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The keynote speaker at this year's Autumn Diocesan Gathering on Oct. 20 will reflect on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. She'll encourage parish leaders to revisit its lessons to reinvigorate the 21st-century Church.

"I would love to think that we would seize upon these insights and try to deepen them," explained Sister Kathleen Hughes, RSCJ, a liturgical theologian and former president of the North American Academy of Liturgy. "We've never really made [clear] the relationship between liturgy and daily life."

Sister Kathleen was a novice in her religious community during the 1962 opening of the Second Vatican Council, but followed its three-year run closely and later wrote the biography of Rev. Godfrey Diekmann, OSB, a pioneer of the U.S. liturgical movement who was present as an expert at Vatican II.

The council, she told The Evangelist, was inspired by the Church's desire to respond to the fragmentation of the world in the face of events like the Holocaust, the Cold War and western hegemony - as well as the Cuban missile crisis, which started erupting three days after the council's opening.

"It had everything to do with what was going on in the world," Sister Kathleen said of Vatican II. "It was kind of a perilous time in the world. That's what emboldened the bishops to have a council unlike any other," with a homiletic, conversational, hopeful tone "urging people to become their best selves" and offering Catholics "a completely new image of Church."

Out of the council, she explained, came calls for "full, conscious and active participation" among laypeople, personal conscience formation and closer connections to the Bible, reflected by today's broader range of readings at Mass.

At her keynote, Sister Kathleen will bring 500 copies of "Give Us This Day," a personal prayer periodical for Catholics, to distribute to attendees.

The council also transformed the liturgy by switching the direction the priest faces on the altar and the times congregants sit and stand, as well as using English instead of Latin for prayers.

But the transition to new rituals took place with inadequate catechesis, Sister Kathleen said. A cultural shift regarding Catholics in America - illustrated by John F. Kennedy's election as U.S. president after centuries of discrimination against Catholics - was also never fully addressed, she added.

Sister Kathleen, who was a professor of word and worship at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago for 19 years, said parishes need to continue educating Catholics on the effects and intentions of the Second Vatican Council, focusing especially on the documents about the Church, sacred liturgy, ecumenism and interfaith relations.

Those lessons could come through listening sessions with Catholics who lived through Vatican II, special homilies, home reading groups and more, she said: "There [are] so many ways to do renewal. People could get enthused about what happened and how it might change where we are today."[[In-content Ad]]

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