Love rather than law in the Seventies

WE are now in the new and exciting period of the Seventies. This is a good moment then—perhaps, belatedly—to be Janus-like and look forward and back, to see what happened to religion in the last decade and to try to discern something of the pattern of the next ten years.
For all faiths the Sixties was an explosive decade but for none more traumatic than for the Catholic Church. What happens is of vital importance to all branches of the Christian religion which have been formed over the centuries by action and reaction with the Church which embodies the mainstream of Christian tradition.
The major religious event of the Sixties was the meeting of the Second Vatican Council in Rome in the autumn of 1962. Called by the "caretaker" Pope, John XXIII, it formed a watershed in the life of the Catholic Church, marking the end of the Papal centralism which had dominated the Church since the reign of Pius IX, and opening up a new Conciliar period. A major achievement of the Council was to restate the doctrine of collegiality—a doctrine in its strict terms referring only to the bishops, but which symbolised a whole new spirit of participation in the life of the Church. embracing not only the clergy but also the laity. This shift of emphasis led swiftly to a crisis of authority crystallised by the issue of the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968 —intended to consolidate Papal power and prestige, but having precisely the opposite effect. Whatever the value of its contents, the mode of issue of the encyclical was a return to the style of the pre-Vatican H Church.
It caused many to take sides who would rather have remained silent, It sparked off what can only be described as a revolution.
In England the 'sixties was the decade of the laity. The English bishops had long been demanding an effective and educated laity, but they had not foreseen what it could be like when it finally appeared.
The Bishops had in mind a docile body of men and women who would be obedient to episcopal directives. They had not bargained for the furies of the Renewal Movement and the independence of the Newman Association. The life of the Church of England shifted during the sities away from the established order of hierarchy and Catholic Union to those newer bodies who, operating on outside lines, used modem means of mass communication as a counter to the advantage conferred on the establishment by their entrenched interior position. As we enter the Seventies the struggle within the Church continues and the stresses seem likely to be intensified in the decade that lies ahead. The spirit of the Seventies seems likely to be one which will lay emphasis on love rather than on law—which will demand a total commitment to the Christian way and the giving of witness on the great social issues of peace, race and world hunger rather than on the observance of ecclesiastical rules. The ecumenical movement will surge ahead but on individual rather than on an official basis. By the end of the Seventies we will see ourselves as Christians who happen to -be Catholics rather than Catholics who happen to be Christians. I will return to these considerations next week.