In more than 30 years serving in Catholic education, both on the secondary and university levels, I have seen the Catholic Church lose many generous and spiritual young people because the institutional leaders do not give them the "spiritual space" to question, to dialogue, to doubt, to challenge. In fact, some of these institutional leaders contend (often behind closed doors) that the church is better off without these querulous youth and instead shower their attention on young people who accept the church with docility and are supposedly "flocking" into the church. It is not the young people (and many of their parents) who are leaving the church that are the supposed "cafeteria Catholics." It is those who are picking and choosing from the teachings of Vatican II, which first convened exactly 50 years ago this October, as if it were not as "legitimate" a Council of the entire church as, say, Vatican I or even the Council of Trent.
When anyone reviews the litany of recent church scandals, missteps, mistakes and public relation blunders, must that person -- the faithful, the not-so-faithful or the unfaithful -- not stop a moment and ask, "Is the Holy Spirit really guiding the church today?"
My answer is: Of course! Probably never before in the history of the church has there been greater de facto evidence of the grace-filled presence of the Holy Spirit. Go to almost any Catholic parish that is following the spirit of Vatican II and you will experience what I am talking about. But (and this is a big but) surely the amateurish solutions proffered by the institutional church in response to the current crises of confidence in the church on everything from the cover-ups of sexual abuse to the refusal to even allow a discussion of the ordination of women could lead anyone with a modicum of common sense to question the presence of the Holy Spirit in Rome or in most chancery offices today.
Yet the Holy Spirit dwells, as always, in the hearts and minds of the faithful -- the lay people, the vowed religious, the priests and deacons, the prelates and popes. We Catholics know that when we all come together as church in a collegial and faith-filled spirit that God -- in the Person of the Holy Spirit -- is there in our midst. This is actually a key teaching of the church, part of its much misunderstood and often misused "magisterium."
Change is hard for an individual to accomplish and even more traumatic for an institution that has many individuals within its structures with vested interests in the status quo to protect. Yet the reason we have a theology of metanoia (change of heart) in the Catholic Church is that many of our church fathers and mothers and holy prophets knew it would take the Holy Spirit to transform us, not only as individuals but also as the institutional church. Transforming man-made, fallible structures and organizations is a meaningful task, but it takes the Holy Spirit to pour grace, zeal and wisdom into the hearts of individuals like you and me so that we will speak up -- yes, with insistent, faith-filled force but also with sensitive, caring and loving actions toward the institutional church itself.
What is so very strange and inconsistent is that the institutional church, which defends its role as protector of the faith and as conveyor of the truth, seems to be doing all that it can to negate the results of its own most recent ecumenical council, Vatican II.
Have they forgotten that Pope John XXIII -- as much the Vicar of Christ on Earth as Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI -- convened bishops from all over the world half a century ago to join with the bishop of Rome to exercise its teaching authority with the assurance that such collegiality is imbued with the presence of the Holy Spirit? Or, as Catholic Bishop Kevin Dowling of South Africa recently said of Vatican II, "its vision, its principles and the direction it gave are to be followed and implemented by all, from the pope to the peasant farmer in the fields of Honduras."
Even the casual observer sees the growing tensions that arise between the various factions in the church today. One sees antagonistic camps of "liberals" vs. "conservatives," "orthodox" vs. "revisionists," and "the faithful" vs. "the heretics." Mean-spiritedness, hostility and acrimony flourish in a church that should be all about the peace and love that Jesus brought to our world. Certainly, all sides are to blame as we permit these differences to obfuscate the "Good News" of the faith.
Yet now, more than ever, those of us who believe in the vision of Vatican II cannot back down from speaking the truth as we see it. The institutional church needs to respond in a vitally new and more effective way to Vatican II that will allow the church to once more "teach as Jesus did."
De LaSalle Brother Louis DeThomasis is a former president of St. Mary's University of Minnesota and the author of 'Flying in the Face of Tradition: Listening to the Lived Experience of the Faithful,' published by ACTA Publications.
Jim Wallis: Having the Sisters' Back
Second Vatican Council - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Holy See - Archive - Documents of the II Vatican Council
To my mind it is not surprising since the obvious motivation of the negative report is a) underlying misogyny of the institution. Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI himself wrote in an official document to all Bishops in 2004 that Genesis should be literally understood and applied, that women must be submissive and be ruled by "the man" - "in the church and in the world" ("God's decisive words to the woman after the first sin express the kind of relationship which has now been introduced between man and woman"). Intelligent, professional women, especially in collegial association are "anathema" in the official church; b) The sisters greviously offended the US Bishops. Competent and professional they did not act as sycophantic dependents against their professional and religious considered review of the Obama health care proposal. They will never be forgiven by the Sanhedrin, oops, I mean the hierarchy.
A reasonable person might ask: If a "Holy Spirit" has ever existed at all, where the heck's he or she been for the last 2000+ years of biblically-inspired and Vatican-approved bloodshed, rape, torture, pillaging, and childhood-induced mental anguish?
You know Brother Louie, you really don't have to be a serf. Unless maybe if it pays too well?
Change does not come without some strife. We may be seeing the end of the baronial bishops and pope. Arrogance goes before the fall.
I very much appreciated (admission: because I've been saying the same thing) your take on who's truly following the cafeteria model. I doubt that any of those who criticize Catholics who disagree with the Vatican as being "cafeteria Catholics" would participate in any open discussion of how they are doing the very thing they accuse others of doing.
It seems the backlash against Vatican II has replicated much of the kind of fearful, autocratic, formulaic proclamations that necessitated Vatican II in the first place. There decibel level of those tearing down the effects of Vatican II needs to be met by an equal level that champions it. Thank you for contributing to that.
Full disclosure: I'm a Mercy Associate, who's Episcopalian, never Roman Catholic. I see many of the sisters and Benedictine brothers I grew up around struggling with the same things you are writing about.
Yep, that's why those few and their allies have their heels dug in up to their elbows.There is SO much about how they're fighting to maintain and increase their control that is counter to scripture. Seldom does anyone who has temporal power give it up without fighting tooth and nail, no matter what they say they believe. They too easily rationalize their actions
I've never felt that I lack the "space" to doubt or question, or grow in my faith. On the contrary, what I've found is that my space for being "devout" and even "docile" has been shrinking quite rapidly, constrained by other loud voices that have been eroding the Gospel as received and transmitted by the Catholic Church, and entrusted to her pastors. You are correct in pointing out that there has been a "corruption of Vatican II" but this corruption comes from those who erect their own personal or group "magisterium" over and above the real one, replacing with their opinions those which we have to receive with divine, Catholic faith.
The "spirit of Vatican II" has been used by a choir of thousand of voices to sing their dissent. What's worse, they think their cacophony is somehow "beautiful" and "liberating" when it really isn't.
- Cut short, please finish reading here: http://tinyurl.com/dyl257l
In spite of the fact that I have alway's had a respectful "fear of the Lord" within my being, I had begun to believe that "hope" had all but been snuffed out as all I can seem to recognize within my being was/is fear.
-May The Peace of Christ be with all.-