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Battle lines in the liturgy wars
Analysis (Reproduced with kind permission of the NCR)
Editor’s note: This is the first part of a series exploring the long-standing “liturgy wars” and how they shape today’s understanding of the Second Vatican Council.
It would be difficult to find two more incongruous words to utter in the same phrase than “liturgy” and “war.” Yet those are the terms that have been widely used in the English-speaking world to discuss a struggle that has dominated much of the Catholic community’s life since the Second Vatican Council, that remarkable series of meetings of the world’s bishops that occurred 1962 through 1965.
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The hermeneutic of dysfunction
Reproduced with kind permission of the NCR
It doesn’t take an expert church observer to understand that those who want to diminish the effect of the Second Vatican Council have come upon an easy sound-bite solution: Put Catholics in one of two “hermeneutics” boxes. Under that scheme, Catholics embody either the hermeneutic of discontinuity, applied to those who believe significant change occurred at the council, or the hermeneutic of continuity, those who hold that the council was merely an affirmation of what went before, but dressed up for the 20th century.
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The new spin on Vatican II
Analysis (Reproduced with kind permission from the NCR)
Editor’s note: This is the second part of a series exploring the long-standing "liturgy wars" and how they shape today’s understanding of the Second Vatican Council.
Not too long ago, when bishops spoke about the Second Vatican Council, the language you’d hear would often include words like people of God, dialogue and collegiality.
That was then. Now, if a bishop speaks of that council, which involved the world’s bishops in meetings spanning the years 1962 through 1965, another word -- hermeneutics -- will likely dominate the discussion. It’s an unwieldy term that traditionally was used in college-level classrooms and referred to principles of interpretation, particularly in matters of scripture.
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