From time to time we all need to look around and see where we are going. We need to do so in the Church as well as in our personal lives. At my age we will find that things have changed not once but many times and we must constantly reevaluate these changes.For the next few days I plan to share my vision of how the church in Florida has changed in thr last fifty years. I would love to get your feedback.
I said before that one can never go back, but an institution and its leaders can go backward. To my mind the community that is the Church in Central Florida has not gone backward. Its members are still active and committed to living and sharing their faith in their communities. Many priests and many parishes, despite the handcuffs of a rigid ecclesiastical bureaucracy, are doing truly wonderful things to help the poor and needy, the migrants and the homeless, to support missions abroad, to
cooperate with other Christian communities in caring for the marginalized members of society. Many have excellent Liturgies and some have powerful preaching. Their schools are fully accredited and provide an outstanding education. I agree with Charles A. Morris who wrote "In general I found grass roots, parish level Catholicism to be healthier than I expected. The real problems are in the Church’s upper echelons." [1]
Here the Church seems to have stagnated, to be at a standstill. New parishes have been established, schools built, numbers have grown. But there is a lack of enthusiasm; we are marking time, moving our feet but not going forward. There is no inspiration, no vision to grab us. Raising $150,000,000 is not a vision, it is a financial goal. Paying off the national debt is a goal but it does not have the same appeal as "a chicken in every pot" or 100% employment. Each bishop and probably each pope needs to express a vision for his people when he takes office, just as John XXIII did, and that should be his legacy. He convened Vatican Council II. What have his successors accomplished?
In some ways the Church has regressed to an old, discredited model of a centralized, authoritarian and rigidly legalistic bureaucracy which was discarded forty five years ago by Vatican II. Recent developments seem to indicate that its vision for liturgical celebration of the Eucharist has also regressed: the Tridentine Rite and the Latin language have once more been approved for use in mass. Rome has again abandoned the principle of subsidiarity in imposing literal translations of Latin texts for the Liturgy, jettisoning the vernacular translations over which liturgists, scripture scholars, musicians and theologians have labored for fifty years. In no parish have I experienced the spontaneously joyful celebration of the Liturgy that we demonstrated forty years ago. We occasionally have inspiring choirs, ceremonially uplifting liturgy, excellent preaching, but all tightly structured and choreographed, lacking congregational spontaneity or participation. Those in the pews are a somnolent audience, not involved worshippers.
So far there has been no formal rejection of the teaching of Vatican II; that would be a denial of the papal infallibility which was defined at Vatican I, but there has been a gradual erosion of changes made by the council over forty years ago, a reinterpretation of its teaching and a brake or reversal on the momentum associated with the Church in the aftermath of Vatican II. This "restorationism" is being achieved by what Bishop Dowling describes as "a series of decrees, pronouncements and decisions which have been given various ‘labels’ stating that they must be firmly held to with ‘internal assent’ by the Catholic faithful, but in reality are simply the theological or pastoral interpretations or opinions of those who have power at the center of the Church." [2] Thus they are open to scrutiny and challenge as to their validity or even accord with the teaching of Vatican II. It is sometimes forgotten that infallibility does not apply to decisions unless they bind the universal Church, not just the Latin rite!
All of this involves a claim to papal authority by a group of curial officials which demands unquestioning acceptance as a mark of fidelity as a Catholic, anything less being identified as disloyalty to the teaching authority of the Church.
I have described in some detail my experience of the Church and especially of the priest’s role in various parishes, cultures and countries both before and after Vatican Council II. It is an account of the activity of the local church in varying situations and different eras in the course of my lifetime, from the simple faith and fervent devotions of the illiterate campesinos and slum-dwellers of the barriadas, to the more informed assent of prosperous and sophisticated middle-class Catholics of mid-century America. In between are the immigrant Irish Catholic minority with a somewhat ghetto-like mentality in England and the Irish Catholic majority in the Republic where the Church had special status and unquestioned authority in Catholic state. In almost all of these the priest was the organizer of the local church, director if its activities, presiding at its celebrations, comforting its tragedies. But always as a voice of the Episcopal authority in the community
[2] Bishop Kevin Dowling: Church Leadership Lacking. NCR, 7/8/2010
[1] Charles A. Morris: American Catholics. Preface; Random House, 1997
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