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A Changed Church, a Changed Role

… But she (the Church) is already present in this world, and is composed of men, that is, of members of the earthly city who have a call to form the family of God’s children during the present history of the human race, and to keep increasing it until the Lord returns.… Thus the Church, at once a “visible association and a spiritual association and a spiritual community,” goes forward together with humanity and experiences the same earthly lot which the world does.… Through her individual members and her whole community, the Church believes she can contribute greatly toward making the family of men and its history more human.

—Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) §40, December 1965

A World of Priests

It was a lively Friday night in December 1965, in the living room of St. Athanasius rectory. With a few days to go until Christmas, things were busy at the parish, but there was always a little time to socialize. Neil Connolly was getting a drink for a fellow priest, while Al DeLuca played piano for the umpteenth time in the last few years. The chatter was lively, as everyone was getting updates about what this guy from the seminary class was doing and what parish so-and-so was working in now. Vacations and holiday visits with families were also on their minds, as DeLuca’s renditions of show tunes sparked memories of growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. The socials that St. Athanasius priests threw every few months were a good tradition.

Connolly was well aware of how lucky he was. Not everyone he’d known in seminary had fellow priests like Gigante, Adams, Steltz, and DeLuca, who enjoyed each other’s company and spent time together. Also, few had an open-minded, supportive pastor like Tom O’Brien. On a night like this, those who enjoyed their parish assignments less than Connolly could appreciate the conversation and company of their friends from seminary who were now spread around parishes in the Bronx, Manhattan, and various upstate counties. Some had become regulars at these socials, which also occasionally included guests like the people from the Puerto Rico program. Even Ivan Illich was expected to drop in this evening, which Connolly was looking forward to.

As he looked around from his post at the refreshments table, Connolly savored the scene, but beyond the chatter and the laughs, he also heard about some struggles. As on other social nights at Athanasius, some shared the personal difficulties of being without familiar faces to turn to. Some were stationed with pastors who were too rigid in their ways, or who were too “old-school” Irish to welcome the new Puerto Rican parishioners with open arms. Being a priest, like becoming a priest, was a sometimes overwhelming and solitary responsibility. The setbacks and demands were many, and they could fill you with doubt, Connolly thought.

Connolly needed this fellowship with his fellow priests personally, especially during periods of self-questioning. There was one in particular that he was remembering that night. During the summer before his final year in seminary, as he was relaxing on the beach, Connolly had thought about what he would become in just one year: a real live, ordained priest. Connolly had taken his seminary studies seriously because he had to—everyone from his parents to his teachers to the Church at large expected a good academic performance from him. But he had sometimes struggled to focus, as he rarely did when he was working with other people, whether on sports teams or in the seminary’s other social activities. A recent church history class had portrayed the priest as playing a central role, in the local towns, across Europe, and elsewhere, as the “keeper of names”—the scribe. The name clericus (Latin for “scribe”), which would soon become clergy, identified a person with an unusual level of education and, therefore, higher authority and power.

But this kind of role was not what Connolly wanted. He had wondered, sitting on that beach, if he was going to turn out to be just an administrator, a record-keeper in some “hallowed hall,” an institutional figure. No, he answered himself, I thought I was going to be preaching in the streets, “thumping the Bible” and saving souls and helping people. He vowed, in that moment, that while he would complete the seminary studies he had sometimes found challenging, his priesthood would not end in records. His priesthood would be meaningful. It would not be institutional, it would not be clerical, and it would not be administrative. It would give meaning to the people, like the Good Counsel priests had given to him.

Years later, in the rectory of St. Athanasius, in December 1965, the path of priesthood indeed seemed to have been meaningful. Despite the hurried world of hundreds of baptisms (including “scribing” all those names!), running from one sacrament to another, and shuttling from society meetings to school activities, his life as a priest was giving meaning to others and to himself. And the teamwork at Athanasius made it even more meaningful. On this December night, after years of struggles, trial, and error, he understood priesthood well, just like his Spanish.

At that moment of reflection, he was interrupted. Ivan Illich came into the rectory. He walked up to Connolly and began a spirited conversation. Connolly remembered how Illich had challenged him in that Puerto Rico program in 1958. Besides sending him to say Masses and hear confessions in the furthest reaches of the campo, in his still-developing Spanish, Illich also sent Connolly other places. Once, he was sent to speak to a group of lawyers, who were thankfully better at speaking English than he was at speaking Spanish. Why he had singled out Connolly for these challenging experiences was not clear, except that Illich probably saw something in Connolly that summer: the quest for something more dynamic and engaging, and the desire to learn. Also, Illich was always emphasizing the need to break away from old institutional practices and meet people where they were.

“Neil, how are you?” said Illich.

“I’m doing great, Ivan. How about yourself?”

Connolly explained the things going on at St. Athanasius—the baptisms, the religious education programs, the Movimiento Familiar Cristiano, and the team ministry. But Illich interrupted.

“Yes, Neil, that’s all very good. But let me ask you—are you getting ready?”

“Getting ready for what, Ivan?” Connolly asked, suddenly feeling uncertain.

“The council, Neil. Did you follow it?”

“Oh, the council! Yes,” Connolly, relieved, said. “It’s great isn’t it? All the debates. History in the making.”

Illich paused and looked at him. “You don’t understand, do you, Neil?”

Connolly paused in kind and looked at him quizzically. “Understand what?”

Illich said softly, but emphatically, “Neil this whole Church is going to change. Your life as a priest is going to change.”

Connolly was puzzled. “How?”

