#383 Does the Pope Matter?

Amid all the coverage of Pope Benedict’s resignation, two points emerge.

       One: the media is having a field day.  Time magazine has put Benedict XVI on its cover, with two stories inside.  Jokes abound, from Jon Stewart to Facebook.  Self- designated experts from Las Vegas to Rome are handicapping the election of the next pope.  As I write, the front page of today’s Boston Globe reports at length on  speculation that Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley may be in the running.  Of course, 40 other home-town bishops around the world are subjects of similar speculation.  In other words, Conclave-mania has broken loose.

But the second point, typified by Frank Bruni’s New York Times Op-ed piece on February 18, is that perhaps all this media attention deceives us into the false notion that the pope matters more than he really does.  Bruni claims the pope and his curia are really “a royal family of dubious relevance,” at least to the majority of Catholics in North America and Western Europe.  I think Bruni has a point--but he also protests too much, in a way that brings out the old debater in me.  So allow me to revert to my former forensic format: I’ll list Bruni’s arguments, and respond to each point, one by one (read Bruni at http://nyti.ms/130cVoA ).

Bruni argues that widespread media attention results from mere “habit and convenience.” The media is drawn to the drama, the “visual backdrops,” the pageant.  It is mere spectacle.

But of course spectacle attracts more than media.  It attracts the public too, and can entertain, enthrall, even inspire them.  The 1,000,000-strong crowd for Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration may never forget that event.  For some, it was life-changing.  

     The truth is that spectacle does hold sway with the human spirit, and Bruni belittles it needlessly.  Catholicism clearly has a knack for spectacle on a global scale.  This is an advantage, not a liability.  The question that must be asked is: is this merely empty spectacle, or is it a means to a greater end?

Next Bruni argues that the pope gets notice as part of our cult of celebrity.  The election holds out drama and the prospect of victory, much like American Idol, Iron Chef, the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, or presidential elections.  The election is our “ecclesiastical Oscars.”

This may be true, but once again Bruni seems intent on missing what matters.  The fact is that not all celebrities are created equal.  Some are merely “famous for being famous,” while others are famous for their impact on people’s lives.  Fifty years ago, Ed Sullivan was a celebrity and so were the Beatles, but no one thinks Sullivan had their lasting influence.   

Wilt Chamberlain was famous winning the NBA championship the spring before Martin Luther King was shot, but only one earned a national holiday and the Nobel prize.  To call the pope a celebrity begs the next question: so what?

Among celebrities in the western world, perhaps the Queen of England is the post closest to the pope’s status, and garners similar media attention for herself and her own royal family.

     Even her role as a symbolic leader is similar, but the pope is no mere figurehead.  Even Bruni calls him the CEO of a worldwide organization, recognizing that he functions as a genuine executive.  And his reach far exceeds the British Commonwealth. So reducing the pope to mere “celebrity” is a half-truth at best.

Next Bruni admits that the Catholic Church is a large and powerful organization (though he fails to note how prevalent and dominant its “charities and agencies” are), but then he argues that today’s U.S. Catholics are “less invested” and “less attached” to the church than 50 years ago.

As a general rule, this is true. But it does not make Bruni’s case against the pope’s relevance.  Quite the contrary.

First, because much of the last 50 years of Catholic history has been a case study in how the pope does matter.

When John the XXIII opened Vatican Council II 50 years ago, his humble daring transformed the Catholic scene overnight.  
 Before John, the pope had been a remote, largely invisible figure operating a great distance from US Catholics. The Vatican might as well have been Olympus, or another planet. But then the Council came, and suddenly Vatican events were the stuff of daily coverage by The New York Times’ John Cogley and of insider perspective from Xavier Rynne in The New Yorker’s “Letters from Vatican City” for four years running.  Moreover, Vatican events were now (for the first time) a global spectacle thanks to satellite TV.  And John’s council soon touched every Catholic at the parish level, especially through changes in liturgy and sacrament.  Moreover John altered the church’s image beyond Catholics: today’s warmer Catholic-Protestant and Catholic-Jewish relations are the result of his influence.

