Blessed Pope John Paul II called it, “the great grace bestowed on the Church in the twentieth century.” The event: the Second Vatican Council whose opening we celebrate on October 11, 1962. Called by Blessed Pope John XXIII in January 1959, the Council assembled the bishops of the world, theological experts and, for the first time, observers from the Protestant and Orthodox Churches. We are the heirs of this grace, and are called to invite a new generation to discover and embrace it. Some of us can look back and see clearly the shifts that resulted from this decisive moment in the history of the church in our time, and as surely we can also see that we still have much work to do to continue and complete the work the Council began.
Vatican II fifty years later
- BLESSED JOHN PAUL XXIII, PRAY FOR US!
Building an economy of love based on genuine wealth
- TRUE ECONOMICS IS THE SCIENCE OF THE WELL-BEING OF THE HOUSEHOLD.
Our economy has cancer: a mountain of debt-based money that can never be repaid no matter how much more we produce or how much more we consume is consuming us. Our lives are literally mort-gaged; in French, mortgage means “a death pledge.” For each dollar, a Canadian spends 23 cents on interest payments that are imbedded in each mortgage, business or farm loan, student loan, credit card interest charges and government debt charges. In America it is 22 cents on every dollar. Without the need to pay interest on our collective debt, we’d all have one free day off per work week. If we reclaim the language of economics from the high priests of capitalism and dare to dream of a new system that eliminates usury, only then can our economy—in the true meaning of that word—recover.
The Church on the eve of Vatican II
- THE OVER CENTRALIZATION OF ANY INSTITUTION...
Why did the Second Vatican Council take place? Without an answer to this question—asked too infrequently, I might add, without some grasp of the general theological climate and religious culture of the “average” Catholic in the years before Vatican II (at least in Europe and the Americas), it is difficult to understand the documents of the Council.
The MESsy World of Ethics
- TILTING OUR POLICY PATIENT REQUESTS...
Where’s my doctor?” asks the labouring patient as she is brought into the case room for delivery of her baby. “I need my own woman doctor. A man can’t touch me!” The head of her baby is crowning; there is no time to wait. It is not the optimum place to begin exploring the reasons for her request. The obstetrician on call is male. The attending physician reminds the patient that her own doctor had told her that she belonged to a team of doctors, and that, while requests for a health-care provider of a specific gender can generally be honoured during prenatal outpatient visits, no promises can be made for the hospital. Even if her female obstetrician happened to be on call the day she goes into labour, there is no way to ensure that a female anesthesiologist would be available should a caesarian section be required, or to arrange for an entire complement of female nurses, attendants and other clinical staff while in hospital. Rearranging on-call assignments and pulling female staff to meet the request could compromise the safety of other patients on the unit.