International Catholic University
James Hitchcock
In the previous lecture we talked primarily about Council's decree on the Church itself, and I emphasized that the Council was primarily an outward-looking event. It was orienting Catholics outward to evangelize, to spread the Gospel in the world, to Christianize the world. But it was necessary to pay some attention to the internal life of the Church because it was necessary to have a solid base. If Catholics were going to go out into the world they would have to pay some attention to the place from which they originated. We talked about the decree on the Church as giving us a richer, more spiritual, more mystical concept of the Church than we had been used to up until that time.
The Council calls its attention to specific aspects of Church life and suggests various ways in which these can be renewed. I suppose that there are a few changes that occurred after the Second Vatican Council that were more dramatic than the movement from Latin to the vernacular in the liturgy. If you ask most people today, even non-Catholics, and if they've heard of the Second Vatican Council at all -- if you ask them what it was all about, the first thing, I suspect, that would come to mind would be to say, That's when the Church said that it was going to move from Latin to English in the Liturgy. I would like to read what the Council actually said on that subject simply because it is very interesting in terms of the gap between reality and perception:
The use of the Latin language, with due respect to particular law, is to be preserved in the Latin Rite. But since the use of the vernacular, whether in the Mass, the administration of the Sacraments, or in other parts of the Liturgy, may frequently be of great advantage to the people, a wider use may be made of it, especially in readings, directives, and in some prayers and chants.
Now that is in fact all that the Council had to say on the subject. The movement from Latin to the vernacular was not a major preoccupation of the Council Fathers. They did not spend three years debating that question. There were no passionate speeches insisting that it was necessary to translate the liturgy into the vernacular. This is almost a passing reference which is made on the decree in the liturgy. If you were reading this decree, which is fairly long, and weren't reading it line by line attentively you might miss this altogether. It's barely one paragraph. It's clear from the way it's expressed that the Council simply assumes that Latin will continue to be used in the liturgy. Latin will be, in fact, normative for the liturgy. And the use of the vernacular under limited conditions is taken as a kind of a concession.
I say this not to argue against the use of the vernacular. Not to say that we need to return to the Latin liturgy, although I think it does have its place, but as I said to illustrate the gap that exists between perception and reality where the Second Vatican Council is concerned. I don't think that the idea of translation into the vernacular could have been a major concern of the Council for two reasons. One is the Council introduces change into the Church but never in such a way as to repudiate the past, never in such a way as to imply that something was wrong in the past. The Council Fathers speak in several places of organic development, and of course we all know what organic development means. It means development which takes place naturally out of the same set of roots. Organic development is what happens when a plant grows or when the human body grows. We may look very different when we are 70 than when we did when we are first born, but we know that there has been organic development over the decades. The Council always emphasizes organic development, and would not have ever said or thought, for that matter, It has been a terrible mistake for the people to have worshiped in Latin for all these many centuries, and now, finally, we are going to correct that mistake. We are going to rectify it. The Council Fathers never would have said that.
Secondly, the Council did not look for what we might call gimmicky solutions. Translate Mass into English and everything will be all right. That type of thing. The Council was always interested in deeper questions, profound matters and principles penetrating more deeply into the Divine mystery. Questions like the use of the Latin versus the use of the vernacular would have been surface questions that were not all that important compared with the deeper ones. But with respect to Liturgy, then, what were the deeper questions? The decree on Liturgy is called Sacrosanctum Concilium, this most holy Council. I said in the previous lecture that the Latin title of these documents comes from the first couple of words of the Latin text. Sacrosanctum Concilium was the first of the decrees of the Council to be completed and to be promulgated. That is to say published, made public, announced as being finished. This occurred at the end of 1962. It was the first significant effort of the Council. It got a lot of headlines because, for one thing, people were casting about still. What is this all about? What is this mysterious thing called the Council? What are they doing exactly? So out comes the Decree on the Liturgy, and the reporters are scanning it, and they see some mention here of the vernacular, and that becomes very exciting. For the Catholic Church to have Mass in English would be the headlines in the newspapers. Although the reporting was accurate enough as far as it went, to a great extent it missed the deeper message.
