Can you hear me now? Is that okay? Is it coming through? Is the microphone working? Okay. Good. Is that okay? Okay. Is that all right? I could try just projecting without the mic. Is that okay? Okay, good, great. Well, thank you. Thanks for being here. And I want to especially thank Father James and the community here at Mount Savior for the invitation to be with you and for your time and presence here. It's wonderful. You know, when I am invited and I travel to give a lecture, it's for me work and it often feels like work. this trip has felt not so much like work, but more like a retreat. And it's a really wonderful place to be, and I've enjoyed the conversation.

[01:01]

And I hope to just initiate some conversation today around the theme, The Eucharist Makes the Church, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 50 Years Later. I'm sure many in the room are aware that this year, 2012, marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, which is probably the most significant religious event of the 20th century, and certainly the most significant event for the Catholic Church since the Protestant Reformation almost 400 years ago. Okay. It was an event that continues to shape the way we as Catholics think about our church, the way we live out our faith, the way we engage our world. And so I thought it would be appropriate this year, 2012, to use this Father Winston Lecture to reflect a little bit on the contribution of the Council and to do so by exploring together the very first document debated at the Second Vatican Council, the very first document promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, and that is the Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium.

[02:22]

Now, the reason Sacrosanctum Concilium was the first document debated at the Second Vatican Council, again, many in the room know the history of the council. It was announced by Pope John XXIII in 1959, which gave those in Rome and bishops around the world about three years to prepare for the council. And over the course of that preparation, a number of different draft documents were written. In the end, I think somewhere upwards of 70 different texts had been readied for the bishops when they gathered in the fall of 1962 to debate. And of all of those documents, the one that was really in the best shape was the document on the liturgy. And that is because this document came as the kind of culmination of a decades-long liturgical renewal that had been promoted by theologians and endorsed by popes. It was a renewal that, if I'm not mistaken, the Benedictines had a little something to do with.

[03:24]

And so when that document was prepared, it was deemed by those in charge to have the best shot at success. And it was quite fortunate that the Council launched, I think, on that note. So even though the ideas for Sacrosanctum Concilium had been in the works for some time in 1962, still the document brought in its wake an almost unprecedented renewal of the Church's entire liturgical life. And today it remains the Church's most official statement of vision for what it is that we do when we gather together for worship. How I want to focus my remarks this morning if you will, sort of the thesis I want to argue, is that underneath Sacrosanctions Concilium's vision of liturgy is a vision of church. There's an ecclesiology in the document, an understanding of community, of who we are and what we're about as a community. And the reason I want to take this approach is, first of all, because I am not a liturgist, an expert in liturgy.

[04:29]

I'm an ecclesiologist, somebody who studies the nature and the mission of the church. As Father James announced, I teach ecclesiology at John Kerry University in Cleveland. I have my PhD from the University of Notre Dame, where I specialize in 20th century developments in ecclesiology. So I thought here I would talk about something I know something about. So I'm going to explore the ecclesiology of the document. Second reason I want to take this approach, and a more significant reason, is that there is, in my mind, a profound connection between what we do when we pray and who we are as a community, between liturgy and ecclesiology. And it's a connection that's, I hope, captured by my title, The Eucharist Makes the Church. It's a phrase I get from the great Jesuit and patristic scholar, Henri de Lubac, who in his famous historical survey of the development of the history of the Mass, pointed out that it was in the first millennium of Christianity that the Church had a deep sense of deep appreciation for the way in which the Eucharist

[05:39]

makes the Church, that how through this celebration of thanksgiving, that is the Lord's Supper, we as Christians are called together and constituted as the body of Christ in the world, something that Father spoke so well at Mass this morning, in the homily this morning. Dulubach pointed out that over the course of the transition from the first millennium to the second millennium, and as a result largely about controversies surrounding the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the emphasis in Catholic theology shifted from the idea that the Eucharist makes the Church, to the idea that the Church makes the Eucharist. It's much more a concern with these sort of sacramental questions of real presence and the way in which the Church's ministers bring about the transubstantiation and presence in the community. In other words, the emphasis became much more on how in the liturgy the Eucharistic elements are changed and not so much on how in the liturgy we are changed.

[06:48]

The Church makes the Eucharist, the Eucharist makes the Church. Both are true, but this morning I want to focus on the latter and sort of get us thinking about that vision of the first millennium by exploring the ecclesiology of the Constitution on the liturgy. And to do so, I would like to ask five questions. Questions that we can ask about our church as a whole, but questions that we can also ask, I think, about our own particular local worshiping community, whether it be this monastery, whether it be our parish communities. I'm always thinking of my own parish. So these are questions, and I'll make some brief remarks on all of them, and then we'll open it up for questions and conversation. First of all, are we a Christ-centered community? Second, are we ourselves as community? Third, are we a learning community? Fourth, are we an active community? And fifth, are we a missionary community?

[07:53]

I should point out, you know, in kind of arguing my thesis, that the Constitution on the Liturgy does not offer a full-fledged ecclesiology. That's left to the other conciliar constitutions, particularly the Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, and the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. Still, I believe in the Liturgy Constitution there are kind of indications towards a vision of church. Pages presuppose something of the vision that would come to define Vatican II. And we catch this glimpse of this in the very opening lines of the document on the liturgy. And here I'll quote from the second paragraph. This is Sacrosanctum Concilium. For the Church is both human and divine, visible but endowed with invisible realities. zealous in action and dedicated to contemplation, present in the world yet a migrant, so constituted that in it the human is directed and subordinated to the divine, divisible to the invisible, action to contemplation,

[09:05]

and this present world to the city yet to come, the object of our quest." So even at the very beginning, the first document, Vatican II issues, the Church is not reduced to its institutional elements, to its hierarchy and visible structures. Instead, Sacrosanctum Concilium points to the deeper reality of God's grace touching persons in community. The spiritual and the relational take precedence, as the liturgy is seen in light of a people being built up to become, quote, a holy temple of the Lord, a dwelling place for God in the Spirit. A few lines earlier, the Constitution on the Liturgy summarizes the goals of the Second Vatican Council. It names four, right? To invigorate Catholics in their faith, to update church institutions, to encourage the unity of all Christians, and fourth, to reach out to the whole world. Okay? No small agenda. Vatican II sought for the Church nothing less than spiritual, institutional, ecumenical, and social renewal.

