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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2022
In “its deepest intuitions,” Vatican II was a missionary council whose stated purpose was to renew the church spiritually and institutionally and so prepare the Catholic community to evangelize a changed, more complex world. Church leaders’ subsequent failure to correctly understand the council's biblically sourced, trinitarian view of mission's object, its method and agency, led to a failure to implement Vatican II's practical pastoral aims. Although the conciliar vision was committed to and embedded in the reformed liturgical rites where it continues to nourish and inspire Catholic life today, the absence of the institutional, ministerial supports needed to complete what the liturgy instills forever blocks achievement of the council's aims. The experience of the US church provides a ready example of how Vatican II's pastoral vision was waylaid and goes unrealized yet today.
1 Bevans, Stephen B., “Revisiting Mission at Vatican II: Theology and Practice for Today's Missionary Church,” Theological Studies 74 (2013): 261–83 at 262CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bevans, Stephen B. and Schroeder, Roger, “Evangelization and the Tenor of Vatican II,” in International Bulletin of Missionary Research 37 (2013): 94–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bevans, Stephen B., “The Church in Mission,” The Cambridge Companion to Vatican II, ed. Gaillardetz, Richard R. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 136–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Affirmation of the missiological character of the whole church was one of the most important teachings of the Second Vatican Council”; Richard Gaillardetz, “Ecclesiological Foundations of Ministry in an Ordered Communion,” in Ordering the Baptismal Priesthood, ed. Susan K. Wood (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 26–51 at 30.
2 Bevans, “Revisiting Mission at Vatican II,” 264. But as Jared Wicks shows, Angelo Roncalli's pastoral inclinations were ascendant long before he became pope; Jared Wicks, SJ, “Tridentine Motivations of Pope John XXIII before and during Vatican II,” Theological Studies 75 (2014): 847–62.
3 Rush, Ormond, “Toward a Comprehensive Interpretation of the Council and Its Documents,” Theological Studies 73 (2012): 547–69 at 568CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Address made at the last general meeting of the Second Vatican Council, December 7, 1965, https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19651207_epilogo-concilio.html. Paul's remarks “authoritatively confirm” that “a renewed vision of Church is a major question of the Council”; Driscoll, Jeremy, “Reviewing and Recovering Sacrosanctum concilium's Theological Vision,” Ecclesia orans 30 (2013): 363–90 at 381Google Scholar.
5 Bevans, “Revisiting Mission at Vatican II,” 262. Debate over how to interpret the council and its documents has raged since the council's close, an extensive bibliography produced in its wake. The council promulgated sixteen documents “which cover an extraordinarily wide range of subjects and do so at considerable length. They are the council's most authoritative and accessible legacy, and it is around them that the study of Vatican II must turn”; O'Malley, John, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 2Google Scholar.
6 There is a deliberate shift in the language of the documents, from “missions” in the plural to “mission” in the singular but the “different emphases, inconsistencies, and at times conflicting views” created ambiguity, per Richard, Lucien, “Vatican II and the Mission of the Church: A Contemporary Agenda,” in Vatican II: The Unfinished Agenda, ed. Richard, Lucien, Harrington, Daniel, and O'Malley, John (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 57–69 at 57Google Scholar. This may explain why “mission seems not to have been regarded as fundamental for the council's interpretation” for the 1985 Extraordinary Synod per Bevans, “Revisiting Mission at Vatican II,” 262.
7 Bevans, “Mission as the Nature of the Church: Developments in Catholic Ecclesiology,” Australian eJournal of Theology 21 (2014): 4.
8 Bevans, “Mission as the Nature of the Church,” 1.
9 O'Malley, “Vatican II Revisited as Reconciliation: The Francis Factor,” in The Legacy of Vatican II, ed. Massimo Faggioli and Andrea Vicini (New York: Paulist Press, 2015), 3–25 at 6. See also Faggioli, Massimo, Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning (New York: Paulist Press, 2012)Google Scholar.
10 Rush, Ormond, The Vision of Vatican II: Its Fundamental Principles (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019), xvGoogle Scholar.
11 Undue attention to the hermeneutics of the council has led theologians to neglect the assembly's stated concerns for the church's everyday mission responsibilities; as Bernard Cooke later observed, the council was not just “a forum for creative theological reflection nor even for creative theological analysis”; Cooke, Bernard, “Fullness of Orders: Theological Reflections,” Jurist 41 (1981): 405–421 at 406Google Scholar.
12 Edward M. Gaffney, Vatican II: The Pastoral Council,” Mid-Stream 5 (1966): 25–43 at 25–26.
13 From the foreword by Massimo Faggioli to For a Missionary Reform of the Church: The Civilta Cattolica Seminar, ed. Antonio Spadaro, SJ, and Carlos Maria Galli (New York: Paulist Press, 2017) 7–10 at 7. On pages 34–48, see also Carlos Maria Galli's “The Missionary Reform of the Church According to Francis: The Ecclesiology of the Evangelizing People of God.” Thomas Hughson attributes Francis’ charismatic leadership to “his personal and official reception of the Second Vatican Council,” in Hughson, Thomas, “Vatican II: Francis and Reception,” Modern Believing 56 (2015): 421–34 at 422CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, Pope John's Opening Speech to the Council, October 11, 1962, trans. Joseph A. Komonchak, https://jakomonchak.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/john-xxiii-opening-speech.pdf. Scholars agree that the council saw this address as setting out the organizing principle for its work, “its pastoral character providing the hermeneutic par excellence for understanding both the conciliar event and its texts”; Gilles Routhier review of Christoph Theobald's La reception du concile Vatican II, Tome 1 in Études Théologiques et Religieuses 85 (2010): 525–37 at 527.
