Both Roots and Wings
Moving the Vatican II Church Into a New Millennium

by Joan D. Chittister, OSB

Concluding address at all three 2001 CTA National Conferences in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago. Edited slightly for space reasons.

Framing these reflections on roots and wings is a story from the Book of Kings. The scripture teaches that "...in those days God called Samuel... ." But Samuel did not as yet recognize the voice of God. "Visions," scripture says, "were scarce in those days," and so Samuel went instead to the priest of the temple, saying, "Eli, you called me. Here I am." But Eli said, "I did not call you. Go back to sleep." Finally after Samuel was called three times, Eli, of whom scripture says, "Eli's eyes were growing dim..." instructed Samuel to say, "Lord, here I am...." And Samuel did, and what the Lord told Samuel was that Eli's days as high priest were over because there were elements in the old system that had to be changed- things his sons did which Eli had not corrected. What can we possibly think about such a serious situation as this? What can we possibly learn from it in our own time?

First, we must remember that Eli was going blind! Eli was no longer able to see what needed to be done next. But one thing you can say for Eli: Eli, the institution itself, enabled Samuel, taught Samuel, ordered Samuel to hear beyond the institution to the voice of God in his life. And more than that. We must realize that the voice of God to Samuel was that the very institution that had formed him was to be re-formed by him. What Eli had taught him he was to use to correct Eli's world. No doubt about it: Samuel is the saint of Vatican II.

The Jewess, Bella Lewitzky, woman of a wandering people, once wrote: "To move freely you must be deeply rooted." Without doubt, roots and wings are of a piece. One without the other is bogus. To renew the church we must be faithful to the church, and to renew the church we must stretch the church. The question is simply: stretch it to what? And how?

In what way is the call of Vatican II still current? Is religion itself really of urgent value in today's world? Is organized religion worth the struggles? At its best, religion offers more than a list of answers. Like Eli, it tenders a way to deal with the questions that plague our lives. This transition from certainty to faith, from faithful answers to faithful questions is a slow one. It is the transition from roots to wings. It is the difference between Call To Action 1976 and Call To Action 2001.

Call To Action 1976 was an attempt to make real what was clearly present in the then fresh documents of Vatican II. Call to Action 2001 is a call to make present what is not so clearly evident in the now old documents of Vatican II but is still implied in them, and must still be alive in us if we are to remain as committed to development as we are faithful to our roots. As committed to our roots as we are faithful to development.

Thanks to Vatican II, ideas changed and that frightened some people. It cast others adrift, plunged many into blind resistance. But it energized the rise of another whole church for whom the past was the glue needed to reconfigure a healthier future. The essence remained: 1. God is. 2. Openness to the world is the way of Jesus, and 3. The Holy Spirit lives in each of us. Those are the givens, the things that do not change. Those are the roots that give us wings. In fact, on those ideas has rested the unity of the church and the development of the faith for centuries as the world tilted and turned.

And the world around us, like the world after Galileo and the world after The Enlightenment and the world after the fall of the monarchies in Europe, is shifting like a glacier in sunlight. Now, in our time, we have again a culture in flux and questions in embryo, and gods in conflict, and tensions - personal/social/local/global/international/organizational - aplenty! The question is not whether the faith is believable. The real question is whether that faith is meaningful to us, here and now. We live in a desert between two places: one at the brink of Vatican II, just over the edge of Vatican I, a relatively static world where change and doubt were little tolerated. The other, this world, a borderless world exploding with information, bristling with independence, inundated with questions, teeming with the agitation and the rage of the oppressed and invisible.

The world races blindly by us unsure what, if anything, religion has to offer a wounded, worried, weary world that is awash in clonings and stem cell research, comic book star-wars weapons and the desperate poverty that militarism and nuclear holocaust breeds-and now fear, great fear, and houses divided against themselves with a microcosm of world religions in every major city in the world. The world is now a place that prays in many languages at one time.

What are we to be about in church renewal if the church itself is to keep pace? The 25th anniversary questions for Call To Action must be: Why must the church be in the world? How must the church be in the world? And what must the church do now to really be a leavening presence in such a world?

