Within 20 years of the closing of Vatican Council II, the fact that there were any women at the Council was already becoming a forgotten memory. English Benedictine scholar Alberic Stacpole wrote a fine book, Vatican II Revisited by Those Who Were There (1986). However, there was not a single article by one of the 23 officially invited women auditors nor any male auditor. This exclusion motivated me to recover the dangerous memory of the female auditors before it was irretrievably lost.
I already knew about two conciliar women, and I was determined to discover others. While studying in St. Louis during the Council, I boarded with the Kentucky Loreto Sisters. I recall their enthusiasm when their Mother General, Mary Luke Tobin, was invited as an auditor to the third conciliar session in 1964. Tobin was invited in her capacity as President of the Conference of Major Religious Superiors of Women in the U.S.A. (currently known as LCWR). Some Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul were in my classes, and their excitement overflowed when their Mother General, Suzanne Guillemin, was invited as an auditor. My detective project led to extensive travel and research, which included two weeks sorting through documents in the library of the Pontifical Council of the Laity in Rome. I met, interviewed, and corresponded with several of the auditors and people who knew them. My book is an important piece of the conciliar mosaic that views the Council and its documents from the unique perspective of conciliar women. Well that I undertook it then in the 1980’s and 1990’s because most of the women have since died.
I’m happy that in response to theological professors in the US who wish to use Guests in Their Own House as a classroom text, my book has been reprinted just in time for the 50th anniversary of the conciliar opening. I included a new Introduction, Postscript, and composite picture of all the female auditors with their names. The original 1996 publication does not seem to have reached Ireland in any great numbers, although I’ve had queries from Australia, Germany, and most recently Brazil.
The most visible outcome of the Council for the world church was in the liturgy. Thanks to previous decades of a vigorous liturgical movement, the Constitution on the Liturgy was the first document completed, and its impact was experienced immediately. The major shift was made from Latin to the vernacular, and all the faithful were invited to join in the responses. Furthermore, the Eucharistic celebrant faced the people, instead of turning his back towards them and mumbling in a foreign language, to which the altar boys responded in a speedy mumble and rang the bell to alert the congregation to the most significant parts of the Mass. 
The most spectacular outcome for women religious was the habit change. Mary Luke Tobin smuggled a young Sister in a modified habit into St. Peter’s in search of informal Episcopal approval. The “new look” caused weeping and gnashing of teeth in most communities, as many of us — the young ones then — may recall, and change couldn’t touch us fast enough. We went through various stages of experimentation. My Ballymahon community opted for “the Swinford Look” after winds of change blew in from the US. Later, in Longford, I modeled a Princess line from Fitzpatrick’s before Bishop Cathal B. Daly and the six major Superiors in the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise. The only comment was Cathal B’s, “Thank you, Sister. You may leave now.” Outside the meeting, I heard, “That’s no habit. It’s a little girl’s dress!”
The conciliar changes aimed at a deeper level and ushered in a new vocabulary. The untranslatable “aggiornamento” basically called for reform and renewal in the whole church and its members. We were called to read “the signs of the times” in the light of the Gospel. We were urged to return to the “charism” of our Foundress. The vade mecum of most Sisters in the 1960’s was Cardinal Suenens’s The Nun in the World. Shortly before his death, Suenens finally gave credit for most of his ground-breaking ideas where it belonged — to Veronica O’Brien, an Irish woman, whom he called “the left hand of God.” She had spent some years in a convent, then moved to continental Europe, where she became the right hand of Suenens by furnishing him with innovative ideas, which he passed on to the Council.
As the original 72 prepared conciliar documents got discussed and whittled down to 16 promulgated, there were frequent reminders that they should be biblical, pastoral, and ecumenical. There were no condemnations or anathemas, something that disappointed prelates of the old guard.
The overall focus was on the Church as People of God — all the baptised — who were to be a light to the world. All were part of the universal call to holiness through a renewed emphasis on baptism. The idea of priesthood and religious life as “higher calling” was debunked. We were challenged to find a new identity.
