John Paul II, Bendict XVI, and Charlie Edward I

In August 1993 he was in Denver, Colorado. I traveled a little more than one hundred miles to see him. I could have cared less.

In February 1996 he came to Caracas, Venezuela. He was just a few miles from where I was living. I stayed home. When I was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1965 the church was still in the midst of the Second Vatican Council. I left the seminary full of hope and dreams about how the church would become relevant to the modern world. By 1996, Pope John Paul II had squashed all those dreams.

Today there is vibrancy in the Catholic Church if one’s vision of life is the Middle Ages. But if the models for the church are Jesus and the Apostles, stagnancy reigns. And while John Paul II has certainly attracted huge crowds and evoked great love from his audiences, the same can be said of Ricky Martin.

I don’t want to question the holiness of the man but let me share with you why he doesn’t rank as one of my favorite popes and why I don’t see much hope in his successor, Benedict XVI, who seems to have been John Paul’s mentor.

In 1965, I was ordained for the Diocese of Cheyenne, which territorially encompasses the whole state of Wyoming. Our diocese and our bishop (Hubert M. Newell) were not considered to be very liberal. Well, to be frank: we were thought to be conservative, even after the Vatican Council. But comparing us to John Paul II and what we know of Benedict XVI we were twentieth century Martin Luthers. Even more incredible, the Reformation statements that we were nailing on the doors of the parish churches were the documents coming from the bishops meeting in Rome for the four sessions of the Council!

I don’t have with me in Venezuela a copy of the Documents of Vatican Council II nor Xavier Rynne’s accompanying history that leaked information about the inner workings of the Council. So what follows is based on my memory. Forgive me if there are errors. But before telling you more about Wyoming here is Charlie’s Short History of Vatican Council II.

When the bishops from throughout the world went to Rome in 1962 responding to Pope John XXIII’s call to “open the windows,” the members of the Roman Curia who had prepared the agenda for the meeting had already shut the windows. The bishops were expected to simply sign the documents that had been prepared and to go home.

Things got off to a slow start. A relatively insignificant bishop who had a great devotion to Saint Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, wanted Joseph’s name included in the Mass. That idea seemed almost as blasphemous as changing a word in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution. No one had touched the Latin “Canon” of the Mass for centuries and what no one touches for centuries becomes forever untouchable in some people’s minds.

John XXIII watched the trivial discussion continue for a few days on his television set where he observed the proceedings. Finally, he sent a message to the Fathers of the Council: the name of Joseph is now included in the Canon of the Mass! Please get on to more important business. And they did!

They threw out the agenda that had been prepared for them and went to work on their own. By the end of the first three or four months they hadn’t produced any document, but instead they agreed to come back the following year and went home to talk to their people.

Stop for a moment and think about that: they went back home to talk to their constituencies. The pope and the bishops wanted to hear what the world had to say to them before saying what they wanted to say to the world. (What a contrast to what happened in the clergy-abuse scandal in the U.S. church when the U.S. cardinals ran to Rome to hear what the pope had to say to them instead of going to their people.)

The ball was rolling and it didn’t stop until John Paul II came along. What happened with the Mass is a good example. We had dreams at the time that maybe the opening prayers of the Mass would be permitted in English. We accepted that the Canon would always be in Latin. We almost fell out of our pews where we heard that the bishops had decided that the whole Mass could be in the vernacular.

That might not sound very significant to someone who isn’t Catholic, but it was. The Roman Curia wanted the proceedings to be in a Latin, the official language of the Catholic Church but a dead language. Dreamers! It might have been the official language of the Roman Curia but how many bishops in the world went around tossing bits of Latin at their people? Few even threw them at other bishops and if one did throw a phrase, the other most probably couldn’t have understood it. Early on in the Council the bishops said to the Curia that they could go to . . . wherever they wanted to go with their Latin. The bishops would each speak in his own language.

I hope this gives you an idea of what was happening: a revolution was taking place and it was coming from above. And short, pudgy John XXIII was smiling. The old man that the cardinals thought would only last a few years giving Papal Blessings had set off a series of yearly firework displays that could be seen around the world.

The Council spoke of a priestly people (and they weren’t just referring to the clergy). They spoke of separated brothers and sisters in other denominations and John XXIII even said that many people were atheists because of the way Christians had acted. (Or maybe that even appears in one of the documents.) So atheists weren’t bad; it was the Christians who goofed. Women were recognized as being important. Justice and overcoming poverty were constantly on their minds as the “first world” bishops sat next to those from the “third world.”

