Why
the Conservative Turn in the Catholic Church?
And What Can We All Learn From It?
by
Gene TeSelle, Witherspoon Issues Analyst [1-4-08]
A
review of Vatican II: Did Anything Happen? edited by David G.
Schultenover (Continuum, $16.95).
Many
people, both Catholics and non-Catholics, have been dismayed in
recent decades at the conservative turn taken by Popes John Paul II
and Benedict XVI, seeing in their actions a turn away from the
spirit (and even the letter) of the Second Vatican Council and a
return to more traditional ways of thinking and acting.
Fresh
ideas are squelched. Social and political movements that question
the standing order are criticized and suppressed. Recently the pope
even intervened in the debate over climate change, warning against
taking it too seriously. Bishops are disciplined for actions that
had been well within their official prerogatives. Although the Mass
has been said in the vernacular for four decades, the Tridentine
Mass in Latin is being revived, with a Good Friday prayer for the
conversion of the Jews — not quite as bad as the earlier language
blaming the "perfidious Jews," but serious enough to raise new
problems in interfaith dialogue. Nuanced language referring
positively to other Christian groups becomes less audible than the
claim to be the one true church. When new cardinals are created,
most of them are conservatives who can be predicted to choose a
conservative as the next pope.
This
trend in the Catholic Church is not seen only at the top. Public
figures like Richard John Neuhaus and Sam Brownback (not to mention
Tony Blair, who is conservative only in a comparative sense) have
become Catholics. The four clearly conservative members of the U.S.
Supreme Court — Roberts and Alito, Scalia and Thomas — and the
swing-voter Kennedy are all Catholics, making up a majority of the
Court. It is not what we would have predicted a few decades ago,
when the political face of American Catholicism was more nearly
characterized by Jack Kennedy, Tip O'Neill, Robert Drinan, and
Justice William Brennan. On the Latin American scene, bishops like
Oscar Romero and Helder Camara and Sergio Mendez Arceo have few
successors, and more bishops seem to be in the spirit of movements
like Opus Dei or Tradition, Family, and Property. Many wonder
whether there is an "elective affinity" between Catholicism and
conservatism, and increasingly mention is made of Dostoyevsky's
Grand Inquisitor, who understands the human need for miracle,
mystery, and authority.
Much
of the dismay comes from a dual psychological reaction: that this is
happening in our own times, and more specifically that the hopes
raised by Vatican II are being frustrated. The current dismay is far
more intense, at least among non-Catholics, than after Vatican I and
its declaration of papal infallibility, which was greeted by
Anglicans and Protestants as the completion and confirmation of
trends that had been palpable for decades if not for centuries.
(There were many Catholics, of course, who regarded the declaration
as inopportune at best and erroneous at worst.) Today the dismay is
shared across a number of religious divides.
Psychological reactions such as these are not necessarily profound
or revelatory. But they do deserve exploration, if only to see how
closely they fit reality.
That
kind of reality check is found in this new book, which contains four
thoughtful chapters, written by two Jesuits and two diocesan priests.
The
framing question is how to interpret the documents issued by Vatican
II.
As we
know, the statements made by Vatican II were often greeted with
great enthusiasm, as a charter for the progressive things that were
happening during the Sixties. The Council authorized a shift to the
vernacular for the language of the Mass, wider participation in the
life and governance of the church, dialogue with Protestants and
with secular political movements. Change often came suddenly, and it
was often linked with overt criticism of the church and its
longstanding traditions.
Others, of course, felt that change was happening much too quickly
and criticism was going much too far. They, too, based this judgment
on the documents of Vatican II.
There
were, then, both "progressive" and "conservative" reactions, to use
the sweeping language that is inevitable. Even those who had played
leading roles in the Council diverged within a few years, starting
rival publishing ventures — the more progressive Concilium
and the more cautious Communio.
The
"conservative" interpretation is that Vatican II did not make major
changes — that it was in basic continuity with the teachings of the
church through the centuries, and its documents ought therefore to
be interpreted in the light of that heritage. Distrusting the
enthusiastic outbursts of those who talked about the "spirit" of
Vatican II, they insisted on paying close attention to the "letter,"
the "texts" of the Council. This was the line taken by Henri de
Lubac and Jean Daniélou — and by Joseph Ratzinger, who would become
head of the Holy Office and eventually Pope Benedict XVI. For them
the Council did not constitute any "break" in the continuity of the
church, any "fracture" — language used by Ratzinger in 1985 (p. 30).
