Now, I didn’t live through the Second Vatican Council, so I can’t speak with any authority about what the hopes and dreams were for Catholics in the mid 1960s. I have read more of the Vatican II documents that most people under 50, I suspect, so I don’t bring no knowledge to this discussion.

It is obvious that many Catholics truly believed that the Council was going to radically change a lot of things in the Church. There were a lot of changes, with the change to use of the vernacular in the Mass probably the most visible (and audible) amendment. There were a lot of changes that took place at the upper levels, including an opening of dialogue with other Christians denominations and also other faiths that had been minimal or non-existent before then. There was a greater effort to have the Church interact with the world in which it was immersed.

But some people weren’t interested in such “minutiae”. They wanted to see the Church became more like the world. They wanted to see a loosening of some of the Church’s teachings that they found too restrictive — things like contraception and homosexuality. They wanted to see married priests welcomed; possibly even women priests. At the very least, women should be given some sort of ministerial roles.

Judith Lynch, who wrote a blog for CathNews earlier this week, seems to one of those women:

In the early years post Vatican II I really thought that the euphoria would last forever, that maybe we could be Australian Catholics, not tagged as RCs, that women would gradually take their place alongside men, baptising babies, anointing the sick to whom they took Communion, bringing a feminine perspective to the Sunday homilies.

I think my favourite phrase was this one: “we could be Australian Catholics, not tagged as RCs”.

The question that I always want to ask people who make such statements is this: Can you point to the Vatican II documents that offered you such hope? Can any of the Soapbox readers shed any light on this? Maybe then I won’t have to pull my hair out every time I read paragraphs like the one above.