It seems like there’s a tendency to impute everything that’s been allowed or changed in the last forty years to the Second Vatican Council. While there may certainly be a remote causal relationship and while later generations may compress the timeline somewhat in speaking of history, it seems to me to be largely inaccurate to speak this way.

Here are some examples I’ve heard fairly commonly:

Myth: Vatican II allowed female altar servers.
Fact: This was allowed in 1994 through an interpretation of Canon Law.

Myth: Vatican II abrogated the requirement for women to wear veils in church.
Fact: That requirement was abrogated with the promulgation of the 1983 Code of Canon Law.

It seems that we forget just how recent some of these things are, even compared with how recent the Council was.

Note: Both of these examples involve women because of the context in which they came up, in case you were curious.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 4:54 PM and is filed under religious practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.