New movements ‘fruits of Vatican II’

Sydney
18 May 2003

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New movements ‘fruits of Vatican II’

By Johanna Bennett

The ‘new movements’ within the Church may be considered controversial by some but to the Vatican “they are the fruits of the Second Vatican Council without question”, says Cardinal James Francis Stafford.

The cardinal, 70, the head of the Pontifical Council for the Laity and considered one of the Pope’s right-hand men, spoke to representatives of about 40 of these and other older Catholic groups at a reception at the Mary MacKillop Centre in North Sydney. The groups included the Neo-Catechumenates, who have recently opened a missionary seminary in Sydney, Focolare, the Disciples of Jesus, the Emmanuel Community and Opus Dei, as well representatives from the Legion of Mary, Catholic Women’s League, the Bishops’ Conference Laity Committee and Catholic students.

Cardinal Stafford said: “The lay movements represent a flowering of the gifts of the spirit, the charismatic element in the Church (that is) a flowering of the prophetic, priestly, shepherding elements within the laity especially.

“These are the equivalent in the past of what Francis of Assisi was, Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa, Mother Mary MacKillop.

“Those were wonderful flowerings of the laity that eventually became part of the religious orders of the Church,” said Cardinal Stafford.

St Francis and the two St Catherines were all lay people.

Some parishes view the new movements as a threat.

The cardinal acknowledged this, as well as the continuing importance of parishes.

But, he said, the parish, despite being one of the oldest communities, had been under siege for 150 years as a result of industrialisation and of the urbanisation and secularisation that had resulted from this.

The new “prophetic” movements that have burst forth complement parishes and speak both of “the meaning of the gospel for our times and to the religious hunger of our times in a way that satisfies that hunger”, he said.

He described the desire for God as inherent and said it was being frustrated by the post-modern secular world view that was “mechanical” and saw the world as little more than “a machine, a dynamo”.

Nor is this science-dominated view of the world neutral, he said, despite claims to the contrary.

It does not address the desire for God and doesn’t allow us to ask the deepest question of all: Why? Why is there anything at all and not nothing?

Cardinal Stafford called for a revival of the Catholic imagination, which includes God in its world view, to counteract this limiting and damaging science-only view of the world.