As the years pass, the gap between Catholics who lived through the Second Vatican Council and those too young to remember it or born afterwards continues to widen.
A column about this divide might be quite interesting. For example, one of my posts drew a comment from Mike that my parish's liturgy is "stuck in the 70s." Meanwhile, my tenth grade Christian Formation students wonder why our parish church looks like an auditorium and why there must be so many hymns that go on so long.
But it turns out Father McBrien is talking about the divide within the Vatican II generation. To him that means the divide between what he regards as the true "Vatican II generation" and the rest of us who also remember the Church before the Council.
The Vatican II generation includes some bishops, even a few cardinals, and many priests and religious, as well as laity. They were restive under the prolonged pontificate of John Paul II. ...But the Vatican II generation was also deeply troubled by the efforts to re-centralize authority in the Vatican and particularly in the person of the pope, the Vatican’s seeming intolerance for theological opinions and pastoral practices different from its own sense of doctrinal orthodoxy and liturgical propriety, and the types of priests appointed to the hierarchy and subsequently promoted within it.
For the Vatican II generation no leading church figure was more disliked or feared than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the long-time head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. ...
Father McBrien began his column noting the Vatican II generation, as he defines it, is a dying breed, yet he and its other members never seem to find this a cause for introspection. ¶ 2/01/2006 12:15:00 PM
What did you say to them? I to wondered this, go into a Catholic Church from the 1800's and then go to a big auditorum one and you just know your getting cheated!
Which post prompted the stuck in the 70's comment?
I had started the class discussion by noting we had a new pastor so this might be a good time to bring up anything they would like to see changed.
Once the discussion started, I just asked some follow-up questions, at least on these issues of church architecture and decoration.
On why so many verses of the hymns, one student said this was to tell the whole story. He laughed knowingly while saying it, conveying that he didn't find that explanation sufficient.
Most of what they had to say was based on what they saw and heard at other churches. Since the parish has provided largely implausible explanations on its liturgical and architectural choices, I didn't pass these along. To a lesser extent, questions like clerical celibacy and women's ordination came up. There I could distinguish Church discipline from doctrine, and East from West, in explanation.
In the plans for our recent parish building project, the new chapel had a traditional look to it. If it had been completed that way, it might have met the need my students expressed. Instead, it was arranged to look like a miniature of our auditorium church.
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