An Alley in Chicago by Margerie Frisbie

Author:Margerie Frisbie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sheed & Ward
Published: 2002-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I understand there are

troublemakers in this city”

Like Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1965, the movement priests in Chicago had been to the mountaintop. They were exultant. Vatican II gains were beyond their expectation. The Chicago moment had towered into the American moment. Again, like Dr. King, they would suffer grievous reverses.

Twenty years later, Jack Egan would designate the beginning of the Golden Age of the American Church to 1940, about the time Monsignor Hillenbrand’s first seminarians were ordained. He’d date the Golden Age’s termination to that time in 1965, when the Vatican Council ended. But that’s hindsight. From their mountaintop in 1965, no Chicago priests would have guessed how quick their fall would be. Their general euphoria had boded a New Age, not a Dark Age.

When Cardinal Meyer returned from Rome after the passage of the decree on religious liberty, Chicago priests greeted him with a sustained ovation at the Resurrection Parish Hall. America’s lived experience of religious liberty was now church doctrine. The Holy Spirit had worked through American Catholics (probably the laypeople best prepared for the council, according to Jack Egan’s observation), their priests, and then through their bishops.

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” Poet Rainer Maria Rilke could have been describing Chicago’s priests—especially those on the leading wedge of change—who considered themselves vessels, in Rilke’s sense, of the Vatican II transformation. The document on the Church in the modern world validated their work; their insights on marriage; their ecumenical contacts; their experiments in human relations; their explorations of liturgical change; their actions for justice; they shared a gratified feeling that Chicago had been a model, a workshop, for the council. Hadn’t they tried out many of the initiatives that the bishops had debated? Would the council have been the same if Chicago hadn’t been open to the future entering into it?

What possibilities were there in that future whose transformation they’d shared in making? How willing was the Church to embrace the world? How high could they climb? Where could they go from the mountaintop? At that peak moment, few of them would have answered, “Down.”

It was not unexpected that curial forces in Rome jockeyed to recapture control of the Church once the world’s bishops jetted back to their flocks. As Jack Egan came home with the priest friend who’d sustained him after the Our Lady of the Angels fire, Father Tom McDonough predicted chillingly that the Curia would get on with its running of the Church, dismissing the council as “those bishops putting out some—not very important—papers.” Jack Egan preferred John Courtney Murray’s assessment. On the one occasion when the four priests forbidden to lecture together at Catholic University did get together, the author of the religious liberty document spoke hopefully. He looked forward to, maybe, fifteen years of confusion after Vatican II. “Then,” he assured the thirty-two priests gathered to say good-bye to their Roman carnival, “I think we are going to see the development of a glorious Church.

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