Vatican II: A Look Back

It’s fascinating to look back to the decades before Vatican II and see what reforms were brewing then that are commonplace in the church today.

Priests and women religious now are involved in social justice issues of all kinds, especially in work for the poor. Back then, some were too, but it was considered more radical. Former San Francisco Archbishop John R. Quinn in his book “The Reform of the Papacy,” writes about the pre-Vatican II worker priests from France and Belgium who “got jobs in factories, where they could be close to their people and share their hardships and insecurities.”

Also in Germany and France in the 1950s, native languages were being introduced into the mass, a radical move, considering that Latin masses were required. The theological jargon for mass in a country's own language is “the vernacular.” Vatican II made it OK to say mass in the vernacular; that’s why you hear English (and some Spanish) in U.S. churches when you attend Roman Catholic masses today.