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Chapter 1 The Crisis 1. Methodological and linguistic definitions. A precise use of words makes for a sound argument. Of its nature, an argument is a movement from one idea to another brought about in a regulated way by means of logical connections; it is not a movement by random methods or imaginary steps. Hence an initial definition of terms is the foundation of clarity, coherence and legitimacy in argument. On the title page of this book I have preferred to use the word change rather than crisis for two reasons. The first is because crisis, linguistically, refers to an event at a point in time and does not go well with the idea of duration. Doctors contrast a critical or decisive day with the course of the disease, which is a process which takes place over time. The phenomenon with which this book deals is diachronic and extends over several decades. Secondly, a crisis is a moment of decision coming between one essential state and another, that is, between one state of being and another different by nature. The biological transition from life to death, or the theological transition from innocence to sin are instances of such crises. On the other hand, merely accidental change occurring within a given thing does not constitute a crisis. So, if one were to speak precisely, the word crisis would only be used when an extraordinary historical development had taken shape, giving birth to a fundamental change in the nature of human life. A change can indeed be a crisis, but it is not a presupposition of our inquiry that the changes which we study in this book necessarily are such. We will, however, adopt the general usage and apply the word crisis to phenomena which approximate to a crisis, even though they do not fulfill the definition we have given. To avoid possible accusations of over-selectivity regarding the great mass of evidence and documentation available, we have adopted the following criterion. Having to demonstrate the changes in the Church, we have not based our argument on random parts of the almost infinite material relating to it, but have relied on documents which illustrate the mind of the Church in a relatively authoritative manner. The evidence we will produce consists of conciliar texts, acts of the Holy See, papal allocutions, statements by cardinals and bishops, declarations of episcopal conferences and articles in the Osservatore Romano. Our book consists of official and semi-official declarations of the thinking of the hierarchical Church. It is true we have also cited books, words and doings from outside these circles, but only as proof of the development and expansion of positions already expressed in the first category of evidence, or implicitly but necessarily contained within it. Our enquiry is partial in its subject matter (what enquiry is not?) but we are not partial in our point of view. Some authors deny the existence of the present confusion in the Church1 or else deny its specific character by attributing it to the duality and antagonism which exists between the Church and the world, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man; an antagonism inherent in the nature of the world and of the Church. This denial seems to us inadequate, because the essential opposition here is not between the Gospel and the world which Christ comes to save, that is, the world understood as the totality of creation, but rather between the Gospel and the world for which Christ does not pray;2 that is, the world inasmuch as it is in maligno positus,3 infected by sin and oriented towards sin. This essential opposition can diminish or increase depending on the extent to which the world as a whole does or does not converge with the world of evil, but we must never forget the distinction or take as essential an opposition which is in fact merely accidental, and variable in its scope and intensity. 1.See
the great inquiry in the magazine Esprit, August-September
1964.
The fact that the opposition between the Church and the world does vary, disproves the opinion of those who deny that the Church has penetrated the world better at some periods than at others and has, at those periods, been more successful in realizing Christianity in practice. Mediaeval Christendom, in comparison with the modern era, was just such a period. Those who deny that there are such specially favored periods base their case chiefly on the continued occurrence of wars, slavery, the oppression of the poor, hunger and ignorance, which they claim are incompatible with religion and, in fact, demonstrate its ineffectiveness. These faults in the human race past and present show, it would seem, that it is neither redeemed nor redeemable by Christianity. Such a point of view is perhaps the result of what we will call secondary Christianity: religion judged by its secondary and subordinate effects on civilization, these being given prime importance and valued more than its transcendent and specifically religious effects. The notion of religion and progress in play here is one we will consider later on (See paragraphs 207-8 and 218-20). 4. The crisis as failure to adapt. A more common opinion is that the crisis in the Church is due to a failure to adapt to a progressing modern civilization and that the crisis should be overcome by an opening or, in the expression of John XXIII, an aggiornamento of the spirit of religion, bringing it into harmony with the spirit of the age. It should be remembered in this regard that the Church penetrates the world from its very nature as its leaven,4 and it can be seen historically to have influenced every facet of the world's life: did it not prescribe even such things as calendars and food? So great did this influence become that the Church was accused of encroaching on temporal matters to the point where a purging or removal of its influence was allegedly needed. The fact is, that the Church's adaptation to its circumstances in the world is a law of its being, established by a God who Himself condescended to become man, and it is also a law of history, shown by the Church's continually increasing or decreasing influence on the world's affairs. This adaptation, however, which pertains to the very nature of the Church, does not consist in the Church's conforming itself to the world: Nolite conformari huic saeculo,5 but rather in adjusting its own contradiction of the world to various historical circumstances; changing that inevitable contrariety without setting it aside. Thus, when confronted with paganism, Christianity displayed an opposing excellence of its own, overcoming polytheism, idolatry, the slavery of the senses and the lust for fame and power by raising the whole of earthly life to a theotropic goal never even imagined by the ancients. Nevertheless, in giving expression to their antagonism to the world, Christians lived in the world as beings having an earthly purpose. In the Letter to Diognetus they appear as indistinguishable from pagans in all the ordinary practices of life.6 4.
