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Church History

What is an Ecumenical Council?

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The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) still looms large in the awareness of most Catholics today. But how many Catholics are aware that we’re currently in the midst of the 450th…

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) still looms large in the awareness of most Catholics today. But how many Catholics are aware that we’re currently in the midst of the 450th anniversary of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), another Church council of great historical significance? And how many Catholics know much at all about the other 19 general councils of the Catholic Church?

Church historians remind us that tracing the developments of the general councils is an outstanding way to survey 2,000 years of Christian history. While the general councils have not treated every aspect of theology and spirituality, they have addressed the major issues of their times. For this reason scholars recognize these meetings as an essential element of the ongoing life of the Church.

What actually constitutes a general (or ecumenical) council? (The terms “universal,” “ecumenical” and “general” are ordinarily used interchangeably, though historically these terms have been used in different ways.) A general council is a meeting of worldwide Church leaders convened by the pope, although this was not always the case in early Church history. All bishops are called to participate, but other officials are also invited.

We should note here the important distinction between general councils and councils that are merely local, regional or provincial. Numerous provincial or local councils (or synods) met during the first three centuries of the Church, especially during the third century, to handle matters of doctrine and discipline. These earliest church meetings in North Africa, Rome, Gaul, Asia Minor and Iberia paved the way for the first general council, Nicaea I.

A number of local councils, some attended by popes or their delegates, also met during the Middle Ages.

Today regional synods of bishops continue to meet, sometimes in Rome, and frequently in the bishops’ home countries as national synods or conferences.

We should also note that the separated Eastern Orthodox churches consider only the first seven councils ecumenical. The Catholic Church, however, recognizes 21 councils to be ecumenical, or general, even though the East was missing from the councils of the second millennium.

Why Do Councils Meet?

When we examine the particular reasons why various councils have met over two millennia, we discover a cycle of challenge and response that brings them into session.

In a sense, councils are convoked because they are provoked, prompted by various circumstances in the life of the Church that require attention. Thus councils most often spend their time identifying and condemning heresy, instigating needed reforms, dealing with questions of church authority, and addressing other significant issues as they have emerged in various historical periods.

Since councils come into existence in response to demanding religious and social issues of the day, the Church has no regular schedule for convoking them. They are simply called as needed.

The councils, we might say, are the Church’s “think tanks” for solving problems and plotting the future. Since apostolic times, Christian leaders have used such major meetings to compare notes and solve problems. Often issues are churning for decades or even centuries before they are brought to a council for solution. The council fathers must enunciate guiding principles and procedures and then plot their implementation.

Consequently, a number of activities are necessary for holding a general council. First, the reasons for convoking the council must be identified. Second, its goals must be established. Third, the Church must engage in a period of preparation. Fourth, the assembly itself must take place. And, finally, the council’s decisions must be put into practice.

A Historical Overview

The Church council held in Jerusalem and noted in Scripture (see Acts 15 and Gal 2:1-10) is not listed with those we consider gen-eral or ecumenical. Yet this meeting of the apostles Peter and James, Paul and Barnabas and others is often noted as the first and model council. The general council of Constantinople II (553) explicitly mentioned the importance of the apostles coming together to consult and to make a decision.

The “Council of Jerusalem,” as it came to be called, probably met in A.D. 49 or 50 to address the question that arose a handful of years after Jesus’ death and resurrection: Must one be a Jew in order to be a Christian? The issue boiled down to whether men needed to be circumcised and whether all were bound by the Jewish dietary laws.

The first general council was the First Council of Nicaea, which was summoned by the Emperor Constantine in 325. Its main purpose was to deal with the Arian heresy, which erroneously taught that Jesus Christ was not fully God.

In the Church’s first millennium, the general councils met largely to formulate doctrinal statements to correct other heretical teachings. The councils of the Middle Ages and Reformation dealt primarily with reforming church divergences and clarifying certain doctrines. In the modern period the two Vatican councils were gathered for dissimilar reasons: the first to define papal infallibility, the second to renew the Church in line with contemporary developments.

Some councils completed the unfinished business of their predecessors. For example, the first eight councils, from Nicaea (325) to Constantinople IV (869-870), met in somewhat rapid succession because they were refining creedal statements. In their deliberations they hammered out the profoundly interrelated dogmas of the Church concerning the Blessed Trinity and the Person of Christ.

Several councils followed soon after another to address persisting problems. The first four Lateran councils met successively in less than a century (1123, 1139, 1179, 1215) to address questions of Church reform. In later situations councils finished the work that earlier meetings could not because of difficult circumstances.