[10:13]

And Sacrosanctum Pencilium claims that the liturgy is central to this task. Thus there's, from the beginning, this appreciation for our vision of Church. For the goal of liturgical renewal, the Council seems to imply, is not simply to get the rites right. The goal is to allow the Church's worship of Christ to transform the community into the body of Christ alive in the world. Which brings us to my first question. Are we a Christ-centered community? The first question to ask is the most important, and the one that I'll spend the most time on this morning. Have we, as we proclaim at baptism, put on Christ? Is all that we say and all that we do as a community rooted in our commitment to the person of Jesus? The first chapter of Sancrosanctum Concilium begins by identifying Christ as the source of our lives, source of our salvation, and our worship. For it's the paschal mystery of Christ's death and resurrection that reconciles us to God, that gives birth to the Church, that continues to empower the sacraments.

[11:21]

And this thoroughly Christ-centered approach runs throughout the Liturgy Constitution and runs throughout the whole Council. It's one of the Vatican II's most distinctive features. We see it, for example, in the very opening lines of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. There, it's Christ that is called the Light of the Gentiles, the Light of the Nations. It's not the Church, Lumen Gentium, that's Lumen Gentium. It's Christ that's the Light of the Nations. And the Church can only be seen in this Light, just as the Moon can only be seen in the Light of the Sun. The Document of the Liturgy returns again and again to Jesus Christ in its call for a more extensive use of Scripture, and in the prominence it gives to the gospel in preaching and in teaching, the Constitution directs us back to the story of Jesus. In its regulations for reforming the liturgical calendar, the Constitution highlights the profoundly Christ-centered nature of the Church's seasons. stating that the Feasts of the Saints should not distract us from the Church's primary focus on Christ throughout the year, a year that moves us as Christians from Jesus' birth to his death and resurrection every year.

[12:35]

In its discussion of the Eucharist, the Constitution recognizes the multiple modes of Christ's presence to us. Christ is present, of course, in a special way under the appearance of bread and wine in the Eucharist, but the Constitution says that Christ is also present in the priest who ministers the sacraments, in the Word of God that is proclaimed, and in the assembly of people who gather in Christ's name. What follows is the most theological part of the talk. It's really the priesthood of Christ that lies behind this Christ-centered view of worship. And here I'll give a quote from the document. Christ indeed always associated the church with himself in this great work in which God is perfectly glorified and men and women are sanctified. The liturgy then is rightly seen as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ. The liturgy is seen as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ. If the liturgy is something that we all do, another affirmation of counsel, then the priesthood of Christ is something that we all participate in.

[13:45]

In the church, for Catholics, priesthood is primarily a corporate category. It includes all of us. A few years ago I saw a bumper sticker that was written in the font of that popular TV show CSI, Crime Scene Investigation, or I don't know, but it said CSI, and afterwards it said, Christ Saves Individuals. And I thought, That's not quite right. It's certainly not Vatican II's vision of church. The document on the church says this, quote, at all times and in every nation, anyone who fears God and does what is right has been acceptable to him. God has, however, willed to make women and men holy and to save them, not as individuals, without any bond between them, but rather to make them into a people who might acknowledge Him and serve Him in holiness." Right? We are terribly tied together, okay? And later on, the Constitution on the Church cites 1 Peter, right?

[14:51]

That line that we prayed at Vespers last night, calling the Church a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His possession. This insight into the priesthood of all believers is not new, but it's newly appreciated by Catholics. In the New Testament, Canterbury scholars have pointed this out, in the New Testament, the word priesthood is only used in one of two ways. At times it's applied to the Jewish priesthood, right, surrounding the temple in Jerusalem. But in a Christian context, it's used in one of two ways. Either priesthood refers to Christ, or it refers to the whole community. The notion of a hierarchical or ordained priesthood comes later in our development, and it comes to dominate our Catholic ecclesiology. So much so that Pope Pius XI, early in the 20th century, could say, quote, the church has become, I'm sorry, the church, the mystical body of Christ, has become a monstrosity.

[15:55]

The head is very large, but the body is shrunken. If not our numbers, then at least our attention as Catholics, our preoccupation with the clergy and their issues, has caused the head to swell, which is neither healthy nor stable. And what Vatican did is to help kind of reclaim that biblical notion of the priesthood of all believers as an important Catholic concept. Now, ever since the Reformation, Catholics have really shied away from this notion of a priesthood of all believers, I think largely because Luther liked it so much. But it's a biblical category, it's important, and there was creative ways of bringing that out, and Vatican II was able to kind of reclaim it without in any way downplaying or denigrating the ordained priesthood, but lift these up, okay? And it did so by first, by talking about the centrality of Christ's priesthood, As our primary reference point. And then talking about two different participations in this one priesthood. The hierarchical priesthood and the common priesthood.

[16:56]

But it's very important to remember when we think about these two priesthoods that they're not two priesthoods that sit alongside each other. Right? It's not the priesthood of the laity, right, everybody who's not ordained, and the priesthood of the clergy, right? It's the priesthood of the faithful, which is the category that includes all of those who are baptized. And within that is a smaller group, the priesthood of the ordained. So it's not so much this kind of dividing line between two groups as it is an affirmation of our common baptism. And when you look at the way in which the Council talks about the Priesthood of the Faithful, it talks about how the Priesthood of the Faithful is lived out in those spiritual sacrifices of life. Right? Reception of the sacraments, prayer and thanksgiving, the witness of a holy life, self-denial, and active charity. The Priesthood of the Faithful is really talking about discipleship, how we live our lives in the growth, formative Christ, and moving towards holiness.

[17:58]

The Priesthood of the Ordained exists within this priesthood. and is in service of it. It's a ministry to it, right? The whole point of the ordained priesthood is to help the priesthood of the faithful exercise their priesthood, which is following Christ's lives of discipleship. So all of it is oriented towards discipleship, towards following Jesus. To embrace our identity as a royal priesthood means to be a community striving to live out the example of Jesus' own priesthood, to be like Him, living lives to offer that acceptable sacrifice to the Father. Again, we have to keep in mind, Jesus was not a priest in the technical sense. Jesus of Nazareth was not a priest. He was not a Jewish religious professional. He was not a member of the tribe of Levi. He was not a kind of a cultic specialist who helped and oversaw the temple sacrifices. Later Christians describe him in priestly language, right?

