CrossCurrents: sacraments

Showing posts with label sacraments. Show all posts

Saturday, September 30, 2017

#468: The NFL’s Loyalty Test

The controversy swirling around the bended knees by NFL players raises issues about our national identity and our commitment to it.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court Justice picked by Donald Trump spoke to a select audience about defending the First Amendment. Here is what Neil Gorsuch said:

To be worthy of the First Amendment freedoms, we have to all adopt certain civil habits that enable others to enjoy them as well. When it comes to the First Amendment, that means tolerating those who don’t agree with us or those whose ideas upset us, giving others the benefit of the doubt about their motives.

Also Thursday, Tennessee Titans tight end Delanie walker revealed that he and his family had been receiving death threats. These were apparently how fans responded after he suggested that fans should not come to NFL games if they felt disrespected by player protests.

These two events reveal the opposite extremes the controversy has surfaced.

It’s tempting to think that the upset over the NFL protests is a mere distraction from the more serious problems facing America. Certainly, for Trump himself, it is convenient if the public and media fight among themselves over the NFL players rather than focusing their attention on his handling of affairs with North Korea, or his slow response to the crisis in Puerto Rico, or his tax plans.

But in 21^st century America, matters of race are never a “mere distraction.” And this case is above all about race. But the real and unfortunate distraction has been to pretend that is about something else. So perhaps it is helpful to reflect and clarify on how the controversy about the NFL is a test of loyalty both for Americans and for Christians.

The clarification requires stating some basic facts to clear the air:

First: the NFL players did not introduce politics onto the playing field. This was done in 2009 when the U.S. government began paying the NFL millions to stage “patriotic” events before each game: color guards, gun salutes, fly-overs—all designed to boost recruiting efforts by whipping up patriotic fervor. In short, this is government-paid advertizing for the military, and it had the effect of bringing politics onto the NFL’s playing fields.

It’s just silly to complain if the players, understanding that politics is already at work here, decide to take advantage of the situation someone else has created.

Second: the players are not protesting the flag or the anthem. Colin Kaepernick explicitly said that he meant no disrespect to either, but was in fact protesting the bad treatment of African Americans by police. One may agree or disagree about the issue of police brutality, but it has nothing to do with either our flag or national anthem.

Third, this is not a protest about soldiers or veterans. The original protest about police brutality has been transformed, in response to Trump’s “Sons of bitches” attack, into a protest about the First Amendment itself. In neither instance are the players attacking, objecting to, or showing any disrespect for members of the military. In fact many protesters are themselves veterans, and many other veterans support them.

The players did not make the decision to have soldiers on the field, and they should not have to take any responsibility for it. The players need to be on the field to play the game, but football could continue even if no soldier ever set foot on the gridiron.

Fourth: player salaries have nothing to do with the protests. Yes, these players are millionaires - -but they are responding in protest to the attacks of someone who is even richer than they are. To allow a billionaire president to make such attacks, and then to claim that his target audience cannot protest because they are rich, is completely inconsistent.

Some fans are even arguing that the players are “ungrateful” because they want to protest despite being well paid. But First Amendment rights cannot be bought off; players do not lose those rights when they accept a paycheck, no matter how large. And since most of them are African-Americans, calling them ungrateful sounds like a new way of calling Black Americans “uppity.”

Bill Russell takes a knee with his Medal of Freedom

Fifth: Kneeling is not disrespectful. The simple fact is, kneeling has been a gesture of respect, loyalty, even fealty, for centuries. Many of us kneel when we pray, as a sign of respect. And many players kept their hands over their hearts to reinforce that sign of respect. This protest does not use kneeling as a sign of disrespect, but simply as a sign of protest--first, a protest against racialized police brutality, and second as a protest in favor of First Amendment rights.

Sixth: Thus the real issues are (1) racialized police violence and (2) the right to protest itself--that is, free speech.

Once we accept the facts of the case, we can look at the underlying question of loyalty.

Loyalty here can mean many things. It can mean loyalty to a flag, or to a song, or to a team, or to the Constitution, or even to a higher law.

Many Americans of course have strong emotional feelings about the flag, and we’re even in the habit of pledging our allegiance to it. But while the actions that surround the flag often suggest that people regard it as something sacred, this cannot really be true.

