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Chapter 5 The Post-Conciliar Period 47. Leaving the Council behind. The spirit of the Council. As we have seen, the council broke with all the preparations that had been made for it, and took the form of an outstripping of the council that had been prepared. After its closure, the post-conciliar period which ought to have seen the implementation of the council became in turn a period in which the council itself was left behind. Papal addresses have often lamented the occurrence of this process; Paul VI for example spoke explicitly about it on 31 January 1972, drawing attention to “minorities which are small, but bold and of very disintegrating effect.” The numerous voices of those who regard the conciliar innovations as insufficient, and call for a Vatican III, bear witness to the occurrence of the same process: their proposed council would force the Church to take the step forward which she refused, or hesitated, to take at the council just concluded. This process of going beyond the council is particularly obvious in liturgical matters, with the Mass being transformed into something altogether different from what it had been; in institutional matters, which have been enveloped by a spirit of democratic consultation and perpetual referendum on every subject; and is still more obvious in the general mentality now prevailing, open as it is to compromises with doctrines alien to Catholicism. This outstripping of the council happened in the name of the complex, ambiguous, diverse and confusing thing called the spirit of the council. Thus the council outstripped, and indeed abandoned, its own preparation, while the spirit of the council outstripped the council itself. The idea of a spirit of the council is not something clear or distinct; it is a metaphor which strictly speaking means the council's breath. Reduced to its logical essence, spirit represents the ruling principle which guides a man in performing all his activities. The Bible speaks of the spirit of Moses, and says that God took the spirit of Moses and bestowed it on the seventy elders.1 The spirit of Elijah entered into his disciple Elisha.2 References to the spirit of the Lord are innumerable. In all these passages, the spirit is what precedes and directs all of mans acts as a primum movens.3 The seventy elders who begin to prophesy when God sends the spirit of Moses upon them, have the same governing idea, the same prime mover as Moses. The spirit of Elijah dwelling in Elisha is Elijah's governing spirit, become now the governing spirit in Elisha. The spirit of the Lord is the Lord Himself, inasmuch as He makes Himself the knowledge and the motivating principle of those who have His spirit. In the same way, the spirit of the council is the ideal principle motivating and vivifying the council's activities, to use a Stoic phrase, it is the “ruling principle” of the council. That having been said, it is obvious that the spirit of the council, namely that which underlies its decrees and constitutes its a priori principle, is neither wholly identical with the letter of the council nor wholly independent of it. How does a deliberative body express itself if not in its regulations and deliberations? Thus the appeal to the spirit of the council is a doubtful proceeding, especially when made by those who want to go beyond its decrees; it is a convenient pretext for attributing to the council a particular individual's desire for change. It should be noted that since the spirit of the council is nothing other than its ruling principle, to posit the existence at the council of several spirits would be to posit the existence of several councils, and some authors have indeed maintained that this constitutes the council's richness. The supposition that the council has several spirits arises from the uncertainty and confusion which disfigure some conciliar documents, and which give grounds for the theory that the council was surpassed by its own spirit. 1.
Numbers, 11:25. 48. Leaving the Council behind. Ambiguous character of the conciliar texts. In fact, this going beyond the council by an appeal to its spirit is sometimes effected by a frank surpassing of the letter of its decrees, and sometimes by a widening or distortion of their terms. These are frankly surpassed whenever post-conciliar thought has adopted, as being conciliar, ideas which the council's texts neither support nor even mention. The word pluralism, for example, is used only three times, and then always in reference to civil society.4 Similarly, the idea of authenticity, as the criterion of the moral and religious worth of any human attitude, does not appear in any document; and if the word authenticus does occur eight times, it is always used in its philological and canonical sense, referring to the authentic Scriptures, the authentic magisterium, or authentic tradition, and never in the sense of that air of psychological immediacy which is today lauded as a sure sign of genuine religion. Finally, the word democracy and its derivatives is not found anywhere in the council's texts, though it does occur in the index of some approved editions of conciliar documents. Nonetheless, the modernization of the post-conciliar Church has been in large measure a process of democratization. The provisions of the council are also frankly abandoned whenever its letter is ignored, and the reforms unfold in directions contrary to those which the council actually decreed. The most conspicuous example of this is the universal elimination of the Latin language from the Latin rites, despite the fact that according to article 36 of the Constitution on the Liturgy its use was to be maintained in the Roman rite; in fact it has been effectively banned, and both the didactic and the sacrificial parts of the Mass have everywhere been celebrated in the vernacular languages.5 The more general procedure, however, has not been to abandon the council thus baldly but rather to appeal to its spirit and so to introduce new words designed to insinuate particular ideas, exploiting to this end the imprecision of the conciliar documents themselves.6 It is highly significant in this regard that, although the council, as is customary, left behind it a commission for the authentic interpretation of its decrees, that commission never issued any interpretations and is never referred to by anyone. The post-conciliar period was thus devoted to the interpretation of the council rather than to its implementation. Since an authentic interpretation was lacking, those points on which the mind of the council appeared uncertain and open to question were thrown open to dispute among theologians, with the resulting grave damage to the Church's unity which Paul VI deplored in his speech of 7 December 19687 The ambiguous nature of the conciliar texts thus provides support both for a novel and a traditional interpretation, and generates a whole hermeneutical enterprise of such importance that we cannot but make brief reference to it here.8 4.
