#328: Connecting The Dots

EXCERPT:
Following a recent training session for my Fidelis program, one participant made a comment that really got me thinking, all the way back to my childhood. The result was a new insight about our current struggle to thrive as Church.

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My insight: I now realize that the widespread suspension of Vatican II’s agenda for renewing Catholicism (regular readers know this theme is dear to me) is due to a failure to connect the dots in at least three ways.

First, many pastors between 1965 in 1980 announced “the changes” coming from Vatican Council II, but could not explain them because they do not understand themselves -- they could not teach what no one had taught them!

Second, many pastors attempted explanations but did not know how to put them in their true historical context. The shift away from Latin, for example, was often explained simply as “making Mass more understandable”--which was true enough, but hardly scratched the historical surface of a paradigm shift from a liturgy tethered to one culture (the Roman Empire) to a liturgy reshaped for use in all the cultures (and languages) of the modern world.

Third, at least one person knew how important it would be to connect the dots once the Council had completed its work: Pope John XXIII. As the Council’s first session ended, John addressed the assembly to assess its achievements. He concluded that “a good beginning has been made,” but then suggested the challenge for the future, when the Council sessions were over:

It will then be a question of extending to all departments of the life of the Church, social questions included, whatever the Conciliar assembly may decide, and applying its norms to them…This most important phase will see pastors united in a gigantic effort of preaching sound doctrine and applying the law,…and for this task will be called forth a collaboration of the forces of the diocesan and regular clergy, of the congregations of religious women, of the Catholic laity with all its attributes and potential, in order that the acts of the Fathers be seconded by a joyous and faithful response.

Unfortunately, John died less than a year after this address. His successor, Paul VI, also “got” the connections as and the need to communicate them. But after Humanae Vitae in 1968, his ability to communicate anything declined rapidly, like a teacher who knows teaching but not classroom management, and has lost control of his students.

John-Paul II acted out Vatican II, but the cult of his personality obscured the Council: instead of being its chief ambassador, he became its successor--witness (a) the way the next generation of Catholic youth identified with him, not the Council, and (b) the way his beatification has obscured the status of both the Council and John XXIII, without whom the papacy of John-Paul II cannot be imagined.

The result, nearly 50 years later, reminds me of what some Christians say about Christmas: our culture forgets “the reason for the season” because it fails to connect the dots (shopping, food, parties, Santa, songs, trees and ornaments and lights) to the big picture: celebrating the birthday of Christianity’s founder. Similarly, Catholics today live amid the trappings of Vatican II yet often forget the reason it happened.

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This has reduced the Council’s meaning to the status of a textbook to be studied, rather than a watershed event in Catholic history to be preserved and celebrated as an act of divine providence. The result: today, in the average parish, the Council’s “changes” have become mere routine and the Council itself--its importance, its purpose, its legacy--is largely ignored.

The generation that lived through Vatican II got the dots but not the connections; the next generation is living with a Church that has reformed its practices but sagged into routine instead of renewal.

Maybe it’s time we all raised our hands and demanded - - or offered -- a better explanation: one that gives us the big picture by connecting all the dots.