A Wide Variety

The time between councils, their duration and their attendance reveal a wide variance. Counting 21 general councils might lead us to think that they were called about one each century. But in reality general councils have met infrequently, often in clusters. And there were long periods of time — sometimes several centuries — that experienced no councils at all.

General councils varied also in duration. Lateran II sat only a week, while Constance (1414-1418) met for three and a half years of steady activity.

But length of time is no indicator of importance or achievement. Lateran IV gathered for only 20 days, yet was the most impressive of the medieval councils. Lateran V met for five years, 1512-1517, but accomplished little.

Concerning participation, as few as a dozen members were present during a low point at Constantinople IV, and only 17 during one session of Trent in 1551-1552. In striking contrast, 2,540 packed St. Peter’s Basilica for the first session of Vatican II in 1962.

Despite difficulties in travel and communication during the ancient and medieval eras, about 600 took part in Chalcedon (451), more than 400 at Lateran IV and nearly 900 at Constance.

Even though each general council has exhibited distinctive characteristics, a common thread runs through all. Each council rose to the occasion and responded to the urgent needs of its day.

To recall the enduring value of what these solemn assemblies have accomplished for the Church throughout the ages, we need only read the words that for centuries have appeared at the beginning of each council document:

“For everlasting memory.”

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Church History

Catholics and Civil Rights

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The civil rights movement was a series of events and developments that profoundly affected and radically changed life in the United States, and Catholics and the Church played important roles….

The civil rights movement was a series of events and developments that profoundly affected and radically changed life in the United States, and Catholics and the Church played important roles.

Setting a date for the beginning of the movement is not that easy. It began in no single place. In some historical estimates, it began with the abolitionists, those Americans who demanded an end to legalized slavery, gradually making themselves heard in the generations before the Civil War.

For other historians, the deciding moment was the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863. Although remembered today, not inappropriately, as a bold, wide step forward, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited. It freed slaves in most, but not all, the territory of the 11 states that had withdrawn from the Union to become the Confederate States of America.

It left in bondage slaves in all of Tennessee, a Confederate state; in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, states that had remained within the Union despite their acceptance of slavery; and in parts of Louisiana and Virginia, both also states that had entered the Confederacy.

In fact, it was the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the amendment’s seating in law on Dec. 31, 1865, that slavery at last was outlawed in the United States.

Catholics were among the Americans arguing about slavery, both pro and con, and they were affected by all the events of the time, but they were not major players, given their status as a small and not yet influential minority — except in Louisiana and to a lesser degree in Maryland.

With regard to racial justice and equality, however, no Catholic either in Louisiana or Maryland made history opposing slavery. Catholic New Orleans was a huge slave market. From Galveston, Texas, to Wilmington, Del., Catholics owned slaves. And, perhaps hard to imagine, dioceses and religious congregations also owned slaves.

Plessy v. Ferguson

The Catholic community in these states, and in other states, at the time either lost sight of African-Americans, preoccupied as the bishops and also the laity were by other concerns, many of them of the bread-and-butter variety, or Church efforts for blacks that were concentrated upon rudimentary education or human services such as care for the sick. It is important here to recall the general state of education and of human services at the time.

A candlelight procession led by nuns calmed tensions in East Harlem in New York in 1967. That year, several cities across the United States experienced riots due to civil rights issues.

Racial segregation, eventually the match that ignited the civil rights movement, was set in constitutional law on May 1, 1896. At that time, by a vote of seven to one, with one associate justice abstaining, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, ruled that “separate but equal” facilities based on race were in accord with the Constitution. The case was originally about seating in railroad coaches. It came to involve every aspect of life, and in practical terms it meant the deprivation and humiliation of African-Americans virtually throughout much of the United States. What Plessy did not permit in law, it accommodated and empowered as social convention.

The case became the basis of an entire cultural pattern. How did Catholic bishops, priests and laity react? Catholics were gaining numerical strength and political power as the 20th century dawned. There was little, if any, however, Catholic criticism of, and certainly no defiance of, segregation. For Catholics, criticizing the culture created by Plessy was going too far out on a limb.

There were exceptions, specifically in the sense of attention on the part of some bishops and other Catholics to the plight of blacks, a plight inevitably bleak and hopeless because of the widespread, popular frame of mind enabled by Plessy.

Trapped in Surrounding Culture

Katharine Drexel, a wealthy Philadelphia heiress, took an interest in African-Americans and Native Americans and eventually founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to educate black and Indian youths. At the same time, the Josephite Fathers and the priests of the Society of the Divine Word turned their eyes toward blacks.