By
contrast the authors of this book emphasize the discontinuities,
even ruptures, starting with the surprise calling of the Council by
John XXIII, and continuing with the bishops' rejection of the drafts
prepared by the Vatican bureaucrats and the writing of totally new
documents (with the aid of theologians who had been silenced or
under suspicion, some of whose stories are summarized here in some
detail), and the open debates on the floor of the Council, with
affirmative votes of 85 to 90 percent. Many of the discontinuities
were directly linked with the leading slogans of the Council:
aggiornamento, bringing the church up to date, and
ressourcement, returning to the sources of the past, which
turned out to be more normative in worship and doctrine than what
had become customary.
The
authors also remind us of the longue durée that set the
context for the Council — the church's condemnation of many of the
basic trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the
anti-Semitism manifested in the Dreyfus affair, the statements of
several popes, and the Holocaust; the division of a major part of
the Catholic world into the Soviet bloc and the NATO countries; the
Cuban missile crisis (which happened in 1962, just as the Council
gathered); the ending of most of the colonial empires except
Portugal's; and the encounter among world religions under conditions
of greater equality. Almost inevitably, Stephen Schloesser says, the
church "stepped back to see the world" (p. 138).
Conceding a point to those who focus on the "letter" of the
documents in order to minimize their impact, O'Malley pays close
attention to the "letter." What he finds is that the Council created
a new genre, the pastoral address, expansive and generous in
tone, seeking to persuade rather than judge or pronounce anathemas.
Indeed, by declining to make any doctrinal definitions, but instead
inviting dialogue, the Council's documents are intrinsically
open-ended, as though they "wanted something to happen" (p. 85). In
the final chapter Neil J. Ormerod puts it even more provocatively:
the Council "sanctioned change," it released "the genie of change"
from the bottle (p. 173).
To be
sure, the process of change was not always "well managed." But the
solution is not simply to "reassert control." Ormerod points out
that any organization will tend to reproduce itself, endlessly
repeating the same actions; and when it feels opposition from its
environment it may take on the characteristics of a sect (pp.
165-69).
The
Catholic Church in many respects fits that model, and as a result it
lost the intellectuals in the eighteenth century, the workers in the
nineteenth, and the middle class in the twentieth; today it is
perceived to be the oppressor of women, gays, and dissidents. And
what is the answer? A call for Europe to reaffirm its Christian
roots and come back to the church. As the world moves in one
direction of distortion, Ormerud says, the church has moved
reactively in the other, failing to "mediate the healing vector of
salvation to our present historical context" (p. 172).
The
question, of course, is how to find that healing balance. And the
task is not an easy one. Let me follow three lines of reflection
that are not dealt with extensively in this book. Each of them, as
it turns out, highlights difficulties more than solutions, but in a
way that confirms the analysis contained in the book.
First,
it would be useful to look at the actual effects of Vatican II in
the lives of bishops around the world. Although the Council was
dominated by the "North Atlantic" bishops of Europe and the U.S.,
they were not the only ones who constituted the 85 to 90 percent
majority. Many of the Latin American bishops developed a new
self-image at the Council, partly through the language of the
Council's own documents, partly through closer encounter with each
other. Some of them moved out of their palaces and associated more
closely with the people, and in the process they discovered the
political and economic problems that the people faced.
This
was one important "rupture." At the same time other ruptures were
occurring. The bishops had to respond to the challenge of Cuba
throughout Latin America; to U.S. support for authoritarian regimes
in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile; to the expansion of the School of
the Americas to gain influence over military personnel; and to
atrocities (often against priests and religious) perpetrated by SOA
graduates in a number of countries. Bishops were divided against
each other (Romero, despite being archbishop of the capital city,
was consistently outvoted in the bishops' conference of El Salvador,
one of the "collegial" reforms of Vatican II). In Argentina the
hierarchy was largely sympathetic with the repressive measures taken
by the army. The Christian Democrats, who tried to pursue a middle
road, were deeply compromised in both Chile and El Salvador, the two
countries where they had the greatest influence. During the 1990s,
in the wake of civil wars and the supposed restoration of
representative democracy, truth and reconciliation commissions had
strong Catholic participation, and several bishops played a major
role in gathering documentation about detention, torture, and
extrajudicial killings — to be answered with murder or character
assassination. That is the highly ambiguous situation in which the
church finds itself today in Latin America.
A
second line of approach is no more comforting. It is to examine the
current situation — after the end of the Cold War; after several
frustrated or stillborn attempts at "humanitarian intervention" in
Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan; after two Iraq wars; after the
intensification of Islamic resentment at Israel and the U.S.; and,
perhaps most "structurally," after the rise of globalization, an
increasingly international marketplace in which government
regulation is being replaced by the shadowy tribunals of the World
Trade Organization, and in which U.S. hegemony is being challenged
by Japan, the European Union, China, and India. All of these, too,
are "ruptures," affecting the church even though it did not have a
determinative role in any of them.
