Dossier, Volume 14 #1

Outpouring of the Spirit and Human Shift

Despite the Catholic Church's painful issues, the synthesis brought about by Vatican II is still something to celebrate.

I was twenty-four when the Second Vatican Council opened. I was working in Holland at the time, at the headquarters of the Grail movement, an international lay movement of Catholic women. Just from things that had happened in my church life, I was probably less unprepared for Vatican II than most North American Catholics. I had already absorbed the idea that the Catholic Church could change, and that change could be a deliberate step closer to the Gospel. This was not exactly a household notion in many pious Catholic families.

When I was an undergraduate at St. Michael's College in Toronto, I took the affirmative side in a debate resolving that the liturgy should be celebrated in the vernacular. So when the switch to the vernacular came some years later, I felt it was a triumph of something I'd been supporting all along. Even better, enthusiasm for Scripture had already begun in the Catholic circles I moved in. That element went back to my high school years, when in the Young Christian Student movement we began every meeting with a "Gospel Inquiry," a pretty free discussion of a few verses of the New Testament in our own life-context. So I was ready for the biblical emphasis of Vatican II.

Right after university, I went down to Grailville, in Ohio, and spent the next four years fully involved with the Grail. I felt I was part of a vanguard. But my vanguard started falling apart. Under the yeasty influence of the changes let loose by the council, many of the women who had attracted me to the Grail were leaving it. And some women were leaving not the Grail, but the Catholic Church. Within a few years the Grail in North America became a sort of postdenominational movement with no formal link to the church. I had hoped it would be my permanent "clan" within the church, but it was no longer the kind of organization where I could make that kind of commitment. Besides all that, my mother was badly injured in 1963, and I was needed at home. So I came back to Toronto.

Only the year before, the Toronto School of Theology had opened, and it suddenly became possible for a layperson to do a graduate degree in theology. So during the Vatican Council's second and third sessions, I was doing my MA in theology. Gregory Baum, who was teaching us, went to every session as a peritus, then flew back from Rome and told us what was happening. It was unbelievably exciting. I felt like a pioneer of a whole new chapter in church life. I was thrilled at the rising up of Scripture as something that all Catholics were being encouraged to feed themselves on. I was optimistic at the rising of ecumenism, and the reconnection of the sacraments with both those sources of reflection.

In the earlier mood of Catholicism, there was so much emphasis on the teaching authority of the hierarchy that no layperson would have thought of getting a degree in theology: why would you learn all that stuff when it was somebody's else's job to teach? So the message from Vatican II that probably had the greatest identity-impact was that the church is a people, the people of God: God communicates not only with the pope and the bishops but with everybody, and we have reason to raise our voices up in the church and say what we think, as part of educating one another.

The shape and colour of the sacraments underwent a transformation too. Some of the changes were small, but they hit people viscerally. At communion, the priest would now say, in a language you understood, "The body of Christ," and you would say, "Amen!" The change introduced a little bit of mutuality and dialogue and taking personal responsibility for what the sacrament meant. I loved it.

The switch from Latin to English in the liturgy changed the experience of Catholicism completely. I understand why some people say it had the effect of shrinking the mystery and the beauty, because it located the acceptance of faith at a whole different point in the brain. When you worship in a language you don't understand, something quite moving and powerful can happen, but it isn't comprehension. You can't take it into your power and say, "I agree with this part," and "I don't agree with that part." By locating the experience of religion at a different point in the human spectrum of response, the switch into the vernacular represented a huge psychological change.

Another message of Vatican II was that God has high hopes for the world and it is intrinsic to being a Christian to take your life in the world seriously and try to bring about God's hopes. I don't think that idea was new to Catholicism as such, although Vatican II expressed it in unusually optimistic terms. But it hit North American Catholics at a significant time sociologically.

Most Catholics in North America before the Second World War were Irish or Italian and poor. They did not expect the oppressive world to change. The people in my big inner-city Toronto parish didn't think the world was a hopeful place or that God liked it much, and they certainly did not believe that they could change it.

Notably missing in the Catholicism that
got offered in Canada after Vatican II
is an understanding of suffering.

However, my father was already a "lay militant." He had campaigned all over Britain with a radical Jesuit to start study groups for Catholic working men so they could take leadership in labour unions. By the time I was born, he was editor of the Catholic Register, which during his tenure was a left-wing journal. Because of him, when I heard some of my high school teachers talk about "the lay apostolate" and "the age of the laity," it made instant sense. Later, I was thrilled to see the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes say that we belong in the world and that God has hope for the world, because I had heard it from my father.

Vatican II didn't try to legislate action to change the world. What it did legislate was liturgical change, and it did so in a hurry. Church authorities forced liturgical changes that I still heartily approve of, but I'm not sure they should have been demanded by law, with no reference to how pastors or people felt. Whereas before the Mass had to be in Latin, now you weren't allowed to celebrate a Latin mass. This approach betrayed the insights themselves, I suspect.

The atmosphere of sudden change had some strange consequences. In my class at the Toronto School of Theology, I was one of two lay students. All the others were priests or religious, and every one of them left the priesthood and religious life. Some of them did some pretty unethical things while they were working their way out. So at one and the same time I was seeing a dawn that filled me with hope, and an abandonment of commitment and seriousness that filled me with confusion. And the light and shadow were two sides of one face.

Now that I'm older, I see everything as more ambiguous. Whereas in my twenties I thought of the Second Vatican Council as an outpouring of the Spirit in quite absolute terms, I now see it also as history. All human tribes go through messy and painful but utterly necessary paradigm shifts, with and without the Spirit. People lose continuity and stability, but the new stuff coming in gives different people energy. Although I still believe that the Spirit of God was noticeably merciful in giving us Vatican II, I see that it was also a human shift where a paradigm that had worked very well for a long time got broken and a lot of people got lost, but a new coherence began.

