What a difference a few years make...

With the seminarians from SJV around this weekend, I have been reminded about how much difference a few years can make. I am a decade older than many of my classmates, and about fifteen years older than most of my brothers at SJV. When I find myself a little out of touch, I find it helpful to review the current Beloit College's list of things about which incoming college students may think differently. My classmates who came almost directly out of college would be on this list. I find these differences interesting and helpful to remember; theology does not always stand apart from the time in which it was written. Context sometimes prevents one from crossing the thin line between heresy and orthodoxy.

For example, in my Ecclesiology class this semester, we've been reading Lumen Gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church) and Gaudium et Spes (the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), both of which were written and approved by the Council Fathers in the early 1960s. One of the interesting things about these documents is how much they are informed by the social/political concerns of the 1960s--particularly the bipolar world which existed during the Cold War because of the United States and then Soviet Union. The council documents are full of explicit and implicit references to communistic atheism, nuclear annihilation, and the lack of harmony and unity among human beings. My section of Ecclesiology (the MAT section) has many lay students in it, many of whom remember the Cold War even better than I do, but many of my fellow seminarians (who are in the MDiv section of Ecclesiology) were born just four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, so many of them have no personal experience of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, or the hair trigger threat of Nuclear War.

And before you think this is exaggerated, I ran across this article [hat tip to Dale Price] which describes how in September 1983, a then-young lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Strategic Rocket forces (who was on unscheduled duty covering for someone who couldn't make it into work) made a 'risky judgement' that the computers were giving him wrong information as they reported incoming U.S. nuclear missiles. [For the movie-goers out there, this reminds me of the conclusion of War Games with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, which may date me even more than remembering the Cold War.] As a result he did not order the programmed response of a full-nuclear response--which presumably would have triggered an American response, and perhaps the end of the world as we've known it.

When we recognize the events that surrounded the writing of the Vatican II documents, we also understand more deeply the real concerns the Council Fathers intended to address. In recognizing these concerns, priests and theologians of today are better equipped to apply the teachings of the Council to our contemporary situation.

So during the 40-hours devotion (see below) this weekend, we thank God for the gift of life and of our vocations. We pray for peace among nations. We ask God to give us wisdom to understand more deeply the movement of the Spirit in the Church, even when it is sometimes hidden in the shadow of historical context.

St. Charles Borromeo, patron of seminaries & seminarians, pray for us!