Not a
determinative role. And yet a role. The Catholic Church is the most
inclusive organization in the world, and through the decades it
could not help being aware of tough issues and trying to respond to
them — the Cold War and the reconstruction of Eastern Europe;
Israel, Palestine, the presence of many Christians in the region,
the future of Jerusalem; the end of colonialism; the minority status
of Christians in most Asian and many African countries; the appeal
of democratic institutions, and the countervailing appeal of
military dictatorship, mob violence, conspiracy, and terrorism.
Being
an inclusive organization the church has been torn by conflicting
loyalties, interests, and solutions. Usually it has issued timely
warnings against military solutions. But diplomacy is always a
delicate matter, especially when all parties know that the Pope has
no divisions at his command. And in the end reconciliation may seem
incompatible with justice.
The
last two paragraphs, I notice, have dealt with issues of war, civil
war, and diplomacy, certainly of abiding importance. More lasting
and more predictable, however, are the issues surrounding economic
globalization. The Catholic Church has a clear set of principles in
the area of economics, general enough to be applicable to a variety
of settings. It has set a middle course between Marxism (not all
modes of socialism or economic democracy) and laissez-faire
capitalism, emphasizing human dignity, participation, and the common
good. The principle of subsidiarity, often cited by advocates across
the political and economic spectrum, encourages decision-making at
the local level and assigns to "higher" or "more central"
authorities the important task of ensuring that this will genuinely
occur.
The
U.S. bishops' letter on the economy, issued in 1986, took strong
positions on controversial issues despite pressures from Michael
Novak, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and the Reagan
administration. But the letter has had questionable impact, and not
only because of the vicissitudes of electoral politics. Since it was
issued the bishops have had other concerns beside economic justice;
among them are abortion and the relation between church and state.
These issues, effectively exploited by Republican strategists, have
taken priority in the thinking of many lay people and many bishops,
some of whom have explicitly thrown their weight on what must be
called the conservative side. The end result is that less attention
is paid to the broad, long-term question how to cooperate with
others, including non-Christians, to give a more just structure to
an increasingly global economy.
Answers to this second set of questions will inevitably be linked
with a third issue about the consequences of Vatican II — the
controversial question "Who lost Western society?" Conservative
pundits are constantly reminding us of the drop in church
attendance, formal membership (measured by the tax rolls in several
European countries), and self-ascribed identification in public
opinion polls. There have been dramatic changes in the traditionally
Catholic cultures of Ireland, Poland, Spain, and the province of
Québec. Often Europe is contrasted with the U.S., where there has
not been the same dramatic drop. But it is occurring here, too.
The
implication is that all of this happened on the progressives' watch,
and even because of them, for it happened after Vatican II; after
the Sixties; after the frightening uprisings of 1968 (a watershed
time for many Europeans and Americans); after the Socialists gained
a majority in the government of this or that country; after various
measures of "secularization" in education, church support, and laws
concerning marriage (including same-sex marriage), divorce, and
abortion; and after the influx of Muslims into Europe and Hispanics
into the U.S.
These
changes are so unsettling that many are attracted to the
conservative solution. This is usually presented as a recovery of
the Christian heritage of Europe and America, and in a form that
would involve turning away from religious pluralism and the secular
state, major achievements of European and American culture since the
seventeenth century.
Such
an emphasis overlooks the major solvent that has loosened the hold
of tradition and introduced change everywhere — the free market
economy that fills the shelves with attractive goods and maximizes
choice, but in the process makes everything into a commodity and
acknowledges only those rights that can be gotten through
bargaining.
Cultural liberalism is made so frightening that economic
liberalism seems to be the preferred solution, even though it is
arguably the more basic factor. One aspect of modernity becomes the
villain, while another aspect, which carries far more economic and
political power, evades criticism and often evades awareness
altogether — not always in theory, but often in practice. An
exception may be the Accra statement by the World Alliance of
Reformed Churches in 2004; but its criticism of "neo-liberal
economics" has been put down as shrill, unrealistic, or overly
political, meddling in matters that are too complex for people of
faith to understand. Its actual impact may be as limited as that of
Catholic social teachings.
These
are some of the major ruptures of our time. This book invites us to
consider them — and to be aware of the built-in difficulties of
responses that are made in official church statements and actions,
for they will either be so specific to their time that they seem
merely transitory, or so broad, so applicable to a variety of
situations, that they can be interpreted in a variety of ways,
minimally as well as more imaginatively.
The
habitual conservative response is to caution that "two wrongs don't
make a right" — that in trying to correct one wrong we are likely to
cause a greater wrong, and therefore it is better not to try.
Response to change is indeed filled with risks, ranging from
excessive enthusiasm and bad judgment to ineffectual action and
unforeseen consequences. But that is the situation in which we are
inevitably placed, and this book helps us to gain much-needed
orientation, not only to its difficulties, but also to its
potentialities.
Thoughts, comments, questions?
Please send a note,
to be shared here.
