About the Journey to Vatican III

We're smack dab in the middle of a huge story in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II is ill and could die soon. The whole world will be watching as a new pope takes the helm. Reforms are in the wind.

Conservative Roman Catholics hope these reforms mean a return to more traditional ways. Liberal Catholics hope the reforms mean more openness and inclusiveness.

Perhaps it will take a Vatican III to institutionalize all the changes in the wind now. After all, Vatican II, held from 1962 to 1965 in Rome, changed the modern church in surprising ways. Surprising, unless you look back five to 10 years before Vatican II. Most of reforms were already in the works.

In this blog, I hope to catalog and comment on the changes already going on in the Roman Catholic Church -- some subtle changes, some covert changes, some out-in-the-open changes. These changes are happening in conservative Catholic groups and liberal Catholic groups and for everyone in between. My plan for this blog is to capture commentary, and link to further reading sources, from all sides.

These "signs of the time" going on in the Catholic Church right now will have to be dealt with in a formal way in a gathering I am calling Vatican III, even though no one can say for sure a Vatican III will ever be called.

But so much is stirring now. It's an exciting time to be a Roman Catholic, because no one can predict how this part of the church's story will play out. In the meantime, the dialogue intrigues. So, let it begin.