From the council to the synod
Massey, Marilyn Chapin & Miles, Jack & Kelly, Mary Pat & Flynn, Raymond & Durkin, Mary & Quinn, Peter & Grace, J. Peter & Vanier, Jean & McCarthy, Eugene & D'Arienzo, Camille & Formica, Palma E. & Sobran, Joseph & LOESCH, JULI & Gordon, Mary & Sheed, Wilfrid & Dybek, Stuart & Fox, Tom & Burris, Keith C. & Wills, Garry & Rambusch, Nancy & Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti
From the council to the synod Raymond Flynn RAYMOND FLYNN holds a Master's degree from Harvard University School of Education. He worked as a probation officer before entering politics. He was a...
...It was this teaching, combined with daily experience in the city's neighborhoods, that taught me this most essential lesson: People have more in common with each other than they have issues dividing them...
...At Confirmations, First Communions, weddings and funerals, my uncles made personal the mysteries of sacramental reality...
...Nobody but the church...
...I wondered why they didn't just leave, as I had when I lost my faith...
...His stories abound with apparitions, spirits, dybbuks, spells, and miracles...
...In I960, before the beginning of Vatican II, I was a suburban housewife and the mother of three small children...
...A few- years ago my husband was dying...
...as a "pastoral" council, addressed none of the most difficult questions of belief in a culture of unbelief Much of my own religious story, were I to tell it in full, would involve just those questions that the council slighted...
...Marty had invited the first multitude of Catholics to come to the Divinity School at the University of Chicago to discuss with him the "why" of our historic appearance...
...It no longer claimed immutability as proof of its divine mandate...
...Religious life was indeed Someone...
...A miserable fate indeed...
...His brother Teddy, he said, "carried one he could hardly lift" I was told by presidential aides that the priest who was to give the sermon when the president was in attendance at Mass had been asked, as was customary, to avoid controversial political issues, and even possibly controversial religious ones...
...Natural law" used to be taught in a large context as well as misapplied to contraception...
...There are immense transformations in our societies coming from the inner brokenness of so many...
...presently at the Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy at Yale, has just been appointed Director of the Early Childhood Education Agency for Child Development for the City of New York...
...When I was a child...
...There...
...and (with Father Andrew M. Greeley) A Church to Come Home To...
...Nuns speak their minds, even to the pope...
...Few have been set aside...
...they have not learned that they do not have to be male...
...strength...
...could he perform the ceremony...
...Everything was possible...
...Peter a genius and a saint...
...Laypcople arc becoming an integral part of the church as institution and mission...
...Sidesplitting laughter could erupt anywhere, and often did so in places requiring restraint...
...on my rare visits to Catholic churches I noticed how much discomfort the congregation felt when required to burst into song...
...I was learning that this pain came essentially from the experience of being a disappointment for their families, of not being appreciated in their parishes, of being devalued and rejected...
...The distinctive ecclesiology of Vatican II, based on service to those in need in addition to addressing articles of faith, has set the agenda for a viable institution, an active force in times of apathy...
...The results have been less than fully satisfying...
...Partly, this is a problem of the age...
...My response is based on "recollections of early childhood," remembrances of days past, contact with other people, religious and lay...
...His essays have been collected in The Good Word and Other Words...
...increasing divorce rate, blatant immorality in the entertainment and media fields, pregnant teenagers, increasing spread of pornography, abhorrent lifestyles, increasing dishonesty in all forms from cheating on income taxes to the sharp rise in petty theft and shoplifting...
...then the Soviet tanks crushed all the flowers...
...It was reconciliation with the Eastern Orthodox a big yawn at the time for most American Catholics that John had most in mind as he called the council...
...This surprised me, for as a child I'd memorized the entire prayer over the years of 8 A.M...
...However, he led the way essentially by loving his disciples, washing their feet, creating community with them, and giving them a new rm-Jcl of authority...
...All this in the name of Vatican II at least as interpreted by its American hucksters...
...I did most of that research and writing as a Catholic woman on predominately Protestant, male, religion faculties at Duke University and Harvard Divinity School...
...the color of our book covers...
...And the tendency of the Right to grab Gregorian chant and Gothic architecture as the screen behind which it can hide its bigotry and hatred of the world makes me suspicious of that as an answer...
...a graduate of Stanford, earned a Master's degree in Southcast Anan studies after serving with the International Voluntary Services in Vietnam...
...Instead, the official church's stance on women then, and now, is anti-women, making it impossible for the church to play any leadership role in response to one of the most critical issues in modern society...
...For me, as for many others, the council's invitation to freely pursue the truth of our religion was one with its invitation to involvement in the world, which meant an active engagement in the movements for social justice and peace...
...Who on earth had got the idea (hat this sort of music, or Muzak, had any cultural purchase on the souls of the faithful...
...Nobody agreed with me...
...It was 1950, a time for double dating, usually with young men who shared the values and morality presented by church and family...
...It was a political, historical reality, dominating major areas of the world and threatening to subordinate others...
...not of destroying it, but of appreciating it...
...His works include Childhood and Other Neighborhoods and Brass Knuckles, a book of poetry...
...My uncle was coming to California...
...Our daily activities, spiritual and social, often centered around our parish...
...Faith wasn't denial of the intellect, but rather a challenge to the mind The documents came out...
...Nevertheless, the boycott, a punitive and condemnatory measure, kept from the LCWR Assembly the two churchmen who...
...This leaves a lot of people out...
...This change has permitted the individual to participate in the reading and responses in a meaningful way...
...Simple as that...
...Martin Luther King, Jr...
...I began to wonder if I had to leave behind spiritual assurance along with the other things of childhood...
...an organization of women and men seeking alternatives to nuclear arms and abortion...
...The new theology came to me like the music of the Beatles came to my friends a call to look beyond...
...From San Francisco...
...I certainly had no difficulty understanding the desire for consumer sex...
...But we are learning, witnessing for faith and we will not go away...
...Cardinal Leo Josef Suencns suggested some answers in The Nun in the World...
...I drifted out of the church within three years of my conversion...
...The church I returned to had changed...
...He was a reporter on the Detroit Free Press and an editor at the Washington Star...
...It affords a shared vocabulary and system of myth by which a sense of wonder and the sacred can be expressed...
...Renewal presaged change, change that would encompass women as well as men...
...Singer is more intrigued by community and mystcry...
...Vatican II has made it necessary for me to explain how people once fasted before receiving Communion...
...Well, maybe God knew I'd almost been killed by the Witnesses' rules...
...At least during the Reformation people knew what they were arguing about and what the stakes were...
...Plastic domes, copper shards...
...That is all gain, and it is enough it is the basic thing we owe to God...
...And just as importantly, I learned that if any of our fellow citizens suffers from the lash of injustice, economic or otherwise, we arc all diminished...
...This wasn't Sexual Shalom it was a cervical Strategic Defense Initiative...
...Catholics are much less concerned about the official church and much more concerned about how their faith sheds light on the problems of their lives and in their world...
...They question the stress on personal involvement and active participation...
...This is due to the church's unfinished business with regard to women...
...Catholics...
...To live with them is to live with Jesus...
...That peace through strength is the answer...
...Dorothy Day...
...It stems from knowing that no one save self can cut me off from the church, from the common journey...
...AS THF ONLY SON of a publishing house and how many of you readers can make that statement...
...At the time...
...When, in recent years, fear seemed to edge out hope and joy in the church, I again looked to my uncles...
...courage...
...They go hoping that, despite the bad liturgies and poor homilies, they will find a sense of direction in the richness of Catholicism...
...We must be the nurturers, the church...
...As an outside observer my sympathies lie with the sense of change, of democratizing the church, that I associate with Vatican II...
...Democ ratize our priesthood...
...He spoke harshly to Peter: ¦"Get behind me, Satan...
...but rather on reflection on the relationship between the "mystery" of human experience and the exciting God found in the stories, symbols, and practices of a long and rich Catholic tradition, including, but not limited to, its creeds and doctrines...
...so Cana and the "liberal" atmosphere of many archdioccsan activities were the center of our religious life...
...In the old church we looked to others to tell us right and wrong...
...People are being incited to individualism and to self-sufficiency, not to depend on anyone any more...
...Well, I don't trust my conscience...
...Pope Paul VI asserted (actually re-asserted) that the human design is not arbitrary, but providential...
...At I'Arche, it was not primarily a question of fixing laws in order to be assured of good discipline (though, of course, good laws and discipline are necessary...
...I'd like to have known my church before Vatican II...
...I can't say much about other countries, but in America Catholicism had become terribly . . . Americanized...
...The church was at the core of our family life...
...Many, possibly most, of the questions and issues raised at the council remain unsettled...
...and is presently book editor of the Los Angeles Times -Then, said Crarly...
...1 believe we arc Gods people, the Creator's children This clarifies my responsibilities and provides life's meaning...
...One cannot tolerate a person doing harm to another or scandalizing them (that is making them trip and fall...
...I've been working this summer on a story seen through a boy's eyes about a young woman who faints each Sunday at 11:15 Mass...
...Or with saccharine and supercilious piety as demanding as a John Denver concert...
...For centuries students had sat in desks like ours, we were told, straight rows of obedient boys, soldierly and orderly, in institutions like this one, the boot camps of the Church Militant...
...It has been suggested to me that my obligations, as a post-Vatican II Catholic, are great: I have to rely on my conscience...
...But it is a church infinitely more alive and spirited, a company of pilgrims who are Catholic by choice...
...Our world is a changing world...
...It was obeying rules without reasons or reason...
...and a documentary...
...Massachusetts, would strike me (for all the poverty of my knowledge of church history) as the tardy arrival of the Protestant Reformation in the Catholic church 1 would be left with the once unthinkable notion that the future of the Catholic church the Barque of Peter, the Mystical Body of Chnst was the future of a denomination A decade later...
...A clearer understanding of the tenets of the Catholic church through openness in discussion, through published expositions, explications, and dialogue...
...It sees the church as a body where each member, particularly the poorest, the weakest, and the most oppressed has a place, which, as Saint Paul says, should be a place of honor...
...More than ever before, the church is conscious of its separation from the state...
...Paul...
...It was pyramidal authority, and physical and psychological distancing from the very people the Lord said to "honor...
...For this, we need the sustenance, above all...
...and guidance Properly recognized, each empowers us as we reach out to one another and our Creator So you might say...
...Much of the power of poetry and story telling, like the power of ritual, exists not in reason, but in images and associations: the blessing of throats, relics, a vision of hell...
...Looking back along the road, I see how we have changed...
...a graduate of Loyola University in Chicago and a one-time case worker with the Cook County Department of Public Aid...
...Contraceptives are the ultimate consumer goods...
...I wish someone had been sterner with me...
...Most of my friends understood...
...I AM STILL a Catholic, thanks to Vatican II...
...It invites me to live as Jesus did and to trust...
...All rectories should be turned into hospitality houses and soup kitchens...
...Yet who among us can miss these problems of the institutional church...
...The largest, most representative council ever convened, Vatican II had the widest cross-section of nations, cultures, non-Catholic and lay observers...
...Still, even when the subject matter of my writing deals with aspects of Catholicism, the effect of Vatican II seems remote...
...We call ourselves U.S...
...The rest, however lovely, was frills, and...
...I had never been baptized...
...The new archbishop in Chicago, like many of his colleagues, did not believe in collegiality...
...requiem Masses, and had even recited it once by heart, as we used to say to the amazement of my fifth-grade class and the nun who taught it...
...Haig (he who fears the radicalism of sisters) and Simon (a charter member of the new gilded class...
...Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward...
...a Russian Orthodox Catholic - anything but an American Protestant I once felt that way too Stephen Daedalus with a soul like a smithy But this doughty old feeling has become alCommonweal 562 legiance to a memory, and it is the council that has made it so...
...I never perceived the church as a vehicle for social change...
...No Latin scholar...
...She is the author of Martin Scorsese: The First Decade...
...When there must be a sermon, let the pastor, if he is not a natural preacher, invite a lay person or theologian who has something to say into the pulpit...
...For me, that is...
...when 1 was fifteen...
...One, seventy-five, is involved in parish life after years of college teaching...
...I suspect the mid-seventies were the low point in church renewal...
...I have observed, Ux>, the enthusiastic participation of congregations attending Masses being said in their native tongues, Spanish...
...I judged people (particu larly public people) on this basis: are you opposed to the killing or are you not...
