DOING VS. BEING

9FEATUREHAPPINESSMENTAL HEALTH

DOING VS, BEING

Do you ever feel like your life is a little bit like being on a hamster wheel? Each morning, you hop on the wheel and rush through your day only to feel exhausted and stressed. And the next day, you have to get up and do it all over again. It’s an endless and exhausting cycle where we race from one thing to the next hoping to find happiness and a sense of worth. Unfortunately, that sense of happiness and boost of self-confidence that we chase remains just out of reach.

It’s so easy to get stuck in the mind-set that the more you accomplish, the happier you will be. We often tell ourselves, “If I can just get that promotion/lose twenty pounds/buy a bigger house/be in a relationship/have children, then I will be happy.” We’re constantly seeking and calculating what more we need to achieve in order to find happiness. The trouble is, we often find that even if we achieve those things, happiness remains elusive. Losing twenty pounds doesn’t make you happier in the long term. Buying a new house doesn’t guarantee an instant dose of happiness. Getting a raise or promotion also comes with an increased workload and related stress. Feeling continually unfulfilled, we wonder, “What else do I need to do earn happiness?”

Uncovering the Hidden Source of Happiness

In my psychotherapy practice, I often see my clients struggling with this. In my office, they wonder aloud what more they need to do to feel less anxious, less depression, less stressed. It’s almost as if we think that if we can unlock the secret and find out what step we need to take, we can uncover hidden sources of happiness. This never-ending quest for happiness can feel like an unforgiving cycle of dreaming, pursuing, achieving, and eventual disappointment. We want to be happy, and that’s not a bad thing, but perhaps we are approaching it in the wrong way and looking for it in all the wrong places. But, unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

Why? Because, living this way actually puts happiness on hold and deprives us of fulfilment in the present moment. By keeping our focus on the future, we are implicitly telling ourselves that we can’t be happy right now because the conditions aren’t quite right. It’s like living in a holding pattern devoid of happiness and fulfilment.

What if instead of focusing on doing, we focused on just being? Instead of feeling restless in our relentless pursuit of happiness, we could feel at peace right now when we make this mind-set switch. St. Augustine’s famous quote, “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you,” is particularly relevant when reflecting on the search for happiness.

Step off the Hamster Wheel

On the surface, focusing on being can seem deceptively simple and it might even sound counterintuitive. We’re so used to pairing happiness with achievement and accomplishment that focusing on simply being can seem laughable. But stepping off the hamster wheel of life creates space and time to experience joy in the present moment. Adjust your perspective from focusing on hoping for happiness in the future to finding moments of joy in the present.

Examples of embracing simply being include practicing gratitude, focusing on the present moment (not worrying about the past or future), and being in nature. When you practice gratitude, you are intentionally calling to mind the good that is happening in your life right now. For example, if you are going through a stressful season in life but your family and friends have stepped up to support you, that’s a reason to be grateful. Or, if the weather is particularly wonderful today, that’s a reason to be grateful. Intentionally calling to mind these reasons for gratitude grounds you in the present moment and helps you to focus on just being.

Similarly, being mindful of your present surroundings, especially in nature, can help you find peace and fulfilment right now. One study found that spending time in nature reduces stress and other studies have found that it can improve your mood, lower blood pressure, and improve your sleep quality. All of these factors can contribute to facilitating a sense of peace in the present. Like practicing gratitude, you are focusing on your current state of being rather than on doing some more.

Practice Mindfulness

Another helpful way to peacefully focus on just being in the present moment is to practice mindfulness. Rd. Gregory Bottaro has developed a course and book that guides you through how to practice mindfulness from a Catholic worldview. In a nutshell, the practice of mindfulness helps to ground you in the present moment, draw you closer to God, and allows you to free yourself from anxieties and worries. It’s an effective way to take your focus from “What more must I do to be happy?” to “I feel a sense of peace right here in this moment”.

Remember, your worth doesn’t lie in how much you’ve accomplished in life. Instead, your worth lies in who you are as a daughter or son of God. Achievements and accomplishments can’t change that and this is important to remember. It takes the pressure off of you to constantly reach for the next accomplishment. And it frees you to just be.

