Carroll describes that moment in his essay:

When I became a priest, I placed my hands between the hands of the bishops ordaining me—a feudal gesture derived from the vassal to his lord … I gave my loyalty to him, not to a set of principles or ideals, or even to the Church.

This, like much else in his essay, is true, but it is not quite the whole truth. What Carroll does not relate are two of the vows he was asked to affirm prior to placing his hands in those of the bishop. They were identical to the vows I made in 1989. The ceremonial reads:

Do you resolve to exercise the ministry of the word worthily, preaching the Gospel and teaching the Catholic faith? Do you resolve to celebrate faithfully and reverently, in accord with the Church’s tradition, the mysteries of Christ, especially the sacrifice of the Eucharist and the sacrament of Reconciliation, for the glory of God and the sanctification of the Christian people?

This is hardly the commitment of a vassal to his lord. There is much in these words that reflects the commitment we were expected to make to the Church and indispensability of the priesthood to it. But every priest’s experience is different and, in some evident ways, Carroll reflects the experience of many priests who passed through the 1960s and ’70s whose high expectations of the Church, of themselves, of their parents, and even of God failed because their presumptions and definitions were flawed from the outset.

This is evident throughout Carroll’s essay, nowhere more clearly than in how he describes his understanding and expectations of the Second Vatican Council. He sees it almost entirely in terms of discontinuity with the past. This went far beyond the “jettisoning of the Latin Mass.” He also saw the hope that Vatican II could offer a replacement of the hierarchy with some kind of liberal democracy.

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I cannot understand how anyone who has actually read the documents of Vatican II could have come to such conclusions. In fact, Carroll’s entire idea of Christianity more closely resembles some of the more fundamentalist tendencies and enthusiastic movements that have periodically reared their heads in the Christian world throughout history than it does the actual reforms of Vatican II.

In Carroll’s version of history there once existed a purer, more original form of Christianity, one that had no priesthood, had no authoritative hierarchy, and was free of “misogyny” (as he defines it) and sexual oppression. But then that mean bishop, Augustine, appeared on the scene centuries later, bringing with him the notion of self-denial as the way to happiness.

Can it be that Carroll does not recall Jesus’s demand to deny oneself, to lose one’s life in order to find it? Or that he has never read the Acts of the Apostles and observed in it the emergence of the gradations of ministry from the apostles, who then extended outward their authority to collaborators in their mission, and instituted the diaconate under their direction? And while Carroll shows knowledge of extra-biblical observations of Christianity in the writings of Josephus in the first century (who wrote, as Carroll rightly notes, “around the same time that the Gospels were taking form”), how could he have missed the 11 letters written by Ignatius of Antioch to a wide diversity of Christian churches throughout the Mediterranean while on his way to martyrdom in Rome?