[19:00]

According to the letter of the Hebrews, Christ is the high priest who is himself the sacrifice. And over the centuries, theologians have taken up that and focused on the cross as the great moment of Christ's self-gift. What I want to make is that the cross does not exhaust Christ's sacrificial action. Rather, the cross is the culmination of an entire life of self-gift enacted through concrete acts of love. So the cross, and I think this is a learning for us as Catholics, the cross is not some kind of heroic, isolated moment for which Jesus simply had to wait, right? Biden, his time, as if, like, you know, his calendar was pretty wide open for those first 30 years, and then it got kind of busy, right? Rather, the cross was where his whole life led. It was the inevitable end to the kind of life he lived in a world of sin, right?

[20:06]

If you live that kind of love, you're gonna get killed, right? In a world of sin, that's the connection, right? That's the connection, that his death is inextricably intertwined with his life. So when we talk about Jesus's priesthood and his sacrifice, it is the cross, but not only the cross. His priesthood was his whole life. His whole life lived as a total response to God. And so then when our participation, when we think about our priesthood as a participation in the priesthood of Christ, we think of it as an imitation of Christ's whole life. But that life is not an abstraction. It's a real story full of concrete actions like accepting others in hospitality, feeding people who are hungry, caring for the sick, sharing the good news, the joy of God's presence in the world, challenging unjust structures. And we need to soak in that story so that we are shaped by it. That seems to me, ultimately, what the Council is talking about when we talk about exercising our priesthood.

[21:08]

You see, the question is not so much, what would Jesus do, right? Another kind of bumper sticker or slogan, right? What would Jesus do? The question is more, what did Jesus do? Because when you ask the question, what would Jesus do, it's a kind of an act of fantasy. We sort of conjure up Jesus and imagine inserting him in the year 2012. And doing that can run the danger of severing Jesus from his concrete historical context, from all those associations and relationships that gave his action meaning. It becomes a kind of abstraction, almost a commodity, something that we can plug into our lives or inject into our story. But the point, I think, of discipleship is not to shape Jesus to fit into our story. It's to allow His story to shape us. And ultimately, that is what the praise of God in the liturgy is about, an act that draws us into and so shapes us according to the story of Jesus.

[22:10]

In the Eucharist, we become what we receive, Christ for the world. Am I doing okay so far? Any comments or questions so far? That's my first question. Are we a Christ-centered communion? My other points will not take as long. The second question is, are we ourselves as a community? And again, continue this process of looking at the document on the liturgy and letting what it says kind of question us today, 50 years later. Are we ourselves as community? The imitation of Christ called for by our participation in the priesthood of Christ is not meant to be a slavish conformity intent on producing cookie-cutter Christians or cookie-cutter communities. Instead, the dynamic of the Incarnation calls us to follow Christ precisely as ourselves.

[23:11]

The great Thomistic principle that grace builds upon nature, helping creation reach its true destiny, reminds us that we should attend not only to who made us, but also to how we are made. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy points towards an ecclesiology comfortable with particularity and local diversity. The great example of that diversity is the openness in the document towards the use of vernacular languages in the liturgy. But in fact, there's an openness to local enculturation that runs throughout the document. As Sacrosanctum Chachilium acknowledges explicitly, the possibilities and benefits of incorporating into the liturgy certain elements of, for example, native musical traditions, marriage customs, initiation rites. Paragraph 37 from the document is programmatic. And here I'll quote, even in the liturgy, The Church does not wish to impose a rigid uniformity in matters which do not reflect the faith or the well-being of the entire community.

[24:16]

Rather, does it cultivate and foster the qualities and talents of the various races and nations Anything in people's way of life which is not indissolubly bound up with superstition and error, the Church studies with sympathy and, if possible, reserves intact. It sometimes even admits such things into the liturgy itself, provided they harmonize with its true, authentic spirit. These statements on cultural adaptation flow out of one of Vatican II's great theological rediscoveries, its emphasis on the local church, right? What we call the diocese today, the notion of the church as a concrete community in a specific place, right? The local church united with its bishop around the Eucharist. It's a vision of church that it draws from the earliest church, the patristic period, and lifts up as a beautiful model for our own thinking about the church. That offers the kind of theological rationale for those who argued that liturgical matters concerning the local church are best dealt with at the local level, which seems to be the emphasis of this document.

[25:22]

So these initial openings in the Liturgy Constitution invite reflection on our own identity as a local church. Do we conceive of our own particular worshiping community? And here again, I'm thinking of my own context, which is parish. Do we think of it as needing to fit some preconceived mold? Or do we recognize and celebrate our distinctive, in fact, unique identity? What are our strengths as a community? What are our weaknesses? What is our history? What might be our future? And I think we can all think of examples from our own communities and the various communities we've been a part of throughout our lives. When I was in graduate school, me and my wife, when we first attended the church that would become our parish, I remember wincing at the offertory when they wheeled up these four grocery carts full of foodstuffs and brought them up along with the cash offerings.

[26:25]

I just thought, oh, that is so tacky. Like you're in the grocery store, they're pushing these trolleys up and leaving them up in the front. But then as we continued to attend and become part of the community, I came to realize what a crucial role the parish food pantry played in the local community. the hundreds of people that they fed every week, how central that was to this parish's own sense of identity and mission, how those carts were full week after week. And I just thought, this isn't, it became what first seemed to me, outsider, like you don't do that in liturgy, right? Became a real, a powerful symbol of their distinctive sense of themselves and mission in the world, right? And the kids would see the bags that they brought from home coming up with the Eucharistic elements. It inspired a sense of identity. Are we ourselves as a community? Are we ourselves? Should the liturgy bear the kind of thumbprint of a corporate personality, a sense of who it is and what role it has to play in this time and in this place?

[27:37]

Are we ourselves as a community? A third question we might ask, inspired by the document on the liturgy, is are we a learning community? The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy puts significant emphasis on instruction, on catechesis, and on learning. In fact, it's even been criticized for a kind of overly didactic approach and a kind of a clericalized view of education, right? The Constitution places great stress on the need to properly instruct the faithful so that they might be prepared to take part in the liturgical celebration, but then it spends several paragraphs saying how this is accomplished by training the clergy. The dominant assumption seems to be that liturgical catechesis consists of educating people about the liturgy, so that they can properly participate at the liturgy. And that is an important task, and it's a valid concern, particularly for those bishops at Vatican II who were contemplating and trying to imagine implementing a liturgical reform whose scope and scale had not been seen in over 400 years. I mean, this was a real issue that they faced.