Admittedly, this happy profile of papal power and impact did not last long.  No doubt millions of U.S. Catholics today are disenchanted with the institution, even alienated from it.  But ironically, this strengthens (rather than weakens) my case against Bruni.  For rejecting Church teaching is not the same as ignoring it, and disenchantment is not the same is indifference.  In fact, I would argue that today’s decline in practice among U.S. Catholics has happened, not in spite of the popes, but because of them.

Sociologist Andrew Greeley documented as early as the mid-1970s that U.S. Catholics were distancing themselves from the institution, and famously argued that there was a single cause: Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which rejected his own papal commission’s recommendation that church teaching on contraception be revised, and instead reasserted the existing prohibition against all “artificial” means of birth control.

Perhaps Greeley overstated his case, but certainly after 1968 millions of Catholic parents opted to reject Paul’s position in good conscience.  Baby boomers, barely emerging from adolescence in 1968, typically decided there own path into marriage family and parenthood would not be guided by Humanae Vitae.  And they in turn raised kids for whom official church teaching on contraception--and indeed on masturbation, premarital sex, and most other matters sexual--was in fact irrelevant to their lives.  In short, three generations of Catholics have not simply drifted away from the institution--they have been pushed by, or ran from, papal action.  Their alienation stands as proof that the papacy, far from meaningless, is capable of significantly affecting people’s lives--for better or for worse.

More recently, of course, the clergy sex abuse scandal has further tainted the church’s credibility on matters sexual--and handed young Catholics their silver-plated alibi to ignore the institution.  John Paul II’s handpicked U.S. bishops transformed the face of U.S. hierarchy: once committed to Catholic renewal and public dialogue, the U.S. hierarchy in the 1980s and 1990s became a corps of company men devoted to protecting their own interests.  Beginning with Boston’s Bernard Law and ending with LA’s Roger Mahony, these men earned a self-inflicted reputation for hypocrisy in high places that has scandalized millions of U.S. Catholics.  This was not some random, accidental occurrence.  This was the effect (albeit unintended) of papal strategy and action.

Even John-Paul’s illness illustrates my point: at the very moment that decisive papal action might have provided the damage control needed to rehabilitate the hierarchy’s good name, his age and illness (in concert with the custom of the pope serving until death) made him incapable of the crisis management the church needed. 

 So once again, the fallout among U.S. Catholics traces to the pope’s doorstep.

The rest of Bruni’s argument is a parade of polls documenting the gap between Catholic officialdom and the rank and file.  The portrait that emerges is indeed bleak.  But since these statistics are themselves the product of papal and hierarchical mismanagement, they cannot demonstrate that it makes no difference who the next pope is or what he does.

On the contrary, the examples of John XXIII, Paul VI, and John-Paul II over the last 50 years suggest that the pope’s performance affects the life of rank and file Catholics more than ever before.

Imagine, for example, if the next pope were to revise the mandate of priestly celibacy.  A century ago, this news would spread out gradually from Rome via print media.  Today, it would be an instant media firestorm that would alter the Church’s--and the pope’s--public image literally overnight.  And it would transform seminaries and dioceses, as well as our priest shortage, in short order.

Or imagine that the next pope calls Vatican Council  III.  We could foresee several years of virtually non-stop coverage of the institutional Church once again transforming itself.  It defies such imagining to argue that no one would pay attention.

Finally, Bruni’s whole argument depends on glossing over its most significant weakness: his focus is almost exclusively on U.S. Catholics (with a token nod to Canada and Europe).  But our 60 million Catholics represent only 5% of the world’s Catholics.  And the Church’s standing in South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is vastly different from the American Catholics scene.  Assessing the papacy’s impact requires a separate account for each region.  And certainly the overall posture of the pope cannot be gauged by his response to the situation of a 5% segment of Catholics.

(I am reminded of a similar mistake the French made when the pope’s World Youth Day was held in Paris in 1997. Assuming the rest of the world to be as blasé about the pope as themselves, they were caught flatfooted--and ankle deep in overflowing toilets!--when 2 million kids showed up.)