Illich said, “Neil, you will have to give up these ways of priesthood.” He refused to say any more that night.

A World of Bishops

For Connolly, this earthshaking challenge to the “ways of priesthood” began in 1962, when he and other readers of the New Yorker opened the magazine’s latest issue to find an article entitled “Letter from Vatican City.” Written by a priest with the nom de plume “Xavier Rynne,” it detailed the circumstances behind the beginning of an event called the Second Vatican Council, which was underway in Rome.¹ This article would be the first of twelve which covered the council, and his regular news updates became a familiar topic to Connolly and his priest friends. At the Athanasius socials, an inevitable question now was, “Hey, did you read the latest from Xavier Rynne?” While other periodicals covered the goings-on of Vatican II, no report compared with Rynne’s level of detail, his insight, and his “color commentary” style of describing the council’s figures and developments. For Connolly, the “Letters from Vatican City” was both a series of entertaining stories and a chance to observe, from afar, history in the making.

On October 1962, more than two thousand bishops from around the world had gathered at the Catholic Church’s global headquarters in Rome. The twenty-first such “ecumenical,” or universal, gathering in Church history, it was only the second to be held at the Vatican, and so it was called the Second Vatican Council, or “Vatican II.”² It had taken three years to prepare. Voting in the Church, a hierarchical institution not known for democratic practices, was a rare phenomenon, an act taken only in the election of a Pope or in an ecumenical council. The council was an opportunity for bishops to frankly discuss the state of the modern Roman Catholic Church, in the wake of the devastation of World War II and at the height of the Cold War, and to vote on recommendations for change.

Connolly knew that he and his friends were following a once-in-a-lifetime event; the First Vatican Council, this council’s predecessor, had occurred nearly a century ago.³ The Archdiocese of New York’s own longtime leader, Francis Cardinal Spellman, flew to Rome in October 1962, bringing along a Jesuit theologian named John Courtney Murray, an international expert on the subjects of Church-state relations and religious freedom.⁴ Like the many other theologians who accompanied bishops, Murray was expected to contribute by offering his opinions on the topics as a peritus, or expert, though he could not vote on the council’s resolutions.

This particular gathering was organized to accomplish four broad and lofty goals: “To define more fully the nature of the Church, especially with respect to the position of Bishops. To promote the restoration of unity among Christians. To renew the Church. To initiate a dialogue with the contemporary world.”⁵ The chief convener of this complex and comprehensive event, which was expected to be completed in two months, was a man of eighty-one years who came from a humble background. Angelo Roncalli had been raised in a large family of sharecroppers in the small Italian town of Bergamo, and he received an education that cultivated his strong interest in social issues, even as he entered the priesthood. After serving in the military and ministry through two world wars, Roncalli eventually became the patriarch (archbishop) of Venice. There, he expanded the Church in structure and outlook, building a seminary while welcoming the Venice Film Festival and the Socialist Party as good developments for the Archdiocese of Venice.

Once elected Pope John XXIII in 1958 by the College of Cardinals, by his peers who had few expectations from an older, quiet cleric, he surprised them all. Over the strenuous and persistent objections of his own entrenched bureaucracy, the cardinals who worked for him at the Vatican government, Pope John XXIII called for the council.⁶ The Pope said it was time for an aggiornamento, a renewal or “updating,” of the entire Church. “It’s time to open the windows and let the fresh air in,” he declared, making the global Church a truly global Church.⁷

Connolly read about the beginning of the council and the life history of Pope John XXIII with enthusiasm and thought, what an amazing man, and what a priest. To have survived such a financially deprived upbringing and reached the position of priest was in itself a major accomplishment. But to have made it through two world wars—that must have given him such a broad and unique perspective on the world and on the Church, and it must have given him a wisdom far beyond what any priest like Connolly could know. And then, for him to announce a major new venture at over eighty years old and fight his own bureaucracy over it seemed courageous. Although he had been chosen in a traditional process, this man was very nontraditional, and he seemed determined to see change through to the end.

Although the Vatican bureaucracy gave in and began planning for the gathering as ordered, resistance to Pope John’s agenda did not cease. Like a political convention, the council was to debate thirteen core issue areas, all about the Church, including: theology; the roles of various kinds of Church members; and the Church’s relationships with other Christians, non-Christian religions, and the secular world. Commissions created “schemas,” or draft platforms, for discussion and vote, to address all these areas.⁸ The issues had been the subject of intense struggles in the Church, some for decades and even centuries, and Connolly had studied some of their history at seminary: How is the Mass to be celebrated? How is the Bible to be read and interpreted? What does the Church say about other Christian groups and possible unity with them? Can the truth be discovered only in Catholic doctrine?

