Don't give in to post-conciliar pain.

One beautiful spring afternoon when I was teaching in a Catholic high school on Staten Island, I found myself with some extra time on my hands. As I took a walk around the rather extensive campus, I stopped for a moment to look at the exterior of the convent building attached to the school.

The convent was constructed in the early 1960s, and the building reflects the idea of the church coming to maturity at that time. This was not intended to be a brick-and-mortar expression of the "church triumphant" (temporally speaking), which was stereotypical of so much church architecture in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The emphasis here was on the human dimension, to create a space that was bright and livable and welcoming to those who would have there and inviting to those who would come to visit. And so this convent very tangibly illustrates the basic shift in how we as a church perceive ourselves and the world around us that was prayerfully hammered out at the Second Vatican Council - the shift from the "fortress mentality" of the post-Tridentine Church to the aggiornamento (spiritual renewal) called for by Pope John XXIII.

But now this convent is almost empty. And as I thought about this, it occurred to me that the building reflects the meaning of the Second Vatican Council in a much more profound way: when we prayerfully and openly as a community allow the Holy Spirit free reign, the result is always beyond what we had anticipated or even remotely conceptualized and, ultimately, more than we ever dared hope for.

Hope in a near-empty convent? Is this convent a sign of the problem that plagues the post-Vatican II church? I don't think so. To understand my vision of hope, it's important to examine briefly the dynamics of what has been happening in the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. during this first generation since the council. That dynamic - basically learning to live amid the rubble produced by the collapse of the post-Tridentine Church - lends itself to two diametrical interpretations.

According to the first scenario, the cataclysmic changes in the church, if not directly caused by the council, were the results of economic, social, and political changes in the U.S., which were let loose into the parishes and amplified there because of an excessive liberalism in spirit and in the documents of the council.

The shining city on the hill that was Roman Catholicism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to this first view, saw its foundational underpinnings knocked out one-by-one as misguided reforms took from both clergy and laity - perhaps dogmatically - nonessential elements of parish life, that clearly defined what it meant to be a Roman Catholic.

Changes in parish life resulting directly and indirectly from the council - from the elimination of mandatory Friday abstinence to the more fundamental changes in liturgical celebration - left Catholics in a state of confusion. The resulting "Catholic angst" has expressed itself in a number of unsettling ways, such as a steep drop in vocations and Sunday Mass attendance.

Not surprisingly, this has left some with a desire to return to the "good old days." This clarion call manifests itself in a variety of ways: a desire for clearer and larger catechisms, more traditional liturgies, a return to more factual-based teaching and preaching and less emphasis on creating the faith experience, and an implicit desire to put the laity back in its place.

The resulting attitudes, pronouncements, and actions on the part of both laity and clergy have a persistent and undeniable subconscious appeal to many because they offer ideas and examples that are clear and concise when many American Catholics are struggling with a moral and spiritual murkiness as to what Roman Catholicism and organized religion in general are really about. Ultimately, however, this scenario is doomed because it is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of what has been happening during the last 30 years.

It is from the second scenario, which more clearly represents the truth, that I derive my hope. According to this view, the prophetic insight of John XXIII was to recognize the cracks in the foundations of the edifice of the post-Tridentine Church. (The image of Edgar Allen Poe's House of Usher is a good one to call to mind here.)

The fundamental difference between this scenario and the first is a basic one of cause and effect. Due to profound global changes in society and in the church, the post-Tridentine fortress was about to collapse - already the decay had set in to such a degree that much of the spiritual, intellectual, and moral vitality of the church had been sapped.

The stark and unavoidable choice facing the vicar of Christ and the council was simply this: Do we lay the foundations for the church of the third millennium, or do we preside over the final days of the Roman Catholic Church as a dynamic and relevant force in the modern world?

And so the council convened and reorganized itself so that it could fully cooperate with the Holy Spirit in laying the new, and also very ancient, foundations of what was to come. By examining itself both ad intra and ad extra - a self-examination and a call to a renewed dialogue with the outside world - the church carried out what to my knowledge is unprecedented in the annals of organized religion: complete, voluntary, and public self-evaluation to determine what is essential to being Catholic and Christian, and the ways this basic faith experience of Catholic Christianity can be lived fully and relevantly at the close of the 20th century.

What emerged from the council - and what is continuing to emerge in this first truly post-Vatican II generation of American Catholics - is no less than the conceptualization and subsequent articulations of a fundamental communal experience of the Holy Spirit, only surpassed in intensity by the first Pentecost.

But just as it took hundreds of years for the church to incarnate, however imperfectly, that first Pentecost experience, so too will it take a great deal of time in human terms for the temporal expressions of what the church is to be in the third millennium to emerge.

It helps me to think of our current situation as analogous to people living in a temporary encampment. The predicted collapse of the post-Tridentine Church has occurred, but what is yet to come - as was true in the design and construction of that convent - will be beyond the wildest expectations of all but a prophetic few. It is a particular irony of our time that the murkiness and ambivalence arising from a deep and fundamental, but not yet completed, personal and communal examination of our faith are the true first fruits of the council's work. Deep in the hearts of the faithful a very new old idea has been reawakened - the church at its core is the faith community united with God the Father-Mother through Jesus Christ, and everything, ministries both temporally and divinely ordained, doctrines and dogmas, articulations of our spiritual identity and destiny, are all grounded there.

Just a sampling of the fundamental questions we have to answer give a clear indication of profound changes yet to come as the birth pangs of the church of the third millennium continue. They are issues to be repressed in a spirit of fear by those clinging to the first scenario but embraced in a spirit of faith by the rest of us.

If the sensus fidelium (sense of the faithful) is allowed to regain a natural balance and harmony with the magisterium, what will happen to the development of doctrine and the interpretation of dogma?

As the church sheds its Western European cocoon (by the year 2000, 70 percent of Catholics will live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America), how will this spur the church forward in its explicit commitment to be the church of the poor and not the henchman of the rich?

Where will the Spirit lead us in the struggle against sexism in the church, a cause of division potentially greater than the indulgence scandal that triggered the Protestant Reformation? How will the complementary but often contrary trends - the decline in the number of priests and religious in the West and the continuing empowerment of the laity - influence and shape each other?

Will the growing but still nascent ecumenical movement in the Roman Catholic Church reach its full potential as humankind comes to see itself increasingly as a global village?

And, finally, how can the church better defend and promote the dignity and sacredness of the human person in a world where the ways and means of dehumanization grow more subtle and insidious?

Those of us who live in the midst of the birth pangs have much to look forward to and much work to do. As the torch is passed now from that generation which saw to it that the council would take shape and take root to those of us who follow h, their path of pilgrimage, we must turn time and time again to that same eternal Spirit in whom they found the courage and guidance needed to continue the journey.

Our challenges will be different but fundamentally the same: to believe in things unseen and to read the signs of the times thoughtfully and prayerfully. We must recognize that only when we can speak of a human family in which every member has embraced and been allowed to live out his or her spiritual heritage as an adopted daughter or son of God will we have justification to speak of a church triumphant.

And when our energies fail us, when the dust and the heat and the inconvenience of our temporary encampment begins to overwhelm us, perhaps we can find a source for our prayer in the prologue of Saint John's gospel. There is a verse there that reminds us of just who lives with us amid the rubble of what was and the early signs of what is to be. "And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us."

Onward.