  But given Bruni’s narrow focus, this much can be said: the actions of four popes since 1962 have either helped or harmed the institutional church’s standing among American Catholics--and the same will be true for the next pope.  Perhaps the media’s superficial, celebrity-and-spectacle driven interest will wane soon after the election, but Catholics everywhere, including the U.S., will be affected by the papacy that follows--for better or for worse!

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

#382 Spring Training—And a Catholic Spring?

On opening day of spring training this week, Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz pinpointed the significance of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation.

 He observed:

An organization, a team, is like the human body. If the head is right, the body is going to function right. But if the head is messed up, then the body is going to be all over the place.

Of course, Ortiz was not actually referring to the pope.  He was talking about departed Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine.  Nor was Ortiz explicitly quoting Saint Paul’s metaphor of the Church as a body where the good functioning of each part (especially the head) is indispensable to all the other parts and to the whole body.  But no doubt he has run across that metaphor during his Catholic upbringing--and no doubt the pope’s departure surprised him just like everyone else (certainly more than Valentine’s!).

Many commentators have already noted that it’s been centuries since a pope resigned, and there’s almost no precedent for a pope resigning for the merely natural, mortal reasons of age, health, and frailty.  The pope is human, but many popes have been loath to acknowledge it, and many have even acted as though they were something else.

James Carroll has observed that Benedict’s resignation marks the symbolic shift away from the near- idolatrous divinization of the pope, just as Vatican II moved from seeing the Church he heads as a “perfect society” to the view of the Church as a “pilgrim people.”

But what commentators have generally overlooked is that Benedict’s decision is only the latest in a series of surprising decisions affecting the papacy over the last 50 years.  Taken cumulatively, these decisions have dramatically transformed the papacy in our time.  Indeed, a case can be made that the papacy has changed more in our lifetime than any other public office in the world.

To appreciate what this really means, we need to see Benedict’s resignation in the historical context created by his predecessors.

When John XXIII was elected in 1958, the papacy was an office marked by aristocratic grandeur and splendid isolation.  The pope wore elaborate robes and tiaras and, rather than walking the earth like mere mortals, he was carried aloft on a portable throne amid waving fans like a slave-borne Roman Emperor.  He never left Vatican City, but remained “imprisoned” there as a symbol of the Church’s besieged isolation from the hostile world outside.  And his rule was solitary too: the proclamation of papal infallibility in 1871 created the widespread belief that henceforth popes had no need of counsel from their fellow bishops or anyone else.  Indeed, that proclamation not only culminated Vatican Council I but convinced most bishops that it culminated all councils forever.

 
John XXIII began to change all that.  He divested himself of much papal finery, affected a simpler style, snuck out of the Vatican for evening walks in Rome, and convened Vatican Council II, calling 2000 Bishops to Rome to deliberate the future of the Church over four years, demonstrating that even the head of Christ’s Church could not operate alone.

John’s successor, Paul VI, continued that Council and expanded its agenda.  He adopted even simpler styles, including a good deal of modern art and architecture.  He traveled in Italy, then to the Holy Land, and finally to the new world, addressing the United Nations and saying Mass at Yankee Stadium.

 He was the first “pilgrim pope,” and he put the papacy back on the map.

The Smiling Pope

 John-Paul I lasted only 30 days before his mysterious, sudden death--but in that time he earned the label “The Smiling Pope” for his affable, gentle manner, thus moving the papacy even further from the stern “Papa” image of yesteryear. Even his name conveyed his desire to continue the transforming begun by his predecessors.

John-Paul II confirmed that name, then strode into the papacy like the actor he was, as if it were the world’s stage, and soon became the Superstar Pope, traveling to more than 100 countries, becoming the most visible human in history, and putting the papacy literally before the eyes of millions.  If John’s papacy made headlines, and Paul’s made the pope a world leader, John-Paul II made the papacy a presence to be reckoned with (as communist Poland, Fidel Castro, and even the Soviet Union soon learned). And, of course, he was the first non-Italian pope in centuries.

Then came Benedict (also not Italian), John-Paul’s chosen “watchdog” yet a quiet modest professor in his past life.  Despite his age and shyness, he confirmed the new papacy as a pilgrim office, traveling less than John-Paul but still drawing vast crowds. 