...I phoned the closest church and a priest invited me to drop by the rectory...
...More and more people are discovering that the poor are the church...
...I was glad I'd been a Catholic, since the church was so obviously the vehicle and mother of everything I loved in Western culture...
...The essential magnet for me was Jesus Christ the historical figure who commanded the New Testament...
...Vatican II...
...I would not have been able to have stayed...
...The Decree on the Church" soon followed...
...What about birth control...
...I was concerned with the acknowledgment of common beliefs and a rejection of irrelevant differences...
...Mass no longer belonged only lo the priest, the choir, and the altar boys...
...Since the Holy Ghost is understood to be the tie-breaker in these matters (what shall we call him...
...What I never understood was the audacity of people who could even try to adapt the teachings of the church to their own appetites...
...The Sabbath was made for man...
...People carry within them an immense amount of personal anguish and this anguish is frequently being channeled into hypcractivity, comforts of all sorts, or else it is being eased through distractions which excite dreams and encourage evasion...
...As only one of many interrelated social problems, economic pressure drove more and more women into the work force, causing them to leave behind younger and younger children...
...increasingly, in other smaller Christian groups, searching out stronger bonds...
...We had hoped to join the Christian Family Movement, but our pastor didn't believe in lay involvement (he even called the numbers at the Friday night Bingo...
...If trusting gives space for each one to act according to the light within him or her...
...I sometimes think that baptism is a kind of spiritual "vaccination to which I had a delayed reaction...
...I investigated other contraceptives...
...Jesus lived poorly...
...a forthcoming book...
...We have had no official involvement with the institutional church since we were board chaircouplc for the Cana Conference the year Humanae Vitae was written...
...It may be, but that solution is indeed dispiriting...
...Many women responded to the blandishments of self-realization, never intending that their need for equality would conflict with their family values...
...I am attracted to the church's sacramental mysteries, am slowly discovering the Scriptures, and am frequently awed by the Eucharist Each of these elements of church offers hope...
...Catholics living in the United States...
...It can get burdensome, is never neat, but the alternative no longer remains an option...
...What was going on in the capitals, in Rome, or especially in Washington, was hardly the cutting edge...
...I was delighted with the faith of a child, but if that were all the church had to offer...
...The freedom to publish absolutely anything we felt like in Sanskrit could hardly have done less...
...1964-66...
...among others...
...There was the Tet Offensive in February of that year...
...And we are in danger of transforming the Cross into a smiley face...
...What I do remember are the dress regulations at college being dropped, the mandatory retreats ended, compulsory courses in the history of Catholic theology giving way to electives in Buddhism or the ethics of social commitment . One by one most of the friends who had gone away to be priests or brothers came home...
...Why was it made so easy for me...
...If the decade-and-a-half before Vatican II raised questions about the value of blind obedience, old wineskins, and spiritual maturity, still I learned that Sister Mary Mark had been right...
...Suddenly the "boys only" rules of my home parish seemed manufactured...
...They make sex and children matters of consumption...
...But it is interesting to think now that from the beginning of the council and throughout to its end, issues of women were not real, and the maleness of the church was not thought of as a problem...
...It has all added up to an extremely complex and troubling state of affairs in which the values of nurturance traditional, unpaid women's work arc pitted against those of the marketplace in an unequal contest...
...It was conforming to an image...
...The church cannot fix all the problems in the world, but she can provide help and guidance to her children to live in a world beset by these problems...
...To do this, the heritage of Vatican II which ushered in an ethical thinking which broadened the personal and private realm to encompass the social and political must be sustained and enriched by hearing what women have to say...
...they have earned a bit of benign and democratic neglect...
...We must be prepared to be leaders, with all the risks entailed We are no longer suckling infants...
...I got off the Pill...
...A seismic shift in middle-class women's awareness of themselves, of their 18 October 1985: 579 identities, and of their possibilities was occurring...
...First, in my assessment of changes since Vatican II, I would affirm several aspects very positively: . The use of the vernacular in the liturgy, particularly in the Liturgy of the Eucharist...
...We face the reality that the ordination of women will not happen under the present leadership...
...But the intellectual ferment of the council the debate over religious liberty, the nature of the church, the responsibility of the laity - passed us by...
...I'd just graduated from college...
...It was professional preparedness, dedicated teaching, compassionate service...
...That line tugged, nagged, disquieted me...
...4) It's all talk, anyway...
...And howcould I have met my wife, a Catholic convert in a faraway land, were it not for this Hucharistic network we call church...
...He was friendly, but when I explained what I was after he became suddenly guarded...
...when topicality was the rage, and it was useless to suggest that people needed fixed reference points outside the Commonweal: 580 currents of the moment...
...The future...
...Then there was the Democratic Convention Police Riot Kxtravaganza ("Welcome to Czechago") and I fell in love w ith Leo Tolstoy and the Jefferson Airplane and a young dissident named Thorn who used to wear a long trailing scarf and looked just like Emmet Grogan...
...I saw the charts that showed the growth rate of the human population shooting damn-near vertically right off the page...
...18 October 1985: 561 Jack Miles JACK MILES was on the staff of the Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science in Chicago He has been an editor at Doubleday and the University of California Press...
...In the summers, they acted as chaplains for a boys camp near the lakeside home our families had built together...
...In this inner world the emotive importance of religion may have infinitely more to do with the recollection of a grandmother mumbling a rosary than with the edicts of cardinals...
...Vatican II was a time of fruitfulness...
...the Catch 3...
...And why is your Vatican making our Catholic church like the Church of Ireland...
...The admission of married men to the order of the diaconate should have given impetus to those who have the power to ordain to reconsider the celibacy issue...
...of all things, my spouse of now nearly two decades...
...Bobby Kennedy triumphed in the California primary...
...The opening up of the Roman Catholic church to ecumenism, to ecumenical dialogue, I regard as a healthy aspect of American Catholicism...
...And I went to dances and handed out leaflets against the draft...
...How can this be...
...Bob Macauley...
...But I'm still trying to understand why the call and my answer was so timed...
...Everything accrued to me I gave up so little and 18 October 1985: 565 what I gave up I didn't want anyway...
...This liberality, of course, stemmed from Vatican II...
...it is announcing more clearly its option for the poor...
...I altended two sessions of the council, and was deeply impressed at the massed presence of the bishops and cardinals, as well as their support staffs men and women, intelligent and dedicated to the church...
...I look about and see much work to be done A journalist by profession...
...It was also many things: habits, bells, silence, study, prayer, scrubbing and waxing marble floors...
...As our bishops meet to evaluate the effects of Vatican II...
...skeptical about women as theologians...
...And Paul VI was not a politician...
...The Baltimore Catechism was out...
...I've just, not so incidentally, come from spending six months in Italy...
...He was close to the poor...
...My relatives did not...
...IN THE twenty YEARS since the final session of the Second Vatican Council, we have seen two decades of progress in the life of the church as it relates to the entire human family...
...All this sets the stage for the way I accepted (read: didn't accept) Humanae Vitae at the time...
...as our founder once put it, not man for the Sabbath...
...Additionally, the American bishops' letter shows that the basic tenets of the Second Vatican Council, handed down some twenty years ago...
...Why can Daniel . . . ?" she asks...
...That our bodies are basically, finally, not in our own best interest...
...If jvery man, and every woman fully human, fully alive, and complete in every detail is made in the image and likeness of God, then we've got to protect and reverence what's natural and healthy...
...the religious, the married, the single, the virgin, the mother...
...Humanae Vilae has destroyed the hope that the church would speak positively on human sexuality...
...In 1985, many of the "issues" of the early post-Vatican II years are no longer of interest to most laity and lower clergy...
...Hanging ON TM-: wall of my bedroom is a papal blessing, a remnant of prc-Vatican II...
...But I am also astonished by the importance American Catholics attach to what the bishops say...
...The church's teaching on tolerance guided me...
...It was more a question of loving and of listening, of trusting and of confirming...
...They were surely more worthy of Catholic attention than the counter statements of Messrs...
...That the council happened al all is surprising...
...she has a brother, twelve...
...because of their positions, had the greatest rcsponsibilty to what was being said at that meeting, not only by Margaret Farley, but by the 700 women in leadership positions By contrast...
...not at all...
...He supplied an answer and the contestant provided the correct question...
...of recognizing the Spirit of Jesus living in the hearts of each one, especially in the hearts of the poorest and the weakest members of the community...
...now we have a celebrity...
...Were what my uncles offered part of a security that had to be discarded if I were to enter adulthood...
...Vatican II remains unfinished business...
...I may have read too much Paul Claudel...
...The liturgy would be enlivened...
...My undergrad years had coincided with the years of the council, but by that point the church was no longer an educational force in my life...
...Professor J. Cort Ryylarsdam, an Old Testament scholar at the University of Chicago, hearing of my interest in theological studies, convinced the Divinity School to admit me as a parttime day student, not because I was a woman (consciousness about women was not an issue then), but because I was a Catholic...
...I presumed the border of the "old days" must have been established, by his count, six years earlier with the conclusion of Vatican II...
...Thus, by 1974 I was less than optimistic about the survival of the spirit of Vatican II...
...The church would remember that it was the church of the whole world, not just of Europe, or those who identified themselves with Europe and its view...
...Jubilee magazine, first published in 1953, called itself a magazine of "the church and her people...
...An institution that denies power and spiritual authority to over one-half of the world by virtue of gender must necessarily be cutting itself off from reality and truth...
...The path of least resistance, friends, is the Sunday paper, financial planning, trips to Europe, jogging...
...A YEAR AGO I left a position at a research university to become the dean of an undergraduate school whose goal is to develop and integrate the intellectual, personal, and professional lives of women...
...it also gives space to act through darkness...
...WHILE THE bishops were meeting, thinking, discussing, voting, and praying together during Vatican II, I was beginning the community of I'Arche...
...I am an ordinary laywoman, not schooled in the great philosophical and theological debates...
...Religious life is still Someone It is the Jesus of my foremothers Catherine McAuley...
...paMoraJly sound solutions to the many practical problems facing families Emphasis should be on the need for mutual charity and unselfishness between spouses and for their children, and a generous and loving attitude towards the world around them Vocations The problem of declining vocations is a senous one for the church and is one which should be looked at by the laity and the clergy in order to get an idea of religious life which is different, perhaps, but as effective as the older model which may have been too rigorous and remote The pnest and religious for the post-Vatican 11 world need freedom from archaic rules, not to make their lives easier, but in order that they might be ab'e to be the type of religious that the church, the lay people, and the world need totally committed ambassadors of Chnst...
...when dishonest, a betrayal of something bigger than any revolution...
...Today, this applies to most ministries...
...And it is also interesting to me that I am happier in Italy than I am here...
...Genuinely human" was the face my uncles had shown me...
...Vatican II appears very much part of the times, part of that same wave of change that manifested itself so dramatically in the U.S...
...Unstrenuous though it may be, however...
...As a businessman, I am filled with admiration for the technological and scientific advances of the century and, indeed, of the last twenty years...
...But to set the record straight, I need to consider my many debts to our church's formal structures: they helped form the piety and faith of my Polish mother, the wisdom of my father, a scientist, who viewed his profession as an act of love, the mapping out of God's divine mystery...
...I was surprised to learn that my students found my lectures shot through w ith themes and examples that to them were clearly Catholic...
...When I hear the bitterness of those we are now obliged to call our separated brothers and sisters...
...Camille D'Arienzo SISTER CAMILLE D'ARIENZO...
...My family is part of at least two of these new communities...
...A freer spirit lived on our library shelves...
...against (he military build-up, and against those who deprive individuals of human rights Doing so sometimes involved standing up to both governmental and ecclesiaJ authorities Those who had not marched across the bridge provided by Vatican II were aghast Today the Vatican, its male constituency formed by other cultures, views religious with suspicion expressed in suppression Women's requests for recognition of equality and for expanded opportunities for ministerial service are often dismissed Even among many men of good will there is a physical commitment, however inadvertent, to an early version of Canon Law which classified women with "children and idiots" Last August both Archbishop Pio Laghi...
...Night...
...that rose and subsequently fell on the crest of the council...
...Religious congregations, inspired by Rome to examine their institutions against the spirit of Jesus and the spirit of their foundresses, entered a period of renewal...
