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Catholic Watershed
By Michael P. Cahill (ACTA/In Extenso, 2014)
Catholic WatershedThis year marks the 50th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council. For American Catholics who lived through it, everything in the church seemed to change. Last year a conference was held on the “lived history” of the council. Scholars discussed the ways people put into practice the council’s call to renewal. In that spirit, Michael P. Cahill invited six Chicago diocesan priests, ordained in 1969, to talk about their 45 years of priestly ministry. We are in his—and their—debt.
The priests entered the seminary as high school students formed in the symbolically rich, parish-centered world of post-war Catholicism. Their experience will rarely be seen again: a seminary class that began with 400 and 12 years later celebrated the ordination of only 35. They had teachers schooled in the theology of the “mystical body of Christ,” which prepared them for the council’s image of “the people of God.” These were from the beginning enthusiastic “Vatican II priests” dedicated to the council’s teachings and Chicago’s traditions of community, shared responsibility, lay leadership, and social justice.
For half of the book these priests describe their parish experiences through nearly a half century of changing currents in church and society. Their attention is always centered on their own parishes and people. The second half offers their reflections, with a healthy degree of self-criticism, on themes of prayer, liturgy, the sex abuse scandal, and clerical celibacy.
There is a lot to be learned here. One lesson is that diocesan priesthood is a collaborative, fraternal vocation where friendship among priests is enormously important. Another is that parish ministry is about people. One must love God and love the church, one priest said, but parish priests must also fall in love with their people. They remain after a half century of “lived history” filled with faith and hope that the people of God will continue to pursue that vision.
This review appeared in the May 2015 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 80, No. 5, page 43).