15 Theobald, Christoph, La reception du concile, Vatican II, 1: Accéder a la source (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2009), 683Google Scholar; see also the lecture delivered at a symposium at Boston College, on September 26, 2013, “The Principle of Pastorality at Vatican II: Challenges of a Prospective Interpretation of the Council.” At stake is not just the principle's application but also a recognition that this involves “a real learning process … between those who proclaim the Good News and those who receive it.” According to Rush, normativeness of the council texts rests “not in their theological or juridical literalness, nor in a spirit that sees nothing more to be gained from them” but appears in those “concrete pastoral or missionary applications that go right to the point where fresh formulations of such and such a text become evidently necessary,” in “The Theological Options of Vatican II: Seeking an ‘Internal’ Principle of Interpretation,” in Vatican II: A Forgotten Future? Concilium 2005/4, ed. Alberto Melloni and Christoph Theobald (London: SCM Press, 2005), 87–107 at 105.
16 I.e., A theology of a pastoral church as received and duly lived by the local community. It has to do with a “style of life” that results from a dialogic encounter with the gospel and its call to a life of holiness as outlined in Lumen Gentium §39–42. Inherently relational, this distinctive Christian mode of living manifests itself as philoxenia/hospitality, that is, as a radical openness and care for others whose context is the ecclesial community that reveals itself through a specific process of encounters and mutual relations; Theobald, Christoph, Le Concile Vatican II: Quel avenir? (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 2015), 221–22Google Scholar.
17 Faggioli, Massimo, “Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Meaning of Vatican II,” Theological Studies 71 (2010): 437–52 at 440CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Neglect of the theological and ecclesiological background of the council's liturgical reforms contributes to the disparate, even conflicting, interpretations of the council, both its intentions and its work.
18 As the concrete enactment of the Catholic faith, the liturgy is the primary theology of the church. Because this theology arises out of God's action on God's people in worship, what occurs here is “the ontological condition of theology … because it is in the church, of which the leitourgia is the expression and life, that the sources of theology are functioning precisely as sources”; Alexander Schmemann, “Theology and Liturgical Tradition,” Worship in Scripture and Tradition, ed. Massey Shepherd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 175. Academic theology, theologia secunda, is a reflection on “what the liturgy says and does through its prayers and rites”; Irwin, Kevin, “The Theological Keys of Sacrosanctum concilium: Reflections and Proposals,” Ecclesia orans 30 (2013): 411–53 at 421Google Scholar.
19 Assessing the council's aftermath, Avery Dulles observed that “the most vigorously debated questions in ecclesiology have been those concerning authority and structures, methods and processes.” Unexamined were the more essential questions: “Why the church, what is its purpose, importance and necessity?” He warned that “nothing will be gained by redistributing power or adopting new methods unless those who wield the power and use the methods have a correct vision of what the church is about”; Dulles, Avery, The Reshaping of Catholicism: Current Challenges in the Theology of the Church (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 132Google Scholar.
20 Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, November 1, 1964, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html. See also Pope Paul VI, Ad Gentes, 1965, §2-4, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651207_ad-gentes_en.html. Together Lumen Gentium and Ad Gentes are the council's “great Trinitarian and ecclesiological frescoes”; Bertrand de Margarie, “The Trinitarian Doctrine of Vatican II,” in The Christian Trinity in History (Still River, MA: St. Bede's Publications, 1982), 223–25 at 223. In this 1967 essay, theologian Joseph Ratzinger argued that Lumen Gentium's trinitarian perspective must first be considered if Vatican II's missiology is to become clear: “Konzilaussagen uber die Mission ausserhalb des Missiondekrets,” in Mission nach dem konzil, ed. Johannes Schutte (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1967). All council citations herein are taken from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990).
21 AG §§2, 35.
22 Karl Rahner argued that “the Church's essence both supplies the hermeneutical principle for its history and, since it is essence in history, reveals itself through that history”; Rahner, Karl, “Towards a Fundamental Theological Interpretation of Vatican II,” Theological Studies 40 (1979): 716–27 at 716CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although he identified “the Church's first official self-actualization as a world Church,” both Lumen Gentium and Ad Gentes confirm that the church in se is mission, that the church only becomes a world church precisely through its missionary activity.
23 Neil Ormerod questions whether communio is the appropriate symbol/model for linking ecclesiology and trinitarian theology. “The divine unity is where God is most different from God's creatures, even the creation we call Church.” We become aware of the inner trinitarian life through “our prior knowledge of the processions and persons within the Trinity.” Thus, a missio ecclesiology relates to trinitarian theology in terms of missio and processio rather than communio and perichoresis. “Communion may be our eschatological end in the vision of God, but in the here and now of a pilgrim Church mission captures our ongoing historical responsibility”; Ormerod, Neil, “The Structure of a Systematic Ecclesiology,” Theological Studies 63, no. 1 (2002): 3–30 at 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Aquinas, I Sent. d. 14, q.2., a.2, trans. Emery, Gilles, The Trinitarian Theology of Thomas Aquinas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 358Google Scholar.
