The Battered Kettle
McGuinn, Rex
The Battered Kettle As I grow older I begin to believe everything is new under the sun. Words, it is true, fade on the page that yellows in the window sill. Rex McGuinn ever, the proportion...
...and it called for greater responsibility in the local churches...
...9 Meat on Friday...
...The council was now willing to admit that Protestant denominations were indeed churches and that Catholics should strive for mutual understanding with them in friendly dialogue...
...There was strong sentiment among the bishops at the council to address the question, but Pope Paul VI, not trusting his fellow bishops Commonweal | 8 September 11, 1998...
...The council's preparatory commissions, dominated by the Roman curia, had prepared draft documents for the first session of the council which would have turned it into a rubber stamp for the then existing ecclesiastical structures...
...But such distinctions were lost on the laity (and on many of the clergy, too...
...Five critical changes I further note five crucial changes that transformed the structures of the preconciliar church: _9 The Liturgy...
...Overnight, Catholicism was willing to change when it wanted to...
...9 Ecumenism...
...Two elderly men with enormous personal prestige who had suffered through the war, they demanded that the preparatory documents be scrapped and that the council fathers themselves shape the documents on which they would vote...
...The gradual drift in this direction in the late 1960s put the centralized authority structure in grave jeopardy...
...As the council went on, the bishops, by overwhelming votes, endorsed a broad range of changes in the church...
...The Vatican bureaucracy could be defied...
...It was clear then to at least some of the bishops that it would be their council, not the Roman curia's...
...Joseph Komonchak has noted three overarching changes: The council proposed a far more nuanced evaluation of the modern world...
...On Septuagesima Sunday 1965, almost every altar in a Catholic church in the United States was turned around...
...The pope agreed...
...What would change next...
...For the first time in at least a thousand years, the priest said Mass facing the congregation...
...The centralization of authority was not yet in jeopardy, however...
...The immutable had mutated...
...Change did not in itself mean that ordinary priests or lay persons could make their own decisions about the conditions on which they would be Catholic...
...Bishops continued to insist that nothing had really changed...
...If the Latin liturgy could be abandoned that easily (and seven-eighths of American Catholics approved of the change) after more than a millennium, the Catholic church could certainly change...
...The heretics, schismatics, Jews, and infidels down the street were now suddenly separated brothers and sisters...
...This change resulted from a decision of the American bishops...
...There was indeed a pluralism of power in the Catholic church...
...Could the bishops have been more cautious in implementing the council...
...Very few Catholics, lay or clerical, realized what had happened...
...and it was said partially (soon totally) in English...
...he occurrence which played a role something like the storming of the Bastille was the sudden opposition of two leaders of the Western European church, Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne and Cardinal Achille Li6nart of Lille...
...The bishops, it turned out, had power in practice as well as in theory...
...Yet implicit in the newly discovered mutability of the church (and in the bishops' revolt against the curia) was the notion that, if something ought to be changed and it would be changed eventually, then it was all right to anticipate such decisions and change on one's own authority...
...it introduced the necessity of updating and reform into the church...
...Two other developments, however, called the authority structure of the church into question...
...They might have left Friday abstinence alone, but liturgical reform and ecumenism by themselves would have created a heady atmosphere in which the expectation of more change would have swept the church...
...None of these reforms touched on the essence of Catholic doctrine...
...Most bishops, it would seem, were prepared to vote for them and go home, still able to tell their people what they (in the bishops' minds) wanted to hear: nothing had changed...
...Moreover, the Catholic hierarchy in the United States was already bringing pressure on Rome to obtain some sort of relief for divorced and remarried Catholics, despite the official posture that the Catholic church could not change its teachings on marriage...
...It may have been the most unnecessary and the most devastating...
...This was a dangerous truth, as subsequent events would demonstrate...
...Fish on Friday had been a symbol that most visibly distinguished Catholic Americans from other Americans...
...Was the prelate t quoted above correct about the bishops' mistakes...
...This is the story of how an attempt to preserve the authority structure of the church in fact weakened and eventually came close to destroying it...
...Rex McGuinn ever, the proportion accepting the teaching had sunk to 12 percent, and most did not confess it...
...9 Birth Control...
...Only in retrospect, however, do these issues suggest that there was serious ferment in Catholicism in the United States or anywhere else when John XXIII convened the council...
...The press reported, with increasing fascination and exuberance, the alteration of the unalterable...
Vol. 125 • September 1998 • No. 15
