One of the signs of growing old is that you seem to experience more and more anniversaries passing by. I frequently mention in this space the importance of the Second Vatican Council which has now passed its 50th anniversary. I was disappointed that so little was done to mark the 25th anniversary of the marvelous statement by the American bishops on economic justice. Why did we let it’s anniversary slip by so quietly?
It has been 50 years since an extraordinary black pastor awakened the conscience of religious leaders all over the country when he took the white clergy of the South so forcefully to task. They were upset with his demonstrations and they wrote him a letter while he was locked up in the Birmigham jail suggesting that he find other ways than the demonstrations and protests that he was conducting against the extraordinary cruelty, injustice and prejudice of the South. This included many Protestant pastors, a rabbi and even a Catholic bishop told him that his demonstrations in terms of human dignity, human rights and black freedom was “unwise and untimely.”
Unwise and untimely! How pathetic, how weak, how frightened. The clergy were 100% off target. Selma was very near and the 1964 Civil Rights Act would never have happened except for the vision and the leadership of Martin Luther King and the patience and courage of the black community. While the U.S. bishops ignored the 25th anniversary of “Economic Justice for All”, I am happy to see that a group of white Alabama clergymen got together to sign a response on King’s letter. It was fifty years later but it was a wonderful thing to do. Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville stressed the importance in responding to King’s words by “asking for forgiveness for past wrongs, appreciating efforts that have been made and being resolved for more action.”
Memories are extraordinarily important and we must really struggle to remember the courage and heroism of those who have gone before us. A whole generation of young people has come along who know virtually nothing of Martin Luther King. They are not concerned about the fact that he is one of the most important American figures in the 20th century. Because of his vision, his courage and ultimately his martyrdom the United States was able to make a dramatic change, an important turn and be prepared to move into the 21st century. Let’s work to remember all of our heroes.

Share on Facebook

Those of us who were around when the Second Vatican Council was in session (that was from 1962-65) remember what an exciting optimistic time that it was. The wonderful pope John XXIII admitted frankly that the Church had problems – cultural problems, structural problems and problem problems. The way he described it was that it was time to “open the windows and let in a little fresh air.” And open the windows he did!

The Council brought together approximately 2,500 bishops from all over the world and they would be in session about four months a year for the four years of the Council.

Overall, the Council initially was a tremendous success. Bishops, strangers to each other at first, soon found common ground and recognized that the four centuries since the Reformation the Church had been in a defensive position. I called that the fact that the “wagons had been circled.” What John XXIII really said as wagon master was “Wagons West.” In other words, move on, have confidence, trust in the Lord. Yes, there were deserts and mountains out there to be traversed but moving forward was an essential part of the mission of the Church and the Council was a magnificent effort to move the Church forward.

When you do four hundred years of change in a large cumbersome structure in less than ten years there are some rough edges. There was a great deal of tension as efforts to implement the Council were undertaken. Pope Paul VI was heroic during this period and the bishops who had been opposed to the idea of the Council to begin with were still around and they endeavored to slow down its implementation. When John Paul II arrived in 1978 he had a very clear vision of who ought to be the bishops of the world. He was in office for 26 years and at the time of his death he had appointed nearly every bishop in the world including me. While this powerful and influential pope frequently discussed the importance of the Council, it was under his leadership that a determined effort was made to divert the general direction of the Council.

The main issue in the Second Vatican Council was not Mass facing the people or the use of the vernacular in the liturgy. The real issue was HOW leadership was to be exercised in the life of the Church. The structure remained essentially the same but those in leadership positions were to function in a consultative and collegial manner. Pastors were to be assisted by parish councils, bishops were to be assisted by both diocesan pastoral councils and councils made up of clergy. Finally, the pope himself is to have the advantage of being assisted by a world-wide gathering of bishops. A new instrument called the Papal Synod was to be established. It would be made up of bishops elected from the various national conferences scattered across the planet. It all looked very good on paper and some progress was made but very soon at each one of these levels it began to weaken and has almost disappeared.
One of the first moves that Pope Francis has made was to bring into existence a commission of eight Cardinals drawn from all over the world which has been charged with assisting him in restructuring the Universal Church. A rhetorical question: does that mean that the Second Vatican Council has come back to life?