The original schemas, however, were written not to generate open dialogue but to promote conservative viewpoints on most of these issues. The idea was that the gathered bishops would mostly rubber-stamp them. However, when the council actually met, a series of unexpected speeches and votes forced all of them back to the drawing board, this time to be rewritten by a more balanced group of theologians and bishops before returning to the full council for a real debate.⁹

Thus, when the first and only planned council session came to a close in the fall of 1962, it had not approved a single document. It would have to be extended to another fall session in 1963. But before the beginning of that second session, Pope John XXIII passed away, and the future of the proceedings was in doubt. However, in June the College of Cardinals elected as his successor a man who was committed to the continuation of the council and the fulfillment of its goals of renewal. In another “Letter from Vatican City,” Connolly read about Giovanni Battista Montini and found him, too, worthy of great admiration. He was just as experienced about matters of the world as Pope John XXIII. The son of an intellectual mother, who was active in the Catholic Action movement, and a father, who was a lawyer, newspaper editor, and elected official, Montini was exposed to social concerns early on. Then, as a priest, he obtained a uniquely global perspective when he was assigned to serve the Vatican Secretariat of State, which he did for thirty years. His missions included an especially difficult one: the critical post–World War II operation to find and care for political prisoners, Jews, the displaced, prisoners of war, and refugees. Then, upon his appointment as archbishop of Milan, he worked so actively with the city’s factories and neighborhoods that he earned the title of “the Workers’ Archbishop.” Finally, as Pope Paul VI, he immediately called for the resumption of the council, which had so much unfinished business to be addressed.¹⁰

As he read with enthusiasm about the new Pope, Connolly also paid attention to some of the leading persons at the council.¹¹ There was Anibale Bugnini, who became a leading advocate for the Liturgical Movement, an international effort to get more lay involvement in liturgy and the sacraments. Another bishop, Augustin Bea, was recognized for his expertise on relations with other Christian denominations. Cardinal Josef Suenens of Belgium was an advocate of the council’s “renewal” goals. So he was given a leadership position as one of four moderators of this assembly, which now included well over two thousand bishops; thousands of periti, or assistants; observers who were officially invited from a variety of Christian denominations and non-Christian religions; news reporters from around the globe; and interested spectators. A particularly dedicated contingent of cardinals, bishops, and periti came from Latin America, including Dom Hélder Câmara from Brazil, and a theologian from Peru named Gustavo Gutiérrez. Both of them were advocates for Church involvement in confronting the “developing” world’s living conditions.¹² Connolly always looked to learn from other priests who shared the greater pastoral and theological understanding he had.

To Connolly and other readers of Xavier Rynne, it was clear that a majority of the world’s bishops were ready to challenge the institutional status quo at the Vatican. After boldly asking the assembly of bishops if they were planning a revolution, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the most vigorous and powerful opponent of the council agenda, was cut off for speaking too long, to which the bishops responded with a round of applause.¹³ Then, when traditionalist forces (the minority in most debates) secured delay on a key vote, a petition driven by the forces of change generated more than a thousand signatures in a day, and a special meeting with the Pope was suddenly secured to obtain a promise for the vote.¹⁴ Another highly anticipated vote, scheduled before the end of the third session, was postponed by a last-minute maneuver, forcing a delay into the last session, and the very real possibility of new changes not being realized. The move prompted a leader of the vote drive to denounce those behind the maneuver: “the bastards!”¹⁵ The intensity of the debates over the schemas was increasing, as the Second Session of 1963 spilled over into a third in 1964, and a fourth and final one in 1965. But the steady hand of Pope Paul VI and the broad-based commitment among participants to resolve most issues secured overwhelming approval votes for all the rewritten schemas, which became official documents of the “updated” Church.

Connolly enjoyed Rynne’s great stories about maneuvering and counter-maneuvering far away in Rome, but mostly they didn’t seem like they would have a huge effect on his day-to-day life, and he continued his usual work at the parish. Even after the conversation with Illich, he thought, The Chancery office—the headquarters of the archdiocese—will tell us what to do, when to show up, and what to learn. He was a parish priest, and his parishioners needed him; he didn’t have much time to figure out for himself what all these changes might mean.

Learning and Teaching

Then, in the winter of 1966, Neil Connolly found himself where he had never expected to be again after the Puerto Rico progam—in the middle of a classroom. And then another, and another, as he became an avid student of the teachings of Vatican II. Lessons were given all over the United States, and Connolly attended whenever and wherever he could go.

One of these events found him watching pictures of wartime explosions and battle scenes projected on a screen. Members of the Catholic Worker Movement were leading a presentation on the Vietnam War and the need for understanding confession and penance in a new light, in terms of forgiveness and reconciliation on an international level. In this dramatic workshop on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, Connolly and his classmates heard an argument for a Church that practices peace and encourages nations of the world to do the same.¹⁶ At a time when the Vietnam War was hotly debated in American society, this workshop brought into sharper focus Vatican II’s ideas about how the Church should relate to and look at the world.

In another event, this one on the campus of St. Louis University, Connolly heard Eddie Bonhomier, the chief organist at the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle in Harlem. Bonhomier stirred the audience of worshippers, playing keyboards and leading them in a combination of gospel, jazz, and blues hymns. Connolly clapped, swayed, and sang along with this rousing modern style of musical prayer and worship. Bonhomier introduced the workshop to a new form of liturgy, one that demonstrated that listening to the Latin Gregorian chant of the old days was not the only way to celebrate Mass with music. That day, Bonhomier taught Connolly, who grew up loving jazz music, that his favorite music of “the world” could become the music of “the Church.”

This jazz Mass, celebrated in English, was brought to life because of the Pastoral Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, also known, like most Vatican documents, by its first two words in Latin—in this case, Sacrosanctum Concilium. This was one of the four council documents (out of a total of sixteen) to be accorded the highest status of “constitution.” Approved with near-unanimity, this Pastoral Constitution was the first to be voted on, as the bishops agreed on the need for greater participation by laypersons in the liturgy and in all sacraments. Sacrosanctum Concilium allowed the language, the music, and the art of the local diocese’s people, in whatever part of the world, to be used in all Church rituals and celebrations. Each bishop was encouraged to respect local values and cultures and allow them to inform the Church’s community and life. Bonhomier’s jazz liturgy lesson gave Connolly an example of what was possible inside a church.

