Missiologist Stephen Bevans argues that “in its deepest intuitions, Vatican II was ‘a missionary council.’”Footnote 1 He attributes this to John XXIII who, in calling the council, wished to bring the church “into a new phase of witness and proclamation,” a desire that became clearer in “the program that [the pope] outlined in various speeches and documents during the three years of the council's preparation.”Footnote 2 Others throughout the church shared the pope's concern, seeing the need to “renew and reform the Catholic church spiritually and institutionally … for the sake of making the church a more effective sacrament of God's mission in the world.”Footnote 3 Paul VI brought Vatican II to its close saying, “Never before, so much as on this occasion, has the church felt the need to know, to draw near to, to understand, to penetrate, serve and evangelize the society in which she lives.” Emphasizing the council's practical pastoral agenda, he concluded, “All this rich teaching is channeled in one direction, the service of mankind, of every condition, in every weakness and need. The Church has, so to say, declared herself the servant of humanity.”Footnote 4
Given that “mission was very much at its heart,” Bevans proposes that the council and its documents are best read and interpreted through mission's lens.Footnote 5 Although mission was “a concept in transition” and the Council Fathers’ treatment of it appears fragmentary rather than systematic,Footnote 6 he argues that such a reading is justified in that “each of the four major Constitutions” documents that the 1985 Extraordinary Synod judged to be primary sources for interpreting Vatican II, “begin with a new missionary statement of one sort or another.”Footnote 7 For Bevans, reading the council in this mode becomes imperative given “today's global ecclesial reality on the one hand and the ‘new chapter of evangelization’ into which we have entered.”Footnote 8
Accepting Bevans’ thesis, this study explores what the council said about mission and the church's charge to evangelize a changed and changing world. I will argue that failure to comprehend Vatican II's biblically sourced, trinitarian approach that opened the way to a more profound understanding of mission explains later failure to achieve the council's aims and so prepared the way for the challenges today's church confronts. Still, any decision to approach the Second Vatican Council through a single optic must reckon with John O'Malley's admonition that because “Vatican II was an enormously complex event,” it “cannot be reduced to simplistic formulas.”Footnote 9 An ostensible challenge to that proposed here, for example, is Ormond Rush's recent The Vision of Vatican II, which, although acknowledging that “the council intentionally focused on renewal and reform of the church,” nevertheless prioritizes hermeneutics, identifying “twenty-four fundamental principles that together provide a comprehensive interpretation of Vatican II and its documents.”Footnote 10
In contrast to Rush and those for whom Vatican II remains an ongoing interpretive project, this study argues that the more significant, compelling question surrounds the assembled fathers’ expectation that their vision of a missionary church would not just be studied and interpreted but that it would be fully received and implemented.Footnote 11 Thus the functional read undertaken here examines the council's practical program “to renew and reform the Catholic Church spiritually and institutionally” for mission's sake. As I will show, such a review of the conciliar agenda—an agenda whose execution was deemed to be “more difficult and even more important than the work of the council itself” because it challenged the entire church “to translate the conciliar experience into the reality of Church life, thought and action”—is both necessary and instructive because it leads to understanding how and why the conciliar aims were ultimately thwarted.Footnote 12 This effort shares Pope Francis’ present missionary and pastoral concerns and aligns with his belief that “reception of the Second Vatican Council and the reform of the Church must enter a new phase.”Footnote 13
Reading the council through mission's lens requires particular attention to the pastoral principle formulated and set forth by John XXIII in his opening speech, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, which directed Vatican II's work. Concerned that “the deposit of Christian doctrine should be more effectively defended and presented,” the pope noted that henceforth mission must be carried out “in accord with a teaching authority which is primarily pastoral in character.”Footnote 14 In acknowledgment that the gospel's proclamation must take into account its hearers, this principle foregrounds the relation existing among those who transmit the faith, those who receive the faith, and the deposit of faith itself, as each is subject to and conditioned by history and culture.Footnote 15 This article therefore looks for those instances where the pope's directive brought critical shifts in thinking along with such changes in ecclesial life and practice that a mission objective demanded. My quest is for what Christoph Theobald calls an “ecclésiologie vécue,” that is, the council's vision of a pastoral church as this was to be received, actualized, and enculturated in the attitudes, behaviors, and ministries of a local community of the baptized.Footnote 16
Of necessity, reading Vatican II from a mission perspective also presupposes Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) and the liturgical reforms it mandated, something hermeneutic studies regularly overlook.Footnote 17 The fact is, informed by the work of the Liturgical Movement and the ressourcement theologians, the council rediscovered the liturgy to be an essential locus theologicus, and it was with this foundational insight that its work of reform and renewal truly began. The bishops were reminded that church mission originates with the trinitarian missions of the Son and Holy Spirit, the saving effects of whose sending are realized in the celebration of the rites of baptism, anointing, and Eucharist. Furthermore, aware that in and through regular celebration of all its rites ecclesial community is formed; aware that under its auspices mission becomes the local church's lived response to its graced encounter with the divine, the liturgy became the prime repository of the council's vision as well as means to its achievement. Consequently, Vatican II's liturgical reforms not only embodied and exemplified John XXIII's pastoral principle, but celebration of the revised rites deepened insight into the practical matter of mission's object, its method and agency, and who bears responsibility for this task. The project here is to search council documents for articulation of that celebrated and attested in/by the liturgical theologia prima, that is, the what, how, and who essential to the making of an evangelizing church, the misapprehension of which would preclude successful implementation of the council's pastoral agenda.Footnote 18
The Council's Theological Starting Point: The Church's Trinitarian Origins
A concise answer to the questions “Why the Church?” “Why mission?”Footnote 19 is provided in Lumen Gentium's trinitarian prologue (LG §2–5), its narrative account of the church's divine origins in the dual missions of Son and Spirit who, together and inseparably, carry out the Father's saving plan.Footnote 20 And if the council's rediscovery that the church exists to evangelize remains implicit in some conciliar texts, the Decree on the Church's Missionary Activity is explicit: “The pilgrim church is of its very nature missionary, since it draws its origin from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit, in accordance with the plan of God the Father.”Footnote 21 As Ad Gentes (AG) §9 explains, “Missionary activity is nothing other and nothing less than the manifestation or epiphany of God's plan and its fulfillment in the world and in its history….” Both Lumen Gentium and Ad Gentes are clear that mission is what the church does, what it must do to be itself, that indeed the community is constituted as ecclesial in the very act of proclaiming the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit.Footnote 22 One can say that the council's entire corpus represents the bishops’ attempt to explicate this foundational claim.