I'm still a Vatican II Catholic: I prefer the set of symbols that the council celebrated to the previous set, and also to some of the current offerings. But I recognize that the Vatican II synthesis holds some aspects of revelation better than others. Notably missing in the Catholicism that got offered in Canada after Vatican II is an understanding of suffering. The sentimental, cheerful church music of the late sixties and seventies couldn't hold the passion and death of Jesus or the passion of any of the prophets. The official line was that with dialogue we would all understand one another, we would all be included, and things would get more participatory and more positive all the time.

At the same time the consumer culture in North America was saying, "Just buy the right things and you'll be fine." We can't help being shaped by that culture, and some of it got into our theological and ecclesiological thinking. And it's a lie. The power of sin is much heavier than that.

There is much more room for tragic vision in liberation theology, which came along later in the sixties. It has room for martyrdom--for going all the way to your death without seeing what you long to see. Vatican II's emphasis on the Bible helped open the way for liberation theology. Liberation theology's most important source book is the Bible and especially the Hebrew Scriptures. But the prophets were much more tragic in their insights than the authors of Gaudium et Spes, let alone the North American interpreters of that document.

Gustavo Gutierrez said later that Vatican II had produced a European, and essentially bourgeois, synthesis of the Gospel and culture. To take the experience of their own people seriously, Latin Americans would have to come up with their own synthesis, and this was the project of liberation theology, which in a way was as much a new beginning as Vatican II was.

Liberation theology didn't directly affect most Catholics nearly as much as another post-Council event: Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which confirmed the church's moral disapproval of artificial contraception. I was a CBC producer at the time and I heartily wished that Pope Paul had just left the question open and let people live with the uncertainty.

Most North American Catholics, after longer or shorter bouts of guilt, decided to ignore what Humanae Vitae said and go with their own opinion. North American culture simply won out. Within ten years, watching the sexual scene, I had begun to see why there is indeed something problematic about high-tech, large-scale chemical repression of the reproductive side of sex. Most young Catholics today don't see any reason to wait for marriage for sexual union. I think that's a huge loss of a sacramental understanding of everyday life.

Vatican II legitimated debate and took lay experience much more seriously as a source of guidance for the church, and I'm delighted it did. In that sense, it prepared people to say to Paul VI, "Thank you but we'll follow our own conscience." The way the council was "received" here, combined with the sociological "mainstreaming" of Catholics, opened a door to secular North American culture to dictate our response to sexual questions.

Feminism barely existed at the time of the Second Vatican Council. Today it's the most exciting intellectual movement in ordinary life in North America. In daily church life now, questions relating to feminism have largely superseded those relating to Vatican II. The really painful issues are between people who love what feminism is doing and people who don't.

Modern culture's denial that
there is a difference between male and
female has a lot to do with the drive to get
everyone involved in the global job market.

And that's a serious challenge to the synthesis offered by Vatican II. For me the heart of Vatican II was its deliberate recovery of the Bible as our common language and most sacred source of the imagination of God's truth. But educated Catholics who are feminists are suspicious of Scripture, for feminist reasons. I still love the ecumenical language that Vatican II chose, which is a biblical language, but many of my friends can't use it because for them it's sexist and patriarchal. So right now in many respects we have no common language. That's very painful.

Now along comes the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with its judgement that the teaching in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that the church has no authority whatever to ordain women is infallible. I feel the same anger and embarrassment and pain over this late 1995 event that I felt over Humanae Vitae in 1968. As I noted, I later began to see that Humanae Vitae had an important dialectical function vis à vis our secular culture. I haven't got to that point with either Ordinatio Sacerdotalis or the recent judgement. But today's fight doesn't feel like a fight about the Second Vatican Council. It feels like a fight about feminism as the vehicle of a transformed understanding of our whole tradition. And the judgement seems like a premature attempt to close a question that is viscerally and vigorously open in the North American church.

But I also think the dialogue on questions around the symbolic role of women needs to get more respectful. I think the future of the whole culture is somehow at stake, and both sides have a hand on some extremely profound truths. At this moment in the global economy, with the market driving a technological juggernaut, there is a tendency to see everyone only as an economic actor. Anything that detracts from job-market functionality--like seeing motherhood as an awesome mystery of creation and redemption, worth your whole time and your whole life (which is how my mother saw it)--is judged regressive.

Modern culture's denial that there is a difference between male and female has a lot to do with the drive to get everyone involved in the global job market. I think it loses something wonderfully juicy in humanity. But the judgement of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith doesn't say anything helpful about that problem, because it only says, "There's nothing new to say."

Feminist consciousness is only one dimension of the dizzyingly fast cultural change of the past thirty years. A huge change that I fear, but don't understand, is the profound cultural damage done by the tidal wave of hyped-up, commercialized television. I still love the Vatican II synthesis as a balance of Christian symbols, and most particularly its enthusiasm for Scripture. But the force of cultural change may have already made the Vatican II synthesis unworkable for most people. Not untrue--just unworkable.

Much more forceful than Vatican II's influence in the past thirty years has been the spread of secularization. In my childhood, the church used to be able to bully us; it had that much power. Now it has much less power, and secular public opinion is able to bully people, largely through television. But I suspect this situation, with its problems, is better than the one I dimly remember, when lots of people were frightened into conformism by the church. Now people are frightened into conformism by liberal capitalism. If there's going to be a tyrant, I'm glad it's the world, not the church.

Janet Somerville is associate editor of Catholic New Times in Toronto and a contributing editor of Compass. This article is taken from an interview conducted in November 1995.