Vatican II: 40
years later
Across the Age Spectrum
A moment on the way to somewhere
else
By TOM ROBERTS
I grew up steeped in the Catholic
culture of the 1950s. We lived just two blocks from the church on the hill. I
attended the parish school, helped count money after Mass on Sunday and spent a
lot of time in the rectory “phone sitting” when the priests all went
out to dinner on the housekeeper’s night off.
I never was abused by a priest. The closest I got to that was a
priest who was a basketball coach and introduced me and my friends to some
curse words we had never heard before. He was loud and foul-mouthed and
embarrassed players in front of the world, but as far as I know never sexually
abused anyone.
My life was full of Catholic peculiarities. I had the Baltimore
Catechism tucked into my book bag nightly. Years later, at a Catholic college,
a group of us from throughout the Philadelphia archdiocese began, jokingly,
recreating the catechism: question number, question, answer. We still had, in
our memories, most of the material in that little green paperback. Our heads
had been filled with theology -- even if it was a lot of bad theology -- by the
time we left eighth grade.
Still years later, a young associate pastor would volunteer that
he envied me because I grew up in the age of the Baltimore Catechism; he had
lived through the post-Vatican II era of what he called “Jesus as rainbows
and butterflies.” I would say that in hindsight what the Baltimore
Catechism symbolized to me was the need for Vatican II.
In elementary school I had my Boy Savior Club badge. It reminded
us to imitate Jesus and keep track of our good deeds, a kind of sacred Boy
Scouts, except that girls at St. Aloysius School could also belong. They could
even be officers. I know, because one of my girl cousins got a spot I had hoped
for. Perhaps a sign of something to come.
I knew the Latin Mass responses, could rip through the Confiteor
and the Suscipiat with the best of them. I became what we called an acolyte, so
I got out of math class to serve High Mass funerals, and I was on the elite
serving team for all the Solemn High and High Masses and all the special
liturgical events.
I narrowly avoided the seminary, though at one point I did have an
application. Some of my very good friends went in, some for a number of years,
but left in the latter years of the ’60s.
My Catholic culture was about as complete as one might hope to
find. From my viewpoint amid the activity and ambitions of a second-generation
extended Italian Catholic family, the church was simply a further extension, at
times a seemingly seamless extension, of that family.
The pre-Vatican II church was a cozy cocoon, the boundaries were
clear, the community well defined. We had our mysteries and mysterious
language, our leaders were different -- holier, we believed -- because they had
put themselves through 10 years of sequestered studies and had forsworn sex,
partners and families forever.
It was a complete system, the parishes, at times referred to as
the “plants” -- a term in the gritty little city I grew up in
equivalent to the steel plants and the tire-and-rubber plants -- were
full-service spiritual delivery systems.
What I didn’t realize at the time, of course, was that I had
the good fortune to be living at the crest of a perfectly formed wave that was
about to break apart.
So I can understand those who are still angry at a council that is
seen to have accelerated the breakup.
But Vatican II would show that it was a system too often based on
denial -- of church history and church errors of the past; of women and their
gifts; of the fact that certain teachings were based on a tortured
understanding of sexuality and even an embarrassing insistence on deeply flawed
cosmology. The instincts behind Vatican II were nurtured in growing scholarship
-- from biblical studies to the new understandings of liturgy and language to
new insights from the human and natural sciences.
Those instincts, however, encountered strong resistance from the
Roman curia, or governing bureaucracy, in the Vatican, symbolized in the
language on the coat of arms of one of the most formidable opponents of the
Second Vatican Council, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. On his shield were the
words, Semper Idem, “always the same.”
Of course, the church is not always the same and it certainly
changed dramatically as a result of the three-year moment of the Second Vatican
Council. I remember enjoying the change in images from church militant and
being a soldier for Christ, phrases of the old catechism, to the new people of
God and pilgrim people. Old anathemas and enmities were turned to opportunities
for generosity and to ask forgiveness. The church turned in on itself as a
bulwark against the world, in another image of that era, opened the windows to
fresh air and the sounds and noise of the world.
What I have come to appreciate, too, is that the council was a
time of titanic struggle among church leaders who believed in a new vision of
church and those who wanted to believe that it should always be the same. A
great deal was at stake -- and still is at stake. In comparison to change in
other institutions we are, in the broad sweep of church history, merely weeks
away from the council.
In a biblical sense, it was the event that contained the tensions
that would play out through the life and history of the church. And they are
tensions we all know in everyday ways. A couple I know has six daughters, all
well educated and now with professional lives and families of their own. The
mother of this clan grew up in the church when women could not get close to the
altar except to scrub the floor and grab the linens for washing. Today she is a
eucharistic minister and runs a model day center for the poor and marginalized
in the basement of the rectory.
For her, the church has shifted in unbelievable ways in the span
of half a lifetime. Some of her daughters have decided to stay and struggle and
have made various grudging accommodations with the institution. Other daughters
have found spiritual refuge elsewhere; for them the institution is a lumbering,
clumsy, patriarchal anachronism that can be as dangerous as it can be uplifting
to the spiritual welfare of its members.
What I have come to know is that my early life in the church was a
time that cannot be replicated, a blip on the radar screen of church history
that, for me, may have been the world of Catholicism in its entirety, but that,
looked at from afar, could only have been a moment on the way to somewhere
else.
The next leg of the journey has begun. We have become a people at
prayer -- in our own language -- far more aware, as the council documents urged
us to become, of other cultures and traditions, and of the need to help
transform, not shrink from or condemn, the rest of the world.
Tom Roberts is NCR editor. His e-mail address is
troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, October 4,
2002
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