By rooting mission in the Trinity, the council resituated it within its proper exitus-reditus, eschatological frame. That is to say, ecclesial mission originates with the processio of Son and Spirit whose movement establishes the basic pattern of redemptive history.Footnote 23 As Aquinas explained, “In the same way that the procession of persons is the rationale for the production of creatures by the first principle, so likewise this same process is the rationale for the return of creatures to their end; since in the same way that we have been created by the Son and Holy Spirit, so likewise it is through them that we are united to our ultimate end.”Footnote 24 As Lumen Gentium and Ad Gentes attest, “The Church in its relation to the Trinity is essentially an eschatological being: It exists and acts in virtue of its expectation of fullness.”Footnote 25 Eschatology thus is “the culmination of ecclesiology, and gives ultimate meaning to the Church and its mission.”Footnote 26
According to the gospels and early church tradition, the trinitarian missions become evidentially manifest in history with the Spirit's descent on the Son at the Jordan, the two sendings converging and coalescing here. “Right from the time of the New Testament” (Acts 10:38), the descent of the Spirit on Jesus was recognized “to be an anointing for mission which should be understood not only in a prophetic and kingly key but also in a priestly key.”Footnote 27 The early church saw the three munera as expressive of Jesus Christ's empowerment in the Holy Spirit and the ways he was empowered to mediate salvation. The church's own missionary exigence is rooted in the Jordan event: via the sacrament of water and anointing, the Spirit's dynamic action on Jesus is reiterated and replicated in believers, signifying the individual's assimilation to the messianic kingship of Christ and “into the life pattern of the Anointed One.”Footnote 28 In the council's words, “The lord Jesus ‘whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world’ (John 10, 36), gave his whole mystical body a share in the anointing of the Spirit with which he was anointed.”Footnote 29 Consistent with this understanding, Vatican II proceeded to identify baptism rather than orders or religious charism as the source of mission's mandate and agency. Lumen Gentium §10 thus asserts that baptism consecrates every Catholic to a life “of witnessing to Christ throughout this world and explaining to those who ask the hope they have of eternal life” (see 1 Pet 3, 15).Footnote 30 This call to mission is reiterated and fulfilled proleptically in the eucharistic liturgy in that it is here “the act of our redemption is being carried out,”Footnote 31 which becomes “the chief means through which believers are expressing in their lives and demonstrating to others the mystery which is Christ and the sort of entity the Church is.”Footnote 32
Taking its cue from this trinitarian framework as this is effectuated and made known through the church's liturgical celebrations, the council went on to consider specific ways the divine οικονομία patterns the church's life and work.
Mission's “What”: Its Goal and Object
In an acknowledgment that mission, far from being just another ecclesial activity, is instead what the church is in se, but also in its recognition of the church as the pilgrim people of God oriented to the kingdom, the council revisited mission's goal and object. Doing so necessitated a decisive break with a theology that had come to overemphasize or even reduce Christ's redemptive work to the salvation of individual souls. Also to be dispensed with was an otherworldly vision of the future linked to an interpretation of salvation that promoted “an escapist or pietistic attitude to life and to the world.”Footnote 33 Left behind was an eschatology that “seemed incapable of inspiring an incisive social ethics [or] a spirituality deeply involved in transforming the world.”Footnote 34 In a return to the Pauline understanding (e.g., Rom 8:19-23, Col 1:15-20) the council recast salvation in both cosmic and communal terms, which entailed “the restoration of God's creational intent for humanity and the world, including the development of culture and society through humanity's interaction with the earth.”Footnote 35 In the words of Lumen Gentium §36: “The Lord desires that his faithful laity should also extend his kingdom … in which creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.”Footnote 36
In light of the council's pastoral orientation, ecclesial mission also had to address the historical realities, the sociocultural contexts within which people reside and that determine their existence. Strikingly new here was not just Vatican II's affirmation of the world and its processes; this approach required the fathers to give studied attention to the mechanics of the world's redemption, which was informed by the European experience of modernity and insights drawn from a growing body of papal social teaching.Footnote 37 In effect, Gaudium et Spes (GS) was an elaboration of the way to future restoration of all in Christ set forth in Lumen Gentium §48–51. The former constitution examined specific situations wherein lay Catholics serve the world by utilizing their intelligence and technical expertise to ensure that human dignity is protected, the common good is promoted, and that culture's advantages are made available to all. For a new day and age, mission called all Catholics to become agents of global social change.Footnote 38
Striking too was the fact that the council conceived mission's objective in incarnational terms,Footnote 39 asserting that just as Christ did, the church must also insert and bind itself to the particular social and cultural conditions of a people.Footnote 40 In becoming man God's son was socialized into the thought forms and norms of his Jewish/Mediterranean culture. In dialogue with the sociocultural influences of his time, accepting what was good in them and rejecting that which was detrimental to human beings, Jesus constructed a self that manifested what in God's terms it meant to be fully and authentically human. Under the power of the Spirit, by his personal witness, in the loving and compassionate way he related to and interacted with all those on society's margins, not only was his gospel made credible, but by this means Jesus rewrote and transformed the regnant sociocultural norms of his contemporaries.Footnote 41 And, as the history of the Christian movement illustrates, it is precisely Christ's modus agendi, his incarnational way of being in the world, in “the concrete way of the Holy Spirit, the experienced transformative presence of God” that Christians, both as individuals and as a community, shape and guide history to its end.Footnote 42 By words and deeds that overwrite the world's values and patterns of doing things, Catholics evangelize the world and ready it for the coming kingdom. By this means, persons and things together are “saved,” that is, both are prepared for and move toward their final recapitulation in Christ.
Mission's “How”: Its Methodology
The council documents also show the assembled bishops reevaluating evangelization's methodology. In doing so they turned to the biblical notion of “witness” (testimonium [Latin], μαρτυρία [Greek]) and the related terms “vocation” (vocatus [Latin], κλῆσις = [Greek]) and “apostolate” (apostolatus = [Latin], αποστολή = [Greek]). Accordingly, Christian witness is the vocation, the call to the apostolic life received in baptism and confirmed in Eucharist; to be a witness is to be one sent to testify through a life of discipleship to the salvation that God has promised in Christ.
Witness
“Witness” is an important New Testament term because it refers specifically to personalized testimony, whether Jesus’ own, that of individuals, or of the entire Christian body that leads to faith in Christ. Biblical scholar E. G. Selwyn proposed that the term “μαρτυρέω” and its cognates are much more descriptive of the primitive and indispensable core of the Christian message than the related terms “κηρύσσω” or “ευαγγελίζομαι.”Footnote 43 His reasoning? “Μαρτυρέω” was a legal term denoting “the personal involvement and assurance of the person making the witness,” which served as its defining, qualifying element.Footnote 44
“Witness” was an important term for the council as well. Reprising the New Testament's emphasis on witness as personal and relational, Lumen Gentium §12 states that the baptized mediate God's saving love to others “when [they] render him a living witness [vivum testimonium], especially through a life of faith and charity.” Ad Gentes §11 describes mission's work as encompassing “the witness of [believers’] words [testimoni verbi]” and “the example of their lives”’ Ad Gentes §21 confirms that the chief task of the lay faithful is “to bear witness to Christ [testimonium Christi], which they are bound to render by their life and by their words, in the family, in their social group and in their professional circle.” Gaudium et Spes highlights witness’ corporate dimension by illustrating how this takes expression as an interactive dialogue between the community of believers and its context.Footnote 45 And in lieu of an evangelization centered on the exposition of doctrinal truth and disciplinary regulation, as μαρτυρία/witness, the church's primary expression and self-realization becomes incarnate in a collective praxis of relationship, the corporate witness of a dedicated, personalized regimen of agapic service of the world and its affairs.
