Report on Paul Lakeland Lecture to Bridgeport VOTF

The Pope said he hoped the council would open the windows of the Church to let in some fresh air.
Bearded and smiling, garbed in a dark shirt and slacks, the compact professor leaned casually against the lectern as he spoke from a 19-page text, looking up frequently at his audience.

Vatican II, he said, brought about a “rebalancing” of the relationships between the Mass as sacrifice and shared meal, between the priesthood and the laity, between the hierarchy and the community and between the Church and the world.
“The train has departed, the genie is out of the bottle,” he said. “There is no suggestion that we return to the day when the priest did his thing at the altar and the rest of us occupied ourselves with our prayer books.”

Seconds later, he added, “The day when the people just deferred to Father will never come again.”

Lakeland said the council failed to carry through “forcefully or clearly” on some matters. One was the training of priests, which he said still does not relate to the “real world.” Another was the recognition of the laity as a ministry in its own right, not just “as temporary replacements until the shortage of ordained clergy could be reversed.”

Lakeland said the council failed to address the concerns of the poor.  He said clerical celibacy and women in ministry were declared as “off the table” by Pope Paul VI, who succeeded Pope John XXIII before the council closed.

The bishops, Lakeland said, had little or nothing to say about contraception, abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, divorce and remarriage or the Church’s history of hostility toward Jews and members of other non-Christian faiths.

Lakeland ended his lecture by quoting from Pope John XXIII’s opening address at the Second Vatican Council in the fall of 1962.

The Pope said he disagreed with “those prophets of gloom who are always forecasting disaster as though the end of the world were at hand.” He went on to say, “Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations, which, by men’s own efforts and even beyond their very expectations, are directed toward the fulfillment of God’s superior and inscrutable designs. And everything, even human differences, leads us to the greater good of the Church.”

Lakeland, who holds degrees from Oxford University, the University of London and Vanderbilt University, has written numerous articles and eight books, including The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church and Catholicism at the Crossroads: How the Laity Can Save the Church.
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