25 Power, David, “Priesthood Revisited: Mission and Ministries in the Royal Priesthood,” in Ordering the Baptismal Priesthood: Theologies of Lay and Ordained Ministry (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 111. In a 1982Google Scholar interview, John Paul II explained that Vatican II helped synthesize his understanding of eschatology: “Whereas previously I envisaged principally the eschatology of man and my personal future in the after-life, which is in the hands of God, the Council constitution [on the church] shifted the center of gravity toward the Church and the world, and this gave the doctrine of the final end of man its full dimension”; quoted in O'Callaghan, Paul, Christ Our Hope: An Introduction to Eschatology (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 311Google Scholar.
26 O'Callaghan, Christ Our Hope, 332–33.
27 Gerald O'Collins, SJ, and Michael Keenan Jones, Jesus Our Priest: A Christian Approach to the Priesthood of Christ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 243.
28 Johnson, Maxwell E., The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), 59Google Scholar.
29 Pope Paul VI, Presbyterium Ordinis, December 7, 1965, §2, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651207_presbyterium-ordinis_en.html.
30 Baptism as a consecration to the missionary apostolate is reiterated in Pope Paul VI, Apostolicam Actuositatem, November 18, 1965, §3, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651118_apostolicam-actuositatem_en.html, and Presbyterium Ordinis §12.
31 Cited in Pope Paul VI, Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), November 18, 1965, §2, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html and taken from the Roman missal at the prayer over the gifts for the ninth Sunday of Pentecost.
32 SC §2.
33 O'Callaghan, Christ Our Hope, 310. John O'Malley concludes that in its “general orientation” the council's profile of the ideal Christian is more incarnational than eschatological, arguing that the council's “style choice fostered a theological choice”; O’ Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, 310–11. Although this suggests a disjunction between the two, read through the lens of mission's exitus-reditus aspect, their essential relation is evident.
34 O'Callaghan, Christ our Hope, 310.
35 Middleton, J. Richard, “A New Heaven and a New Earth: The Case for a Holistic Reading of the Biblical Story of Redemption,” Journal for Christian Theological Research 11 (2006): 73–97 at 76Google Scholar.
36 See also Apostolicam Actuositatem §7.
37 In redefining its relation to world, Vatican II appeared to put the classic understanding of the church's vocation in question. Joseph Komonchak attributes the council's failure to integrate “what it called the church's proper religious mission and its participation in the common human project on earth” to the uneasy compromise between French and German theologians “necessary for the constitution to gain a consensus.” See Komonchak, Joseph, “The Ecclesiology of Vatican II,” Origins 28 (April 22, 1999): 763–68 at 767Google Scholar.
38 Gaudium et Spes is “a mission document par excellence” because of its underlying conviction that “the church finds its identity and purpose by being fully immersed in the service and dialogue with the world”; Bevans, “Revisiting Mission at Vatican II,” 266. This analytic shaped the constitution's survey of the different areas of contemporary experience and its exploration of the various ways by which Catholics’ grace-filled care for the created world can foster and enable an authentic human existence for all.
39 This follows from the council's trinitarian starting point: both creation and redemption find their unity in the person of the Son, “the incarnate and redeemer Logos” who “accomplishes and fulfills the work of the creator Logos”; Chenu, Marie-Dominique, “Consecratio Mundi,” Nouvelle Revue Theologique 86 (1964): 608–18 at 615Google Scholar. AG §10 presents the incarnation as the paradigm for mission, that this is the way the church is constituted in local cultures/contexts.
40 A good example of the pastoral principle applied is AG §11, which states that believers must “play their part in cultural and social life through the various interchanges and activities of human living. They should be familiar with their national and religious traditions.” Above all, they must come to know “the people among whom they live and should associate” so that “by sincere and patient dialogue” they are able to give testimony to Christ.
41 Certeau, Michel de, The Practise of Everyday Life (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar, examines the tactics and strategies individuals use to override established cultural norms and practices.
42 Saines, Don, “Wider, Broader, Richer: Trinitarian Theology and Ministerial Order,” Anglican Theological Review 92 (2010): 511–35 at 533Google Scholar.
43 See E. Selwyn, “Eschatology in 1 Peter,” in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, ed. D. Daube and W. D. Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 394–401 at 395.
44 See Green, Michael, Evangelism in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns, 2003), 106Google Scholar.
45 Pope Paul VI, Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. Per Pope Paul VI, Dei Verbum, November 18, 1965, §2, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html, God's self-revelation is itself dialogic, that is, through the Word made flesh and in his holy Spirit: “God in his great love speaks to humankind as friends and enters into their life so as to invite and receive them into relationship with himself.”
46 John P. Meier argues that the term απόστολος “was probably not used by [Jesus] or his disciples as a fixed term for a particular group of his followers.” At most, it was used in “an ad hoc sense when Jesus sent some disciples out on a temporary mission,” for example, Mark 6:30 and Matt 10:2. “It was in the early church that ‘apostle’ was first used as a set designation for a specific group—though different authors used the designation in different ways. What is beyond doubt is that in the first Christian decades ‘apostle’ had a range of meanings that extended beyond the twelve.” See Meier, John P., “The Circle of the Twelve: Did it Exist During Jesus’ Public Ministry?” Journal of Biblical Literature 116 (1997): 635–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 639–40.