  He authored several encyclicals that present the basics of Christian faith, hope, and love in modern form, and wrote books on Jesus that he insisted were merely one man’s opinion. 

He earned his bad press with several PR gaffes (especially regarding other faiths) and with his belated response to John-Paul II's bungling of the priestly sex abuse scandal.  But the same time, he continued to transform the papacy into more and more of a human scale.  With him, the papacy seemed less like a monarchy and more like a ministry of service.

Such modesty also helps explain his resignation.  When John Paul II was declining with Parkinson’s disease, he deemed it the pope’s responsibility to offer his heroic suffering as a public model to the world.  But Benedict is not so ambitious or charismatic, and perhaps is more realistic.  Sensing himself incapable of doing justice to the office, he saw his duty in the very human act of accepting his limits, letting go, and letting someone else lead the Church.

And so, five popes later, we find a radically transformed papacy.  Gone is the ever-present papal “We” in favor of the simple “I”; gone are many of the regal trappings in favor of simple white overcoats and the popemobile. Gone is the stern dictator who can govern without consulting his own bishops; gone is the splendid isolation in favor of the globetrotting leader who commands media attention wherever he goes.  And now, gone is the lifetime office that seems immune to the limits of human living.

Why does all this matter?

Because it turns out that the new papacy aptly fits our times in a way that could make Benedict’s successor--whoever he is—more effective.  And ironically, my early reference to baseball is relevant here too.

For just as American sports have witnessed a culture shift to “free agency” that forces successful managers to become “players’ coaches,” so too the culture within Catholicism has shifted.  I made this connection six years ago, when baseball’s Opening Day came during Holy Week.  I wrote: “we Catholics have entered deeply into the era of faith's free agency.”

You see, back in the day when Ted Williams was baseball’s highest paid player, he and every other player were mere wage-slaves because of baseball’s “reserve clause.” Starting out their careers, players became the “property” of one owner, and remained so unless traded or released. If unhappy with the owner’s offer, their only option was to take it or leave it—that is, play for “short money” or retire.

Then came Curt Flood’s 1970 court challenge to the reserve clause, and the players’ wage-slavery gave way to free agency. In the new era, everything changed. Players with enough service automatically qualified as free agents at the end of their contract, and could negotiate a new deal with any owner they chose. This remarkable shift transformed the face of all professional sports. The upside, of course, is that professional athletes are now “free,” not owned. No longer obligated by law to one owner, they can choose their own team.

Why do I tell this history here? Because the transformation in sports echoes a similar transformation in our Church. In a single generation, Catholics have embraced “ecclesial free agency”—that is, they now can choose their own parish, their own church, or their own faith. They can even choose no faith at all.

Where sports had Curt Flood, Catholics had John XXIII. The renewal he triggered at Vatican II (1962-1965) ended the old “shepherd and flock” system where Catholics sheepishly obeyed whenever the clergy commanded.  In those days, any priest knew that he could get people to obey him by pushing the magic buttons of Guilt, Fear, Obligation, and Duty.

Vatican II--The Pope Consults his Bishops

 Once Vatican II’s renewal took hold, all that ended. Most priests stopped pushing the magic buttons, and those who continued to push them soon learned they didn’t work anymore. While my parents’ generation believed a single missed Mass meant the fires of hell, my daughter could calmly declare to her grandfather, “I can do God’s work in my own way. I don’t need to go to church for that.”

In other words, we Catholics have entered deeply into the era of faith’s free agency.  And free agency alters the role of our leaders in both sports and Church. Today, a professional coach may be judged by whether the players “allow him” to coach them—that is, he must earn his authority and their confidence. More and more, the same is true of the Church, where lay people may (or may NOT) “allow” clergy to lead them. The bottom line, as David Ortiz instinctively knew: no organization can survive unless its leaders have a reliable way to motivate the members—and the Roman Catholic Church is largest organization of all!

Small wonder that putting together a winning strategy for motivating “faith’s free agents” looms as the single greatest challenge facing the Church, not just this season, but for many seasons to come.