Sacrosanctum Concilium unleashed a sense of freedom in local dioceses and parishes during this learning period. Now any bishop or priest—whether in Recife, Brazil; Jakarta, Indonesia; or in a Spanish parish in Hunts Point in New York City—could give new expression to the liturgy and potentially reach thousands more in the process. Connolly realized that the Church of Vatican II could truly go to the people. With this new freedom, Connolly did something he had never done before as a priest: He faced the people throughout the Mass. Then, he took responsibility for teaching the parishioners by leading them in speech and prayer and song. “El Señor este con ustedes,” he would call out, and he would teach them to respond, “Y con tu espiritu.” As each Sunday passed, the call-and-response took on more rhythm and more volume. Parishioners took to the new look and sound of a ritual they had treasured as sacred and comforting. Within months of Connolly’s initial lessons, the centuries-old tradition of priests celebrating with their backs to their congregation was gone. The language of Latin was gone. The quiet and passivity of the laypersons at Mass were gone.

Connolly also helped parishioners discover their voice in the other sacraments. Baptisms, once celebrated at Athanasius with assembly-line speed or in large, disorganized, crowded events to meet crushing schedule demands, were now going to be celebrated differently. The ceremony was now treated as a deliberate event, in which all families were intentionally brought together to be welcomed into the parish community. Each act of baptism, Connolly learned at workshops and, in turn, taught his parishioners, would now be an act of the whole Church, the living body of Christ, celebrating in the people’s language and thus allowing them to fully understand the significance of the act.

The last sacrament of life, like the first sacrament, was given new meaning with the new language as well. “Extreme unction” or “last rites,” as the sacrament was known, would now be called the “sacrament of healing,” signaling a different purpose. The family of a terminally ill person would hear a different message than the hope for a cure from Connolly and other priests: “May God heal you if that is in His will. And if it is not in His will, may he give you the strength to undergo what is entering your life, so that you may reconcile with Him.” Connolly found real meaning in this sacrament, much more than he had on the first day he administered it in that darkened SRO hallway years ago.

Post–Vatican II, Connolly performs revolutionary acts of concelebration and facing parishioners. (Fr. Neil Connolly’s personal collection.)

As Connolly learned in post-council conferences and lectures, this new approach to healing and to all the sacraments was an attempt to return to the origins of the Catholic faith, to the early centuries of the Christian movement. In that time, all activities were conducted in small, still-forming communities. Early Christians shared their food and their homes, and they prayed and read and reflected together. They strove to continuously understand what was asked of them as a Christian community, both in relationship to each other and to the world. Connolly saw this emphasis on the original community as something worth cultivating. Otherwise, he thought, to the lay parishioner the Church could often just seem like a large, imposing, and uninspiring institution, or sometimes a spiritual “filling station” where you stopped in briefly between other important activities to fill up your tank.

With the interest in returning to Scriptural roots and original communities, Connolly created a new event for Easter season at Athanasius. He sought to unite the elements of the Old Testament and the New Testament, but in a different way—on the street and in the Church. He got the support of Gigante and Adams for his idea of a ceremony before the Easter Mass. But he also wanted to introduce this carefully to the parishioners, who were still learning to embrace the changes in the sacraments. So he and the staff chose a few dozen parishioners who had been most receptive to the Vatican II changes already underway in the parish. They would be his participants in this new “Ceremony of the New Fire.”

On Holy Saturday, the evening of the scheduled event, it was raining lightly, but a few dozen invited faithful appeared anyway. They stood out on Southern Boulevard a couple of blocks from the church, and each person was given a candle. Someone was called to read scripture, telling the story of Moses and the people of Israel traveling to the promised land, led by a tower of fire provided by God. Connolly and the other priests led the group in prayer and song; then, after a round of lighting candles, they processed, still singing, toward Tiffany Street and finally to the church. Symbolizing the journey out of darkness for Moses and his people, the procession gathered more people and grew as the moving field of flickering lights cut through the darkness of the streets and reached the church. The Ceremony of the New Fire was complete, yielding to the ceremony of the resurrection that was the Easter Mass.

After Mass, many of those who had participated in carrying the new fire gathered for coffee and snacks to enjoy some music and some conversation. The parishioners spoke about the original ritual with great satisfaction and gratitude that they were given a chance to participate. They were moved by the song, the prayer, and the symbolic fire; they said they felt the presence of the Holy Spirit out on the street. Connolly thought, We created something. We created the presence of the people of God, in the place and language and act of the people. This night, we brought the Vatican II Church—and the original Church—to life and into the street. As in Puerto Rico, wherever the people were, that’s where the Church was.

Was this what the bishops in Rome wanted or expected? It was not what he himself had expected during his years of reading about the council and then returning to his busy round of parish activities. But it was a little of what he had wanted to see when he vowed to be a meaningful priest. Something was inspiring him now.

New Roles

Even while he was busy traveling around the country and learning from the emerging American experts on Vatican II, Connolly found some time at Athanasius for quiet reading of all sixteen major documents. In the process, he discovered the work which had captured the imagination and passions of the bishops over those four years in Rome. Taken together, the documents reflected all of the major debates that had been the Church’s focus for decades in some way or another. As he read the documents, Connolly marveled at the thought put into them, and he felt inspired about the future Church and its possibilities. However, some of the writings left him with questions and doubts.