47 The online concordance, II Vatican Council: A Full-Text Search Engine, http://www.stjosef.at/council/search/, indicates that of the 194 uses of apostolatus/apostolatum in council documents, 113 of these appear in the decree on the laity. Given the sheer frequency of this term's use in respect to laity, some Council Fathers objected to speaking of laity as having an apostolic mission, arguing that the designation “apostolic mission” should be reserved to the apostles. See Peter de Mey, “Sharing the Threefold Office of Christ, a Different Matter for Laity and Priests? The Tria Munera in Lumen Gentium, Presbyterorum Ordinis, Apostolicam Actuositatem and Ad Gentes,” in The Letter and the Spirit: On the Forgotten Documents of Vatican II, ed. Annemarie Mayer (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2018), 155–79 at 160n25.
48 Congar, Yves, “The Laity,” in Theological Issues of Vatican II, ed. Miller, John H. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 239–49Google Scholar at 246.
49 Lumen Gentium §9 describes the church similarly: “God has called together [convocavit] the assembly of those who look to Jesus in faith as the author of salvation and the principle of unity and peace, and he has constituted the church [constituit ecclesiam] that it may be for one and all the visible sacrament of this saving unity.”
50 One's vocation may be lived out as married (LG §35), widowed (GS §49), as a religious (LG §47), or as a cleric (LG §28); it is also shaped by one's choice of work or one's participation in socioeconomic (GS §63) or political life (GS §75).
51 Per the concordance, of the more than sixty variants of vocatio that appear in council documents, half are found in Gaudium et Spes.
52 The messianic people have “been set up by Christ as a communion of love and truth; by him too it is taken up as the instrument of salvation for all, and sent as a mission to the whole world as the light of the world and the salt of the earth” (see Matt 5, 13-16), Lumen Gentium §9.
53 Although Vatican II rediscovered the local church, theologians had the bishop's church in view, whereas in lay experience, the local church means the parish and diocese are two distinct realities. Still, attention to the diocese raised awareness that mission is inherently local and is shaped by the culture and needs of individual circumstances.
54 In his commentary on Ad Gentes, Suso Brechter observed that “right down to the present day,” members of religious orders and congregations “have almost exclusively undertaken the entire missionary work of the Church”; Suso Brechter, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 4, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 87–88. It is notable that this decree was not “composed because all the bishops at the council felt the need to speak about missions and evangelization.” That it exists is due to “an important and powerful group of men [who] felt a need to stress to the church that mission work was not something optional, carried on by self-appointed missioners organized in para-church societies to work in far-off lands, but something essential to the very nature of the church as church”; William Burrows, “Mission in the Context of ‘Conscientized Action’ and Dialogue,” Missiology: An International Review 13 (1985): 473–86 at 474.
55 “The era of modern mission that began with Jesuit missionary efforts in Asia and Latin America was based on the idea that Europeans would go out ‘to’ the pagan nations [that is, ad gentes] and convert them to Christianity”; Burrows, William, “Jesus and Christology: Mission and the Paradox of God's Reign,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 39 (2015): 232–35 at 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Then mission's “primary focal images were ‘conversion’ and ‘expansion’”; Burrows, William R., “Reconciling All in Christ: An Old New Paradigm for Mission,” Mission Studies 15 (1998): 79–98 at 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Per Lumen Gentium §10, baptism is a consecration to mission: “For by the regeneration and anointing of the Holy Spirit the baptized are consecrated as a spiritual dwelling and a holy priesthood … witnessing to Christ throughout the world and explaining to those who ask the hope they possess of eternal life.” This claim is reiterated in AA §3 and PO §12.
57 Although Lumen Gentium §9–12's description of the messianic People of God does not explicitly include Christ's royal function, Lumen Gentium §13 adds that collectively “the church as the People of God … takes up and encourages the riches and customs of peoples in so far as they are good; and in taking them up it purifies, strengthens and raises them up.”
58 LG §§10, 34–36. The extensive collection of texts gathered by Paul Dabin for Le sacerdoce royal des fideles dans la tradition ancienne et moderne (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1950) confirms the importance this figure had in the early rites and for patristic theologies of baptism.
59 LG §35.
60 “They should learn to offer themselves as they offer the immaculate victim—not just through the hands of the priest, but also they themselves making the offering together with him”; SC §48.
61 “For all their works, if done in the Spirit, become spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ: their prayers and apostolic works, their married and family life, their daily work, their mental and physical recreation, and even life's trouble if they are patiently borne” (see 1 Pet 2, 5); LG §35.
62 Most histories of the tria munera overlook its original association with baptism and anointing. Rediscovery of this figure by Catholic theologians in the years prior to the council may be attributed to the influence of the Protestant reformer John Calvin, who interpreted Christ's offices soteriologically, that is, he saw the three as the means by which Christ accomplished his work of redemption. Peter Drilling called attention to Calvin's critical role in initiating “the modern movement to pattern Christian ministry on the threefold function of Christ's ministry,” which proved important for the council's deliberations”; Drilling, Peter, “The Priest, Prophet and King Trilogy: Elements of Its Meaning in Lumen Gentium and for Today,” Eglise et Theologie 19 (1988): 179–206 at 191Google Scholar. Peter de Mey points out, however, that the council used the tria munera inconsistently; it could refer to 1) all baptized-confirmed and eucharistic Christians; 2) to ordained ministers, and problematically 3) as the source of an “essential difference” that exists between the ordained and non-ordained. See Peter de Mey, “The Bishop's Participation in the Threefold Munera: Comparing the Appeal to the Pattern of the Tria Munera at Vatican II and in the Ecumenical Dialogues,” Jurist 69 (2009): 31–58 at 31.