Vatican II would never have happened without the spirit-filled, people-oriented roly-poly Guiseppe Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, a core group of open-minded bishops, prophetic theologians, and a sufficient number of laity, including women religious who rose to the challenge. In the 1950’s we were told there would never be another Council. It wasn’t needed because the Pope is infallible, as defined at Vatican I (1870). In 1959, like a bolt from the blue, good Pope John announced that he would call an ecumenical council to respond to the needs of the modern world. A flurry of activity began among Bishops and theologians throughout the world. When the Council opened on October 11th, 1962, John said he felt like he was “launching a big ship that someone else would have to take out to sea.” He died a year later, and his successor, Cardinal Montini, the more cautious Paul VI, continued the voyage until 1965, although he would never have initiated the launch. To be fair to Paul, he accepted the nudging of high profile bishops and admitted women as auditors for the first time in history.
St. Joan’s Alliance was posing the question of women’s ordination around the Council. Paul VI asked the Pontifical Biblical Commission to examine the New Testament to see if anything there prohibited women’s ordination. When the Commission returned a negative verdict, Paul did not accept it and wrote Inter Insigniores, a document against women’s ordination, using unwarranted scriptural evidence. Pope John Paul II repeated his stance in 1994, and this has been perpetuated ever since. Paul VI also set up a special Commission to consider the question of birth control. The findings recommended change, but once again Paul refused to accept the evidence and recommendations of his own Commission, producing a most divisive document, Humanae Vitae, which caused much heart ache to responsible laity until they chose to follow their own conscience, which the church recognizes as the highest court of appeal.
Some Canadian and German Bishops called for inclusive language in the liturgy so that women could be named as such and not as “brethren” and “men.” This was not reflected in the English translation of the conciliar documents. The so-called “new Missal” introduced in 2011 continues to erase women with its all-male references to a he-God and male humans.
The conciliar women had great expectations. They saw their presence and work as simply a beginning of the acceptance of women and their gifts as full church members. If baptism was the gateway to all the sacraments, then why do we still have seven for men and only six for women? More than any other group, the US Sisters immersed themselves in the spirit, teaching, and renewal of the Council. Several earned degrees in theology so as to be ready for the ordination that never came officially. Ironically, the LCWR (Leadership Conference of Women Religious) is now under investigation from Rome for having carried the renewal too far, by Roman standards. In the last decade or so, some courageous bishops in union with Rome but acting anonymously have ordained Catholic women both to priesthood and episcopacy, and they in turn continue to ordain others. Girls have been accepted as altar servers in some places. Despite biblical references to female deacons, only males have been ordained to the diaconate, thus adding another clerical layer that has no sacramental power to alleviate the priest shortage.
Even the current worldwide scandal of clerical pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church has done nothing to make Rome re-think its canonical position, “Only a baptised man can validly receive sacred ordination” (Can. 1024). If the Church were consistent in its use of sexist language, this would also include women, but it does not. With the recovery of the diaconate for married men, expectations rose that a married priesthood would follow, but it did not, except for the admission to Roman ranks of non-Catholic married clergy.
If the real issues pertaining to ordination of women and married men had been addressed and resolved at the Council, we would not find ourselves in crisis today. Vatican II saw the Eucharist as the core of the liturgical and sacramental self-expression of the Church — “the summit toward the activity of the Church is directed… the fountain from which all its power flows” (Con. Sacred Liturgy, #10). The people have a right to the sacraments, especially the Eucharistic liturgy.
How do we reconcile that with the current direction in our church, gearing up for “priestless Sundays,” when many parishes will have no Sunday Mass but simply a communion service with pre-consecrated wafers and no wine? If we take seriously the conciliar teaching on the centrality of the Eucharist as essential to Christianity, Rome is in fact eviscerating the essence of Christianity, rather than rethinking its own manmade sexist laws that exclude more than half the human population from even consideration as candidates for priestly ordination. This kind of action—or inaction—reminds one of Jesus’ encounter with the hypocritical action of the scribes and Pharisees. It resonated with the words of the prophet Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” Jesus continued, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition” (emphasis mine).
The Mass rocks in Ireland are a lasting monument to the devotion of the Irish people to the Eucharist, “in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword.” Are we willing to let Roman rule wipe out the heart of our living faith at this time? Or are we willing to stand up and be counted with the authentic Jesus’ tradition of inclusivity against the much later Roman sexist clericalism that has denigrated women for too long and is now experiencing the impoverishment of its own self-destruction.?
Can we recognize here the work of the long-suffering Holy Spirit?
Carmel McEnroy rsm
Congregation