Luke, 13:21.
Analogously, when confronted by the barbarians the Church did not adopt barbarism, but clad herself in civilization; in the thirteenth century when confronted with violence and greed she took on the spirit of meekness and poverty in the great Franciscan movement; she did not adopt renascent Aristo-telianism but forcefully rejected the doctrines of the mortality of the soul, the eternity of the world, the creativity of the creature and the denial of Providence, thus opposing all the essential errors of the Gentiles. Given the fact that these are the principal tenets of Aristotelianism, scholasticism could be called a dearistotelianizing Aristotelianism. Tommaso Campanella sees an allegorical allusion to this process in the cutting of the hair and nails of the fair woman taken prisoner.7 Later still, the Church did not adapt to Lutheran subjectivism by subjectiviz-ing Scripture and religion in general, but by reforming, that is, formulating anew, her own principle of authority. Lastly, in the nineteenth century storms of rationalism and scientism, she did not adjust by watering or narrowing down the deposit of faith but by condemning the principle of the independence of reason. When the subjectivist impulse reappeared in Modernism, the Church did not accept it either but blocked it and reproved it. One can therefore conclude to a general rule that while Catholicism's antagonism to the world is unchanging, the forms of the antagonism change when the state of the world requires a change in that opposition to be declared and maintained on particular points of belief or in particular historical circumstances. Thus the Church exalts poverty when the world (and the Church herself) worships riches, mortification of the flesh when the world follows the enticements of the three appetites,8 reason when the world turns to illogicality and sentimentalism, faith when the world is swollen with the pride of knowledge. The contemporary Church, by contrast, is on the lookout for “points of convergence between the Church's thinking and the mentality characteristic of our time.”9 7.
Deuteronomy 21:12.
There are those, though they are not very many, who deny the existence of the present confusion in the Church, and there are even some who regard this articulus temporum10as a time of renewal and reflowering. Denial of the crisis can find support in some speeches of Paul VI, but these are counterbalanced and abundantly outweighed by as many, in fact more, statements to the contrary. Pope Paul's speech of 22 February 1970 bears a remarkable witness to his thought.11 After having admitted that religion is in decline, the Pope maintains nonetheless that it would be an “error to go no further than the human and sociological side of the question, because a meeting with God can arise from processes which escape purely scientific calculation.” It would seem that what God can do with what theologians call His absolute power is here being confused with what He can do by His ordinate power within the really existing order of nature and salvation which He has established by His free decree.12 The problem of the crisis is evaded by this confusion. By bringing in the idea of an act of God performed outside the order which He has in fact established, the religious crisis deplored from the historical point of view ceases to be deplorable. It is indeed very true that “a meeting with God can come about despite a hostile attitude to religion,” but it is nihil ad rem.13If one turns to considering what God can do by His absolute power, one has entered the realms of the miraculous. It then becomes possible to ignore contradictions and to maintain, as the Pope does in another address, that “the more modern man is averse to the supernatural, the more he is disposed towards it.” Why not indeed, if one considers the absolute power of God? 10.
