Robert Blair Kaiser--Time magazine's correspondent at Vatican II and author of the recent A Church in Search of Itself: Benedict XVI and the Battle for the Future--has apparently founded a new organization, takebackourchurch.org. According to the mission statment, the organization is "seeking ownership and citizenship in the people's Church envisioned at Vatican II, attended by accountable, listening servant-bishops."
 
Here is an excerpt from the organization's most recent newsletter:

We use the word campaign advisedly. This will be a political battle in a Church that has gotten us used to the idea that theres something shady, maybe even something sinful, in trying to overturn the old pyramidal structure. We plead not guilty to that charge. But we do plead guilty in our wish to overturn at least in the United States -- what the last pope called "the divinely instituted hierarchical constitution of the Church." Divine institution means it was founded by Christ. But if Jesus founded our Church (most scholars say it was the Holy Spirit at Pentecost who did that, but never mind), he certainly didn't found the hierarchical Church that we know today. Claiming Jesus did so can have only one purpose: to keep us in our place.

By contrast, the Fathers of Vatican II invited us to take ownership of what was, after all, our Church. (They just didnt tell us how to do it.) In their redefinition of the Church, they reminded us that our baptism made us all, priests and people alike, equal in Gods eyes. Equally Christian. Equally Catholic. Yes, our priests, bishops, and popes had authority, but, according to Luke 22:24-26, it was an authority quite different from the authority of the kings and princes of this world. It was an authority to serve, not to dominate. In that sense, apostolic authority became more like a duty, or a mandate to listen -- and act -- on behalf of the common good of the Christian family. No longer would the Church be divided in two a teaching Church and a learning Church. Vatican II said (in Lumen Gentium 32) that we all have a duty to teach one another.

I have to say that I almost don't know where to begin with this.  Because in its own way this is as one-sided a reading of Vatican II as the view that the Council was in such strict continuity with previous councils that nothing of consequence actually happened.  Just for starters, I have to wonder why an essay that quotes Lumen Gentium approvingly is willing to overlook paragraphs 18-19, which reaffirmed in reasonably strong language the divine institution of the episcopacy and the doctrine of papal infallibility.  Whatever one thinks of these doctrines, they are certainly not the invention of the previous pope.

I'm all for having a serious discussion of Roman centralism, a problem the Church has been struggling with since at least the Gregorian Reform, if not earlier.  But pretending that the Council fathers at Vatican II had the same mindset of the Founding Fathers of the American revolution is just nonsense.  It is not supported by either a close reading of the documents or by the history of the Council.  Intellectual honesty demands that we be willing to face what David Tracy might call the "ambiguity and plurality" of the Council documents, rather than using them as proof texts for positions arrived at by other means.