PAIN IS NOT METAPHYSICALLY BASIC

 Pain is not metaphysically basic

Once we understand that God’s love is more powerful than suffering, we have lost, at least in principle, the motivation to sin.

 Contemplating the events of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, our mind has turned, again and again, to the brute fact of pain. Even the most sceptical philosopher would have to admit the existence of pain and would have to deal with it. Try as we might to flee from the world of matter, our bodies and our minds simply will not permit us to set aside the fact and the problem of suffering.

Everyone suffers and at a variety of levels. Babies suffer from hunger and thirst, and their piercing cries remind us of it. We all experience cuts, blisters, bruises, broken bones, infections, rashes, and bleeding. If we live long enough, we develop cancers; our arteries clog up and we suffer heart attacks and strokes. Many of us have spent substantial time in hospitals, where we languished in bed, unable to function. Innumerable people live their lives now in chronic pain, with no real hope of a cure. And as I compose these words, thousands of people around the world are dying, gasping for their last breaths.

But pain is by no means restricted to the physical dimension. In many ways, psychological suffering is more acute, more terrible, than bodily pain. Even little children experience isolation and the fear of abandonment. From the time we are small, we know what it is like to feel rejection and humiliation. A tremendous psychological suffering arises from loneliness, and I have experienced this a number of times in my life, particularly when I started at a new school in a city I did not know. Commencing one’s day and having no realistic prospect of human connection is just hellish. And practically everyone has had the dreadful experience of losing a loved one. When the realization sinks in that this person, who is so important to you, has simply disappeared from this world, you enter a realm of darkness unlike any other. And who can forget the dreadful texture of the feeling of being betrayed? When someone that you were convinced was a friend, utterly on your side, turns on you, you feel as though the foundation of your life has given way.

But we haven’t looked all the way to the bottom of the well of suffering, for there is also what I might call existential pain. This is the suffering that arises from the loss of meaning and purpose. Someone might be physically fine and even psychologically balanced but might at the same time be labouring under the weight of despair. Jean-Paul Sartre’s adage “la vie est absurd” (life is absurd) or Friedrich Nietzsche’s “God is dead” expresses this state of mind.

Having surveyed these various levels of pain, we sense the deep truth in the Buddhist conviction that “all life is suffering.”

Now I want to take one more important step. There is a very tight connection between pain and sin. Most of the harm that we intentionally do to other people is prompted by suffering. In order to avoid it, avenge it, or pre-empt it, we will inflict it upon others. And this is the leitmotif of much of the dark and roiled story of humankind. To bring it down to earth, just consider how you behave toward others when you are in great pain.

My gentle reader is probably wondering by now why I have been dwelling so insistently on these dark truths. The reason is simple. During the holiest time of the year, the Church places before us an image of a man experiencing practically every kind of pain. The Roman cross was perhaps the most wickedly clever instrument of torture ever devised. The person whose infinitely bad fortune it was to hang from it died very slowly of asphyxiation and exsanguination, even as he writhed in literally excruciating (ex cruce, from the cross) pain. That’s how Jesus died: at the limit of physical suffering, covered in bruises and lacerations. But more than this, he died in equally excruciating psychological distress. His closest friends had abandoned, betrayed, or denied him; passers-by were laughing at him and spitting on him; the authorities, both religious and political, were mocking and taunting him. And dare I say, he was also in the grip of something like existential suffering. The awful cry, “God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” could only have come from a sense of distance from the source of meaning.

However, the one who hung upon that terrible cross was not just a man; he was God as well. And this truth is the hinge upon which the Paschal Mystery turns. God has taken upon himself all of the pain that bedevils the human condition: physical, psychological, and spiritual. God goes into the darkest places that we inhabit. God experiences the brute metaphysical fact of suffering in all of its dimensions. And this means that pain does not have the final word! This means that pain has been enveloped in the divine mercy. And this implies, finally, that sin has been dealt with. Once we understand that God’s love is more powerful than suffering, we have lost, at least in principle, the motivation to sin.

These wonderful Easter days teach us that pain, in point of fact, is not metaphysically basic. The divine mercy is metaphysically basic. And in that is our salvation.