The situation is fraught with danger. It seems we are being asked to ignore the obvious and abandon the vision of Vatican II. On the other hand, we find ourselves without the moorings of the soul it takes to stay a course in dark time, to trust that the Holy Spirit is working in this confusion. But such a situation is not a new one.

In ancient times, when Greek mythology ceased to satisfy the new commitment to the orderly, rational pursuit of evidence, philosophers then too began to point out the contradictions inherent in popular theology. Who was really God if there were many gods? What kind of religion was it that dealt with humanity in some kind of brutal sport? What was heaven if competition between the gods was par for the course, and chaos part and parcel of godliness there? The old myths condemned themselves by their own hand. Intelligent people began to feel distant from a system that was arbitrary and incongruent, destructive and unyielding. Religion reeled from the assault. Philosophy emerged with more reasonable answers to the problems of life than did religion.

Religion as the ancient Greeks had known it was dead. But which was the greater errancy: the mythological explanations of life given by religion or the rational imaginings of the new purveyors of philosophical ideas? In fact, which is the greater errancy today: the distance from the world of a clerical church under siege before Vatican II, or the wildly committed imaginings of the "people of God" after it?

The answer lies now, I think, as it did then, in the relationship between roots and wings, between respect for the past and commitment to the present. Social turbulence is always a sure sign that the faith must be rethought, reinterpreted, restated in the light of present circumstances.

It is not the first time in Catholic history either that new spiritual understandings have emerged in the light of new questions - and new questions in the light of new understandings. The Council of Nicaea in 325, the Council of Constantinople in 381, the Athanasian Creed in the sixth century, even Pope Paul VI's "Credo of the People of God," published as late as 1968 - all attempted, in the face of different questions, to reformulate the fundamentals in ways that could be understood by people at that time.

To question is not to deny. It may, in fact, be the truest type of faith, the most faithful kind of religion. If we are really to be faithful, to be rooted, we must ask ourselves again and again: What did Vatican II really mandate? Those are our roots. And what is left to be done? Those are the things that must give us wings.

Against what must we struggle? And from what can we draw hope? The answer lies in looking again at the Documents of Vatican II, with both their turning points and tensions.

1. In the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the turning point is the very definition of the church itself. In Baltimore Catechism days, the definition was structural and very straightforward. "The church," every child learned, "was that body of lawfully baptized faithful who accepted the teachings of the church, were gathered around the local bishop who was in communion with the church in Rome."

Vatican II enlarged that definition of church, gave us new roots. The church, the council declared, is "the people of God." There and then the focus shifts beyond the hierarchical, beyond spiritual childhood, beyond being consumers of faith to being carriers of faith. But then the tensions multiply too. The whole question of role definitions-of who does what-of gifts and responsibilities-of who's in charge of what-of relationships and ecclesiology-of who is more important than whom in the church-become new points of theological departure.

People who do not "belong" to a church but who are the church begin to take that focus seriously and in ways that alter past patterns and beliefs. They begin to make clear that they want their church open to women, open to homosexuals, open to married priests, open to women priests and preachers, open to lay consultation. In other words, they want their wings.

2. In the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation the place of scripture in Catholic formation re-energized literary exegesis and historical scholarship, areas dormant in Roman circles for eons. This fresh encouragement of biblical study raises new issues as well. Whether or not Revelation is ongoing may become even more problematic now. Consequently, an understanding of "tradition" that is based on historical patterns of practice and custom is now being contested in favor of new insights with firm scriptural foundation. If scripture, for instance, has nothing at all to say about the ordination of women, on what basis do we use Jesus as our right to obstruct it? It is the question of the place of scripture-the model of Jesus-in the development of doctrine that must give us all new wings.

3. The turning point in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy with its institution of the vernacular as an "official" language of consecration was its concern to return the liturgy of the church to the people, who are the church. Gone was the notion that Eucharist was something done for us and on us instead of with us, something for a single priest in a dark crypt to "get in." It was all a great breakthrough for Christian community. But tensions lurk in these shadows, too. Uniformity, that long-heralded counterpoint of Catholic unity, became a point of contention about the nature of tradition.