63 Although Lumen Gentium §31 confirms that as members of the faithful, clergy and religious must also show concern for the world, because laity are “secular,” they have primary responsibility here.
64 In a series of lectures presented at King's College London in 1989, John Zizioulas proposed that every Christian serves as a “priest of creation”; see Zizioulas, John, King's Theology Review 12 (1989): 1–5Google Scholar, 41–45, and John Zizioulas, King's Theology Review 13 (1990): 5. See also Keightley, Georgia Masters, “The Church's Laity: Called to Be Creation's Priests,” Worship 84 (2010): 309–27 at 316Google Scholar.
65 Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi, December 8, 1975, §19, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_p-vi_exh_19751208_evangelii-nuntiandi.html.
66 Faggioli, Massimo, True Reform: Liturgy and Ecclesiology in Sacrosanctum Concilium (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 39Google Scholar.
67 The brief preamble (SC §1) “enumerates the essential objectives of the Constitution and of the entire Council”; Paul de Clerck and A. Haquin, “La constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium et sa mise en oeuvre,” Revue theologique de Louvaine 44 (2013): 171–96 at 173. “This intimate connection between the reform of the liturgy and the whole council is solidly indicated at the outset in the document's title, which has no specific reference to liturgy but is simply Sacrosanctum concilium”; Driscoll, “Reviewing and Recovering Sacrosanctum concilium's Theological Vision,” 370. Driscoll notes G. Dossetti's argument that references in succeeding documents evidenced SC's influence on the council's renewed vision of the church, at 381n45.
68 SC §1.
69 Godfrey Diekmann, “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” in Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal, ed. John H. Miller (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 17–30 at 19.
70 Chito Arevalo, “The Eucharist and the Church,” www.clerus.org/clerus/dati/2002-03/25-999999/06SAIIEN.html.
71 Chan, Simon, “The Holy Spirit as the Fulfillment of the Liturgy,” Liturgy 30 (2015): 33–41 at 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 Quoted in ibid., 33.
73 Josef Jungmann, “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 1, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 1–87 at 9.
74 Kavanagh, Aidan, On Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1984), 116Google Scholar.
75 SC §14.
76 In a 1979 article noting that the liturgy's reforms remain “unfinished and unbegun,” Kavanagh cited the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, which highlights the anomaly created by the West's separation of confirmation from baptism. Because the two sacraments are now received together at the Easter Vigil, rather than reduplicate the anointing, the baptismal anointing is omitted. Kavanagh noted the significant loss of meaning created with the disappearance of reference to the neophyte's being anointed “As Christ was anointed Priest, Prophet and King.” Critical of what remains current practice, he argued that “traditionally nothing is more clear than that anointing is intrinsic to Christian baptism for it is here that one is marked or sealed with the messianic Spirit of prophecy, priesthood, and kingship—being thereby constituted a Christos … it is the postpaschal appropriation of [Christ's] consummated vocation by others”; Kavanagh, Aidan, “Unfinished and Unbegun Revisited: The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults,” Worship 53 (1979): 327–40Google Scholar at 330–31. Ironically, infant baptism is the practiced norm today and takes place in the midst of the assembly so that the anointing and its accompanying words commissioning the child to Christ's threefold office are recited and witnessed by the entire assembly.
77 Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation, 114. Adult formation as the norm is confirmed in the 1997 General Catechetical Directory (no. 20) and the US National Catechetical Directory (nos. 32–33).
78 SC §21.
79 SC §34.
80 SC §§35, 3.
81 SC §37–40. Although theologians tend to consider Gaudium et Spes, Ad Gentes, and Lumen Gentium as primary resources for understanding conciliar teaching on inculturation, missionary theologian Mark Francis claims that Sacrosanctum Concilium is the true “Magna Carta of inculturation”; Francis, Mark, “Liturgy and Inculturation since Vatican II,” Worship 91 (2017): 24–42Google Scholar at 26. Per Nathan Chase, the council saw the liturgy's inculturation to be a way for the church to both “embrace cultural pluralism” and “to relate to cultures that were not based in the classical cultures of the Mediterranean world.” He notes that although the Zaire Rite was the only enculturated form of the Eucharist to be approved by Rome post–Vatican II, it continues to serve as “a prophetic witness” to the council's belief in the liturgy's capacity “to lead the faithful, using their own cultural symbols and practices, into the heart of the liturgy, into the paschal mystery”; see https://cruxnow.com/interviews/2021/01. See also Nathan Chase, “A History and Analysis of the Missel Romain pour les Dioceses du Zaire,” Obsculta 6, no. 1 (2013): 28–35. Shortly upon the close of the 2019 Synod on the Amazon, Pope Francis celebrated the Zairean liturgy at St. Peter's, in this way affirming the synod's recommendation that “a liturgical rite be developed for use by the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.” See Francis, Pope, “The Synod on the Amazon and Liturgical Inculturation,” Worship 94 (2020): 145–53Google Scholar.
