Vatican II | Neville Ann Kelly, D.Min., Ph.D.

This compelling, collaborative history chronicles American Dominican sisters’ experience of significant changes following the Second Vatican Council’s call for ressourcement and aggiornamento. I am privileged to know many religious sisters, and this book invited me to more intimately participate in their congregations’ energetic, transformative, and sometimes disorienting reforms in the decades following the Council.

This is a story that needs to be told by those who lived it.

Joining other recent works celebrating the immense—but often overlooked—contributions and lived history of religious and monastic women, this book paints a vividly detailed portrait of how the sweeping reforms affected sisters’ individual lives and their communities. A sequel to Period Pieces: An Account of the Grand Rapids Dominicans 1853–1966 by archivist Mona Schwind (Grand Rapids: Sisters of St. Dominic, 1991), this work uses primary, experiential sources to discuss events within the changing theological contexts that prompted them.

Among these Dominicans, response to the Council inspired extraordinary transformations of liturgy, spirituality, education, community life, and ministry, each considered in four distinct parts. An introductory preamble situates the volume in the upheavals of the twentieth century and reflects on how the sisters’ varied responses to change resemble the community-stitched liturgical tapestry in the renovated Marywood Chapel. Like the textile, these interwoven strands represent the simultaneous unity of the congregation and the diversity of its members.

Where once a clear hierarchy, large group living, and a monastic-styled interior focus had structured daily life for centuries, Vatican II called these sisters beyond “the trials of childhood dependency and the adolescent turbulence of fierce independence” to “the give and take of adults living and dying in interdependence and mutuality” (p. 149). Turning to the originating sources of Scripture and the Dominican tradition, and guided by the signs of the times, these sisters boldly implemented reforms through a collegial creativity and dedicated commitment to “find Dominic’s tune for this nuclear space age” (p. 61).

Part 1: Challenge, Innovation, and Experimentation

Part 1 discusses landmark changes to personal and community prayer. Experimentation with different forms of prayer remained distinctly faithful to Saint Dominic’s ecclesial—yet innovative—tradition, allowing measured experimentation with new ideas and practices. A section on sisters’ first use of the vernacular English and Spanish in communal liturgy allows post-Vatican II readers the opportunity to discover this beauty as if for the first time.

Dominicans’ intense involvement in developing inclusive language for sacred texts and psalmody followed, along with other innovations all eyeing retrieval of order’s original, founding spirit. Discovery and development of charismatic gifts, liturgical dance, expanded annual retreats, architectural renovations, and a particular emphasis on sisters’ ministry of preaching led to a number of pioneering educational conferences and institutes. Uniformity of observance gave way to collaboration, dialogue, creativity, diversity, and social consciousness, yielding a renewed focus on the Dominican charism of study.

Part II: Shifting Identity and Mission

Covered in Part II, intellectual and spiritual formation involved extensive revision of sisters’ approach to theology and its concrete application in the world. Inspired by Cardinal Suenen’s Nun in the World: Religious and the Apostolate (London: Burns & Oates,1963), insightful leaders like Sister Aquinas Weber (prioress 1966-1972) guided the congregation through the challenging implementation of Perfectae Caritatis. The pre-Vatican II emphasis on external symbols such as uniform clothing, gave way to a deepened understanding of sisters’ essential identity and mission, and expanded their potential in professional theology and secular arts and sciences.

Parts III & IV: Interpretation, Conflict, and New Horizons

Not surprisingly, Part III on the common life and Part IV on ministry both reflect the profound conceptual shifts underlying post-Conciliar reform. Issues of conflict over the many changes reflected sisters’ varied interpretations, and disagreements arose at times. For example, modification of the traditional Dominican habit, essentially unchanged since its medieval design, required prolonged discussion, debate, and experimentation. Living in non-convent styled houses without an appointed superior offered another difficulty that required finding new ways of intentional community life, “not dependent on common walls, but common hearts” (p. 145).

As Vatican II opened the windows to the world, sisters opened their daily lives to others, religious or laity, including those who had left their community and lay associates. Formation of a collaborative novitiate and numerous coalitions assisted sisters in an expanded vision for Aquinas College while supporting establishment of missions in New Mexico, and Chimpote, Peru while serving in varied ministries of peacemaking and justice worldwide.

Remaining Faithful

Narrator Mary Navarre concludes this compelling, well edited and exquisitely organized compilation of theologically grounded memoirs by reflecting on why “this is a story that needs to be told by those who lived it” (p. 282). This approach succeeds in opening an illuminating portal into both the profound and mundane transformations of post-Conciliar Dominican life. While some readers may wish for inclusion of critique of the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s recent investigation of the American Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Navarre insists that while “investigations and assessments flare up, come and go” (p. 284), sisters are more imminently concerned with living authentic lives of deep prayer, study, common life, and socially conscious service, while viewing “always in the distance—the shadow of the cross” (p. 286).