When the bishops called the first CTA 25 years ago, I sat on the smallest committee-the committee on language. I told the committee that ours was the most volatile topic. "Impossible," they told me. The office of women's concerns, altar girls, theological study-they passed! Ours didn't. Our request for two tiny words to designate the whole human race-DIDN'T!
The liturgy became a battleground where bread recipes, the gender, dress and geography of altars and ministers became theologically central and the translations of pronouns were centers of conflict and control. Mystique has again become confused with mystery. If we do not get beyond this, there will be no Eucharistic wings on which to fly.

4. In the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the church in Vatican II turned squarely from an insular perspective which emphasized the separateness of the sacred and the secular, to the consideration of the integrity, the essential connectedness of the sacred and the secular. It was a transfiguring moment, never more than now! From a posture of resistance and rejection of the larger world, the church turned to a commitment to human advancement, to the development of world community, to the acceptance of science and to a new concern for the economic and cultural development of all peoples as well as for their spiritual salvation. The transformation of society, in other words, is publicly declared in this key document as an essential part of the church's mission to humanity.

And so the tensions are clear. Someone must still ask: how much involvement is too much involvement of church in the political system and political issues? When does advocacy become control? And when we argue for moral principles in the marketplace, whose morality shall it be and who decides? And how? By endorsing candidates, by forbidding the support of a candidate to people, to adults, to citizens of conscience-or by teaching principles? The answers are slow in coming but on them lies the very existence of wings.

5. The Decree on Ecumenism recognized officially the scandal of Christian division. What is more, this statement asserts a unity in vision and essential commitment among the whole Christian family. Finally, the paper affirms the diversity of gifts-liturgical, spiritual and theological-that make up the whole church of Christ in all its denominations. But the challenge is to move Christian ecumenism beyond ecclesiastical get-togethers to the recognition of the single mission and the common table of the total Christian church. The scandal of division is not the scandal of the people. It is the scandal of professional church makers and it must be repented before we can teach peace to anyone else. Indifferentism is not ecumenism, of course, but absolutism, on the other hand, erodes the witness of the full Christian presence-even when it comes packaged in documents from Rome. Conversion and repentance are imperatives of the church as well as its members.

Whatever recent documents, written again without the approbation of the church universal, say to the contrary about the salvific value of our sister churches, Vatican II and its outreach to the entire Christian dispensation is the root that gives the faith wings.

6. In the Decree on the Bishops' Pastoral Office in the Church, the church makes a screeching turn from medieval hierarchy to modern pastor. The bishop is not defined in these documents as "lord and lawgiver." His role is to enable the church; to be in touch with issues and ideas; to create a national identity. Clearly the question of international control of the newly heightened local church is the high water to be negotiated now. Without resolving this, pastoral paralysis will surely set in, ecclesiastical climbing for official favor will surely take over as bishops defer to Roman control rather than stand for national needs, until, in the end, bishops become unnecessary at all. To fly in the face, for instance, of national conferences of bishops and their authorization of liturgical translations for their own countries-let alone attempt to stop the renovation of a cathedral in mid-air-is not only to obviate the local church but to turn bishops into altar boys as well. It is to tie the wings we have been given.

7. The Vatican II Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, and the Decree on Priestly Formation, may someday be seen as pivotal to the development of the new church to which the earlier documents point. In these documents clericalism dies an official death-however prevalent it may still be. What is asked of the priest is, of course, the ability to form community, to lead the search for God but to acknowledge, to listen to and to trust the laity whose gifts, the same documents say, are essential to the church. As the telling phrase of the document-"Brother among brothers" (sic)-celebrates, the priest is to be spiritual catalyst, not parish potentate. But the role revision sounds a great deal easier in theory than it is in practice. "Father says" is no longer enough to qualify for the running of a school, a ministry, or a parish unilaterally. From a position of "father"-the patriarchal lawgiver of a Roman family in whose hands lie the life or death of the entire clan-the priest is now asked to assume the role of "brother," the document says, of caring peer, of loving equal-even to the married and to women!