...But I am hopeful that the synod, taking a lead from the American bishops, may endorse a "second coming" role for the church in which the Gospel will be preached "to the rich...
...If change was to come in the church, it had to come by fiat, even if the command was to "express yourself...
...Perhaps they can deal from there...
...I was immersed in buying, cooking, dirtying, cleaning, resolving crises, toCommonweal: 570 gether with men who had a mental handicap...
...There was a sense then that an education more vital and morally engaged was available on the streets, in the news, from the music pouring from the radio...
...he asked I mumbled something about aggiornamento, but thirteen yean later, when I married, it was in an Episcopalian church in Malibu My cousin had been more nearly nght about what was happening to us in the Catholic church than I had been...
...We attended Mass together at the cathedral in St...
...I am a Vatican II Catholic by generation as well as by choice That makes my notion of Catholicism quite different from that of my elders There is a sense in which the church is too easy for my generation We don't have as much of our parents' anger and guilt, but we don't give enough of a damn cither...
...So 1 was shocked in the late sixties when I looked back and saw what had happened to the church since Vatican II...
...To understand we must know where we arc: we need to identify ourselves...
...He came from and had done most of his pastoral work in Appalachia Vatican II caught him...
...There was a general sense back then of liberals milling about the Bastille without any real hope of getting in...
...Margaret Fax Icy...
...What a waste of resources...
...Prejudice, misunderstanding, and elitism diminished...
...couldn't it...
...Nor did Dorothy Day seek a commission from the Vatican envoy to the U.S...
...John Cogley, James O'Gara, and William Clancy did not ask the pope's or the archbishop of New York's permission to oppose the Red Scare of the 1950s...
...but mat victory, by God's grace, is possible...
...and the Share program, founded by Carl Shclton, a deacon in the San Diego diocese, which is providing food at minimal cost in exchange for service to the poor...
...A writer can approach religion from so many different aspects as a system of morals, a study of manners, a source of mystery...
...They have listened and know where they are headed...
...It is true the church can be invaded by the cultural values and fads of the moment...
...I became a Catholic...
...What lay ahead of me back in 1967 was a three-year sojourn at Harvard University, then as now a culturally Protestant institution The council-inspired changes I saw in the Catholic community of Cambridge...
...REUGIOUS LIFE is not something, but 'Someone.' " Sister Mary Mark McGann was responding to my first query into the meaning of a religious vocation...
...I know many who have not rejoiced in this "new" church...
...Along came Vatican II...
...The presence of grace does not entirely disappear: the occasional treasure will find his way in...
...is a writer and poet...
...head of a special pontifical commission to study U S religious, boycotted the meeting of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in New Orleans...
...Others suffered and changed and rejoiced as a result of Vatican II or gave up before Vatican II...
...A book like Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, for example, combines them all...
...I was in Catholic grade school, and our elders were in turmoil...
...What rules had become restraints to fidelity to the Gospel of Jesus...
...IT IS NOT, to my mind, a time for optimism...
...Thus, if the answer was "9 W," the question might be "Herr Wagner, do you spell your name with a V?" American Catholic women have been participants in such a game...
...From a new tolerance for apparently minor organizational adjustments, much can begin, and not least in Donegal...
...Eugene McCarthy did not ask the bishops if it would be all right to oppose the Vietnam War...
...They complain of being alienated...
...PRESIDENT KENNEDY visited Minnesota in early October of 1962, shortly before the opening of Vatican II...
...It is all of this I wish to pass to our children, as it has been passed to me through the church, old and new...
...She is the author of Christ Unmasked: the Meaning of the Life of Jesus in German Politics, and The Feminine Soul: The Fate of an Ideal (Beacon Press...
...To tell his story the writer appropriates sources of power from his own background...
...The oasis of the council was not the promised land...
...Economy...
...r let the congregation read a short meditation...
...1968...
...Mary Pat Kelly MARY PAT KELLY spent six years in the Sisters of Providence order in Chicago...
...In I9S0...
...Twenty-five years later, I am still a suburban housewife, but now I am the mother of seven young adult children, most of whom are finally finding their way out of the "nest...
...I have no nostalgia for the old order, the safe but stultifying fortress I knew as a child...
...It manages to survive each redecoration attempt...
...As church, we need "ordained" ministers...
...The Church in the Modern World...
...Did 1 have to raise my kids Catholic in order to be a communicant...
...I don't think it matters in the end...
...it was not Davis but rather John Cogley, a theologian among journalists and a journalist among theologians In a bnef statement published in the New York Times, in the late 1970s...
...I am delighted to be able to fly from New York to Danvin to Singapore to Brussels and home again in days...
...After years of honoring what I thought was an ecumenical and even a highly critical interpretation of that history vis-a-vis its political effects...
...I was just entering my senior year of high school...
...Final Payments also was a Book Critics' Circle Award nominee...
...Final Payments, am/The Company of Women, received the University of Rochester's Kafka Award...
...Is the solution to admit that we live in an age when the forms that we need are not available, and humbly to go back to the poetry, music, and architecture of another time...
...In order to understand the church as the People of God, it became necessary to study the Scriptures...
...And this I hold to be decisive for the history of the human race...
...it would be so for our sons...
...we found that our new freedom could not be cashed in for very much or for very long...
...for better or for worse...
...W'ho will be held responsible for "burying these talents...
...Through the "Kumbaya" era the statues still stood with their plaster halos, visionary eyes, and painted wounds in the little neighborhood churches...
...I am now more conservative than my instructor, on this issue at least...
...which sends tens of millions of dollars of food and medicine to starving people in Central and South America and in the war-torn areas of Lebanon and Africa, without regard to the religious beliefs of the recipients...
...Of the many that I have collected from thoughtful patients and friends, only one continues in its place of honor...
...That is therapy: restoring the natural...
...Peter Quinn PETER QUINN attended Manhattan College, was a VISTA volunteer in Kansas City, taught in a Catholic high school, received a graduate degree in Irish history from Fordham...
...But the legitimacy of this flesh and blood connection waned in high school...
...I miss Vatican II even more in retrospect: I miss not having been part of the Before and After...
...The nuns were upset The pillars of the parish vowed resistance Altar boys had just learned the Confiteor in Latin and now were told to forget it We had a pastor, in our little Ohio town, who was at first as confused as the rest of us...
...a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Warfare State, holding up the Gospel Book with death, like rings, on all its fingers...
...Just as I now wish I'd sent my children to a traditional school where teachers taught Latin and were inclined toward a little healthy repression instead of teaching all about the Black Panthers and all about how to be happy a futile enterprise I wish that my instructor, and every post-Vatican II Catholic I encountered at that time, would have been less liberal with me...
...One change followed another...
...Vatican II was an incredible expression of life, an amazing manifestation of the Sprrit of Jesus guiding his church...
...I know this sounds perverse...
...How...
...What I did not anticipate at that moment was how broad a path beyond the perimeters of the Catholicism of my youth my study of religion, undertaken in Chicago in the turbulent sixties, would open for me...
...Transatlantic Blues, a biography of Clare Boothe Luce, and a forthcoming portrait of his parents...
...We didn't have to dismiss automatically the beliefs of Protestants or Buddhists or Hindus...
...Smiling at me is the "pope of the people...
...I came to Catholicism by falling in love with it...
...We are on the move, if not always together, attempting in many ways to build the Kingdom...
...So it is not surprising that strange ideas evolve inside the church, because people are people and are sinners and have difficulty believing in the folly of the Gospels...
...What I needed to research my story was a 5...
...but as specifically Catholic publishers, we might as well have...
...Too few young men are training for the priesthood...
...I took on the new age with all the spirit and enthusiasm of a young man entering the world for the first time I wanted quick and sweeping changes, but these desires were somehow tempered by the consolation that I had a lifetime to sec them through Twenty years later...
...Most revolutions herald a coerced freedom...
...And yet (he council has had a genuine impact on me...
...But a little more proves to be enough...
...The Gospels and the church of Jesus are always in some ways counter-cultural...
...We don't use that any longer...
...We are drowning in our property, our programs, the banality of bad preaching...
...The laity seems more questioning, sometimes even querulous...
...In the spirit of the Vatican Council he challenged religious congregations to examine their lives...
...there were tunnels connecting monasteries to convents for you-knowwhat...
...What a relief not to have to believe that everyone else was benighted...
...Our nation worships false ginls, among them the nuclear genics...
...I liked smart dissidents...
...King was murdered...
...And then in the 1960s, under the fatherly guidance of Pope John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council rekindled the essential truth behind these great teachings while openly facing the future and offering a bold new vision for the church in the latter part of the twentieth century...
...At the beginning of the council we had on the throne of St...
...Authors could burrow just so far into a fresh line of thought before running into Big Papa frowning at the end of the tunnel...
...The Catholic church in America was becoming Americanized, all right...
...L'Arche communities have since been founded in many parts of the world...
...unalterable rituals and dogmas of Roman Catholicism...
...the Amcrishares Program, founded by a successful businessman...
...It was a hell of a year, anyhow...
...I MISSED Vatican II...
...A host of what might be called non-dogmatic changes deserved attention: such things as liturgy in the vernacular, the conception of the priesthood and the sacraments, ecumenism...
...This unfortunate tone spilled over into matters of doctrine...
...Poison gas at the pass...
...When I go to Mass these days...
...The speed and manner of communications were being recast dramatically...
...I'm aware of a split between what might be called an outer vision looking out, that is, at the world and an inner vision...
...It permits beautiful things, but it also allows difficult and destructive things...
...the commandments of the church, the sacraments, the rosary, and so forth All of these are part of the hentage of the Roman Catholic church and should not be denied to our children who need them today to maintain their moral balance in a world so devoid of absolutes Christian Family The Christian family of today needs to be encouraged and supported by the church through realistic...
...The world was starting over again, with our generation, with the anti-war movement, with the civil rights struggle, with the sexual revolution...
...Let's not kid ourselves who really rules the Catholic church, Elitist, clerical bureaucrats...
...we will be well adapted to our environment...
...Eventually he leaned over to me and, referring to the church so pleasantly described, said, "If it is in such good shape, I don't think I would call a meeting...
...What are bishops to say about war...
...Any politician can tell which way the wind is blowing...
...And like Star Wars, you spent the money but you didn't end up being all that ever-lovin' safe...
...If the Roman Pontiff had been a politician, he would have OK "ed contraception...
...Such things arc never said in the secular press, where the abortionist now offers his services and religion appears as either a menace or an irrelevance...
...I had long opposed such devices in the United States Senate, arguing that issues on which the Senate voted demanded an open and personal commitment...
...I DON'T KNOW whether the human race will last another 500 years...
...Barbara Grizzuti Harrison BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON1 s books include Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, Off-Ccnter, a collection of essays, and a novel...
...I wasn't paying much attentionI was living in India at the time and having babies and putting lots of flowers in lots of vases and studying Hinduismso Vatican II went over my otherwise-occupied head...
...We are the church: a royal priesthood, but still a pilgrim people...
...But if we manage to avoid blowing ourselves away with the Bomb, poisoning ourselves with toxic effluents, or erasing our identities, line by line, with genetic engineering that is to say, if there exist on this planet, 500 years from now, human beings who know they are human beings those human beings may well consider that they almost didn't make it...
...My response, therefore, is that of a practicing Catholic for seventy some years, of a father of nine children and fourteen grandchildren, and of a "busy" business executive...
...They don't need to be "fixed...
...Those of us who were altar boys were most immediately affected...
...The responsibility of witness and service is now that of the laity...
...I was also reshaping my identity as a Catholic, specifically as a woman who was Catholic, femaleness being the more primordial of these twin states...
...I continue to look back at that most important gift my 18 October 1985: 559 parents ever gave me, the anchor of my upbringing my faith and to the church, the agent of that faith...
...En route he questioned me as to why I was not carrying a missal...
...It was possible to believe that, when you were only seventeen, and it was 1968...
...1 envied believers and never tried to weaken their faith...
...From my days as a student in Rome, I had developed the skepticism of the Italians...
...He insisted that his "last rites'" be said in Latin, a sign that he had not been abandoned by the church of his youth...
...Their words and our experiences have not always matched, especially, as we well know...
...I am fascinated by my office computers turning out columns of figures in minutes...
...I applaud the use of English...
...and if we weren't blessed with a vocation to the priesthixRl...
...The politicians of the church are not the church...
...He invites me to live the beatitudes, to be meek and humble of heart like him, to be compassionate and forgiving...