Apostle
For biblical scholars, “απόστολος” is the NT term used to designate those sent out to bear witness to Christ and his gospel.Footnote 46 In this vein, Vatican II's Apostolicam Actuositatem (AA) §2 states that “every effort of the mystical body” to direct the whole world to Christ and to bring all to share in the saving work of redemption “is rightly called apostolate [apostolatus].” Notably, the council uses this term almost exclusively to describe the lay vocation.Footnote 47 As the very title, that is, Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity (Decretum de apostolatu laicorum) attests, lay people too are apostles and, just as clergy and religious with whom they share baptism, they too are sent to bear witness and confess Christ. Apostolicam Actuositatem §2 describes their efforts as involving “labours for evangelizing and sanctifying people”; more particularly, laity are sent to imbue the social order with the spirit of the gospel and so perfect it. According to Lumen Gentium §31, laity are apostles within secular society: Catholics whose very situatedness in the world, as world conditions their life as Christians and orients their apostolic work to the quotidian. As Congar explained, “The faithful are not so much sent to [the world] as find themselves in it and form part of it. They are simply asked to be Christians in all that they are.”Footnote 48
Vocation
Reflecting its trinitarian origins, mission is the vocation that has defined the church and its members from the outset. The Latin vocatio is the Vulgate translation of Paul's term “κλῆσις” (from καλέω, to call) and in its earliest years, “εκκλησία” (a form of καλέω) was the term by which the church was known: as “the community of those who are called,” εκκλησία was the very source of their identity and was precisely what and who the first Christians understood themselves to be.Footnote 49
On the one hand, vocation is an intimate, personal thing. It pertains to the believer's response to God's call to her and the commitment made in baptism to a life of Christian discipleship. Per the council, the Catholic's calling is made personal by virtue of the Spirit's gifts, which are unique to each.Footnote 50 But whereas in the past, this term designated the religious and clerical state, the council went out of its way to affirm that lay life in the world is no less a Christian calling. As Lumen Gentium §31 expressly states, “It is the special vocation [ex vocatione propria] of the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and ordering these in accordance with the will of God … it is here that God calls them [ibi a Deo vocantur] to work for the sanctification of the world … in this way revealing Christ to others principally through the witness of their own lives.”
But vocation is also constitutive of the church (AG §§1, 6) and is realized concretely through the agency of the local community (LG §26). Ad Gentes §6–7 notes that because God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,” “all the baptized are called upon [vocantur] to be joined together in one flock so that they may give unanimous testimony [testimonium] before the nations to Christ their Lord.” Interestingly, the council's most expansive treatment of Christian vocation and that of contemporary mission is found in its final document which is an extended exploration of the church's calling today.Footnote 51 Informed by the pastoral principle, Gaudium et Spes examines select areas of experience where vocation is lived and practiced. In classic terms, the constitution examines the church/world relation but does this in terms of the consecratio mundi, the preparation of the human and created realms for their eventual recapitulation in Christ. Consistent with the council's trinitarian starting point, Gaudium et Spes situates mission in the “now but not yet” of the kingdom, a period during which—and as a result of the Christ-event—a dramatic renewal and reordering of the cosmos has begun. As the incarnate Logos, Christ accomplished the work of the creator Logos in redeeming and liberating all creation from the slavery of sin and corruption so that it is once again capable of union with God. Until such time as God's reign is fully instituted, however, God's redeeming, saving grace is mediated via the apostolic servant witness of the women and men who form Christ's ecclesial body.
Mission's Who: The Agent
Its expanded concept of mission, its resetting of the church/world relation required the council to reconsider the evangelizer, the ecclesial “who” that enfleshes, makes real the Catholic community's missionary responsibilities. Generally speaking, the ecclesial community in its entirety is the agent of God's redemptive plan.Footnote 52 Practically, mission is the mediation of God's salvific offer to others by all the baptized of a certain place—lay, religious, and ordained—who, united in love and fellowship, regularly gather around the eucharistic table in and for worship.Footnote 53 Furthermore, as the work of local communities, mission is context bound, its outreach determined by the specifics of time and place, the demands of each local culture and its history.
Nonetheless, although mission is the local church in actu, this becomes manifest in the lived testimony and in the collaborative service of individual baptized Christians. But in this, Vatican II represented a significant shift in thinking. For centuries, mission was regarded as a task accorded clergy and religiousFootnote 54 whose object was the conversion of peoples and church planting in new lands.Footnote 55 The Council Fathers, however, unequivocally identified baptism rather than orders or religious charism as the source of mission's mandate and agency.Footnote 56 Ad Gentes §4 confirms that at this moment, the Holy Spirit instills “in the hearts of the faithful the same missionary spirit by which Christ himself was driven.”
Given baptism's newfound prominence—and the fact that the majority of baptized are lay—the council elected to examine mission's agency in Lumen Gentium's chapter 4 treating lay ecclesiality.Footnote 57 These believers are described as receiving a share in Christ's messianic agency at the font: by the Spirit's anointing, they become participants in the tria munera, Christ's threefold office of priest, prophet, and king.Footnote 58 Consecrated and set apart, “the holy people of God” whom God calls to be witnesses and who are gifted with a sense of the faith (sensus fidei) share in the prophetic role of Christ “in order that the power of the gospel may shine forth in the daily life of family and society.”Footnote 59 The royal work of the baptized consists in all those things done to prepare for God's coming reign.Footnote 60 Endowed with the Spirit's charisms and illumined by the sensus fidei, Catholic laity serve the kingdom daily not just by overcoming their own proclivity to sin; they strive to eradicate sin's effects on secular structures and cultural institutions. These efforts culminate in believers’ participation in Christ's priestly office and their offering of spiritual worship in, with, and through him at the Eucharist. Like Jesus, their priestly self-gift takes form as the prayers and the apostolic works associated with their everyday efforts that proclaim God's graced offer of salvation.Footnote 61 Indeed, every prophetic or servant work of theirs done in the Sprit becomes an acceptable sacrifice to God through Christ.