MORE ASTONISHING THAN BIG BANG

What’s more astonishing than the Big Bang? Ask the man who proposed it

On Easter Sunday, we contemplate with wonder the empty tomb, and the circumstances of the Resurrection transport us all the way back to Genesis. That tomb is situated in a garden, just as the history of the human race began in a garden.

Mary Magdalene mistakes Our Risen Lord for the gardener. Adam’s task had been to tend the garden which God entrusted to his care. Where Adam’s disobedience brought expulsion from that first garden, Our Lord defeats Satan on the Cross and, in the garden close by, reverses the consequences of Adam’s rebellion, the most terrible of which is death. All of this makes Christ the New Adam, whose Resurrection marks a New Creation which promises us an eternity infinitely more wonderful than anything to be found in the paradise of Eden.

Sceptics might argue that the academic consensus that the origins of this universe lie in an “explosion” in which space expanded from a single point relegates all belief in a Divine Creator to the status of mythology. The father of the Big Bang theory would disagree. He was a Belgian Catholic priest, Mgr Georges Lemaître. After Mgr Lemaître had presented the theory at a seminar in California in 1933, his friend Albert Einstein is reported to have led a standing ovation and commented that this was the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation for the beginnings of the universe he had ever heard. For Mgr Lemaître, the Big Bang was just one manifestation of God’s creative genius, something that reinforced his Catholic faith.

The Resurrection is infinitely more marvellous even than the Big Bang. The creation of the universe cost God nothing. He could have fashioned a hundred million universes like ours in less than the blink of an eye. The Resurrection, on the other hand, cost God very dearly. In the Incarnation, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity united Himself with our human flesh and entered a world in which He would be vulnerable to the jealousy and political intrigue of fallen human creatures. On Good Friday, we meditate on just what a price God was willing to pay, as we see the King of Creation scourged, mocked and nailed to a Cross. His precious blood was the price of His glorious triumph over sin in the Resurrection.

Einstein was apparently enthralled by Mgr Lemaître’s proposal that the power of that primeval explosion known as Big Bang was still, in the 1930s, transmitting energy through an expanding universe in the form of cosmic rays. Likewise, the Resurrection continues to pulsate its supernatural power to this day. In Holy Week, countless souls are lifted up from the death of sin and restored to the life of the Resurrection in the Sacrament of Penance.

The grace conferred in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony remains live and active throughout the life of a married couple, enabling them to meet the challenges and opportunities that come their way, just as long as they remain tuned in to the Presence of Our Risen Lord in their marriage.

In the Sacrament of the Sick, the souls of the suffering and fearful are raised up and filled with hope in the general resurrection of our bodies that will happen at the end of time. In the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lord feeds us with His living Body, making Holy Communion the most perfect encounter with the Resurrection that we can experience on this earth.

Looking at the history of the Church, we see how, when her lustre has been tarnished by the venality and waywardness of her shepherds, faith in the Resurrection has raised up new generations of saints to bring refreshment and renewal to her sacred mission. Of course, the power of the Resurrection is not restricted to the visible confines of the Church and her Sacraments. The hundreds of thousands of baptisms taking place at Easter Vigils around the world this year testify to its potency to raise up new Christians from the mire of unbelief, superstition and false religion, and to incorporate them into Christ’s mystical risen body.

Intriguing and persuasive as it may be, the Big Bang remains a theory. A scientific consensus only holds sway for as long as it remains unchallenged by a more compelling explanation. Even if it stands the test of time, most scientists seem to agree that this universe and time itself will come to an end. The Resurrection, in contrast, is not a theory but a fact. Its effects are in their youth and will endure into eternity.

LITURGY THE GREATEST MASS MEDIA

Why liturgy is the greatest mass media

Smartphones and TV have irreversibly changed society; neither has come close to what liturgy does.

This week, as we move through the Holy Week liturgies — whether we go to everything available, or can only make it to the minimum — we will be participating in the most powerful form of mass media in the history of the world.

Yes, smartphones are changing the way people interact and yes, television — whether by cable or satellite or internet — has reshaped the way we live. But neither has come close to equaling what liturgy has done.

