Current views:
Just a few items:
- It’s the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, but since we’re not supposed to be living in the past, I don’t think we should dwell on it much, do you? Anyway, here’s JXXIII’s opening address (as I noted last week, it’s not in English on the Vatican website)
- In searching for some contemporary commentary, I ran across this – which is not contemporary with the opening of the Council, but was published in the Atlantic in 1967 – a long article on American Catholic bishops by Daniel Callahan (Catholic ethicist known mainly for his strong support of abortion and other anti-life stances). It is an interesting snapshot of a certain perspective – Callahan being, of course, pro-reform and everything else – as well as an accurate (imho) description of the episcopal mindset, even today.
Ironically, it was the Council which broke the unquestioned grip of the American bishops. They went to Rome in 1962 as comparatively obscure figures on the stage of world Catholicism. They were known to come from the richest Catholic Church in the world, and a few, like Cardinal Spellman of New York and Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles, had an international reputation for financial genius. Beyond that, no one knew much about the American bishops, especially where they stood on such crucial issues as religious liberty, ecumenism, and the place of Scripture in the Church. By the end of the Council in 1965, however, they had as a body made their mark. In one critical vote after another they came down overwhelmingly on the side of the progressive majority. That outcome proved they are capable of moving with a liberal tide. In the eyes of those Catholics eager for change in the Church, that was their glory. They showed they could move….
….But if the bishops showed they could move, they also showed that they move much like the rest of mankind, by first looking cautiously about to see where the rest of the herd is going. And that was their undoing. The price they paid for their moment of fame at the Council was the destruction of a deeply ingrained myth: that the Catholic bishop is a wise, omnipotent, resplendent figure, inevitably learned, courageous, and visionary. Not quite. As a result of the intense public exposure they received, the bishops came out of the Council cut down to ordinary size. They would henceforth be judged by a relentless kind of human logic. Since they voted progressively at the Council, they would be expected to act progressively once they got back home. To their great distress, they discovered they would be openly criticized when they failed. “Put up or shut up” is the suitably descriptive phrase here; and that is of course an American, not a Roman, phrase.
I’m not trying to single handedly repopulate the Earth over here. Having kids, especially lots of them, is now counter-cultural; it’s so far outside the norm that I’m used to random strangers commenting every time we’re all out in public. But it’s the most fulfilling expression of hope and belief in the future. I like to think that, by making not just one or two babies, but by bringing into the world a whole brood, we are doing our part to inject more vitality into it.
- The gorgeous new pipe organ at Birmingham’s Cathedral of St. Paul is featured on this month’s issue of American Organist magazine.
Charlotte was Both 