...Is there an "ex-priest" or simply one who is not active...
...She has also published short stories, poetry, and criticism...
...I thought it was terrific...
...There are several possible explanations: (I) Women are, by nature, incurable optimists...
...WE WERE LINKS in an unbroken tradition...
...I enacted a bit of what 1 then foresaw Charles Davis became an Episcopalian while I was at Harvard His defense of his move, as I recall, was that partly because of the conciliar reforms nothing except papal authonty remained so distinctive of Roman Catholicism that you could not get it elsewhere in the Christian world Sacraments, spirituality, theology, asceticism, even celibacy everything could be had under other auspices, most notably, for an Englishman like himself, under those of the Church of England Davis seemed to me to have the best of every exchange He wasn't exciting, he was just irrefutable Charles Davis had not claimed that it was necessary to leave the Catholic church, only that it was not necessary to stay in it...
...Dead Latin scholarship has yielded to live vernacular inarticulateness...
...Certainly, the political structures of the world had changed in the years following World War II...
...I decry these evidences of a breakdown in the social, moral, and religious fiber of American life: permissive attitudes about premarital sex...
...I was twenty-three when Vatican II first convened...
...We must either perfect our wholeness, or repudiate it If we repudiate it, there is little to prevent us from erasing ourselves finally, function by function, line by line...
...This willingness of the church to take an active role in the events and issues that shape the quality of life for all people is an important example for all of us to follow...
...Parishes are far too large...
...I did believe that in many respects it was either unaware of the changes that were taking place in the world, or it was simply unresponsive...
...What ought one to expect from the mouth of a bishop on the subject of poverty...
...The church was falling into the trap of trying to justify herself in terms inappropriate to her nature...
...Vatican II reminded us that in the end there are three things that count: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love...
...Since we Americans suffered neither the historical fatigue nor the cynicism of Europeans, we expected our post-conciliar institutions to reflect their own "renewed" rhetoric...
...But the Holy Spirit isn't just anything that's blowing in the wind...
...In order to encourage "participation" of the laity, the church bureaucracy at some level had mandated the singing of hymns that were neither popular nor traditional...
...I was discovering the deep pain and suffering in the hearts of people with a handicap...
...their congregations, and the Vatican...
...an area which needs the attention of the church is the enormous challenge to bring the message of Christ to the world in a more effective way We need to sell our product more effectively hvery means should be used to meet this challenge, especially an organized and cooperative effort to make better use of television and the media Scattered and sporadic efforts are noi very effective People like Mother Angelica, who has accomplished so much single-handedly, should be encouraged and helped h\ the hierarchy And lastly...
...My friend's husband had terminal cancer...
...I thought the church made perfect sense as she was...
...US women, no longer willing to be treated like "children and idiots...
...His words were inscribed on the Vatican Pavilion: "Let the world know this: The church looks at the world with profound understanding, with sincere admiration, with an intention not of conquering it, but of serving it...
...My mother became a CCD teacher and got deeply involved in religious education...
...The American bishops' recently announced intention to draft a pastoral letter on women in society and in the church, attendant upon consultation with American Catholic women, signals an awareness of their need for questions...
...not fitting some standard that was half Victorian lady and half submissive child...
...which had already napalmed Vietnam, and which might nuke our sweet home planet into a smoking briquet...
...Though 1 could appreciate its ecumenical spirit, I'd have been more impressed at the time by some gesture that seemed more directly related to the civil-rights and anti-war moveCommonweal: 57S ments say, demoting Cardinal Spcllman to sub-deacon...
...Possibly the great optimism and openness of John XXIII over-personalized the council...
...This program, founded in the San Diego diocese, has spread to Mexico, Chicago, New York, and areas around Washington, D.C...
...The auxiliary spoke of the happy condition of the church, of its fortune to be having a council at which there were no great divisive issues...
...Because this situation still largely exists, the changes that the council brought about must be seen as superficial...
...limits have to be set...
...Hpiscopalianism has in me a lax practitioner and as fitful a thinker as Catholicism did...
...taught history at Manhattan College, became a speech writer for Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, and is now an assistant to the president of Time Incorporated...
...my life straddles neatly the pre- and post-conciliar church ()nc day my type will be considered a rare breed...
...In the twenty years since the council, much has happened...
...1 would have no place to hide I often consider myself a traveler At mid-life the journey appears much shorter now Like many others...
...Since 1980 he has been the editor of the National Catholic Reporter AT forty ONb...
...That's the way I grew up...
...Did I have to forgo sex (I was by this time divorced...
...If we all live like Jesus, there is an immense hope for the world and all together we become the church...
...As long as the church is run by male celibates, the promise of openness to life which the council represented remains a cruel lie...
...This is the patent-lcathcr-shocs, nuns-whackschool-kids syndrome dear to the heart of a certain kind of "Play the Enlightenment for Me Again Sam" liberal...
...I can remember when a Catholic would hesitate to attend even a wedding or funeral service conducted by a rabbi or a Protestant clergyman...
...has been made much easier to cultivate as a result of the council 1 feel a need to embrace church traditions (and the freedom to cast some aside...
...And as a result go their own ways...
...Nothing would change...
...having got what they wanted, left anyway...
...Her purity has become indecent...
...At the same time as Pope John opened the windows of the church, the flying buttresses that had supported and reinforced our Catholicism swayed and shook...
...or better...
...and combative readiness for a tussle and a laugh...
...I hadn't the stomach to seek an annulment on her behalf or otherwise have our decision scrutinized by the Los Angeles chancery office But this was not our first step toward the Episcopalian church...
...tor all the ambiguities being a Catholic woman presents, it is impossible not to be and feel Catholic...
...My old love was making a terrible fool of herself...
...I'm convinced that the Catholic heritage will survive even the most inept statement that might come from the forthcoming synod, and the even more inept reporting of it by the popular media...
...They may serve to encourage others to follow suit...
...In December 1965, when this document came out...
...He was a member of the State legislature and the Boston City Council, and is now the mayor of Boston...
...How could someone who had never been Catholic understand Hamlet, with its passionate drama of death and sacraments...
...Yet, I profess that I am disturbed by many of the changes in attitudes and mores in our present day society...
...My experience in l'Arche shows me that trust calls forth that which is deepest and most beautiful in each person...
...We are turning it into milk and cookies at three...
...Roth is a realist...
...Nancy Rambusch NANCY RAMBUSCH...
...Each must follow this conscience faithfully and must not be forced to act contrary to conscience...
...reporting for Commonweal, the National Catholic Reporter, and other journals...
...As I indicated, by the time of Vatican II, I no longer relied on an institution as a moral educator...
...In fact, I'd never met these stock figures of the ex-Catholic memoir...
...Head 'em off at the Fallopian tubes...
...I knew I needed to put the exact words that he was remembering into the story, but I could no longer recall them...
...Then came a document that perhaps most reflected the experience of the faith in the New World: the "Declaration on Religious Liberty...
...This is the vision of the Vatican II Catholic...
...The advocates of contraception, of course, had the entire current culture a thoroughly commercial culture in which the customer is always right on their side...
...In a post-conciliar world, it would have been called "the church as her people") As new ministries developed, women eagerly embraced them, only to discover that the "new" ministries were framed according to "old" categories...
...The answer was Yes...
...I drew a garish diagram of my inner waterways with all of the available barriers and plugs, jellies and jams, and state-of-the-art devices in place, and I was positively dismayed...
...Pass along the heritage of Catholic literature: from Chesterton's joy, to Flannery O'Connor's stones of the paradox of redemption, to Walker Percy's American existential, to Pe'guy writing of God's invocation to his daughter...
...We must remember that we arc a pilgrim people...
...Max Jamison...
...Although laypeople arc now serving in many different capacities, both in parishes and dioceses, the problem of too few priests remains critical and unmet...
...the tyrannies of the past the mystifications (as opposed to the actual mysteries), the hierarchical msensitivitics, the blindnesses to the realities of human life these were to be overthrown...
...It turned out that the right to publish the latest avantgarde theology was not the pearl beyond price we had thought it, in 1970s America, and one could only crank out so many books about ecumenism and the joys of pluralism...
...it also had to attend to the church's relationship with the world at large...
...A meeting was in order and it was held...
...Someone once said to me sadly, fearful as he was of change: "They have thrown out the baby with the bath water...
...In that women were vessels of reproduction, the question of birth control impinged upon them, but as spiritual and intellectual beings who had no voice, no representation well, the concept simply didn't occur...
...Suddenly there was no question that couldn't be asked...
...But it is always the selfless acts which I find most interesting When I spot 18 October 1985 567 them I explore them...
...In the face of incomprehension, scorn, and outright opposition on the part of let's face it nearly everybody, the pope held up before our eyes the inviolability of the human design...
...I read the comment of some smart dissident priestling to the effect that the new encyclical was "an intellectual embarrassment...
...He questioned me as to the other impediments and seemed disappointed that there were no legal knots to be untangled He married them in a Mass at their house...
...It is no mean task to conduct a revolution under the imprimatur system, and one recalls with wonderment the quaint ruses we and our rivals went through to get our books printed in friendly dioceses...
...One cannot tolerate one person leading another into a world of illusion, confusion, and death...
...No idea that couldn't be entertained...
...I think, "Why me...
...however, concern for my father precluded (he realization of that dream...
...The process starts simply enough...
...virginity, as an ideal, was nonsense because the whole idea of consecration and sacrifice was alien...
...I would mention here Father Bruce Ritter's Covenant House, which serves as a refuge for so many lost, hurting, young street people...
...And a little bit of Latin the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei, the Gloria could be let back in...
...Economy which issued a letter in response to the bishops' pastoral, entitled, "Toward the Future: Catholic Social Thought and the U.S...
...a syndicated columnist, and a commentator on CBS Radio's Spectrum...
...The insights of John McKenzie and Raymond Brown replaced Cecil B DeMille images in my imagination...
...I spent fifteen years outside the church before I came back...
...No matter what they do in Rome, we must begin celebrating the unadulterated Mass again, without add-ons, including, in most cases, sermons...
...It invites me to look at Jesus, to let myself be called and loved by him, to follow him in the paths of poverty...
...Contraception was supposed to prevent abortion...
...It calls me to the fundamental message of the Gospels...
...As the months and years passed by, I began also to discover their incredibly deep insights into fundamental questions such as love and hate, guilt and forgiveness, death and resurrection...
...He founded I'Arche, a community for mentally-handicapped youths and adults in France...
...Having grown up in rural Minnesota, I was used to a variety of languages: Latin and a smattering of Greek in the Mass, German for the rosary and for hymns, English for the stations of the cross and children's hymns...
...What was the turning point...
...Foreign Bodies (Doubleday...
...Jean Vanier JEAN VANIER has devoted his life to caring for the wounded members of society, the handicapped, the elderly, prisoners, and the lonely...
...The fifties are as hard to describe to one's grandchildren or rather the grandchildren one would have had if times hadn't changed as the Age of Modesty is...
...However...
...I, unaware of their choices, had become increasingly attracted to the sacrifice, the physical trappings, and the goodness of the Sisters of Mercy who taught me...
...Communism was no longer merely a theory of political and social organization, to be challenged solely intellectually and morally...
...I wouldn't know Isaiah or Jeremiah or Micah...
...Then I read that women with my kind of medical history who were on the Pill could end up with a stroke...
...The changes came slowly at first...
...And who agreed with me...
...we wiil be spared any danger of martyrdom...
...Yet during those years I have discovered a need for a kind of freedom that Vatican II did not explicitly herald...
...Jesus acted in the same way...
...If my grade school religious education featured a flashcard approach to doctrine...
...Trust is the way Jesus treats us...
...Those years have also marked a considerable period of growth for me as an individual...
...While the assassination of John Kennedy ended forever the innocent beliefs of the past, the tough-minded, brilliantly thought out work of Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Kiing, Francis Durwell (like the hard-edged lyrics of John Lennon) called us from despair...
...of a sacred liturgy...
...I am proud of the bishops' recent stands...
...THE RESPONSE of a layman to the question of how he has been affected by changes in the American church in the twenty years since Vatican II will necessarily be colored by his own experience with the Catholic faith from childhood to the present and by his current position...
...So was mystification (some of it), and fakery (the more outright kinds...
...and a manner that was an uncanny mix of careful deference for the Jesuit seminarian I then was...
