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Caption: Fourth-graders raise their hands to answer a question this school year at Christ the King School in Irondequoit, N.Y. Catholic Schools Week begins this Sunday and runs through Feb. 5. (CNS/Mike Crupi, Catholic Courier)
Fourth-graders raise their hands to answer a question this school year at Christ the King School in Irondequoit, N.Y. Catholic Schools Week begins this Sunday and runs through Feb. 5. (CNS/Mike Crupi, Catholic Courier)
Half a century after Vatican II, a year of faith and debate

By Francis X. Rocca
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Fifty years ago this October, Blessed John XXIII and more than 2,500 bishops and heads of religious orders from around the world gathered in St. Peter's Basilica for the opening session of the Second Vatican Council.

Over the following three years, Vatican II would issue 16 major "pronouncements" on such fundamental questions as the authority of the church's hierarchy, the interpretation of Scripture, and the proper roles of clergy and laity. Those documents, and the deliberations that produced them, have transformed how the Catholic Church understands and presents itself within the context of modern secular culture and society.
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Caption: Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia greets Dominican Sister Mary Sarah Galbraith at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Nashville, Tenn., Jan. 26 after she was installed as the new president of Aquinas College during a Mass of investiture. (CNS/Rick Musacchio, Tennessee Register)
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia greets Dominican Sister Mary Sarah Galbraith at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Nashville, Tenn., Jan. 26 after she was installed as the new president of Aquinas College during a Mass of investiture. (CNS/Rick Musacchio, Tennessee Register)
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THIS WEEK IN ORIGINS

Editors: Contents of Origins CNS Documentary Service, Vol. 41, No. 34 (Feb. 2, 2012):

-- The federal requirement that most religious organizations include contraceptives and sterilization coverage in their health plans puts at risk a "cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for conscience and religious liberty," Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, tells the annual National Prayer Vigil for Life.

-- Pope Benedict XVI says that the rise of "radical secularism" threatens core values of American culture and requires that Catholics give "public moral witness" on crucial social issues.

-- The efforts of secularist forces today to impair and impede the church's witness mean Catholics must not only bear witness to the Gospel of life but also to religious liberty, Bridgeport, Conn., Bishop William E. Lori says.

-- Catholics need "to wake up from the illusion that the America they now live in is somehow friendly to their faith," says Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput. "What we're watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism" that is "neither tolerant nor morally neutral," he says.

-- The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "articulated many soaring ideals about who we can be as a people and as a nation. But those ideals are dead on arrival if we leave them on the pages of our history books or celebrate them merely once a year" and do not continue his activism for justice, says Bishop George V. Murry of Youngstown, Ohio.

-- The Vatican doctrinal congregation erects an ordinariate for former Anglicans in the United States.
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