The council's use of the tria munera to identify the divinely endowed agency instrumental to engendering a missional church was one of its most important yet misunderstood insights.Footnote 62 Again, because of the figure's original association with Jesus’ own priestly, prophetic, and royal commissioning at the Jordan, the council reestablished the intrinsic link between baptism's anointing and believers’ own commissioning. And just as the munera represented the threefold dimension of Jesus’ ministry, so too the council viewed these as ways the christifideles actualize their baptismal consecration and mediate God's salvific offer to others. Thus in presenting participation in Christ's munera as constitutive and therefore definitional of lay Catholic existence and in recognizing these baptized to live in that milieu now understood to be both venue and object of the church's becoming, the Council Fathers assigned missional responsibilities directly to them.Footnote 63 As Lumen Gentium explains, laity are the church as world precisely because of their secular character, that is, their very existence is formed out of the things, events, activities of every day. Led by God's Spirit and showered with charismatic gifts, these “priests of creation” are dismissed from the eucharistic assembly and sent to transform social systems and networks, and they are sent to liberate creation from its limits by unifying the spiritual and material, opening all to the possibility of communion with God.Footnote 64
If in the past, the hierarchical church ministered to the world by creating a Christian civilization whose institutions, organizations, and laws oversaw and protected human well-being, Catholic laity were now called to help build an authentically human world from within by bringing the gospel's influence to “all the strata of humanity” so as to convert humankind's “criteria of judgement, determining values, points of interest, sources of inspiration and models of life, which are in contrast with the Word of God and the plan of salvation.”Footnote 65 And if in the past the world was simply the place where lay Catholics were called to live out their Christian vocation by doing good and avoiding evil, their vocation now takes form as a life in community that demonstrates the love and friendship Jesus himself extended to even the alien, the stranger. Inevitably, the attractiveness, the very irresistibility of this collective witness, metamorphoses into an ever-expanding worldwide community of love, fellowship, unity, and solidarity that brings fulfillment and finality to both believers and the world.
The Liturgy: Mission's Matrix and Instrument of the Council's Vision
The strongest argument for reading the Second Vatican Council through mission's lens, the argument that underscores the council's intent to reanimate and refit the church for evangelization as just described, is embedded in the liturgical reforms instituted by Sacrosanctum Concilium. As Faggioli forcefully argues, the primary lesson of this constitution is that liturgy itself, which “is the main source to which the Church needs to return in order to understand its essence and its mission.”Footnote 66 Sacrosanctum Concilium's very first words—indeed, the first words to be promulgated by the assembly itself—set forth the council's pastoral orientation and the what, how, and who of mission.Footnote 67 “For particularly cogent reasons” the council proposed to achieve its aims by “undertaking the reform and promotion of the liturgy.”Footnote 68
Peritus Godfrey Diekmann, explaining why the liturgy's reform was essential to bringing the church “into a new phase of witness and proclamation,” noted the profound influence on the council of the Liturgical Movement that occasioned the rediscovery that “the most important self-manifestation of the church is the assembly of eucharistic worship” itself.Footnote 69 As a visible reenactment and actualization of the paschal mystery in every time and place, the liturgy was “the source, the center and the summit, the going-forth of the Church's Trinitarian life, the very core of both its communion and its mission.”Footnote 70 True worship, in effect, “is the enactment of and participation in the trinitarian economy of salvation. It is the ‘upward’ movement of the church in response to the ‘downward’ movement of the Trinity.”Footnote 71 As the 1971 Synod of Bishops would affirm, “The Eucharist constitutes the church and puts it at the service of the people,” in order that “all of humanity, all peoples, and all of human history come together as one family and one communion around the Table of the Lord till the end of time.”Footnote 72
Sacrosanctum Concilium testifies to the council's rediscovery of liturgy as a primary venue of God's salvific activity and a privileged site for believers’ real encounter with Father, Son, and Spirit. At the genesis of ecclesial reality, it is the very source of Catholic identity as well as the framework within which christifideles shape their lives. As Joseph Jungmann explained, “It is above all in the liturgy that the mystery of Christ and the true picture of the church ensuing from it” become a life-giving reality for the faithful “making them better equipped to act in the world as Christians.”Footnote 73 Because “the liturgy does not merely talk about God, but manifests the assembly's graced union with the Father, through Son, in Spirit,”Footnote 74 Sacrosanctum Concilium called for restoration of the laity to “that fully conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations” (SC §14). Here is an acknowledgment that not only does the liturgy's very nature demand the conscious engagement of those present, but full and active participation in the church's worship is indeed the laity's “right and duty by reason of their baptism.”Footnote 75 Underscoring this claim, the renewed rites of initiation reflect early Christian belief that baptism's water and anointing bestow full ecclesial agency, that is, participation in Christ's own threefold office of priest, prophet, and king, receipt of the Spirit and its charismatic gifts and admission to the eucharistic assembly.Footnote 76 Restoration of the ancient catechumenate placed responsibility for Christian formation with the local eucharistic community, recognizing that it is here that the entire faithful “learn to fulfill the mission of Christ and his church” (AA §29). In principle, adult baptism was restored as the norm with emphasis placed on personal conversion and formation for Christian living rather than on instruction on doctrinal content.Footnote 77
Based on norms specified in sections 21–45, Sacrosantcum Concilium mandated changes in the Mass to enable lay Catholics “to understand the holy things which the text and rites represent and to enter into them through a celebration that is expressive of their full meaning, is effective, involving and the community's own.”Footnote 78 Simplifying and shortening the rites to make them “more lucid and intelligible”;Footnote 79 the return to the people of such ancient practices as the singing of hymns, responding to prayers, offering the gifts; removal of strictures surrounding reception of the Eucharist, but especially the prominent role accorded Scripture's reading and homiletic interpretation: these participatory acts were a means “to get across the meaning of the liturgy more explicitly.”Footnote 80
But the liturgical reforms were also central to implementing the council's mission agenda. Sacrosanctum Concilium's §37–40's call for inculturation of the rites, for example, was an important step toward advancing the Catholic community's dialogue with culture.Footnote 81 Aware that language mediates and shapes a people's thought forms and behavioral patterns, that language too is a bearer of a society's cultural values and institutions, the council pressed for use of local vernaculars for “some prayers, readings, and instructions given to the people.”Footnote 82 SC further stipulated that in renewing the rites, elements drawn from a community's “history, traditions, their cultural patterns and artistic expressions” be incorporated into the language of prayer formularies, that such even inform composition of the prayers, their proclamation, their ritual expression.Footnote 83 As a result of this refinement of its vocabularies of word and rite, the church's liturgy became paradigmatic for the encounter of faith and culture. The expectation was that once fully enacted, the council's liturgical reforms would allow believers to render, in concrete and accessible ways and in diverse cultures, “the mystery of restored communion between God in Christ by the Spirit and our world in a Spirit-filled Body, the Church of Christ.”Footnote 84
Its reforms also attest to the council's awareness of liturgy's indispensable role in forming witnesses and nurturing missionary disciples. Indeed, ritual theory substantiates Sacrosanctum Concilium §2's assertion that the liturgy “marvelously strengthens [believers’] power to preach Christ.”Footnote 85 Per theory, liturgical rites are said to depict a world as well as create one. On the one hand, they prescribe the specific behaviors, the relational patterns that enable one to negotiate a world successfully.Footnote 86 Through regular performance of the Christian rites and through the habit memory ritual inscribes in bodies,Footnote 87 individuals reenact the world as redeemed in Christ, they enter into and discover here who they are as ecclesial persons; moreover, they learn “how it is to live in this world” through exercise of the priestly, prophetic, and royal agency baptism bestows. More exactly, their bodies learn to enact the Christ-like behaviors essential to being “the people of God”: By way of the liturgy's ritual acts, for example, hearing God's Word, tasting and sharing bread and wine together, seeing the poor through the eyes of Christ via material offerings, smelling incense rising in prayerful gratitude, a person experiences the tangible moments the liturgy provides for God's Spirit “to rest on” and inspirit Catholic bodies for a lived and living witness. Precisely by means of the embodied sensate knowing ritual makes possible, believers are moved to perform the very deeds that are sign and witness of God's own parental concern. Furthermore, by means of ritual's reorganization of their bodily behavior, the christifideles come away with a deeper sense of their own vocation and their unique call to the missionary apostolate.
