EXCERPT: For us Baby Boom parents, Vatican II proved the Church capable of breaking with its recent past (based on a "quarantine" strategy, ghetto-fying Catholic life to protect it from the infections of modern life), capable of throwing open its windows and admitting the freshening gusts of renewal, of engaging the world outside.
For us, this gave the Catholic Church a public presence, even an influence, it had never had in "Protestant" America. Instead of a ghettoized curiosity, Catholicism became a public force for good. Vatican II made Catholicism a player in the cultural struggles of the 1960s at the very time most institutions were being dismissed as arrogant, unresponsive, and irrelevant.
The key point here is not the objective reality of Vatican II, but rather our personal (and collective) experience of it. Sure, the Council changed the Church -- but more importantly, it also changed us! Once the dust settled, we were no longer the same people. We were still Catholics, to be sure -- but that no longer meant docile people going through the motions and rituals of Catholic life out of obligation or the comfort of conforming to generations-old family ways. Being Catholic now meant, rather, accepting stewardship of a vast ancient legacy offering priceless wisdom to a world beset by abuses of power.
Sadly, this change in us may be the source of the generation gap between us and our children. Perhaps our problem is not that Vatican II has failed, or that its changes have not lasted, or that a reactionary and fearful hierarchy is bent on restoring the pre-conciliar status quo.
For the most part, in fact, the reforms of Vatican II have lasted. They are still with us, and so our kids grew up in a Church that we know has changed. But it did not change them, because they have never experienced these changes as change.
We remember pre-conciliar Catholicism, so for us there is a "before" and an "after" -- and we experienced living through the transition from one to the other. That shifting experience changed us as well as the institution, but our kids never lived through that shift.
Whereas we had Vatican II's constant shifting as our coming-of-age church, our children had John-Paul II's charismatic globe-trotting. Now, J-P II’s papacy was unthinkable without Vatican II's changes, but he neither sought nor brought the kind of radical overhaul accomplished by John XXIII and Paul VI before him. Our children experienced renewal precisely as the status quo of Catholicism.
In short, the very thing that was the transformative experience of our lives became something our kids just took for granted. The Catholicism they knew in the 1980s and 1990s was nearly as stable as 1950s Catholicism. In that sense, their experience of Church was more like our own parents' (their grandparents') experience.
Who can blame them for not seeing the Church as we did—as a place of change, and hope, and even revolutionary promise?
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