See the cited Concordantiae of Vatican II regarding these
words. 49. Novel hermeneutic of the Council. Semantic change. The word “dialogue.” The depth of the change which has taken place in the Church in the post-conciliar period can be similarly deduced from the great changes which have occurred in its language. I need hardly mention the disappearance of such words as hell, heaven and predestination, all of them to do with doctrines which are not mentioned even once in the conciliar texts. Since words follow ideas, their disappearance suggests the disappearance or at least the eclipse of concepts which were once very prominent in the Catholic system. Semantic transposition is also a great vehicle for innovation. So, for example, to call the parish priest a pastoral worker, the Mass a Supper, authority and every kind of office a service, and spontaneity even of a reprehensible sort authenticity, suggests a change in these concepts when they are referred to by the latter terms. The neologism, generally a philological monstrosity, is sometimes designed to signify new ideas (for example conscientise), but is more often the product of a desire for novelty, as can be seen in the use of presbyter rather than priest, or diaconia rather than service, or eucharist instead of Mass. Even in the introduction of new terms for old, there is generally a hidden change in the concept involved or at least a change of nuance. Some words that had never been used in papal documents and which occurred only in specific fields have acquired an enormous popularity in the short space of a few years. The most notable of these is the word dialogue, which was previously unused in the Church. Vatican II used it twenty-eight times and coined the famous formula which expresses the axis or main intention of the council: dialogue with the world9 and mutual dialogue between the Church and the world10. The word became a category embracing the whole of reality, going far beyond the ambit of logic and rhetoric within which it had previously been confined. Everything had a dialogical structure. Some even went so far as to imagine a dialogical structure in the divine essence (considered as one, not as three), a dialogical structure in the Church, in religion, in the family, in peace, in truth and so on. Everything becomes dialogue, and truth in facto esse11 dissolves into its own fieri12 as dialogue.13 9.Gaudium
et Spes, 43. 50. Novel hermeneutic of the Council, continued. “Circiterisms.” Use of the conjunction “but.” Deepening understanding. The “circiterism” is something which occurs frequently in the arguments of the innovators. It consists in referring to an indistinct and confused term as if it were something well established and defined, and then extracting or excluding from it the element one needs to extract or exclude. The term spirit of the council, or indeed the council, is just such an expression. I remember instances in pastoral practice, of priestly innovators violating quite definite rules which had been in no way altered since the council, and replying to the faithful, who were amazed at their arbitrary proceedings, by referring them to “the council.” I do not deny that a knowing subject can only direct his attention successively to the various parts of a complex whole, given, on the one hand, that the intentio14 of the intellect is incapable of contemplating all sides of it at once, and on the other, that the exercise of thought is free. I do, however, maintain that this mode of operation, natural to the intellect, must not be confused with that deliberate diversion of attention which the will can impose on the workings of the mind so that, as the Gospel puts it, it fails to see what it sees and to grasp what it knows.15 The first kind of mental operation occurs in genuine research, which of its nature proceeds step by step, but the second does not deserve to be called research, since it imposes on facts a manner of viewing them which originates in ones subjective inclinations. It is also common to talk about a message, and a code by which one reads and deciphers the message. The notion of a reading has replaced that of the knowledge of something, thus replacing the binding force of univocal knowledge with a plurality of possible readings. It is alleged that a single message can be read in different keys: if it is orthodox, it can be deciphered in a heterodox key; if heterodox, in an orthodox key This method, however, forgets that the text has a primitive, inherent, obvious and literal sense of its own, which must be understood before any reading, and that it sometimes does not admit of being read with the key with which the second reading proposes to read it. The conciliar texts, like any others, have, independent of the reading that may be made of them, an obvious and univocal readability, that is, a literal sense which is the basis