If, however, “a liturgy of Christians is nothing less than the way a redeemed world is, so to speak, done,”Footnote 88 it is also true that the mode of being in the world the liturgy shapes and nurtures, what Theobald calls “style of life,” likewise engenders a mode of being world. The bonds of love and fellowship with which the Spirit gifts the eucharistic communion reveal not only what is possible for life in community, but they embody what it ought to be. A new world too, certainly a new way of being world, is born via the witness of believers whose liturgically formed attitudes and behaviors become messianic signs disclosing “the true meaning of human life and the bond that unites all humankind” (AG §11). Through “a specific process of encounters and mutual relations,” relations that even though drawn from the everyday business of politics, the economy, technology become sacramental insofar as they are made instantiations of gospel teaching and exemplify life as lived under God's rule. Sent to transform society by healing its systems, sent to free creation from sin's disfigurement and ensure that its bounteous gifts are shared by all, the lay baptized live their Christian vocation in exercising their missionary agency.
The Conciliar Vision Waylaid: The US Church as Case in Point
Yet as Nicholas Lash argued, the state of the liturgy is also “the first and fundamental test of the extent to which the program, not merely of the decree Sacrosanctum Concilium, but of all the council's constitutions and decrees, is being achieved.”Footnote 89 While Vatican II's missionary manifesto and its pastoral agenda was received and sedimented within the revised rites, this vision—despite repeated efforts to reverse the liturgical reforms—continues to this day to inform and nourish Catholic life via parish liturgical celebrations. That said, the hierarchy's subsequent failure to implement the conciliar project properly and fully, highlights the breach created between Christ's call to discipleship and the inspirited gifts for mission the liturgy engenders and the absence of the ecclesial ministries and institutional supports needed to develop and foster lay Catholics’ baptismal agency. This absence impedes the liturgy's thrust to bring together “all of humanity, all peoples and all of human history” as “one family and one communion around the Table of the Lord until the end of time.”Footnote 90 In short, it prevents the Roman church from becoming the missionary community the council intended and the one Pope Francis now strives to re-create.
Over time, aside from periodic calls for a “new evangelization,”Footnote 91 current practice suggests that mission is again viewed functionally, a vocation of the few rather than the gospel style of life to which baptism consecrates and inducts all.Footnote 92 Remarkable too is that despite the appearance of magisterial documents such as Christifideles Laici (1988), Redemptoris Missio (1990), and Sacramentum Caritatis (2007), which exhibit a strong missionary concern while emphasizing the liturgy's social and ethical implications, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI nevertheless oversaw efforts to reverse the liturgical reforms the council believed fundamental to mission's engagement.Footnote 93 The question is, how exactly did the council's intentions and its expectations go awry?
The American Context: Background and Pastoral Challenge
Apart from implementing the liturgical reforms per Rome's timetable, the council's project to create a mission-centered church commanded neither the urgency nor thoughtful attention it demanded in the years following the US bishops’ return from Rome. One explanation is that until 1908, the United States was a declared mission territory; this had long been the operative mindset and faith's dialogue with America's culture had advanced. This church had been built and overseen by émigré clergy who had to deal with the discrimination and injustices confronted by a growing, culturally diverse, and largely uneducated immigrant laity. In conjunction with religious orders of women and men imported from Europe, the US hierarchy established an extensive network of schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other charitable organizations to provide for the Catholic community's needs. In 1919, the bishops created the National Catholic Welfare Conference to be the church's public voice articulating Catholic teaching on the sociopolitical issues of the day. Given this history, there seemed no immediate need to involve laity in society's care or give them a responsibility for the moral direction of their individualistic, freedom-loving culture. For their part, laity were accustomed to viewing social ministry as belonging to clergy and religious, an outlook that has consistently “deterred lay initiative and participation.”Footnote 94
Another obstacle to lay engagement with the world was Vatican II's call to religious congregations to reassess their founding charism and vocation with the result that large numbers of clergy and religious left their ministries to enter the public arena. According to one observer, no group of US Catholics “took more seriously Vatican II's emphasis on the Church serving the world … than religious orders of women and men.”Footnote 95 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, priests, brothers, and nuns engaged in civil disobedience, marching in support of civil rights or protesting the Vietnam War. With episcopal support, they got involved in public advocacy, organizing peace and justice centers for developing policy and lobbying for legislation implementing radical social change. But as these Catholics sought “to impose their own agendas on the laity,” this intrusion into what the council declared to be the laity's sphere of activity did not escape criticism.Footnote 96 Monsignor George Higgins, council peritus and “perhaps the best known proponent of Catholic social action in the United States,” charged them with being “too enthralled with marches and demonstrations” and “too moralizing and quick to make prophetic denunciations” while ignoring the complexity of moral issues and thus the need for long-term education and structural reform.Footnote 97 Laity too criticized the willingness of so many priests and nuns to bypass their ecclesial commitments to pursue social causes. Their 1977 statement, “The Chicago Declaration of Christian Concern,” contested the clergy's acting “as if the primary responsibility in the Church for uprooting injustice, ending wars and defending human rights rested with them as ordained ministers,”Footnote 98 arguing that “the Good News calling for peace, justice and freedom need to be mediated through the prism of lay experience, political wisdom and technical expertise.”Footnote 99 This refutation indicates that barely a decade after its close, one of Vatican II's most significant achievements, its teaching on the laity, “seems to have all but vanished from the consciousness and agendas of many sectors within the Church.”Footnote 100
