This summer brought the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the United States.

For as strange as that semiquincentennial was in the life of my troubled home country, this summer brought the anniversary of something even stranger in the lives of U.S. Catholics.

Fifty years ago this summer, during the bicentennial of the United States in 1976, U.S. Catholics met in Detroit for a conference called Call to Action. Planning began in 1972.

A bold bicentennial idea

The bishops of the United States began discussing how the bicentennial might be an occasion to highlight the many ways Catholics had contributed to U.S. history and society.

A television special was considered, and so was a traveling museum exhibit.

In the end, the bishops called a “Bicentennial Dialogue” where lay women and men gathered with religious women and men, priests, and bishops with hopes the conversation would help the church shift from “living with people in society to standing for their needs and speaking to the wider society in the name of liberty and justice.”

It was a bold idea baked in the mold of Vatican II.

Detroit’s Cardinal John Dearden
and Cincinnati’s Archbishop Joseph Bernardin
—who had planned the conference—
were embarrassed.

More than they bargained

The bishops got a lot more than they bargained for.

By Call to Action’s end, delegates on the floor successfully passed motions that called for the ordination of women, the end of priestly celibacy, and several other things that expressed a growing distance between Catholics and their church’s leadership.

Detroit’s Cardinal John Dearden and Cincinnati’s Archbishop Joseph Bernardin—who had planned the conference—were embarrassed.

More than that, the failures of those motions to gain traction fed a growing suspicion after Vatican II that divided so-called progressives from so-called traditionalists.

In many ways, Call to Action marked the beginning of Vatican II’s transition from enthusiasm to disillusionment across the whole church.

The polarization that resulted has stultified and in some cases reversed the momentum of the Council. We have lived around the globe with those results for a long time.

The tide turns again

The tide began to turn again under Pope Francis, who called the church to synodality.

Francis said synodality “is an expression of the Church’s nature, her form, style and mission,” in the way Vatican II understood the church.

Synodality is the mature reception of Vatican II, one we know continues now with Pope Leo. Yet, so many years since both Vatican II and Call to Action, we face the question of whether we have learned anything.

Facing an old fear

Vatican II and Call to Action were important moments in the life of the church. They also unleashed fear.

The fear is a fear of change rooted in the ultimately heretical idea that the church and God need our protection.

Decades later, now as synodality again invites us to imagine new ways to be a church together, we must learn from the mistakes of the past.

We need to listen carefully to the Spirt and each other to find within ourselves the hope that will lead us to the church of the third millennium, the one God has been calling us to all along.

• Steve Millies is the director of The Bernardin Center at CTU. A political theorist who trained at The Catholic University of America, he taught political science for 15 years at the University of South Carolina Aiken before coming to Catholic Theological Union (Chicago, IL) where he teaches courses in history and Catholic social ethics.