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Vatican II: 40
years later
Council advanced rediscovery of Christian family
By ROBIN LOVIN
Methodists welcomed Vatican II with
the enthusiasm of family members rediscovering their own place in a larger
network of kinship and inheritance. Albert Outler, perhaps the leading
Methodist thinker at that time, was a Protestant observer at the meetings of
the council during the same years that he was providing some of the leadership
that resulted in the union of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United
Brethren to form the United Methodist Church. The larger stirrings and deeper
questions that Outler observed in Rome helped turn what might have been simply
a merger of two Protestant denominations into a genuine pursuit of theological
roots and bearings for the future.
When the United Methodist church was formed in 1968 in Dallas, the
city where Outler lived and worked, its leaders were committed to the idea that
this would be a new church, not just a continuation of its predecessors. United
Methodists thus took up the question of church renewal in the years after
Vatican II with a seriousness that was partly born of the council’s
example, and United Methodists shared the inspiration, enthusiasms and pains of
those years with our Roman Catholic neighbors in ways that would not have been
possible for either community a few years before.
For myself, I have lived my whole career in ministry and higher
education in the world those movements created. I began my theological
education in 1968 and finished my Ph.D. a decade later. When I began, the
Catholic student in a Protestant or nondenominational institution was still a
rarity, though I shared dormitory space that year at Harvard with a Trappist
and I learned parish ministry in a field education seminar that we shared with
St. John’s, the archdiocesan seminary in Boston.
In the decade that followed, academic theological studies were
transformed by the infusion of Catholic scholarship, energy and the spirit of
inquiry set loose by Vatican II. In North America, Christian ethics, in
particular, was reconstituted as a single field of inquiry, in which scholars
work from an ecumenical bibliography, write their books for an ecumenical
readership, and conduct their discussions as part of a single community of
discourse. The work of Msgr. John A. Ryan, the teachings of the social
encyclicals, and the pastoral letters of the American Catholic bishops have
joined Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel and Reinhold Niebuhr’s
Christian Realism as fundamental starting points for reflection in social
ethics.
On matters of just war and economic justice, I think the issues as
framed in the Catholic tradition have become the preferred starting points for
ethical reflection. While Protestant and Catholic ethicists have
responsibilities for teaching and church life that vary with our respective
communions, our thinking about ethics is done together.
The result has been not only a richer and more diverse discussion,
but a much larger pool of talent in which to develop future leadership. At the
beginning of the era launched by Vatican II, the Society of Christian Ethics
was predominantly a group of Protestant men who could meet around a seminar
table on one of the campuses where its members taught. Fr. Charles Curran and a
few other Catholics joined that conversation early, but they were the
exceptions. Today, the Society of Christian Ethics draws several hundred
participants from college, university and seminary faculties, and its recent
presidents have included Mercy Sr. Margaret Farley, Lisa Cahill, and Jesuit Fr.
David Hollenbach, all distinguished Roman Catholics whose writings are
standards on the reading lists at most North American theological schools. Many
things have contributed to those changes, but it is impossible to imagine the
Roman Catholic contribution to Christian ethics in these decades without
Vatican II, and it is impossible to imagine the discipline today apart from the
way that it has been reshaped by Catholic scholarship and leadership.
I experienced those academic changes from my first years as a
student in Boston, and later as a scholar and teacher in Chicago. These were
nondenominational theological schools where the development of the academic
disciplines is a constant concern and the experience of the churches is perhaps
less in evidence -- or so it worked out for me. Thus, I did not become fully
aware of a second major impact of Vatican II on United Methodist life and
thought until about a dozen years ago, when I moved from teaching and research
in ethics into administrative roles in United Methodist theological schools.
There, the profound transformation of Methodist worship by the liturgical
renewal begun at Vatican II was apparent in the classroom, in the chapel and in
the thinking of the faculty.
