Daily Inspiration Quote by Lance Morrow

Morrow’s line reads like ecclesial sci-fi: Vatican II as a gravitational event, not a committee meeting. The phrasing “a force that seized the mind” yanks agency away from bishops, popes, and factions and hands it to history itself, as if the Church were briefly possessed by modernity. That’s the rhetorical trick: it reframes a messy, human council into an almost impersonal surge that makes change feel both inevitable and terrifying.

The image of being “carried…across centuries from the 13th to the 20th” is deliberately blunt about how far behind the institution seemed to Morrow’s (largely postwar, media-saturated) sensibility. The 13th century is code for scholastic certainty, fortress Catholicism, and a worldview built on hierarchy and metaphysical confidence. The 20th stands for pluralism, mass politics, liberal democracy, and a Church forced to speak in public, not just to itself. Morrow compresses all that into a single jump cut: medieval to modern, no middle frames.

Subtext: Vatican II isn’t just “updating”; it’s dislocation. The Church’s “mind” implies not only doctrine but temperament - how it imagines authority, language, even the audience for faith. Writing as a journalist, Morrow is also narrating the council as a cultural story with a protagonist (the Church) and a plot twist (the sudden encounter with contemporary life). It flatters the drama, but it also hints at the cost: if you’re hauled across centuries, you arrive with whiplash, and everyone argues about what got left behind.