of any other sense which may be found in them. Hermeneutical perfection consists in reducing the second reading to the first, which gives the true sense of the text. The Church, moreover, has never proceeded in any other way. The technique adopted by innovators in the post-conciliar period thus consists in illuminating or obscuring, glossing or reinforcing, individual parts of a text or of a truth. This is merely the abuse of that faculty of abstraction which the mind necessarily exercises when it examines any complex whole. It is a necessary condition of all discursive knowledge arrived at in time, as distinct from angelic intuition. To this they add another technique, characteristic of those who disseminate error: that of hiding one truth behind another so as to be able to behave as if the hidden truth were not only hidden but simply non-existent. When the Church, for example, is defined as the People of God on a journey, the other side of the truth is hidden, namely that the Church also includes the blessed who have already reached the end of the journey, and that they are the more important part of the Church, since they are the part in which the purpose of the Church and of the universe has been fulfilled. In the next stage, the truth which was still part of the message but which has been put in the background will end up being dropped from the message altogether, through the rejection of the cult of the saints. The procedure we have described is often effected by using the conjunction but. One has merely to know the full meaning of words in order to recognize the hidden intention of this school of interpreters. For example, to attack the principle of the religious life they write: Le fondement de la vie religieuse n’est pas remis en question, mais son style de réalisation.16 Again, to get round the dogma of the virginity of Our Lady in partu they say that doubts are possible non d'ailleurs sur la croyance ellemême dont nul ne conteste les titres dogmatiques, mais sur son objet exacte, dont il ne serait pas assuré qu’il comprenne le miracle de l’enfantement sans lésion corporelle.18 And to attack the enclosure of nuns they write: La cloiture doit etre maintenuey mais elle doit etre adaptee selon les conditions des temps et des lieux.19 The particle mais20 is equivalent to magis,21 from which it derives, and thus while appearing to maintain ones position on the virginity of Our Lady, on the religious life and on the enclosure of nuns, one is asserting that what is more important than a principle, are the ways of adapting it to times and places. But what sort of principle is inferior rather than superior to its realizations? Is it not obvious that there are styles which destroy, rather than express, the fundamentals they are meant to embody? At this rate one might just as well say that the fundamentals of gothic style are not in dispute, only the way they are realized; and then proceed to abolish the pointed arch. This use of but often occurs in the speeches of the council fathers, when they lay down in their principal assertion something which will be destroyed by the but in a secondary assertion, so that the latter becomes what is principally asserted. So too at the Synod of Bishops in 1980, French language group B wrote: “The group adheres without reserve to Humanae Vitae, but the dichotomy between the rigidity of law and pastoral flexibility must be overcome.” Thus adherence to the encyclical becomes purely verbal, because bending the law to conform with human weakness is more important than the encyclical s teaching.22 The formula of those who wanted the admission of divorced and remarried people to the Eucharist was more forthright: Il ne s'agit pas de renoncer à l’exigence évangelique, mais de reconnaître la possibilitypour tous d'etre réintégrés dans la communion ecclésiale.23 At the same Synod on the Family in 1980, the use of the word deepening24 cropped up among the innovators. While seeking the abandonment of the doctrine taught in Humanae Vitae, they confessed complete adherence to it, but asked that the doctrine be deepened; meaning not that it be strengthened by new arguments, but changed into something else. The process of deepening would apparently consist in searching and searching until one arrived at an opposite conclusion. Even more important is the fact that “circiterisms” were sometimes used in the drawing up of the conciliar documents themselves. These inexact formulations were deliberately introduced so that post-conciliar hermeneutics could gloss or reinforce whichever ideas it liked. Nous Vexprimons d'une facon diplomatique, mais apres le Concile nous tirerons les conclusions implicites.25 It is a diplomatic style, that is, as the word itself implies, double, in which the text is formulated to accord with its interpretation, thus reversing the natural order of thinking and writing. 15.