There were documents that opened up the Church to other faiths. The Decree on Ecumenism asserted that the Catholic Church needed to actively explore and find the opportunity to work and celebrate, and even worship, with the clergy and ministers of other Christian faiths.¹⁷ The Decree on Eastern Catholic Churches recognized the Eastern Orthodox Church as a variation of the Catholic Church and called for efforts to find common ground with and, perhaps, officially reunite with that Church and its membership.¹⁸ Finally, the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions acknowledged the presence of truth and holiness in these other religions and, in a significant move responding to the horrors of the Holocaust, affirmed that Jews were not responsible for Christ’s death.¹⁹ In line with the postwar secular consensus on “human rights,” the document proclaimed that minorities in the nations of the world, whether religious, racial, ethnic, or other, should be free of discrimination and persecution. This all contradicted the Church’s long-held official position that “error” (that is, non-Catholic religions) “has no rights.” But for Connolly, this new message of reconciliation and relationship was true to the Christian message of love he had been taught.

Connolly was also intrigued by the documents addressing theology and religious education. The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation urged continuing and active scholarship to understand the time and the context in which the scriptures were written.²⁰ This position reaffirmed the Church’s progressive trend to find the truth and meaning in scriptures with the help of the arts and sciences, articulated years earlier in the papal letter Divino Afflante Espiritu.²¹ The Decree on Religious Education praised and affirmed the work of Catholic schools and Catholic religious education, which had been important to Connolly’s first seven years as a priest. But it also supported the importance of academic independence in Catholic colleges, again declaring that openness and truth-seeking was vital to education and scholarship. Connolly heartily agreed.

Other documents proclaimed a new identity for the Church and its members, beginning with the bishops. The Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church, along with Sacrosanctum Concilium, gave much greater and clearer power to the Church’s bishops around the world, as opposed to the central staff at the Vatican in Rome.²² From now on, each bishop was to be recognized as the primary power in his diocese. He would be expected to lead the diocese and its parishes in a way that reflected the culture of the people who worshipped there. Bishops’ power was also to impact the global Church, reflected in their participation at this council and their votes to approve the sixteen documents. And another of the council’s four major documents, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, or Lumen Gentium, recognized the responsibility for the Church as a whole that each bishop shared with the Pope as their leader.²³ Finally, each bishop was encouraged to join with others in his country to address Church concerns there. Connolly’s own bishop, Cardinal Spellman, was already a powerful leader in the Archdiocese of New York, and Connolly thought that his newly shared power with the Pope would make him even stronger.

The council’s expanded sense of the identity of the Church itself was more challenging to grasp. Lumen Gentium now defined the Church in several ways. It was still an institution, with its sacraments as “signs” to the world, identifying it as God’s Church. But the document also renewed an ancient scriptural emphasis on the church as a “mystery,” and as a spiritual community.²⁴ Every one of its members—priests, religious sisters and brothers, and particularly laypersons—was, by right of his or her status as a baptized Catholic, one of the “people of God.” This concept made each Catholic equally responsible for the life and direction of the Church, both as community and as institution. This encouraged Connolly, who was striving to create a spiritual community at Athanasius, to continue the work of religious education. But even with the positive news, some things were still not clear to him and left him with questions. How is everyone in a parish responsible for the parish? If the St. Athanasius parishioners were the people of God, what should they do?

Just as intriguing and puzzling to Connolly were two new concepts of priesthood. Lumen Gentium determined that laypersons would now be seen as possessing their own category of ministry, in living out and sharing their faith: the “priesthood of the faithful.”²⁵ Each layperson, again by virtue of baptism, had the same responsibility as priests to be messengers of the faith and model the life of a true Catholic. They were to be served in this new “priestly” capacity by ordained priests, bishops, and religious, whose role was now defined as the “ministerial priesthood.” In the same spirit of revising the liturgy and sacraments to reflect the language, customs, and values of laypeople, these two concepts of priesthood re-oriented ministry in the direction of laypeople. These newly designated priests would need to be supported in order to carry out their mission.

As Connolly read these sections of the Pastoral Constitution, he thought about his own experiences at Athanasius. What would “priesthood of the faithful” mean, practically speaking? Did the laypersons in the parish need to act differently? Was there a special kind of attention or orientation which Connolly must provide them which he hadn’t up to this point? No one provided workshops or manuals, like the Sunday missalettes and catechism books and the conferences about the Pastoral Constitution on the Liturgy, for developing or serving the “priesthood of the faithful.” And what did it mean for him to be a “servant priest,” as the Pastoral Constitution now defined him? Hadn’t he been doing everything he could to prepare his parishioners for all the sacraments, to provide religious education to the children, and to support the societies? With more and more questions shaking his confidence in his own priesthood, he looked to initiatives coming out of the Vatican and the archdiocese to give him answers.

Action and Reaction

Even before the final closing of the council, the leader of the global Church wasted no time in carrying out the messages of the Church in Renewal. In October 1965, Paul VI followed in the footsteps of his namesake, the apostle known for his travels around the world to spread the message of Christ and the new Christian movement. Pushing for a global movement of world peace, he appeared in New York City before the gathering of the world’s leaders as the annual United Nations General Assembly, urgently calling on the leaders to end conflicts and achieve lasting peace. He spoke with the weight of decades of experiences as a witness to the horrors of war and the suffering caused: all those who had lost lives, families, communities, and futures. Paul pleaded for peace before representatives of 114 nations, asking also for an end to the threat of nuclear weapons. The leader of the global Church wanted to turn the council’s words into meaningful action. But he also called on the bishops of the world to do the same.²⁶