[28:42]

But for all this attention on how to teach the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Jucilium also reflects on how the liturgy itself teaches. And the text comments on the power of symbolic ritual to instruct. And here again I'll quote, "...the purpose of the sacraments is to sanctify people, to build up the body of Christ, and finally to worship God. Because they are signs, they also belong in the realm of instruction. They not only presuppose faith, but by words and objects they also nourish, strengthen, and express it. That is why they are called sacraments of faith. They do indeed confer grace, but in addition, the very act of celebrating them is most effective in making people ready to receive this grace to their prophet, to worship God duly, and to practice charity. If we move beyond intellectual formation and think about personal transformation, which really is the ultimate goal of catechesis, a richer vision emerges, right? We do need to be trained for our active roles in the liturgy, but the activity of God in the Eucharist also trains us.

[29:49]

As source and summit of all activity in the Church, the liturgy moves us into deeper communion with God. Through it, the Lord renews the covenant between God and humanity and sets each of us aflame with Christ's compelling love." So it would be a mistake to interpret Sacru Sanctum Concilium as proposing that the Eucharist is the endpoint of the Christian life. The summit is also the source. And present in the Constitution is a dynamic ecclesiology pointing towards ongoing conversion. As a community, we ought to reflect on our own openness to growth and the transformation to which the Christian life and liturgy calls us. I think the post-consideration restoration of the ancient order of the catechumenate invites us to pause and reflect, right? In the early church, becoming a catechumen, wanting to enter into this fellowship of Christ, becoming a catechumen often meant a radical life transition.

[30:54]

leaving behind certain professions and circles of friends. And thanks to the revised rite of Christian initiation for adults, today many of us are reminded every year of the process of coming to Christ, a process that calls the whole assembly to recommit to that continual conversion demanded by our baptism, I remember, too, at this parish of ours, at Easter time, they brought out an incredible, I kind of initially called it a holy hot tub, right? A pool for immersion. A pool for immersion. And I'd never seen this done in a parish before, full immersion. And on the Easter vigil, sure enough, the candidates changed into robes and were dunked. And I remember sitting there thinking, because I knew some of these people, and thinking, You know, they had kids. They had family coming in from out of town. They were planning brunch the next day. It was an incredible whirlwind of a weekend, incredibly stressful. And in the middle of that, they had to get dunked in water in front of all of their family and friends and associations, right?

[32:01]

I mean, it was like, I remember, you know, like, talking to one of the kids in the youth group afterwards, he said, I'd rather die than do that. And it occurred to me, that's kind of the point, right, about Romans 6, right? That kind of, the radicalness of it, I mean, it's something simple, it's like, oh, you got to redo your hair and change clothes and the sacristy, and it just seems like such a pain, why don't you avoid it? But it was a fuller symbol of the radical transformation that that calls each of us to, right? That conversion, which is primarily personal, is also a facet of our corporate life. To be a learning community means to be open to conversion. Are we prepared to change in small ways and in great ways? Have we dealt with change in the past? How will we face those changes in the future that inevitably come? Are we a learning community? Fourth question we might ask is, are we an active community? Change often sparks resistance. It often leads to conflict. We see that in our parishes at the local level. We see that in our larger church at the universal level. And there's a lot of disagreement in the church today.

[33:03]

There's a lot of arguing going on, a lot of fighting over things, including the liturgy. I think that's unfortunate, even though sometimes I join in it. I think it does cause harm, frustrates our mission as a church, and all the rest. But when I step back, I wonder if it really is all that bad. I wonder if sometimes our real problem is that we don't have enough arguments. Because to argue is to be engaged. It's to be invested in the debate. It's to think that the outcome matters. When I look out over the whole church, right, and not just, you know, the clergy or theologians or groups who would spend a Sunday morning here, committed enough to be here together. When I look out at the whole church, I wonder if the problem isn't that so many of us disagree. but that so many of us don't care. In other words, the real problem isn't polarization, but apathy. Are we an active community?

[34:04]

Are we engaged? And it seems to be an active community, we need not only to know the tradition, but to know how to engage in it, how to participate in it. In recent decades, it seems our church leaders have rightly sort of focused on formation, on attempting to pass on the faith and educate about the tradition. If you just think about over the course of my lifetime, the explosion of church teaching documents under Pope John Paul II, the universal catechism, there's a strong emphasis on clarity in church teaching. But I worry if we're making a huge mistake by not addressing with equal force issues of engagement and participation. The document on the liturgy of Vatican II states that the, quote, full, conscious, and active participation of the whole people of God in the liturgy is the first concern of liturgical renewal, the goal to be considered before everything else. Active participation is the refrain that rings throughout the Constitution. It's repeated over a dozen times.

[35:05]

The participation is not only a right, but also a duty by which all the faithful are bound by reason of their baptism. and it flows out of the Church's ancient vision of the whole assembly as the subject of the liturgical action. Thus, at the Eucharist, Christian believers should not be, quote, strangers and silent spectators. They are to offer, along with the priest, the acceptable sacrifice of praise. And most of the concrete recommendations for reform mentioned in Sacrosanctum Concilium are based on this principle of participation. Thus music and church design are to foster the assembly's full participation. Local languages are allowed and a noble simplicity is encouraged, all so that the various prayers and rites can be more easily understood and that the people can more easily take part in the event that is the liturgy. This call for active participation follows from the very nature of the liturgy. It rests on the very meaning of baptism. Godfrey Dieckmann, pioneer of the early liturgical movement and an American Benedictine, once observed that the greatest achievement of the Second Vatican Council was, quote, the restoration of the baptismal dignity of the laity, an achievement even greater than Episcopal collegiality.

[36:21]

Ongoing liturgical renewal today certainly asks how we might encourage a more participatory worship experience, but such efforts will be seriously hampered if we neglect to ask how we might encourage a more participatory experience of church in general. Is our community an active community, not just at worship, but in all aspects of our life together? What do we do to foster a greater sense of involvement in which everyone realizes their responsibility to contribute to the mission of the community? Do we promote dialogue among ourselves? Do our communities model a collaborative spirit? Do we truly empower the community to live its baptismal vocations? And finally, are we a missionary community? In the end, this activity, this engagement, is not for our own benefit. Christ called his disciples not just to hop on board, but to go out and preach the good news to the world.

