It’s clear that the church can’t do its job if it ceases to exist as an organization. We’ve seen enough corporations die of late (e.g., Lehman Brothers, Arthur Anderson, and even, sadly, Salerno–goodbye Jingle Christmas cookies). And I lived through the bust up of AT&T as an employee and it was not pretty (even though old Ma Bell seems to be rising up from the dead and reconstituting herself again from her various parts). The point is, it’s worthwhile for the church to protect its corporate structure. But only with the realization that this structure is only a very small part of the richness, messiness and mystery that is the fullness of the church. And clearly any *protecting* that goes via the sacrificing of the innocents, as so often was the case in the pediophelia scandals, is sinful. The church is special, but not so special that it gets to escape the bounds of morality.
I think we should recognize that the sacred role of the priest has become thoroughly enmeshed with the authority of the bureaucracy. In his book What Happened at Vatican II, John O’Malley describes the discussion that took place on The Decree on Ministry and Life of Priests. “Two opinions emerged from the speeches: the first tended to see priests primarily as cultic figures who were empowered to consecrate the eucharistic body of Christ and to forgive sins in God’s name, who exercised an almost exclusively top-down authority, and who were under bishops who exercised the same authority in their regard. … The other orientation saw priests in a more active role in society at large, saw them as having a collegial relationship with their bishops and as fostering a similar relationship with those unto whom they ministered.”
Well the second opinion clearly won the day (which was a good start), but the enmeshment of “empowered to consecrate the eucharistic body of Christ” with “an almost exclusively top-down authority” still stood. What we ended up with was a diminishment of the sacredotal role of the priest without much dent at all in the authority structure of the church. Hmmm. A negative double-whammy.
I think we need to envision a priesthood that is able to execute the sacred rituals of the church with full and glorious transcendence (as is the nature of the sacred), while implementing an authority structure in the church that is much more fully collegial, all the way up and down the line, from the pews to the Pope.
Tags: bureaucracy, church
It seems to me that the two big negatories from Vatican II are the loss of the sacred and the loss of a clear statement of the intellectual content of the faith. The importance of the sacredotal role of the priest got lost in the enthusiasm of going back to the sources and restoring the importance of the Liturgy of the Word. And a systematic statement of the faith got sidetracked in the move toward a more pastoral way of speaking (and the well-deserved blowback against the Curial neo-scholastics). So in two of the most important things the conservatives could conserve, they blew it. But the centralized power of the Pope and the authority of the Curia remain intact. Well. We all got the short end on that one.
Tags: bureaucracy, 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
In at least two important respects, I think Vatican II goofed. The first is in regard to the structure of the ritual in the second part of the Mass. The Liturgy of the Eucharist should be different from the Liturgy of the Word in nature, in tone, and in how we participate. And it is not, from where I sit.
I think the church in the old days got the Liturgy of the Eucharist right (even if they got pretty much everything else wrong). But I don’t think Vatican II should (in practice if not by decree) be considered infallible, any more than whatever proceeded it. Let’s remember that As Gary Wills rightly points out (see post below), no one asked the laity about any of this.
Sometimes the yearning for the rituals of old, like the Latin Mass, are written off as nostalgia. I don’t consider it a question of nostalgia at all; it’s a question of how best to construct a ritual that both signifies and creates the real presence of the divine in church. If we all thought God was being made present at the Consecration, would we really busy ourselves standing and kneeling and speaking and shaking hands? I don’t think so. It’s all good stuff, just not where it’s presently situated.
I don’t miss the Latin; I miss the quiet. That’s when you could actually sense the presence of God (not that I entirely know what that means). Such receptivity requires time and silence. That’s where the real grace and healing goes on. As Wills says, we came to church “to do things-witness the miracle, and believe in it; consume the Eucharist, and believe in that.”
To me it all comes down to what we think is actually going on during the Consecration. Figure that out and the proper ritual will fall into place. I just don’t think we’re there yet.
Which brings us to what I think was the second goof of Vatican II. From reading O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II, it seems one of the big changes was a move from a faith with a rigorous, systematic intellectual content (unfortunately–and incorrectly–used to browbeat the “Modernists”) to a more pastoral, Scripture and Church-fathers-based approach. This was clearly needed but as in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we may have thrown out the baby with the bath water. Looking at the textbooks my kids grew up with, the basic message of Christianity is that Jesus was nice and you should be nice too. I think there’s a little more to it than that.
… From “Qualified Non-expert:”
I absolutely agree with you in saying that the Church made a goof in the new liturgy that followed Vatican II, in that it neglects the importance of quiet. The old liturgy had (among many other elements, not all beneficial) a cadence of sound passing to silence passing to music passing to the spoken word passing to silence. This reflects a very positive USAGE of silence as a tool for prayer. We lost that.
This is a part of the overall most central loss in the new liturgy – the sense that the participation we are called on to perform is inherently interior, though it flows over into external action. Virtually every choir member, lector, extraordinary minister, alter server, and even usher, feels that his or her “participation” is more active precisely because of fulfilling those roles. Whereas the reality is that fulfilling these roles is usually more of a distraction to the interior participation that the Council focussed on.
However, I would be careful of calling this failing a goof of Vatican II. The Council called for a reform of the liturgy, and laid down certain principles for this. The actual group that Paul VI called together to form the new mass clearly ignored the principles laid down, and wrote whatever they wanted to write (with an eye to getting it close enough to OK for Paul to let it go, without his throwing the whole effort away and starting over). Benedict XVI is on record for aligning himself with the view that the reform of liturgy that the Council called for never happened.
One of the major problems with changing ritual is that ritual is imbued with a wealth of symbolic meaning, often on a whole range of different levels. It is extraordinarily difficult to be certain, when deciding what should be done away with, that you have correctly understood the full range of symbolic meaning, to correctly estimate the value that ritual adds to the liturgy. For example, the loss of the all-male altar boy cadre will have an inestimable impact on the psychology of young people trying to understand non-identical but complementary roles for the sexes.
Tags: bureaucracy, Vatican II