...The English liturgy had taken on the national vices of shallow ness and crassness...
...And in Vatican II...
...And besides," I opined solemnly...
...At the same time, I never quite fell out of love with Catholicism It was so beautiful...
...As a child I knew the human face of the church through my uncles who are priests...
...The internal democratic process and the external exposure Commonweal: 574 brought many religious (o a maturity impossible to achieve before "Activist" sisters marched on Selma...
...1982...
...Others rejected the isolation of the "woman's separate sphere" philosophy which had kept women at home with their children, out of the "real" world's traffic, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution...
...I had moved to Los Angeles, not a stronghold of Catholicism, and taken a job at the University of California Press in which none of my close associates was Catholic and religion as a whole was just one segment of a diversified publishing program When I met my future wife in 1979 and we started attending St Aldan's Episcopal church in Malibu...
...calling the church to hope, to take risks, to trust, and to have a greater belief in Jesus...
...In Catholic high school and college during the council, I remember almost no discussion of the arguments raging in Rome...
...Marilyn Chapin Massey MARILYN CHAPIN MASSE Y is dean of the College of New Rochelle...
...I spent four teaching at Loyola University of Chicago and two as an editor in the Catholic publishing program at Doubleday Most of my associates in these places were Catholics, and my ties to them were the stronger part of my ties to the church By the end of the 1970s, however...
...It was ours...
...never untroubled...
...A greater emphasis on God as a loving, forgiving father, if not a direct result of the council, seems to me is enhanced by movements that were an outgrowth of the council: the Charismatic Movement, the Renew program, the resurgence of devotion to the Blessed Mother, evidenced by renewed participation in Father Patrick Peyton's Family Rosary, the scriptural rosary, etc...
...In Roth's work it is the individual's responsibility to create a private moral system...
...Mary Claire Kennedy asked me what did / think of Humanae Vitae, I threw up my hands and pronounced in tones of exasperated common sense...
...Bishops arc more pastoral...
...There were special circumstances in 1980 My wife, raised a Lutheran, had been married before to a Catholic and at a nuptial Mass...
...Catholics in general have become more socially concerned...
...At the center of the church I love is an unembarrassed and uncompromising insistence on transcendence, of which virginity, personified in Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin, was an important sign...
...Martin Luther King spoke out...
...The church's exaltation of virginity answers to something deep in our nature...
...My "partner" (as the family planning literature called him) was a genuinely good guy, and I was carefree and pharmacologically infertile...
...For all of us...
...Hdmund Pellcgrino noted recently in Health Progress that if the witness of the church is to survive in the health ministry, the "laity must play the primary, and in some instances, the sole role...
...I had been married eleven years, had two children, and was organizing a national educational enterprise serving preschool children...
...and we are losing the precious heritage of the Mass...
...We moved before they reached school age...
...My guess is that they are rooted in the "old days...
...However, that meant I had to take time to listen to them...
...It might be hard for me to conceive of it at all...
...One (predominantly Huropcan) was that the revolution had already happened, and that without at least this much ratification, intellectually honest people would have had no choice but to leave...
...That extends to this generation's priests, who have brought us the happy chat Mass, and a degree of facile egocentrism as embarrassing as it is debased What I most love about the Vatican II church is its social conscience What most disappoints and confuses me is the lack of rigor and depth in the faith of persons my own age What I miss most in the contemporary church of this country is a sense of holiness...
...I was a single-issue fanatic against the war in Vietnam...
...Twenty years after the council, committed Catholic women still seem to hope that an institutional church which has excluded them from its ruling councils, will alchemically reflect their "presence" in the shaping of both the American church's present and its future agendas...
...On the other hand, maybe I have a pathological need for rules because of my experience with the Witnesses...
...John's aggiornamento is not yet, and perhaps never will be...
...There at the Chapcl-of-the-Pincs, my sisters and I set out the chalice, held the paten, and (the greatest thrill) rang the bells at the consecration...
...It is a ramshackle place where the roof may occasionally leak, and the walls may be cracked, and the people upstairs arc sometimes overbearing, but it is home nonetheless, the context of my life...
...You know, the Digger...
...Traditionally, that attention has been given to where women ought to be In the early days of television...
...1 seem to have retained enough of my novitiate earnestness to want a little more than that...
...His many books include Nixon Agonistes, Bare Ruined Choirs, Confessions of a Conservative, Explaining America: The Federalist, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment...
...Being a good sister meant "radiating joy...
...I won't say that when we did get into the Bastille we found nothing there...
...Liturgical reform came, in the mid-sixties, to St...
...I came to him with a problem...
...But, above all, things are growing and evolving within the church because the church is the Body of Christ and the Spirit of Jesus is continually guiding it...
...What causes me pain is this: What right did I have to luck out (if luck is the word...
...At first, I fared pretty well...
...I dipped into some of the modish Catholic writers, and found something worse than simple heresy (a word that wasn't used any more): a general evasiveness...
...It tells us that virtue means a hard daily struggle for each of us...
...The mystery was not opacity...
...and Caryl...
...from rules and expectations that cripple our spirits and personalities Along with the loss of naivetes which an intensive study of religion almost inevitably precipitates, this recognition makes it somewhat difficult to talk about a Catholic identity or seamless development of faith...
...Steve Allen played a character called the Answer Man...
...For myself, I search out voices of wisdom, following those who have extended their lives to the poor and needy...
...Priests have learned that they do not have to say the Office...
...We are conditioned by a culture of excessive individualism which has isolated our vision...
...However, in the world of the Slavic and Hispanic neighborhoods I often write about, leaving out churches would be like leaving out taverns...
...My older daughter, eleven, is already asking about her place within the institutional church...
...Perhaps, the crisis will continue until there is no other option...
...Martin Marty's living room, captures that course Dr...
...We now face the exciting challenge of getting on with our study of the- relipiom experience of our modern world...
...Stuart Dybek STUART DYBF.K...
...Vatican II's commitment to tolerance and the church's restated commitment to respecting the dignity of every individual led to a greater understanding and acceptance of other faiths and cultures...
...Though there was much talk about collegiality...
...you could believe or disbelieve, but I didn't see how you could really feel that anything vital was lacking...
...So I came to Catholicism in a somewhat unusual way...
...I suggest that the turning point will have been this: the Commonweal: 572 publication, in the Year of Our Lord l968...
...I do not recall that I thought the church was in great trouble...
...Brother Thomas, the principal, told us that on the first day of high school, in the early 1960s...
...In fact, according to the document, the Spint could be heard in all the religions of the world...
...As a pastoral theologian, I am excited about the church of 1985, even with its shortcomings...
...It was a reminder that the church is not above all a human institution which can be governed by good discipline, clear definitions, and rigid laws, but rather it is the Body of Jesus, inspired and held together in a dynamic unity and guided by Jesus himself and his Holy Spirit...
...It sounded as if it had been left over from a provincial hootenanny...
...Religious men and women were those "who set out to follow Christ with greater liberty...
...So, as the council ended, I was filled with hope about the laity's role in the church, about the possibility of some positive statement on birth control (in the five years we had participated in Cana, the "party line" on family size had switched to "responsible family planning" amid rumors of a possible change in the church's teaching on artificial contraceptives), about collegiality at all levels of the church, about ecumenism, and about my theological studies...
...But he will find his way into a roomful of men half blind by prejudice...
...It was not a dogmatic council but a pastoral one...
...teaches in the radio and television department at Brooklyn College, co-authored, with Edgar Willis, a textbook...
...And if the opportunity is lost or misused...
...As a student I had been greatly impressed at the sensitivity shown towards the rights of workers by the church in Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum the great encyclical in which economic justice became a guiding light of church teaching at a time when other great institutions in the world were far less sympathetic...
...The rcsull is more prosaic, but honestcr...
...It was always a comfort to me to know that the Catholic church was still there...
...Mary Durkin MARY DURKIN is a pastoral theologian and author whose books include Marital Intimacy: A Catholic Perspective...
...I graduated from the eighth grade in 1965...
...obtained my doctorate in June 1974, the only one of my 1965 hopes, aside from ecumenism, to come to fruition...
...In I'Arche, I discovered that at times we need to be firm...
...IN 1961...
...Aw, geez, Claire, if we don't have contraception, we'll end up with abortion...
...In the scientific world, major new advances were appearing with startling rapidity...
...looking across, stare at stark hunger throughout the world...
...was a signer of last year's New York Times statement calling for dialogue on the issue of abortion...
...Vatican II paved the way to our discovery that "religious" issues, not institutional and theological issues, must be addressed if the church is to be responsive to the world...
...the gradual withering away of clericalism...
...It is with my wife and three children I feel most called to participate After that...
...That females are a misbegotten breed...
...John XXIII...
...Yes, I was persuaded by its truth and evidence...
...So what was I to conclude...
...The old neighborhoods, the political machines, the immigrant identity all seemed to crumble together...
...but the more you penetrated, the more you found ahead of you...
...For me...
...Allen Ginsberg celebrated the "Prague Spring" with flowers in his hair...
...To answers, clerically supplied, they were expected to confect questions and lifestyles that "fit...
...Bear witness in the world...
...I was involved both in child rearing and career building at the time the council started...
...This may be, in my personal history, merely the approach of middle age, but I don't think so...
...Humanae Vitae is an intellectual embarrassment...
...There's no going back...
...Priests were running off to get married...
...The church's insensitivity to questions of divorce and homosexuality, its obsessional closedmindedness on the subject of abortion closes its doors to those who, living in the modem world, live with the complex realities of modern sexuality...
...Wilfrid Sheed wilfrid SHEED was Commonweal "5 drama critic and.book editor...
...In the name of truth and God, they control even popes...
...By 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade, about half of my female friends at least, of those whom I knew well enough to know such an intimate thing had had abortions...
...Even there one sensed hints of places where established dogmatic theology and moral teachings were being challenged...
...This renewed mission of service to those in need demonstrated the wisdom and strength of the church...
...In my case the unity of messages resulted in an untypically active career as a Ph.D...
...Like Star Wars, a lot of capitalist creeps invested a lot of money in developing and promoting these things...
...Where arc we headed...
...The result satisfies no one, but is irreversible...
...The ice cream parlor, dance floor, bowling alley, or beach afforded social environments for us...
...But it is 18 October 1985: 577 clear we are not the same church of twenty years ago...
...For me it was...
...They molded my formal Catholic education during which I was passed from prayerful, selfless nuns to eager and educated Jesuits, and through a host of other religious who ushered me along the way...
...So 1 know that my Catholic identity is still there in my intellectual work, but as a scholar I have grown comfortable with its being implicit...
...But the average Catholic is denied the aesthetic riches of the church...
...Both canceled their scheduled speaking appearances because a third speaker...
...Paralleling the self-gift my marrying classmates gave their husbands, I would henceforth be docile, obedient, and faithful to Jesus through his church...
...Cogley said that he had not so much converted to Episcopalianism as discovered that the positions he had slowly come round to were positions Episcopalianism bad held all along I wanted to hear more...
...5) All of the above...
...Now, we seem to learn very little but self-expression...
...of the encyclical Humanae Vitae...
...Each person must sec and recognize the demands of the Divine Law through his/her own conscience...
...let the Mass simply be...
...These changes have not been universal, consistent, or uni-directional...
...This came home to me at Harvard Divinity School, now itself peopled by multitudes of Catholics, when those Catholics responded so positively to my lectures on the history of Christianity...
...Ther* is always a period of confusion during and after a change in attitudes...
...In addition, by 1974 the women's movement should have made it easier for women in the church...
...As the sermon went on, the president began to drum with his fingers on the railing...
...We call it because it is progress...
...My parents were both lapsed Catholics...
...However, the seeds of Vatican II had been planted long before...
...they were in the hearts of many...
...Eventually I saw that the battle within the American church was really revolving around birth control...
...So when, early in the school year...
...I don't know how I earned my privilege, if privilege it is...
...But I can't imagine anyone falling in love with such a church...
...Might I still believe in a woman's right to what 1 then called "reproductive freedom...
...Six months later I was received in wedding gown and veil as a "Bride of Christ" as my father wept in the first pew...
...The reason I wish this is that what I once regarded as my great good luck coming into the church at a time of opening and loosening is now a source of pain and bewilderment to me...
...I simply lost my faith or failed to keep faith...
