A Layman's Response to Vatican II

Continued from yesterday (see below), John Meehan talks about the founding of Magdalen College - from his book "Two Towers-the de-Christianizaton of America and a Plan for Renewal" (RequiemPress):

In 1968, I began to address the "spirit" subterfuge by instructing others outside of my family and home about the real and true Vatican Council II. Later on, in 1973, two other laymen and I founded a Catholic institution of higher learning in light of the documents of Vatican Council II. Despite the publication of Conciliar documents that defined the lay vocation, apostolate, and spirituality, a long-standing, bureaucratic clericalism made it very difficult to erect a Catholic college founded and administered by lay people. Representatives of the institutional Church presumed that Catholic education was the strict province of the clergy or teaching religious orders. Furthermore, the effort to found a Catholic college with an integrated curriculum and ordered campus life was complicated, at that time, by political unrest and social upheaval in this country.

Nonetheless, the post-Conciliar distress of Catholic parents confirmed that a pressing need did exist for a lay apostolate bold enough to ensure that sacred scripture, catechetical instruction, and liturgical training were fundamental elements of undergraduate Catholic education. But, three obstacles stood in the way of forming young people through an integration of the Word of God, catechesis, and liturgy.

First, many parents had been provided with only a rudimentary knowledge of the Deposit of Faith by way of the Baltimore Catechism, and few of their offspring had received systematic catechetical instruction or disciplined liturgical training at any level of their formal religious education. Second, watered-down doctrine and liturgical abuses entered almost every aspect of parish life which dismayed the majority of childlike believers raised in ancestral cultures of piety.

Since the Council of Trent (1545-63) and the subsequent Counter-Reformation, catechetical instruction and "preparation for attending Mass" had always been basic features of parish instruction and formal Catholic education. Therefore, I was convinced that a renewal in undergraduate Catholic education by way of systematic catechesis and liturgical training, while difficult, would not be impossible. Simply put, these two so-called obstacles — catechesis and liturgy — could be done away with by implementing the relevant documents of Vatican Council II.

The third obstacle, sacred scripture, I knew had a long and somewhat dark history. That history went all the way back to the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation. Except for the seminary training of priests, the formation of monks, and the preparation given by a religious order to its members, the study of sacred scripture was not an essential element of either parish instruction or the formal education imparted to lay people. While virtually every Catholic home in America possessed a Bible, few ever read, let alone studied the Word of God.

Having sacred scripture become an integral part of undergraduate Catholic education and campus life responded to an exhortation of the Fathers of Vatican Council II: read, study, and meditate on the Word of God. Hence, I was convinced that the third obstacle could be overcome because the "silence" of sacred scripture had been broken indirectly with the liturgical reform approved by Pope Paul VI in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.

One great gift of the Fathers of Vatican Council II, then, was opening again the treasures of sacred scripture to the laity. The promulgation of the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, and the approval of Pope Paul VI to permit the use of vernacular languages in the cycles of scriptural readings, responsorial Psalms, and Gospel accounts enabled lay people worldwide to listen to and become familiar with the Word of God. In this country, the Old and New Testament readings, Psalm responses, and Gospel passages were read, prayed, or sung in the English language.