82 SC §36. For a theologian's assessment, see Doyle, Dennis, “The Concept of Inculturation in Roman Catholicism: A Theological Consideration,” US Catholic Historian 30 (2012): 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
83 Anscar Chupungco, “Liturgical Inculturation: The Future that Awaits Us,” 1–11 at 2, https://www.valpo.edu/institute-of-liturgical-studies/files/2016/09/chupungco2.pdf. Such reforms were to be “consistent with the thinking behind the true and authentic spirit of the liturgy” (SC §37), preserve “the fundamental unity of the Roman rite” (SC §38), and be done under the guidance of local ordinaries. The result would be “the insertion of liturgy into a given culture in such a way that the liturgy absorbs the culture (and thus is able to speak from within the culture) and the culture absorbs the liturgy (and thus the Christian faith upon which it rests becomes more deeply integrated into the social fabric and worldview of that society)”; Rita Ferrone, “Our Eucharist Is a Feast,” Commonweal, January 5, 2021, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/our-eucharist-feast.
84 Aidan Kavanagh, “Liturgical Inculturation: Looking to the Future,” Studia Liturgica 20 (1990): 95–106 at 105.
85 For an introduction to the field, see Ronald L. Grimes, ed., Readings in Ritual Studies (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ronald L. Grimes, Deeply into the Bone (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
86 Theodore Jennings, “On Ritual Knowledge,” in Readings in Ritual Studies, 324–34 at 328.
87 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22–26, 93–95.
88 Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 100.
89 Nicholas Lash, Theology for Pilgrims (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), 227–28. “It is here, in the way we celebrate the Eucharist together, and relate what we are doing there to what we do and undergo elsewhere, that the doctrine of the Church expounded in the Council's Constitution Lumen gentium, the doctrine of God's word in Dei verbum and the account of Christianity's relationship to secular society in Gaudium et spes do or do not take shape, find flesh. It is in this that the state of the liturgy is the first and fundamental test of the extent to which the council's programme is being achieved.”
90 Chan, “The Holy Spirit as the Fulfillment of the Liturgy,” 33.
91 Richard Rymarz attributes this phrase to John Paul II, which “is encapsulated in Redemptoris Missio” and specifically has in mind “those countries with ancient Christian roots … where entire groups of the baptized have lost a sense of the faith … and live a life far removed from Christ and his gospel. In this case what is needed is a ‘new evangelization’ or a ‘re-evangelization’ (RM 33)”; Richard Rymarz, “John Paul II and the ‘New Evangelization’: Origins and Meaning,” Australian eJournal of Theology 15 (2010): 1–22 at 2.
92 Roger Schroeder described the decade after the council (1965–1975) as being a time of crisis for mission, a period overflowing with cultural change that brought an end to the colonialism with which ecclesial mission had been so closely aligned. In this time of ferment, “there was need for a new theology and practice of mission”; “Catholic Teaching on Mission after Vatican II: 1975–2007,” in A Century of Catholic Mission: Roman Catholic Missiology 1910 to the Present, ed. Stephen Bevans, vol. 15, Regnum Edinburgh Centenary Series (Oxford: Regnum, 2013) 112–20, at 112. Fabrizio Meroni, Secretary General of the Pontifical Missionary Union, recently argued that the missio ad gentes remains the paradigm, the model that “configures the entire evangelizing mission of the Church” whose uniqueness lies in “reaching those who have not yet encountered Jesus Christ and his gospel.” Still he acknowledges it is tempting “to reduce mission to an adjectival juxtaposition of already existing and perhaps frail structures, rather than having the apostolic courage and audacity necessary to allow ourselves to be re-created and reformed with new modes of Christian presence ad witness.” See Fabrizio Meroni, “Some Initial Observations on Missio ad Gentes: A Theological-Pastoral Reflection on the Extraordinary Missionary Month, October 2019,” The Australian Catholic Record 96 (2019): 387–99 at 389, 391.
93 In “Cultures, Inculturation and Sacramentum Concilium,” Nathan Mitchell argues that during a quarter-century of retrenchment, the flourishing of “cautions” and “concerns” about alleged liturgical “excesses” and “abuses” had less to do with the church's worship than they did “with the magisterium's ambivalent view of contemporary Western culture,” that is, its “love-hate-relation with both the plurality of cultures” as well as with the process of inculturation itself. He finds some postconciliar documents to exhibit greater unease with inculturation as this pertains to “gospel, worship, and church life in familiar Western cultures” than when applied to “evangelization in missionary contexts”; Nathan Mitchell, “Cultures, Inculturation and Sacramentum Concilium,” Worship 77 (2003): 171–81 at 174–77. In her commentary on John Paul II's 2003 Ecclesia de eucharistia, Susan Wood identifies points that constrain ecumenical dialogue, a conversation that Vatican II saw to be essential in “A Symposium on the Encyclical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia of Pope John Paul II,” Pro Ecclesia 12, no. 4: 394–416.
94 Baggett, Jerome, Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live Their Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 182Google Scholar.
95 Curran, Charles, The Social Mission of the US Catholic Church (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011), 65Google Scholar.
96 Ibid., 69.
97 Ibid., 70.
98 “The Chicago Declaration of Christian Concern,” in Challenge to the Laity, ed. Russell Barta (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1980), 19–27 at 22.