First, the U.S. Supreme Court has long determined that in the name of protest people may even burn the flag. It also ruled that people have the right not to salute the flag. What this demonstrates, no matter how you feel about it, is that the right to protest is more important than this piece of cloth. We cannot defend the flag by preventing protest. Instead, we must protect protest even if it harms the flag.

Many Americans also have strong emotional attachment to the national anthem. And the singing of the anthem at sports events became popular and routine during the 20^th century, and especially during and after World War II. But most people only know the first verse, and except for the final line “The land of the free and the home of the brave,” the rest of the song is simply a celebration, not of American values or institutions, but of a battle victory over the British in 1812.

The song has been linked to sports, but we do not sing it in a theater before a movie, or a play, or in church before each ceremony. We are perfectly capable of being Americans and celebrating American values and institutions whether we sing this song or not.

These things symbolize our nation and our people, but they are only that: symbols. If we treat them as though we must love them to love the country, we make them fetishes, as if they are the whole of us. It’s like loving someone’s big toe, instead of the whole person. This is not patriotism, it’s pathology.

And worse, to turn this song or this flag into something sacred—something, for example, higher than protest itself--is to fail the loyalty test that Americans, and especially American Christians, should be passing.

For Americans, the values enshrined in our Constitution are the highest standards we possess as a people. The right to protest is the First Right among these, and nothing else in our social life is higher or more important. Any attempt to prevent rightful protest as “disrespectful” to the flag or the anthem--or even to the military--is actually an act of profound disrespect for the Constitution itself, the very foundation of our nation, which those other things represent..

And for Christians, the lesson should be even more obvious. Treating any object--a song, a flag, even a veteran or soldier--as something sacred fails the test of loyalty to the First Commandment: “Thou shall not have false gods.” Christians believe that only God is sacred, and that God’s will creates a higher law than any other law.

That law includes, especially for Catholics, the idea that we are one human family, all children of God, all brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, and that therefore any division among us is a scandal to our faith.

The very notion that Blacks in our country have been mistreated for centuries must be a source of shame to all of us. That shame reflects the fact that America has failed to do God’s will for centuries, that slavery really is our original sin, and that we have not finished our penance and amendment for that sin. Using the flag and the anthem as camouflage to hide that makes the sin worse. Using our soldiers as human shields to hide our sin is worst of all.

So while loyalty to team, to flag, to a song, to the military may all be good things, the real test of our loyalties this: is our first loyalty as Americans to the Constitution? Is our first loyalty as people of faith to the will of God and God’s higher law?

Viewed this way, the controversy is hardly a “mere distraction.” As serious as the other problems facing us are, this challenge of loyalty to God and Constitution cannot be ignored, cannot be forgotten, cannot be avoided. It is a test of loyalty that, sooner or later, this nation must pass—or the nation will fail.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

#395: The Burden of Proof--Part 2

How the new burden of proof challenges the Catholic Church to honor its own teachings.

Now that the Supreme Court has entered the same-sex marriage debate, we have reached a tipping point where voter opinion matters less than the constitutional question of how to justify discrimination that denies gays a civil right.

Now, suddenly, the burden of proof is on those defending the traditional definition of civil marriage. Now, to make their case, they must prove Bishop Vigneron’s assertion that re-defining civil marriage will “hurt us all.”

Having the burden of proof means that mere assertions will no longer work. They will have to demonstrate concrete harmful consequences.

This is exactly the burden of proof that courts have been demanding for 10 years. And it is the burden of proof that defenders of “one man and one woman” have been failing to meet in case after case. So in 2003 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court addressed the Department of Public Health’s case against gay marriage and concluded:

The department has had more than ample opportunity to articulate a constitutionally adequate justification for limiting civil marriage to opposite-sex unions. It has failed to do so…It has failed to identify any relevant characteristic that would justify shutting the door to civil marriage to a person who wishes to marry someone of the same sex….The absence of any reasonable relationship between, on the one hand, an absolute disqualification of same-sex couples who wish to enter into civil marriage and, on the other, protection of public health, safety, or general welfare, suggests that the marriage restriction is rooted in persistent prejudices against persons...

In this week’s DOMA case, the Supreme Court first noted that DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) denied gay people their rights by discriminating against them:

The Act’s demonstrated purpose is to ensure that if any state decides to recognize same sex marriages, those unions will be treated as second-class marriages for purposes of Federal law. This raises a most serious question under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment…. DOMA writes inequality into the entire United States code.

