To simplify even this simplification, John XXIII, greatly influenced by liberal theologians like Karl Rahner and John Courtney Murray, hoped to make the church a less authoritarian institution dominated by the pope and his bureaucracy (the curia) and turn it into (or return it to, he believed) a more collegial body in which not only bishops and other clergy but also the laity could make their voices heard. At the same time, while he did not want the church to bend to the ways of a modern, secular world, he wanted it to engage more directly, even self-critically, with that world—and also with other religions and other Christian sects.
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Our photo gallery spans the pope's youth to his last days at the vatican.
A bold agenda, in other words, and one that was resisted by conservatives in the curia and other parts of the church as well as by such lay Catholics as William F. Buckley. Not surprisingly, the extent to which John's goals were realized or thwarted, both in the council under Paul VI and in subsequent years, is the subject of considerable debate. Conservatives, by and large, would say that what was good about the council—certain reasonable accommodations with the modern world (including, for instance, the abandonment of the Latin mass)—has been achieved and sustained, while what was reckless (above all, disobedience toward, or selective regard for, church teachings) has been slowly contained or at least challenged, most forcefully by John Paul ii. As Michael Novak puts it, John Paul "hated the laxity that came into the church since Vatican II."
Liberal critics, however, see such "laxity" as the unintended consequence of conservative efforts to stifle the spirit of Vatican II. Crucial to that spirit, they say, was a willingness to engage in collegial discussion of such matters as contraception, a greater role for women, and even the option of marriage for clergy. "Vatican II seemed set to restore our church..." writes John Cornwell, director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Cambridge University, in his book Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People, and the Fate of Catholicism, "by encouraging the faithful to engage the world while offering the means to transcend it."
But according to Cornwell, and other liberal voices, that spirit of engagement began to wane even under Paul VI. To begin with, Paul effectively cut short the possibility of an open discussion of celibacy among his bishops by issuing an encyclical (Sacerdotalis Caelibatus) that upheld the status quo. Then, while he did call a commission to discuss contraception, conservatives within the curia undercut the majority vote in favor of changing the Vatican position against artificial contraception, easing the way for the encyclical Humanae Vitae that reasserted the old stand.
The stifling of collegial give-and-take on issues urgent not only to the operation of the church but to problems faced by Catholics in their everyday lives resulted in the growing disobedience or selective observance that conservatives call sandbox or "cafeteria" Catholicism. Today, for instance, as numerous polls have shown, between 70 percent and 80 percent of American Catholics simply ignore the pope's condemnation of contraception. A 1997 Lilly Foundation survey of under-40 American Catholics similarly found that about 80 percent of respondents believed that the church should change its official stand on divorce, remarriage, and human sexuality, while 87 percent supported the ordination of women. (When broken out separately, the responses of Latinos, who are often thought to be macho in attitudes toward women and deferential to priests, were roughly the same as those of the larger American Catholic population.) "If anything," writes Wills in the National Catholic Reporter, "Catholic dissidence is growing rather than slowing down, despite all efforts by the curia to reverse this tide."
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