...lay and religious alike, Vatican II had called us to become theologians and ecumenists at that famous and intellectually rich Protestant divinity school...
...I could understand leaving the church, but not defacing her especially from within...
...Living for Ireland, on the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP) of Northern Ireland...
...it was laughter and loneliness, and social retardation...
...Free to start over, I left the Bronx and joined vista, taught in a settlement house in Kansas City, mingled with people from all over America, young men and women right out of college, fired with the same enthusiasms, certain that with the right technology, with the right amount of innocent good will Commonweal: 564 and determination, or with a wisdom found only in the preindustrial Orient, we could remake the world...
...I am hooked I have studied and flirted with other paths, but have never strayed far I can no longer imagine leaving the Catholic church It simply has too many arms...
...namely, that most of the Christian churches have preserved most of the Christian patrimony...
...I was raised in an Irish Catholic household by a mother and father who taught me (hat a deep faith in God was the most valuable thing my forebears brought with them from Ireland, where due to colonial misrule they knew economic and religious discrimination in their own country...
...Your thoughts are not the thoughts of God but the thoughts of men...
...The excitement that I felt as a teenager, when Pope John said he was opening the windows, has vanished...
...It doesn't exist as an issue in the American church...
...I must say that by my seventeenth birthday (hat deck had long since been tossed to the winds...
...French, etc...
...In particular, our sexual design (with its pleasurability and its fertility and its bond-ability) is not sick...
...Faith in God was one of the few things they had to bring with them to America, a possession which they and my parents clung to with pride and devotion...
...He headed the President's Private Sector on Cost Control and was a member of the Lay Commission on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S...
...Sisters soon discovered the enrichment was mutual...
...They dislike guitars and folk music...
...in the area of human sexuality...
...how to be of service while on the move I have heard some call us pilgrims, and others nomads Whatever...
...Not, of course, that these are mutually exclusive categories...
...Not "Our Church...
...It remains to be seen, in my opinion, whether the church can transcend a historical political structure from which women have been excluded and live up to the promise of Vatican II to affirm the full potential of humanity...
...We shall grow out of it...
...It clearly demonstrates that Vatican II's implicit call for action continues to be heard just as loudly today...
...My own lament is the constant tinkering with the Mass...
...The advanced theological degree programs at the Catholic universities in Chicago only offered late afternoon and early evening courses geared to the convenience of the religious teachers in the Catholic schools, so I thought I would have to wait until my family was older...
...Should it have been...
...Nuns were kicking up their heels...
...Pius X parish in Baltimore when a liberal priest, well-meaning, muddlehcadcd, patrolled the aisles shouting at people who did not sing the English hymns...
...Renewal" was the operative word...
...Since our children were not yet of school age, we were relatively unaffected by our pastor...
...More than anything I'd ever felt, I wanted to know, love, and serve him...
...Everything would be compulsory: jackets, ties, short hair, silence in the hallways, retreats, confession, rosary beads, the courses we took...
...As my mind grew, so did the difficulty of "taking it on faith...
...So much for perspective...
...Again, we find that our geographical parish is not to our liking, but rather than move to another location, we simply have changed parishes...
...It was a time of uncertainty for nations and individuals alike...
...Protestants since Coleridge have been misreading it as a psychological study...
...In three months her husband would probably be dead...
...After those wonderfully enriching years of what I see as the production of theory, I have, in a sense, come home, drawn by a subterranean stream flowing from the revelations of Vatican II, to be dean in a college with a strong Catholic heritage and an equally strong commitment to access in education...
...but I was also drawn by its dignity and beauty, enraptured by its inexhaustible traditions and rituals, which deepened its mystery by the very bounty of its self-disclosure...
...Houslander It is the Jesus of Mary, the first altar on which he lay It is the Jesus who drew the four American churchwomen to El Salvador where they suffered "the same fate as the poor " Carrying on the work of Jesus, those women and the poor people to whom they ministered embraced a post-Vatican II relationship with the Someone of religious life Jesus, who said...
...That, of course, is the need for the freeing of women, myself included...
...you can retool the economy and redesign society...
...at the dawn of Roman Catholicism's new age...
...And they may look back in history to ask themselves, "What was the single most important event which saved the human project on this planet our human dignity even, our human identity...
...not of condemning it, but of strengthening and saving it...
...Well, Humanae Vilac wasn't any kind of turning point for me certainly not at the time it was promulgated...
...After all...
...The notion that formal beauty is somehow beside or even against the point, a notion that has characterized the wrongheaded populism of so many post-conciliar liturgists, leads one inevitably to the question: what, then, is the point...
...I noted the hcmorrhoidal looks on the faces of the Vatican Curia...
...A blurring of the borders and a diminution of the gravity of border-crossings could then have been precisely what the benign, sagacious old pontifex had in prospect...
...a Christian ethics professor at Yale...
...It is not enough for liberals in the church to congratulate themselves that they ignore or defy the hierarchy on the subject of birth control...
...Virtually every social, political, scientific, and religious institution on earth was for it...
...The priority of conscience: a distinctly post-conciliar insight...
...When I was invited to reflect on how Vatican II had affected me, I realized that the ferment of the council during my own undergraduate years, more than anything else, had shaped the course and the integration of my own intellectual, personal, and professional life...
...It's interesting to me that Vatican II has less apparent effect among the faithful in that country than it does here...
...Being young, healthy, and heterosexual, and being, within the year, free of any adults with pretensions of governing me in loco parentis...
...Having been a very Protestant sort of Catholic...
...If we're sick or injured, we're to restore what's natural and healthy...
...6) None of the above...
...The official church's teaching on women serves to reinforce the anti-woman bias wherever it exists...
...Some Catholics are nostalgic for the old theological rigidities, even after or especially after they have rejected them...
...We are each called to love and serve God with talents generously bestowed "Brotherhood" with Christ includes even non-Catholics and non-believers...
...if the council was a council of trust, it did not in any way suppress authority which is always necessary...
...The sixties were the time of "relevance...
...is the director of the Family Practice Center and associate director of the Rutgers Medical School Family Practice Residency Program at St...
...Developing it in good faith can cause unrest, but peace of mind as well...
...I felt no bitterness whatever toward the church...
...It had been so for our fathers...
...If I was imitating anyone as I edged toward Episcopaliarusm...
...We are not living in a time in which the public arts flourish: music, spoken poetry, architecture, for example those forms in which the religious genius has so fully expressed itself are at a low point in their history...
...The last conciliar document...
...Both my closest friend and closest cousin had decided to enter religious communities...
...Let our celebrants learn the language of quietude...
...Once, we learned irrelevant things very well...
...What came through was a sense of promise, openness, and possibility as the church posited its presence in the modern world and acknowledged a willingness to learn from that world...
...And, as I was soon to discover when I went job hunting, it is not only church leaders who have problems with the "new woman...
...Love and freedom were the focus of the decree on the renewal of religious life...
...We don't need to be "cured" of it...
...I have kept my honor bright since 1980 by not reading Hooker, the Anglican Aquinas...
...Evaluating ministries meant changing some...
...In the mid-1960s, as a probation officer assigned to the Superior Court system in Roxbury, I worked with young people from Boston's poorest communities...
...As long as the American church keeps Marian devotion furtive, we will get along famously with our neighbors...
...I felt even more strongly about this when it came to matters on which I anticipated the council might act...
...Fathers and mothers read the lessons and ""commentated.'" The people were on the altar and everyone could ring the bells...
...That was 1965, a year of protests and marches, a good year for music even on AM stations...
...18 October 1985: 581...
...1 sense I may be cheated from these hopes, but again feel consoled that a good number of us...
...few people understood what it meant, and the hierarchical, clerical culture was not eager to give up its power...
...Things could, for the first time, be examined, not by some specialized office in the Vatican whose name, even, was incomprehensible, but by the ordinary layperson, without, perhaps, the intervention and translation of "Father...
...No way...
...Renewal meant restructuring...
...In any case...
...I do not think the special synod of bishops can turn back much of what has happened, reverse or turn aside some of the strong currents now running in the church, such as the changing concept of the priesthood, including the issue of the ordination of women...
...As a religious creature weaned on Vatican II, I am also most comfortable today w ith a more implicit than explicit identity as a Catholic...
...They have become in their "high" manifestations increasingly self-referential: important, therefore, to a limited audience...
...Possibly too much was expected...
...When I sprang myself from the sect (or, to give credit where credit is due, and to give me the benefit of the doubt, when God sprang me), I thought of the church (when 1 thought of it at all) as the place where sexual repression and/or sexual titillation took place via the confessional...
...there were few human tics to the Catholic church left for the breaking...
...Or did the council perhaps begin from the same sort of observation on the part of the younger Roncalli that later would move Charles Davis...
...As a senior in an all girls' boarding school, my romantic involvements real and imaginary were confined to weekends and holidays, and monitored by one very protective father...
...A growing number of our teachers left the order, and soon you might run into them on the street or subway, men whom you were used to seeing in black robes with stiff white bibs in the shape of the Ten Commandments now in suits or dungarees, some of them pushing baby carriages...
...Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo" in the hearts of the followers of Christ...
...in fact, ignored, is the bias against women that quickly becomes a bias against sexuality as well...
...if it had not been for my experiences inside Protestant scholarly and worship communities...
...When I became a writer and started going to literary parties (something I don't do much anymore...
...They had no place within the body of the family, society, and the church...
...I had to trust and appreciate them...
...There is too little mystery and too much bureaucracy...
...Episcopalianism is not the path of least resistance for me or for anyone...
...Teach them theology and teach their teachers...
...This post-conciliar church is more disorderly than the organization I was raised in...
...It's-Not-the-Act-but-the-full-contcxt-andconsequcnces-of-the-Act...
...What was there to believe in...
...Catholics who lived through an epic turning point I came of age in l%5...
...The Good News is critically relevant to our lives today...
...Eugene McCarthy EUGENE McCarthy, a long-time contributor, is the former senator from Minnesota and presidential candiate in 1968- He is the author of...
...He had a tale for every rock and pool...
...when I see other men and women particularly women in pain over the very issues that I was granted such latitude on (birth control, for example...
...and was present at several of the sessions, in between visits to weather-damaged neighborhoods and shelters for those made homeless by Hurricane Elena His expressions of solicitude for the women meeting in his diocese, his frequent reiteration of his personal esteem and the gratitude of the church for their dedication and committed service, provided healing of the painful rebuff afforded by his brother bishops...
...While the council was deliberating in Rome, a women's movement was gathering strcrigth in America...
...Nor has the establishment of the permanent diaconatc provided a solution...
...We cannot do that with preachers as dumb to theology and the world as the Reverend Falwell...
...No, the baby is still there and the bath water is still dirty...
...I'd never suffered at the hands of tyrannical priests or sadistic nuns of the sort disaffected Catholics are always talking about...
...Commonweal: 566 1 would respectfully suggest (hat the areas the church should concentrate on might be Education To educate our children in the tenets of the faith into which they were baptized...
...His theme often has to do with the individual's need to define himself against aspects of his background that are at once dear and stifling...
...The faithful need to "hear" the Good News speak to their experiences...
...My answers are inadequate Are my children to face unnecessary barriers...
...This pilgrim church, trying to reconcile change and tradition, timeless truth and the vagaries of human metaphor, is my home...
...and observations of the current scene, social, economic, and political...
...Over time, following the example set by the participants of Vatican II, I looked within myself and then at the world around me...
...I was vaguely uneasy that I was putting chemicals into my body every day that I'd hesitate to put into my compost pile...
...Reacting in one passage to the aloofness of "religious" people, she observed: "It would be well if those seeking perfection ceased trying so painstakingly to learn how not to love and learnt instead how to love well...
...special witnesses to the world of the love which G<>d has for each one of us Vocations will come when priests and religious themselves truly understand the gift of love they are for this loveless world The growth of Mother Teresa's order is just the normal reaction of dedicated young Chnstians to a call from God that is clear and compelling Evangelism Lastl...
...But if we perfect our wholeness, we will hold up before the eyes of the world the image and likeness of God...
...He ate with the publicans and sinners and was criticized for that...
...The altar boys are now bit players in the Mass, and some of them are girls...
...The church faces the challenge of recovering and reaffirming the rich symbolism and ritual practice of what scholars have called the feminine, which abounded in its devotions to Mary, while affirming the equal humanity of women and men through internal political change...