In his travels to different parts of the United States to learn the teachings of Vatican II, Connolly also learned about other council-inspired action, this time in his home country. Though the American bishops had occasionally gathered since the mid-nineteenth century and had been more formally organized since World War I, a new body called the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) now took shape. Under its first president, progressive archbishop of Detroit John Dearden, they embarked on a broad-based social justice agenda.²⁷ American bishops declared their support for striking farmworkers, and they inspired growing national support for the many Mexican and Mexican American Catholics who had called for a boycott of lettuce and grapes.²⁸ The bishops also advocated for peace negotiations in Vietnam and supported conscientious objection to war. Moreover, they advocated for the creation of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, a fund to support grassroots civil rights and related activities. The spirit of change was already capturing the attention of the broader American society in the 1960s, and with Vatican II’s directive to bishops to take part in their respective national matters, it was compelling the American Catholic Church and its hierarchy to action.

But initiatives for change were also emanating from the grassroots in the U.S. Catholic Church, as laypeople realized they had a role to play as “the people of God.” Women religious, or “sisters,” as they were commonly known, were asserting their rights to participate in activities beyond elementary school classrooms and hospital nursing.²⁹ After leading in the nation’s Catholic school systems and hospitals, many women religious decided to lead elsewhere. They created and ran community service organizations to help young people, poor people in need of social services, immigrants in need of English language education, and families in need of medicine and nursing care. But, in the socially activist spirit of the time, they also walked picket lines with farmworkers, marched for civil rights, and petitioned for better housing in inner-city and rural America.³⁰ And they often did these things in ordinary attire, not the distinctive and restrictive “habits” of the past, after the Vatican Council Decree on the Adoption and Renewal of Religious Life gave them a new freedom to do so.³¹

In the world of Catholic laypersons, who were also empowered by their new ministerial status as “the priesthood of the faithful” and “the people of God,” new organizing efforts emerged. New laypersons’ organizations were founded throughout the country.³² Particularly in middle-class communities, laymen and laywomen called for a greater say in their parishes and their dioceses. In places like Long Island, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas, local entities developed into chapters of national Catholic organizations. Their concerns ranged from the liturgy in their local parish to the need for Church action against the Vietnam War. Those concerns were being brought up elsewhere in the Church, as the bishops’ initiatives proved. But the fact that these organizations were created outside parish structures or formal diocesan programs and outside of previously recognized laypersons’ movements and societies signaled an independence unfamiliar to Church authorities.

Fr. Neil and Sr. Ann Marie in new post-Vatican attire. (Fr. Neil Connolly’s personal collection.)

Not all of the bishops who had voted to approve the council documents that had sparked all this change were ready to accept these grassroots movements. When the archbishop of Cincinnati sanctioned the Glenmary Sisters over their efforts to dress as laypersons and directly live with and serve the Appalachian community in Ohio and surrounding states, over ninety members resigned en masse and reorganized themselves into a new order, independent of the authority of the archbishop.³³ In Texas, a bishop banned parishes in his diocese from playing folk music in their liturgy,³⁴ and Dallas laypersons’ organizations staged protests over the decision.³⁵

Similar conflicts, which often involved laypersons, erupted throughout the country. Connolly was surprised by them, but it was other conflicts that felt more personal because they involved priests. In one case, a Milwaukee priest was ordered by his bishop to quit his involvement in a civil rights boycott.³⁶ In another, Vatican officials stepped in against a priest at odds with his bishop in California.³⁷ Then, in New Jersey, another bishop suspended a priest for holding mass in people’s homes.³⁸ Having heard confessions in the back of a colmado, in the Puerto Rican campo, Connolly found this bishop’s action surprising, especially since the priest was bringing the Gospel message into people’s homes. There were many more conflicts arising than there had been in the early days of Connolly’s priesthood, reflecting the tensions over new council roles: the bishops, with their newly given authority over their dioceses, and the priests, sisters, and laypersons, with their newly given responsibility for the Church as the “people of God,” did not always find it easy to figure out who had the last word.

Stories about these conflicts compelled Connolly to ask even more questions than those that came from reading the documents. Does a priest have a right to defy his bishop? Can a bishop ban a priest, or suspend or punish him if the priest feels that his actions are following the new teachings of Vatican II? Yes, the council gave the bishops plenary power over their dioceses, and all priests were ultimately accountable to the bishops who ordained and led them. But could these priests challenge the bishop if they saw something wrong? And if the priests, sisters, and laypersons are all “the people of God,” are all the Church, what did they have the power to decide about the Church? There were so many unanswered questions and new difficulties about the way the Church would work after the council, even as the new possibilities were exhilarating.

The Church and the World

Of all the council documents he read, nothing caught Neil Connolly’s attention quite like the last one. Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, was issued, or “promulgated,” on December 7, 1965, the last day of the council, and just a few weeks before Illich told Connolly that his life was about to change.³⁹ It was fitting that the last schema introduced into the council was the last one to be resolved by the bishops. Originally known only as “Schema 13,”⁴⁰ it was actively promoted by bishops from the poorer countries and continents known as the “Third World,” including the bishops of Latin America. From the occasional Latin American priests visiting and staying at Athanasius, and from reading articles in New York’s the Catholic News and the National Catholic Reporter,⁴¹ which emerged during the council years in Kansas City, Connolly knew there were serious challenges facing those bishops, including Hélder Câmara of Brazil.