In the final analysis, however, America's bishops’ inability to create a mission-driven church must be attributed to their signal failure to read the liturgy as a locus theologicus. This resulted in their inability to discern, to appreciate, and to appropriate the council's deepened insight into mission, its object, its methodology, and the inspirited agency conveyed by baptism's anointing—all embodied in the reformed rites and mediated via their continued celebration by the local church. As a consequence, these pastors were unable to translate the council's mission agenda into an effective acculturated praxis for evangelizing the American context. In particular, they were unable to resolve the disjunction between the renewed liturgy's graced intuitions and US Catholics’ capacity to fashion a servant witness responsive to their times that was a pastoral imperative. The fact is, the impetus to mission that the liturgy implants in believers—because it is an embodied, sensate knowing—does not translate immediately or directly into the reflective, complex acts of diakonia that contemporary mission demands. To this point, recent surveys of the belief and practices of US Catholics regularly attest: although laity instinctively know that helping the poor is essential to being Catholic (in 2011, this was second in importance only to belief in Jesus’ resurrection),Footnote 101 they just as consistently think “church involvement with activities directed to social justice” is not their concern.Footnote 102 According to a 2017 survey, few laity “are even familiar with Catholic social teaching” and on contested social and political issues, “personal opinion is typically more influential” for decision-making than church teaching.Footnote 103 At bottom, respondents did not view their parishes as responsible for “remedying society's ills”; neither did they put this at the forefront of “why they are religious and participate at church.”Footnote 104
Yet the clergy's ministerial service on behalf of this new iteration of mission, the servant leadership (Christus Dominus §16; see Luke 22:26-27) required to enable lay evangelization of the secular was precisely the pastoral challenge Vatican II presented to US bishops and pastors. As council documents explained, because a society's structures are permeated by sin, because they are a source of human oppression and suffering, of discrimination and exclusion, sociocultural realities become both mission's object and the very medium and material of Christian witness. In practice, whether as public official, information technology expert, educator, or simply voter, baptism mandates American laity to use their education and expertise to cultivate a cultural milieu protective of creation, of human life and dignity. Per Lumen Gentium, their apostolic vocation is not limited to beatitudinal works of charity; precisely as lay, they are directly called “to make the church present and active in those places and circumstances where only through them can it become the salt of the earth” (33). For US Catholics, discipleship is to be lived through complex decisions about the expenditure of personal and public funds; in designing policies that provide a safety net for those disadvantaged by capitalist markets; in pressing for reforms of discriminatory penal systems; in life practices that protect the environment. And, insofar as evangelization includes bringing “the Good News to all the strata of humanity” to convert “both the personal and collective consciences of people,” Vatican II opened the way to the creation of new ministries and other ecclesial entities necessary to help the local church bring to fruition what celebration of the renewed rites initiates.Footnote 105 These innovative forms were to assist believers to convert what occurs in and through the liturgy of the altar into a liturgy of the every day that takes form as the “eschatological public activity of those who at all times and in all places stand ‘before the face of God’ and from this position … make the everyday round of so-called secular life into the arena of the unlimited and unceasing glorification of the divine will.”Footnote 106
The Council on Bishops’ Pastoral Responsibility to Implement an “Integrated and Many-Sided Formation” and to Provide the Institutional Supports Leading to the Everyday Application of Baptism's Tria Munera
To effect this conversion of the liturgy of the altar into the liturgy of the every day, the Council Fathers set out principles for rendering the baptismal, missional consciousness of believers into concrete acts of Christian service. Because this begins with an informed participation in the liturgy that is “the source from which believers can imbibe the true Christian spirit,” Sacrosanctum Concilium §14 states that those responsible for pastoral care must themselves be “thoroughly immersed in the spirit and power of the liturgy,” that therefore a priority must be “the liturgical formation of the clergy.” Although Christus Dominus (CD) §12–14 proceeded to emphasize bishops’ teaching responsibilities, their role in forming mature Christians, and their pastoral duty “to make people's faith, enlightened by doctrine, a living faith, explicit and active,”Footnote 107 Apostolicam Actuositatem made these obligations explicit by delineating the fundamentals of a missionary catechesis. Pastors must provide church members with “an integrated and many-sided formation” (AA §28), one considerate of an individual's age, circumstances, and talents as well as “the conditions in which people live, not only spiritual and moral but also social, demographic, and economic” (CD §17). Rooted in active participation in the sacramental liturgies, especially the Eucharist wherein charity, “the soul of the whole apostolate … is imparted to them and nourished” (AA §3)Footnote 108 and in conjunction with an “instruction in sound doctrine,” laypeople must learn “to see, judge, and act in all things in the light of faith, so as to form and perfect themselves, with others and so enter into effective service of the church” (AA §29).
Because lay witness is “exercised in all circumstances and in every sector of life” (AA §30), formation takes “its distinguishing mark from the secularity proper to the lay state and the spirituality belonging to it” (AA §29). Believers therefore must be “taught the true meaning and value of temporal goods,” become practiced in the right use of things and be concerned for the common good in accord with the principles of the church's moral and social doctrine (AA §31). The council regarded such training essential because lay mission requires more than taking the prophetic stance, something the magisterium does when, publicly challenging cultural norms, it proclaims the vision, motivation, and norms for Christian action. Lay mission's uniqueness, however, lies in its direct engagement with those very contexts disfigured by sin, where implantation of faith's normative vision requires discernment and skill at making prudential judgments that result from dialogue, negotiation, coalition building, and the compromises leading to social reform.Footnote 109 To this end, Gaudium et Spes identified specific areas about which laypeople must be able to think and act in the language and categories of Catholic social ethics in their everyday encounters. Thus, as Christ's disciples illumined by conscience and the sensus fidei, Vatican II charged the lay church with “healing and ennobling the dignity of the human person, strengthening the fabric of human society and investing the daily activity of men and women with a deeper sense and significance” (GS §40). Spiritually formed by the liturgy, informed by a missionary catechesis to act as the Body of Christ for the world, Christ's faithful will be prepared to “completely and actively insert themselves into the reality of the temporal order and effectively play their part in its affairs while, at the same time, making for an effective presence as living members and witnesses of the church at the heart of temporal things” (AA §29).
