I was very young during Vatican II and really can’t remember Mass without English even though I can remember taking the Missals to church that had Latin on one side and English on the other and then later not taking them. I do remember that our parish out in the country with a religious order priest from outside the archdiocese held on to the Baltimore Catechism, eucharistic adoration and processions and the like for much longer than the parishes in the nearby towns did. The students from our parish had catechism because we didn’t have a parish school.
I also remember Mom used to wear a little lace cap to church, but I also remember she used to dress up to go to the grocery store or to a department store. Judging by all the other changes going on both inside the Church and outside of it, I can’t see that Vatican II can be named as the cause. I think it was an attempt to respond to changes in the world, a response that had mixed results.
As an example: When students from our rural public school (who learned our catechism in classes taught by our volunteer moms, mostly) went to the Catholic high school in a nearby town, we were shocked at how little even the best students who had gone to Catholic school knew about the Faith, even though they were taught by the sisters at their parish school. The sisters were very orthodox, so they must have chosen some new teaching materials, I guess. It wasn’t that they were teaching things that were wrong so much as all memorization had been taken out of the lessons, just as grammar seems to have been taken out of their English curriculum as a stand-alone subject, which had also not happened at our little country school. We knew what the holy days were off of the top of our heads just as we knew what the parts of speech were and how to diagram a sentence. We couldn’t imagine it was possible to go to a Catholic school and not learn those things, but so it was.
When we talk about accepting change we have to remember that the changes in the Church weren’t the only forms of upheaval taking place. Lots of things were changing at what seemed a very fast clip at the time. By most accounts I can find, there was a slight rise in church attendance in the 1950s followed by a rather precipitous drop.
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I would agree with those who say that the major changes were accepted because at the time questioning the bishops or the Pope just wasn’t done but also that some areas, especially in the cities, rushed headlong into every kind of change they could accomplish on the blind “the new way is better mentality,” whereas out in the hinterlands there was more of a tendency to make only the changes that were mandated, hanging on to as much of the old way of doing things as was allowed.
Our church still has its historic altarpiece to this day, its confessional have always been used, the same Stations of the Cross have been used every Friday during Lent, and so on, but the altar rail was removed, an altar was placed in front of the high altar, and the more ornate details of the painted decorations were painted over rather than curated when it came time to repaint.