Reading this Constitution was like hearing Father Fitzpatrick’s lectures on the Puerto Rican people those summer evenings in Puerto Rico, making it clear to Connolly that he and the Church were a part of history. The Church did not just exist alongside humanity; it was living within it. It shared the fate of the rest of humankind and, as such, owed its longterm well-being to its ability to work and coexist with all humankind, recognizing and realizing shared goals. One of these goals, according to the document, was to help realize the full potential of every human being on earth, Catholic and non-Catholic. In achieving that goal, the Church could realize its other significant joint goal: creating a world of dignity and well-being for all.

While celebrating the accomplishments of civilization that humankind and technology had brought about, Gaudium et Spes focused on the central issue of inequality. The bishops noted in this Pastoral Constitution that there were many people living in conditions of misery. These people were not reaping the benefits of economic progress that the developed world had experienced. And their suffering, it was pointed out, was not merely accidental or the result of a failure to move forward as quickly as Western Europe and the United States. Rather, it was the result of structures and institutions creating unequal and exploitative economic relationships across the globe through the colonization of the last few centuries. Inequalities, in turn, meant hunger, illness, and substandard housing. And importantly for the Church, situations that were harmful to the well-being of families were contrary to the goal of realizing the full potential of every human being.⁴²

The Pastoral Constitution did not leave the discussion at the point of stating that the inequality existed between poorer and richer nations of the world, or poorer and richer regions within developed nations.⁴³ The bishops said it was the Church’s responsibility to address not only the inequalities but also the conditions caused by those inequalities. And declaring those conditions was not enough. It was incumbent upon the Church to identify particular situations of injustice, such as when a large corporation takes the property of farmers, leaving them dependent and landless. Or it might mean identifying the exclusion of a community of indigenous people from a role in governing their homeland. Or the injustice might be workers not receiving fair wages to raise their family with dignity or workers enduring inhumane working conditions.⁴⁴ Whatever the situation, the bishops said, the Church had a responsibility to identify injustice and to call it out.

Moreover, since the Church had been identified as the “people of God,” all of its members were responsible for finding and challenging injustice. The institutional Church and the people of God had to take action as well as play the prophetic role of denouncing injustice. The entire Church was expected to side with those organizations peacefully working to address injustice. Supporting laborers’ efforts to form a union, as well as those of human rights organizations, workers’ cooperatives, and farmers’ associations, was a responsibility.⁴⁵ And while remaining independent of partisan political activity, the Church was expected to challenge and pressure governments over policies that would impact the economic and social well-being of people, especially the vulnerable.

Connolly found these mandates resonating with his experiences. Of course, his father’s history as a local leader in the Transport Workers Union taught him what decades of Irish labor struggles in America had taught the people in general: that a fair wage and fair working conditions were things to be fought for. The sacrifices endured by Con Connolly’s family were a part of Neil’s upbringing, and the principles behind the transit workers’ strike were reinforced by older Catholic teaching: for example, “On Capital and Labor,” an 1891 document by Pope Leo XIII that supported workers’ rights, including unionization and a living wage.⁴⁶ The teachings on workers’ rights, growing significantly after the industrial revolution and through the labor struggles of the twentieth century, anticipated other areas of broader Catholic social teaching that became more widely known and better-developed following Vatican II.

Connolly himself had also taken steps on labor issues during his time in seminary. He had helped organize a seminar on “The Church and Labor” during his last year at St. Joseph’s, involving some guest speakers. Most prominent among them was Father John “Pete” Corridan, a Jesuit priest who worked in the shipyards of the New York waterfront and became a friend of the longshoremen working there. His visits to the docks endeared him to the workers, even as he faced the wrath of some union “leaders” corrupted by the influence of New York’s organized crime rackets. Corridan’s efforts to give the workers honest wages and better conditions led him to denounce corruption before Congressional Waterfront Commission hearings. His work was featured in Pulitzer Prize–winning articles and the Academy Award–winning movie On the Waterfront (1954). Corridan’s crusade inspired Connolly, and he was thrilled to invite him for a talk before the future priests at St. Joseph’s on his role and experiences as a “workers’ priest.”⁴⁷

But Connolly’s confidence about labor issues were not enough to help him understand another council concept. The bishops emphasized that their call to work for justice was in the service of cultivating the “kingdom of God on earth.” This kingdom, the bishops wrote, drawing on scripture, already existed, like a seed or a young plant ready to be brought to fruition. Every member of the Church was on the journey toward that kingdom, to be realized as an era of peace, dignity, and justice for all humankind. It was up to Church members to take action now, in order for the kingdom to “be brought into full flower.…”⁴⁸ Instead of preparing exclusively for heaven, the bishops wrote, “the expectation of a new earth must not weaken but rather stimulate our concern for cultivating this one. For here grows the body of a new human family.” Connolly realized that these lofty words, proclaimed to humankind as part of the last message emanating from the council, signaled a brand-new level of interaction with the world. They were also words he would need some time to make sense of. What was the “Kingdom of God on earth”?

From Doubts to New Responsibilities

As he thought about the council documents, the conferences, and the conflicts he was hearing about from around the country, Connolly was feeling doubts about his priesthood again. Despite two council documents about priests, there was no real new place in the Church for priests, nor was there a new job description like there seemed to be for bishops and laypeople. Connolly was still called on to take care of a parish and its people, to preach the Gospel message and perform the sacraments, though in a more dynamic way that engaged the people. And even with the introduction of new entities called “Presbyteral Councils” to allow priests to advise their bishop, priests still answered to their bishops.

