The most pivotal event for thinking about the church, of course, in the past four hundred years was the Vatican Council which ended in 1968. Two of the most important documents that came out of that three year effort were the one on the church and the one on the church in the modern world. And, you may remember that in that situation, about 1968, the church for the first time in its history was described as the People of God and that phrase was not chosen accidentally. It was precisely as a counter-action, and we know this from the documents of the Council; we know this from John the twenty-third's opening statement, that this was to be an absolute contradistinction, a radical contradistinction, to the kind of hierarchical church that I grew up in, at least.

Everything there flowed from the top down. The very notion of the People of God, of course, is an essentially non-hierarchical notion. That does not mean obviously that it excludes hierarchy, but it certainly radically redefines what hierarchy is to be. And, of course, therein lies the problem; because the church had acculturated itself, especially after the Reformation, that failed attempt to reform the church in the sixteenth century. It had dug in its heels and become more and more a model of the ancient regime of royal houses. So, it is not surprising that the renewal sought at Vatican II did not work very well, and has not worked. And I think that by and large this is a general feeling of people today. We are not the People of God, we do not understand ourselves as the People of God.

To give you a little example of this from my own history, I was in my first parish in 1968 when these documents were released. And, as you know, one of the other great changes in the second Vatican Council was the reversal of the altar so that the celebrant faced the people. There are two parishes in this little town in Southern Illinois: the German parish where we were and the Irish parish. So, the two assistants and I, in those days they had that luxury, were sitting with the pastor. The pastor had done nothing about liturgical reform, no plans had been arranged. The night before the Sunday that the altar was to be reversed we said to him, "Oh, did you know that Father so and so at the other church got a new altar and it is now facing the people?" We spent, the other assistant and I, until past midnight scrounging up some reasonably presentable table so that we would not be liturgically scooped by the other parish. That is true. Now, what sort of preparation or kind of understanding can people have on the basis of that particular maneuver?

Another aspect from that same parish was the adaptation of the rhetoric without any substance at all. This pastor was notorious in the diocese as being particularly hard-nosed, but a great builder. He demanded from everybody in the parish and got it, by dint of haranguing and hounding people, ten percent of people's gross income to support the church. And, not surprisingly, giving money was a regular theme in his sermons. So, shortly after the end of the Council he would come up and say, "People of God we need your ten percent!" That is not a joke either. The point I am getting at is that it is not surprising thirty years after the Council that the Church is enormously disheveled, because I think it is true that there has been either retrenchment, depending on your point of view, from this new vision of the church that was presented in Vatican Two, or, we had so sacrilized the pre-Vatican Two Church, that any alteration to that was seen as a kind of desecration.

Fortunately, that is where we are today and as John Paul the Second enters his dotage, as with lots of old people, perhaps, he may be becoming more and more afraid, so that the hierarchical reigns are drawn in even tighter. The question for many of us is "how can I stay in an institution that seems to be so indifferent to so much of what is going on in the world?" And, obey; because obedience, of course, in the hierarchical church, is of the essence.

Well, obedience is not of the essence. The radical transformation of our relations with each other by the Grace of God, the model of Jesus, is of the essence. Yet, somehow we have managed to dress this out in terms and grammars and categories and formulae that disguise better than reveal those possibilities, I think.

The Church, there is another aspect of it that came out of the Council, that is absolutely critical, because the church right now is so terribly polarized in all kinds of ways. This other aspect of the Church that comes out of the Second Vatican Council, is that we are a Pilgrim People. We are not yet what we are to be. And those two notions of the church, that it is the People of God, and a Pilgrim Church, must be seen in a unitary way; because the problem for us "liberals" is to say those guys are screwing up things endlessly and interfering. And so we wage battles that are ultimately feckless, rather than saying that no, we are not what we ought to be. And because of the way the battle lines are drawn today we do not even think very much of what we ought to be. We from the liberal wing of the Church are simply a resistance movement to those retrograde forces. So we tend to displace our energies and our view of things as well.