This is what happened with the last one.
Sorry, it’s a bit of a long read; a couple of the main points are that they got rid of the Latin Mass and had the Priest face the Congregation. If I remember right, women didn’t have to wear veils at Mass anymore.
The Pope is saying stuff likeTHIS.
Is it time for a Vatican III?
Is one even needed, I’d rather ask.
Unlike Latin Mass and covered female heads, rules which were followed quite universally within the pre-VII RCC, the most “radical” things Pope Francis is saying are things which a lot of congregations already do.
For example, he recently called for a study on whether to ordain diaconesses; one of the main duties of deacons is to hand out Communion. Those times I’ve performed that duty in a church in which they didn’t know me, the priest asked if I’d received Confirmation. I’m female and if anybody ordained me a deaconess, it was while I wasn’t looking. Accepting lesbians, gays, transexuals and divorced people? Again, lots of congregations are already doing it. He’s calling for the general body of the Church to do it, but it’s already being done.
I’m not sure where you’re from, but the Lincoln Diocese in Nebraska is very slow to move. It just seems to me that the church leadership should come together to support the Pope. Time’s are a changing, History is speeding up.
What dogma or practice do you perceive the Pope is changing, specifically?
So far, Francis has not made any claim for an action that actually differs from current church practice and law. (He has used language that is more humanitarian than theological and there is a group of conservative bishops who are seeking to have him clarify his comments.)
I have no idea whether the church “should” convene another council. Politically, within the church, anyone who argued for such an event would probably have the action backfire on them. The Second Vatican Council was called by Pope John XXIII in 1959 and was actually conducted between 1962 and 1965. What is not understood about that council by many people, including a huge number of Catholics, is that the ideas discussed and changes made as the result of the council had been percolating under the surface of the church for at least 50, (and some would say 89) years. European culture had changed dramatically since the 16th century Counter Reformation of the Council of Trent. Secularism (that had begun in the 16th century) had become a general cultural movement. The Age of Exploration had brought large numbers of non-European people into the Church resulting in a number of ad hoc adjustments to the expression of church ideas to make the message of the church more understandable to the non-European peoples (often troubling the European-based hierarchy). The very change of European society from agrarian to industrial had challenged older expressions of church thought. And the rise of racism, the horror of (industrialized) world war, and the threat of world-ending nuclear war all became issues that the church felt a need to address.
However, every one of those issues had been addressed by numbers of theologians and pastors throughout the decades prior to 1959. No statement issued from the Council was a new invention. (This, unfortunately, was a surprise to many Catholics who had not been aware of these discussions and a number of people reacted as if the Council had simply made up new rules out of thin air.)
Issues addressed by the Council included changes to make the Liturgy more participatory by the congregations, rethinking and addressing the issues of secularism and church-state interactions, racism, (to some extent) sexism, ecumenical relations with other Christians and relations with non-Christian belief systems, issues surrounding the rise of “total warfare,” education (both of Catholics and of priests, particularly), colonialism, and several other issues regarding an old church in a changing world. Changing the position of the altar and changing the celebration of the mass from Latin to the vernacular were the things that caught the attention of most American Catholics, (since they saw those changes weekly), but a lot more went on than those changes.
Reiterating my earlier point that all the changes published from Vatican II had been in serious discussion for decades, I would guess that the sort of discussions that Pope Francis is suggesting will need to percolate for several more years–with many theologians and bishops wading in with opinions–before the church is ready to convene a new council to address them. Were such a council called today, the results would tend to simply cast current practices in absolutist terms. With the shift in active church participation moving away from Europe to South America, Africa, and to a certain extent, Asia much of the church hierarchy is actually more conservative on some of the issues mentioned in the OP than European and North American hierarchy (Lincoln, NE and St. Paul, MN, notwithstanding). The issues have not yet been discussed for a sufficiently long period to give rise to a universal consensus.
Catholics, at least in the USA, are no longer a culturally homogeneous minority group like they were in the 1800s. They’re pretty much integrated into their local culture, and the average Catholic from Lincoln probably has more in common with the average Methodist from Lincoln than with the average Catholic from San Francisco. If Pope Francis were to say that being transgender and expressing it was not sinful, Catholics like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly would probably not listen to him. If the Pope were to say the opposite Catholics like Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry would ignore him. Basically, I think that at least in the USA, there are other more powerful cultural forces at play that shape people’s views more than what the Pope says. As such, I think a Vatican III would be useless.
The US Catholic Church tends to be much more “conservative” than those from traditionally-Catholic countries, although that does change by congregation as it does everywhere. The conservative is in “” because very often the things people think they’re preserving are really not part of the rules, not just in this but in anything in which one encounters that word (my go-to example: traditional gender roles which hail from the Industrial Revolution).
I’m from Spain. Nebraska is one of the US states I haven’t been to.
Exactly. If American Catholics are more conservative than French, Spanish, or Italian Catholics it’s because Americans in general are more conservative than the French, Spanish, and Italians. Having another Vatican council won’t change that.
It is also important to recognize the differences between the actions of the bishop and the values or attitudes of the people.
I do not know whether the people of Lincoln embraced the views of (now retired) Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln when he was getting a lot of attention for his outspoken conservative views, but I know that Minnesotans were generally unhappy with (now retired) John Nienstedt of St. Paul/Minneapolis.
As to the speed of church change and movement, glaciers are regarded as hasty in the RCC. 
The fundamental doctrines of the Church are either true or not. They aren’t up for negotiation.
If they’re true, “history” passing us by is of no consequence. If they’re not, a council to revamp them is pointless.
Probably because the ‘liberal’ Catholics have already left the Church. Or only show up in church on Christmas, Easter, weddings & funerals.