It then noted the clear and concrete harm from such discrimination: cutting off gay couples from the benefits contained in more than 1000 Federal laws pertaining to “social security, housing, taxes, up to criminal sanctions, copyright, and veterans’ benefits,” as well as health care, bankruptcy, and even children’s benefits.

Next the court reiterated that denying such rights is a major constitutional violation:

DOMA is unconstitutional as the deprivation of the liberty of the person protected by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Finally it concludes that no defender of DOMA had proved any justification for such a breach of rights:

DOMA singles out a class of persons…The Federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure.

Similarly, in the ruling about California’s Proposition 8, the Court failed to find justification for that law’s ban on gay marriage. In fact, the absence of such proof led the Court to conclude that those defending the ban had no business in court at all--that is, no legal “standing”:

It is not enough that the party invoking the power of the court had a keen interest in the issue. That party must also have “standing,” which requires, among other things, that it had suffered a concrete and particularized to injury….We find the petitioners do not have standing.

Once again, the point is that discrimination requires some extraordinary justification:

The equal protection clause requires the state to have a legitimate reason for withdrawing a right or benefit from one group but not others…This requires the litigant to prove that he has suffered a concrete and particularized injury that is fairly traceable to a challenge to conduct, and is likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision.

And, the Court concluded, the petitioner never met this burden of proof:

The only individuals who sought to appeal that order were petitioners, who had intervened in the district court. But the district court had not ordered them to or refrained them from doing anything…. Here… The petitioners have no “direct stake” in the outcome of their appeal.

All this demand for proof of “concrete and particularized injury” could well be too high a burden of proof for Catholic officials to meet. Perhaps it is time that they remind themselves of two things: (1) The difference between civil marriage and the Sacrament of Matrimony, and (2) Catholic teaching on homosexuality. Until now, the bishops’ strategy has ignored both.

Catholic teaching says homosexuals must be treated with the same respect and dignity as anyone else. It condemns any “unjust” discrimination against gay people. If we apply this teaching to the question of civil marriage after 10 years of debate, two things are clear.

First, it is now well established in American law that access to civil marriage is a civil right, which means laws banning gay couples from civil marriage deny gays their rights and are a form of discrimination.

Second, to continue supporting such bans the Catholic Church would need to prove that such discrimination is not “unjust,” since the Church itself condemns that. It would have to argue that such discrimination is justified because of the harms caused by allowing same-sex civil marriage. And to do that, it would need to come up with much stronger proof than the courts have seen so far. Is that possible?

Clearly the burden of proving such a case is heavy indeed. It seems to me that church officials have now three choices:

(1) They can cling to the arguments they had been using for 10 years: pretending that civil marriage is the same as the Sacrament of Matrimony, (even though the first is administered by the priest acting as an agent of the state, and the second is administered by the couple acting as ministers of the Church), and pretending that any change will “hurt us all.” This option guarantees failure.

(2) Or, they can marshall better evidence showing that redefining civil marriage to allow gay marriage creates concrete harm, and accept the burden of proving that to the American public and the courts. Legally, this is the only way to stop gay marriage, now that they courts have determined that this is not a matter of majority will but a matter of civil rights. But proving such harm is a tall order, especially since 10 years of gay marriage have convinced growing millions of Americans that no harm has resulted.

(3) Or, finally, they can acknowledge that civil marriage has taken a historical fork in the road that diverges from the Sacrament of Matrimony, creating two very different institutions—one a civil right governed by the U.S. Constitution, the other a sacrament governed by Catholic tradition.

They can get priests out of the civil marriage business (one wonders: why are they in it at all?).

They can admit that banning gay civil marriage equals discrimination, and they can also admit that the burden of proof to justify such discrimination has become an impossible task.

Thus they can conclude that allowing gays access to civil marriage is an act of justice that treats homosexuals with all the respect and dignity that Catholic teaching promises them.

Then the bishops can focus on strengthening the Sacrament of Matrimony, a task they seem to have forgotten.

Sunday, June 30, 2013

#394: The Burden of Proof--Part 1

The Supreme Court has shifted the burden of proof in the debate over same-sex marriage.

When I began writing CrossCurrents in 2003, America’s debate over same-sex marriage was just heating up. Almost immediately, the American Catholic hierarchy made protection of the status quo on marriage a top priority. They have spent 10 years losing ground, and this week’s Supreme Court rulings confirm what has been clear for some time: the burden of proof is now on the US Bishops and anyone else trying to resist this change.