United Methodists were no doubt prepared to rethink worship by a
rediscovery of their Anglican roots and a new awareness of John Wesley’s
emphasis on the Eucharist and the liturgy in which it is offered to the people.
This renewal could not have attained the scope and theological seriousness that
it did, however, without the depth of learning provided by Roman Catholics who
were working out the liturgical implications of the council’s new ways of
thinking about the church. Catholic institutions provided the doctoral programs
where many of the new generation of United Methodist liturgical scholars got
their training. Indeed, some United Methodists became members of Catholic
faculties that were developing a more ecumenical and interdisciplinary approach
to liturgical studies.
The ways we taught our students to lead worship were changing,
along with the words we expected them to use. The paschal candle, the
procession to the font and anointing at baptism, a liturgical emphasis on the
reading of the gospel lesson, and the development of sung eucharistic texts all
made their appearance, first in the seminary chapel and then, gradually, in the
congregations that seminary graduates served. The alb has begun to replace the
quasi-academic preacher’s gown as the favored liturgical vestment, and the
seasons of the church year have become better known and more widely observed.
These things are not simply borrowings from the Catholic liturgical renewal,
and it would not be a good thing for Methodism if that were all there was to
it. By now, Catholics and United Methodists alike are participants in a wider
ecumenical movement of scholarship and practice that is connecting contemporary
forms of worship with an ancient sense of worship’s purpose. But just as
the academic discipline of Christian ethics is not conceivable without the
energy and initiatives that flowed from Vatican II, the worship of many
Protestant congregations today takes the shape it does because of a renewal
that could not have happened without the work of the council.
At length, my own academic and administrative journey led me to
Dallas and to the dean’s office at Perkins School of Theology at Southern
Methodist University, where Albert Outler had done the transformative work that
reshaped United Methodism and opened it to dialogue with what he had observed
at the Second Vatican Council. By 1994, the changes in theology and worship
that had begun in the years after Vatican II were part of daily life at
Perkins, and no doubt they seemed to a new generation of students to be
authentically, even characteristically, Methodist. But even Outler might have
been surprised if he could have come back and shared my discovery that the
largest worshiping community in Perkins Chapel week by week was the Catholic
campus ministry. The ministry has a small chapel for daily needs in the Neuhoff
Catholic Student Center, but for the larger congregations at Sunday Masses,
they need the larger space of the seminary chapel, which we have been glad to
share with them.
Perkins Chapel was designed and built for the worship needs of
Protestantism in the 1950s. By the late 1990s, it could no longer serve the new
reality of worship that I have already described, and the Perkins-Prothro
family generously provided for a complete renovation. That, of course, could
not be done without consulting all of the users, including especially the
Catholic campus ministry. To my great delight, not to mention my administrative
relief, we found that what the Methodists needed and what the Catholics wanted
were the same things -- simplicity, flexibility, a setting that would remind us
that liturgy is the work of the whole people of God. We not only had common
needs. We had developed a shared language in which to discuss them. The
renovated Perkins Chapel reminds me each time I enter it that for all the
differences that remain between our communities, Christian worship today
witnesses to our unity in ways that would have been inconceivable before
Vatican II.
I doubt that Albert Outler, sitting in on the proceedings at the
council, ever imagined that Protestants and Catholics at SMU would one day
redesign Perkins Chapel to suit their shared needs. He welcomed the ecumenical
rediscovery of the Christian family, but he experienced it as a rather formal
affair, in which family members occasionally invited the relatives to tea. We
today live it more like a large extended family that lives in the same
neighborhood, wandering rather freely in and out of one another’s houses,
helping ourselves to coffee and occasionally finding items in the closet that
our cousins left behind. The visits are less tidy than they once were, but
it’s good to be living together after all.
Robin W. Lovin is Cary Maguire University Professor of Ethics
at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He served as dean of the Perkins
School of Theology from 1994 until this past August.
National Catholic Reporter, October 4,
2002
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