The last time the church said it was going to make changes was in 1965.

Fifty-eight years ago. In the meantime, all the changes to be seen were basically meaningless ones.

Not because change was forbidden.

On the contrary.

The Vatican documents of 1965 oozed theological life.

They were clearly meant to dispense with the church of the Middle Ages, to bring the church into the modern world rooted in Scripture and the model of Jesus.

But as the ocean liner that brought so many of the American Catholic hierarchy back from Rome disembarked, the New York press corps, snapping pictures and shouting questions, suffered one bishop after another shrugging their questions off.

Nothing had really changed, it seemed. Nothing newsworthy, at least.

In essence, the assumption was correct.

Whatever changes the people had wanted from the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council were, it seemed, formless, silent, lost in the bustle of a busy church frozen in a medieval mind.

Instead, after 400 years without a council of reform, the kinds of changes the people had expected from this council lay yet in Rome, drying in wet ink there and largely ignored here.

Even more to the point, few, if any, priests taught the council documents to their congregations.

Few if any priests admitted that they themselves had not bothered to read the documents either.

Oh, a few churches redesigned their confession boxes and a few more took down the altar rails, but really, other than that and the move to the vernacular in all liturgical events — nothing much did happen.

Most of the changes were window dressing.

No one talked about a reunion with the Christian family of multiple denominations, for instance. No one moved to include women as fully baptized members of the church.

Quickly chosen lay consultants and episcopal advisers were disposed of in short order.

The lay ministers that had been so long awaited were educated in local seminaries by the thousands and then shrunk quietly away in great numbers, too, as fewer and fewer of them were really deployed in the ministry of the church itself.

The male church in large part stayed male despite the few women allowed in minor offices like readers or altar servers "as long as men were not available."

The prayers and pronouns of the church pronounced the church to be male in every particle while women remained invisible and left the church in large numbers quietly now.

Why did nothing change when change was called for?

Well, to be clear, the 2,000-2,500 bishops from around the world who attended this 21st ecumenical council voted yes for all of its documents, but once back on home soil, many simply ignored them, that's why.

The two popes, John XXIII and Paul VI, who had led the way to these times died. The popes who had called the Second Vatican Council to bring the church into the modern world lived on in the hearts of the new church in the pews.

But both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI resisted the full force of Vatican II. Though they never denounced the council, they never really promoted it either.

This synodality is different. Continue reading

• Joan Chittister is a Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pennsylvania, Joan Chittister is a best-selling author and well-known international lecturer on topics of justice, peace, human rights, women's issues and contemporary spirituality in the church and in society.

My concern today is how to construct a new future for women around the world through the global outreach of the church.

The 6th-century philosopher Boethius reminds us that every age that is dying is simply a new age coming to life.

A second insight that gets my attention comes from Woody Allen 15 centuries later: "I'm not afraid of dying; I just don't want to be there when it happens."

Both messages are clear: First, continuity can go too far. Second, to fail to face the moment we're in can fail the future that's coming with or without us and whether we like it or not.

Point: This is a crossover moment in history. This is the moment when history discovered women. Continue reading.

Sr Joan Chittister, a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania, is a best-selling author and well-known lecturer on topics of justice, women's issues, and contemporary spirituality. This opinion piece comes from a talk Sr Joan gave to the American Academy of Religion and The Society of Biblical Literature last November.

Source: The Junia Project

Image: The Women's Conference

We, and all our institutions, as a result, are a greying breed.

At the same time, we are, in fact, the healthiest, longest lived, most educated, most active body of elders the world has ever known.

The only real problem with that is that we are doing it in the face of a youth culture left to drive a capitalist economy that thrives on sales.

So, what we sell is either to youth, about youth, or for the sake of affecting youth. But after all the pictures of 60-looking 80 year olds going by on their bikes fade off the screen, the world is left with, at best, a very partial look at what it means to be an elder.

Especially for those who never did like biking much to begin with.

The truth of the matter is that all of life, at any age, is about ripening. Life is about doing every age well, learning what we are meant to learn from it and giving to it what we are meant to give back to it.

The young give energy and wonder and enthusiasm and heart-breaking effort to becoming an accomplished, respected, recognized adult. And for their efforts they reap achievement and identity and self-determination.

The middle-aged give commitment and leadership, imagination and generativity. They build and rebuild the world from one age to another. And for their efforts they get status, and some kind of power, however slight, and the satisfaction that comes from a sense of accomplishment.

The elderly have different tasks entirely.

The elderly come to this stage of life largely finished with a building block mentality. They have built all they want to build. It is their task in life now to evaluate what has become of it, what it did to them, what of good they can leave behind them.

The elderly bring to life the wisdom that comes from having failed as often as they succeeded, relinquished as much as they accumulated. And this stage of life comes with its own very clear blessings. Continue reading

Image: Twitter

In a recent article, Joan Chittister writes that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Catholic Charities in the US, Caritas, and now the Girl Scouts, have 'been curtailed, "investigated" or put in some kind of canonical receivership because of their reputed lack of orthodoxy on sexual issues or because of association with other groups that, according to the bishops, have the same problem. And all of that in the face of the sex abuse debacle of the church itself, still to be resolved, never monitored, and totally closed to outside investigation.'

• Read Joan Chittister's article in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: CBS News

Last week, Rush Limbaugh, popular voice of far-right politics, used his position on the airwaves to insult, label and pronounce on the sexual motivations of a young Georgetown law school student who testified on behalf of the coverage of contraceptive medicine in national health care insurance plans.

And he did it not once, but at least three times. It was not, obviously, a slip of the tongue. This was a personal attack of precise aim.

Then this week, on another subject but with a similar tone, students at Columbia University, Barnard College's sister school and one of the country's premier educational institutions, raged online at Newsweek's "The Daily Beast" about the unworthiness of the women of Barnard to have the honor of President Barack Obama as their graduation speaker. The insults hurled at Barnard, a woman's college since 1889 and a partner school of Columbia, were every bit as sexual and sexist, as degrading and as vehement as Limbaugh's.

At least Limbaugh didn't hide behind false screen names as did the respondents to the Barnard issue, who chose to be vile rather than accountable for their free speech.

Like Limbaugh, the students of Columbia — many of them women — who resent the fact that President Obama agreed to do the graduation address at Barnard rather than accept similar invitations to Columbia chose invective rather than analysis to register their reactions to the situation. They and the screaming respondents who answered their tirades with tirades of their own simply abandoned all pretense of intellectual development or rational response.

It is clear in both cases that "free speech" has reached a new low. The question is, Whose fault is that, really?

And the answer is that there are culprits aplenty, it seems. Read more

Sources

• Joan Chittister in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: MassLive.com