[37:26]

We are gathered together as a community in order to be sent out to the world. Are we a missionary community? There's an old saying that cuts to the heart of the truth, right? It's not so much that the church has a mission, it's rather more that the mission has a church. The missionary dimension of community, understood in the broader sense of that mission of evangelization, service, dialogue, that is the responsibility of the Church in all times and at all places, is a final question we might ask of ourselves. What does liturgy have to do with mission? What does worship have to do with the welfare of others, the poor, the oppressed, the victims of violence, in a word, everything? But the Church does not exist for itself. It exists to continue this thing Christ started, serving to announce and helping to realize the reign of God in our midst. Saint Augustine once wrote this of the Eucharist. Quote, all other food is transformed by our bodies into ourselves.

[38:28]

But this food, the Eucharistic bread and wine, transforms us into the very thing we receive. So the most important question to ask is, have the changed elements changed us? The goal of the liturgy is nothing less than becoming the body of Christ, living as a church, and as individuals in imitation of Christ's own sacrificial life of love. Unfortunately, Sacrosanctum Concilium says very little about the Church's missionary dimension. And this omission is something of a disappointment, particularly given the fact that many of the early pioneers of the liturgical movement were also deeply committed to issues of poverty, peace, and civil rights. Another American Benedictine monk, Virgil Michael, was an outstanding example of this concern. He and many others saw the call to active participation in the liturgy as inextricably intertwined with active participation in the world. The Document on the Liturgy does offer some tentative affirmations, right?

[39:29]

Its opening signals a broader concern by mentioning the Council's desire to seek unity with other Christians and to reach out to all of humanity. Its discussion of the sacraments names the practice of charity as one of the hopeful effects of the sacramental celebration. But it's really only through the other Council documents and the Council as a whole that the full vision of the liturgy becomes clear. The Church does not celebrate the liturgy for itself, but for the world. God is not best glorified by good liturgy, but by a world redeemed and transformed by the grandeur of self-giving love. And so we end in many ways where we began. To be a Christ-centered community is to be a community centered on Christ's own mission of self-giving love. Love that took concrete shape in specific acts of healing the sick, feeding the hungry, welcoming the sinner, and confronting the unjust. And if our attention to liturgy distracts us from these issues, then it becomes self-defeating, a process detached from its goal.

[40:36]

We should always keep in mind, how does our worship serve a world in need? We should continually ask, are we becoming the body of Christ alive in the world? Thank you very much. And as I said, I intentionally sort of phrase these in terms of questions, right? Not offering answers, but questions to get us thinking. What are your questions? I think we have some time for conversation, comments or questions. Yes, please. has changed the way I was personally told me that I could be participating in the lottery by allowing us to understand it in our own language, and it did not just have the older boys who read the Latin.

[41:41]

or Latin scholars being able to participate. And this recent liturgical change seems to counteract that in requiring a more direct translation of Ligví. And I think it may impede active participation to some degree. Most of us have memorized everything throughout our participation, through our readings, and I just wonder how many people understand what the word consubstantiation means. I just never could understand why it was so important to more directly translate the letter P. That could lead to more active participation.

[42:52]

Yeah, I appreciate your comment and I can say a few things but you have things to say too so feel free to respond to one another and we can hopefully have some kind of a conversation. Yeah, it's somewhat of a dark time in thinking about Sacrosanctum Concilium 50 years later. I mean, you mentioned the kind of recently revised translation. There's also the moves made by the present pope to allow for a freer celebration of the pre-conciliar liturgy, the Trinitine rite. And how to approach that. I think you're making the right observations. How well do these changes correspond to the vision of the Second Vatican Council? I mean, I was teaching a course on contemporary Catholicism to a group of 18 and 19-year-olds at John Carroll last semester as these changes were underway.

[43:54]

You don't need a PhD in theology to see some significant difference between the vision of Vatican II and the vision of these changes. Now, okay, the most charitable way to read it? is to say that those involved in making these decisions are calling for a more, a deeper sense of the sacred in our common worship. That maybe this whole emphasis on intelligibility has lost something of the mystery of the Eucharist. And I'm all for mystery, I'm all for sacredness, I'm all for this being a truly inspirational kind of movement, moment. But I also think, you know, if you invest the same amount of time and energy in music and preaching, We get a lot farther along than making these translations.

[44:55]

So, I mean, I could have a lot to say, but I think you're making this sort of right point. Let's focus on that piece. The principles for translation are deeply problematic in my view. They don't make a whole lot of sense. So I don't mind the idea that we would revise periodically the language of the liturgy, because historically, I mean, we can observe the liturgy is always in a process of transformation, and certainly, right, that maybe some of the translations we had gotten accustomed to could be improved. But there are better ways to do it, and there are ways that were in the works, that had the support of the local bishops' conference, that was actually producing some quite beautiful improvements to the English translation of the Mass. Why we had to let go of that and maintain a kind of a tight, centralized sort of control with literal translation trumping all other issues, to me, is

[46:01]

is a mystery and a great, great disappointment. But others have ideas on this too or other questions or points you want to raise. Any on this topic? Frankly, it seems to me to be a vast improvement in many ways to actually have the Latin, which is the basis of the liturgy, translated with something that's accurate to the Latin, as opposed to some 1970s paraphrase that was sort of a dumbed-down, happy-clappy sort of the liturgy in many instances. And now I think it's a much more sacred, loftier language. And frankly, by now, if you haven't figured out what consubstantial means as opposed to one and being with the Father, you know, maybe you... And I would say that it's easy to paint in, I'm not saying you're doing this, but maybe my remarks are doing this, paint in broad strokes.

[47:04]

I would say that there have been, in the translations, some beautiful improvements. For example, the language of in the Eucharistic prayer, welcome them into the light of your face, to me conveys a kind of a personal dimension of the beatific vision that was not there in the earlier translation, and yeah, and so I would tend to agree that I think that even though I was used to it, I'd never known a prayer other than the prayer that we had said, that it would be important to continue to kind of revisit that, but I'm just troubled by the by the process, which seems to me to be contrary to Vatican II's vision of local Episcopal conferences, the ones closest to the language. And I think that some of that was in work. And so, for me, it's a level of question of procedure, too.

