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Now That We've Arrived in 2000 By Msgr. George G. Higgins The Yardstick January 3, 2000  With the century in which I lived my 84 years now at an end, and with the beginning of the new century and new millennium, I am prompted to reminisce about the past and to peek into the near future. From my point of view as a priest, the past century's major event was Vatican Council II. I am grateful because of the sense of historical perspective it gives me that my own priesthood was split more or less down the middle: 25 years before and 35 years after the council. In odd moments during recent days, while thinking about the new millennium, I have tried to recall what the church was like and what our expectations were before the council. I scoured my personal library looking for helpful leads. The late German Jesuit theologian Father Karl Rahner, among others, came to my rescue. Father Rahner repeatedly reminded us that far-reaching changes of the most surprising kinds had occurred since the council, and he tried to help us come to terms with these unexpected and, for some, unsettling changes. If the church appears confused today, Father Rahner said in 1977, it is because society is confused. Both, he said, go together. In my opinion Father Rahner was right on target when he said that today's confusion is not all that bad. To the contrary, it may prove providential if it forces all of us to develop a spirit of authentic Christian maturity, a deeper poverty of spirit and a more profound spirit of Christian hope. As St. Augustine cautions in a reading that recurs every year in the Liturgy of the Hours on the Wednesday of the 20th week in Ordinary Time, it makes no sense to pine for the past. Augustine said: "You may think past ages were good, but it is only because you are not living in them." Christian maturity is the one quality, perhaps more than all others, that will be required of all of us in the predictably troubled days ahead. The church is living in an era of unpredictable transition at all levels of pastoral life. At times it will all seem very ambiguous. Those who do not have a sense of personal fulfillment ought not to blame the church but rather their own lack of freedom and maturity, which does not allow them to put up with ambiguous situations. The crises in our lives are the conditions that make us free and mature. One last word. A recent scholarly study of American seminaries found that today's seminarian is less oriented toward social justice than his counterparts of an earlier generation, a phenomenon also recorded of Catholic college and university students in general. I hope and pray that this is a misreading of the evidence. In light of the fact that globalization will be the hallmark of the next century, I think it is appropriate here to quote a passage from a meditation titled "Concern for the Poor" in a recent book by a Spanish Jesuit in India: "Thank you, Lord, for your gift to your church in our days: the gift of concern for the poor, of awareness of injustice and oppression, of awakening to the liberation of the human soul and in the structures of society. Thank you for having shaken us out of our complacency with existing orders, out of our acquiescence in inequality and temporizing with exploitation. Thank you for the new light and the new courage that have surged through your church today to denounce poverty and to right oppression. Thank you for the church of the poor." I suggest welcoming the new millennium on this note of realistic Christian hope.   Papal Social Encyclicals   Other Catholic Social Teachings General Articles of Interest  Catholic Worker Connection Msgr. George Higgins  Home Page E-Mail: Fr. Sinclair Oubre