After Vatican II, I don’t think, as an individual, it came out clearly enough what we were supposed to do. That, of course, gave a lot of latitude to people who said “change everything” as well as a lot of latitude to people who said “change nothing.” I think that the difficulty many people in the ’60s and ’70s had with the changes was that we were long on the application of what we were supposed to do, but short on the knowledge of why.

I was secretary to Bishop Loras T. Lane who had been at the council and was very proud of that fact and knew pretty much all about the inside of the council. After the council, the responsibility of following up on all of this fell to Bishop O’Neill, which he did very well, especially when many people at the time saw the changes not as an updating, but as a chance to “break the shackles.” The changes of the Second Vatican Council were not meant to be liberations from everything normative in our religion.

Pope Benedict XVI is asking us, in this Year of Faith, to go back, look at the Catechism (of the Catholic Church), look at those (council) documents and find out for ourselves, in this time, what did the council really want to do? And then, how are we going to believe and how are we going to do it after this Year of Faith?

I think the most important thing that came out of Vatican II was two-fold. One, it completed a discussion of the structure of the Church, which the First Vatican Council had talked a lot about  — the papacy, papal primacy, infallibility. The Second Vatican Council also talked about the co-responsibility of all of those who are, as the College of Bishops, succeeding to the College of Apostles and their part in governing the whole Church; and the responsibility of everyone down the line — priests, deacons, lay people, everybody — as members of the Church, of contributing to it. It is not just large numbers of people who pay, pray and obey and then this lordly class of priests and bishops.

The other thing is the interest in the Scriptures. Catholics have to become more aware that this is the Word of God; it is part of the foundation of our faith, what God revealed in the Old Testament, what the Gospels and the writings of the Apostles tell us in the New Testament and the experience of the Church, the tradition that is part of our history. Those things were underlined by the council and are worth pursuing.

I don’t know of a single document of the council that I would say was in any sense irrelevant, but two things stand out. The Second Vatican Council did accomplish what was hoped for in its inception, that is, completing the definition of the Church hierarchical structure. That is not the only thing in the Church that is important, but what was interrupted from what they had hoped it would be in the 1870s, was completed in the 1960s, which of course illustrates why it is nice to belong to the Church Jesus founded because it is still present in all these ages.

The goal, then, of this Year of Faith is not to have everyone become a theologian. I would like people to say that they have a better understanding of their religion in some way and that everyone who participates in it with goodwill, would come away saying, “I am glad I did that because I know more about what I am supposed to be, more about what my relationship is to God, to Christ, to the Church and I am better off for having done this.”