My doubts about the bishops’ strategy are not new. In my early CrossCurrents pieces on this issue, I advised that the bishops back civil unions for gays, as Pope Francis did in Argentina. After the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned a ban on civil marriage licenses for same-sex couples in 2003, I observed that it was time for the U.S. Catholic Church to get out of the civil marriage business (in which priests act as agents of the state) while the getting was good, in order to focus on the Sacrament of Matrimony. I wrote:

The bishops could have drawn a sharp line between “civil marriage” and the “Sacrament of Matrimony”. Then they could have defended the unique meaning of Christian marriage against evolving, secular versions of civil marriage. Instead, the bishops chose to meet the court on its own turf, arguing that the good of society depends on denying same-sex couples, and lobbying against any broadening of civil marriage.

Thus the bishops dug in their heels by talking about “marriage” as though civil marriage and sacramental Matrimony were the same institution, while launching scary warnings about the woes to follow us if gays were to marry one another.

Ten years later, the rising tide has eroded the bishops’ stand, yet they cling to the same losing strategy. Immediately after the Supreme Court killed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) this week and reinstated a California court’s ruling in favor of gay marriage, Catholic bishops quickly sprung into reaction. Predictably, they offered only more of the same losing strategy.

Archbishop Alan Vigneron of Detroit said:

Catholics and millions of our fellow citizens will continue to make the case…that marriage cannot be redefined, and that attempts to do so hurt us all.

And Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco hammered away on the theme of the “truth about marriage”:

The federal government ought to respect the truth that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, even where states fail to do so. The preservation of liberty and justice requires that all laws, federal and state, respect the truth, including the truth about marriage...The common good of all, especially our children, depends upon a society that strives to uphold the truth of marriage. Now is the time to redouble our efforts in witness to this truth.

The Bishops’ problem is very simple: by confusing the two institutions of matrimony and civil marriage, they’ve replaced the facts with wishful thinking. They want to make their case on two grounds: (1) there is one unique, non-negotiable truth about “marriage,” and (2) changing our definition of marriage will “hurt us all.” But both these arguments have become less and less credible over time.

Actually, the “truth about marriage” argument was never very convincing. It only worked as long as people pretended that “marriage” referred to one thing rather than two different institutions, as I wrote earlier:

Many Catholics can’t tell civil and sacramental marriage apart. They may not realize that in fact civil marriage is a great deal older than sacramental marriage: it existed in archaic cultures, in Egyptian and the Israelite cultures, in Greek and Roman cultures, all before St. Paul ever taught that marriage could be understood as a sign of Christ’s bond with his church. Civil marriage took various forms, with various rules (Israelite men were sometimes required to marry their brother’s widow; Roman men were permitted extra-marital sex with slave-women; Greek men were permitted extra-marital sex with boys). Such rules evolve even within a culture, of course: not long ago most states forbade marriage by mixed-race couples.

But while the Bishops failed to acknowledge this truth, Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall stated it plainly in her landmark Goodrich opinion legalizing same-sex marriage:

We begin by considering the nature of civil marriage itself. Simply put, the government creates civil marriage. In Massachusetts, civil marriage is, and since pre-Colonial days has been, precisely what its name implies: a wholly secular institution…No religious ceremony has ever been required to validate a Massachusetts marriage.

The truth is that “civil marriage” is an invention of the government, and different governments have defined it differently for centuries. Moreover, this re-defining has included the evolving recognition that civil marriage, unlike the Sacrament of Matrimony, is a civil right that people make claim access to as a matter of justice:

The benefits accessible only by way of a marriage license are enormous, touching nearly every aspect of life and death. The department states that "hundreds of statutes" are related to marriage and to marital benefits...It is undoubtedly for these concrete reasons, as well as for its intimately personal significance, that civil marriage has long been termed a "civil right."

Without the right to marry…one is excluded from the full range of human experience and denied full protection of the laws…Because civil marriage is central to the lives of individuals and the welfare of the community, our laws assiduously protect the individual's right to marry against undue government incursion. Laws may not "interfere directly and substantially with the right to marry…"There can be no prohibition of marriage except for an important social objective and reasonable means."

There are two consequences of this fact. First, civil marriage is now being drawn into the general history of civil rights. Second, this history now challenges Catholic teaching to practice what it preaches about the just treatment of homosexuals.

First, on general history, Marshall wrote:

The history of constitutional law "is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded."…This statement is as true in the area of civil marriage as in any other area of civil rights.