For spring training 2013, the Red Sox have a new manager.  And for spring 2013, Catholics will have a new pope.  And just as sport’s free agency means a manager must be the kind of “players’ Coach” who can motivate players to follow his lead, our next pope must be a “people’s pope” capable of inspiring Catholics to follow him. And there is hope we’ll get that “people’s pope,” thanks to the way the papacy itself has been transformed by the last five popes--including Benedict’s decision to become the first living “Ex-Pope” in centuries.

The papacy, which long seemed to be the stern face of God the Father on earth, has come instead to be the human face of the Catholic Church—personifying, in this retiring old man, the 1.2 billion  of us sharing life’s journey in faith.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

#119 Vatican II: Legacy and Hope

   With the resignation of Benedict XVI, and the prospect of a new Pope within a few weeks, it is more urgent than ever that we make the 50th anniversary of Vatican II a time of renewed clarity about and commitment to its legacy. The following is the second part of my postings from Vatican II's 40th anniversary:

   In my last post, I suggested we risk losing the legacy of Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) unless the “Vatican II Generation” convinces Catholics too young to remember the Council that Vatican II is too important to forget.  

Pope Paul VI Addresses the United Nations, October 1965

   But why do we risk forgetting Vatican II? And why is it so important to remember?

The most obvious reason for forgetting Vatican II is that 21^st century Catholicism presents a troublingly negative image for younger Catholics, especially in America. The clergy sex abuse crisis has scandalized and depressed many Catholics, and provided others with a convenient excuse to disengage from Church life. The hypocritical and dishonest leadership of Bishops caused even wider damage than the abusive behavior of priests. The result: a self-inflicted crisis of credibility that leaves church authorities powerless to command the respect and compliance of their flock—and obstructs our view of Vatican II’s great accomplishment.

But there is a larger shadow obscuring the memory of Vatican II: the papacy of John-Paul II. This is ironic, because in many respects John-Paul II’s papacy was a product of the Council, impossible to imagine except in the post-Conciliar era. But the cult of his personality has obscured the Council’s importance. For millions of younger Catholics, JP II is their Vatican II – which is to say their Catholic identity is not as “post-Vatican II Catholics” but as “John-Paul II” Catholics.

For example: it has become commonplace in the media, both Catholic and secular, to treat the history of late 20^th century Catholicism as though John-Paul II was its most important feature. As I argued last week, both John XXIII and Paul VI regarded Vatican II as nothing less than the rebirth of the Catholic Church 20 centuries after its founding—an event of much greater importance than any one man’s reign as Pope.

But assuming I am correct that (1) Vatican II is too important to forget and (2) recent events may make us forget –what exactly is the legacy that we risk losing?

Unfortunately, Catholics have floundered for the answer for 40 years. Too often Catholics have sought answers in the overwhelming volume of the sixteen documents of Vatican II. In my own view, those documents provide clear messages

about Vatican II’s reforms, but they do not send a clear, unambiguous, uncluttered message about the purpose of the Council as a whole! Beyond the reforms, everyone seems to know that Vatican II was about “Renewal” – but we have been arguing about what that means for 40 years.

For me, the most direct way to understand what “Renewal” means (and therefore understand Vatican II’s real purpose and legacy) is to listen carefully to the eloquence and unmistakable clarity of Vatican II’s chief architect, Pope Paul VI.

On October 8, 1965, Paul became the first “Pilgrim Pope” when he traveled to the New World to address the UN in New York. Vatican II would end just eight weeks later, but until now it had remained a distant blip on most Americans’ radar. Paul used this speech to announce the Council’s agenda in the most public way imaginable:

We here celebrate the epilogue of a weary pilgrimage in search of a conversation with the entire world, ever since the command was given to us: Go and bring the good news to all peoples…The hour has struck for our "conversion," for personal transformation, for interior renewal. We must get used to thinking of humanity in a new way...With a new manner, too, of conceiving the paths of history and the destiny of the world...The edifice of modern civilization must be built upon spiritual principles which alone can, not only support it, but even illuminate and animate it.

Listen to this man. He is speaking to the whole world, not just to Catholics. He says the Church has been seeking “a conversation” with that world. He says our new moment in history demands a new understanding of humanity and the human future. He says that will only happen through an inner, “personal transformation” in which spiritual principles animate the whole of our civilized life together.