By uniting people across nationalities and borders, liturgy has helped build civilizations. By filling people with hope and purpose, liturgy has provided untold social benefits, reducing crime and increasing prosperity. And liturgy has helped each of us personally, bonding our families, reducing our stress, and connecting us to a social network in the real world that is ready to help us in hardship.

This is because liturgy is the ideal mass media.

When we gather at church we sit in the peace and quiet of the most beautiful place we visit each week.

The best churches are made to be not just beautiful, but awe inspiring.

The churches in the part of Kansas where I live were built by monks working with German immigrants. Their stained-glass windows, soaring ceilings and careful artwork reveal the beauty and depths in the hearts of the plain farmer families who made them. When you enter each church you have left the drab world behind and find yourself in a place as close to heaven as the world can get.

So, before a liturgy even starts, the Catholic Church gives you an immersive experience that your smartphone can’t match.

Then the liturgy starts with one of the most powerful acts human beings ever do: Singing together.

If you have ever sung a song by a campfire — or on a road trip, or around your Christmas tree — you already know how bonding group singing can be.

Now, scientists are discovering why. Jill Suttie, at a Cal Berkeley publication that looks for scientific answers for better living, has tracked down several scientific studies that describe what happens to the human brain when people sing. Group singing floods the human brain with endorphins and oxytocin. People who listen to or perform music together get along better, work better, and feel more fulfilled.

Churchgoers get to experience the benefits of group singing every week at church. Only for us, singing together not only bonds us with each other — it bonds us to God.

We sing “All Glory Laud and Honour,” and we are there with Jesus entering Jerusalem. “Ubi Caritas” clarifies what the Holy Thursday washing of the feet is all about. “O Sacred Head Surrounded” brings us by his side at his Passion, and “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” is as thrilling on Easter Day as “Angels We Have Heard on High” is at Christmas.

Early in Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto, about ancient civilization, an old man tells a story at a campfire. This is the most primal and effective form of communication there is — so much so that Plato argued that communicating through writing would ruin everything.

Human beings are hard-wired to respond to other human beings. A real, live, flesh-and-blood person commands our attention in a way a screen can’t. This is why traditional education is so much more effective than online education — when we are in the room interacting with a real person, side by side with others, our minds come alive.

Communication also comes down to more than just words. The demeanour and body-language of a storyteller conveys more to us than words alone do.

So, when we listen to a lector or a priest tell us a story, we are experiencing the most fundamental form of human communication.

We are also experiencing the most fundamental form of divine communication. In Genesis, history starts when God speaks: “Let there be light.” In John, salvation history starts when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Jesus Christ walked on earth more than 2,000 years ago, then ascended into heaven. But he is still with us in the sacraments and in the liturgy.

There, in his Real Presence in the tabernacle, he presides over our re-enactment of his life using symbols. This is especially clear in Holy Week, when we carry palms, wash feet, venerate the cross, bless a fire, light candles and are sprinkled with holy water, reliving his life together.

To signify his death on Good Friday, the tabernacle is empty, the sanctuary lamp extinguished and the doors left open, leaving a hole in the centre of the church like the hole in the centre of humanity when Christ died.

As powerful as singing and storytelling are, they pale next to our ritual participation in Christ’s redemptive act while in his very presence.

So make the most of Holy Week, and each liturgy. It offers the greatest experience available on earth.

FUNERAL EULOGY

Since the liturgy has its own structure and rhythm 'it should not be interrupted to add in our extras', the bishop said

The funeral Mass is an important moment of prayer and faith after the death of a loved one – but it is not the appropriate time for eulogies, which are better suited for the funeral reception, said Bishop Joseph Toal of Motherwell, Scotland.

“The funeral liturgy in the Catholic Church brings great consolation and hope to those who have lost a loved one because we proclaim the Resurrection of the Lord and our hope of eternal life,” Toal said in a letter to priests and deacons.

“Its strength is in the faith of the Church and the words of the liturgy that express that faith. We need to accept therefore that it is what the Church offers us that counts most of all, rather than our own words.”