Now let me bring you back to “conservative” Wyoming. Every time Bishop Newell returned from Rome (there were four sessions), we waited to hear what news he would bring. He set us a Pastoral Council to advise him and there were more lay people than clergy on it. A Board of Education was established. An Ecumenical Commission. A Liturgy Commission. All with heavy lay involvement.

When the time came for Bishop Newell to retire, he invited every Catholic in Wyoming to tell him what kind of bishop they wanted to replace him. Thousands of comments were sent in and he read them all. A report was sent to the Apostolic Delegate in Washington. I often wonder if that report has since been destroyed so that no one in Rome will dig it up someday and say that in the late 70s a bishop in Wyoming consulted his people about their future bishop.

In April 1985 I was in the amazons of Bolivia. I asked Bishop “Bernie” Schierhoff if he had any advice for me as I was beginning my missionary work. He replied, “Don’t get in the way of the laity. They will do so much for the Church if we will only let them.” Bishop Newell believed the same. Today the message is that the laity can do many things for the church, as long as it is the hierarchy who tell them what to do.

And women in the church? They have become the least important of the unimportant. What do women know about anything?

Maybe this would be a good place to share a few personal memories about my conservative Bishop Newell. I don’t know what the rules of the church are today, but when I was hearing confessions many years ago I could not give absolution to a person who was involved with an abortion. I had to go first to the bishop and ask for a penance for the person. One day after meeting with Bishop Newell, I mentioned to him that someone had confessed an abortion.

Bishop Newell gave me some insignificant penance to give to the woman (tell her to “say The Lord’s Prayer three times” or something like that) and then said to me (as best I can recall his words): “Father, we men should give thanks to God everyday that we don’t have to make the decisions that women have to make in their lives.” He would speak against abortion from time to time; he never spoke against a woman who had an abortion.

Bishop Newell taught me that the priest was to try to put himself in his people’s shoes and not to judge their actions. I was often his chauffeur as he traveled throughout Wyoming. Early one morning we were behind another car when the traffic light changed from red to green. The car didn’t move. I honked the horn and the driver stuck his arm out the window and gave us the legendary finger. Bishop Newell simply commented, “Who knows what the man’s wife said to him this morning?”

Once, after a celebration in a parish hall, he said to me, “Father, on occasions such as these look for the people to whom no one is talking. They, too, are important. Speak with them.”

Bishop Newell died a few decades ago. But two years ago I had the privilege of meeting Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the former bishop of Chiapas, Mexico. He was at the Second Vatican Council also and I sensed in him the same dynamism that I had known in Bishop Newell.

After the Council, the Latin American bishops knew that their work had only begun. It was there that they got to know each other and became friends. They then began a series of meetings to discuss the reality of Latin American and in Medellin, Colombia, and Puebla, Mexico, they began to speak of a necessary “option for the poor.” “Liberation theology” became the framework for pastoral work in this part of the world. The future Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger, did all he could to squash that way of thinking saying it was Marxist. When I asked Bishop Ruiz if the theology of liberation still existed he replied, “Is there a theology of slavery?” For him, the only theology worth its name was one of liberation.

In 2007 there will be a fifth meeting of the Latin American bishops. The place? Rome! The only thing that surprised me when I saw that news was that the bishops (mostly appointed by John Paul II) hadn’t chosen Alaska for their meeting place. There they could have been even farther from the Latin American reality and from the ideals their predecessors expressed in Medellin and Puebla.

 Well, now you know how my joyous story of the Vatican Council and the Catholic Church came to an end with the arrival of Pope John Paul II and the future Benedict XVI and how the music began to sound like the 78-rpm records I heard as a child when the spring on the wind-up phonograph wound down. The party was over. The laymen, the laywomen, the separated brothers and sisters, the little people throughout the world were all on the outside of a male-command center in the Vatican. And my dreams were only memories.

I understand there is a movement to have John Paul declared a saint rapidly. I have no problem with that. Declare him a saint tomorrow. I suppose he was a very holy person. No problem.

On the other hand when I get to heaven (I think we all will), I can imagine God saying to me, “Charlie, welcome. However, we’ve decided that you will have the very last seat way in the back of this great assembly.” That will be ok with me.

But if I see John Paul II sitting closer to God than the wife of the garbage collector who together with her husband struggled all their lives so that their children could have a little bit of food on their table and who had an abortion after their seventh child, I will be ticked off royally. And, sorry, God, I will declare myself an atheist.