For decades before the Second Vatican Council there had been something called the Liturgical Movement. The Liturgical Movement was a movement within the Catholic Church that aimed at reemphasizing the liturgy and getting Catholics more involved in the liturgy. At first glance this might seem to be totally unnecessary and a kind of a redundancy. A Baptist for example, might look at the Catholic Church and say, You've got nothing but liturgy. You're drowning in liturgy. You don't put a whole lot of emphasis on preaching, and revival services, and that kind of thing. Everything in your Church revolves around your Eucharistic celebration. That was of course true. But the Liturgical Movement worked from the perception, which I think was by and large correct, that most Catholics did not begin to appreciate the liturgy as they should.
The language problem was a problem but not an unsolvable one. You could equip yourself with what was called a missal, which was a thick book that had all the prayers, all the text of the Mass for the entire year, and on one side Latin and the other side English. You could take those to Mass and very carefully follow the Mass and know exactly what the priest was doing. Some people did that, but they were a fairly small minority. Most people went to Mass and didn't really understand most of what the priest was saying and doing. They believed that what was happening here was a very great sacred action. They knew that according to the teachings of the Catholic Church that the body and blood of Christ were now present on the altar, and they would receive the body and blood of Christ in communion. But they didn't understand a lot of other things about the liturgy.
The Liturgical Movement aimed at educating them. A simple idea. But not only education in the sense of Let's give out more information: here's a sheet that gives you twenty basic points to remember about the Mass, or Here's a translation. But education of the deepest sense: appreciation, penetration of what was previously unknown or foggy. The Liturgical Movement aimed to help Catholics understand and appreciate what the liturgy was, which was a Divine action. The continuation through time of Christ's sacrifice on Calvary. The continuation through time of the Lord's Supper, the Last Supper. An action to which we don't just come as spectators but through which we are incorporated mysteriously into this whole process ourselves when we are there.
We receive the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist but we are also even prior to that we have been incorporated into the body of Christ as members of the Church. What is going on at the altar here does not consist of human creations, texts written by human beings, rites and gestures that have been invented by human beings, although of course, human beings were involved at every stage. But these are seen as Divine actions. That's why so much of the text of the Mass was simply taken from the Scriptures, because they were the words of God, not the words of men. And what goes on in the liturgy is that we are privileged to participate in these Divine actions. God has condescended to come down and be present in our Church, be present on our altars, be present in our midst, and gather us in with him. We need to know, we need to understand this and appreciate it.
So part of the liturgical movement was also that the liturgy should be celebrated with the greatest care and with the greatest reverence -- anything you could do to make it more meaningful to people in terms of music, in terms of vestments, in terms of art, in terms of a beautiful church building. Anything was more than worth it. The Liturgical Movement was very much trying to overcome what was not an uncommon attitude in the pre-Concilliar Church, what was sometimes referred to as the filling station mentality. Why do I go to Mass? Well I go to Mass to fill up on Divine Grace which has been made available. But just as I go into the gas station and I like to get out in under five minutes, so the faster the Mass is the better because I can get all the grace I need even if the priest has compressed the whole service into twenty minutes. That is the wrong approach, and this is one of the things which the Liturgical Movement was attempting to overcome.
Let me read a passage from Sacrosanctum Concilium to give you a sense of what they were really talking about:
In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem towards which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, minister of the holies and of the true tabernacle; with all the warriors of the Heavenly army we sing a hymn of glory to the Lord; venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them; we eagerly await the Saviour, Our Lord Jesus Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in glory.
Notice the completely supernatural orientation of this. We are oriented towards the Heavenly City. We are oriented towards Jesus Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father. We are anticipating his return. We hope some day to be with him in Heaven. In a previous lecture we talked about the image of the Pilgrim Church; the mention of the pilgrim is here again. We are a pilgrim people. What does that mean? It means we are journeying towards the Heavenly City.
In the wake of Vatican II there would be those who would attempt to say that what the Second Vatican Council did was to turn a Eucharistic sacrifice as it was ordinarily referred to before into a communal meal or communal celebration. And so people would say, We get together at Christmas and Easter and have family dinners, and we have birthday parties and dinner parties for our friends. And we have there a great spirit of celebration. We experience a great feeling of warmth and union with one another and we are indeed celebrating our communal oneness. And so they will say that's really what the Eucharist is supposed to be. It's a banquet or a dinner where we get together to celebrate our oneness, and when we do that Christ is in the midst of us. But it has this very horizontal dimension. That is, it's the here and now. It's this group of people gathered together in this room and they are appreciating and celebrating one another -- totally foreign of course to the passage we just looked at which is vertical in its orientation: we are looking towards Heaven. Even in the reformed liturgy, that is to say the liturgy that emerges after the Second Vatican Council, which some people would point to as making their point and showing what they mean. (Why else are we using the vernacular?, for example. Because we want to communicate with one another).
