“Aggiorna-What?” The Universal, the Local, and the Religious 1960s

Depending on one’s perspective, the 1960s could be either exciting or terrifying for the religious believer in the United States. This was all the truer for the nation’s Roman Catholics, who first voted “one of their own” to the presidency and then watched their own church experience its far-reaching Second Vatican Council, only the twenty-first in the Catholic Church’s almost 2,000-year history, as the institutional Church grappled with updating itself to the modern world. That world could watch Vatican II in ways predecessors could not have: modern communications technologies, most especially the television, meant that people around the world could watch the Council unfold and follow the deliberations of the world’s 2,500 Catholic bishops on a daily basis.

            Catholics were not the only ones concerned about the Second Vatican Council, either in the U.S. or abroad. Because Pope John XXIII said frequently that Vatican II’s goal at the outset was a healing of the divisions that had shattered Christendom over the preceding four centuries, Protestants wanted to know whether the Council would result in a new push for proselytization and conversion or an end to condemnations of non-Catholics as heretics. Jews paid close attention, too, as Pope John’s additional claim that the Council would bring the Catholic Church “up to date” – a rough translation of the Italian word aggiornamento the pope had originally used – implied at least a modification of Catholicism’s previously adversarial relationship with Judaism.

            To a certain extent, both Protestants and Jews found olive branches extended to them by the time the Council closed. The Council Fathers passed, in landslide votes, declarations in support of religious liberty; frameworks of a new ecumenism predicated on cooperation rather than mutual condemnation; and an explicit rejection of anti-Semitism. The Catholic Church had “gotten with the times,” and all was well. Or was it?

            My poster places in dialogue global religion and its local interpretation, seen through the Roman proclamations of Catholic Church in the 1960s with their implementation at the city and diocesan level. As my title implies, in many places the “average” American Catholic was unaware of the deeper significance of Vatican II, beyond a general sense that change was afoot. Some Catholics picked up the Council’s reforms enthusiastically and quickly, building new relationships with local non-Catholics and approaching the civic sphere with a renewed vigor that shed the baggage of the so-called “Catholic ghetto” that had dominated American Catholic life for over a century. Other Catholics rejected the Council either in part or in toto, unable or unwilling to believe that Protestants and Jews might not be destined for hellfire or that English should encroach upon sacral Latin in Catholics’ public worship. As this poster shows, the outward definitions and categories of religion have not always corresponded with the beliefs and actions of individual believers. Nowhere is this better seen than in the tumultuous 1960s, that dramatic decade that witnessed a total restricting of American society and religion.