But he was reassured by a recurring theme he heard from the council documents and his various trainings: shared responsibility. First, he had to take responsibility for building a different kind of Church, a “people of God.” The thousands of parroquianos (parishoners) at St. Athanasius whom he had baptized over the years were now the people of God, responsible for the parish. As their priests, Connolly and the others were responsible for serving them, rather than leading them. In turn, he had to teach them to be responsible for their parish, and not just for their Sacred Corazón, or Santo Nombre, or Movimiento part of the parish. For the whole parish, a responsibility new to their Catholic identity.

Connolly also saw another responsibility for himself: the Church. Not just St. Athanasius but St. Anselm, St. Anthony of Padua, St. John Chrysostom, and all the other parishes around him in the Bronx. And the ones in Manhattan and Yonkers, and Newburgh, and those in the capilla in Jayuya and the other campos in Puerto Rico. And the parishes of those priests, sisters, and laypersons he met out in the conferences in Missouri and Indiana and elsewhere in the United States. Somehow, he thought, I am responsible for the current and future life of the Church, and for its fulfillment of the new council teachings.

Moreover, he knew that if he were to carry out those teachings, then he could not continue doing things as he had for the last seven years. He couldn’t just react to every situation or solve every problem that came along. Instead, he would have to be intentional in his actions within and outside the parish. Also, it could not be an “automatic” Catholicism anymore in the parish, where you’re baptized, you receive Communion, so you’re automatically Catholic, you’re a “member of the tribe,” and there is nothing more to think about or understand. He would have to challenge parishioners and others to be intentional about their Catholicism, to understand the message of responsibility for the whole Church.

There was another responsibility Connolly decided was his: to bring the Church into the world. As a priest, he would need to teach his parishioners to bring their parish into the world, a little like he had done with the Movimiento Familiar Cristiano. But while he engaged some parishioners in the Movimiento to “see, judge, and act” on matters of the world, Gaudium et Spes was calling for something more from Connolly, more than the labor seminars and more than community trips to Bear Mountain Park. He would need to speak about unjust conditions in the world and somehow teach his Church—the whole Church—to do the same. It seemed overwhelming, like those hard days in the seminary he was remembering that December night in the rectory when he saw Illich.

He wondered what he might be capable of accomplishing with these new council teachings. It would take a while to find out and to do it right, just like it had taken a while to learn Spanish, to “de-Yankeefy” and understand his parish. But how to accomplish these teachings in the world? As a priest? What was he capable of? What was any priest capable of in this new Vatican II Church?

He started to remember one of those Saturday nights when he and fellow seminarians would regularly go out to unwind from the difficult days. They played cards at someone’s home, or went out bowling. But the jazz clubs were their favorite place to go and have some drinks, and talk about life for a while, while listening to the popular acts of the time—Illinois Jacquet, Charlie Parker, and others—in Manhattan, either on “Swing Street” (52nd Street) or in the Village. On this night, it was Eddie Condon’s, a place in the Village, featuring Teddy Wilson, a well-known cornet player of the time. One of the seminarians, a Spanish man named Rafael Verdejo, started bragging about how he knew the club owner.⁴⁹

“You know, that Condon is my family.”

Connolly and others laughed and rolled their eyes at Verdejo’s remarks. “Ah, you’re full of shit,” one of the men barked, as the others chuckled.

Not ready to let the subject go, Verdejo said, “I’m telling you, Condon’s my uncle. He even lets me play here sometimes.”

More laughter erupted as someone yelled, “Cut the malarkey.”

Then he stopped the comments by raising his hand. “I’ll tell you what,” he said with a sly smile.

“What?” said another man, laughing.

“I’m gonna go up there and play.”

“You?” asked Connolly, and the laughter resumed. “C’mon,” said Connolly, “Give me a break. What makes you think you can—” But before Connolly could finish his question, Verdejo bounced up and started walking over to the stage where Wilson had just finished playing a set.

Verdejo looked at Wilson, pointing to the piano, and they both nodded. In seconds, Verdejo sat down at the piano bench and asked Wilson about something which Connolly couldn’t hear. Then his fellow seminarian counted “one, two, one, two three four” and began to play. Wilson joined in, and the two went back and forth, punto a punto, one song after another, in an impromptu jam session.

Connolly and the other seminarians stared, stunned, and muttered, “Holy shit.”

As he sat in awe watching the two perform, Connolly thought about how Verdejo really surprised everyone. He realized that you can never tell what a person is capable of. That night he wondered what he himself might be capable of. It was a question that was coming up regularly in the year leading up to his ordination and in the beginning of priesthood.

Verdejo showed Connolly something that night, in addition to demonstrating his own talents. He just got up, went into the center of it all, and, without worrying about the larger audience, he let go and immersed himself in the performance. That was what Connolly had to do—let go and immerse himself. Connolly kept that moment and that lesson in his memory, and he applied it later when major challenges presented themselves in his life. That was what Illich called on him to do in Puerto Rico, and it was what he again called on him to do that December night in the Athanasius rectory after the council closed. Let go of the old Church and the old priesthood. Walk into the unknown and improvise, in partnership with any other musician who would play with you.

Connolly was ready to learn more about building the Church into the people of God. He was ready to take responsibility for the whole Church. He was also ready to bring the Church into the world and create “the Kingdom of God on earth.” And yet, while he had some ideas about the people of God and taking responsibility for the Church, he had little idea of what creating the Kingdom would involve, or where to start. Fortunately for him, there was someone who would give him a first answer. It was not Illich, but rather another extraordinary member from the 1958 summer class in Puerto Rico.