8. The Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of Religious Life came over 400 years after the Council of Trent thought it had cast religious life in stone-by declaring solemnly that it was just right as it was-wimples, walls and all. No more ministries to consider, no more forms to create, no new orders to allow, no new rules to permit beyond those of the early orders-the Council called Vatican II called religious life to renew itself. More importantly, perhaps, the Council instructed religious to turn to the gospels, the initiating intent of their founders and the social realities of the times-not to church law or episcopal control-for their criteria and direction. And these are dangerous directions all. The tensions surfaced almost immediately and are with us still. The dualistic notion that the essence of religious perfection lies in separation from the world and blind, military obedience, lingers pathologically in the minds of a generation formed on false or symbolic asceticisms rather than on the searing demands of a gospel that cures lepers, raises women from the dead and contends with Scribes and Pharisees from the Temple to the tomb!

Transcending the world, then, becomes a counterweight to transforming it. So the renewal of religious life becomes a struggle to balance the claims of law against the touchstone of an experience rife with new poor, alive with new questions, challenged by new kinds of spirituality-and of spiritual adults.

As a result, of the ministries listed in the Kenedy Directory, the registry of official Catholic organizations, over 75 percent were founded by religious communities while they were being called into chanceries and scolded for leaving the schools and not wearing school uniforms.

Finally the question of whether or not religious life is to be fundamentally charismatic or functionally institutional simmers at the center of the renewal of religious life. Whether religious are to animate or simply to staff the works they undertake in a church in whom all are called to minister and lead and teach and serve remains a determining issue. Are women religious to be the good sisters, the darling daughters of the church, or the dangerous women sent from the tomb with a message on their minds and a gospel in their hands? The struggle between control and charism is getting stronger every day as religious use their roots to justify their wings.

9. That the role of the laity in the Church was even an issue at Vatican II may be the greatest turning point of the church's modern history. In the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity the lay state in the church began, for the first time in history, to be described as a "vocation."

The laity were instructed in this document that the believer "has both a right and a duty to use their gifts" in the church. Participation rather than passivity became a factor of lay commitment. From that rationale came the call to the laity to be responsible for church organization, for Catholic education, for religious formation programs, for church administration and for thoughtful, considered reflection, for the sensus fidelium that John Henry Newman gifted to the modern church.

The inherent tension in this development of the laity is at least twofold. 1. This departure from clericalism raises the issue of authority. When competency lies with the lay leader, to what degree is the priest in charge of parish or school, and why? 2. If the laity really are gifted for the sake of the Christian community, does this mean lay women, too, or only lay men? And if it does mean women, why are they not being generally, wholly, totally accepted in worship or administration, in the diaconate, at least, for which we have centuries of women deacons as models?

Here history, theology and law all come together to confront and expose the debilitating sexism of the church. If I were a Roman Catholic bishop in this country, I would not be disturbed that Catholic women were throwing themselves on the steps of the cathedrals begging to minister in the church. I would be disturbed that they had to go to Protestant seminaries for the theological and pastoral preparation to do it.

If Roman Catholic dioceses continue to refuse to prepare women for participation in the church, I predict that this movement of Catholic women to Protestant schools of theology will significantly alter the shape of the church-the faith!-in the next 25 years. If the "Catholic Mother of the Year," that is, is still considered as important as she is now to the passing on of the faith! The preparation of the laity guarantees that the church will always have the wings it needs.

10. In the Decree on the Church's Missionary Activity, the turning point is attitudinally so deep that perhaps only a Catholic can sense its real depth. Two new postures are affirmed here. The first is that conversion must be free. With this statement hundreds of years of church-state control are abandoned by a church whose entire middle history was embedded in theocratic governments. The second notion is that missionaries are to be more presence than proselytizers. They are to become inculturated, and, as quickly as possible, enable the new church to become a native church. According to the document, at least, Western ecclesiastical imperialism is finally over.