US Bishops’ Failure to Implement Council Directives on Forming Adult Christians
History shows that the American hierarchy did not adhere to the council's schema for forming missionary disciples. While the US church had success in implementing the RCIA'S catechumenate process for those coming into the church, the bishops disregarded the council's insistence that an integral formation for mission must be an ongoing, lifelong, adult-oriented process. For example, the detailed guidelines implementing council teaching set out in the General Catechetical Directory (1971) state that “catechesis for adults, since it deals with persons who are capable of an adherence that is fully responsible, must be considered the chief form of catechesis. All the other forms, which are indeed always necessary, are in some way oriented to it” (20).Footnote 110 The Directory's original US adaptation, Sharing the Light of Faith (1977) made the same point: “While aiming to enrich the faith life of individuals at their particular stage of development, every form of catechesis is oriented in some way to the catechesis of adults who are capable of a full response to God's word” (32).Footnote 111 Despite these clear programmatic statements, adult formation proved secondary to the US bishops’ concerns for the growth and maintenance of the impressive system of parochial schools, colleges, and universities devoted to the Catholic education of children through young adulthood that was a major achievement of their immigrant church. Even in the immediate postconciliar years, the prime objective of parish religious education programs was the sacramental preparation of the burgeoning numbers of children unable to enroll in Catholic schools. In summarizing late-twentieth-century efforts at “passing on the faith,” Peter Steinfels concluded that for the American church “adult education has never been the Catholic style” because “the idea that learning, reflecting, discussion is a major pillar of adult discipleship, along with prayer and service, simply hasn't registered” with the result that “religious education remains child-centered.”Footnote 112 In 2003, catechetical scholar Jane Regan conceded “few have heeded the 30-year-old call for adult faith formation” in part because “no one has been too sure why adult faith formation is so important.”Footnote 113
Even in those dioceses where adult formation was tried, such programs tended to be informational and remedial and were divorced from the faithful's worship experience.Footnote 114 Whether taking form as lectures, workshops, or classes, these simply replicated the “schooling model,” making adult formation an instruction “in propositions of the tradition that [believers] did not receive or have forgotten from their last experiences of formal religious education.”Footnote 115 Despite educators’ recurrent efforts to present faith as a matter of one's personal encounter with Christ (fides qua) over faith as simply beliefs about him (fides quae), sociologist James Davidson noted the US church's emphasis on religious literacy, and its dedication to the school model has underpinned “much of what takes place in religious education.”Footnote 116 The operative assumption that right belief naturally and implicitly leads to right action not only provides “the framework within which a great deal of social ministry takes place,” but even now remains “the bedrock of most weekend homilies and a great deal of pastoral counseling.”Footnote 117
This pedagogy, however, falls far short of the mystagogical formation the council intended, the exemplification of which was fleshed out as the “Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults,” a marriage of liturgical rite, communal reflection, and practical action.Footnote 118 Reliance on the school model also stood in the way of bishops learning from those formation practices already known to the American church. There was much to be appropriated from the lay movements that sprang up throughout US dioceses in the 1930s through the 1950s. Groups such as the Catholic Worker, the Grail, Young Christian Workers, the Christian Family Movement, and Opus Dei brought a new sense of mission to an increasingly educated laity, products of Catholic educational institutions, who struggled “to merge social consciousness with the life of faith.”Footnote 119 Driven to address dehumanizing working conditions, the situation of the poor and homeless, and racial and ethnic injustice, these Catholics sought to create “a new social order penetrated by a spirit of the gospels.”Footnote 120 More importantly, these movements took their spiritual sustenance from “the life of the church and the traditional spiritual disciplines such as liturgy, meditation on scripture, and personal prayer.”Footnote 121 And with the support and encouragement of their clerical chaplains, these intimate para-liturgical gatherings gave lay Catholics regular opportunities to examine together their beliefs and everyday experiences. Furthermore, out of this dialectic of prayerful reflection and lived witness, these laity carved a spiritual path that was not only biblically and liturgically grounded, but they also defined a spirituality that was authentically lay and secular.
Ironically, the lay movements’ approach to adult formation could have readily been replicated if bishops had followed through with the establishment of the synods and councils per Vatican II's recommendations (LG §37, CD §27, AA §26). These too were to be ecclesial spaces where in accord with “the knowledge, competence, or authority they possess,” in accord with “their right and duty to make known their opinion on matters which concern the good of the church,” laity could contribute to the planning and organizing and so share responsibility for the life of the local church and its mission. These would also have been opportunities for the prayerful collaboration of those learned in Scripture and Catholic social norms and those having expertise in the real-life situations, out of whose fraternal exchange ideas would emerge for meaningful Catholic social action. Unlike similar bodies proposed and later mandated by canon law, however, both the diocesan and parish pastoral council were left optional, their US implementation entirely dependent on the predilections of individual bishops and pastors. Ultimately, Vatican II's proposal to create institutional spaces wherein laypeople had a deliberative voice and vote subsequently “met with resolute resistance” from Rome.Footnote 122 In the words of Massimo Faggioli, “The twentieth century struggle to rediscover the ancient, patristic conciliar and synodal tradition in the Church seems to have had a short life.”Footnote 123
Perhaps the most important resource for creating a missionary church that America's bishops failed to utilize was an increasingly enculturated Catholic laity whose interest, enthusiasm, and anticipation of change had been generated by media coverage of the conciliar debates. Moreover, the postconciliar experience of worshiping according to the renewed rites had awakened in many laity a new sense of being church, an awareness that they too were called to a life of holiness and vocation.Footnote 124 This, combined with the social and political turbulence of mid-century America, underlay the readiness to engage that typified lay response to the Call to Action assembly held in Detroit in 1976. Convened by the bishops, this bicentennial project entitled “Liberty and Justice for All” aimed at instituting an intra-church dialogue “to clarify and specify the implications for the church in the United States of a social ministry at the service of the justice of God.”Footnote 125 During the two years of preparatory hearings held in dioceses and parishes nationwide, bishops listened as thousands of laypeople described their experiences of injustice; heard for a first time in these public settings were Hispanic, Black, and Native American Catholic voices recounting the inequities they regularly confronted.Footnote 126
Remarkably, throughout both the regional listening sessions and Detroit's deliberations, lay Catholics repeatedly called on their bishops to provide the pastoral innovations that council documents beginning with Sacrosanctum Concilium had identified as essential to underwriting the mission to the secular. During the initial consultations, in fact, the majority of lay suggestions had to do with the need for an adult formation “appropriate to the needs and concerns of the total church and the people involved”; especially desired were “constructive programs relevant to racial, ethnic and cultural concerns.”Footnote 127 At Detroit too laity stressed the need for “building church communities of character by forming individuals through the sacraments and religious education in ‘the gospel,’ in the teachings of the church, in spirituality and in the Christian moral life.”Footnote 128
But no less critical for laity was the establishment of various forums to continue the kind of dialogue and collaboration between clergy and laity such as they had experienced during Call to Action. Indeed, one of Detroit's final recommendations called for implementation of a “process of listening, responding, implementing” that would become a regular part of US Catholic life to initiate, encourage, and enable “pastoral programs relating the ministry of the church to the broader community, the nation and the world.”Footnote 129 Such meetings were described as being significant opportunities to build trust between “the bishop and the people, the pastor and the people, and the powerful and the powerless.”Footnote 130
In the end, history shows that these lay requests went unheeded, Detroit's work was dismissed, even forgotten, and as Vatican II receded into the past, disillusionment set in up and down the American church. This is not to say that the council had no lasting impact. Many laity found opportunities to fulfill their baptismal calling through service on diocesan peace and justice commissions and religious education committees; some worked through existing parish organizations like the Council of Catholic Women and the Knights of Columbus to update and broaden their agendas; some participated in local ecumenical groups whose focus was charity or advocacy for justice. And of course, council teaching opened the door for lay ministry within the church, upon whose flourishing the US Catholic community now utterly depends.Footnote 131 And as lay movements like Communion and Liberation, Focolare, and Cursillo gained a foothold, these too provided opportunities for lay spiritual formation and witness. Nevertheless, observing what appeared to be a growing apathy and lax practice of many postconciliar Catholics, conservative elements were quick to attribute this to Vatican II's liturgical reforms and so pushed to minimize or repeal them outright; persistent efforts were made to restore the Latin Mass and to redefine actuosa participatio in terms of personal interiority.Footnote 132
Both publication of the universal catechism in 1997 and John Paul II's advocacy for memory learning, which influenced the Vatican's 1997 revision of the General Catechetical Directory, signaled a shift away from the conciliar idea of faith formation as a layered, lifelong process and a return to a more traditional view of faith as assent and a matter of religious literacy. For most US Catholics today, faith formation takes form as brief, ill-prepared Sunday homilies; church teaching on social questions appears in documents issued by the bishops’ state and national conferences, whose true aim is legislation, which are then distributed to pastors for parishioners’ instruction.Footnote 133 These rarely read texts adopt a “one size fits all” pedagogy, give no consideration to the different “age, conditions, talents” or the laity's cultural diversity as recommended by Apostolicam Actuoasitatem. Footnote 134 They fail as an instruction in helping laity “to see, act, judge,” and evaluate complex political and economic problems in the gospel's light or, more importantly, to do the kind of critical analysis that leads to social reform. On the other hand, this approach suits the current hierarchy well, many of whom seem convinced that the lay role is not to think or discern regarding complex social and public policy agendas but simply to sentire cum ecclesia by following episcopal teaching.