But those are very few. And not much different from Protestant churches, either. I don’t think that the priest facing away and speaking Latin was in any way a “fundamental doctrine”, but that’s what most Catholics remember changing from Vatican II. And that’s what most of the fuss was about.
Just like now: most of these things being talked about are things that many parishes have already done, without waiting for ‘approval’ from the hierarchy. And that will continue, as the conservative bishops & cardinals appointed by JPII & the Hitler-Youth Pope die off.
Years ago I remember reading that “there are certain church rules that Catholics have repealed by ‘voting with their feet’ – by just not following them”. For example, Holy Days of Obligation: most Catholics couldn’t even tell you how many there are or when they are, much less going to Mass on them. And most parish priests know better than to make an issue of it. This isn’t just minor things, either – the church hierarchy is strongly anti-abortion, but Catholic girls have more abortions than other religions. (Possibly because the church is also very anti-birth control.) So despite what the church hierarchy espouses, in actual practice, most Catholics Do use birth control, and even abortions when necessary.
There is some of that, of course.
On the other hand, much of the “conservative” nature of American Catholics has very much to do with the long tradition of anti-Catholic behavior among Protestant Americans. Belief systems that feel that they are being persecuted are much more likely to trend conservative. From attacks by Virginia settlers on Maryland settlers in the seventeenth century, through the church burning and occasionally murderous riots of the 1830s and 1840s and the rise of the Know Nothing party in the 1850s through the anti-papist tracts and demonstrations directed against Catholic immigrants and the rise of the KKK, the U.S. has a long tradition of Catholic bashing. It has only been with the post-WWII acceptance of Catholics by all but the most extreme Protestant denominations that Catholics have begun to feel less threatened and moved away from the natural conservatism of those who feel persecuted. Europeans got most of their religious animosity out of the way by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so they have a more than 150 year head start on those in the U.S.
Wow an evenhanded thread in Great Debates:)
Realistically, there’s no real need for a Council. Pope Francis still wants a church where marriage is man/woman with divorce not permitted, no artificial birth control, and a celibate/male only priesthood. He’s just using a “carrot over stick” approach to win back people who have violated those rules. The only real scenario I can see him calling a new council is if the continuing aging of the priesthood and increasing intake of formerly Anglican married priests put pressure on the celibate priesthood, and it’s going to be a long time before any Pope breaches that issue.
Plus I wonder if the aftereffects of Vatican II have scared Church leadership off calling another council. Whatever you think Vatican II accomplished spiritually, there’s no denying the post-Vatican II era has seen sharp dropoffs in mass attendence and overall sense of Catholics being different than other denominations.
From Wikipedia:
The reference you made seems to imply something else.
Or they go, but they shut the hell up because the Mass is in a strange version of English they don’t understand (what the hell happened to “vernacular”?) and because, when they try to volunteer, they are asked for more paperwork than for a wedding (why would anybody ask for certificates of baptism and confirmation to become a lector? The second requires the first). Or they’ve found a parish where they actually feel welcome, without leaving the Church.
When I was dating Idiot Boyfriend, I’d often go to church at his parish. The Jesuit in charge spoke in everyday English, used a modern translation of the Bible and the church had the images one expects to find in a church curated by Jesuits; half the Masses were officially in Spanish and if he went to start one in English and recognized everybody as being Hispanic he’d switch. The Augustines in mine used the KJV, held only one Mass in Spanish for a congregation with 2/3 Hispanics (that Mass used to need to be held with the doors open) and would scold people for wearing medals (see: Hispanics). At the diocesan parish I later belonged to, women weren’t allowed as lectors and there was no Mass in Spanish or Creole (majority of Hispanics, parish next to Little Haiti). That was all within the same city.
Are you sure that the odd parishes were actually Catholic and not Sedevacantists or something?
I’ve never encountered anything like your references to the need for paperwork to read at mass and I have not seen women excluded from being lectors since 1968.
I have encountered a few priests who were simply not comfortable stepping away from their own restricted use of English and I have often wondered just how far out of touch the local bishop was to permit that sort of thing.
(The Bible would have either been the Douay–Rheims version, (actually, the Challoner update, still called the Douay), but there is no way an actual Catholic group was going to use the KJV. On the other hand, I have never seen a lectionary based on the Doauy and the very earliest lectionaries, prior to 1972, were based on the Confraternity edition that was not particularly “modern” but was a 20th century translation closer to the modern than the 18th century Challoner. I wonder where they got one.)
In addition to defining what are the ‘fundamental doctrines’ of the Church, the Church has discussed and negotiated many things over its history in trying to discern the will of God. And after all, when Jesus gave the keys over to Peter, He gave him the authority to bind and loosen things on Earth, which would be reflected in Heaven… so there is a biiiit of leeway, no?
The ones with the paperwork and the Shakespearian English were Augustines. I swear a lot of those guys would like to not just destroy every image ever graven, but go back to the 5th century. Before Christ.
Same assholes told me I had to make an appointment to get Confession, first available slot was the following week. I’d seen a church from the Metrorail called “Corpus Christi”, so I headed there instead. Surprise surprise with that name: Jesuits (not the Idiot Boyfriend’s parish), Confession available as soon as I could find a priest.
I voluenteer in a Nursing Home and one non-Catholic lady told me the priest that says the Catholic mass just said that anyone who believed in the true presence could recieve Communion so she does. If that is a new rule i had never heard of it from any of my RC friends or relatives.
The issue of married priests in the Latin rite is a matter of discipline, not doctrine – married priests are common in the Eastern sui iuris Churches, as in the Orthodox Churches. There is no Church dogma against married clergy, except that the priest must have been married before ordination.