TAPESTRY IN TIME: The Story of the Dominican Sisters, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1966-2012, edited by Mary Navarre. ISBN 978-0-8028-7255-5. Eerdmans, 2015, pp. 336. $20.00 pb.

Reviewed by Neville Ann Kelly. Excerpts from this review were originally published in Catholic Books Review.

December 7, 2015, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et spes, a document bearing exceptional correspondence with the “joys and hopes, the grief and anguish” of our own, twenty-first century moment.

Like Francis’ papacy, the unplanned and unprecedented Pastoral Constitution of the Modern World reframes the Catholic Church’s posture as open, dialogic, and involved in the mundane affairs of daily life in the world. An ongoing call, this mid-twentieth century document offers the contemporary church a timely impetus for its unfolding future.

Beyond the Hallowed Certainties

Non-dogmatic and pastoral, the document’s tone expands the church’s embrace beyond the safety of hallowed certainties to the margins of the unknown. Throughout the multiple drafts, turbulent disagreements, and prolonged controversies that led to and followed its promulgation, the document addresses people of all faiths—as well as of none—living throughout the world in very concrete situations and particular circumstances.

Issuing a new kind of global solidarity, the Church recognizes and even embraces her participation in the often troubling and problematic affairs of human beings, of which she, too, is comprised.

In the document, the Council intended to address to these so-contemporarily familiar questions:

How can the Church intelligibly frame its concerns about the political and social issues facing humanity to those unacquainted, and perhaps unwilling to accept, Christian concepts and verbiage?
Can Christian theological statements be capable of addressing specific conditions like poverty, war, hunger, illiteracy, and racism?
How can faith adequately explore and engage aspects of science and technological advance?
How can the Church demonstrate and apply an authentic solidarity with world concerns, to speak with, rather than about, the rapidly changing world?

Rather than answering these and other questions, the approach the Second Vatican Council took to them gives us its continuing legacy. Rather than grounding its desire for dialogue with contemporary humanity from an ecclesiological stronghold, seemingly at some distance from the matters considered, the Council chose to stand on the commonly shared ground of its own humanity.

By approaching the contemporary world through an anthropological standpoint—articulating the deeply theological meaning of the human person in light of contemporary crises—the Council began to address and paint a more early defined portrait of its own self-understanding as it had not done since the early centuries of the Church’s existence.

Clarifying the mystery of humanity

Guided by its own distinctive vision, and grounded by an incarnational Christology, the Council proclaimed something that remains for us unfolding, yet to be fully attended in the first decades of this new century: “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.”

The existential meaning of human existence, shared among all peoples, faiths, and nations, is illumined through the self-giving Christ-event, wherein the profound communion of Trinitarian persons is shared with each human being. In turn, Gaudium et spes proclaims that each person, like Christ, “can fully discover their true selves only in sincere self-giving.”

Here, a Christological context illumines the human horizon. Understood as a concretely lived, existential encounter with all that is both human and divine, Gaudium et spes sets the stage not only for constructive dialogue among peoples of all faiths and philosophies throughout the world, but for dialogue and openness within the diverse schools, parishes, and institutions that constitute Christianity.

Distinctly Christian, this worldview is nonetheless interreligious, for all participate in its drama. Those of good will, “in whose hearts grace is active invisibly” are partners in the saving mystery of Christ. All are related to the intense mysteries of life and death as brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, within one human family. Ultimately, to be human is to participate in a vast spiritual mystery.

Like the popular teaching of Pope Francis, Gaudium et spes is reflective of a profound anthropology moving the Church not only toward openness, dialogue, and constructive action within the world in which it lives, but toward a renewal of its own self-understanding as incarnated, embodied participants in very human affairs.

Humanity is the vital concern of the Church, with whom it shares its own meaning and destiny. Recognition of the universal, though at times implicit, participation of the entire world within the Christocentric mystery provides the Church a renewed understanding of its own identity.

The Continuing Legacy

The fundamental legacy of Gaudium et spes continues its earthy, sleeves-rolled-up mission in our own day and into the next decades and centuries of Christian experience. The Second Vatican Council’s thought can mold and shape the world beyond measure as it has silently—and sometimes not so silently—transformed the religious landscape.

From its bounded impenetrability, the Church begins to throw open its windows onto the very world it has, at times, bastioned itself against. Like Jesus, Christianity can find that even the most mundane offers an abundant potential for a transforming—even miraculous—grace, where ordinary water offered by humble stewards is changed into an incomparable and uncommon wine.

Excerpts of this article were previously published on the Vatican II and the Future Church Internet Conference website.

Tapestry in Time: The Story of the Dominican Sisters Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1966-2012. Edited by Mary Navarre, OP

This is a story that needs to be told by those who lived it.