Even in the reformed liturgy after Vatican II there is really almost only one place in the liturgy where the priest addresses the people directly. He says, "pray brethren." That was in the old liturgy as well, "Pray brethren that my sacrifice and yours will be acceptable to God the Father Almighty." Almost everything else in the liturgy in terms of prayer is directed to God. The priest is praying to God the Father through Christ his Son in the name of the people. If the Council had intended this to be a horizontal celebration, a celebration of community unity, one has to conclude that they were extraordinarily inept.
Clearly that was never the Council's intention, as shown again here in the passage we just read. There is a parallel here. In the previous lecture when we were talking about the Church, I mentioned the people who misconstrued the Second Vatican Council as meaning that the Church was now a democracy. That's not true; you cannot find that anywhere in the Conciliar documents; they very clearly reaffirm the hierarchical nature of the Church. Parallel to the concept of the Church as a democracy is the concept of the liturgy as a communal celebration. If the Church is like a club, like an organization that we join in order to be with like-minded people, then of course the liturgy is like a club meeting, or a club banquet, or a club party. But once more, that is very far from what the Council had intended.
Related issues here: the use of Gregorian Chant. The Gregorian Chant was invented at some time in the Middle Ages by monks in monasteries for the most part. And it was the text of the Mass or of the Divine Office that was sung according to a certain musical style which is very plain, very simple, but in many ways also very effective. I think that many people who have heard Gregorian Chant find it to be a very uniquely spiritual kind of music. Every once in a while some secular music publisher will come out with a tape of Gregorian Chant music and then discover that it is a runaway best seller. That happened about five years ago with a tape put out by some Spanish Monks.
One of the things the Liturgical Movement was trying to do, with a strong boost from various Popes, was to establish that the Gregorian Chant was the appropriate kind of music for Catholics. The pre-conciliar custom in a lot of parishes was in a way not too different from what it is today: that is, you have the Mass being celebrated and then people sing hymns which are independent of the Mass. That is to say the hymns themselves have a text which is not that of the actual Mass. So in the old days while the priest was praying at the altar the congregation for example, might be singing a hymn to the Virgin Mary. One of the ideas behind the Gregorian Chant is not only that it is supposed to be a superior and very spiritual kind of music, but that when you sing Gregorian Chant you are also singing the actual liturgical texts themselves. So you are in fact participating in the liturgy that way. There is a common belief that the Council effectively did away with Gregorian Chant. In a lot of places they have disbanded their choirs and they argued that in some way or other that was in accordance with the desires of the Council. As a matter of fact, where the Council mentions Gregorian Chant, the only place it mentions Gregorian Chant, it says that it should be given pride of place, which means that it should be given first place in the ranking of Catholic music. It says that it is permissible to have other musical styles, other musical creations in the liturgy, but not to the detriment of Gregorian Chant, and Gregorian Chant has pride of place.
A key term in the Second Vatican Council's Decree on Liturgy is the word participation. If you could use one word perhaps to sum up what the Liturgical Movement wanted before the Council that would be it, participation. But the word participation in this context can have different meanings -- not necessarily contradictory to one another but nonetheless somewhat different. Some people argued that participation had to be active. So for example in the old days the altar boy, or the server, or the acolyte as he was variously called, was the only person who responded to the priest. When the priest said certain prayers in Latin that required an answer the altar boy alone would make the answer. One of the innovations that had started to come in even before the Council was what was called the Dialogue Mass, in which the entire congregation was invited to respond. If you had a Missal you could follow, and the entire congregation was invited to respond.
