholic population. Brasil is at the same time the country with most Catholics and most Evangelicals/Pentecostals in the world; Catholicism has lost about a third of its members to them. In the US there are as many or more Evangelicals than Catholics; Catholicism has lost about a third of its members. The growth rate of Evangelicals/Pentecostals in the Global South is about double that of Catholics. Numbers speak louder than words. There is a meteoric rise of charismatic/Pentecostal religiosity in the world, especially the Global South. For an independent Vatican II Rite With 23 inter-independent Eastern Catholic rites in union with Rome, surely there is room in the Catholic Church for a rite of aggiornamento. Or are we going to wait until the great wisdom of the Roman Rite is lost because it will not tolerate any new understandings and practices of Catholicism...or because we are afraid to bring Vatican II to fruition in the transvaluation of doctrine, governance and liturgical practice? The Vatican II rite we have The western Catholic Church has had a variety of rites, the Gallican rituals, the Mozarabic Spanish rituals, and the Ambrosian Milanese rituals. The Roman rite is itself a break-off from the original Greek ritual that was in Rome until the 5th century. The Roman Rite survived because it inculcated the Germanic and Gallican customs into its ritual. The failure to accept and adapt to the Calvinist reforms of the 16th century led to the more standardized Tridentine ritual that has lasted 400 years. I assume that the new Vatican II Rite would be more than a ritual. However, a rite has to grow organically. A Rite must have some indigenous elements that make it unique from the other churches. Language might be one. Instead of a universal uniform rite we could have a New England Rite, a New York Rite, a Texas Rite, a California Rite, an Australian Rite, or New Zealand Rite.
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