Share on Facebook

He was not overly photogenic, but what a man! What a Pope! In 1958, the world was informed that a successor to the awesome Pope Pius XII had been chosen. There was his picture- short,very heavy, and virtually unknown. Who was Angelo Roncalli? We may not have known who he was in 1958, but we soon learned. He became Pope John XXIII, a quiet, prayerful man, in his late 70′s, who was to effectively teach both the whole world and the Church his ideas and his vision that went far beyond the bounds of Roman Catholicism, and deeply touched the hearts of men and women across the world.
The first and most dramatic single thing he did was to call the first Vatican Council. The surprise announcement shocked and stunned Vatican officials. The last world council was held in 1870, and there had only been nineteen in 2000 years. What would happen when all the bishops got together under one roof? The council would be an extraordinary event that has had tremendous effect on the day to day life of the Church. Not all of his hopes have been realized, but I for one think we will yet see its fulfillment. For me personally, one of the most important things that this Pope accomplished was to write two extraordinary documents, and send them not just to the bishops, or just the Catholics, but to the whole human family. The first was Pacem in terris, and I will come back to this in a few days with more details, but for now I want to relate it to earlier papal documents that reflected the social theology of Roman Catholicism.
Let’s go back to 1891. Pope Leo XIII wrote the first of the great social encyclicals, and his document reflects where the economic systems were at that time. Therefore, it concentrates on the relationship between workers and owners, envisioning a world of small shops and factories.
Forty years later, (and that’s the name of the second document quadrajessimo ano) and Pope Pius XI challenged a much more complicated economic world, and challenged governments and industry-wide corporations to be concerned about and to treat fairly, the working people scattered across the planet. In 1963, this beloved pope from the Italian alps had worldwide vision, and although he solidly supported the teachings and values of the two earlier encyclicals, he reached out to embrace truly worldwide structures. Pope John XXIII reached the United Nations, to international cartels and was teaching about the reality of a one world economy, twenty years before the term was popular!
To summarize, in 1891, Pope Leo XII stressed local economic challenges. Pius Xi, in 1931 moved to the national sphere. Pope John XXIII framed this issue throughout the world in an international context. My life has been dramatically affected by these three documents, and I am happy to say that the world and the effectiveness of the Church within the world is enhanced because of them.

Share on Facebook

Francis is now in his third week as Bishop of Rome and leader of the Universal Church. He continues to make the front page of papers all over the world and it is obvious that not only Roman Catholics are happy to have a smiling pope, but there is strong enthusiasm for him far beyond the limits of actual Church membership.
Tradition is a tremendously important aspect of religious structures. That is true of virtually every major religion and it is certainly true of Roman Catholicism. However, tradition should not be a prison and except for a short interval of the Second Vatican Council, there has been a tendency to lock the Church in with yesterday’s customs and traditions. The 266th successor of St. Peter has told us by his words and his actions that this is not the way he is going to exercise his papal ministry. His face, his words and his actions stand for joy, hope, openness, laughter and love. He manifested all of these qualities during Holy Week. He made a series of celebrations with much more spontaneity and joy than the Vatican clerics have been used to. May God bless him for it.
You can’t believe it! While most of the world, both within and beyond the confines of the Church, seem to be extraordinarily well pleased with this new pope from the Third World, there are murmurs of discontent from some on the right.
It seems that many traditionalists on the right are fearful that the new pope will implement some of the changes that many of us had hoped would come out of the Second Vatican Council.
One of the conservative Catholic blogs had this to say. “This is one of the worst possible men to be elected pope if you are a traditionalist. This is totally depressing. The last one out of the Church please turn off the lava lamp.” A journalist in Buenos Aires, writing for conservative blog Rorate-Caeli, “Of all the unthinkable candidates Jorge Mario Bergoglio is perhaps the worst.” said Mario Gonzales calling Francis “A sworn enemy of the traditional Mass.”
And here is a good one. Adam DeVille, a theology professor at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, implies that it is time that conservatives start being less concerned about what the pope does or says. “Yes, he is the Bishop of Rome. Yes, he has a special place in the Church. But people need to wean themselves off looking to him constantly and assuming that everything he does we have to do.” Wow! Is that an about face or what?
Onward through the fog.

