All is grace
Hehir, J. Bryan
ALL IS GRACE J. Bryan Hehir THE PRIESTLY LIFE OF SHAWN SHEEHAN On October 24, 1990, the church in Boston buried a "great priest." Shawn Sheehan-a priest of the archdiocese for forty-nine years,...
...The focus was eccle-sial, but never narrowly churchy...
...There is clearly a tightening from the top, the mood of the moment is consolidation not innovation...
...They worked, he once told me, from one sentence in Pius X's instruction on sacred music that said that the laity should participate in the liturgy...
...He could show you how the innovation of liturgical reform in the nineteenth century had to be related to the seemingly different devotion to the Sacred Heart-different until you saw that they both stressed the humanity of Christ, present in his church through sacramental life and devotion...
...Shawn Sheehan's teaching combined these two characteristics...
...Shawn Sheehan-a priest of the archdiocese for forty-nine years, an architect of the liturgical movement in the United States, a gifted teacher and pastor, and a friend of the poor and the vulnerable all his priesthood-was laid to rest...
...Louis...
...Virgil Michel and Godfrey Diekmann at Collegeville...
...Shawn was a teacher all his life, but in the more specific sense he taught church history and liturgy at St...
...They went back to the tradition in all its depth and breadth and they used it to fashion a future vision of Catholicism that they had no guarantee would come to fulfillment...
...In hindsight one can look back and find there a little-known but very gifted faculty in biblical studies, systematics, and moral theology...
...In 1961 that was heady stuff...
...But these forerunners of the council believed firmly that they had a piece of the truth, an insight if not a finished product...
...in 1990 it's still worth consulting...
...So we learned from articles and anthologies...
...Particularly for Shawn Sheehan, the first led to and demanded the second...
...I remember one of those church-world lectures that set me questioning and led, through his advice, to Yves Congar's Lay People in the Church...
...To be a student at St...
...John's in the time of the council was more of an opportunity than most of us recognized...
...Shawn's connections bridged ideas and institutions in Catholicism, and taught you to respect both-even when the institution sometimes hindered your pursuit of the ideas...
...Shawn connected elements of the church's life that provided a "way in" to the Catholic tradition...
...His connections were catalytic: His ideas generated questions which led to inquiry that enriched one's sense of how catholic Catholicism is...
...This faculty understood that one could not prepare priests for the conciliar experience simply by staying with the approved manuals of theology...
...it was thematic, broad strokes blending theology, worship, and social witness...
...ALL IS GRACE J. Bryan Hehir THE PRIESTLY LIFE OF SHAWN SHEEHAN On October 24, 1990, the church in Boston buried a "great priest...
...Later, he enthusiastically shared the fruits of reform with inner-city and suburban congregations, who like his students, found the experience a little chaotic but profoundly Catholic and deeply Christian...
...Shawn Sheehan's life deserves examination for its own intrinsic merit...
...And they joined this conviction to another belief-that truth is one and the Spirit in the church will ultimately lead it to grasp truth wherever it resides...
...the temper of the times makes comparisons with the 1950s familiar theologically, pastorally, and in styles of governance and leadership...
...the church was always in the world for Shawn -whether the world was the Roman Empire, the medieval commonwealth, or industrial society of the twentieth century...
...Shawn's history course did not proceed logically or chronologically...
...Shawn Sheehan stood in this tradition of renewal and reform, enhanced it, helped others to know its spirit and substance...
...He could connect the church's reaction to the fourth-century Arian heresy to a liturgical style that so emphasized the divinity of Christ that participation in the Eucharist declined for eight centuries...
...Very often the response to their effort was suspicion or even repression...
...For them the liturgy was sacred but always social...
...But it also holds a larger lesson that is worth identifying today in the church...
...The names in that network of liturgical reform form an extraordinary group: Sheehan, William Leonard and Frederick McManus in Boston...
...He used a yearlong, seemingly rambling course in church history as a framework-some would say a foil-to immerse future priests in the questions that were at the heart of his own ministry...
...hi the life and achievements of this company of reformers lies a larger lesson for today...
...John's Seminary in Boston and as his assistant at a suburban parish in the archdiocese...
...I can write this account because I personally benefited from Shawn Sheehan's priesthood in two ways: as a student of his at St...
...Hence there was no false dichotomy of a sacramental ministry and a social ministry...
...The efforts cut across the very heart of the church's life, from ecclesiology to ecumenism, from social ministry to sacramental life...
...Shawn was a vital link in that network of people in the 1940s and 1950s that prepared the way for the liturgical reform of Vatican n. When they began their efforts in the Liturgical Conference the grand vision of a council was nowhere to be seen...
...These were both difficult and challenging years to teach and learn for they spanned the transition from precon-ciliar to conciliar theology in Roman Catholicism...
...At the heart of the ecclesial vision was the liturgy...
...In a year when the Catholic public and the general public have read many headlines of priestly life marred by tragedy, it may be useful to make better known another side of the story, the story of a priest who never made headlines, but did make history, quietly, faithfully, and effectively building the Body of Christ through word and deed...
...The multiple demands on the time of seminary faculty meant that most were not well published...
...In this setting it is useful to remember the genius of the preconciliar period when some of the most significant ideas and programs of conciliar reform first took shape in small groups of people who refused to be captives of a given moment in the life of the church...
...They built a movement on a sentence and created through the movement a foundation for a council they never expected but warmly welcomed...
...John'sinthe 1950s and 1960s...
...Reynold Hillenbrand and Martin Hellriegel in Chicago and St...
...For many who experienced the exhilaration of the council and the open space it created intellectually, socially, and ecumenically in the postconciliar period, the present moment in the church can be disorienting...
...But they were deeply immersed in the best of Catholic theology leading to the council...
...from professors willing to create courses that were rooted in the tradition and yet focused on "the growing edge of the tradition," as it was being shaped before our eyes at Vatican II...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 20