Matthew, 13:13. 51. Features of the post-conciliar period. The universality of the change. The primary characteristic of the post-conciliar period is an all-embracing change affecting every aspect of the Church, whether internal or external. From this point of view, Vatican II has given vent to such enormous mental energies as to deserve a unique place in the series of general councils. The very universality of the change effected leads to the question of whether we are not confronted with a substantial mutation, as mentioned in paragraphs 33-35, analogous to what, in biological terms, is called an idiovariation. The question arises as to whether a change from one kind of religion to another is not underway, as many in both lay and clerical circles do not hesitate to assert. Were that the case, the birth of the new would entail the death of the old, as in biology or metaphysics. The age of Vatican II would then be a magnus articulus temporum,26. the climax of one of those cycles which the human spirit undergoes in its perpetual revolving upon itself. Or, putting the question in other terms: might not the age of Vatican II be the one that provided proof of the pure historicity of the Catholic religion, which is tantamount to proof of its non-divinity? The change can be described as more or less all-embracing in its extent.27. Of the three sets of attitudes which sum up in themselves the essence of religion, namely things to be believed, things to be hoped for and things to be loved, there is not one that has not been touched and has not tended to change. In the intellectual sphere, the notion of faith has been changed from an act of the intellect into an act of the person, and from adhesion to revealed truth into an attitude to life, thus encroaching on the sphere of hope.28. Hope lowers its object, becoming an aspiration and a belief about a purely earthly liberation and transformation.29. Charity, which like faith and hope has a formally supernatural object,30. similarly lowers its object and turns towards man; and we have already seen in the closing speech of the council how man was introduced as a pre-condition to the love of God. These three sets of human attitudes, which concern the mind, are not the only things touched by the innovations; the sensory side, as it were, of the religious believer has also been affected. For the sense of sight, there have been changes in forms of dress, in sacred furnishings, in altars, architecture, lights and gestures. For the sense of touch, the great innovation has been being able to touch that thing which reverence for the Sacred used to render untouchable. For the sense of taste, there is drinking from the chalice. For the sense of smell, there has been the loss, more or less, of the sweet smelling incense which was used in sacred rites to sanctify the living and the dead. The sense of hearing has experienced the deepest and most widespread change, as regards language, which has ever happened on the face of the earth, the reform having changed a language affecting half a billion men. It has also changed musical styles from melodious to percussive, and banished from the Church that Gregorian chant, with which for centuries “the daughters of music”31. had soothed and conquered the hearts of men. I am, moreover, leaving aside here what will have to be said later concerning innovations in the structures of the Church, in legal institutions, in nomenclature, in philosophy and theology, in coexistence with civil society, in the understanding of marriage-in short, in the relation of religion to civilization in general. This raises the difficult question of the relation between the essence of a thing and its accidental parts, between the essence of the Church and its accidents. Is it not possible that all the things we have listed pertaining to the Church, whether individually or generically, could be reformed and yet leave the Church unchanged? Yes, but three points must be noted. First: there are those things that the scholastics called absolute accidents, that is, accidents which are not indeed identical with the substance of something, but without which it does not exist. These are such things as quantity in corporeal substances, and in the case of the Church, faith. Second: although there are accidental parts to the life of the Church, she cannot assume and abandon any and every accidental quality indifferently, because, just as every entity has certain accidents and not others (a ship one hundred stades long, as Aristotle remarked, is no longer a ship) and as, for example, the body has extension but lacks consciousness, so the Church too has certain accidents and not others, and there are such things as accidents which are incompatible with the Church's essence, and which destroy it. The Church's great historical struggle has been to reject those accidental forms which would have destroyed her nature, whether by insinuating themselves from within, or by being imposed upon her from without. Was not monophysitism, for example, an accident pertaining to the way one understood Christ's divinity? And was not Luther's spirit of private judgment an accident pertaining to the way one understood the action of the Holy Spirit? Third: the things we have listed as being affected by the post-conciliar change are indeed accidents in the life of the Church, but accidents should not be regarded as matters of indifference, which can be or not be, be in one way or be in another, without thereby changing the nature of the Church. This is not the place to conduct a full metaphysical debate or to appeal to St. Thomas's De ente et essentia. It is, however, essential to remember that the substance of the Church exists only in her accidents, and that an unexpressed substance, that is, one without any accidents, is a nullity, a non-existent. The entire existence of an individual across time