There was a world wide
consultation of Bishops before the initial preparation of the Council began.
I think of it as the
beginning of one of my exams:
-----------------------------------------
Name: ……………………
Class*: ……………………
Answer the following question in ink using only one side of the paper
provided.
Question 1
“What do you think the
coming Vatican Council should discuss?”
*In case of confusion, put your Diocese.
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It has to be said, that
the response was not rip roaring excitement. After all, once you have the Pope
being able to solve the problems, why do you need a Council? You can’t second
guess what was in someone’s mind or heart, but could Blessed John XXIII really
have meant to call a Council like the ones in the past? I very much doubt it.
So in a spirit of
enthusiasm and exuberance Blessed John asked them all what they wanted to talk
about.
And what do you think the
answer was? Liturgical reform? Religious liberty? The theology of being a
Bishop?
No. They wanted a tighter
adherence to the rules and discipline of the Church and a new Marian Dogma.
That’s right - more Our Lady and more obedience. Think of what happened in the
aftermath and then again at what the collective mind of the Council Fathers was on the
eve after the consultation.
We can ask ourselves
whether or not the Bishops were so deluded as to be sitting in the middle of a
Church which was hopelessly out of touch and in such terrible need of reform
(as those who reread history will have us believe) and not to notice what was
going on. I spring to the defence of these Bishops. If nothing else, at that
time in the Church we were involved in every social enterprise going. They did
not live in ivory towers, and Christ’s Priests and lay faithful were at the
coal face – not on some ‘liturgical committee’ which seems to have replaced
actually 'being in the world' as the activity of choice for your average professional
Catholic nowadays.
So how did all this
change? What caused it to go so very much off course?