99 Ibid., 24.
100 Ibid., 21. On the council's reception in the United States and the claim that by the 1980s the forces of history had led “to the obscuring of Vatican II's overall vision and the principles of its implementation”; see Chinnici, Joseph, “Reception of Vatican II in the United States,” Theological Studies 64 (2003): 461–94 at 492CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
101 Michele Dillon, “What Is Core to American Catholics in 2011?,” fig. 2, National Catholic Reporter, October 24, 2011, https://www.ncronline.org/news/what-core-american-catholics-2011.
102 William D'Antonio et al, American Catholics Today: New Realities of Their Faith and Their Church (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2007), 24. A 2018 CARA study shows that belief in the need to engage in charitable works declines in direct proportion to a decline in regular Mass attendance. See Mark M. Gray and Mary L. Gautier, “Proud to Be Catholic? A Groundbreaking America Survey Asks Women about Their Lives in the Church,” America, January 16, 2018, https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/01/16/proud-be-catholic-groundbreaking-america-survey-asks-women-about-their-lives. Such attitudes are in striking contrast to an American church prior to Vatican II wherein “the responsibilities of the people in the pews were taken increasingly seriously, or at least discussed with growing frequency under the rubric of the lay apostolate and Catholic Action”; see Debra Campbell, “The Heyday of Catholic Action and the Lay Apostolate, 1929–1959,” in Transforming Parish Ministry: The Changing Roles of Catholic Clergy, Laity, and Women Religious, ed. Jay Dolan, Scott Appleby, Patricia Byrne, and Debra Campbell (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 222–52 at 222. On page 252, Campbell concludes, “A substantial segment of the American Catholic laity entered the 1960's with the soaring confidence that they would be called upon to serve their church in countless unforeseen capacities in the years to come.”
103 D'Antonio et al, American Catholics Today, 24.
104 Baggett, Sense of the Faithful, 185.
105 Evangelii Nuntiandi, §18.
106 Ernst Kasemann, New Testament Questions of Today (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 191.
107 Pope Paul VI, Christus Dominus, October 28, 1965, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651028_christus-dominus_en.html. To further specify the duties of the local ordinary as defined in Christus Dominus, the Sacred Congregation for Bishops in 1973 published the Directory on the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops, devoting an entire chapter to “The Bishop as Teacher in the Faith-Community”; Leonard Crowley, “The Teaching Power and Mission of the Church,” Studia Canonica 9 (1975): 215–34 at 221.
108 AA presupposes SC §48's instruction on the need for a liturgical catechesis that enables believers to have “a good understanding of this mystery [of faith]” that “through the ritual and prayers, they should share in the worshipping event, aware of what is happening and devoutly involved.”
109 Lay evangelization of the secular aims at what Augustine called “tranquillitas ordinis,” that is, establishing the peace of order that mirrors “the harmonious fellowship” of the heavenly city; it is achievement of that earthly concord that derives from “an ordered obedience, in faith, in subjection to an everlasting law,” Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), XIX, 13. It must be noted that the idea of “peace as tranquility of order” was “a paradigm of singular importance” for John XXIII's encyclical, Pacem in Terris, especially in terms of its treatment of human rights”; Russell Hittenger, “Quinquagesimo Ante: Reflections on Pacem in Terris Fifty Years Later,” in The Global Quest for Tranquillitas Ordinis: Pacem in Terris Fifty Years Later, ed. Mary Ann Glendon, Russell Hittinger, and Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo (Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2013), 38–60.
110 Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, General Catechetical Directory, www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_11041971_gcat_en.html, emphasis added. Paragraph 30 states that catechesis is a lifelong process: “Catechesis has the function of lending aid for the beginning and the progress of this life of faith throughout the entire course of a man's existence, all the way to the full explanation of revealed truth and the application of it in man's life.”
111 United States Catholic Conference, Sharing the Light of Faith: National Catechetical Directory of Catholics of the United States, nos. 32–33 (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1974). In an oral intervention at the 1977 synod, US Bishop Raymond Lucker argued that because the catechesis of adults is key to the catechesis of children and youth, the evangelization and catechesis of adults is one of the church's most pressing needs; see Frye, Mariella, “Reflections on the National Catechetical Directory for the United States and the Roman Synod on Catechetics in Our Time,” Louvain Studies 7 (1979): 205–21 at 207Google Scholar.
112 Steinfels, Peter, A People Adrift (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 237Google Scholar.
113 Jane Regan, “Adult Faith Formation: Will It Catch on This Time?” America 189, no. 9 (September 22, 2003): 18–21 at 20.
114 Beginning with the 1997 General Directory for Catechesis, however, there was an effort to use the stages of the catechumenate as the basis for an organized approach to evangelization.
115 Regan, “Adult Faith Formation,” 19.
116 Davidson, James, Catholicism in Motion: The Church in American Society (Ligouri, MO: Ligouri Publications, 2005), 130–31Google Scholar.