[48:06]

Yeah, please. I'm grateful that you reaffirmed the priesthood of all people, the laity as well. And I'm stymied with Rome. We're to be in dialogue. We're dialoguing with each other. Dialogue with you, thank you very much. And how can we be in dialogue? We're the priesthood of all people. We all have things to offer, to discuss and say there's no, you know, nobody has a hold on the truth. And how do we do that these days when Rome is so intransigent and saying, this is how it is. Our good sisters, we could go there. They're leading the gospel life and they're being called out for it. How do we speak up to this? Well, I think that the first step, I mean, again, I think,

[49:14]

There is an incredible spectrum between doing nothing and launching another Reformation. I mean, in other words, I think, and in fact, I think that there are many tools within our current canonical structures as a church to promote and foster a more dialogical experience of church, right? So, you know, beginning at the local level and with the pastoral councils, financial councils, there are, we have the sort of resources at our, and I don't know if it's a matter of the way in which, you know, kind of our ecclesial system works, right? We don't all that we have as baptized believers is a kind of a moral authority to call the Church to account to its own best instincts, and for participation and conversation, that there are ways in which to

[50:20]

And that at least tends to be my approach, that I think that the best sort of challenge to those things that we may see as unjust or at least wrong-headed or whatever is to say, look, We have these principles, we have this, and it comes down to simply kind of making the case on the virtue of moral authority, because we don't have juridical authority. We can't vote the bums out of office and all the rest. So, I mean, that's not a lot, and it might not change the world, but it is a way of exercising discipleship in the present moment. So it's, I mean, How do you dialogue with people who refuse to dialogue? Has anyone ever had that experience? How do you dialogue with... You don't do it. You just kind of absent yourself from it.

[51:25]

You go along your own path to do things because you have given us a great number of ideals and theology that in fact is endless. document. 50 years later, you have a whole different church. You have a whole different church that has a sense of or being attacked and they have to protect themselves and if you've tried to work within the context of the church and you say there may be these canonical things and we have moral authority but that's in reality just does not happen. This has been my experience of that and so I don't know what the answer is, but you really have, at the end of the church, as far as I can see it, a kind of a schism that exists between authority and those who want to try to live a Christ-like life, and I think a Christ-like life, and the type of problem that you have with the sisters.

[52:50]

It just is blatant. There you have people doing this, and then you have an authority that says this other thing. Well, that's the reality of the time, and how you deal with it is very, very difficult. One needs not only to look at the theology, but the sociology and the anthropology of what the Church taught. I'm glad that you raised the question, and I say that, like Tony, I don't have the answer, but it is for me and has become increasingly an incredible problem as a theologian to figure out how to negotiate this. And this is, by the way, kind of trying to promote some sense of agency or ownership. I don't know, activism among the laity. It's not just a problem in the church.

[53:51]

When we think about all that is wrong with our world today, with our political culture and structures in this country, with our kind of global kind of economic system that seems to keep so many people in poverty around the world. It's a very similar feeling of powerlessness, and what can I do about it? And so I think maybe there's one place where dialoguing with those facing some of these issues outside of the church may help us respond within the church. And I haven't begun to do that yet, but I have some sensibility that there's a kind of a spirituality, a psychology, a kind of a deep sense of, I don't know what to quite call it, helplessness, that touches us on a number of different levels. You see it kind of, like you were saying, I have this kind of vision of it kind of spilling out. And history helps, these are far from the lowest times in our church's history, far from the worst times, but there's a way in which people keep following Christ within that.

[55:03]

Just after this letter about the Women's Religious came out, I just happened to be meeting with a religious woman who that morning had been with a larger gathering of sisters, and they were engaged in the various charitable works, and so they were obviously all talking about this. And I, you know, from the outside get so kind of outraged at the injustice of this, and very kind of prophetic, and she said the sensibility was like among these women was, of course, a sense of of hurt, but also sense that this is not anything new. And don't make such a big deal. I mean, she said, they're so busy with their ministries and their work, they don't have time to worry about this. So, I mean, it's kind of your sense that people kind of keep doing it.

[56:07]

Which to me, it was kind of, you know, sad. You know, you kind of want to say, well, that's the problem, but also kind of inspiring, too. Other questions or comments? Yeah, you had your hand up early. You started off by saying you're an ecclesiologist and not a religious, and then talked about how the liturgy is very much part of leading people forward and leading people to fight for us. The one thing that I saw in Battling Doom 2 was a looking forward. This was a tremendous, tremendous council that wasn't looking backwards and trying to figure out how to, except for some of the really key things from the early church, how to bring that back into the church. But it was a council that was always looking forward. I'm seeing, now this is where my mind into sociology comes in, I'm seeing now where the ordained

[57:22]

the ordained priesthood versus the the late priesthood is, and this is the ecclesiology, is trying to take the church and make a little backward guess. To me, that's one of the things that this new, these new words, you know, it's liturgy, the story. The Latin language is a dead language. It's long gone. if we were going to, my own belief is we should have been doing it in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, to look forward, not look backward. Now why do we see, in your opinion, the ordained priesthood I didn't make this look that good. Let me just make a couple of comments. The first comment is, I might sort of emphasize things maybe a little bit differently, although I heard you kind of signal this when you talked about the early church, but the point that I always try and make about the Second Vatican Council is, yes, it was imbued with this kind of spirit of positive engagement and moving forward in engagement, but what made it an incredible success was the recognition

[58:48]

that this adjournamento, right, the updating, was rooted in a resource mall, or a resource in a return to the sources, that the best way to engage the present moment and enter into the future is by reclaiming the riches of our own tradition. So when they're debating, when they actually get about, after the Council, to reforming the liturgy and changing the structure of the rites, the fundamental structure of the revised rite is closer to the liturgy of the early Church than what we left behind in 1962. The critiques that were made about the document on Revelation, about there being these two sources, Scripture and Tradition, well, the theologians and bishops of the time pointed out, it's like, that's not actually what Trent said! So much of Vatican II was not moving beyond the past, it was moving beyond a recent past, and recovering a thicker ... C.S. Lewis once said that the unhistorical are usually trapped in a fairly recent past.

[59:54]

I think what goes back to eternity, to antiquity, is what their grandfather wore or did. So yeah, so that would be the first point. The second point is, let me just try this out with this group, because I thought a lot about forces in the church, and I teach undergraduates, some of whom come and kind of surprise me with their interest in what I think of as old devotions. I mean, I'm a little bit odd, generationally I'm a little bit odd, because I grew up, I'm technically a Generation X. And so I'm supposed to be cynical and more spiritual than religious, and all these kinds of characteristics. But I grew up, I joke, in a pre-Vatican II church in the 1970s. It was a small town in rural Michigan, and we did First Fridays, I know how to say the rosary, I wore a scapular for a good part of my childhood.