St. Katharine Drexel helped blacks in the early 20th century. CNS photo from Pope John Paul II Cultural Center

While these efforts were praiseworthy, the overwhelming current of American Catholic opinion, and organized effort, was to ignore injustices imposed on blacks. It may be hard to imagine such indifference, but segregation was so strict and encompassing that few whites truly knew precisely what blacks experienced.

The formal stance of the Church was to relieve human misery and to equip young blacks for lives easier and more rewarding than those their forebears had known, but the attitude was paternalistic. It was as if blacks were perpetual children, rendered as such by their lack of the aptitude that whites enjoyed.

In this, the Church was trapped in the culture surrounding it, and rare was the program that denied this presupposition about anyone not born white. After all, going beyond the United States, it was the mindset that launched, and certainly fixed in place, the great colonial empires ruled from Europe, including Catholic Belgium, France, Italy and Portugal.

Some Catholics, by the 1920s, came to see these injustices indeed as injustices. Jesuit Father John LaFarge was among them. Editor of America magazine, he had a platform to dissect the social norms so widely prevalent and to call for correction.

Bishops were appointed to dioceses with large black populations and, while never confronting what Plessy had created, they built schools and hospitals for African-Americans. Perhaps unwittingly they sowed the seeds of logical questions that later entered the minds of Catholics. If blacks are entitled to the Christian concern of the Church, how then are they different from other human beings? If they are not different, how can they be treated as if they were?

Then came the terrible events in Europe, in particular the savage anti-Semitism in Germany. No decent person could observe what was being done to Jews by the Adolf Hitler regime and not be repelled. To be sure, it was not the same in this country, although the collective experience of American blacks hardly was exempt from brutality of the most frightful type in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Lynchings were not uncommon. The criminal justice system and judicial action were jokes when it came to justice for blacks. Still, the specter of European Jewry’s sufferings under Hitler caused some Catholics in this country to think.

Always, of course, Catholics, as well as others, simply were kindhearted and prompted by the love of Christ that embraced all. Once, for example, the Ku Klux Klan stopped a train in Alabama and dragged a black man from the train. They led him to a tree along the roadbed, planning to hang him. Unnoticed by the Klan, a Benedictine abbot was on the train. He had not all that much security himself, being a Catholic cleric. Nevertheless, seeing what was happening, he left the train and walked directly to the Klan leader to plead for the man’s life. Ignored, the abbot then knelt in the dirt before the Klan wizard and implored that the man’s life be spared.

The man was hanged, nevertheless, but Christianity drove the abbot, and it drove many other Catholics to recoil at the abuses of blacks.

Jumping on Board

When the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, on May 17, 1954, reversed Plessy, strong currents of interracial justice moved through American Catholic public opinion, but by no means pulled the heartstrings of every American Catholic.

Bishop Vincent Waters of Raleigh, N.C. St. Katharine Drexel helped blacks in the early 20th century. CNS photo/courtesy Diocese of Raleigh

To give them their due, the older generation of Southern bishops at the time not only guided the Church through the terrible days of the convent inspection laws, the Ku Klux Klan, the Al Smith campaign of 1928, and limited resources and great demands, but in communities from El Paso, Texas, to Norfolk, Va., Little Rock, Ark., to Jacksonville, Fla., they had made the Church a presence for the good of the entire society.

Some were reluctant to embrace the cause of desegregation. It was not as if any opposed equal rights nor denied the status of human dignity of blacks. Most had worked precisely to enhance this status. Rather, they feared that if they moved too quickly, all would be lost, and in the end neither Catholics as a whole or blacks would be in better straits.

Given the natural course of events, these more cautious bishops were leaving the scene. Succeeding them was a new breed. Having matured in the days just before World War II, and often educated in Europe or in the more intellectually sophisticated centers of the Atlantic Northeast, they saw as the priority the bringing of justice to African-Americans.

Some came from outside the South. Native Southerners, however, were outstanding as bold champions of change, such as Bishop Vincent S. Waters of Raleigh, a Virginia native, Tennessee-born Bishop Joseph A. Durick of Nashville, Bishop Joseph Brunini of Natchez-Jackson, himself from Mississippi, and Bishop Carroll T. Dozier of Memphis, also from Virginia.

To be honest, all these bishops headed divided presbyterates. Old ways died hard for more than a few Catholic priests. Others, to their credit, were at the front line.

There were dozens and dozens of priests who marched when the demonstrations started. They were insulted and cursed by many, encouraged by some, but they marched precisely to put the Church in the forefront of the movement to recognize human rights for blacks.