In this week’s DOMA case, the Supreme Court saw this at work as well in New York State:

The limitation of lawful marriage to heterosexual couples, which for centuries have been deemed both necessary and fundamental, came to be seen in New York and certain other states as an unjust exclusion…New York acted to enlarge the definition of marriage to correct what its citizens and elected representatives perceived to be an injustice they had not earlier known or understood.

This movement linking civil marriage to all other civil rights explains the rising tide of court decisions favoring a new definition of marriage. For if keeping the “one man and one woman” definition means denying gay people in a civil right, the question arises: how can that be justified? It becomes a matter of justice.

This explains why the movement to accept same-sex marriage has been so rapid: from one state in 2003 to 13 and counting in 2013. Now 40% of gay Americans already have access to this civil right, and the rest are demanding to know why they should be denied their rights.

This has dramatically shifted the burden of proof away from those proposing change; they now have both the rhetoric and the reality of civil rights on their side.

NEXT: How the new burden of proof challenges the Church to honor its own teachings.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

#367 Ten Ways Catholic Life is Better

Today’s tough times shouldn’t blind us to how much renewal we have already accomplished…

In these days of sex-scandal fatigue, declining numbers, fractured fellowship and polarized politics it is tempting to wallow in discouragement. These are hard times. We long for the “good old days.”

But there is another view. As I observe my 40th anniversary in parish work (I began at St. Mary’s in Laurel, Maryland in the summer of 1972) I prefer to think of our present situation as a short-term stumbling block on the long-term path of Catholic renewal.

As someone who lived through Vatican II, I see our Church in the light of the Council’s call for a “Second Pentecost” to give new life and vitality to our ancient tradition.

But while Vatican II’s four years were my four high school years, my childhood was spent in an earlier version of Catholicism. So my perspective filters through a life lived in three parts: (1) a pre-council childhood, (2) a conciliar adolescence, and (3) a post-council adulthood spent working in the Church. From this vantage point, I see many ways the Church now is dramatically better off.

1. Catholic Identity. Gone are the days when Catholicism shaped our identity mainly by giving us rules to follow. Nowadays everyone I work with knows that being “Catholic” means to embrace a personal faith descended from 20 centuries of believers and shared with 100s of millions worldwide. By now Catholics cannot remember the days when “personal faith” was an alien concept among Catholics. Yes, the “good old days” had its share of “devout” Catholics--but for most the “Catholic faith” was merely a set of propositions one accepted and rules one obeyed. The idea that God is love, and we are to be disciples of His incarnate Son, too often got lost in the shopping list of Catholic Do’s and Don’ts. Those days are gone, and good riddance.

2. Liturgy. Gone too are the days of unheard mumbled prayers and passive people in the pews. Gone are full pews at Communion time (only 15% of Mass-goers received communion in the 1950s), rosaries at Mass, the “elites” who possessed their own missals and the skill to navigate among their many multicolored bookmark-ribbons.

Now people come to Mass for the right reason - - the Eucharist itself. They participate in its celebration: hearing the readings, responding to the priest, praying together the Kyrie and Gloria and Psalms and Sanctus and the Our Father, greeting each other in peace, and coming forward en masse to receive Communion.

3. Sacramental life. I still remember when Baptism meant merely “washing original sin from the soul” of babies (and mothers were excluded), when Confirmation made “soldiers of Christ” of kids too old for Christian initiation but too young to take any mature responsibility. I remember when funerals were morbid black reminders of death’s grip and God’s wrath. I remember when the Eucharist was merely an annual duty-call for most Catholics.

Today our sacramental system, while far from perfect, has been restored to firmer foundations. Baptism makes us members of the Body of Christ, and its fullest form is the restored Baptism of adult catechumens at the Easter Vigil. Confirmation now comes between Baptism and First Communion, or else is conferred on youth old enough to seriously renew their own baptismal vows. Funerals are now bright with color, alleluias, the Paschal Candle, and the hope of Resurrection. And the Eucharist is once again the center of all, the way we come together as one body. Even Reconciliation, though underutilized, is now humane rather than mechanical, healing without being clinical.