...At the center are values of love and reconciliation, the search for justice and peace, notions of human family and personal dignity, the good news of God's unending concern...
...a Catholic wedding like Catholic practice as a whole was worlds away from its Episcopalian counterpart In 1980...
...But human beings as such in our minds, our souls, our bodies, ourselves are not to be redesigned...
...He started to read and rethink He became an enthusiast Here was the living church, the church embracing the world, the theology of hope and of witness...
...Some, of course, did...
...I spend considerable time trying to figure out how best to fit in...
...Anyway, when Humanae Vitae came out, it wasn't hard to see which side I'd be on...
...Although I did not hand-pick the religious instructorI walked off the street into Saint Patrick's one day...
...However, Vatican II demonstrated to all the willingness of the Catholic church to reach out to other faiths and deal with the issues of humankind in the modern world...
...By now I was in a novitiate...
...It gives space also for people to be themselves, to vent their pain, and their anger...
...Women in the church I saw largely as outsiders, subsidiary and subservient, considered less as persons than as agglomerations of ascribed categories and roles: the lay...
...I sometimes feel I am experiencing liturgy as burlesque My personal summary of the changing nature of the church since Vatican II is to say that somehow things went ironically and dolefully awry, that the right things in Catholicism were lost or de-emphasized and the wrong things kept and emphasized How is it that the pope and the clergy matter as much as ever, and the liturgy less...
...For, it was only if I loved and trusted them sufficiently that they would be at ease enough to express 'hemselvcs and thus help me to discover the presence of Jesus in them...
...Gradually, our responses to the prayers of the celebrant were cut back, anglicized, turned over to a reticent congregation that spoke with far less clarity or enthusiasm than we who prided ourselves on articulating a Latin we barely understood...
...Laypeople must now carry Christ not only to the secular marketplace but to Catholic institutions themselves...
...In addition, I now have a doctorate in theology, something I never Commonweal: 560 would have considered possible prior to the council...
...I'm not especially anxious to examine the psychic and emotional sources for what I write...
...Her most recent novel is Men and Angels (Random House...
...The Feast of Love: Pope John Paul II on Human Intimacy...
...The emergence of these groups is a real sign of hope...
...It was a call to action...
...Brother Patrick reiterated it all to us in the only religion class I remember him teaching on the coming council, the gathering of the Church Fathers in Rome that would reaffirm the ancient...
...He returned to Vietnam in 1970...
...I felt confirmed in the vision of Christian community that I was called to live...
...Ground Fog and Night, Gene McCarthys's Minnesota, and Complexities and Contraries: Essays of Mild Discontent (Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich...
...I FIT WERtNT for the Second Vatican Council, I would not be among those asked to give an opinion in this journal...
...Joseph Sobran JOSKPH SOBRAN is a senior editor of the National Review...
...What we were seeing was a huge theological meltdown...
...Paul...
...Last year's draft pastoral letter on economic justice released by the United States Catholic bishops is an example of the church's readiness to confront some of the most important issues facing us...
...Writing against the background of World War II, she portrayed war as the continuing Passion of Christ...
...I see now the transition for me from old church to new could not have been more natural or exciting A personal assessment of the extraordinary synod requires perspective and a confession of sorts Let me start with the confession: I love the Roman Catholic church, recognize its essentially unchanging character, have willingly embraced it in both prc-concihar and post-conciliar forms although my love...
...It was much easier for the average prcconciliar Irish Catholic to think of becoming an atheist, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jew...
...In this somewhat larger context, there were always two ways of looking at it that I found equally persuasive...
...I never anticipated that there would be a time when my family would not need my constant attention...
...Garry Wills GARRY WILLS taught classics at Johns Hopkins and is presently Henry R. Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University...
...Gradually, disillusionment gave way to understanding, love, and acceptance...
...Now that I think about it, I realize that I am here because I still want to try to make real in the world, and not merely in books, the promise of liberation that broke open my world twenty years ago...
...I understand the spirit of Vatican II...
...There are times I wish for more boundaries, simply put, more rules...
...Later, it seemed an easy transition from that to an appreciation for the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe...
...We will continue on the journey...
...represent a conundrum for the Roman church The Vatican, unable to comprehend the pluralism, diversity, or participatory nature of the U S church as a whole, targets women for the kind of control a/forded classes of people in marginalized societies What has all this to do with me...
...The difficulty of not accepting a married clergy rests with the celibates not us...
...Injustices abound, even within our own church...
...and the guy on duty took me onI felt as if I were going to a progressive school...
...I at first tended to think of Vatican II as primarily a publishing event...
...Taking one course a quarter...
...Cherish the Mass and the sacraments...
...Throughout the sixteen documents produced by the council are the common threads of the centrality of the family, the wrongness of discrimination, and the Christian's duty to help build a just and peaceful world...
...Palma E. Formica PALMA E FORMICA...
...In other words, what is needed is a renewal of the mission of the church a mission which Vatican II has already inspired, but which needs to be intensified using every resource possible within the church, especially the close cooperation of clergy and laity and the genuine use of their particular expertise...
...We are a pilgrim people...
...I began my theological studies in early 1965 before the closing of the council, "inspired" by Hans Kung's comment on the need for lay women theologians made during a lecture to Cana Conference workers in 1964...
...I began to see a great wisdom hidden in their hearts...
...ALL REVOLUTIONS arc betrayed, every historical promise compromised...
...demanded solidarity with the whole human family...
...To welcome the poor in their brokenness is to welcome Jesus...
...A moment in space and time, a gathering twenty years ago in Dr...
...in part, as the notion of a common priesthood We are meant to do more than establish parish councils and self-appointed commissions of lay activists I thought we were supposed to be freed from hierarchical churchincss Isn't the Luchansl a statement of fundamental human equality far transcending Jefferson's'' IB October 1985 575 I am, apparently, one of the few readers of the bishops' recent statements on war, peace, and economics who thought them good...
...The Sovereign Woman: Her Presence in the Literature of Ireland...
...Without the council they would be gone forever...
...I am never sure which way it goes: does a bias against women engender a bias against sexuality, or is it the other way around...
...I marvel at their truculence I marvel that they refuse to consider the readmission to the active ministry those who are ordained but have married...
...Not only could we study the Scriptures, with the "Decree on Ecumenism," we could draw on the understanding of other Christians...
...There are some things in this universe that are sacred...
...The quality of the liturgy in the average parish must make the experience for almost everyone a source of pain and alienation, something which the saintly take on as a penance and endure, but which drives the less than saintly away...
...She has been the Catholic commentator for the past twelve years on WINS Radio in New York...
...It tried to see God's grace working among other peoples and other faiths...
...Only the most extreme would blame these changes in our society on the Vatican council, even in part...
...In this inner world I suspect it is almost as if Vatican II never occurred...
...The hierarchy was afraid to assert its authority, except in political matters about which it knew less than I did...
...He was not alone in clinging to "tradition.'" Hach of us seeks the perfect world according to his or her own perception...
...It was said of the parish that it sinned in English, confessed in German, and was absolved in Latin...
...I cast a shaky vote for the former...
...And gradually, hesitantly at first, 1 found myself circling back to the Catholic tradition I had been nurtured in Not to the cocoon of unquestioning orthodoxy ethnic as well as religious but to the wisdom Catholicism has always contained: the sense of human-frailty and imperfcctibility, the rituals of penance and communion, the shared struggle across the centuries of frail, flawed, sinful human beings to touch the mystery of God's love, to embody it, to live it, to be saved by it...
...recognizing ourselves as fully church, forge on ahead Looking back to that turning point...
...1985...
...He is the author of The Conservative Manifesto: The Philosophy, the Passion, the Promise (Empire Books, IW2...
...who taught and touched and went about doing good...
...But our church institutions suffer from a critical personnel shortage...
...I was baptized in the church but I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and did not become a practicing Catholic until many, many years after the event...
...The openness of its discussions and the implications of its documents are a testimony to the power of the Spirit For me personally, Vatican II was the affirmation of what I believe...
...We arc further conditioned in a way only the most hardened among us could fail to see...
...Religion there is an aspect of the landscape...
...The promise of the council was a promise of genuine change...
...At this time in our history, the future of the church does not depend on synods...
...2) Milton had it right: "He for God only, she for God in him...
...they must remember that they are our voice at the synod...
...When the council documents were promulgated, I had a wary sense, one of cautious optimism...
...Many of us recognize our most common sins, among them sins of racism, materialism, and complacency...
...Our bishops have got to address the issue...
...I couldn't today call forth phrases from the Psalms...
...The extraordinary synod...
...the closing year of Vatican II...
...The other was that the council was a panicky, quasi-Episcopalian grab for the vanishing liberals who...
...Philip Roth and Isaac Bashcvis Singer might both be termed Jewish writers, but what intrigues each about his Jewish roots is very different...
...My struggles were so minimal...
...The church must give serious attention to where women are...
...I was soon in an excellent position to experience the personal and social benefits to be derived from sexuality liberated from fertility...
...Negotiations are in process...
...Joseph's Missal...
...It was a matter of weak faith and weak flesh...
...The priest turned and spoke to us in the language of everyday life When our convent chaplain demurred, my uncles came to celebrate a Mass full of banners and singing...
...The husband was handed the Epistle for that Sunday: "If I speak with the tongues of men and angels and do not have love, I am a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal...
...All the doubts never seemed even to culminate in a robust denial that would make possible a new affirmation...
...He spoke angrily to the Apostles: "Let the little children come unto me...
...When John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, I was a little puzzled by the hopes this act raised in so many American Catholics...
...I also think of the insights which come from raising two daughters and a son...
...Juli Loesch________________ JUU LOESCH was a founding member of the Pax Center, a Catholic peace and justice community in Erie, Pennsylvania, and is the founder of Prolifersfor Survival (P.S...
...They'd been married for thirty years, but he was a Protestant and the church of pre-Vatican II had refused to bless their marriage...
...The archbishop had already gone on to Rome...
...Pope Paul VI revived that response in me at the time of the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows...
...in other words,'No...
...I know God calls one when He is good and ready...
...At one point in the story the character remembers a requiem Mass he'd attended as a child, and feels haunted again by the grim verses of the Dies Irae...
...and Angry Catholic Women...
...But most writers have an identifiable emphasis...
...Limits must be set to violence, deviant behavior, and the telling of half-truths...
...3) What we have here is a clear case of cognitive dissonance...
...18 October 1985: 573 You can reorganize the government and restructure the university...
...Most American women, forced into the world of work, left their families by economic necessity, not personal preference...
...As Cardinal Sucncns of Belgium urged at the end of Vatican II's first session, the council had to do more than examine the mystery of the church itself...
...Catholic in the face of a culture that neither supports nor understands our faith...
...placed conscience above civil law...
...It showed the church as an institution of great vitality, and as a young man trained by the Dominican priests at Providence College, I was proud to be a part of it...
...I no longer call you servants, but fnends " Keith C. Bums KFITH C BURRIS taught political theory at Washington A Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, wrote regularly for tht Pittsburgh Post Gazette, has published articles in Commonweal and Christianity & Crisis, and is now an editorial writer at the WinstonSalem Journal WHEN Vatican II came...
...We must teach our children there is greater mystery in the sanctuary than on the movie screen...
...What I do remember is eating meat on Friday for the first time, the old ban lifted, a delicious sense of committing an unmortalized sin...
...the two seemed to belong to the same world The borders between them had become blurred Border-crossing was not the dangerous business it had once been One could, in fact, cross back and forth repeatedly, like an American citizen living in Tijuana, or a Mexican living in San Diego...
...Every large process of human change goes just far enough to be "too far" for those who opposed the change anyway, and stalls well before it makes sense even to those who advocated it...
...The Blessed Virgin herself is sometimes hidden away as dirty pictures used to be largely because the consumer society now sells dirty pictures openly...
...My guess is that in terms of the inner vision, what Vatican II has done is to push the old days back, to make them a little more ancient...
...I help to record the path we are on...
...Personally...
...But the council's spirit of ecumenism came to my rescue...
...Maybe now we could see beyond such limits...
...Riots erupted...
...He is a co-recipient of the 1985 O. Henry Award...
...It was as permanent and concrete as the New York neighborhoods we came from, solid facades of brick, stolid, safe, secure places that would always be as they were then, per omnia saecula saecuhrum...
...Now it is misapplied without being taught...
...An institution run by male celibates must deny itself the best of its age...