Share on Facebook

Anyone who is interested in the developments in the Roman Catholic Church across the world would have to be struck by the amount of growing tension in different countries over the last two or three years. There have been organized complaints, petitions, demands for change in many parts of the world and almost all of them take the same format. Each group consistently takes up several comparable positions. The first is that the Second Vatican Council is being cruelly rolled back and negated. The assertion is that the Vatican officials have been consistently and quietly working to undo accomplishments of Vatican II quietly over the last two decades and it is done behind closed doors without benefit of consultation with the Church across the world. A second assertion is that changes are required in many pastoral areas whether it be who is an apt candidate for ordination to the priesthood or what the function and jurisdiction of the National Conference of Bishops. Finally, and this is one most frequently heard, is that it is virtually impossible to have an effective dialogue with Church leaders on any subject that they do not wish to discuss. Complaints and charges, demonstrations, dissident groups have formed where there is virtually no way to directly communicate with the Vatican authorities. This has been true in Australia, Ireland, the United States and other countries as well.
Now comes Switzerland. Fifty year old Abbot Martin Werlen, leader of the Abbey of Einsiedeln, a member of the Swiss Bishops Conference, recently delivered a sermon for Church reform. He has chosen as his title, “Discovering the Embers Under the Ashes” and ties his remarks to the late great Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini who just before his death last August coined that Catholicism “embers” were hidden under the ashes. Werlen stressed a dramatic decrease in the numbers of priests and religious, plummeting church attendance and a refusal by Church leaders to face what the basic causes of this dissatisfaction is. Abbot Werlen went on to talk about the problems of the Church’s refusal to deal with the problems of remarried divorced Catholics who are now barred from the Eucharist. He pointed out that the Orthodox Church have an excellent pastoral program and the Catholic Church has never condemned the Orthodox approach. He went on to call for local churches having more say in episcopal nominations. Finally, he urged the Church to rediscover synodal processes which were so important in the first millennium in the history of the Church. After the Abbot’s remarks were printed in a brochure, Bishop Markus Buchel of the Diocese of Sankt Gallen, the newly elected president of the Swiss Bishops Conference, responded by saying, “Abbot Werlen has taken up urgent questions the faithful were asking. He has outlined the problems very clearly and has put forward possible solutions. This is an impetus for necessary discussions in the church that are also a great concern of mine. That is why I am most thankful to him.”
Well there it is. There is tension and dissidents in many parts of the universal Church and as yet Vatican leaders have shown no sign of being willing to deal with them directly.

Share on Facebook

It seems to me that a lot of exciting and important things were going on in the early 1960’s. One thing that has affected me and most American Catholics was that the Second Vatican Council was beginning to crank up. Another thing that has affected each and every one of us, whether we know it or not, was the publication of a single volume in September of 1962 by a courageous woman who was a John Hopkins educated zoologist. The woman was Rachel Carson and the book was the extraordinarily important, Silent Spring.

While no one else was paying much attention, Carson became interested in the harmful affects of pesticides, especially DDT. Developed during the war, DDT was promoted as a great scientific advance and was widely and successfully used as an insect killer in the United States. Carson cited the work of Nobel Prize scientist, Otto Warburg, and explained in a clear manner that people could easily understand why repeated small exposures to pesticides and nuclear radiation changed the ability of the cell to carry out normal activities resulting in malignancy which is the reason that there is no safe dose of a carcinogen. Many scientific experts shared her concern.

