Two weeks ago, I sat in front of my television for several hours and listened to the topics each of the dioceses wanted addressed at the synod in Rome. The German church, in fact, has gone so far as to film the gathering of the topics from German congregations that will be sent to Rome as the skeleton for these discussions. In fact, churches all around the world have been gathering and detailing the items the people themselves want to see considered for timeliness, for growth, for equality. They will be allowed to speak to what 99% of the church rather than the 1% of the church, its clerics, allow to be heard. This time, the laity themselves have been deemed to determine what topics must be considered - married priests, genderism, marriage theology, equality, women priests, whatever. The laity has been invited into the intellectual theology of the church rather than simply poised to bring pious concern to the event. This time, Pope Francis is having the faithful themselves become part of the agenda-making process before the synod even convenes. Though they never denounced the council, they never really promoted it either. The popes who had called the Second Vatican Council to bring the church into the modern world lived on in the hearts of the new church in the pews.īut both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI resisted the full force of Vatican II. The two popes, John XXIII and Paul VI, who had led the way to these times died. Well, to be clear, the 2,000-2,500 bishops from around the world who attended this 21st ecumenical council voted yes for all of its documents, but once back on home soil, many simply ignored them, that's why. Why did nothing change when change was called for? The male church in large part stayed male despite the few women allowed in minor offices like readers or altar servers "as long as men were not available." The prayers and pronouns of the church pronounced the church to be male in every particle while women remained invisible and left the church in large numbers quietly now. Why did nothing change when change was called for? The bishops from around the world who attended Vatican II voted yes for all of its documents, but once back on home soil, many simply ignored them, that's why. Instead, after 400 years without a council of reform, the kinds of changes the people had expected from this council lay yet in Rome, drying in wet ink there and largely ignored here. Whatever changes the people had wanted from the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council were, it seemed, formless, silent, lost in the bustle of a busy church frozen in a medieval mind. ![]() They were clearly meant to dispense with the church of the Middle Ages, to bring the church into the modern world rooted in Scripture and the model of Jesus.īut as the ocean liner that brought so many of the American Catholic hierarchy back from Rome disembarked, the New York press corps, snapping pictures and shouting questions, suffered one bishop after another shrugging their questions off. The Vatican documents of 1965 oozed theological life. In the meantime, all the changes to be seen were basically meaningless ones. ![]() The last time the church said it was going to make changes was in 1965. The word synodality has been around a year or so now and people are still asking what it really means - for them, of course.
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