is, furthermore, contained in his acts of intellect and will: and what are intellection and volition but accidental realities which occur, come and go, emerge and disappear? Yet ones moral destiny, salvation or damnation, depends on just those accidents. So too the whole life of the Church in time is her life as it exists in accidentalities and contingencies. How then can one fail to recognize her accidentals as important, and indeed substantially important? Are not changes in accidental forms accidental and historical changes, occurring within the unchangeable nature of the Church? And if all the accidents were to change, how would we be able to tell that the substance of the Church had not changed? What remains of a human person when his whole accidental and historical expression is changed? What remains of Socrates without the ecstasy of Potidaea, without the conversations in the market place, without the Five Hundred and the hemlock? What remains of Campanella without the five tortures, the Calabrian conspiracy, the betrayals and the sufferings? What remains of Napoleon without the Consulate, Austerlitz and Waterloo? Yet all these things are accidental to the man himself. The Platonists, who separated essences from historical events, said the essences could be found beyond the sphere of the planets. And where, pray, are we to find them? 26.
“Great point in time,” i.e., a turning point of the ages. 52. The post-conciliar period, continued. The New Man. Gaudium et Spes 30. Depth of the change. As one examines the various movements, whether progressive or regressive, which have disturbed the Church across the centuries, one often discovers catastrophal ones, that is, ones which have sought to change the Church from top to bottom, and through her, to change the whole of humanity. These are an effect of that spirit of independence which yearns to dissolve the bonds of the past in order to throw itself forward regardless, meaning quite literally without a backward glance. Not, therefore, a reform within the limits provided by the very nature of the Church, and in accordance with certain established arrangements which are accepted as given, but a movement of regeneration which invents a new nature for the Church and for man, sets them on another basis and redefines their limits. Not something new within the institution, but new institutions. Not the relative independence of a development germinating organically in dependence on a past which is in turn dependent on a foundation given semel pro semper,32 but independence pure and simple, of the sort which is today called creative. There are many instances of this sort of attempt. Without searching too far afield for examples, and adducing heretical earthly eschatologies from the Third Age of the Holy Spirit, it is enough to remember the direction the Catholic renewal took in the last century in the ardent imagination of de Lamennais, as seen in his letters published by Perin.33 The Breton abbe was convinced the Church was about to undergo wholesale reform and a profound transformation, which was quite certain to happen even though the exact shape of the reform was as yet unforeseeable: but in any case, a new condition of the Church was imminent, as was a new era of which God Himself would lay the foundations by a new revelation. I will not delay in order to show that this creation of a new man is characteristic of the modern Revolution, and coincides exactly with the one aimed at, in more esoteric form, by Hitlerian Nazism. According to Hitler, mans solar cycle was coming to an end, and the new man, who would put down the old humanity, was already appearing with his new nature.34 Gaudium et Spes, paragraph No.30, contains a very extraordinary passage on this subject. It says that the moral obligation which ought to take pride of place in contemporary humanity is social solidarity, nurtured by the exercise and spread of virtue, ut vere novi homines et artifices novae humanitatis exsis-tant cum necessario auxilio divinae gratiae.35 The word novus occurs two hundred and twelve times in Vatican II; much more frequently than in any other council. This large figure includes frequent use of the word in its obvious sense of a relative newness affecting the qualities or accidental properties of things. Thus there is mention of the New Testament (obviously), of new means of communication, new obstacles to the practice of the Faith, new situations, new problems and so on. But in the passage cited (and perhaps too in Gaudium et Spes 1 nova exsurgit humanitatis condicio36), the word is taken in its more narrow and rigorous sense. It is not merely a case of a new quality or new perfection arising in man, but rather of a novelty in virtue of which the basis of humanity is changed, and there is a new creature in the fullest sense of the term. Paul VI repeatedly proclaimed the newness of conciliar thought: “The important words of the council are newness and updating...the word newness has been given to us as an order, as a program.”37 It is appropriate to emphasize at this point that Catholic theology, indeed the Catholic Faith, knows of only three radical kinds of newness, capable of bringing about a new state of humanity and, as it were, of transnaturalizing it. The first is defective, and is the one by which man fell, by reason of a primordial fault, from a state of integrity and supernatural existence. The second is restorative and perfective, and is the one by which the grace of Christ restores the original state of human nature and, indeed, elevates that nature above its original condition. The third is completive of the whole order of things, and is the one by which, at the end of time, man endowed with grace is also beatified and glorified in a supreme assimilation of the creature to the Creator, an assimilation which, in via Thomae38 just as much as in via Scoti,39 is the very purpose of