The church was ready

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy THE CHURCH WAS READY A POSTSCRIPT TO VATICAN H For Catholics before Vatican II, the land of the free was preeminently the land of Sister Says - except, of course, for Sister, for whom it was the land of Father Says Wilfrid Sheed Frank and Maisie THERE IS a crying need for a dispassionate social history of twentieth-century American Catholicism Why...

...I have been struck in reading the round-ups of opinion anticipatory of the approaching synod at how varied and differing are the views of the preconcihar church in this country, and how often, even in the case of theologians, the view is narrowly based on personal experience What was it like to be a Catholic before Vatican IP Everyone, like Wilfrid Sheed in the statement above, is right in his answer, but only partly so Misconceptions abound (High on the list of these misconceptions — and there are many — are two which seem to be cherished by almost everyone one, that the reformation of the liturgy was launched by Vatican II, the other, that renewal in religious orders began with the document Perfectae Cantatis ) The median age of Americans living today is only thirty-one years' Today's church members who are under the age of twenty-five were not born when John XXIII called the church to distinguish "the signs of the times" as Jesus, the pope noted, had recommended Thirtyyear-olds were only four, forty-yearolds, fourteen, and those fifty today were only twenty-four A minority of the fifty-year-olds may have had their understanding of the universal church broadened in their college years Otherwise, it is probable that a good half of America's Catholics, if they remember anything at all, remember the preVatican II church in terms of family practice and a particular parish or school Those of us who do remember tend to be selective in our memories Depending on experience and temperament, we tend to paint the pre-concihar church in black or white The stones, for example, of bullying, ignorant, authoritarian priests and sadistic parochial school nuns are legion The market for them seems inexhaustible Then there are the writings of others, like myself, who tend to take a more roseate view In answer to the question "Why Catholic9" I wrote some time ago, for example I must admit that quite possibly I would not be a Catholic if my earlier experience had been of the church as an enemy of the intellect or of the creative impulse and beauty So many people insist that they met with such enmity in childhood or early adolescence that I have to suppose that parochial life was — and still is — inimical to mind and creativity in many parts of the country One could call it 9 grace that the church of my youth was the ally of intelligence and excellence in learning, and affirmative of beauty and art and music My experience was not totally unusual The brilliant and controversial author, Mary McCarthy, has written in her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, "There was a Catholicism I learned from my mother and from the simple parish priests and nuns in Minneapolis, which was, on the whole, a religion of beauty and goodness, however imperfectly realized " And I could write of the atmosphere of the Catholic college at which I taught in the 1940s The so-called "Catholic Renaissance' ' was at its joyful height To be Catholic meant no longer that one kept one's religion in one mental compartment, one's secular knowledge in another . The church was being rediscovered To be a Catholic now meant that one was part of a worldwide community which shared a splendid heritage of arts and letters, and in which tremendous intellectual effort was being put into the restructuring of 15 November 1985 633 human society to cope with modern evils It meant that one could claim affinity with the ancient Greek and Roman and Hebraic cultures from which Christianity sprang, it meant one could identify the universal in the tribal and ethnic cultures to which Christianity had adapted, it meant that the church could affirm what was true and beautiful wherever it was found I wrote almost lyrically of the vigor of Catholic participation in the world of arts and letters, listing a litany of authors and thinkers seriously discussed in the journals of the day — among them Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Bernanos, Maunac, Claudel, Undset, Mantam, Gilson, Bergson, the Insh waters, and the newly emergent first-class American writers like J F Powers and Flannery O'Connor The campus was alive with discussion Granted, it was an unusually good college and yes, all right, on the same campus at the same time a pnest was teaching his New Testament students that attendance at a "B" movie was a mortal sin, and faculty argued whether it was permissible or not to invoke "mental reservations" when taking the Legion of Decency oath Few had the courage not to take it (What twenty-five-year-old knows what the oath was, and worries about "mental reservations"9) I, like everyone else, experienced the church I was born into as dogmatic, defensive, closed, puritanical, and, to the extent that there was no allowance for theological speculation, anti-intellectual The church had all the answers They were summarized in the catechism which I once knew entirely by heart It is interesting to note which of those answers, repeated over and over, now suck in my mind "Why did God make me7" Answer "To know Him, to Love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him in the next " No mention here of the love of neighbor included in Jesus' summarization of the Commandments The emphasis was on a personal relationship with the Creator "What constitutes a mortal sin9" Answer "A grave matter, sufficient reflection, and full consent of the will " That was an answer we clung to, for the avoidance of hell seemed even more important than going to heaven Even murder might not have been preceded by sufficient reflection Defensive We learned what we learned about church and Bible history in order to refute the claim of heretics and unbelievers Apologetics was the order of the day We might have all been in training for the Catholic Evidence Guild Only Catholics belonged to the true church Only they had the truth, and the truth had been laid out once and for all (There was no thought of possible further movement of the Holy Spirit, nor of any new or developing theology ) Closed However aware those of us who did not live in Catholic ghettos might be of the virtues of our Protestant and Jewish neighbors, we knew that we could have no truck with them in an ecclesial sense We could take no part in Protestant weddings If we ventured so far as to attend weddings and funerals, we were not to stand, kneel, sing, or do anything that indicated that we accepted this service as a church ceremony We all knew the answer in Msgr Conway's The Question Box, the undisputed reference in every Catholic school library, to the question "Is not the 'bond of chanty' (John 13) sufficient to unite men in the fellowship of Christ9" Answer "Our Lord, who tells us to love our neighbor, also says 'He that beheveth not, shall be condemned ' " Puritanical We were told that Easter was the greatest feast of the church, but I cannot deny that the almost total emphasis of the pre-concihar church was on the sufferings of Jesus, and on selfdepnvation as the way to please him The enjoyment of creation and the fulfillment of potential was suspect It goes without saying the preoccupation with sexual sin, which goes on even to this day, was an overwhelming part of this mind set When I have said all this I must still say that the church was our home It fed our need for a personal relationship with God, with a multiplicity of pious practices, novenas, and observances of the church year It was a profoundly Marian church and Marian devotion, however sentimentalized and at times semildolatrous, was a gentling, loving, and humane influence (To pray with the mother of Jesus, no matter how imperfectly, was to celebrate his humanity and to participate in Pentecost) Finally, the pre-concihar church was richly various There were any number of national churches in which homilies and hymns came in a variety of languages There were saints for every season and every need There were all kinds of religious communities, each with its own spiritual traditions And, despite its limitations, I became aware, as I grew older, of the church in Amenca as a church ever changing It was imperfect, it was culture-bound, but it was a church of prayer and alive with movements The American liturgical movement was more than fifty years old at the time of the council, the literary revival, thirty years or more The movement to recover the original chansms of the religious orders and to adapt them to the modern world had been launched by Puis XII in the early 1950s The social action movements which umted the best of the clergy and the laity in the Depression years had grown and multiplied — among them, the Catholic Worker movement, the interracial movement, the rural life movement, the vanous Catholic labor movements, the Christian Family movements, etc , etc — all had plowed the ground When Pope John convoked the council he could say that the church was ready He referred to the rising growth of "the immense energies of the apostolate of prayer and action in all fields " He talked of a clergy better equipped in learning and virtue for its mission, and of a laity "which has become ever more conscious of its responsibilities " The aged pope looking down the corridors of time to the previous council could see in the church a gradual growth of healthy commumty bearing within it the seeds of new beginmngs We, too, must look back to find the roots of that which has borne fruit Otherwise, how can we really know what to keep and what to discard, and what the nature of our new beginning should be now9 Abigail McCarthy Commonweal 634...