What were the post-Vatican II changes like to live through?

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HomeschoolDad

HomeschoolDad

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For those here who are old enough to remember…

What was it like to be a Catholic from the period from 1965 (end of the Second Vatican Council) to the mid-1970s?

I am more curious as to how the changes in the Mass were received (the promulgation of the Novus Ordo Missae in 1969 as well as the incremental changes from 1962 to 1969), but I am also interested in the immediate reaction of the faithful (not necessarily the media) to Humanae vitae in 1968.

I was first exposed to Catholicism in 1974. In the parish that was later to become my home (and this was a fairly conservative diocese liturgically and theologically), you would have had no idea that a Latin Mass ever even existed. I asked several people about this and pretty much got the brush-off, as though I had asked about something taboo. In a neighboring parish (in the next diocese), as far as I recall, the priest said the New Mass but ad orientem (facing the altar) and he rushed through it so fast that with his ethnic accent, I thought it was Latin at first.

I remember, of all things, the Catholic high school yearbooks in the school archive. From 1968 to 1969, it was as though someone had thrown a switch. The entire emphasis was changed. Let’s just say that it was as dramatic as, for instance, the difference between the SSPX and the Paulist Fathers in the present day. It just looked and felt very, very different, and it stayed this way. Whatever happened seemed to have happened quickly.

I wasn’t there. I don’t know what it was like. I just got in for the last quarter, so to speak.

Can anyone share their thoughts?
 
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My folks experienced it. They said that with the Latin Mass, they could barely understand much of it because they did not speak Latin and could not hear the priest for a significant portion of the Mass.

When I asked them if they’d like to attend a TLM nearby, they declined. They said that they prefer the NO, although they don’t like priests who ramble on in lengthy homilies or make changes to the rubric, choirs that use songs that they don’t recognize and that sing to perform (like doing solos and using fancy instruments) rather than to guide the congregation, and the regular Sunday Mass used for other purposes (like installation of lay ministers, which should take place in a separate Mass for them and their loved ones).

Finally, in my case, I started going to Mass after Vatican II, and the closest thing I experienced concerning the Mass before that was kneeling on a communion rail in the school chapel. We were also reminded of purgatory and hell.
 
I was there before Vatican II. We went to Church every week as a class. The St. Joseph’s missal was available. The Latin and English were right next to each other. Everyone understood everything. We knelt at the Communion rail.
 
edwest211 said:
I was there before Vatican II. We went to Church every week as a class. The St. Joseph’s missal was available. The Latin and English were right next to each other. Everyone understood everything. We knelt at the Communion rail.
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Thank you for your good response. People of your age cohort are precisely whom I’m seeking out for answers. Do you have any other general observations about that time period in the Church?

I do remember when communion in the hand and lay eucharistic ministers were introduced. As I remember it, any “pushback” or disagreement were dismissed as being “dissident”. People were told, in so many words, “this is the new way we’re going to do it, and that is simply that”.
 
I have wondered this same thing. Thanks for asking this question. Was it a gradual change or a flip of the switch? One Sunday the priest was facing east and speaking Latin and another Sunday he was facing the people in the vernacular? When did the music change? What happened to the old regalia?
 
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I was a really little child when the post-Vatican II changes began to happen. I have very vague, early memories when I was a preschooler of the priests saying a form of Mass that was somewhere between TLM and OF (some parts in English and some in Latin) while facing ad orientem.

I also remember my very first ever guitar Mass; it was at an airport chapel that closed in the last 10 years, and we were on our way to fly to visit my grandma (a very big deal then, most people couldn’t afford to fly and we weren’t well off at all, and had to save up for this big event each year) and my parents only went to this Mass because it was the only one we could get to for Sunday and still make our flight, and my mom would have preferred to skip it, but I thought it was great. I danced to the guitar songs and pretended to strum a guitar on the back of the plastic chairs. I was about 5 at the time. Within the next two years, they started having a guitar Mass at our parish church and also the church was renovated and a giant sparkle-painted Risen Jesus two stories tall was put behind the altar; the saint statue that had been there was moved and I think there was a high altar that was dismantled.

When I went to first grade at Catholic school, I had a sister for a teacher and my mother took one look at her and disliked her on sight because she wore short skirts and high boots and didn’t look like a sister at all. I myself was weirded out by the textbook used for our first grade religious lessons, because not only was the art in it super-primitive compared to the many children’s books about Jesus and Bible figures that I already had at home, but it also had almost no words (I could already read, which I didn’t realize was unusual) and worst of all Jesus in it did not have a beard or long hair and I, at age 6, had a really difficult time accepting a weird looking Jesus. He looked much like the picture the BBC has been promulgating of “what Jesus really looked like.”

I also remember my mother taking me to see the older kids do a May crowning when I was 5 and I thought when I got older maybe I could crown the Mary statue, but that was the last May crowning I saw anywhere for about the next 30 years. Apparently they went out of fashion. I never did get to crown the Mary statue 😦

(continued next post due to char limits)
 
HomeschoolDad said:
this is the new way we’re going to do it, and that is simply that”.
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I would say it is not different today for restorationist priests… at our parish, the pastor has imposed several major changes - altar rail, additional prayers before and after the mass, statues, statues,
statues… and he won’t take any feedback from the parishioners.