the universe. It is therefore not possible to imagine a new humanity which, while remaining in the present order of the world, goes beyond that condition of newness to which man has been brought by the grace of Christ. That kind of transcendence does occur, but lies in the realms of hope and is destined to be realized at the last instant of each creature's existence, when there will be a new earth and a new heaven. Scripture uses the verb to create in its strict sense when speaking about grace, because man does not receive merely a new power or quality from grace, but a new existence, something affecting his very nature. Just as creation is the passage from non-existence to existence in the natural order, so grace is the passage from non-existence to existence in the supernatural, and is discontinuous with the former and altogether original, in such a way as to constitute a new creature,40 a new man.41 This newness, which begins in the essence of the soul during our earthly life, envelops the whole of our mental activity and in the final metamorphosis of the world will envelop our bodies as well. Apart from this newness, which bestows upon man (by acting upon that something of the divine reality which exists in the human self) a new existence which is ontological and not merely moral, the Catholic religion knows of no innovation or regeneration or addition to mans being. Whence we must conclude that the council's novi homines should be understood not in the strong sense of a change of nature, but in the weak sense of a great revival within the body of the Church and of human society. In fact, the formula has often been understood in its strict and unacceptable sense, and has invested the post-conciliar period in an aura of ambiguity and utopianism. 32.
“Once and for all.” 53. Impossibility of radical change in the Church. And yet, from among the episcopate, voices are heard speaking quite unmistakably about a change in fundamental matters. It would seem that the crisis in the Church is not a kind of suffering which must be undergone in order to survive, but a suffering which generates another kind of being. According to Cardinal Marty, the Archbishop of Paris, the newness consists in a fundamental option by which l’Eglise est sortie d'elle meme pour dire le message42 and thus to become missionary. Mgr Matagrin, the Bishop of Grenoble, is no less explicit and talks of a révolution copernicienne, par laquelle (l’Eglise) s’est decentrée d'elle-même, de ses institutions, pour se centrer sur Dieu et sur les hommes.43 But to be centered on two centers, God and man, is not a coherent idea, even though it may be a nice verbal formula. This supposed fundamental option, that is, this assertion of a new foundation, is from the Catholic point of view absurd. Firstly, because the Church's coming out from the Church means nothing other than apostasy. Secondly, because as I Corinthians 3:1 says: “No man can lay any other foundation different from that which has been laid, which is Christ Jesus.”44 Thirdly, because it is not legitimate to reject the Church in its continuous historical reality: Apostolic, Constantinian, Gregorian, Tridentine; and to leap the centuries systematically, as Fr. Congar admits he wishes to do: le dessein est d'enjamber quinze siécles.45Fourthly, because it is not legitimate to equate the Churchs going forth into the world in missionary activity with the Churchs going forth from itself. The latter is a movement from its own existence, while the former is the propagation and the expansion into the world of the Church's own being. It is, moreover, historically incongruous to call the contemporary Church, which no longer converts anyone, “missionary,” while at the same time denying that character to the Church which in times not far from our own converted Gemelli, Papini, Psichari, Claudel, Peguy, etc., and while keeping quiet, of course, about the missions of the Propaganda Fide which were so flourishing and glorious until very recently. Fr. Congar repeatedly states that the Church of Pius IX and Pius XII is finished. As if it were Catholic to talk about the Church of this or that pope, or the Church of Vatican II, instead of the universal and eternal Church at Vatican II! Mgr Pogge, the Archbishop of Avignon, says46 quite literally that the Church of Vatican II is new and that the Holy Spirit is incessantly drawing it out of its staticity. The novelty consists, according to the bishop, in a new definition of itself, that is, in the discovery of its new nature, and the new nature consists in “having begun once more to love the world, to open itself to the world, and to become dialogue.” This conviction that a great innovation has occurred in the Church, attested by the universal change in everything from ideas to material objects to terminology, is also apparent in the continual reference made to the faith of the Second Vatican Council, while abandoning reference to the one Catholic Faith, which is the faith of all the councils. It is no less obvious in Paul VI's appeal for obedience as due to himself and to the council, rather than as due to his predecessors and to the Church as a whole. I do not deny the fact that the faith of a later council sums up the faith of all earlier ones. But one must not detach and isolate things which are connected, or forget that if the Church is one in space, it is even more one in time it is the social existence of Christ in history. In conclusion one could say, with the merely relative precision inevitable in all historical analogies, that the Church in our age finds itself in the opposite situation to that pertaining at the time of the Council of Constance: then there were several popes and one Church, now we have one pope and several Churches; the conciliar one, and the Churches of the past which we are to regard as belonging to other ages and as having no authority. 40.