His April 3 letter on the celebration of funeral liturgies aimed to help clergy and lay faithful in arranging funerals.

“Since the liturgy has its own structure and rhythm, especially the Requiem Mass, it should not be interrupted to add in our extras,” he said. The homily during the funeral Mass is “not a time therefore for anyone else to be getting up to talk about the deceased, whoever they may be.”

The bishop suggested “a few words of tribute could be offered” before a funeral Mass or service begins. “These words though should be written down and shown to the celebrant beforehand and should not be prolonged,” he added.

“Often what families want to hear and share can be offered in a more appropriate and less formal manner at the reception afterwards,” Toal continued. “Those closest to the deceased gather for this part of the funeral and it may well be better to share there their happy memories about the deceased in this setting.”

The Motherwell diocese has 66 parishes in Lanarkshire and parts of Glasgow. As of 2015, it served an estimated 162,000 Catholics, the diocese website reports.

“The important point though is the full celebration of the Catholic funeral rites and our intercession that the deceased’s sins may be forgiven and that they will be worthy to share in eternal life with God,” he said. The homily is just one part of the Mass or funeral service, and its role is “reflecting on the Word of God which has been proclaimed and leading into the celebration of the mysteries in which we place our faith.”

The bishop said that Church instruction for funerals clearly state that the priest or deacon who celebrates the funeral should “preach a homily as on other occasions on the Word of God, emphasizing at a funeral the hope of resurrection in Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“The instruction specifically says the homily should not be a eulogy,” he added. “It is a homily therefore spoken by the priest or deacon.”

It is also not appropriate to add a final tribute to the deceased before or during the close of the funeral Mass, known as the Final Commendation.

Bishop Toal said it is fitting for the preacher to integrate some details about the deceased person’s life into the homily “so that it is personal and recognizes the family’s wish to recall their loved one in a sensitive way.” This requires some skill and “an effort to find out something about the deceased from their family.”

“Clearly the homilist is not there to give a blow-by-blow account of the deceased’s life but rather to use some of what he knows in a fitting manner through the course of the homily,” he said, adding “whatever is said about the deceased should be accurate and prepared.”

The bishop said the faithful should keep in mind that not all celebrants have the same ability to integrate the personal and the spiritual. He also offered guidance for family participation in the funeral liturgy.

While families sometimes want to do particular tasks during funerals, “it may be better to leave liturgical tasks to those who do them normally in the parish,” Toal said.

Discussing in particular lectors and those who say the prayers of the faithful, the bishop noted, “It is an ordeal for people to come forward to read if they are not used to doing so, or perhaps are not even regular attenders in church.”

He encouraged family members of the deceased person to look to the priest or deacon for guidance, given their responsibility to decide on these roles.

IRRELIGION CAUSES WARS

 It is not religion but irreligion that, by far, has been the leading cause of war.

Every institution has its problems and aberrations. But it is not religion but irreligion that, by far, has been the leading cause of war. Religion has been the most powerful force in the development of civilization.

In his book The God That Did Not Fail (Encounter Books, 2006), Robert Royal, who is the president of the Washington, D.C.-based Faith and Reason Institute, has stated the following:

“Organized irreligion in the twentieth century committed atrocities on a scale that the fiercest religious wars never approached. The scientific racism of Nazi Germany killed forty million and attempted genocide against Europe’s Jews. The scientific socialism of the Communist countries killed a hundred million (and still counting) people around the globe.”

Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong were not exactly men of God.

Henri De Lubac comes to the conclusion, in his book The Drama of Atheist Humanism, that “man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God he can only organize the world against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism.”

Christ’s directives, “Turn the other cheek,” “Love thy neighbour,” “He who lives by the sword perishes by the sword” and “My peace be with you,” are not statements that incite warfare. Leaving religion because it is too war-faring is the logical equivalent to joining the Nazi Party because it is so peace-inducing.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James has written perhaps the most objective work on the religious experience in general. His Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature is a classic in its field. Although James had little interest in the legitimacy or illegitimacy of religious experience, he was an excellent observer. In addition, he recognized the value of religion.

“The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery,” he writes, “to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.”

