A thought experiment: there were no Vatican ll reforms. What is the state of the Church in the Anglophone world in 2018?

[SuscipeMeDomine]

I hate to derail t the thread by returning to the OP…

But if Vatican II hadn’t happened we wouldn’t have the RCIA at all. People would be limited to the “convert classes” that were once common. Even if RCIA isn’t fully implemented (or implemented well) in many parishes, the idea behind it is outstanding.

We wouldn’t have the Liturgy of the Hours designed for lay people to participate. For those of us whose lives are enriched by this form of prayer, Vatican II was a real blessing.

We wouldn’t have the universal call to holiness that Vatican II called for.

And someone like @(name removed by moderator) will have to say for sure, but I believe we wouldn’t have permanent deacons and all the blessings they bring to parishes.

 

[PetraG]

I agree with you about WWI and WWII, but am not following your comment about JFK. What does electing a Catholic president have to do with the ecumenism of the Popes?

I mean that the election of JFK showed that American Catholics were assimilating and being allowed to assimilate with American Protestants. With or without Vatican II, Catholics were going to have closer relations to non-Catholic neighbors, they were going to have greater membership in non-Catholic organizations, they were going to marry non-Catholics in greater numbers and so on. The Church and the leaders of other denominations had to decide how to handle that. If what they mainly did was fight with each other while their “less religious” groups of laypersons got along rather handsomely by comparison, it would have mainly raised cynicism about religion in general.

With or without Vatican II, there were going to be movements within the Church that came from the laity. Our society was running from one fad to the next like chickens with their heads cut off, and I really don’t believe that not having Vatican II convene was going to totally prevent that. Based on comparison with the Orthodox, however, I agree that we probably would have seen a greater loss in numbers but fewer liturgical abuses and fewer people sticking around because they could have a fling in a “new church” without ever formally leaving the Catholic Church. They just had to shop around for a parish with a priest taking a fling into the fads or find a Catholic Bible study group that was going to integrate whatever thing they were into, and they were good to go.