[60:56]

I grew up in that kind of thick American Catholic culture. Students today don't. And so when they come to class and they're interested in getting Eucharistic adoration going on campus, they want rosary groups, they have all these kind of devotions. Why are they trying to go back? In some ways, that's, if I can include myself in here, that's our generation's way of framing the issue. And I read a wonderful article by William Poitier, a historian at the University of Dayton, and in this article he was sort of arguing, he said, when you look at, so I'm trying this out, I'm curious about if it makes any sense. He said there are at least two ways to tell the story of American Catholicism over the last 40 or 50 years. One story revolves around the Second Vatican Council, and it's usually the story told by folks of an older generation, right?

[61:57]

And that's to kind of, those who grew up in the pre-conciliar church, who saw Vatican, who were kind of During their formative years were quite excited or enthused about the church's engagement with the world, and were inspired by this, and so on. So their story is a story of liberation from the closed Catholicism of the past. He says, there's another way to tell the story of the last 50 or 60 years, and that's to make your center not the Second Vatican Council, but to make the center of your story the disillusion of the American Catholic subculture. which has a lot more to do with World War II than with Vatican II, that over the course of the 20th century, this European immigrant church that had basically decided that its way to survive in the late 1800s, early 1900s, in a culture largely Protestant, often seeming quite hostile to Catholicism, the only way to survive was to create their own Catholic world in this country.

[63:00]

And they did so by promoting a series of distinctive devotions, parallel institutions, they created a kind of a, you could disparagingly call it a ghetto, Catholicism, but in a way it was an incredibly successful strategy for passing on the faith. And there was much that was good about that, for all this is bad, in terms of the way in which it brought people up. I mean, the bad is that it kept people kind of sheltered from the larger world, but you know, you could be... born in a Catholic parish to Catholic parents, go to Catholic elementary school, Catholic high school, Catholic college, you know, you could, all the while, you know, going to Catholic hospitals, putting your money in Catholic petty unions, finding a good Catholic girl to marry, I mean, in a way, that type sort of world. And all these distinctive practices, like meatless Fridays, 40 hours, all these Well, for a variety of reasons, that sort of falls apart over the course of, and it's not totally disconnected from Vatican II, but what religious sociologists would point out is that there's pretty significant social change that follows in the wake of World War II.

[64:19]

So you've got the GI Bill, you've got all of these immigrant Catholic men having access to higher education, able to kind of move up out of the ethnic neighborhoods, move out into the suburbs, and what sociologists point out is that demographically there comes a point somewhere in the 60s when Catholics just start to look a lot like all other Americans. So if that's your story, I'm sorry it's taking longer than I should, if that's how you tell the story, and that I think is the story maybe more important to my students, younger Catholics, then your story is not so much a story of liberation from a closed Catholicism of the past, your story is one of a lack of any kind of Christian sense of identity or what I mean that that's the question that I get they don't ask it explicitly But it's the question I get most offered from my students is something along the lines of what does it mean to be a Catholic? I never would have asked that question growing up.

[65:22]

It was very clear what it meant to be a Catholic. And so, in any way, you know, I do agree that we need to keep looking forward. And I believe Vatican II was the greatest religious event of the 20th century and continues to be our touchstone and our guidance. And in some ways, I share more with the Vatican II generation than with my own generation. But I have a certain amount of sympathy for these kids who are in this postmodern world where everything is up for grabs looking for some sense of identity, and I think that that filters out. So in some ways, at the higher ups, even though you've got bishops and cardinals who, of course, are much older and belong to a different generation, their frame on the world is that it's, you know, what did Benedict say, the dictatorship of relativism. It's all up for grabs. We need to find, this is more important right now, maintaining our identity. and drawing boundaries and bringing dissidents in the line. And so I can appreciate the instinct, but I would say that I think it's strategically a faulty, it's a bad strategy, because you've got to be encouraging people

[66:38]

to play with their tradition. You can't just hand them the tradition, you've got to teach them to play with it. And part of that means asking questions, engaging, and so on. I don't know if that helps at all. Actually, yeah, I think that was very good, and I just put it in my own words, because yeah well through this yeah maybe what our our young people haven't yeah um i want to be an adult in my faith yeah don't get into this this stuff because that's that's treating me like a child but maybe uh the one thing that we all missed was we never we never uh brought our young people up through that through that childhood it was just so They jumped to, well you understand, don't you? Without giving them those anchors of prayer, like the rosary, things like that. Yeah.

[67:41]

Very interesting. No, I mean, I had this moment early on, because I was trained by the Vatican II generation, and so you do theology kind of in a deconstructive mode, right? You tackle the silliness of things. But I had this moment, like, the first year I was teaching, when we were talking about something, and a student in the back kind of said, we were talking about the cross, and, you know, I don't know what it was, it was an introductory course, we were just doing New Testament, passion stories, whatever, and a student said, what is flogging? What is what? Flogging. Oh, flogging. I said, oh. It just occurred to me that I was presuming a whole vocabulary that they just never had. Since the liturgy is supposed to teach us about who we are as people of God, priests of the faithful, a couple of trends seem to be turning for the worse. One is having baptism. at the Eucharist, by the Eucharist. It was very popular in the beginning because it was something different.

[68:46]

In most cases, it was bringing together a number of babies, the community, and the whole myth. It's a period, maybe you get some experience, but it doesn't matter. It's a period of death and dying, because let's switch those baptism to the infant mill, They will lengthen the celebration and the Eucharist at an unimportant. People get very much upset, you know, because the mass should be 50 minutes, and it went to 60. The other thing too, you mentioned the RCIA, we have been involved in training of people. And of course, that's relegated to the Easter vigil. And all older people know that the Easter vigil used to take three hours, starting at six o'clock in the morning in the old days, you know, and then a dining hall for broken beds and everything like that. And it was a beautiful way to show that the adults

[69:50]

many of whom would be baptized, confirmation, Eucharist. The tongues, beautiful. That's another issue. Why we don't have tongues? To demonstrate what the meaning of dying and rising means. You know, and all of a sudden, people say, I'm not going to go to the Eucharist. It's too late, it's in Hebrew. Don't take too long. You know, and we've lost that teaching moment, because the liturgy is said so well, and it teaches us. I'm wondering whether in your experience, have the baptismal children and men died off, and the RCIA have been born? I think it's very hard to generalize, because I've seen that, but at my parish, which is different from the parish I told you the story about, my present parish, they do do the baptisms at the Sunday Eucharist. It's a lovely sort of moment, and the pastor is able to do it in a prayerful way, but that doesn't distract.