When the liturgical reform got into high gear after the Council the idea developed that full participation by the congregation was essential. So that means that you have to hear everything that the priest says. He has to articulate it audibly, and you should ideally follow his words and understand them, and the congregation should respond wherever appropriate. The Lord be with you. And with your spirit. The congregation should join in with the priest in saying certain prayers, the Gloria, the Credo, the Lord's Prayer. Without that the people are not truly participating, and they are not doing what the Council intended should be done. I think there is a lot to be said for that. It may be a little bit too literal minded. The argument has been made that one can participate in a kind of spiritual way and that is by being very attentive, by being in the proper frame of mind, by being in the properly prayerful spirit, by having a proper appreciation of the Divine Mysteries which are being celebrated and that it would be of somewhat secondary importance whether you were participating in a more overtly active way. On the whole I think that the move toward congregational participation has been a good thing. But it shouldn't be understood in such a way as to imply that therefore nobody attended Mass properly until after the time of the Council.
Another of the things which the Liturgical Movement was very concerned about when its proponents said We want to heighten appreciation for the Liturgy was non-liturgical forms of devotion or what are often called popular devotions. Here again, I suppose, if you were a Baptist looking at the Catholic Church, a Novena Devotion to the Mother of Perpetual Help would not look all that much different from a Mass, and you would say, The Catholic Church is overflowing with rituals of all kinds, and so I don't understand what you are talking about when you say liturgy is being neglected. But of course in the Catholic stream of things a popular devotion is virtually by definition something which is not liturgical. Liturgy has to do with the Sacraments, so any administration of a Sacrament such as Baptism, Matrimony, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, Ordination to the Priesthood, and so on, these is a liturgical action.
Above all the Mass is the liturgical action, the Eucharist, the center of all the life of the Church. That is the liturgical action. Then added to that would be the Divine Office, the official daily prayer of the Church, the morning prayer, the noonday prayer, the mid-afternoon prayer, the evening prayer, the night prayer, which all priests were obligated to say and which in monasteries was always sung or said in common, the monks praying in the name of the whole Church, praying on behalf of those who could not or would not themselves pray. When you get into popular devotions, Mother of Perpetual Help, Saint Jude, Saint Anthony, innumerable others, these are non-liturgical activities.
I think the Catholic Church in allowing these popular devotions to develop had done something very wise. The liturgy as it existed in the pre-conciliar Church was not for most people an emotional experience. When you went to Mass not much happened that would actually touch or stimulate your emotions. I think most people were there in a rather calm, dry, and detached fashion. They believed it was important. They believed it was a holy action, but it didn't move them. They were doing their duty by being there, but it didn't move them. But the Church knew that emotion in religion is important; touching the heart is important. There have to be ways by which people can express their personal religious sense. Thus all kinds of devotions grew up in the Church. People could find a saint who particularly appealed to them, a saint with whom they could somehow identify, a saint whose own life they could see as having had relevance to their own, a saint who had suffered an illness of some kind, or a Saint who had been orphaned, or whatever. There grew up around these various saints prayers, devotions, religious services, that were to a certain extent specialized. You prayed to Saint Anthony for a lost article; you prayed to Saint Jude for what we call hopeless cases; you prayed to certain saints for cures of certain illnesses, and so on. These things could be very heartfelt. The prayers themselves in those kinds of devotions tended to be very emotional. Whereas the text of the Mass was sacred and nobody could tamper with it, you could legitimately make up your own prayers to pray to a particular saint, Virgin Mary, whoever, that would suit your needs. Pour out your heart. Have you lost your job? Are you facing disaster in your family? Whatever it may be, pour out your heart; do it spontaneously.
I think it was wise of the Church that it had, in a sense, these two levels. The level of formal worship in which you forget about yourself, you enter into the sacred action itself. And then the other level where you could indeed indulge or express your personal emotion. A few years ago someone published a book called, Thank you, Saint Jude. It mentioned that Saint Jude, one of the twelve Apostles, was designated as the patron of hopeless cases. I'm not quite sure how that came about. I have often wondered if it was because he must have been often mistaken for Judas because of the similarity of their names. But in any case this was a highly encourged devotion. If there is something in your life that really just seems hopeless, you just find yourself in a situation in which you can't see any solution, things just seem to be getting worse, go to Saint Jude. He is the court of last resort. Somebody who wrote this book went back and studied a magazine which was called The Messenger of Saint Jude in which people sent in their petitions, and they would send in letters, and they would say Pray for this and that and the other. They would describe what was going on. And then later they would send in other letters saying, a marvelous thing happened to me, my cancer has been in remission, I got a job, or whatever it might be. And this man, who was a somewhat skeptical historian, was studying this as an indication of popular religious thinking.
