An article on the Opinion page in last week’s The B.C. Catholic caught my eye, mainly because of the seemingly incongruous juxtaposition of the headline and the author’s name and photo. The headline read “Time to throw a few bones to the toothless lions among us,” an unfriendly suggestion at best but rather disturbing when it is found in a Catholic newspaper, and even more so when it comes from a Catholic priest. The author of the article is Father Raymond J. de Souza; the article carries a photograph of Fr. De Souza, wearing his clerical collar. I was curious enough to read the article in its entirety, a rare occurrence for this cynical sort-of-ex-Catholic.
The tone and content of the article are astonishing. Fr. De Souza writes about two elderly and distinguished experts on the Second Vatican Council, both of whom were slated to be “highlighted” at a Vatican II conference in Ottawa this past weekend. One of these men is Gregory Baum, a former priest who was a peritus, or theological advisor, at the council. Baum is nearly 90. Here is what Wikipedia says about him: “He was the Professor of theology and sociology at University of Saint Michael’s College in the University of Toronto and subsequently professor of theological ethics at McGill University’s Faculty of Religious Studies. He is currently associated with the Jesuit Centre justice et foi in Montreal.” Professor Baum has written thirteen books. Here is what Fr. De Souza says about him in the B.C. Catholic column: “Baum too was a peritus at the council. But at nearly 90 years old he is a lion no longer able to hunt whose roars have long since lost their capacity to terrify the jungle. More than a theological force, he is now of principal interest as an archaeological specimen, the relic of a time when the future of the Church was expected to be an abrupt break with her past.”
Fr. De Souza is equally dismissive of the Catholic journalist Robert Blair Kaiser, 82. Wikipedia: “As a correspondent for Time Magazine, [Kaiser] won the Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award in 1962 for the ‘best magazine reporting from abroad’ for his reporting in the Second Vatican Council.” Fr. De Souza: “…Kaiser is another of the old lions rather grumpy now that the new Church never quite took hold in the Catholic world as it did world [sic] of mainline Protestantism.”
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council by Pope John XXIII. The council, consisting of four sessions from 1962 to1965, was attended by nearly three thousand bishops from all over the world. The pope’s vision for Vatican II—and for the Church—is captured in the Italian word aggiornamento—“updating”—a word which he used in the 1959 announcement of his intention to hold a new ecumenical council; John XXIII saw the mission of the council as bringing the Church into the modern world.
A significant aspect of aggiornamento was to effect the reversal of a trend that had been evident in the Church since the eleventh century but had intensified in the past one hundred years, a trend which saw power increasingly concentrated in the hands of the pope and his officials in the Vatican, the latter collectively known as the Roman Curia.
The council attempted to redefine the Church as “the people of God,” empowering the laity and encouraging them to participate more fully in the liturgical and pastoral life of the Church. A recent editorial in America Magazine described the effect of this re-imagining: “It encouraged a keen awareness of corporate belonging to the one body of Christ based on the unity of baptism, the priesthood of all believers and the universal call to holiness. Appropriating the image as their own, hierarchy and faithful, clergy and religious experienced an intensified sense of communion in one body.”
Vatican II, then, was striving to flatten the hierarchical structure that had rigidified over the centuries and in doing so create a Church characterized by the harmonious participation of all its members in bringing the message of love to the world.
The council fathers concretized this re-imagining in several ways. The Mass was now to be celebrated in the language of the congregation, rather than in Latin, and the celebrant was to face the people in the pews as he conducted the liturgy. The altar rail that separated the priest from the people was removed. Lay persons became acolytes, lectors, and Eucharistic ministers. Diocesan pastoral councils and parish councils, with full and equal participation of the laity, were formed.
Lay people, including, for the first time, women, became theologians and experts in religious studies, invigorating parish education programs with their newfound religious perspectives and theological knowledge and expertise and adding a new dimension to the faith life and the intellectual life of the Church. Finally, in the face of virulent opposition from the Curia, the authority of bishops, particularly within their own dioceses, in communion with the pope as “the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity of the bishops and of the multitude of the faithful,” was reaffirmed, in effect diminishing the power of the papacy and of the Curia.
Despite shock experienced and expressed by certain members of the laity and clergy at the sudden and radical changes in the liturgy, there was a general sense of euphoria among the Catholic faithful both during and after the council. The council fathers had succeeded in overcoming the resistance and machinations of the Curia and set in place the foundation for a new and modern Church, one in which “The People of God are the Church. Whatever structures and other institutional elements exist within the Church are to assist the People of God to fulfill their mission and ministries. These elements, therefore, exist to serve the whole People of God, not the other way around” (Richard McBrien, in The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism).
Father de Souza’s article, and the dismissive and disrespectful tone he takes toward two distinguished men who undoubtedly know more about Vatican II than this arrogant priest ever will, is a small, parochial example of a much larger reality: the communion of all the faithful envisioned by the council fathers and celebrated by the majority of Catholics in the early post-conciliar years has been forestalled by reactionary forces within the Church. Beginning with the weak and indecisive Paul VI, successor to John XXIII (who died in June 1963), and followed by the ultraconservative and restorationist John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI, the papacy, with the support of the Roman Curia, has succeeded in restoring the hierarchical, patriarchal structure of the Church and the dominant and privileged position of the Catholic clergy.
While Rome attempts to enforce unity through papal and curial authority, there can in fact be no communion of the faithful under the present conditions in the Church as the unity that the hierarchy seeks is in fact merely conformity to its view of what the Church should be. In their desperate attempt to maintain power and to hold together the medieval structure of the Catholic hierarchy, pope, cardinals, and bishops use threats, disciplinary procedures, and campaigns of condemnation against groups or individuals perceived as departing from orthodoxy as it has been defined by Rome. Clearly the reformist vision of Vatican II, not to mention the gospel message and the example of Jesus proclaiming universal unconditional love, has been replaced with a thinly disguised megalomania that has transformed communion into division.
Given the vision of Blessed John XXIII, the courage of the bishops in attendance at Vatican II, and the hopes of millions of laypeople sparked by the council, the state of the Catholic Church—divided, defensive, exclusive—fifty years after this miraculous event is sad indeed. It is little wonder that thinking people, many of whom are lifelong Catholics, are leaving the Church in frustration, even despair. Writer Michael J. Walsh states, in another America article, “Pope Benedict has launched a ‘new evangelization’ in an effort to win people back to the practice of their faith. But loss of belief is not, I am convinced, the main reason Catholics no longer turn up to church on Sundays. Rather, it is the feeling that their church has been stolen from them.”
To this I can only add a sorrowful “Amen.”
Photo Credit
“Second Vatican Council” by Lothar Wolleh.
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