The Second Vatican Council and the American Church

THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL AND THE AMERICAN CHURCH

Vatican II

As one observer noted, by the 1960s Catholics in the United States had won their struggle to discover what it meant to be American. But after Vatican II they had to struggle with what it meant to be Catholic.

Widespread Input

In 1959 the newly elected (in October 1958) pope, John XXIII, announced an ecumenical council to bring the Catholic church up to date (aggiornamento). The council, the first in nearly one hundred years, opened in 1962 and was conducted in four sessions before closing in 1965, with Paul VI now the pope. Americans were active at the council, both Catholics as participants and Protestants as observers. Americans such as John Courtney Murray, Francis Cardinal Spellman, and Joseph Cardinal Ritter of Saint Louis played important roles in framing the documents of religious liberty, the absolution of the Jews for the death of Jesus, and the changes in the liturgy.

Changes

Vatican II did not create the explosion of activity that characterized the Catholic community in the last half of the decade. The tensions and desires were there waiting to develop; now they were allowed into the open. The Mass was given in English, and the priest faced the congregation, who participated fully in the service. The rigid separation from other religious groups had ended, and many interreligious contacts were initiated. The National Catholic Bishops Conference replaced the National Catholic Welfare Conference in 1966, and the American hierarchy began to guide its flock. Laypeople began to acquire a larger role in determining the affairs of the church, depending upon the local parish or diocese, and in 1967 the United States Catholic Conference was created to give laypeople a role to play along with the conference of bishops.

PRIESTS AND THE CHURCH

"I was, and always will be, a Catholic priest, but I cannot presently be the priest I was.…We do not need a solution to the birth-control problem.… We need freedom from a legalistic Church that has transformed the simplicity of a personal and Christian love into a world of fear and guilt. We do not know how to find God, we have never learned. We have only been taught to keep laws, to avoid sin, to fear hell, to carry a cross that we built ourselves.…No longer can I stand before my bishop and smile in shy assent when I know he is wrong. No longer will I bow before a pastor when I know his mood has formed the policy of his Church. No longer will I accept in silence the travesties that a dishonest theology has imposed on simple and unsuspecting men. Nor will I leave the Church, even if they demand it of me for it is my Church. I will be a Catholic, a vocal and honest one, even if my superiors forbid me to be a priest. I shall be a Catholic who follows his conscience, demands meaning and relevance from his Church, and will not permit his God to be reduced to empty ritual and all-absorbing law."

Source:

James Kavanaugh, A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church (New York Trident Press, 1967), p. 3 passim.

Modernization versus Traditionalism

Many American Catholics were delighted with the modernizing qualities of the changes. But some of the results were disturbing. For nuns to discard their old habits and wear twentieth-century dresses was one thing; for them to challenge traditions of deference to male hierarchy was another. Worse, large numbers left their orders. More than forty-three hundred nuns returned to secular life between 1966 and 1969. Priests also challenged their constraints and acted individually in their own lives and inside the parish. Many married, often without officially leaving the priesthood. More than thirty-four hundred priests left between 1966 and 1969, it was estimated.

Change

Conservative Catholics objected to the changes. Some simply missed the old structures and habits of their lifetimes. The end of the Latin mass was particularly painful for some who went to great lengths to search out celebrations of the traditional liturgy. Others found the whole drift from authority to individual choice disturbing. But their objections were of little avail. Observers of the church later concluded that it was the hierarchy's teachings on sexuality, particularly birth control, rather than the modernization of the church that caused the weakening ties of the Catholic community.

THE SECULAR CITY

"The forces of secularization have no serious interest in persecuting religion. Secularization simply bypasses and undercuts religion and goes on to other things. It has relativized religious world-views and thus rendered them innocuous. Religion has been privatized. It has been accepted as the peculiar prerogative and point of view of a particular person or group. Secularization has accomplished what fire and chin could not: It has convinced the believer that he could be wrong, and persuaded the devotee that there are more important things than dying for the faith.… The age of the secular city … is an age of 'no religion at all.' It no longer looks to religious rules and rituals for its morality or its meanings.…For fewer and fewer [people] does it provide an inclusive and commanding system of personal and cosmic values and explanations."

Source:

Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillian, 1965), pp. 2-3.

Sources:

"Bishops Approve Liberty Draft," Christian Century, 82 (6 October 1965): 1214;

"Church and Religious Liberty," America, 113 (9 October 1965): 393-394;

"Vote Against Prejudice," Time, 86 (22 October 1965): 61.