In Mississippi, Father Bernard F. Law, later cardinal-archbishop of Boston, did remarkable things to elevate and validate the image of the Church because of his constant, but often resented, call for rights for blacks.

Swinging Toward Racial Equality

OSV file photo

At the national level, the Catholic bishops were unswervingly behind the civil rights movement, and their series of public statements made their position crystal clear. At the level of the papacy, Pope Paul VI left no question about Catholic teaching and universal Church policy in the matter. For example, he named African-American priests to the episcopacy, a switch from the time when many dioceses would not accept black applicants for the seminary. The arc was swinging toward racial equality in American Catholicism. At the very time so many young Catholics were attending Catholic schools, Catholic education embraced racial equality. Teachers taught it. Catholic publications forthrightly supported it, and at the time when the Catholic press was at its strongest. Young priests were ordained who fully supported civil rights, and some Catholic lay organizations came around, albeit sluggishly.

This hardly is to say that in the 1950s and 1960s American Catholic public opinion, especially in the South, accounted for one great, mighty groundswell for rights for blacks. Many Catholics feared violence. The Church lost ground numerically among whites, although in the end maybe not as much as might be assumed. Bishops and priests lost good will, although again not as much as they had presumed. No social study of American life today escapes the facts that racism lives in this country. The arc, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, swings toward justice. Still, it goes back and forth. As the U.S. bishops wrote in a statement marking the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington: “The dream of Dr. King and all who marched and worked with him has not yet fully become a reality for many in our country. While we cannot deny the change that has taken place, there remains much to be accomplished.”

Msgr. Owen Campion is OSV chaplain.

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Church History

The Holy Grail

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If you’re aware of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table — if you’ve heard Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal or seen movies such as “Indiana Jones and the…

If you’re aware of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table — if you’ve heard Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal or seen movies such as “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” — you’ve heard of the Holy Grail.

That object of quest and romance, providing supernatural nourishment and healing, has a long history in literature and legend. Tales about the Holy Grail — as a stone or gem, as the chalice Jesus used, or as the platter on which the Passover lamb was served at the Last Supper before Jesus suffered and died on Calvary — appeared in French, English, German and Italian during the 12th and 13th centuries. The stories include mysterious connections with Joseph of Arimathea, the spear of Longinus (the centurion who pierced Christ’s side on the cross) and even the conversion of England. The Grail was also sometimes described as the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood and water that poured from Christ’s side after Longinus pierced Him as He hung dead on the cross, a mysterious sign of the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist and their source in the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

In these early versions of the quest for the Holy Grail, the imagery clearly reflects Catholic belief in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Precious Body and Blood of the Holy Eucharist. In spite of all these sacramental and doctrinal images and interpretation, the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages did not participate in or emphasize the quest for the Holy Grail. While the medieval Church is often criticized for taking advantage of miracles and shrines for pilgrimage, she did not use this seemingly perfect opportunity for donations and bequests to venerate the Holy Grail, among other relics of Jesus’ life and passion. Yet, in the same era, the Church developed even greater devotion to the holy Eucharist through the institution of the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Christ, in 1264. Pope Urban IV asked St. Thomas Aquinas to write the Divine Office for this great feast, and he composed the great hymns and sequences we sing today on Holy Thursday and Easter Sunday and at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The legend of the Holy Grail coincides with this focused devotion and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, which including the Corpus Christi processions.

Journeys of the Grail

The story of the Holy Grail begins with Joseph of Arimathea, the member of the Sanhedrin who went to Pontius Pilate for permission to remove Jesus’ body from the cross on Good Friday. Joseph and Nicodemus — who had come to Jesus secretly — prepared His body for burial in Joseph’s own new tomb. Imprisoned by the Jewish authorities for his proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection, according to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, Joseph receives the Grail from our Savior to nourish him — then miraculously escapes from his cell without disturbing the seals on the door. Leaving the Holy Land, he travels to France and then to England, bringing the Grail with him to Glastonbury in Somerset, England. As Glastonbury is also claimed by some legends to be the burial place of King Arthur and his queen, Guinevere, the legends of Avalon or Camelot and the Holy Grail become entwined.