When the book was published the chemical industry went berserk. Carson’s short publication was a threat to their bottom line and the industry angrily reacted to her scientifically sound arguments that DDT was harmful. They attacked her methods, her motivation and her conclusions, and they threatened to sue both the publisher of the book and the New Yorker magazine. Carson heroically stuck to her facts and was soon joined by outstanding scientists all over the world. Scientists and activists founded the Environmental Defense Fund, the largest and most effective private environmental advocacy group in that area that would soon be followed by the establishment of Earth Day all over the country. Then the response at the federal level was the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Carson’s vision and her followers achieved very real victories in those days, but the battle continues even to this day. The Tea Party has many interesting items on its agenda but one at the top would be the suppression of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Meningitis anyone?

Share on Facebook

On October 11th, Benedict XVI celebrated the golden jubilee of the opening of the Second Vatican Council with a Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. That date 50 years ago began a four-year process revitalizing the 2,000-year-old institution which we call the Church. At the conclusion of the fourth session in 1965, the bishops would scatter back across the world and undertake the difficult task of implementing four years of prayer, study and renewal. The Council itself and the years to follow would represent an extraordinary transition in the life of the Church, a transition that would produce different responses in different segments of the Christian community.

Regretfully, a half century has had a daunting affect on the human memory. There is not a bishop alive today who attended the Council. Very few priests under 75 have any real memory of it. There are hundreds of millions of Catholics across the world that it is simply an oft-repeated name that does not carry too much weight in their day-to-day lives.

Despite these facts, the Council was the most important ecclesiastical event in 100 years and was only the third meeting of the bishops across the world since the Council of Trent closed its doors after the final session in 1547. Vatican I was short and incomplete. Its primary concern was defining certain aspects of the papacy but then was interrupted by the Civil War in 1870. Regretfully, it was interrupted before it clarified the office of bishop in the life of the Church.

In 1961, I don’t remember the exact date, Giuseppe Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, was gloriously reigning and at a major liturgical celebration at the Vatican he rather casually announced that he was going to call another Council that would be Vatican Council II. He seems to have made this announcement without a detailed discussion with his key staff members and they were thrown into a certain amount of disarray. Reports from that time relate that key Vatican Cardinals attempted to dissuade the Holy Father from going forward with the Council. He did not heed their advice and the Council began on October 11, 1962 with 2,500 bishops present.

Since the Curia officials were not able to block the opening of the Council, they made every effort to control its activities and when the bishops arrived their helpful Vatican staff handed them a sizable stack of documents ranging over a number of problems and issues (as the Curia saw them)! The bishops were expected to study them and make them the working papers for the Council. There was almost instant revolt and one of the leaders in the rejection of these staff documents was Cardinal John Cody of Chicago. This was the first indication that American prelates would be having a real influence in this modern Council.

Tomorrow I will talk about the next events. This was really an exciting and encouraging period where people had great hope for true and profound revival in the life and functioning of the Roman Catholic Church.

Share on Facebook

When I was appointed a bishop at the end of the 1970’s, I made it a point to get to know as many of my brother bishops as possible. There were about 225 of them. Since we had two general meetings a year and a endless smaller meetings of committees and special projects, it was fairly easy to do. I have to admit that I was greatly impressed with the leadership that the Church had at that time. It was truly exceptional.

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin towered over many of his brother bishops and was accepted as a national leader not just inside the life of the Church, but in American society in general. Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco was a leader in all areas of Church life, but especially in continuing efforts to more completely implement the Second Vatican Council responding generously to John Paul II’s request that the bishops help him to more effectively utilize the papacy and remove it as a difficult block to Church unity. Archbishop Patrick Flores of San Antonio was a tremendous source of encouragement to minorities gradually being recognized for their gifts inside the life of the Church. Flores was a migrant worker as a child and would later be one of the nation’s most beloved archbishops. The list could go on and on but I am prejudiced. Those archbishops have all either been retired for many years or have gone on to God and new men have been assigned.

