Jesus Livingston Seagull

Read this post and comments at Substack.

As I and a zillion others noted, yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. What do I have to add to the conversation today? Just one observation. I hope it’s just one. We’ll see how this turns out.

We can talk all day (and for decades) about the intentions of the Council fathers, the fallout, the “spirit of Vatican II” and the distance between those apparent intentions, unspoken intentions, words and results, but in my mind, all that aside, I really do think that much of the awful post-Conciliar fallout can be blamed on two things: 1) the speed of the changes and 2) the authoritarianism of the implementation of these changes.

It’s not a unique observation, but hear me out, because I want to dig into is what these factors communicated about the reality of the post-Conciliar mindset, in contrast to the official narrative.

The changes came very quickly, and I’ve got a wrap-up anecdote to illustrate that, so stick with me.

Yes, there had been rumblings and expectations and places in the global church where a lot of these changes were happening in the decades before the Council. It wasn’t a total, absolute shock. But still – quickly. The Mass changes, Friday abstinence gone from one week or month to another, then quite radical changes put into practice within ten or fifteen years of the Council. Communion in the hand, for example, in the United States, in the mid-70’s, when I was in high school. Something absolutely forbidden in the pre-Conciliar church, taught to schoolkids as a good, even preferred practice fifteen years later.

The rapidity of these changes had various impacts, but the one I want to focus on they communicated about the nature of the Church: that maybe “solid” and “unchanging” and “trustworthy” weren’t words to describe this Church after all.

Yes, of course the Church changes, develops and adapts. How that happens, especially in relation to culture, is one of my great interests. But traditionally, faith had always been understood as something that was given to us through Scripture and Tradition and protected – the “deposit of faith” – by the Church. Perhaps mid-century Catholicism was due more historical awareness and openness about change and development in church practice and teaching, but the fact remains: When one day you’re proclaiming something as an immutable teaching or a required (or forbidden) practice, and the next – or even the next year – you’re saying, “never mind” – most people are not going to be wow, thanks for the opportunity to engage is some mature reflection on the nature and mystery of faith – but rather – Huh. So is anything these guys say actually true and worth my time?

Which leads to the second point: the fact that the Council was supposed to be all about the Church as the People of God, not a top-down hierarchical institution – but the energy of the whole thing flowed – surged – from top to bottom, not only on the global level, but on the local scene as well.

What does this do? Among other things, it undercuts the claims of the Council to be all about the Church as the People of God with a less authoritarian mode of decision-making, which in turn breeds cynicism about the whole operation.

I have written about this before in the Synod-context. Go here for that – about how language about the “Spirit” can often be a cover for authoritarianism.

So, to try to sum up here: It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to label the Second Vatican Council as a failure, in part because the rapidity of the changes and the authoritarian way in which change was promulgated undermined the stated message of the Council: to simply render the unchanging Faith more understandable in the modern world and to encourage the laity to see themselves as engaged, integral parts of the Body of Christ.

We’re changing these things that we taught you were immutably true yesterday. Why? Because the Spirit moved us to.

It ultimately communicated that this business of Church was simply one more worldly entity whose contemporary face is dependent solely on who’s in power today.

Douthat today:

The work of the French historian Guillaume Cuchet, who has studied Vatican II’s impact on his once deeply Catholic nation, suggests that it was the scale and speed of the council’s reforms, as much as any particular substance, that shattered Catholic loyalty and hastened the church’s decline. Even if the council’s changes did not officially alter doctrine, to rewrite and renovate so many prayers and practices inevitably made ordinary Catholics wonder why an authority that suddenly declared itself to have been misguided across so many different fronts could still be trusted to speak on behalf of Jesus Christ himself.

After such a shock, what kind of synthesis or restoration is possible? 

So, my anecdote. This is mostly to remind you of how quickly things changed. You can read other accounts elsewhere, especially from folks who were older and suffered a great deal from the decisions of mostly priests and religious with the mission of forming them in adult faith by treating them like children who need to be taught a lesson and, like good children, accept what they’ve been told. I was younger, born in 1960, never experienced a Traditional Latin Mass (because I wasn’t taken to Mass until I was five years old), went to public schools and sporadic CCD until 1974, when I started at a diocesan Catholic high school in the South.