James grounds the religious experience in human nature, something from which one cannot defect. Therefore, his appeal is to everyone.

He finds that all religions have two things in common: a sense of uneasiness and that there is a solution to this uneasiness through a higher power. This uneasiness, simply stated, is the sense that there is something deficient about us as we stand.

Consequently, we long for something better by engaging in some higher power. James has nothing to say about God, but his work casts a convincing light on man’s natural aptitude and fundamental need for religion.

This aptitude, or impulse, of course, can be misdirected. People may believe in the promises of a political party, in success, in materialism, or in some form of utopia. But, as history shows, these beliefs do not answer the fundamental uneasiness that characterizes all human beings.

The need for some kind of religion, James finds, is universal. The slogan “May the Force be with you” from the movie Star Wars became a cult favourite no doubt because it resembled a religion for those who may not have had a formal religion or belief in a higher power poised to improve our lot.

Can a person abandon religion entirely? If the aptitude and need for religion is built into his very being, the answer appears to be “No.” He may entertain false religions, but he cannot shake himself free from the fundamental religious impulse that resides in his soul.

“What bothers an agnostic like me,” said 20th-century French writer André Malraux, “is that it seems — yes, it seems, that man cannot live without the transcendent.”

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be fulfilled,” writes St. Paul (Matthew 5:6). Here we see how Christianity is consistent with what William James says about everyone: the presence of a fundamental thirst and the existence of a solution. But Christianity goes much further: Its solution is a loving God who fulfils our needs through sanctifying grace.

Marx rejected religion because he thought it was at odds with social justice; Nietzsche rejected it because he thought it stifled personal growth; Freud rejected it because he thought it was unhealthy; Comte rejected it because he thought it was inhuman; Sartre rejected it because he thought it suppressed freedom.

Yet we can say that none of these modern atheists abandoned religion entirely. Each kept a scrap and misled himself into thinking that he had rid himself completely of religion.

Christianity not only has retained all the scraps but, by God’s design, it has woven them into a complete and coherent tapestry that includes social justice, personal growth, good health, humanity and freedom. Rather than attempt to abandon religion, one should find one that is directed to a real God and satisfies all of humanity’s fundamental needs.

VATICAN II IRRELEVANT ?

Is Vatican II Irrelevant Now?

Is Vatican II irrelevant now in the seventh year of Francis’s pontificate? In one respect, yes; in another, no. Neither explanation is what one might expect at first glance.

Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI devoted the heart of their respective pontificates to trying to implement—or salvage, depending on one’s perspective—the teachings of the Council. All three were present for its duration and major players in its workings as pope, cardinal-archbishop, and theological adviser, respectively. All three deeply believed in the Council’s purpose, message, and general teachings, and sought to make them vibrant within their own Magisteria.

Even Joseph Ratzinger, who, when writing within the guild as an academic theologian, openly criticized certain aspects of various conciliar documents, most notably the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, sought to preserve the integrity of the Council when he became pope. In his first Christmas address to the Roman Curia in 2005, forty years after the Council’s conclusion, Benedict XVI made his most famous attempt at rescuing the Council from what he called the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” a method of interpretation that disregarded what the Council actually said in favour of an agenda inimical to the Council and to the Church’s teachings, hidden under the nebulous banner of the “Spirit of Vatican II.”

Benedict, though well aware of the dramatic upheavals the Council generated, expressed his steadfast commitment to its correct implementation: “Today we can look with gratitude at the Second Vatican Council: if we interpret and implement it guided by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the ever necessary renewal of the Church.”

It is well known that in the ensuing decades after the Council, the “Spirit of Vatican II” ruptured the Church’s theological, liturgical, and pastoral life. All that was part of the Church’s centuries-long Tradition was suddenly forbidden by those who controlled parishes, chanceries, seminaries, and universities. Instead, new fades, prompted not by the faith, but by the left-leaning wanderings of the rapidly secularizing West, were introduced into every facet of Church life.