“Period of time.” 7. The Pope recognizes the loss of direction. On many occasions when his spirit rebelled against the lo-quimini nobis placentia,14 Paul VI outlined the decay of religion in dramatic terms. In his speech to the Lombard College in Rome on 7 December 1968 he said “The Church is in a disturbed period of self-criticism, or what would better be called self-demolition. It is an acute and complicated upheaval which nobody would have expected after the council. It is almost as if the Church were attacking herself.” I need not emphasize the famous speech of 30 June 1972 in which the Pope said that he sensed “that from somewhere or other the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” “In the Church too,” he went on,15 “this state of uncertainty reigns. It was believed that after the council a sunny day in the Church's history would dawn, but instead there came a day of clouds, storms and darkness.” In a later passage which has similarly become famous, the Pope gave the reasons for the general breakdown as being the action of the Devil, that is, of an evil force who is a damned person; thus placing the whole of his historical analysis within the bounds of orthodox aetiology which sees in the princeps huius mundi16 (the “world” here really does mean opposition to God) not simply a metaphor for merely human sin, or for the Kantian radikal Böse,17 but a person, really conflicting, or cooperating, with the human will. In his speech of 18 July 1975 the Pope went on from diagnosis and aetiology to consider the right cure for the Church's historic sickness, and showed how well he understood internal dissolution was damaging the Church more than any attack from outside. With vehement and touching emotion he exclaimed “Enough of internal dissent within the Church! Enough of a disintegrating interpretation of pluralism! Enough of Catholics attacking each other at the price of their own necessary unity! Enough of disobedience described as freedom!” The confusion is still acknowledged by his successors. John Paul II described the state of the Church in these terms at a conference on missions given among Catholic populations: “We must admit realistically and with feelings of deep pain, that Christians today in large measure feel lost, confused, perplexed and even disappointed; ideas opposed to the truth which has been revealed and always taught are being scattered abroad in abundance; heresies, in the full and proper sense of the word, have been spread in the area of dogma and morals, creating doubts, confusions and rebellions; the liturgy has been tampered with; immersed in an intellectual and moral relativism and therefore in permissiveness, Christians are tempted by atheism, agnosticism, vaguely moral enlightenment and by a sociological Christianity devoid of defined dogmas or an objective morality.”18 15.
“Tell us what pleases us.” Isaiah, 30:10. On 7 December 1968. [Translator's
note.]
Some people go further than denying the crisis and attempt to present it as something positive. They base their argument on biological analogies and talk about ferments and crises of growth. These are “circiterisms”19 and metaphors which have no place in a logical argument or an historical analysis. As for ferments, which have become a commonplace of discussion in post-conciliar literature, used by those who want to beautify the ugly, one can indeed draw biological analogies, but one must distinguish ferments of life from those that accompany death. One should not, for example, confuse saccaromycetes aceti with saccaromycetes vini. Not every fermenting substance produces a plus, or an improvement. The decay of a corpse is a powerful pollulation of life but it presupposes the disintegration of a higher kind of being. To say that we are confronted with a crisis of growth is to forget the pathological nature of growing fevers, which do not in fact occur in the normal growth of organisms, whether of the animal or vegetable kingdom. Furthermore, since any growth which may occur will only become apparent in the future, those who use these biological analogies are arguing in a vicious circle, since they are not at present in a position to show that growth, rather than corruption, will be the real outcome of the crisis. Introducing another poetic analogy, the Osservatore Romano of 23 July 1972 states that the present groanings of the Church are not those of death but of birth, since a new being, in fact a new Church, is about to appear in the world. But can a new Church be born? Here, under the attractions of poetic metaphor and an amalgam of ideas, there lurks the notion of something which, according to the Catholic system of things, cannot possibly occur; namely the notion that the change which the Church experiences over time can amount to a fundamental change, a substantial mutation, a change from one thing into something quite distinct. According to the Catholic system, change in the Church consists of change in accidentals and in historical circumstances, amidst which the substance of religion remains the same, without innovation. The only newness known to orthodox ecclesiology is the eschatological newness of the new heaven and the new earth in which, by means of the judgment of all judgments, there will be a final and eternal reordering of the whole creation, freed not from its finitude but from the imperfections of sin. In the past, other versions of such a reordering have been proposed, in which it was imagined as an event in earthly history inaugurating the reign of the Holy Spirit; but such versions are heretical deviations. The Church changes but does not mutate. Fundamental innovations do not occur in the Church. The new heaven and the new earth, the new Jerusalem, the new song, the new name of God Himself, do not belong to this world of time, but to the world above. The attempt to force Christianity to go beyond itself, to create une forme inconnue de religion, une religion que personne ne pouvait imaginer et décrirejusqu’ici, as Teilhard de Chardin20 boldly wrote, is a paralogism in logic and an error in religion. It is a paralogism, because if the Christian religion is to become something wholly different from itself, then there is no one subject to which the terms of the argument relate and there is thus no continuity between the present and future Church. It is a religious error because the kingdom which does not originate from this world experiences temporal change only as accidental to its being and not as affecting its substance. Of this substance iota unum non praeteribit. Not one jot will change. Teilhard could only forecast that Christianity could go beyond itself by forgetting that going outside oneself, that passing one's limit, means dying (ultima linea mors),21 and that Christianity would thus have to die in his view in order to live. We will address this argument again in paragraphs 53 and 54. 19.
“Circiterism.” This seems to me to be a necessary term to express
a typical characteristic of the contemporary world both inside and
outside the Church. It comes from the Latin adverb circiter (=
about, more or less). The word was much used by Giordano Bruno in
his Dialogues. We borrow it from him as perfectly apt for
its object.
