Crossing the Street. Robert R LaRochelle
expectation. Those days when Catholics might quietly ‘say their Rosaries’15 or other prayers as the priest ‘said Mass’ appeared to be fading away. A new language regarding this worship experience came onto the Catholic scene, a more communitarian and participatory language. Instead of ‘going to Mass,’ Catholics were welcomed to ’participate in our shared celebration of the Eucharist. 16
2. A major change in the way Catholics viewed other Christians. Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism17 had the effect of casting Protestants in a different light. It appeared that the Catholic Church was reaching out to non Catholics in a way heretofore unforeseen on the official level. Rather than condemning the errors of Protestant ways, the Council called for deeper cooperation on all levels of the church. This would include studying together along with the church’s ‘separated brethren,’ the Council’s term for non Catholic Christians, reading the Bible together and joining with one another in prayer. In an outstanding and timely 1972 column for his local Archdiocesan newspaper, the distinguished Catholic theologian Richard McBrien spells this out in specific, helpful detail. It is a source worth reading!18
3. The Council emphasized a different kind of role for persons who were not ordained, i.e. most of the people within the church. It declared a common ‘priesthood of the faithful’19 in which all Catholics would embrace their identity as ‘ a priestly people.’20 A new popular Catholic hymn also emerged, using for its title that very Biblical term ‘priestly people.’
4. In fact, the Council truly reshaped how Catholics would view the church. As some ecclesiological theologians have noted, this Council moved the church from the position of seeing itself as synonymous with the notion of Kingdom of God and more toward being a servant of a Kingdom, a realm that is far greater, broader and wider than the church.21 The concept that church and kingdom were not synonymous with one another had broad implications for the church’s understanding of itself.
5. The official Council documents and structure had the imprint of John XXIII’s style all over them — They struck others, including interested Protestant observers present at the Council, as open, hospitable and welcoming to others, reflecting the reality that the Catholic Church has a message for the world, but that there are other messages out there as well. The Council created the impression that the church was willing and eager to work cooperatively with all persons of good will to achieve the goals of the Kingdom of God. It should be noted that the council itself was a collegial gathering in which Bishops (and observers from all over the world and varied religious traditions) rubbed shoulders with and truly collaborated with one another.22
The Second Vatican Council unleashed a torrent of change within the church. Much of the change was not directly intended by the documents themselves but those zealous about the reform of Catholicism saw within the Council and the direction of the church’s official pronouncements a newfound openness to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit upon the whole church, including its nonordained. Thus, as a result of Vatican II, a church that had for so long been identified as presenting answers to its ‘faithful’23 by which they were expected to shape their lives was becoming a church in which many clergy and faithful alike became quite comfortable asking questions.
And so, through the 1960s and 1970s, controversies and questions swept the Catholic Church. Priests and theologians challenged many of the practices of the church. They stood in private disregard of and public disputation with the church’s teaching on birth control, mandatory celibacy for its priests, the ordination of women and the infallibility of the Pope. A new phenomenon emerged whereby Catholic lay men and many lay women began attending exciting graduate programs in some of the world’s finest Catholic universities and colleges and attained credentials to serve as pastoral ministers, chaplains, youth ministers and Directors of Religious Education, in many cases serving either in expanded positions with new titles or in ministries that had not been envisioned not so long before.24
In Chapter 3, I will locate my own journey through the Catholicism of this post Vatican II period with these changes I have just described. As I will reiterate at that time, many of these changes took place as another phenomenon was occurring. Large numbers of men who had been ordained to the priesthood had decided to give up their priestly roles. Declines were starting to happen in the number of young men who were entering seminaries to train to be priests. At the same time, religious orders of women (popularly known as nuns) were experiencing the same reality as was the ordained priesthood. Articles, books and films regarding the relational and sexual lives of priests and nuns began to emerge. The net effect of their departure had a massive impact upon the official church’s ability to staff local parish elementary and secondary schools. The situation dramatized in films like Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s25 was not fiction at all. It was real. Catholic schools depended for decades upon the incredible, herculean efforts of these sisters and their departure, oftentimes documented as ‘leaving to be married,’ had a powerful effect on the configuration of Catholicism in many countries, most definitively in the United States!
As has also been demonstrated by the data, the departure from the priesthood of so many men who opted to marry women also has had a net effect on the high proportion of Catholic priests who are homosexual in their orientation. We will examine how this fact has provoked reactions in the church reflective of the divide between the ‘John XXIII’ Catholics and those of a more ‘John Paul II’ persuasion.
In October 1978, the College of Cardinals elected a Pope whose over twenty six year pontificate (1978-2005) would have an incredibly powerful impact upon the Roman Catholic Church as it entered the twenty-first century. Pope John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyla, was a renowned Catholic bishop in his native Poland who by the strength of his powerful intellect and his charismatic personality, used the ministry of his papacy to reshape the church.
That Pope John Paul reshaped Catholicism is not disputed by those who would call themselves Catholic progressives or Vatican II Catholics. There is disagreement between the more conservative proponents of John Paul’s approach and their liberal counterparts regarding where John Paul stood in relation to that prized jewel in the crown of Catholic reform, namely Vatican II.
John Paul’s adherents would contend that the Pope was very much a Vatican II Catholic and that he firmly believed that many of the changes in the church as well as the passionate cry for even more changes was a misinterpretation of both the letter of the Vatican II documents and the spirit of the Council. So called progressive Catholics saw the era of John Paul II as ‘restorationist’ i.e. moving away from the ‘modern’ approach of Vatican II and back to what they would call a ‘Catholic triumphalism’ based on a powerful papacy. They saw the work of John Paul II, in conjunction with his righthand man, the distinguished German theologian Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, his successor, as moving the church backward and ignoring the positive thrust of Vatican II.
Those who would look upon the work of Pope John Paul and eagerly declare him ‘John Paul the Great’ hold him in high esteem for what they perceive as changes he effected within the Catholic Church. The historical facts indicate the following, regardless of an individual’s interpretation of them: Under John Paul II, many significant changes were made in the Roman Catholic Church. These changes include:
1. A movement toward uniformity in doctrine and a clarification of the ‘Catholic’ teaching on a topic. This was manifest in the publication of a universal catechism,26 discipline imposed upon dissenting theologians,27 the selection of bishops, the relationship of many local Catholic bishops to colleges and universities in their dioceses, changes in curriculum in seminaries responsible for priestly formation and in schools in Catholic dioceses, and public clarification that discussion and dissent is not acceptable in such areas as the ordination of women, homosexuality and birth control, among others. It also provided the impetus for changes in the Mass which would ultimately lead to the publication of the new Roman Missal that went into effect in Advent 2011.28
2. A shift in ecumenical attitude which reflected a discomfort with those church communities which held different positions on the above mentioned ‘hot button issues’ and an