4. The Bible. Many of us remember when “Bible” referred merely to that big coffee table book where families recorded baptisms and weddings. But few Catholics remember that we never heard the Old Testament or the letters of Paul at Church. Only the Gospel was read aloud and in English. Now nearly the entire body of the Old and New Testaments is proclaimed aloud at Mass over a three year cycle. And we’ve fairly well dispensed with the old-time “sermons” on whatever topic crossed Father’s mind, in favor of genuine homilies that unpack, interpret, and apply the scripture readings for the congregation.

Moreover Bible study has become part of many adult education programs and faith-sharing groups, and is built into every single school-age religious education curriculum. So the Bible is now at the center of Catholic life in a way unknown to our grandparents.

5. The Laity. “Laity” means “people,” and the day is long gone when they were content to “pray, pay, and obey.” For 40 years or more, lay volunteers have assumed leadership in ministry as lectors, Eucharistic ministers, in baptismal and marriage preparation, in the RCIA, and as parish councilors and small group leaders. And since 2005, lay professionals now make up the majority of parish staffs.

Laypeople are no longer helpless children in the church, totally dependent on “Father” to care for them. Such infantile docility enabled the cover-up of sexual abuse for decades, but Vatican II’s call for an “adult” laity finally doomed clergy corruption. The Church of silence is gone for good.

6. The Workforce. Gone are the days when parishes were run by a drill-squad of priests, alike in uniforms, training, tasks, and lifestyle. Now parish leadership resembles a ball-club: role players with distinct jobs, different training, and specialized skills. Before my arrival, the St. Mary’s staff consisted of three priests. Today St. Mary’s lists more than 12 staff people on its website. Typically, large parish staffs are now loaded with laypeople. Instead of marching in lockstep, they must work like a team--which means their diverse gifts build up the Body of Christ, just as St. Paul described, in a way the old workforce never did.

7. Women’s roles. Even as numbers of women religious fell, women rose to new prominence in our Church. Nuns headed diocesan departments, became parish pastoral associates, and lay women as well flooded into parish ministries, until today women make up nearly 80% of all parish staffs. Our grandfathers could never have imagined this transformation of Catholicism’s patriarchy--but maybe our grandmothers dreamt it!

8. Collaboration. John-Paul II said “Collaboration is the act proper to solidarity,” and our unity as Church today is manifested by our deep commitment to a collegial approach at all levels. Following the model of Vatican II itself, we now see Catholic life shaped by gatherings of the US Bishops, diocesan councils, parish pastoral and finance councils and a myriad of parish committees and small groups.

I used to joke that Vatican II gave us lots of documents, lots of changes, and lots of meetings--and for the last 30 years I’ve made my livelihood going to those meetings. The Church’s business no longer follows the Charles Lindbergh “flying solo” model, but instead uses the model Saint Paul had in mind when he addressed his letters to “My Co-workers.”

9. Ecumenism. Who still remembers the “good old days” when Catholics were prohibited from any dealings with Protestant churches? As teenagers, my older sisters were even kept from YWCA dances because the Y was a “Protestant” organization. For my parents, Catholics were “devout” but Protestants were always “staunch.”

Over the last 40 to 50 years the landscape has completely changed. We still have differences with our separated Christian brothers and sisters, but we no longer fear “the other” or shun them. Indeed, many progressive Catholics now find they share much perspective with progressive Protestants, just as many conservative Catholics feel allied to conservative Protestants. Such conversations across the ecumenical boundaries were unthinkable 50 years ago, but a commonplace now--and that has revised hope for a future when Christians will again be united.

10. The End of Quarantine. At all levels, Catholicism has ditched its old isolationist posture in favor of dialogue with the outside world. That world remains toxic in many ways, but rather than hide away from fear of infection our Church now opts for immunizing its people with a faith strong enough to engage those of others faiths and even those of no faith. So our popes travel the world and address the UN, our bishops blog and issue pastoral letters on public policy and voter education, our schools teach a broad range of students from different backgrounds, and even our liturgies embrace facets of contemporary culture (folk music, photography, dance) that enrich our life as Catholics, living a global faith in the global world.

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During my high school years, as the Council progressed, my father once speculated on the outcome: “What if priests get just as good at mumbling English as they ever were at mumbling Latin?” The operative word, of course, was “mumble”--and he was right in part. We still mumble along, trying to perfect renewal and sometimes stumbling on an obstacle in our path. None of the 10 points above is perfectly realized. They are works in progress.

But there is no doubting this: these 10 points have already restored an authentic practice of our ancient tradition that seemed impossible 50 years ago. They have made us a better Church.

WELCOME !