There are problems with this kind of thing, which the Liturgical Movement was very much aware of. It could be superstitious: If I burn a candle in front of the statue of a Saint then I'll get what I want. Or the reason why the thing hasn't yet happened in my life which I wish would is because I made a mistake and I prayed to the wrong saint. It could be really just superstitious, almost a magical outlook. There was also the fundamental theological question for which there is, I think, no totally convincing answer, and that is why does one need to pray to a saint? We have access directly to Jesus Christ himself. We don't need to go through a mediator. I think the best answer to that question is that we don't have to go through a mediator to get to Jesus, that's perfectly true. But that it may be of subjective benefit to the person himself or herself to think of themselves as having a heavenly friend and to talk to that heavenly friend, play to that heavenly friend. As long as they clearly understand that Jesus is listening and it's not true that you have to send someone up to Jesus to try to convince him.
The most important problem as the Liturgical Movement thought, was the tendency sometimes for these popular devotions to crowd out the liturgy. Serious Catholics went to Mass every Sunday and would never think of missing unless they were sick. Many serious Catholics went to Mass every day. Many serious Catholics attended a novena service one night a week, perhaps more. They said certain devotional prayers to particular saints every day. No Catholic who was not totally ignorant would ever have said, The center of my faith is the devotion to our Mother of Perpetual Help. Even the most minimally instructed Catholic would have said The Mass is the center of our religion: of course the Mass is what is the most important. I can miss going to Novena services Tuesday night if I have to but I can't miss Mass. There was no problem along those lines, but what the Liturgical Movement was thinking about was where were people's hearts in all of this? As it says in the Gospel, where your heart is there will your treasure be. Where do they really feel at home emotionally? Do they feel at home emotionally when they attend Mass, or is that something they have to do out of a sense of duty, and they feel at home when they go to novena services? And often the answer was the latter, and so one of the purposes of the Liturgical Movement was to make the liturgy itself, the Mass itself, so meaningful to people that this becomes the center of their religious life.
After the Second Vatican Council an amazing number of things in the Catholic Church changed with an amazing speed. The shift from Latin to the vernacular is one. Another one is that the Catholic Church, which before the Council might have been thought of as awash in popular devotions, seems to almost go to the point of suppressing them. Churches usually had side altars, and on the side altars there were statues of various Saints. Sometimes when they were having devotions they would hold the services in front of the altar where the statue of that Saint was. People would go and pray before the statue of a particular Saint; they would light a candle before the statue of a particular Saint. All of a sudden people began to notice the statues were disappearing. They were no longer having devotions on Tuesday night, and the priest is telling us that we're not supposed to. The Second Vatican Council said we are not supposed to.
For many people this was really emotionally rather devastating. Something that had been very close to their hearts was suddenly wrenched away from them, and they didn't really understand how that could have been done or why it was done. But they were obedient and they went along with it. Just as the Council clearly did not intend that the whole Liturgy should instantaneously be translated from Latin into the vernacular, and Latin should be forgotten, or the Gregorian Chant should be forgotten, so also it addresses the subject of popular devotions and it says due respect should be shown for popular devotions. Due respect. It has the appropriate warning: don't let the popular devotions interfere with the liturgy. It's quite clear that the Council expected that popular devotions would continue. We could go on and find other examples.
When these liturgical changes occurred there was a crisis in terms of the fundamental meaning. The movement, which didn't take quite as instantaneously, and there was a lot of confusion so people don't always have clear ideas as to what they themselves even think, but there was a movement away from the liturgy as a Divine action in which we are privileged to participate as human beings, to the liturgy as a human action. And lots of problems immediately began to develop. One of them was liturgical improvising. Not long after the Council we began to hear about substitution of readings. So on a given Sunday whoever is celebrating the Mass decides that the readings that were assigned by the Church for this day aren't meaningful to us in this community. So they either go searching around for another Scripture reading which is more meaningful or they put something else in its place entirely outside the Scripture. You hear of cases where the Gospel quote is actually reading from the New York Times. And they make up their own prayers, they compose their own prayers; sometimes these are even extemporaneous as they go along. A number of things of that kind happened, and there was much complaining by people who were often told, This is in keeping with the intentions of the Second Vatican Council. Not so. The Second Vatican Council is extremely unequivocal on that point. It says in one place, no one, not even a priest, may add to, subtract from, or otherwise alter the sacred text of the liturgy. Some people criticize this mentality as being legalistic as you have to adhere strictly to rules, something that's lacking in spirit. Maybe, maybe not. But if that is true you have to recognize that it's the Second Vatican Council itself.