A tiny number of bishops, priests, and lay people laboured to stop these alarming practices by appealing to the actual texts of the Council: nowhere did a single document even mention turning the altar to face the people, or that all religions were equal, or that theologians formed their own authoritative Magisterium, or that Catholic universities need not be controlled by the Church, or that clerical celibacy and women’s ordination ought to be reconsidered. As long as there was at least nominal support from the pope for realigning post-conciliar practices with what the Council actually said—and there was from all three popes, even if weakly in the case of the floundering Paul VI—then it seemed that the Council could be rescued from its inauthentic interpreters.

Flash-forward to the present—fifty-four years after the Council’s close and fourteen years after Benedict’s speech—and the nature of the conversation has shifted. Pope Francis is the first pope ordained a priest after the Council’s close. From the start of his pontificate through to the present, Francis has been championed by liberal Catholics for his “prophetic interpretation of the Council,” which is to say, for using his office to advance the Spirit of Vatican II.

And this he has done: from opening a study commission for females in the diaconate, to his rigged synods and his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia that have softened the Church’s teachings on marriage and family life, Francis has turned the Spirit of Vatican II into the substance of his papacy. His recent affirmations and speeches that make Catholicism appear as just another religion raised legitimate concerns until Bishop Schneider, during an ad limina Vatican meeting of the Kazakhstani episcopacy, was able to secure from Francis a clarification that God permits religious pluralism rather than wills it. Thus if it were not for vigilant and faithful bishops like Schneider, Francis would be content to give the Spirit of the Council free rein.

Since Francis is receptive to its distorted Spirit, he has invoked the Council without engaging its texts in the manner his predecessors did. Take, for example, his vigorous declaration that the liturgical reforms that followed the Council are “irreversible” and any “reform of the reform”—a reconfiguring of aspects of the Mass that were wrongfully or harmfully changed—is wrongheaded. Off the table for Francis is any discussion of the vast distortions between what the Council said about the Mass verses the new Mass that a subsequent committee engineered. We saw this illustrated when Cardinal Sarah’s advocacy of ad orientem worship was sharply rebuked by the Vatican in the summer of 2016. Three months later, Sarah’s wings were clipped as Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship when the dicastery’s episcopal members were replaced by Francis acolytes.

Rather than return to the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy for analysis, Francis urged the faithful to reform their mentality and accept the new Mass as it is. And if these papal assertions were not enough, Francis publicly invoked his “magisterial authority” to strengthen his speech, a move that not only had popes before him never attempted, but one that, as canonist Ed Peters pointed out, showcases a bumbling of the papal playbook.

We could cite other examples where Francis encouraged a group of Italian theologians to adhere to the Council without encouraging a corresponding exploration of its texts, and when, speaking at a canon law conference, he stated that “the Second Vatican Council marked the passage from an ecclesiology modelled on canon law to a canon law conforming to ecclesiology,” a statement that, again according to Ed Peters, gives the wrong impression on both subjects.

So for Francis, Vatican II is still relevant in regards to its nebulous Spirit, for it provides cover for more distortions of Catholic faith and practice, as well as a model for how to make these distortions happen in the present. Case in point is how Francis dispatched his closest collaborators to advance a reading of Amoris Laetitia that is a serious—and dangerous—rupture of Catholic teaching on marriage and the Eucharist.

But Vatican II has become irrelevant in another sense: there is not much motivation to appeal to its documents anymore. Conservative prelates and laity trying to counter Francis’s disruptive innovations have been appealing for support not to Vatican II, but to Scripture and the broader Tradition because Francis and his supporters have steered the universal Church beyond the texts of the Council. Defending and redeeming these texts is no longer as important as it seemed only a decade ago because the issues at stake today were not contemplated by the Council fathers. For example, no bishop at the Council imagined that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics could receive the Eucharist while living in an adulterous relationship.

Does this mean that the actual teachings of Vatican II will fade into oblivion? Not in the short term, since the Council’s documents and approach have been incorporated into the extensive and widely consulted Catechism of the Catholic Church, which itself was created to rein in the wayward Spirit of Vatican II.

But as a collective body, the texts of Vatican II will continue to have less and less import. Ironically, it is the Spirit of the Council untethered from reality that is both winning the moment, and inspiring a genuine reform by driving its opponents to the real source of renewal—Scripture and Tradition.