This agenda goes ‘way beyond turning altars around or shifting rituals from Latin to English. It is about a new relationship between the Church and the world.

Two months later, as Vatican II ended, Paul VI showed he was not naïvely assuming that modern culture was always friendly to Christian values. Rather, he was challenging the Church to reach out to and befriend even a hostile, secular modernity. 

For Paul, charity was the Council’s “principal religious feature.” In stark contrast to the condemnations and siege mentality of past centuries, Vatican II always approached controverted issues with its mind on understanding and its heart on reconciliation. Paul chose to illustrate with the example of secular humanism:

Secular humanism…has, in a certain sense, defied the council. The religion of the God who became man has met the religion (for such it is) of man who makes himself God. And what happened? Was there a clash, a battle, a condemnation? There could have been, but there was none. The old story of the Samaritan has been the model of the spirituality of the council. A feeling of boundless sympathy has permeated the whole of it.

Over the last 25 years, the Church has implemented Vatican II’s call to reach out to the world – how else to explain John Paul II’s constant globetrotting? But even while reaching out, the Church in recent years has often seemed fearful and hostile, rather than charitable and sympathetic.

It’s understandable that many Catholics are disturbed by developments since Vatican II: the spread of legal abortion, the declining numbers of churchgoers, priests, brothers, and sisters; the growing secularization and consumerization of modern society; the rise of terrorism; the decline of “traditional moral values.”

Any of these might be reasons to abandon the positive, open, optimistic attitude, except for one thing: all the troubling developments since Vatican II pale before the horrific developments before Vatican II. Think of WWI (60,000 dead the first day at Verdun). Think of WW II, (over 30 million dead, a majority women and children). Think of the Holocaust, and its systematic attempt to wipe out a people. Think of the Cold War and the global terror it spawned while condemning most of the world to abject poverty.

Here’s the bottom line: if those horrors did not stop John XXIII and Paul VI from proclaiming their vision of a friendly, optimistic partnership between a “reborn” Church and a “transformed” world, why should we, 40 years later, fall prey to pessimism, fear, and hostility? Granted, these 40 years have not produced the kind of spiritually “illuminated” civilization that Paul envisioned at the U.N. But was anyone naïve enough to think that kind of renewal could be accomplished in a single generation?

Paul VI proposed a “conversation with the entire world” to make that vision real. Forty years later, we must ask: are we, as Church, still speaking to the world? And is the world still listening? If the answer is yes, then the conversation continues, the legacy is intact, and Renewal is still our hope for the future.

But if the answer is no, we should not be surprised if the future is bleak, and we have only ourselves to blame if we fail to retrieve the vision of Vatican II and convince the next generation to pick up that conversation anew.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2005

#118: Does Life Begin at 40?

As part of my ongoing observance of the 50th anniversary of Vatican II,  I am reprising two posts from the 40th anniversary! Here is the first:

Most of my parish presentations on the Second Vatican Council II (1962-1965) begin with two images. The first image is from an event that happened 40 years ago this past week, in December 1965, when Pope Paul VI rose to announce the end of the council before 2000 bishops in St. Peter’s Basilica. His speech is especially significant 40 years later, after so much conflict and debate about Vatican II’s legacy.


For Pope Paul, the key question was, “What is the religious value of this Council?”—and in his mind, the answer was very clear:

 Never before, perhaps, so much as on this occasion, has the Church felt the need to know, to draw near to, to understand, to penetrate, serve and evangelize the society in which she lives; and to get to grips with it, almost to run after it, in its rapid and continuous change. 

I have always felt that, aside from all the documents produced by the council, and all the literature of all those documents, and all the arguments about that literature, the public pronouncements of two men set the gold standard for understanding the council: John XXIII (whose personal vision the council was) and Paul VI (who brought that vision to life).

How can anyone claim to discover the “true meaning” of the council if that meaning conflicts with the stated intentions of the council’s founder and chief architect? Neither the concrete texts of the council documents nor any elusive “spirit” behind the council can be invoked to justify an interpretation that conflicts with the stated intentions of John and Paul.