So you cannot simultaneously cite the Second Vatican Council as your authority for liturgical change if you are also going to turn around and say the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council were affected by the same disease of legalism, because they said quite explicitly that nobody is to tamper with the sacred text. Is this mere legalism? No. It rests upon a very simple but true recognition. No individual, no group of people are wiser, holier, or more insightful than the Church as a whole. The Church as a whole collectively through its hierarchy, through its councils, through its many many years of experience has determined what is appropriate liturgy, has determined what are appropriate readings and prayers which adequately, truly, profoundly express the meaning of Catholic life. And it's presumptuous of an individual priest, or a liturgical committee, or an individual congregation to say, We know better. You don't know better, even if it should turn out that eventually the rest of the Church should agree with you and say, Yes, I think that's a decided improvement. A sense of the community of the Church, a sense of charity towards others, a sense of real belonging in the Church would dictate that you not do this on your own, that you continue to participate in the universal liturgy, the universal prayer, which is the prayer of the entire Church.
We have seen in the post-conciliar Church a certain amount of what might be called puritanism. The historical movement of puritanism in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in new England, wasn't really in its origins a matter of strict personal morality, which is the way we think of it now. You know a puritan is someone who disapproves of drinking, and so on, but they were called puritans precisely because they wanted to purify the worship of the Anglican Church. Too much ceremony, too much ritual, too sacred. They wanted to reduce Christian worship pretty well down to Bible readings, sermon and a few prayers.
In the post-conciliar Catholic Church we can say there has been something of a resurgence of puritanism. You go into sometimes a beautiful old Gothic Church and it looks as if it has been vandalized. The statues are gone; the stained glass windows have been replaced by plain glass; the communion rail has been taken out. The Stations of the Cross have been taken out; the beautiful marble altar has been replaced by a wooden table, etc. Very often it is claimed that this is in keeping with the intentions of the Second Vatican Council. Far from it. The Second Vatican Council explicitly says that proper respect and reverence should be shown to these things. The only thing that it says is -- it's almost common sense -- don't overdo it. Don't multiply the number of statues, don't multiply the number of devotions, and so forth, to the point where it becomes obscure. We can use the analogy in dealing with trees and plants. You prune solely for the purpose of encouraging the growth; you don't prune in order to create an empty space. And it would be a similarly wise principle to recall in liturgical matters.
I think the biggest error that was made with respect to liturgy after the Council was to come to think of it as expressive. By that I mean that liturgy was supposed to embody or express my personal subjective feelings and those of my community. The Catholic Liturgy was always austere and formal. It was intended to be that way. Every prayer was prescribed; every gesture, every ritual was carefully prescribed. It was to be done correctly. Proper education would lead us to appreciate the meaning of these things so they would not become meaningless rituals. It was to be done the way it was supposed to be done.
Wisely the Church turned to popular devotions as an outlet for people's personal subjective religious experiences. Probably because popular devotions were suppressed after the Council unwisely, and therefore there was no outlet any longer for people's personal subjective religious feeling, but partly because of a misunderstanding of the Council, people increasingly began to think that the Liturgy was supposed to be itself expressive. If I'm not experiencing an emotional charge when I go to Mass then there is something wrong. And we do whatever we need to do to achieve it. So we shock people by having unexpected readings from unexpected sources, and they are saying, Wow! Did you hear that? We had a reading from the New York Times. Or you introduce new sorts of things into the liturgy and the ritual that people don't expect and which they find something of a turn-on. You're dealing with young people, and you introduce rock music into the liturgy. All kinds of things, again totally contrary to what the Council had intended -- a misunderstanding of the concept of participation.
