Editorials
Vatican II: 25 years Twenty-five years have passed since the final session of Vatican II closed on December 8, 1965. The celebration of this anniversary has been muted, even somewhat neglected....
...But even had the preconciliar church survived intact, it is unlikely it would have shaped the last quarter century to the extent that the church of Vatican II has done...
...It is small-minded...
...The people most stirred by Vatican II in 1965 and most devoted to implementing it thereafter have been put on the defensive by those who never accepted the council in the first place, and by those who, over time, redefined its agenda in minimalist terms...
...The bishops counsel the U.S...
...Twenty-five years after the council there are as many reasons for gratitude as for disappointment...
...There is no going back on the council, yet we are stuck in fulfilling its agenda...
...She would certainly not claim credit for that, much less take comfort from it...
...Its refusal to allow the University of Fribourg to award Archbishop Rembert Weakland an honorary degree (see p. 709) is only the most recent...
...It was beyond the imaginative powers of the council fathers to express repentance for the millions killed, tortured, or spiritually maimed in the cause of spreading or preserving the "Word of God...
...Histories of the council proceedings remind us of the fierce resistance in the curia to the thrust of the bishops' deliberations (in particular, the most recent, Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After, ed., Adrian Hastings, Oxford...
...If we are to join them in living the challenge of peace, now is the time to deliver their message to Congress and the president, Registered Mail...
...Neither letter will be remembered for the novelty of its content...
...It is mean...
...The letter argued that both teachings "find their roots in the Christian theological tradition...
...They were Special Delivery, and represent a watershed event in the relationship between the U.S...
...It is also holier, braver, more generous of heart, and more open of mind...
...The change of practice the council mandated was not grounded in a full recognition of how badly the church itself at times had betrayed the law of love...
...That sentence capsulized the council's seismic shift from a church bringing its certainty and sacraments to save a God-deserted world to a church sharing both its grace and its weakness with a world in the travail of birth...
...But there are other, perhaps more subtle, problems that escape attention and are part of the debilitating paralysis that mark this anniversary...
...The decrees on liturgy and Scripture opened a new depth of understanding and a new level of practice in the lives of ordinary Catholics...
...PRIORITY MAIL The letters of Archbishops Roger Mahony and Daniel Pilarczyk to Secretary of State James Baker and President George Bush last month were more than First Class...
...shooting war in the Persian Gulf...
...in fact, these failings were often evaded...
...The Catholic church today is less orderly, unified, stable, and confident than the church that John XXIII called to Rome in 1962...
...That recognition in all quarters would in itself constitute a small miracle, and a necessary one...
...both relied heavily on the U.S...
...The future does not lie in some easy compromise of these two mistaken tendencies, but in the cultivation of a spirit of self-critical responsibility...
...Weakland's efforts to understand the views of those who disagree with the church's and his own views on abortion are apparently the immediate cause for the Vatican's action...
...Their intent is unmistakable: to apprise the administration that in the bishops' opinion there is no moral justification at this time for a U.S...
...is no longer willing to settle for a morality of scorched behinds...
...Each side must turn from pursuing its own destructive course...
...Remembrance engenders repentance which encourages restitution and true conversion...
...Some follow from the top-down spirit in which reforms were initiated, some from the reluctance to go further in implementation, and some from cultural and economic shifts-the sexual revolution, third-world debt, cynicism about authority-that have had dramatic effects on the church as on the world...
...bishops' 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace...
...The Mahony and Pilarczyk letters, sent with the affirmation of the majority of the episcopal conference, apply the teachings of the 1983 letter to the present Gulf crisis...
...Certainly it contrasts with the 1991 centenary of Rerum novarum, for which multiple preparations are under way...
...O'Brien noted that history would judge Day not only on the merits of her faithfulness to a particular vision of the Catholic life, but on how the Catholic Worker movement, which was her life's work, would affect the landscape of American Catholicism...
...On the other side, the psychological, if not explicit, rejection of tradition and of papal and episcopal authority among would-be reformers can only end in further drift and theological and liturgical illiteracy...
...Studying that record today shows the degree to which that curial spirit survived and has been given new life by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger...
...As she said more than once, our society is a social disorder that makes for war...
...The conflict between these tendencies is reflected in the frustrated complaints of those lay people who have given time and energy to various pastoral councils and other "consultative" bodies, only to find that bishops and clergy still hold the real power, and that many hoard it jealously...
...This change is the result of the 1983 pastoral and its arduous composition process...
...The ambiguity or silence of council documents on some questions has left a trail of half-finished reforms...
...It is what comes from the church's failure to undergo a conversion of heart...
...They do so with clarity and dispatch...
...A full and central role for the laity is assumed in the constitutions on the church and the church in the modern world, while the decree on the laity is weak tea...
...others hide out in small communities of bitterness ever ready to see the church as an oppressor and to ascribe the worst motives to official pronouncements and actions...
...And yet, Catholics living through the before and after of Vatican II continue to feel and see its unprecedented influence...