The Holy Grail of Arthurian legends becomes the great object of a chivalric quest, as the Knights of the Round Table set out to find the chalice and the Holy Blood (the sangreal) — and fail or succeed according to their purity and holiness. Thus the great Lancelot fails because of his adulterous affair with Guinevere, while Percival, Bors or Galahad, depending on the version, succeed because of their purity, or in the case of Galahad his virginity. Literary historians have often surmised that the ideals of chivalry were inspired by medieval devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Arthur’s knights strove to be brave, to defend women, and to be chastely devoted to their chosen Lady. When a knight failed in this ideal, as Sir Lancelot failed, the Holy Grail became a catalyst for his repentance as he recognizes his unworthiness and does penance for his sins of adultery and disloyalty.

Although Thomas Malory’s 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur included the quest for the Holy Grail in his influential summation of the Arthurian legends, the fascination of the Grail legend faded at the end of the Middle Ages. The story of the Holy Grail was revived by Romantic and Victorian era interest in what many called the “Age of Chivalry,” with Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” (1869) and Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth festival piece Parsifal (c. 1880), although both the Anglican Tennyson and the mystical Wagner eliminated the background of the Real Presence in their Grails. In the 20th century, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” tells a ridiculously comic version of King Arthur’s knights and their quests, while John Boorman’s 1981 film, “Excalibur,” based on Thomas Malory’s work, included Percival’s successful quest for the Holy Grail, healing Arthur and the land because “the land and the king are one.”

Myths and Theories

Joseph of Arimathea removes Jesus from the cross. Shutterstock

This mysterious link between the legend of the Holy Grail and Britain, or England, became an argument for the English Reformation in the 16th century. Queen Elizabeth I cited Joseph of Arimathea’s presence in England long before Pope St. Gregory the Great sent St. Augustine of Canterbury to Kent as important to the tales. She informed the Catholic bishops who protested against the establishment of the Church in England at Parliament in 1559 that Joseph of Arimathea was the “first preacher of the Word of God” in England, and that the country already had bishops and priests when Rome “usurped” their authority. Elizabeth was citing the authority of the sixth-century monk Gildas, whose shrine at Glastonbury Abbey had been destroyed when King Henry VIII suppressed all the monasteries, convents and friaries in England, Wales and those parts of Ireland he ruled.

Near the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey today, the annual Glastonbury Festival celebrates music and New Age, neo-pagan spirituality during the summer solstice. Although the most reliable historical research indicates that Glastonbury Abbey was founded in the seventh century, the legends of King Arthur, Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, Avalon and even the Glastonbury Thorn, a tree that magically grew from Joseph’s staff, become a confusing tangle of mystery and secret knowledge.

Conspiracy theorists have even woven the legend of the Holy Grail into their webs of arcane and unknowable history, presenting a story that Dan Brown infamously adopted in “The Da Vinci Code.” This version claims that the Holy Grail was really the womb of Mary Magdalen, or her descendents from her marriage with Jesus, who had not really died on the cross, nor risen from the dead — and who, according to Brown and his sources, is not really the Incarnate God, the Second Person of the Trinity, who came to earth to redeem us and establish His Church.

The Real Presence

As noted in the 2006 book “The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence” (Loyola Press), Adolf Hitler did search for the Holy Grail just as “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” depicts. He and Heinrich Himmler were fascinated by the promise of great and secret powers they could obtain by possessing the Grail; Hitler believed the blood of the Grail was the original, pure Aryan blood. Himmler, according to “The Grail Code,” was “nuts for Grail lore and the Arthurian legends in general” (p. 223), and he both re-created the Round Table at the SS headquarters and searched for the Holy Grail in southern France, the enclave of the medieval Cathars, Gnostic heretics who surely would not have valued the Holy Grail in connection with the Eucharist. The Cathars rejected belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist because of their absolute dualism, believing that all matter is evil, and since each of the seven sacraments involve matter (bread and wine, water and oil, etc.), they refused baptism and all the human elements of the Catholic Church.

But all these false views of the Holy Grail cannot diminish the true mystery of the real presence of Jesus Christ in the holy Eucharist. We have found the Holy Grail; Jesus Christ gave it to the Church the night before He died and told the apostles to “do this in memory of me” (Lk 22:19). At every Mass the words of consecration make the Lord present in holy Communion, our sacramental source of nourishment and healing.

Stephanie A. Mann writes from Kansas.