There is no source that you can go back to before the Council in the terms of great theologians, great saints, great scholars who would ever have said that the Mass in order to be meaningful has to produce an emotional charge in you. This idea is also inherently radically individualistic because what produces an emotional charge in me may not produce one in you. Therefore in a certain sense we cannot even participate in the same experience if that's what we are looking for. So you begin to get the fragmentation of the Church. Mass for students, Mass for farmers, Mass for people here, Mass for people there, all of them having a different Mass because all of them are tuned on to a different wave length. And then, of course, the logic of it is even when you get a group together like students or whoever they may be, they may not all be on the same wavelength either. So the logic of it is that they keep breaking up into smaller and smaller groups. The logic of this of course, is that everybody makes up their own liturgy and no one has to follow a settled prescribed liturgy. All of this is so far removed from the intentions of the Second Vatican Council that it scarcely needs mention.
Among other things in terms of the internal renewal of the Church which the Council addressed itself to, it didn't mention a number, but two of great importance are the renewal of the priesthood and the religious life. We don't have a whole lot of time to say anything about that. I don't know if there is a whole lot that needs to be said.
Probably next to the movement to the vernacular the greatest, most dramatic change that took place in Catholic life after the Council was when nuns first started modernizing their medieval or old archaic religious habits into a more modern style, and then for the most part stopped wearing habits altogether and started wearing lay clothes. I think if you would ask the average person, even a non-Catholic, What did the Second Vatican Council do? they would probably mention that very high on the list. Alas, once again there is no warrant for it in the body of the Council documents themselves. There is actually a reference to Nun's habits in which it says that they should be seemly and appropriate, and they do in fact say that maybe it is not desirable to wear something that is too archaic or cumbersome. So there is a warrant for some modification in the dress, but clearly the Council anticipated that nuns would continue to dress in a distinctive religious habit.
What about priestly celibacy? There was tremendous agitation in the post-conciliar period. Let's get rid of priestly celibacy. A lot of priests leave the priesthood. There was scarcely a mention of it on the floor of the Council. Almost no bishop got up at the Second Vatican Council and urged the end of celibacy. And the only mention of celibacy in the documents of the Second Vatican Council affirms it and says what great spiritual value it has, and that the priest is to learn to live his celibacy and to see that this is something to which he is called and which will bring with it the possibility of holiness. Women priests? Nowhere on the radar screen during the Second Vatican Council. Something that had not been even remotely considered.
In terms of religious life male and female, the Council urged something we talked about in the previous lecture, resourcement, French word, going back to the sources. They said the authentic renewal of religious life consists of going back and studying your founder. When your community was founded 300, 400, 1000 years ago, what did your founder have in mind? What did your founder want? Measure yourself accordingly as to how far you may have come from that, how far away from it have you gotten? In a sense that's what the Council was doing for the Church as a whole, by going back to Scriptural roots and going back to the early Fathers of the Church. Let's measure ourselves against our origins.
One of the most dramatic and tragic misconceptions of the Council is visible at this point because many religious communities did the opposite. They didn't do resourcement; they didn't say Let's go back to the beginning and see what our founder wanted us to do. They said Let's look around at the modern world and see what we should do to accommodate ourselves to the modern world. So wearing secular dress, living in an apartment, having your own job, having your own car, seeking your own career, all these things which we are familiar with in contemporary religious life, male and female, is very much contrary to the intentions of the Council and marks a diametric departure from the injunction which the Council gave in terms of how to renew religious life.
I might say here that there is a very close parallel in liturgy as well. At first the liturgical changes after the Council were justified on the grounds that we are going back to the practices of the early Church. The people who didn't like it were told You can't get better than the early Church. But soon that pretense was dropped and liturgists were just talking about the needs of the present day and updating the liturgy and making it relevant to the twentieth century, which is a different thing entirely.
If you are going to dismiss anyone who thinks that priestly celibacy is a good thing, or anyone who believes that nuns should wear some form of habit, that religious should live in communities, that they should be living under a rule, that they should have communal missions like schools or hospitals -- all these things which became so controversial in the post-conciliar Church -- if you are going to dismiss all that as reactionary, old fashioned, backward, you have to recognize that the Council itself was at fault. It was the Council that was reactionary and backward. So how then can you cite the Council as your authority for change? Because the changes you want are quite clearly contrary to what the Council explicitly said. This is a problem which runs through every aspect of contemporary Church life, and we will have occasion to talk about more of it as we go along.