...On many fronts, then, there is cause for discouragement...
...According to David Hollenbach, {Justice, Peace, and Human Rights, Crossroad), the most significant development in the pastoral letter's teaching was its effort to relate the traditional Catholic just-war teaching to an ethic of nonviolence...
...It is silly...
...Both were short and to the point...
...Among those we must count Jews, Muslims, aboriginal peoples, dissenting Christians, and even faithful Catholics, lay and clerical, theologians and peasants...
...each contributes to the full moral vision we need in pursuit of a human peace...
...hierarchy and Washington...
...By 1962, the church of the 1950s was already feeling a foretaste of the focus that would come to be known, in the shorthand of decades, as "the Sixties," and, if the council had not taken place, the church would be desperately in need of convening one now...
...they warn that no offensive action should be undertaken before "all reasonable peaceful alternatives" have been pursued...
...In that lengthy document, the bishops laid out the ethical principles by which Catholics are to assess and judge situations and actions which might lead to full-scale war...
...however forcefully these claims are asserted they can only end in discrediting religious authority...
...Nevertheless, I would say that our way of life, as we are living it, is not worth saving...
...This failure to remember and to repent has permitted a certain arrogance and a muted sense of triumphalism to continue to have their corrosive effects on the church...
...Ten years later, as the Mahony and Pilarczyk letters show, the moral teaching of the U.S...
...November 29, 1980) and the implications of her life for the American Catholic church ("The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Day," December 19,1980...
...Popular and solid Scripture study programs have made serious Bible readers of Catholics, with the attendant effects on spiritual life and social action...
...But the contrast between the two observances suggests that both papalists and social activists find it easier to agree on celebrating the achievements of the church's social teaching than for the Catholic church to unite around the council that raised hopes for renewal and reform but whose teachings are now mired in ecclesiological and theological disagreements...
...No one would question the importance of Leo Xffl's encyclical as the starting point for the church's modern teaching on social justice...
...Ten years ago this month, David J. O'Brien wrote a commemorative article in these pages on Dorothy Day (d...
...Eyes can always turn to the Vatican for good examples...
...We are all responsible for the life of the church, but none of us is all-knowing or all-seeing about how to carry on its mission...
...The Catholic church in the U.S...
...And when it came to the state of Catholic moral teaching on war and peace, Day would sometimes quote the aphorism of a Benedictine friend of hers: "The moral theology we are taught is to get us into heaven with scorched behinds...
...If the institutional church cannot remember its failures, reformers suffer another kind of forgetfulness, the inability to remember that the church has ever done any good...
...Mass in the vernacular, the priest facing the people, and congregational participation enriched our understanding of the Eucharist...
...The restorationists ultimately will have to face the issues of participation, collegiality, ecumenism that now perplex the reformers...
...Writing in Commonweal to protest the Korean War [December 29,1950], Day took up the contemporary-sounding argument that the war was being fought to protect our way of life: "We shall, of course, be called defeatists and appeasers...
...After twenty-five years some have left the church entirely...
...The reformers in turn will have to deal more frankly than they have with questions of catechesis, doctrine, and the life of faith...
...The bishops' respectful but critical objections, issued in advance of an impending conflict, indicate that they will no longer simply bless mobilization calls...
...It has metamorphosized from a church that had shown itself primarily concerned with securing its own institutional well-being to a church that, across the globe-in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Philippines-has nurtured and sheltered some of the most courageous defenders of the human dignity that is God's image...
...Still, discouragements of the current moment ought to be the occasion for sober reflection...
...Seeing the ways in which the church can be all too human an institution, too many liberals and progressives have forgotten that there have been Catholic communities and movements, ideas and actions that must be seen as Spirit-inspired, even small miracles-not the least of them John XXIII and the council he convened...
...In its endorsement of religious liberty and improved relations with other religions, the council hardly attended to the church's own past failings...
...In 1990, the bishops are clear that not all such means have yet been tried...
...But who can doubt that the greatly expanded influence of the church's social teaching and its acknowledged centrality in the life of the Christian draw their impetus from the opening paragraphs of Gaudium etspes: "The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the [people] of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well...
...Catholic church on war and peace is qualitatively different from the view that prevailed at the time of Day's death...
...Certainly, looking back on twenty-five years, the difficulties, distractions, and misdirections are plain to see...
...and the UN to "stay the course of persistent, peaceful, and determined pressure against Iraq...
...The constitutions on the church and the church in the modern world have had a more complex pattern of implementation...
...On the one side, the theological and ecclesiological absolutes that grow not from our tradition but from the Vatican's idealized notion of the church, are at odds with the everyday experience and life of the church...
...There are other, more egregious lapses to be found in council documents...
...The Mahony and Pilarczyk letters have applied the strict criteria of the just-war theory to a real situation, and announced that war in the Persian Gulf would be morally illicit unless all elements of the moral norm had been satisfied, and all other avenues of resolution-particularly nonviolent means-had been exhausted...
Vol. 117 • December 1990 • No. 21
