News

Can charity and love prevail?

By Tony Staley
Compass Correspondent

ALLOUEZ -- Vatican II was a turning point in the church and Catholics need to develop a culture of charity to work through their differences, a St. Norbert College professor of religious studies said April 28 at Resurrection Parish.

Vatican II was the most significant event in the church since the 16th century Council of Trent, said Paul Wadell, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. "How we knew the church before Vatican II in many ways was very different from the church that emerged in 1965 from the council."

Those changes were signaled from the start when Pope John XXIII called a council to throw open the windows and let in fresh air, despite objections from his advisors, Wadell said.

The world's bishops showed they wanted a change in how the church was run at the opening session on Oct. 11, 1962, when they demanded a say in who would serve on the 10 committees that would draft council documents rather than accept a list proposed by the Curia (the church's central offices in the Vatican).

Wadell highlighted three council documents to show the changes: "Lumen Gentium," "Sacrosanctum Concilium" (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) and "Unitatis Redintegratio" (Decree on Ecumenism).

Because some bishops wanted change and others wanted the status quo, "no group got everything that they wanted," Wadell said. "You see this in the council's documents. A lot of the documents reflect compromises. So there are tensions in the documents of Vatican II and what we conclude on those documents depends a lot on where we read them."

"Lumen Gentium" re-envisions what the church is called to do, but what that means depends on the passages cited, he said. Chapter 2, "The People of God," presents a vision of equality within a community of the baptized. But Chapter 3, "The Hierarchy," focuses on the differences between leadership - the hierarchy - and the laity, Wadell said.

Lay ministry was one outcome of "Lumen Gentium," he said, because it speaks of the church as the People of God, as the baptized being members of the Priesthood of Christ, of the need for collaboration, shared responsibility and using our gifts.

Most Catholics experienced the council most directly through "Sacrosanctum Concilium," Wadell said. It led to Mass in the vernacular, rather than Latin, to the priest facing the people, to a greater role for homilies and Scripture, including Bible study. It also called for Catholics to receive the Eucharist and to be the Body of Christ in their daily lives, Wadell said.

For that to happen, the documents said repeatedly, Catholics needed to be active participants at Mass, Wadell said.

"Unitatis Redintegratio" fundamentally changed how Catholics look at other Christians, Wadell said. It:

• encouraged ecumenical dialogue and praying and working together for unity, including joint action on peace, justice and human rights.
  
  
• said Christ is present in other churches so we can learn from them.
  
  
• said all Christians are responsible for the disunity.
  
  
• noted our common bond in Christ and our need to learn about other churches, to ask for pardon for our role in disunity and to be open to reform, Wadell said.

"Vatican II was a beautiful event in the life of the church, but where we didn't do such a good job was taking what happened at the council and incorporating it into our local faith community," Wadell said.

The Council Fathers mistakenly thought Catholics would read the documents, he said. Because changes were often poorly communicated some thought that everything was up for grabs.

To resolve divisions among Catholics, Wadell called for a culture of charity in which the faithful could talk about their differences based on a shared faith in Christ. Like Pope John XXIII, he said, Catholics need to be a people of hope, not a people of fear, because fear leads to division.