The being of every entity is identical with its internal unity, whether it be a physical individual or a social and moral one. If a physical organism is dismembered and divided, the individual existent perishes and is changed into something other. If an association of minds diverges and opinions and wills are divided, the conspiring of the parts in unum22 ceases, and the community perishes. So in the Church too, which is certainly a society, internal dissolution damages unity and consequently the Church's very being. Damage to the Church's unity is fully recognized in Pope Paul's speech of 30 August 1973 which laments “the division, the disintegration which has now unfortunately entered various circles within the Church” and which declares that “the re-establishment of spiritual and practical unity within the Church is today one of the Church's most grave and pressing problems.” In his speech of 23 November 1973 the Pope deals with the aetiology of the enormous confusion and confesses his own mistake, admitting that “the opening to the world became a veritable invasion of the Church by worldly thinking.” This invasion deprives the Church of its power to oppose the world and robs it of its own specific character. The equivocal use of the first person plural in this speech is striking. “We,” he says, “have perhaps been too weak and imprudent.” Is it “we” or “We”? 22. “Into one.” 10. Positive interpretation of the crisis. False philosophy of religion. The spurious optimism with which some people regard declining faith, social apostasy, abandonment of worship and depravation of morals, is born of a false philosophy of religion. It is said that the crisis is a good thing because it obliges the Church to take stock of itself and to look for a solution.23 The Pelagian denial of evil is implicit in these assertions. If it is true that evils are the occasion of goods, they remain nonetheless evils, and do not cause any goods as such. A cure is undoubtedly related to and conditioned by an illness, but it is not a good inherent in the illness or caused by it. Catholic philosophy has never fallen into this confusion and St. Thomas teaches that eventus sequens non facit actum malum, qui erat bonus, nee bonum, qui erat malm. Only the mental habit of “circiterism” typical of our age makes it possible to regard the crisis as positive by fixing one's attention on the positive results which are allegedly to flow from it. These results, as St. Thomas quite deliberately expresses it, are not the effects of evil, (only defects pertain to evil) but are simply events related to the evil and brought about by other causes. The line of causality producing any good consequences related to the crisis does not run through the crisis itself. The latter remains simply a crisis. The true line of causality producing good is something independent. Clearly, the whole metaphysic of evil is involved in this question and we do not wish to enter into that subject here, but in the face of spurious optimism it is important to drive home that a happy event relating to evil is not an effect of evil but an increase in good which evil of itself is incapable of producing, just as persecution does not of itself produce martyrdom, nor suffering itself produce wisdom (Aeschylus), nor trial itself produce an increase in merit, nor heresy itself produce a clarification of the truth. To attribute a good to the crisis when that good is extrinsic to it and proceeds from other causes, implies a defective understanding of the workings of Providence. In the providential order of things, good and evil retain theit intrinsic natures (being and non-being, efficiency and deficiency) while taking their place in a system which is itself good. What is good is the system, not the evils which form part of it; even if one can by catachresis call them good evils as Niccolo Tommaseo does. This view of the providential order of things enables one to see how al mondo di su, quel di giii torni,26 and enables one to see too how a creature's departure from the right path, and even its damnation, can be fitted by Providence into that final order of things which constitutes the ultimate purpose of the universe; the glory of God and of His elect. 23.
Cf. LCI., No.285,1 April 1967, p.7.
The good result which is to follow upon the Church's crisis is therefore a posteriori and does not change the negative character of the crisis itself; still less does it render the crisis desirable, as some people dare to claim. This spurious optimism offends by assigning evil a fertility which only good really possesses. St. Augustine gave the doctrine a very apt formulation in his De Continentia:27 Tanta quippe est omnipotentia eius ut etiam de malis possit facere bona sive parcendo, sive sanando, sive ad utilita-tem coaptando atque vertendo, sive etiam vindicando: omnia namque ista bona sunt.28 It is not the case that in some later phase of its being, evil generates good; it is only a different and positive entity (ultimately God) which can do so. That evils, even though ordered by Providence, cannot become good, appears very clearly in the last case mentioned by St. Augustine; that of vindictive justice. It is good that sins be punished by damnation, but such sins are not therefore good. Thus it is that, according to Catholic theology, the blessed rejoice in that just order in which Providence has placed sinners, but do not rejoice in their sins, which remain evils. The existence of virtues conditional on the existence of defects, constitutes a chain of causality in which certain goods depend on certain evils. Thus repentance is conditional upon the existence of sin, mercy on the existence of misfortune, and forgiveness on the existence of guilt. This does not mean, however, that sin, misfortune and guilt are good, as is the virtue which is conditional upon them. 27.
Patrologia Latina (P.L.) 40,358.
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