My sentiments exactly. Sometimes it feels as if one is beating one’s head against a brick wall when some people refuse to see that what happens in a certain parish or diocese is not necessarily the norm for the universal Church.
Because the Church in the United States has never been intricately bound up with the state like it has in most of Europe and South America, it is hard for Americans to understand the relationship between the Church, the state and the common people. Even here in Canada. most Catholics who do not live in the Province of Quebec. where, until the not so distant past, the Church literally controlled the lives of the citizens, have difficulty understanding how the memory of that past has had great ramifications for the Catholic Church and the faithful in Quebec today.
You’re perfectly right.
Another precision.
Still in the 60’, catholicism was a real part of the French national identity. In France, you could hear the words “Catholic and French for ever”, as a motto of ordinary citizen who where not even catholic in some case! Even now, some French people, who are themselves proclaimed atheists, are still asking the Church to baptize their children or to marry them… just because in France, it’s like that (I have good exemples in my own family)!
After Vatican II many French people (and not only “the integrist”) felt as if something of their own identity was “stolen” or “disapearing”. I suppose (I may be wrong) that it would be almost impossible for an American, Japanese or even African catholic to understand the real meaning of catholicism as a part of one’s own national identity. For so many people I knew when I was a little boy (even people who went to the church once a year, or even people who never went to the church at all) the word “French” was quasi equivalent to the word “catholic”.
It will be easy to undestand then, that the identification of the “collapse of catholicism” whith Vatican II was made easier because at the same time occurred an identification of the “collapse of the national identity” with such event as “may 1968”, the massive importation of immigrants, the real collapse of the old and traditional agrarian society, the lost of civic values, the emergence of new “super powers” (think at the way most French people think of American as a menace for their culture, in private now…), etc.
In other countries, it would be quite interesting to study why exacly people began to refuse Vatican II. Abuses could not be the only reason. An anecdote is only an anecdote and not a proof.
So, we have now set for a long journey in our collective memory, in history books, etc. if we whant to understand our present.
At least, nevertheless, we can consider that a common explanation, the simpliest one, is that many people with no particular ideology and with no particular theological education felt that something of their faith was betrayed by the new liturgical, theological and pastoral abuses. Then, as we are now, and because the implementation of the decision of Vatican II was made in some places, for different reasons and with different results, with flagrant abuses, with such great irresponsability, with almost no consideration for the feelings of some catholics and with the instant reflex of “excluding” anyone who would say something against these abuses, we are in the following situation: instead of having one undisputed and catholic form of the mass (the Novus Ordo of Paul VI with the Tradition in the respect of Vatican II), we have now two forms: EF and OF.
Bravo!
Without speaking, at least in the case of my country, of the hundreds of priests and monks, of the thousand of lay people and of people with sympathetic feeling towards the Church who disappeared without a word.
For exemple: where has gone the catholic intellectual and clerical world so active in Paris until the begining of the 70’. Where all these people have gone?
Virgile.