[71:00]

So it's hard for me to generalize, but I do know that there are pressures, you know, just that sometimes it's, particularly with the clustering of parishes and deacons being asked to perform sacramental functions that they can perform, like baptisms. You know, that there are some of those kinds of factors too that complicate. But I would agree with the sentiment of your remark that these are important moments that the more we can draw communities into. One last story about this, the parish with the holy hot tub. After being there a couple of years, we had our first child, Kate, and when it came time to baptize, they did it there during the Sunday Mass once a month.

[72:03]

So there were maybe five or six babies. Well, we'd just gotten an associate pastor who had just come back from something like 20 years in Africa. And kind of a goofball. And when I saw that he was going to preside again, I was like, oh no. And so we had the baptism. I mean, it was incredible. He asked us all up to the front, holding the babies like the Lion King in front of the community. He asked the whole assembly to stand up and process around the church so that we could all gather in the gathering space around the holy hot tub, baptize the babies, pass the babies. I mean, there was a few minutes there where I didn't know where Kate was because everyone was kind of welcoming her into the family of faith. I mean, at first I was horrified when I saw that he was going to be the presider, because I just thought, what's my family going to think?

[73:06]

And by the end, I'm in tears just with this kind of incredible moment of a communal welcoming. Now, you can't do that in every parish. But anyway, it's a piece of the puzzle in terms of we're shaped by our experiences of liturgy. There is a lot of disrespect for the church around the world. I'm thinking of in France there are thousands of people who want to legally disconnect themselves and invalidate their baptism in the Catholic Church and in other churches as well. I was wondering if the ecclesiologists and theologians of the Catholic Church are trying to come up with remedies for what caused this disrespect of clergy and of the church around the world.

[74:06]

So, first of all, your comment is helpful in terms of, what's your context that you're looking at some of these questions from? So if, you know, you can kind of... I think there's a great need for change in the Catholic Church, maybe even another Thaddeus can counsel, because the situation is so serious. of disrespect for the Catholic Church around the world. Not so much where you are, you're in a Catholic university, you're getting young people there who are interested at least, but in a secular university that I'm familiar with, There's very little respect, and because of what's happened with the clergy and all that, and the women's issue, what are the theologians doing now? Have they come together and said, we've got to change things? And we no longer let these atrocities become immoralities to devastate our church.

[75:21]

Right, let me just make a couple of comments. One, Robert Putnam, a recent sociologist of religion, published a book called Amazing American Grace maybe, that looked at, from a sociological perspective, at kind of shifting attitudes towards religions in general, although I think the focus was on Christianity. And the decline, exactly what you described, so it's not just in other places, it's in this country too, it's in Cleveland too, this kind of lack of respect towards institutional religions by and large. And when he looked at the attitudes of young people towards their Christian churches, Catholic, Protestant, all the rest, in this country, number one reason for their disillusionment. Actually, the overly politicized nature of religious leaders, beginning with the kind of Protestant religious right and all the rest. So that was a major kind of factor. I think it's, you can't, you can't ignore the lingering ripple effects of the sexual abuse scandal.

[76:29]

Particularly the way in which that has been framed, sometimes not always very fairly, by our secular media culture. So, yeah, those are all huge. The other main point that I want to make is that I think that this dynamic that you're talking about is a... is in many ways a North Atlantic perspective on Catholicism. It's looking at the church from the perspective of Europe and North America. One of the points that John Allen, the Vatican correspondent, has been making for a number of years now, and we're just starting to listen, is that we live in an upside-down church. that the incredible growth, energy, and future of Catholicism is in the global South. And you just look at, I mean, the numbers are staggering. When you look at the explosion of Catholicism in Africa, its continuing vitality in Latin America, and various places that we consider the third world, the developing world.

[77:37]

And that's an incredibly challenging, actually, it's a challenging reality for us in the North, because part of what goes along with that recognition is that these issues that are so important to us are not going to be the issues that are going to be driving global Catholicism in the future. And that, you kind of feel marginalized a little bit, but hell, we've had our run at it, at dominating the global Catholic story, and now it's going to be leaders and laity in Africa, Latin America, increasingly in Asia, that are the Philippines, these are the places, right? I think it's something like, and I'm going to get this number wrong, something like 9%, if it's not 9%, it's certainly under 15%, but I think the number that Alan uses is 9% of the global Catholic population is in the United States. So, as Alan says, that's one reason, I mean, we just have to keep in mind, Pope Benedict doesn't wake up every morning thinking about the Church in the United States.

[78:45]

Right? That explosion is not just Catholicism, that explosion is Christianity. Christianity, yeah, the Pentecostal, in Latin America, the kind of Pentecostal, and that's created tension, it's also an explosion in Islam. It's very interesting to me, you know, the experts, right, 50 years ago, were predicting the end of religion, right, that the kind of sociology of religion was dominated by what was called the secularization thesis, and that was the idea that the more the world modernizes, the less religion will hold, because, you know, religion emerged to explain things that people couldn't explain, and now science explains them, so that was the theory. Well, a funny thing happened in the last 50 years is that religion has enjoyed an incredible resurgence worldwide in all its variations. So, again, that's another perspective on all of these questions that touch on the role of women religious, the role of women in general, liturgy, and so on, that there's a bigger story going on right now in American Catholicism, and I'm conscious of time.

[79:52]

married clergy in the Catholic future? Well, everybody in this room knows, I hope, that the Church for a long, long time had married priests. You know, Jesus cures Peter's mother-in-law, I mean, from the very beginning. And that there were a variety of, at the time, good reasons, the discipline of celibacy took hold. So the Church would acknowledge and admit today that this is a disciplinary matter, that it is not a doctrinal issue, and the argument that the Vatican is making right now, anyway, is that it's more prudent to maintain the present discipline than not. that when change comes on this issue, it's going to come from Africa. From Africa, yeah. It's going to come out of that cultural sensibility. And that, I think, given the numbers, we'll kind of start to listen there.

[81:03]

Now, most of Catholicism in Africa is guided by a much more conservative sexual morality, much more liberal a much more liberal economic theory than we are in the States. So again, we're going to be challenged to face our Catholic brothers and sisters around the world in a lot of ways we might not expect. So I don't want to keep you here forever, even though I could talk about it forever. So thank you very much for having me.

[81:34]

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