However, this growing shift in the center of the church from First to Third World peoples in population, character and tone has done little or nothing to dislodge Roman curial control. Tension is inherent here. How long new native churches will tolerate Western formulations, Western interpretations, Western liturgical forms and Western theological analysis is anybody's guess. The Chinese church, the Asian church, and that other newly recognized mission church-the American one-are growing wings!

11. The Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions is a time bomb waiting to go off. In a dramatic move, this declaration from a council of the church, solemnly assembled, asserts that as Christians we must accept "all that is true and holy" in non-Christian religions. Imagine! We are clearly saying that in Buddhism, in Hinduism, in Judaism, in Islam there is something "true and holy." After centuries of their repudiation, moreover, the church officially condemns in this statement any persecution or discrimination based on race, color, condition of life or religion. The implications for world development and the creation of human community are far-ranging but late and incomplete: late for Tissa Balasuriya and his call to watch the language of original sin in cultures that see original perfection; late for gays and lesbians who are yet to be seen more as normal than "disordered;" late for women who are still considered outside the pale of a God who parts the seas, draws water from a rock and raises the dead to life, but cannot and will not work through a woman. Apparently femaleness is the only substance before which God goes impotent!

More, no consciousness of the effects of pluralism in the new multi-cultural governments is found in this document. The issues of school prayer and the hanging of Judeao-Christian commandments in U.S. courtrooms as the basis for judicial norms, in a government based on the separation of church and state, both of which are now emerging with a vengeance, threaten the very pluralism which, as a nation, we espouse and as a global people we can no longer avoid. The tensions residual in both those realities are yet to be recognized as issues of faith but are, I submit, very real indicators of the presence or absence of true Christians. It is no longer learning to function as a Christian in a non-Christian world that is essential. It is learning to function as a Christian in a non-Christian neighborhood that is essential to the integrity of both state and church.

12. In the Declaration on Religious Freedom the revolutionary tenet is simply that conscience must be the primary determinant of religious conviction. Everyone- everyone-even nuns and priests, I assume, is immune from coercion in the name of religion.

The problem is clear: someone, somewhere must come to grips with coercion. Is legislative pressure or church-state collusion to write denominational morality into law "coercion"? And, if it isn't, whose morality shall it be in a multicultural society in a world without borders? What is the line between church and state? What is the place for conscience in individuals and what does that have to do with the development of doctrine and the measure of our own Catholicity? Who does the measuring?

People do not question because they reject the church. They question the church because they love the church. They question because they seek a spiritual life, with or without an institution, and even outside of it if being in it is what makes the spiritual life impossible for them. Most of all, they question because the church itself has created an ideal which too often it then does not itself seek. That's what happened to Martin Luther, and Catherine of Siena, and Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton. They did not question because they did not believe what the church taught; they questioned because they did.

And that's what happened to you and me. In Vatican II they taught a whole new way of being church-and we believed them! Being rooted in Vatican II is not enough to make yourself a Vatican II Catholic. It is just as necessary to develop Vatican II as it is to preserve it, to grow its wings as to prune its branches. And each of these documents of Vatican II cries out yet for wings by believers who are as committed to the present and dedicated to the future as they are rooted in the past.

For the next 25 years it is not necessary to repeat the agenda of Vatican II, but to complete it. We are struggling now with silencings for thinkers and mandatums for theologians, and recipes for liturgy and a newly emerging authoritarian pastoring and a parallel priesthood independent of local bishops and more committed to some transcendent ideology than to the enculturation of the local church-a system to be reckoned with in the future. Mark my word.

But there are signs of great hope, as well: lay theologians now who speak a bold truth. Groups who know they are the new church in embryo. Dignity and ARCC and WOC. Quixote Center and Pax Christi and the Center of Concern and NCAN. LCWR and CMSM. And especially Call to Action, you-this great flowing movement of faithful hearts. There is, most of all, the Holy Spirit who refuses to give up on us. And finally there is Samuel, who allowed the institution to lead him to the voice of God and then built a new people in the shadows of the old. There are the wings that come from Vatican II itself to carry us- because of our roots-beyond our roots. The message of Vatican II at this 25th anniversary moment is still: Go on! Fly, Church, fly!