Waiting for Vatican III

by Sue Rakoczy · January 27, 2009

26th January was the 50th anniversary of Blessed John XXIII’s announcement that an ecumenical council would be held beginning in 1962. He asked the whole church to pray that it would be�a “new Pentecost”. I remember praying that prayer each day with my class in a Catholic high school in the US. I d�dn’t know what a “new Pentecost” for the church would mean. And maybe he didn’t either.

But the Council showed us what could be possible when people were truly open to the Spirit. The Church was transformed in so many ways that the things we take for granted today, eg liturgy in the vernacular, ecumenical relations, Scripture reading and prayer by all, lay ministry, women as theologians, openness to the world and more were unknown in 1962 when the Council opened.

The fruits of Vatican II are still with us but openness to the Spirit is�much less evident. The papacy of John Paul II was marked by extreme control and authoritarianism, often masked by his personality. Last year when I was giving mission homilies for my religious congregation��in a parish in the Detroit area in the United States, the parish priest told me about a meeting of all the diocesan priests which had been held recently. Some of the the youngest cohort of priests boasted that John Paul II had abrogated Vatican II–it no longer had any authority in the Church and only his teachings were to be followed. Of course, this is not true–no pope can abrogate a council, but the fact that these priests said he had done so is�very worrying.

Archbishop Denis Hurley used to say that a council needed to be called every 25 years. This would mean that the majority of bishops would participate in a council during their lifetime. His episcopal motto was “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”. We certainly need that freedom in the Church today. Instead, there is fear, control (witness the liturgical changes which so many in South Africa find difficult because of the assumption that Latin remains the language of the Church) and� the sense that the newness, freshness and freedom�of the Spirit is not needed anymore.

So let us pray that Vatican III–to be attended not only by bishops but by laity, female and male religious, male and female thelogians, all of whom will listen and discuss the the future of the Church together–will be called in order�to bring a 21st century “new Pentecost’ to the Church.