The Emerging Laity

I’m going to engage a bit with Lary Chapp’s recent post on Vatican II, the liturgy and the laity.

His point is that the Second Vatican Council, intended to have a missionary focus, failed.

The Council’s vision was sweeping and broad. Its goal was to re-evangelize the world through a missionary effort that would take the Church’s vast spiritual riches and place them in the modern public square as genuine interlocutors with a world made weary by the genocidal wars of recent memory and the emerging threat of nuclear apocalypse.  But in order to do this the Council fathers knew that a purely clerical effort would not do and that the time was now for a lay revolution in the Church.  Very often in the history of the Church great spiritual leaders arose to reform their religious orders which often ended in them breaking away from the main body in order to found a more rigorous, “discalced” movement of radical Catholicism.  Therefore, I like to say that in its universal call to holiness the Council was calling for a discalced laity shorn of the purely contractual Catholicism so prevalent in the pre-conciliar Church.  They sought a more evangelical laity who would rise to the challenge of modernity and bring the Gospel into the world in a radical way, but also in a way appropriate to the laity who must after all, live in the world and provide for their families. 

This effort failed.  It failed because the Council did not follow up on this call to holiness with concrete directives and pastoral proposals.  It all remained vague and open-ended which allowed the progressive faction of the Church, making free use of the media, to pitch the Council as a “modernization” that sought to conform the Church to the world rather than the world to the Church.

I don’t disagree at all, but I want to approach it from a slightly different angle – surprised? – one I’ve taken before. So nothing new, in a way – but that’s the way it is, isn’t it? We keep having these same conversations over and over and over again. It’s exhausting.

If you read the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity that emerged from the Council, you’ll see this. It’s a very optimistic and strong call to the laity to be formed in faith and take the light of that faith out into the world.

But what happened, within minutes, it seems of the Council’s close, is that the focus of this call – go out into the world, where you live and work– was forgotten or abandoned, and what rose instead was the conviction that what “Vatican II did” for the laity was to open up the doors of the Church to them in ways not possible before.

So, what was did a “Vatican II Church” look like?

One in which the laity were “involved” at all levels of decision-making an action.

A liturgy pulsing with that Spirit of Vatican II was not, of course, only in the vernacular and possibly ad-libbed by the celebrant accompanied by 3-chord guitar hymns  – it was a liturgy in which the laity were all over the place, doing as much as possible.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was not an adult right after Vatican II – I was born in 1960, so that means my teen years and young adulthood were happening from 10-15 years after the Council’s end. I was also in the South, which is always going to be a little more conservative church-wise than other parts of the country.

(A few years ago, a friend of mine working in a California parish had noted a job opening at a parish around here. She asked me about the ideological bent of the place. I said it was the most liberal parish in town. “But,” I continued, “that means it’s probably well to the right in California terms.”)

But nonetheless, I can tell you – as a person who, when asked as a 14-year old what she wanted to do when she grew up, answered, “theologian,” much to the puzzlement of her southern Methodist grandparents – yes, I can tell you from my own religious education in Catholic high school and my college campus ministry experience in which I was very involved, the emphasis and excitement was all on being “involved in Church,” and of course I was all in.

On the ground in those years, that was understood to be the great change, the great advance, the great leap forward, the tremendous gift of Vatican II – that the sanctuary was no longer for the clerics, that lay people could work in the Church in roles previously not open to them, new ministries in the Church abounded, new groups in the Church were springing up, and those barriers were coming down.

So why did Vatican II “fail” as a missionary effort? Lots of reasons, but this is one.

For some reason (and I have my theories), the popular definition of the fruits and spirits of Vatican II came to be centered on what the Church looked like, rather than what it was called to do in the world, and what that Church was supposed to look like was one reflective of a contemporary vision of what it means to say that the Church is the Body of Christ. And so that’s where the energy went.

Which then means: that’s where the arguments started happening. So that what defines the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is not, indeed, a renewed missionary spirit, but infighting. Decades and decades of infighting.

Slightly off-topic: I – and others – have often reflected on the question of What Happened to Catholic Writing after Vatican II. Not to say there’s been nothing of quality produced – not at all – but there is definitely not a “flourishing” as we saw in Europe and the United States before Vatican II. What’s up with that? I’ve often thought that a huge reason was that very concentration of post-Conciliar Catholic cultural energy on intra-Catholic conflicts and issues.

When you know that the Mass or Church teaching isn’t up for grabs, that, well, no your opinion on this or that doesn’t really matter in the big picture, you shrug, and maybe you write some essays or bring your doubts or questions into your art in some fashion, but since you have no power to really change anything, it frees you to concentrate on the art – and I don’t mean this even just for individuals, but as I said, for Catholic culture in general.

More to come in another post, but that’s the beginning of it:

Conclusion: The Second Vatican Council’s vision of a more deeply engaged missionary Church in the modern world has fallen short so far because Catholic laity settled, fairly quickly, on visibility within the life of the church as the choice definition of living out the baptismal promise.

So in a blink of an eye, your “engaged laity” was all about having an impact on the life of the Church rather than the world – whether that be through liturgy committees, diocesan commissions, getting to wear an alb when you’re lectoring or, in the present day, apparently, being a jerk on Twitter.

Oh, wait. Twitter. That’s “the world,” I guess. So, okay. Good job, everyone!

Priesthood of all believers, amiright?