UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
By Robert Blair Kaiser
COMMENTARY
Over the weekend, an editor on the Internet observed that many events this year commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council “seem to be wakes, lamenting and grieving over the lost opportunity.”
Rather than wring our hands over what the church has become under back-to-back popes who have acted in an arrogant and authoritarian manner, we should celebrate what Vatican II has already done for us.
It has given us a new view of ourselves. It’s made us more free, more human and more at the service of a world that Jesus loved.
It has given us a new view of the church. It’s our church, not the pope’s church, or the bishops’ church, or a priest’s church.
It has given us a new view of our place in it. We can think, we can speak, we can act as followers of Jesus in a world that needs us.
Rather than whine over what daddy won’t let us do, we can put the Council into play ourselves.
American nuns showed us how.
In 1979, Mercy Sr. Theresa Kane, then the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, told Pope John Paul II the church ought to be ordaining women. Doing that, she implied, the church could break the stained-glass ceiling and give first-class citizenship to half of its membership, the women in the church.
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