This is the way we’re gong to do it … like it or not.
 
(continued)

The first time I got communion in the hand was on a visit to Canada, they weren’t doing it in USA yet, and I didn’t realize you had to consume Jesus right there and I took him back to my seat and consumed him there, and all heck almost broke loose. I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was receiving in your hand as opposed to your tongue if you weren’t going to carry Jesus anywhere. I was about 9 I think.

Once around the same time a priest at my mom’s old hometown parish decided to distribute Communion to people kneeling at the altar rail and my mother and aunts went on about it for days. I didn’t know why this was a big deal. I seem to recall it happened from time to time at different churches.

One thing I don’t miss about post-Vatican II was the proliferation of awful art and hideous felt banners which for the most part used ugly colors and appeared to have been made by first graders. I occasionally see some banners around now but they seem to have gotten a LOT more professional and tasteful.

Mostly I just remember everything being really neohippie and social activist for a lot of years. Vocations were never discussed in terms of someone being cloistered or contemplative. Praying wasn’'t enough all by itself. You were supposed to be helping the sick or the poor or teaching or protesting or going to work in the missions. The missions were really big then because the bishop of our diocese then was a big mission activist type. Our diocese was sending people to El Salvador, two of whom ended up martyred along with two other missionaries they were picking up at the airport. One was from the next parish over and I still see a memorial to her when I go there even though everybody else has forgotten about the El Salvadoran martyrs. That was pretty much how I saw religious life vocations: you either went in the inner city and lived like the Berrigans or you went to some dangerous place and probably got killed.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
When I went to first grade at Catholic school, I had a sister for a teacher and my mother took one look at her and disliked her on sight because she wore short skirts and high boots and didn’t look like a sister at all.
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Sister Nancy Sinatra. Lord have mercy. 👢👢🎶

Our good sisters wore a simplified habit that left no doubt they were in the religious life.
 
My mother really hit the roof when “Sister Nancy Sinatra” was spotted at some parish dance slow dancing in an embrace with our tall handsome young priest.
 
I never saw a Latin mass, but when I was in first and second grade our uniform had a beanie that buttoned onto the waistband of our uniform.

We weren’t required to wear it, and the teachers wouldn’t tell us why we had a beanie we never used.

Then one of the little girls in my class discovered the deep dark Secret Of The Beanie—you were supposed o wear it to Mass, or whenever we were taken to the church.

Naturally, we all loved it and started wearing them in the Church.
The teachers weren’t pleased. They didn’t tell us outright not to wear them, but they hinted around that they were old fashioned and not very modern and they couldn’t understand why we wanted to wear them.

Then it became a moot point when in third grade our uniforms were changed to a beanie-free model.

The other memory i have is of using the term “extreme unction” in the fifth grade because I had read it in a book. My teacher was really irritated and wanted to know where I even learned such a word.
 
0Scarlett_nidiyilii said:
The other memory i have is of using the term “extreme unction” in the fifth grade because I had read it in a book. My teacher was really irritated and wanted to know where I even learned such a word.
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I ran into the same kind of thing. After I was received into the Church (age 15), I had a strong suspicion that something was being silenced, forbidden when it shouldn’t be. I got hold of some pre-Vatican II catechisms, and an old Father Stedman hand missal, said “this is all so good and beautiful — why don’t they want us thinking about these things anymore?”.

The Traditional Latin Mass movement in the Church has done a lot in the past 30 years to bring these things back. Very thankful of that.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Mostly I just remember everything being really neohippie and social activist for a lot of years.
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This is what it seems to be to me. There is a parish nearby that is really really stuck in the 1970s. Many of our songs in mass have a very hippy 60s folky vibe to them that I am sure baby boomers love but us millennials just do not care for.
 
To be fair, I still have a sneaking appreciation for “Day By Day” accompanied by guitar.

*runs off to fetch fish necklace
 
nightshade said:
Mostly I just remember everything being really neohippie and social activist for a lot of years.
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No, it hasn’t aged well at all.

I understand that some millennials are embracing the Traditional Latin Mass because they see it as more “authentic”. I for one welcome them. It’s not at all inconsistent for someone who likes craft brews and organic food to seek out a more intense, deeply spiritual liturgy.
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nightshade said:
This is what it seems to be to me. There is a parish nearby that is really really stuck in the 1970s. Many of our songs in mass have a very hippy 60s folky vibe to them that I am sure baby boomers love but us millennials just do not care for.
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The difference between millennials and those of us who lived through it is that we kind of differentiate between what was actually “neohippy” or “activist” and the stuff that came along much later. The vast majority of the guitar songs used at Mass during the 60s and 70s are no longer used today; you rarely if ever hear them. All the St. Louis Jesuits stuff got popular in the late 70s and during the 80s and 90s so I don’t see that as being hippie or folkie, having lived through it; those were often fairly complicated songs with harmony parts if they were done by an experienced group. Millennials tend to lump the 60s through the 90s or 00’s together and call it all “hippie” especially if any non-traditional element, like a guitar, was involved. I understand why you do this but in my world, “hippie” stopped by the mid-80s.
 
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