In the late 1990s with the approach of a new millennium, the American hierarchy had to confront the deleterious consequences their neglect of adult formation had had. Observing that “many Catholics seem ‘lukewarm’ in faith (cf. Rev 3:14ff) or have a limited understanding of what the Church believes, teaches, and lives” (35), that growing numbers had left the church for “other non-denominational, evangelical, or fundamentalist communities” (36), the bishops’ issued Our Hearts Were Burning Within Us, a pastoral plan placing adult faith formation at the forefront “of our catechetical vision and practice” (6).Footnote 135 Yet despite the frank assessment that “a substantial change in emphasis and priorities” was critical to forging “a more balanced and mature catechetical ministry” (14), some twenty years later, surveys show that this teaching effort was completely ineffectual. American Catholics continue to know less and less about their faith or even why they are Catholic rather than simply Christian.Footnote 136 Lay exodus from the church continues apace, and of great concern is that participation in the church's liturgical life continues to decline among those Catholics who do remain. The great tragedy is that while the ideal of a church on fire for Christ's gospel burns strong within the liturgy, absence of an “integrated and many-sided faith formation” (AA 28) and the servant leaders dedicated to creating communities of missionary disciples leaves the US church bereft of any real missionary zeal.
Conclusion
This article argues that when read through the optic of mission, the Second Vatican Council's intent to refit the church for its work of evangelization becomes clear. Informing the council's deliberations, John XXIII's pastoral strategy brought new insight into mission's goal and object and its methodology; but especially important was retrieval of the ancient church's belief that mission's agency was bestowed through the water and anointing of baptism. Because the council's approach to the church was more inductive than deductive, more ministerial than academic, this caused “a profound reorientation of ecclesiology.”Footnote 137 At the very center of the conciliar vision was “the entire People of God as actively and responsively constituting the Church,” their baptismal consecration conferring on the laity “full worshiping and teaching and ruling rights according to rank in ‘the chosen race, the royal priesthood ’” (1 Pet 2:9), they were a holy people called to exercise their baptismal agency on behalf of the gospel's spread.Footnote 138 Emphasis newly placed on the local assembly was also revolutionary in that attention to those gathered around the parish altar underscored that “the church's pre-eminent manifestation or realization” occurs here, that mission itself begins with evangelizers formed by the liturgy and whose immediate context, defined by local sociocultural traditions and circumstances, pastoral outreach must address.Footnote 139
In retrospect, the council did not anticipate how return to this biblical, trinitarian, eschatological understanding of mission would lead to the reanimation of a lay-centered, baptismal church, yet this church was exactly what the conciliar deliberations ushered into being. Neither did the assembly anticipate the degree to which changes to the church's rites would effect a substantial resocializing and reconstruction of the ecclesial body.Footnote 140 Diekmann remarked at the time that if fully implemented, Sacrosanctum Concilium's reforms would “most radically affect the future polity and life of the Church by its honest effort to restore full responsible citizenship to the layman.”Footnote 141 Certainly, reform of the rites reconfigured the bodily moves and physical placement of the baptized in such a way as to convey to laity that they were full ecclesial persons and so revealed the church's worship to be the co-offering of presider and people together rather than something done by the presider on the laity's behalf. Via the rite's prescribed words and physical moves, presider and people now faced each other during the eucharistic liturgy and all experienced themselves to be “in the deepest sense ‘priests’ and ‘ministers.’”Footnote 142 And sent forth at Mass’ end to “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord,”Footnote 143 “all the faithful as members of one body, knew themselves to stand “under Christ's command to preach the gospel to every creature.”Footnote 144 In effect, “the traditional lex credendi—the law of belief about the nature of the church, a law that Prosper of Aquitaine recognized as being so profoundly shaped by ritual experience—had been powerfully reshaped by a new lex orandi,”Footnote 145 a law whose priority was the incarnation of Christ's own mission of love and service bringing all things to final recapitulation in him.
Yet while this imaginary of a missionary people continues to be remembered and celebrated liturgically in parishes across the world, as the US experience shows, the hierarchy never managed to complete what the liturgical renewal began. As a result, the Second Vatican Council lives on today in the American church more as the object of study than it does as a pastoral vision realized. Responsibility for this lies squarely with the clergy's continued resistance in accepting the lay baptized as full ecclesial persons no less called and consecrated to God's service than they; it stems from their egregious failure as pastors to put in place the conciliar principles for forming disciples as outlined in Apostolicam Actuositatem as well as the institutional means permitting Catholic laity to become what their liturgical experience attests them to be. Instead, the clergy's lack of understanding, even fear of an active and engaged lay church as evidenced by the US bishops’ response to the 1976 Call to Action led church leaders to disregard the pastoral obligations that the council handed them. But Catholic theologians too have been complicit by allowing their academic interests to supersede their own ecclesial responsibilities. They have failed to help the church translate Vatican II's vision into an effective mission praxis, opting instead to make the council and its work objects for recurring study. Most surprising has been theologians’ neglect of pneumatology and a studied attention to the Spirit's historical processio, especially as this manifests itself as an ecclésiologie vecue, that is, as a pastoral church realized, enculturated and become operative via the ad intra servant ministries that nurture and prepare local communities to become Christ's servant body in and for the world.
The conclusion here is that only by a critical reappropriation and implementation of its declared aims, only when Vatican II's missionary vision committed to its rites is allowed to take flesh instead of remaining imprisoned in its documents, can the Catholic Church halt its descent into that Valley of the Dead Bones about which Ezekiel spoke so graphically. The whole church must willingly listen and rehear the voice of God's Spirit as it spoke through the council and learn again that only when the entirety of Christ's ecclesial body lives its call to be a true lumen gentium can the human community come to know the personal living God; only then will these words of the prophet ring true: “The nations shall know that I am the Lord when in their sight I display my holiness through you” (Ezek 36:22 NRSV).