Those intentions were clear at the opening of the council in October of 1962, when John XXIII referred to the council fathers meeting “as if in a new Cenacle.” The Cenacle, of course, was the upper room where the Church was born on Pentecost. On another occasion, John made his point even more explicit, calling the council “a second Pentecost.”

Three months later, as the Council’s first session ended, the Pope concluded by imagining what the Council’s outcome would be, and he repeated his opening day imagery:

“It will be a new Pentecost indeed, which will cause the Church to renew her interior riches and to extend her material care in every sphere of human activity.” 

 The next autumn, after John’s death and the election of Paul VI, the new Pope re-opened the council by quite deliberately quoting John’s “new Pentecost”.

What did this mean?

It meant that both men saw the council coming in a moment in history that required nothing less than the rebirth of the church. Though there had been 20 ecumenical councils in the 20 proceedings entries, they did not refer simply to “another Pentecost,” let alone “a 20th Pentecost.” This, for them, was to be the Second Birth of the Church. In my mind, there can be no doubt about what this means.
First, it means that Vatican Council II must rank among the very most important events in the entire 20 centuries of Catholic history. I would personally rank it as one of the two or three greatest of all Church councils and would also rank it among the half dozen most important events in Church history.

Second, the notion that the Church in 1962 needed to be reborn begs the question “Why?”
Why, after 20 centuries of living off the legacy of the First Pentecost, was it now necessary to have a Second? What challenge was the Church facing that it had not faced over those 20 centuries? And how was the council supposed to meet that challenge? No explanation of Vatican II is credible unless it answers these questions.

Third, Paul VI picked up the baton dropped by John XXIII with the same visionary zeal that John himself had shown. In particular Paul expressed the same optimism about the council’s work and legacy. Neither man succumbed to fear, hostility, or pessimism in looking at the Church’s challenge and future—and this optimism extended beyond the Church to the world outside.

The Second Image I use actually comes from 1963, just after Paul VI had assumed the reins of Vatican II:

The little boy, bare-headed in his winter coat and short pants, stands saluting his fallen father. Next to him stands his widowed mother, the grief engraved on her face just barely visible behind the black veil. A nation and world watches as his father’s casket passes by.

For any American born before 1960, the classic image is as close as our memories. For younger readers, it is an icon emblazoned on our culture. One need look no farther to see the great gap separating not only today’s Catholics from the Catholicism of the past, but also a “generation gap” among today’s Catholics.

Kennedy’s funeral was the first globally televised event in world history—and the most widely viewed Latin Mass in history. Countless millions watched the procession of black-clad figures rising in Washington’s Saint Matthew’s Cathedral as Richard Cardinal Cushing intoned the first Latin phrases of the Requiem Mass for the Dead. It was a ceremony full of long solemn silences between the woeful singing of the Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”) and the deathly echoes of chanted Latin lifting into the church’s incense-filled arches—with Walter Cronkite and other TV commentators explaining what was happening as the aging Boston cardinal recited the Latin with his back turned to us all.
For many, the Kennedy funeral remains an archetypal image, but for me the telling image is the little boy himself. For some of us, JFK Jr. is the little boy we saw saluting live on TV. But for others, that little boy is but a photograph in a history book. For them, the real JFK Jr. is the most eligible bachelor of his generation, himself the victim of a tragic and early death.

Why does this matter? Because those who saw the boy live can remember Vatican II, and those who did not, cannot.

That boy’s father, in his 1960 inaugural address, spoke of the torch being passed to a new generation. He meant it was time for the nation’s fate to become the responsibility of those born after 1900.
The same is true of Vatican II. After 40 years, the time has come: the council’s fate, its legacy, must become the responsibility of those born after 1965. Anyone who believes the work of Vatican II is complete is dead wrong. But if a new generation cannot be persuaded to take up the cause of Renewal, the council’s promise may be dead too.

If Vatican II is to live on, then its life must begin now, at 40 years into its history. But I fear the challenge will not be met, not because it is insurmountable, but because it has gone unrecognized until now. Is it too late, after 40 years, to breathe new life into Vatican II?

Next week: Why Vatican II needs a second wind, and how to get it.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2005