Thomas Aquinas and the Grail

When he wrote the Divine Office for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, St. Thomas Aquinas also wrote prayers to prepare for and rejoice after receiving holy Communion. As the Holy Grail healed and made whole the knight who was worthy to find and receive it, St. Thomas shows how much we need the healing grace of holy Communion: “Almighty and ever-living God, I approach the sacrament of Your only-begotten Son Our Lord Jesus Christ, I come sick to the doctor of life, unclean to the fountain of mercy, blind to the radiance of eternal light, and poor and needy to the Lord of heaven and earth. Lord, in your great generosity, heal my sickness, wash away my defilement, enlighten my blindness, enrich my poverty, and clothe my nakedness. May I receive the bread of angels, the King of kings and Lord of lords, with humble reverence, with the purity and faith, the repentance and love, and the determined purpose that will help to bring me to salvation. May I receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood, and its reality and power. . . . Amen.”

Like knights of old we seek the Holy Grail, finding it at Mass each Sunday or weekday, praying to be prepared to receive the Lord’s Body and Blood worthily and devoutly.

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Church History

Father Pierre-Jean De Smet

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If you lived in the United States during the 19th century and asked anyone, other than a Native American, to name the most famous person in the American West, the…

If you lived in the United States during the 19th century and asked anyone, other than a Native American, to name the most famous person in the American West, the answer might be Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson or explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

But if you asked a Native American the same question, the response would likely be the “black robe” Father Pierre-Jean De Smet. Perhaps no individual in the 19th century had more impact on Native Americans than this Catholic missionary.

Born in 1801, Pierre-Jean De Smet began seminary training as a teenager in his native Belgium. Excited by the possibility of being a Catholic missionary in the New World, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 20 and entered the Jesuit Novitiate at White Marsh, Md. In 1823, he moved to the Jesuit facility in St. Louis, where, four years after arrival, he completed his priestly training and was ordained.

In 1826, Pope Leo XII established the Diocese of St Louis, which exceeded the size of the other nine American dioceses combined; it encompassed everything north of Louisiana and west of central Illinois. Almost all of this new diocese, especially west of the Mississippi River, was made up of remote and undiscovered land. It was along the Missouri River, in the Rocky Mountains and west toward the Pacific Ocean that Father De Smet would spend a lifetime proclaiming the Gospel of Christ to the Indians.

Eleven years after taking his priestly vows, Father De Smet was assigned to assist in the establishment of a Catholic mission, called St. Joseph, at Council Bluffs, Iowa. Here, near present-day Omaha, Neb., more than 2,000 Potawatomi Indians had been relocated from the Upper Midwest. Father De Smet spent two years among these people professing the Word of God and exposing them to Christian precepts. Although success was limited, many of these people did find new dignity, freedom and salvation in Christianity.

However, there was one problem that constantly nagged and hampered Jesuit efforts. The relocation agreement that moved the Indians to Council Bluffs stipulated that the U.S. government would monetarily compensate the Indians. White traders and merchants seemed to know of this stipulation and were quick to exploit the Indians, introducing them to the vices of the white man, including alcohol. Father De Smet and his colleagues struggled continuously to keep alcohol out of the missionary encampments, even protesting to the highest levels of government, but with little success.

In that era, the enemy of the Potawatomi was the aggressive and much larger Sioux tribe. These two tribes had frequently engaged in warfare, mostly to the Sioux’s advantage. In 1839, Father De Smet took it upon himself to end the violence. He made the trip from Council Bluffs to the Sioux encampment in the eastern Rocky Mountains, some 12 days of travel up the Missouri River. Alone and unarmed, he walked into the Sioux camp. As he found throughout all his missionary efforts, he was treated respectfully and provided great hospitality. The Indians listened to what this black robe had to say and agreed to make peace with the Potawatomi.

Father De Smet was graced with a God-given special charism that allowed him to relate and minister to Native Americans. He never offended them, never lied, never took advantage or mistreated them. In fact, he would, on numerous occasions, zealously defend their rights before presidents and congressional leaders alike. He was their benefactor at a time when many other whites regarded them as little more than savages. In the most unsanitary, foreign and remote conditions he accepted whatever charitable gifts they offered. A smelly buffalo robe was graciously accepted, or food served on a filthy plate was eagerly consumed; he found ways to fit in with people he grew to love and admire.

In 1840, after two years at Council Bluffs, Father De Smet was assigned to minister to the Flathead (or Salish) Indians, located in what is now Montana. During the several years prior to Father De Smet’s assignment, the Flatheads had made repeated trips to St. Louis seeking a black robe to come live with them and teach them about Jesus. In the spring of 1840, Father De Smet was directed to proceed to the Flathead encampment near present-day Missoula, Mont., and establish what became known as St. Mary’s Mission.