The freshman religion teacher was very good. We read Dei Verbum – I think I still have the mass-market copy of the Vatican II documents that we all had in those days – and spent the rest of the year on the Old Testament. Miss Olson was young, but fairly old-school in her approach – even as she was earnestly sharing the vision of the Council with us. She did a good job, and the material was solid.

Then sophomore year? 1975? The main text of the fall semester?

Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Some of you might remember or know of JLS. It was a massive best seller, originally published in 1970 to little notice, but then exploding, so that in 1972 it sold a million copies, and has now sold about forty million.

The book tells the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a seagull who is bored with daily squabbles over food. Seized by a passion for flight, he pushes himself and learns everything he can about flying. His increasing unwillingness to conform finally results in his expulsion from the flock. Now an outcast, he continues to learn, becoming increasingly pleased with his abilities while leading a peaceful and happy life.

One day Jonathan meets two gulls who take him to a “higher plane of existence” in which there is no heaven, but a better world found through perfection of knowledge. There he meets another seagull who loves to fly. He discovers that his sheer tenacity and desire to learn have made him “pretty well a one-in-a-million bird.” In this new place, Jonathan befriends the wisest gull, Chiang, who takes him beyond his previous self-education, and teaches him how to move instantaneously to anywhere else in the Universe. The secret, Chiang says, is to “begin by knowing that you have already arrived.”

But unsatisfied with his new life, Jonathan returns to Earth to find others like himself to teach them what he has learned and to spread his love for flight. His mission is successful, and Jonathan gathers around himself a flock of other gulls who have been declared outcasts themselves for not conforming. The first of his students, Fletcher Lynd Seagull, ultimately becomes a teacher in his own right, and Jonathan leaves to teach other flocks.

I spent some time last night re-reading the thing at archive.org – it took maybe fifteen minutes.

My memory of it and the way it was dealt with was very faint, but mostly centered around Jonathan as some sort of Christ figure since he, what, descended from his new place of wisdom to share this wisdom with the gulls back home? I guess.

“I don’t understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has just tried to kill you. ”

“Oh, Fletch, you don’t love that! You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practise and see the real gull, the good in everyone of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love. It’s fun, when you get the knack of it.”

In reading it last night, I was surprised – although I probably shouldn’t have been – by how vaguely Eastern or simply new-agey it is, and how tenuous any connection between the bird and Christ is – and how trying to make the connection produces a warped, to say the least, understanding of Jesus, Christianity, faith and mission – and even the role of nature and grace.

But mostly, Jesus.

“Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, and unlimited idea of freedom, ” Jonathan would say in the evenings on the beach, “and precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us where we have to put aside. That’s why all this high-speed practice, and low- speed and aerobatics… ”

…and his students would be asleep, exhausted from the day’s flying. They liked the practice, because it was fast and exciting and it fed a hunger for learning that grew with every lesson. But not one of them, not even Fletcher Lynd Gull, had come to believe that the flight of ideas could possibly be as real as this flight of wind and feather.

“Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, ” Jonathan would say, other times, “is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too …”

For decades I have thought, “Wow, I can’t believe that was my sophomore religion text in a Catholic high school, crazy times, right?” but last night I transitioned fully to: I CANNOT BELIEVE THEY USED THIS AS A TEXT IN A CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL. WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE.

Who were, I don’t hesitate to say, very nice, well-meaning people. Most of them.

So let’s circle back. This was 1975. Ten years after the end of the Council. In just ten years, high school kids had gone from having substantive, challenging religious education in a Catholic high school, to spending weeks comparing a stupid anthropomorphized self-actualizing bird who just wants to fly, man, to Jesus of Nazareth.

(One of our big Senior projects was to compile a folder with reflections and artwork comparing the Beatitudes to the lyrics of The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha.)

Don’t tell me that didn’t have an impact, both in terms of most obviously, the collapse of religious knowledge, but also our generation’s sense of how serious this whole business is. Narrator: not very serious at all.

I do remember what the teacher wrote in my progress report that year: Amy makes good grades although she sits in the back of my class reading novels all period.

Oh come on…just breaking those chains and learning to fly, okay?

Another post that might interest you on another failed aspect of the Council.

Also this – on “Participation” and the Council.