...Opening up to successful business leaders avenues through which they can serve the poor and underprivileged by their active involvement with caring groups...
...Certain exterior attitudes in the church had to topple...
...And I wonder if I might not have been a better Christian I'm not a very good one if I'd had to go through the Before and After process...
...Cultural Catholics'" may seem like a pretty drab outcome to such a mighty convulsion, but it is my experience that CCs at least are not tempted to leave the church any further than they have, but tend to hang around in the shadows near the door...
...The pity is that they are said so seldom within the American church nowadays...
...The history of the papacy from the beginning of the council to the present is the outward and visible sign of the failure of 18 October 1985: 569 the council's promises...
...Church leaders need to begin to "listen" to the Spirit's presence in the lives of the believing faithful...
...Before, we had viewed Commonweal: 576 reality through a certain frame...
...J. Peter Grace J PETER GRACE is chairman and chief executive officer of W. R. Grace & Co., in New York...
...Catholic by commitment, sometimes perplexed, angry, unsure, but certain salvation is in the breaking of the bread...
...Now I'm not so sure...
...Being a wife and mother was a full-time job...
...without most of the memories, affections, and early childhcxxl experiences of the "born" Catholic...
...But was it such a yawn...
...a daily reminder that change has happened, that hope and confidence in a sinful, "holy church" is not incongruous...
...The emphasis has shifted from institutional representatives to the people as church...
...When I was a kid, I was indoctrinated with the usual cultists' mischievous nonsense the church was the Scarlet Whore of Babylon...
...The thrust of the letter suggests that our institutions must be used in the pursuit of economic and social justice...
...We were free, at last, of petty strictures and inane regulations, of narrow uniformity, of ethnic clannishncss, of tradition and sin and guilt, of our Catholic immigrant past...
...Mystery was dissipated...
...For them it was an event staged in Rome that resulted in a scries of documents...
...When it came to ecumenism...
...It is counter-cultural...
...Someone" is at the heart of the longings of most teenagers...
...The aspect that had the most immediate and profound impact on me was that of tolerance...
...The war had destroyed all moral authority for us...
...This says more about me than it says about Vatican II...
...Writing Scripts for Television, Radio, and Film (Holt, Rinehart), and contributed a chapter in Mid-Wives of the Future: American Sisters Tell Their Story (Leaven Press, 1985...
...After the first flush of triumph, as the Jacobins pounded each other's backs and waved at the crowd, enjoying their own forms of triumphalism...
...People are no longer motivated to go to church on Sunday out of a fear they will go to hell...
...In fact, he destroyed the "liberal" spirit of the archdiocese as he withheld funds from those progressive programs which had made Chicago famous...
...I was attempting to reconfigure the received wisdom of my religious upbringing and education in the conscious creation of a family environment...
...an image...
...Without Vatican II...
...My husband and I were neophyte volunteer workers for the Cana Conference of Chicago...
...and when Humanae Vitae came out...
...To put the matter briefly: before Vatican II it took guts to publish Hans Kung, afterwards it took even more guts to lose him to Doubleday...
...Bobby was murdered...
...Free from . . . free for" became an important balancing act...
...Not "Our Country...
...But my inner vision, the one looking in on the private world of imagination, is far more conservative...
...I see Pope John XXIII as he throws open the windows and invites the Spirit to breathe new life into the church...
...I know I am one of the few editorial writers...
...Peter's Medical Center in New Brunswick...
...and is...
...I would suggest the focusing of religious and lay missionaries on renewed efforts to bring the Good Sews of the Gospel to the spiritually hungry they serve, with a concomitant wanness about becoming involved in political and economic affairs Tom Fox TOM FOX...
...R.S.M...
...Ivan Mich has never asked permission to think or do anything...
...In a time of uncertainty and upheaval, it proved that it had more to offer than a doctrine of rhetoric...
...The statement caused a nft that remains unresolved between the religious who signed it...
...Some people are discouraged by what has happened during the twenty years following Vatican II...
...I would find a way to visit him in California His unexpected death left me with a keen and specific sense of loss In 1978 I had left the Society of Jesus, and the word "lapsed'' captures well the quality of my religious practice Of the ten years that followed...
...What I expected from the council's cosmic ageada was initially unclear...
...His books include The Hack, People Will Always Be Kind...
...It's from the old days...
...She wanted very much to receive the sacrament of matrimony, but her local pastor required a three-month course of marriage instruction...
...It searched the modern world for signs of God's presence, reaffirming its catholicity, its willingness to seek new ways to express ancient truths, to renew the promise of Pentecost...
...But to combat these evils should be high on the church's agenda of unfinished business...
...Still, even in the church something was brewing...
...foreclosed my father's dreams of grandchildren, donned a postulant's garb and entered the novitiate...
...Maybe those unbaptized babies didn't have to languish in limbo after all...
...Vatican II confirms all this: it calls for a church that listens 18 October 1985: 571 before speaking, that loves and affirms before chastising...
...In either or any case...
...The church, then, becomes the home only for celibate men or men married according to the church's limited definitions of permissibility...
...Advanced studies, and inter-community and lay cooperation involved educational and philosophical exchanges...
...Institutional changes were taking place all across society...
...Spiritual renewal for the people of God is ongoing...
...Rerum Novarum built upon Thomas Aquinas's message'to us centuries before in his Summa Theologica about the responsibility of government and of those in positions of power to God's children on earth...
...including our failings and successes...
...I don't mean that I've developed an Evelyn Waugh consciousness and wish to return to a prc-Vatican II rigidity...
...There may be exceptions in large cities, on the campuses of universities...
...Our clergy is aging and stressed...
...In spirit, at least, it probably continues to encourage the more radical elements within the church by contributing a strong sense of unfinished business...
...And that, I believe, was the experience of nearly every convert in an age of many conversions...
...Within the Society of Jesus, I never made it to the thcologatc, and so I never really read Aquinas...
...We shed an encumbrance without gaining complementary insight...
...Me, for instance...
...1 have since been informed that Vatican II was not Commonweal: 568 exclusively about publishing...
...Our sexual powers are O.K...
...It is not a vision designed to make the agony of belief palatable, but to recognize and accept that faith is for grownups...
...and Archbishop John Quinn...
...they are the heart and the center of the church...
...It is vulnerable to any critic, and an embarrassment to most of its friends...
...What is needed most of all is a little reverence...
...We can accept ourselves, and our failures, because we are loved and forgiven by a gracious God who loves us unceasingly...
...The exodus of substantial numbers of priests and religious has affected me as well as the whole church My generation had been taught that these are the "chosen ones, called to the better way...
...Religion in America, in keeping with the national character, tends to be functional, convenient, Unitarian a consumer good like microwave ovens and fast-food joints, tailored to impatient people who just like to feel good, who don't even comprehend the idea of authority, and who go to community colleges where education is vocational and the meaning of literature and philosophy can be snatched from Monarch Notes...
...he said, somewhat suspiciously and perhaps rightly so...
...When I speak with those of my contemporaries who were unable to make the transition from a treasured childhood faith to an adult appreciation of Catholicism, I always want to say, "If only you'd gone through the council...
...In all our striving and conniving for liberation, it had never dawned on us that the first to be liberated would be our own authors...
...As a Catholic, I worry about who will teach our children the truths of the faith, witness to Christ's healing of the sick, and bring us the sacraments...
...Theologians were doubting everything, including the divinity of Christ...
...I did not expect much movement in the church on moral issues such as birth control or abortion, which in the early sixties had not yet become political...
...The answer was No...
...As it turned out, the preacher that day happened to be an auxiliary bishop...
...Mary Gordon MARY GORDON'S first two novels...
...Yes, there must be women priests, and married priests, and truly local parish priests...
...permeate the church's teachings today...
...endless additions and subtractions, and loading it up with a lot of talk, Broadway musical tunes, and administrative reports either having to do with the diocese or parish...
...The missionary commitment of the Maryknoll Sisters appealed to my youthful idealism...
...thirty-four years after romantic notions brought me to religious life...
...I now became in her company a very Catholic sort of Protestant, and this is what I have remained As its detractors have never hesitated to point out...
...As I' Arche was just beginning, I did not have much time to follow closely what was happening in Rome However, I felt that a breath of fresh air was being given to the church...
...That kind of thing...
...This leaves no one at home to care for the young or the old...
...I keep a close eye on those who risk discomforts out of Christian concern...
...An opportunity to solidify a pastoral vision of church, and a notion of faith, not simply as knowledge, but as an entire way of life...
...How can Father Cardenal ask permission of Rome to live as best he can in a world Rome could never understand...
...In any case, I saw woman, in a clearly masculine Divine Economy, as "other...
...I met only lapsed Catholics, who told boozy lapsed Catholic stories...
...The courage of church leaders inspired me, reinforcing the idea that my own relationship with Christ could grow...
...Did marriage "desacramenti/.e" holy orders...
...When I began to take religious instruction (for reasons uhich I have written about elsewhere), what bowled me over was the incredible liberality that permeated the proceedings...
...But in expressing these feelings, the allegiance of most writers is, I think, to the culture being portrayed rather than to any theology...
...We sit at bountiful tables and...
...I grieve, as well, that the liturgical reforms the council brought about left behind them an absence of that formal beauty that characterized the ancient liturgy, and replaced it with a desperate scrambling after the second-rate...
...As for practice, one of the Curia's more ironic victories is the disappearance of so many Catholics of my own generation, reformers who once rallied against Romanita, into a classic Mediterranean "hatched-matchcd-and-dispatched" relationship with Rome...
...In the novitiate I discovered Caryl 1 Houslander, eccentric, holy, artistic, mystic...
...I still had a conservationist streak in me as regards my own waterways, which, more than any of the wild rivers of the world, have a right to be what they are: clean, that is, not spiked with toxic chemicals, not "doctored" or "altered" or "fixed...
...who loved, healed, comforted and challenged...
...The crucial images and memories of one's childhood arc not promising material for reform...
...I was appalled...
...For me, it underscored the need to treat every human being with dignity and respect, no matter what the color of a person's skin or the cut of her or his coat...
...Priests, lay people (both women and men), and academics were, and many still are...
...Vatican II, for all its progressive intentions, seemed like the church playing catch up...
...Thank God those days are gone...
...There is a sense of freedom from meaningless rules, but there is also a deep desire to be "inspired" by one's religion...
...Vatican II helps me personally a great deal...
...That evening I met friends, intellectual colleagues, and...
...Clearly, the church was not quite in the happy condition it was judged to be by the auxiliary bishop of St...
...and any religious charlatan can get the drift and call it the Holy Spirit...
...That culture could make no sense of chastity...
...Another important development of Vatican II was the church's willingness to look outside itself and embrace the world around it...
...student and in the subsequent focus of my research and writing, not on Catholicism, but on the relation between religion and politics in the modem West...
...What is at issue, what is not defied, what is...
...change was necessary...
...New Jersey...
...I was a little taken aback when I learned punch-card voting was to be used...
...I see Vatican II as the council of trust in a world that does not know the value of trust...
...In retrospect, that assessment of Vatican II seems severe...
...Archbishop Philip Hannan of New Orleans celebrated the Mass previously assigned to Archbishop Quinn...
...the Ten Commandments...
...First on the ""Sacred Liturgy...
...Once you try to be up-to-date, you are in perpetual danger of falling out-of-date even assuming that "relevance" is a relevant criterion...
...Now we still listen, but weigh official teachings against our own experiences...
...How to Save the Church...
...I saw the church willing to examine itself and to assess its direction...
...This invasion of culture inside the church is as old as the hills...
...We gather in parishes and...
...papal pronuncio to the U.S...
...The need for a good job, a decent home, enough food for our families, and quality education for our children, arc basic to all of us...
...IN 1971 I was living in Iowa City, attending the University, of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and working that summer on a story about a man inside a fake elephant who ends up running amok inside a church...
...Intensive study, theological consultation, liturgical updating, and communal soul-searching produced general chapters where new democratic processes replaced blind obedience...
...you do not intend to become a Protestant* -I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent' IN JUNE 1967.1 went for a walk along the coast in Donegal with a cousin of mine, an older man who is a native speaker of Irish...
...I became a husband and father, as well as a public servant...
...The direction of my professional life over the last twenty years is directly attributable to the excitement generated while the council was still in session...
...Over their protests I gave away my wardrobe, sold my car...
...arc the church...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 18
