Great local article about 50th anniversary of Vatican II

At Vatican II, 50 years ago, Catholic leaders gathered to change their church and its world outlook

By John Pope, The Times-PicayuneThe Times-Picayune
on October 09, 2012 at 6:35 PM

 

In a massive display of solemn ecclesiastical pomp, hundreds upon hundreds of elaborately robed leaders of the Catholic Church strode into St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome a half-century ago Thursday. It signaled the start of a historic three-year assembly that would change the way members of the world’s largest Christian denomination viewed themselves, their church and the rest of the world.

On Oct. 11, 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. He blesses the crowd as he is carried in a procession to the Basilica.Times-Picayune archive

 

 

It was the first day of the Second Vatican Council, more popularly known as Vatican II, which was designed to assess the church’s role in a rapidly changing world. Leading the prelates who had assembled beneath St. Peter’s soaring dome was Pope John XXIII, who said frequently that he convened the council because he thought it was time to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
For many Catholics accustomed to a church in which their priests turned their backs on worshippers and uttered the Mass in Latin, a language that few parishioners understood, the air came in at gale force.
As a result of Vatican II, priests started celebrating Mass in the language of the countries in which they lived, and they faced the congregation, not only to be heard and seen but also to signal to worshippers that they were being included because they were a vital component of the service.
'Active participation'
“It called for people not to have passive participation but active participation,” New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond said. “Prayer is not supposed to be a performance. We’re supposed to be actively participating.”
The changes took effect Nov. 29, 1964, the first Sunday of Advent. At St. James Major Catholic Church, the reformatted service came as a shock to many worshippers, said Aymond, who was an altar boy in the Gentilly church’s first English-language Mass.
Because he had been an altar boy for years, young Gregory knew all the prayers in Latin. But, he said, that was no help. “I was lost,” he said. “I had to keep looking at the book to find the prayers. I didn’t know what was coming next. It was the first time I had heard the Scriptures proclaimed in English.”
The changes didn’t stop when Mass ended. As time went by, many nuns shucked their voluminous habits in favor of clothes similar to those worn by the people they served. And men and women in religious orders started taking on causes, even risking arrest, when they spoke out in favor of civil rights and workers’ rights and against the war in Vietnam.
Such changes represented an about-face from the church’s defensive approach to the world before Vatican II, said Christopher Baglow, a theology professor at Notre Dame Seminary.
“It wasn’t that the church wasn’t committed to human dignity before Vatican II,” he said. “With Vatican II, the church began to look closely at the ways with which modern thinkers tended to promote human dignity and showed how they and the Gospels are complementary.”
Part of the modern world
With Vatican II, the Catholic Church sent out the message that it was part of the modern world, said Thomas Ryan, director of the Loyola Institute for Ministry. “Not against, not above, not apart, but in the modern world,” he said. “The church sought to engage, not condemn.”

In January 1965, Sister Henrietta Guyot, director of the department of nursing at the LSU School of Medicine and former director of Charity Hospital School of Nursing, models the 'old' and 'new' style of nun's habit.Times-Picayune archive

 

 

The council documents say there must be a conversation between the church and the world, Aymond said. “The church, by its teaching and by its discipleship, has something to say to the world. At the same time, the world is saying something to the church. It’s saying some good things, I think, about globalization and the environment, respecting people of all genders and classes and cultures and languages.

“It called for people not to have passive participation but active participation.” -- New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond

“We can’t just say we’re not going to be involved in these conversations. As the church, we have to be in conversation with others who agree and disagree with us.”
Acknowledging a common belief in God
This shift included the Catholic Church’s attitude toward other religions. Before Vatican II, Catholics weren’t supposed to visit other denominations’ houses of worship. When Rabbi Edward Cohn of Temple Sinai was growing up in Glen Burnie, Md., he said his best friend, a Catholic, had to get permission from his archbishop to attend Cohn’s bar mitzvah.
“Catholics looked down on other religions and thought of them as condemned to hell,” Ryan said.
But one document from the council acknowledged that these disparate faiths had a common belief in God, said Ryan, who described it as nothing less than “a revolutionary approach.”
Perhaps the biggest of these changes came in the church’s approach to Judaism. Before Vatican II, Jews were stigmatized as the people who killed Jesus Christ. That changed with the council, when the Catholic Church acknowledged its Jewish roots and Jews’ covenant with God, Ryan said.
“It had the effect that the sun has when it comes up and interrupts the night,” Cohn said. “It was no less dramatic than that. It provided an entirely new day. It changed everything.”
Pope John Paul II enhanced the church’s ties with Jews, whom he described as “our older brothers in faith,” by becoming the first pontiff to visit a synagogue and by establishing diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993.
Not all the changes brought about by Vatican II have been welcomed -– five local churches still offer Masses in Latin, for example -– and many would say there haven’t been enough changes regarding the status of women. Women still cannot be ordained as priests. And this spring, the Vatican orthodoxy watchdog launched a full-scale overhaul of the largest umbrella group of American nuns, accusing the group of taking positions that undermine Roman Catholic teaching on the priesthood and homosexuality while promoting several “radical feminist themes” incompatible with Catholic teachings.
When the Vatican-ordered inquiry was initially announced, many religious sisters and their supporters said the investigation reflected church officials' misogyny and was an insult to women religious, who run hospitals, teach and play other vital service roles in the church. Conservative Catholics, however, have long complained that the majority of nuns in the United States have grown too liberal and flout church teaching.
Although Vatican II was a catalyst for a great deal of change, it didn’t happen in a bubble, Aymond said. The 1960s was a decade of change, with protests against racism, war, sexual behavior, the status quo and authority in general.
“If that’s going on in the world and in society, that’s bound to affect the church because we’re both a divine and a human institution,” Aymond said.
“Vatican II isn’t about replacing what the church is,” Baglow said. “It’s about helping it be more vitally what God intended it to be in the first place.”