The insightful John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter had a lead article last month under the title “New Gung-ho Archbishops Known For Aggressive Style.” That really caught my eye and I wondered about which issues they were being aggressive. The report uses three new archbishops as example of that aggressive style. The first is Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore who is the most visible point man for the USCCB’s efforts to protect religious freedom which they see as being seriously and imminently threatened. The second aggressive archbishop is Salvatore Cordileone, newly arrived in San Francisco. He is described as “the major Catholic cheerleader on Proposition 8 which will ban gay marriages.” The third new archbishop is Samuel Aquila, newly appointed to Denver to replace Archbishop Charles Chaput who was promoted to Philadelphia. The article, while interesting, does not list Archbishop Aquila’s area of aggressiveness. I am sure that time will reveal it soon enough.

Archbishops come and archbishops go. The Church remains.

Share on Facebook

The Second Vatican Council began in 1961. Nearly 3,000 bishops met in Rome for about 90 days a year for four years. It was an awesome meeting, the first meeting of the world’s bishops since 1870 and a meeting that made the heroic effort to study, evaluate and, where necessary, refresh the structures of the Church.

Americans are notorious for having short memories and not overly interested in history. Everyone who was ten years old at the time the Council ended, should be now making serious plans for retirement. I think that you can see that in the Church today not everyone is as excited about the reality of the Council as those of us who lived through it as relatively young adults. It was a period of extraordinary hope and optimism, a period in which young Catholics felt that the Church was going to open itself up in terms of its structures making room for real influence from the laity. There was no question about giving up the necessary power of the ordained in the life of the Church, but there was hope that the ordained, who controlled the power and authority at every level, would find a more effective way to utilize that power.

Adaptations were made at the parish, diocesan, national and universal levels. More laity were brought in, and the Church has made an honest effort to utilize the wonderful gifts and expertise that the Church needs and can utilize in its capable and generous lay leaders. All of that is very good. Nevertheless, those who remember the excitement, the hope and the optimism of the 1960’s are frequently found to be discouraged and saddened by the fact that those windows that Pope John XXIII wanted to be thrown open in order to allow fresh air into the inner-life of the Church have been not completely closed, but certainly lowered! Structural changes, such as the role of episcopal conferences, efforts at ecumenism, have sadly been downplayed with understandable dulling of hope and optimism for Christian unity. In administrative areas, changes that were brought about by nearly 3,000 bishops publicly debating have been frequently offset by decisions made by a small number of Church leaders operating behind closed doors. This was not the intended thrust of the Council, but this is what we are struggling through at the present time.

I have no doubt that the Church leaders, who have been endeavoring to shut down much of the Second Vatican Council, are sincere. I just believe that they are exercising very poor judgment and if they prevail, the Church will continue to contract at a tragic rate.

I want to be wrong!

Share on Facebook

For good or for ill, seminary education is fairly standard around the world. The basic courses – four years of undergraduate work with a major in philosophy and the second four years is in the various forms of theology as well as other ecclesiastical subjects – things that need to be known by someone who is going to function in a parish or most other priestly roles. Their curriculum may be the same but priests differ dramatically in different periods of time. I don’t know if that is true of the whole world but it is certainly true of the United States. Priests who started in the seminary in the late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s were profoundly influenced by the ‘60’s, the chaos of that period and the awesome hope generated by the Second Vatican Council. They would later be dubbed as “Vatican II priests.” Sometimes that expression was a compliment, sometimes it was derogatory depending on the frame of reference of the speaker.

There are always exceptions and no description fits everything or everyone, but the Vatican II priests were optimistic about the Church’s mission to the world. They were vitally concerned about bringing the message of Jesus Christ into the failing human structures of day-to-day living and society. The bishops of that period reflected the same thing. It is very interesting to look at the list of the subjects upon which the bishops spoke out in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. They were working for peace, for freedom for everyone, for a more just societies, for concern for the poor and the vulnerable. The episcopal statements coming out of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops today are overwhelmingly “in-house” being concerned about churchy issues and they reflect a dramatic withdrawal from the mode of operation of the last generation. Both groups are bishops, both groups are faithful to the Gospel but they are very different. Will the frame of reference turn again in the near future?

Only God knows.

Share on Facebook