Happy Birthday to the Mac and to Vatican II

So yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the launch of Macintosh and today is the 50th anniversary of the announcement that launched Vatican II, both splendid, world-changing events. I won’t carry on too much about the Macintosh, but I really hope we celebrate the heck out of Vatican II, since it really was quite the thing.

Slipping into the mode of thinking that Vatican II wasn’t a big deal implies the church today behaves in much the same way as it did in the hundred and fifty years before Vatican II, which is a bit of a stretch. It implies the church in all its hierarchical glory was never wrong about most of the major issues of the day: It was not wrong in its stand against democracy, it was not wrong when it said a state should be able to dictate the religion of its people, it was not wrong about the importance of Scripture and the early Church Fathers, about the uses of history, about Bible studies, about the relationship of the hierarchy to scholarship, or about the laity. This sorry history (and all it implies about how wrong the church can be on so many critical issues over such an extended period of time) is wiped from memory when we say that at Vatican II nothing really happened.

The other thing it means is this. If nothing really happened, then there is no unfinished business. If nothing happened, the fact hat no women or laity played a role in the Council is just a quaint historical tidbit. If nothing happened, the fact that birth control, celibacy, the reform of the Curia and the formation of the Synod of Bishops were taken off the Council’s agenda by Pope Paul VI is meaningless. The fact that the issue of the authority of the Pope vs the authority of the bishops was not satisfactorily resolved is irrelevant. If nothing happened at Vatican II then who needs Vatican III?

Not only did something happen, a lot more needs to happen, so let’s celebrate the event as much as we can.

Tags: bureaucracy, Vatican II