Vatican II: 40
years later
Across the Age Spectrum
Taking the idea of ‘people of God’
to heart
By TERESA MALCOLM
The Second Vatican Council taught us
the idea of the church as the people of God. Whenever I hear this, a little
song runs through my head, a song I learned, complete with dramatic gestures,
in my childhood:
I am the church
You are the church
Yes, we’re the
church together
All of God’s people
All around the world
Yes,
we’re the church together
It seemed clear enough to me. Of course we’re the church. I
had never known any different.
I was born in 1967, two years after the council ended. The days
before Vatican II are a history lesson, anecdotes from my parents and
grandparents, jokes from Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect
Up? and all the other ’50s nostalgia trips. Superficialities are what
spring to mind: Mass in Latin, no meat on Fridays, nuns in habits, writing
“JMJ” at the top of your paper in school.
It seems pretty cute and harmless. But what I can’t really
grasp is the pre-Vatican II idea of church. The “people of God” is a
new idea? It was so thoroughly inculcated into me I can’t imagine any
other way.
I was raised by parents who took the call for the participation of
the people of God to heart. Take any role a layperson could take at a parish,
and they’ve probably done it: musician, religious educator, parish council
member, lector, eucharistic minister -- the list goes on. When our growing
parish formed a kind of “subparish,” a smaller neighborhood group
that gathered for Mass at, appropriately enough, Roncalli (John XXIII’s
family name) High School, my parents became de facto pastoral ministers and
liturgy planners for the close-knit faith community. This is the kind of thing
laypeople do in my church. They haven’t always?
We belonged to the Christian Family Movement, and my most vivid
memories of it were of the community of families we formed. Every year, we went
on the camping trip to Lake Wabounsie, Iowa, where we had outdoor liturgy along
with the usual camping activities. All the kids wanted to tumble down a steep,
scary, dusty hill. There on that hill was the church, rolling, running or
inching down a hill that to my child’s eyes seemed darn near cliff-like.
Yes, I was an incher.
Vatican II permeated my childhood religious life. When I spent the
night at my best friend’s house on a Saturday, I often went to the service
at their Lutheran church with her family the next morning, instead of just
trotting across the street to go with my own family to Mass. And every year my
sisters and I went to summer Bible school at the Lutheran church. I was living
a little Vatican II ecumenism.
In religious education classes, which we called CCD and never knew
what that stood for (for the record, it’s Confraternity of Christian
Doctrine), we who were children just after Vatican II were perhaps the
“experimented upon.” The teachers were laypeople and it was not
“school, only on Sunday.” Gone was the Baltimore Catechism; in were
arts and crafts in gaudy ’70s colors, songs and an informal
atmosphere.
Looking back, we had fun, but there was a bit of “baby out
with the bathwater” to it. The adults were so excited by the new, they
seemed to set aside a lot of the old. In my small and highly unscientific
survey of Catholic friends of my age, at least some shared my feeling of loss
for the traditions we didn’t get a whole lot of, like learning much about
the saints and the rosary, or rituals like “May crowning” and St.
Blaise Day. I got to do the St. Blaise throat blessing with the candles for the
first time this past February. OK, it didn’t do much to prevent the
bronchitis I’m suffering from right now, but I liked it. I wasn’t
pining for the old days I never knew. I felt connected to the faithful of the
past and present, to the people of God. I felt ... Catholic.
Still, despite the gaps we felt only later, CCD wasn’t all
style and no substance. Along the line I got a decent grounding in the
sacraments as each new one came along. Of course, though I didn’t know it,
it was the new post-Vatican II days in this as well. From my first
reconciliation on, I have only experienced that sacrament face-to-face. And at
my first Communion, I didn’t wear a veil and I was so proud of my pink --
yes, pink, not white -- dress. A couple years later, we learned to take
Communion in the hand. That’s one of the few “before and afters”
I remember.
I felt the pain of slow reform in junior high, when I was so
jealous of altar boys. I was going through a super-religious phase and how I
resented the boys who looked like they wanted to be anywhere but there at Mass.
Now when I see altar girls looking like they want to be anywhere but there, I
can reminisce with a little “back in my day” nostalgia myself. Girls,
you got it easy.
Now people say Vatican II’s reforms have been derailed, that
the clock is being turned back. Working at NCR continually puts me face
to face with the ways this may be true of a dispiriting number in the
hierarchy. Theologians are silenced, more power is centralized in the Roman
curia, and documents released in the current sex abuse crisis reveal the
arrogance of higher-ups.
But to focus on hierarchical behavior is perhaps a bit myopic. The
Second Vatican Council said that we were the people of God, and maybe the
people of God have taken that to heart. You see it in every parish, carried
along by Catholics like my parents who take the call of their baptism
seriously.
You see it in the Voice of the Faithful, seeking to address the
sex abuse scandals with the belief that they are the church. When even
conservative Catholics protest because they think their bishop’s
renovation of a cathedral strays too far from tradition, it looks like they,
too, think they are the church and ought to have a say.
The work is not finished, but maybe the mindset Vatican II gave
birth to has taken hold. And that is cause for hope as the church -- the people
of God -- continues the struggle to reflect the reign of God on earth. The
little song starts going through my head again: “Yes, we’re the
church together ... ”
Teresa Malcolm is NCR news editor. Her e-mail address is
tmalcolm@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, October 4,
2002
|