Missionary Challenges

Father De Smet, along with other Jesuits, would establish at least seven missions in the Rocky Mountains, as well as numerous smaller locations largely using the methods of their founder, St. Ignatius. This was never an easy task as the effort was plagued with danger. Just getting to the Indians took days, weeks or even months. Travel was primarily by riverboat, and those river journeys were filled with potential accidents: sand bars, tree stumps, snags, low water and unchartered shore lines. Disease, terrible weather, including tornadoes and snowstorms, forests and thickets also had to be braved. And always there was the unknown reception by the Indians, which never seemed to slow Father De Smet.

Additional aggravation came from the U.S. government, which was forever trying to force the Indians farther and farther west, to confine nomadic people to the reservation. The government also insisted on parceling up the Indians among different religious missionary groups, clearly favoring the Protestants. Perhaps the biggest detriment to all the missionaries was the idea that the noble, proud Indians would adapt to the white man’s culture — that is, they would not only be Christianized but act, dress and conform to a white man’s world. That last challenge was never fully realized.

The Jesuits would quickly discover that the harvest was plentiful but laborers were few. There was an ongoing need for funding and more black robes if their missionary effort was to succeed.

Father De Smet was up to the challenge. He raised money by selling his writings that described the Indians and the geography of the West. He went to Europe repeatedly and not only obtained funding, but convinced more Jesuits to migrate to his missions in the United States. He also petitioned U.S. Congress to support the Jesuit missionary efforts.

During his 72 years of life Father De Smet would come to know and associate with popes, Catholic superiors, presidents, members of congress, Indians from dozens of tribes and his fellow Jesuit missionaries. He would use them all for the greater glory of God.

Peace Mediator

On seven occasions over a 20-year period, Father De Smet was solicited by the U.S. government to intercede between warring Indian tribes and between conflicts of Indian tribes and the United States. One Indian tribe not willing to accept containment on a reservation, not willing to accept the white man’s infringement into their way of life, was the Sioux.

In 1862, they started a war against the United States. The army struggled to handle the situation, and once again the government asked Father De Smet to find a way to intercede and end the warring. The Jesuit, by now 67 years old, took on the assignment to stop the bloodshed and save the Indians from eventual extermination. From St. Louis, Father De Smet traveled 33 days by boat up the Missouri and then trekked another 16 days over land into south central North Dakota looking for the chief of the Sioux, Sitting Bull.

In April 1868, armed with his crucifix and black robe, he entered the Sioux camp and after a few days convinced the famous chief to send representatives to meet with government officials at Fort Rice, N.D. At face value this was a remarkable achievement, because there is little evidence that the two men had ever met. It was Father De Smet’s reputation and the Holy Spirit at work. At the conclusion of the Fort Rice conference, Father De Smet returned to St. Louis where he died on May 23, 1873, Ascension Thursday, from kidney disease.

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Church History

Why is Sacrosanctum Concilium Important?

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These celebrations have provided an opportunity for the Church to properly assess the achievements of the council as well as to discuss areas in which the council may have fallen…

These celebrations have provided an opportunity for the Church to properly assess the achievements of the council as well as to discuss areas in which the council may have fallen short. In addition to articulating both the successes and failures of Vatican II, these celebrations have provided the framework by which to discuss the impact of the council on the life of Holy Mother Church as well as positing what impact the council may have on the future of the Church.

In addition to these celebrations, in his Christmas address of 2005, then Pope Benedict XVI provided a significant hermeneutic (or lens) through which to view the work of the Second Vatican Council. He spoke about the hermeneutic of continuity between the work of the council and the life of the Church before and after the council. The “hermeneutic of reform,” of renewal, sees “the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.”

And then he noted that certain sectors of culture and society sought to separate Vatican II from the history of the Church and promoted a hermeneutic of discontinuity focused on the spirit of the council, not the truths of the documents themselves: “The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts…. In a word: it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the council but its spirit. In this way, obviously, a vast margin was left open for the question on how this spirit should subsequently be defined and room was consequently made for every whim.”

This gap between the texts themselves and the allusive spirit of the interpreter created an opportunity to respond to every whim in the life of the Church.

The framework provided by both Pope Benedict and the Church’s historical celebrations creates the context for an overview of the first document promulgated by the council fathers, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. It can be rightly argued that this document more than others suffered under the hermeneutic of discontinuity presented to the world in the context of the spirit of the document opposed to what the document actually outlined and promulgated. Despite the confusion sometimes created by this misreading of the document, Sacrosanctum Concilium remains integral to the Church’s organic development of the liturgy.

The council fathers wisely began the deliberations of Vatican II with the sacred liturgy precisely because of its significance in the life of the Church. The liturgy is “the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives, and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, No. 2).

