I just finished Ralph Wiltgen’s The Rhine flows into the Tiber. There was nothing very surprising in the book—to my mind it reaffirmed what I’ve thought before, that it’s an odd idea to call an ecumenical council to have open-ended discussions on what to do in general and make universally binding decisions. It’s a situation that naturally leads to undue influence on the part of any coherent minority that knows what it wants—which, on Wiltgen’s account, is just what the result was. (Here are some further thoughts I’ve had on the Council.)
The governing arrangements of other institutions don’t work that way. American government has elections, political parties, federalism, and the limitation and division of powers to help ensure that the various possibilities of action are adequately thought through and discussed before anything decisive is done. The Supreme Court, which is an institution mostly designed to preserve and pass on the doctrine it has received, has principles like “ripeness” and “case or controversy” that limit its decisions to particular concrete situations and to principles that have been adequately developed at a lower level. Previous ecumenical councils had in effect followed the Supreme Court model—they were called to deal with particular problems that had been causing serious practical problems, so the council fathers were ready to act collectively in an informed way. Vatican II did not have that safeguard. It just had the Pope, who on several occasions had to intervene at the last minute to prevent serious compromise of doctrine. Those interventions were an impressive demonstration of the importance of the papacy, but decision by last-minute intervention doesn’t seem a good arrangement as a general thing.
I suppose the basic thing that bothers me about Vatican II and later developments, including the growth of Church bureaucracy and the peripatetic papacy of John Paul II, is that they try to do too much at too high a level. The result is to make the Church less traditional—and therefore less the possession of the faithful as a whole—and more a structure of authority that must continually reformulate and reassert itself to be viewed as relevant to what’s going on. Contemplation and implicit faith are lost, and even the liturgy becomes a matter of assertion, noise, physical action, and self-expression.
A problem with newly formulated assertions coming down from above—even if they are correct—is that they don’t persuade everybody and not everybody understands them the same way. The result is that people go off in different directions and divide into parties. “Conservatives” are those who attach themselves to John Paul II, “progressives” those who line up with the thinking of certified “experts,” and too much of the life of the Church becomes a battle between the two. The result is that average Catholics mostly lose interest and drop out, and if they still come to church their reasons for doing so become extremely vague.
If that’s so then the way forward in the Church will have to involve stability at the top, grass-roots recovery of tradition below, and in the middle getting rid of lots of functionaries who think they can invent something better. The Church, we are told, is the People of God. The life of a people exists with the aid of common habits, attitudes, understandings and beliefs—that is, with the aid of tradition. Without such things all that’s left is orders coming down from above trying to give form to impulse and confusion below, and in the case of something as subtle and profound as religion that can’t possibly work.
All this reminds one of the
All this reminds one of the distinction between conservative and traditional Catholicism. How would these two approaches work in respect to a specific set of issues, like those involving sexual morality? It is said to be the case that large numbers of mass-attending Catholics in the First World engage in sexual relations outside of marriage and contraception, and they do not understand themselves to be sinning but rather exercising their right to dissent from Magisterial teaching on morals. The conservative might say that the Pope, bishops, seminary professors, and priests in the in parishes need to insist forcefully upon these teachings, “from the top down”. By way of contrast, how would the traditional Catholic respond? What would “grass-roots recovery of tradition” be like in this case? Would it preclude more authoritative pronouncements from the hierarchy?
A few months ago, Crisis magazine published an article by Russell Shaw in which he argued the necessity of *another* council, whether for the entire Church or for the American Church. His point was that, one way or another, the Church had to “get real” on the sexual issues. For now, we pretend there is one Church, but the members feel free to believe anything they want, and *remain in the Church*.
WW
When there’s gross
When there’s gross indiscipline with respect to something that’s as basic and well-established a part of the Christian life as Christian sexual morality, I think that what traditionalists would expect in the first instance from the hierarchy is specific disciplinary action. They wouldn’t view it as the basic job of the Pope to come up with a new theology of the sexually embodied human person and travel around giving speeches and challenging everybody to live by it. If the Pope theologizes that’s wonderful, but it’s not a necessary part of his job. Christianity exists prior to any particular Pope or bishop. It’s their job to guard and pass on what already exists rather than continually create it anew through what they say and do.
Beyond specific disciplinary action, the hierarchy should do what they can to help stabilize Christian life and make it self-sustaining at the local level. So an additional part of the overall response to problems like the practical abandonment of Christian sexual morality by many Catholics is encouraging the things that set Catholic life apart and promote the consciousness that it has a particular content. Those things would include stability in the liturgy and emphasis on its universal and transcendent aspects, practical disciplines like meatless Fridays and the requirement of confession, stricter controls on theologians and others who set up as teachers of Catholicism, limitations on local ecumenical initiatives, and encouragement of Catholic schools at all levels that offer a distinctively Catholic education. In other words, doing away with a lot of the changes that followed on Vatican II, to the extent those changes exposed local Catholic life much more directly to all the cross-currents of human impulse and non-Catholic or dissident belief, and so made it more difficult for it to sustain itself as distinctively Catholic without constant comprehensive intervention from above.
Agreed. I would only bear
Agreed. I would only bear in mind the magnitude of the problem. We now have a Church in which not only the laity, but significant numbers of priests and bishops in the West believe that conscientious dissent from the Magisterium *is* a perfectly valid form of Catholicism. (They read and write for “America” and Commonweal.) When one observes with a steady gaze our academic theologians, the picture becomes worse.
WW
Oh, agreed it’s a big
Oh, agreed it’s a big problem, prudence is required along with boldness, etc., etc., etc. I’m very happy no one’s asking me to try to run the show. I think the future belongs to orthodoxy though even from a purely human standpoint. Dissent is centrifugal and sterile in any number of ways, while Catholic orthodoxy offers the most rationally satisfying, rewarding and complete way of life possible. That’s in the long run, of course. In the mean time we have to put up with a lot, but each of us can contribute a bit to the solution.
Sorry to be a nudge, but I’m
Sorry to be a nudge, but I’m in a “nudge-like” mood. I believe you meant to say “peripatetic” when describing Pope John Paul II’s papacy, not “peripatic”.
The solution to the dissent problem will come when bishops and priests are ordained who will defend the faith without equivocation. As a priest, I try to do so, and many of my brothers are also teaching in accord with the Magisterium. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of us out there across the U.S. to effect a strong turn of the tide.
When all is said and done, there is nothing we can do on our own (or collectively) that will succeed unless those who are faithful to the Magisterium heed the oft-quoted advice of St. Augustine: Act as if everything depends on you, but pray as if everything depends on God.
Oops! Thanks for the
Oops! Thanks for the correction, and I’ve fixed “peripatetic.” Also thanks for the other comments—as a lawyer I have the habit of thinking about things organizationally, which I do think is often a useful perspective, but it’s worth repeating that personal leadership based on truth is more important than formal organization.