117 Davidson, Catholicism in Motion, 130.
118 Although per official documents, the baptismal catechumenate is held to be the model for all catechesis, efforts to implement a liturgical and mystagogical formation has never fully succeeded in the American church. Already by 1990, “a despondency had set in”; Fischer, Balthasar, “The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults: Rediscovery and New Beginnings,” Worship 64 (1990): 98–106 at 105Google Scholar. A review of recent journals, however, shows this method receiving new attention. And according to Carlo-Mario Sultana, the newly issued Vatican Directory for Catechesis (2020) uses the catechumenate to illustrate how “all the different forms of catechesis with different categories of people is planned and put into action”; Carlo-Mario Sultana, “A Pastoral Reading of the Directory for Catechesis,” Roczniki Teologiczne LXVIII (2021): 43–56 at 50. It also presents mystagogy as the means “to help and to accompany individuals in continuing to accept Christ in their life and who on their part seek to keep inserting themselves into the mystery of Christ, and to allow Christ to enlighten their lives, words and choices,” at 54.
119 Wolfteich, Claire E., American Catholics through the Twentieth Century: Spirituality, Lay Experience and Public Life (New York: Crossroad, 2001), 23Google Scholar.
120 Ibid., 27.
121 Ibid.
122 Beal, John, “’It Shall Not Be So Among You! Crisis in the Church, Crisis in Church Law,” in Governance, Accountability and the Future of the Catholic Church, ed. Oakley, Francis and Russert, Bruce (New York: Continuum, 2004), 92Google Scholar.
123 Faggioli, Massimo, The Rising Laity: Ecclesial Movements since Vatican II (New York: Paulist Press, 2016), 102Google Scholar. Interestingly, synodality is a tradition Pope Francis seeks to revive.
124 For a study of US reaction to the implementation of the liturgical reforms, see Massa, Mark, Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1999), 148–71Google Scholar.
125 Hinze, Bradford, Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church: Aims and Obstacles, Lessons and Laments (New York: Continuum, 2006), 64–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This theme was chosen in light of the 1971 synod statement on justice in the world and Paul VI's “call to action” in Octogesima Adveniens.
126 See Hinze, Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church, 71. As history shows, this type of synodal experience was not new to the American church.
127 Manning, Frank V., A Call to Action (Notre Dame, IN: Fides/Claretian, 1977), 14–15Google Scholar.
128 Hinze, Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church, 77.
129 Ibid., 78.
130 Ibid.
131 Although Vatican II's teaching on the tria munera opened the way to lay ecclesial ministry, popes and bishops expressed concern that if laypeople became more interested and involved serving within the church, this would not only lead to the “clericalization of the laity” but it would also deter them from assuming their responsibility for mission to the world. See Fitzgibbon, Eamonn, “Clericalization of the Laity: A Prescient Warning of Pope Francis for the Catholic Church of Ireland,” Irish Theological Quarterly 85 (2020): 16–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
132 See Arinze, Cardinal, “Active Participation in the Sacred Liturgy,” Antiphon 9 (2005): 6–15Google Scholar. This was a keynote address delivered at the 2004 conference of the Society for Catholic Liturgy in Mundelein, Illinois, on September 23, 2004. In the cover letter promulgating Summorum Pontificum (2007), Pope Benedict XVI noted his intent to promote “an interior reconciliation in the heart of the Church.” In reality, his action created a clash between a liturgy that mediated the hierarchical Tridentine vision of church and a liturgy that mediated Vatican II's vision of the church as the communitarian people of God.
133 The USCCB website, https://www.usccb.org, is a primary resource for these documents and other materials. For an assessment of the conferences’ work, see Yamane, David, The Catholic Church in State Politics: Negotiating Prophetic Demands and Political Realities (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005)Google Scholar.
134 “For decades, bishops, individually and collectively, have thrust the institutional church into active public advocacy in legislatures and courts on a few key issues” with the result that this “has compromised the church's public witness on the full range of moral-political matters essential to a just society.” This “intense public activism on a narrow set of issues leaves lay Catholics ill-equipped to bring their faith to other issues central to the common good;” Angela C. Carmella, “An Informed Laity: Understanding the Church's Political and Legal Advocacy,” in Voting and Faithfulness: Catholic Perspectives on Politics, ed. Nicholas P. Cafardi (Mahwah, NJ; Paulist Press, 2020), 277–96 at 278.
135 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Our Hearts Were Burning Within Us: A Pastoral Plan for Adult Faith Formation in the United States (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Publishing, 1999).
136 Per a 2019 Pew poll, 43 percent of US Catholics surveyed do not believe Christ is truly present in the Eucharist, and only 28 percent knew about transubstantiation; see https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/05/transubstantiation-u-s-catholics/.
137 Diekmann, “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” 19.
138 Ibid., 20.
139 Ibid., 21.
140 Cipriano Vagaggini's prediction about the Council Fathers’ grasp of the profound implications of Sacrosanctum Concilium proved to be “overly optimistic”; Faggioli, “Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Meaning of Vatican II,” 440–41. This “shift of eucharistic agency from the priest alone to the whole assembly” was “seismic” and was one of the most momentous achievements of the Council”; Lash, Theology for Pilgrims, 277.
141 Diekmann, “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” 20.
142 One could argue that this displacement of the clerical celebrant explains the efforts to restore the Tridentine Mass form where there was no confusion over who was priest and minister.
143 One option for the Mass’ closing rite, see Foley, Edward, ed., A Commentary on the Order of Mass of the Roman Ritual (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011), 625, 637Google Scholar.
144 Massa, Catholics and American Culture, 170.
145 Ibid.