After articulating the nature of the liturgy, which is to build up and strengthen the body of Christ, the document prepares to articulate principles whereby the liturgy may be renewed chiefly so that the liturgy may be that source which imparts “an ever increasing vigor to the Christian life of the faithful” (No. 1). Before providing concrete principles by which this renewal should be governed, the council fathers exhorted a respect for and adherence and obedience to the tradition of the Church.

Jesus’ Priestly Office

The principles used to assist the Church in liturgical renewal involve, first, an understanding of the nature of the sacred liturgy. At the heart of what the Church celebrates in the sacred liturgy is a continuation of the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ and an expression of His mission to bring about salvation and reconciliation for the whole world.

The Church’s perennial teaching is that the redemptive work of Christ continues in the life of His spouse, the Church, who cooperates concretely in the mission of the Savior through sacramental life. The council states: “Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations. He is present in the sacrifice of the Mass, not only in the person of His minister, ‘the same now offering, through the ministry of the priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross,’ but especially under the Eucharistic species” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, No. 7).

The council fathers are able to define the liturgy as “an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ” (No. 7). Through His priestly office Christ is able to sanctify men who are in turn able to fittingly adore God. The liturgy as an action of adoration and sanctification allow men to experience here on earth a foretaste of the glories of heaven and consequently requires from the faithful knowledge and spiritual understanding of what is happening when they are present at the sacred liturgy.

Renewal

Having established foundational principles for the renewal of the sacred liturgy, the document articulates norms for its renewal based on more general aspects of the nature of the liturgy: the communal nature of the liturgy, catechetical and pastoral aspects of the liturgy.

The document concludes the articulation of norms by mapping out the adaptation of the liturgy to the cultural realities in which it would be celebrated. The remaining sections of the document are given over to a discussion of each of the seven sacraments and sacramental realities beginning with the most holy Eucharist. Here the council fathers offer a re-articulation of traditional Catholic theology regarding each of the sacraments and applying the principles set forth at the beginning of the document.

After addressing each of the seven sacraments, the document addresses the importance of sacred art and furnishings. So, too, the council fathers give attention to the liturgical year, the Divine Office and sacred music.

The significance of Sacrosanctum Concilium comes not only from the comprehensive discussion of the whole of the liturgical life but also from the various misunderstandings about the sacred liturgy that developed as a result of a misreading of the document.

Chief among these misunderstandings regards the “full, conscious, and active participation” of all the faithful. This has been understood more often than not as an exhortation to involve more lay faithful in the work of the liturgy when the document makes no specific reference to how this might be implemented.

Furthermore, having already articulated the importance of tradition in rooting and guiding the renewal of the sacred liturgy, this particular phrase, having already appeared in magisterial documents, involves an interior preparation and awareness and has very little to do with exterior functions.

The document speaks eloquently about the importance of the ongoing use of and formation in the Latin language (see No. 36). While allowing the use of the vernacular in the celebration of the sacred liturgy, there is a clear exhortation for the preservation of the use of Latin in the liturgy.

Finally, while it has become normative to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass facing the congregation, nowhere in the documents was it suggested or mandated that the Church abandon the ancient practice of celebrating holy Mass ad orientem — that is, facing the east.

Clear Directions

While the spirit of Sacrosanctum Concilium has been trumpeted to allow a variety of abuses to sacred celebrations, the document itself has provided the Church with clear directions to better assist all the faithful in fruitful celebrations of the sacred mysteries.

The exhortation for better knowledge of the rites and rituals of the faithful has provided the impetus for many in the post-conciliar period to strive for greater knowledge about the rituals so that they might more deeply penetrate the mysteries celebrated therein. So, too, the exposure to more sacred Scripture has brought the richness of biblical language more comprehensively into the liturgy.

As the Church now moves beyond these historical celebrations and reflections, she is presented with an opportunity to return to the actual content of the document itself and to authentically execute the desire of the council fathers for a deeper appreciation of the Church’s liturgical life. With the pontificates of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, who has publically committed himself and the Church to the liturgical insights and direction of his predecessor, the Church will be able to more authentically engage the dynamics of liturgical renewal articulated by the council.

The understanding of the council fathers that the celebration of the Church’s liturgical life was the source and summit of all her activities is still very much operative today as it was at its promulgation.

What Sacrosanctum Concilium provides, within the framework of restored tradition and sound doctrine, is the opportunity to assist the faithful in experiencing more deeply and richly the incarnate wisdom and love of God.

Msgr. C. Eugene Morris, a priest of the St. Louis archdiocese.

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