II
Corinthians, 5:17. 54. The impossibility of radical newness, continued. The idea of a radical change, advanced in all sorts of metaphors and “circiterisms” that fail to convey precisely what they intend because of the badness of their style, is naturally linked to the idea of the creation of a new Church. Indeed, once one has refused to recognize that there is a continuity in the Church's development, based on a foundation which does not change, the Church's life will necessarily appear as an incessant act of creation, or process ex nihilo. At the Italian Church Assembly of 1976 Mgr Giuseppe Franceschi, the Archbishop of Ferrara, said in one of the principal addresses: “The real problem is to invent the present and to find in it paths of development to a future which will be truly human.” But “to invent the present” is a compounding of words conveying no intelligible meaning, and if one invents the present, what need is there to find in it paths of development for the future? Why not invent the future as well forthwith? Creation has neither presuppositions nor lines of development: ex nihilo fit quidlibet.49 But to deal with vague statements of this sort rigorously in grammar and in logic does nothing to resolve the question; it merely makes one recognize the general “circiterism” of the episcopate.50 We have already drawn attention to the impossibility of there being anything new in the fundamentals of the Church, the impossibility of a rebirth which would replace one set of foundations with another. Man is reborn in baptism, and his rebirth excludes a third birth, which could be no more than an epiphenomenon of the second, a kind of monstrosity Antonio Rosmini calls this notion a heresy in set terms. The Christian is one who has been reborn and it is through such rebirth that the Church herself is reborn; hence, as there is no higher level of life for a Christian other than the eschatological, there is no higher level of life for the Church herself.51 History shows that changes in the Church are built upon a perduring foundation, without change to that foundation itself. All genuine reforms within the Church have been based on old foundations; none have attempted to lay new ones. To attempt to lay them is the essential characteristic of heresy, from the Gnosticism of the first centuries, to Catharism and the other mediaeval heresies regarding poverty, to the great German heresy of the sixteenth century. I will give two examples. Savonarola brought about a great upsurge in the religious spirit of the Florentine people, breaking with worldliness, but not with the people's life as citizens, or with the beauties of the arts, or with intellectual culture. Although the movement he began was broad and deep, and although he resisted the Pope, he was quite clear that he was not promoting anything radically new in religious matters, no saltus in aliud genus.52 The root remains what it has always been; the foundations have been laid once for all. His words in his sermon on Ruth and Micah are unambiguous: “I say indeed there must be a renewal. But the faith will not change, nor our belief, the Gospel law will not change, nor ecclesiastical authority”53 An analogous set of circumstances arose in the early seventeenth century, when Christians overtly influenced by contemporary learning came to believe in an incongruous link between faith and philosophy, as the result of new discoveries in the natural sciences. Some of them thought that the profound change in the manner of viewing the physical universe carried with it a similar change in the idea of man, a rejection of religious certainties and an incipient secularization of the world. This drastic interpretation of cultural change was rejected by the very authors of that change, such as Galileo, Castelli, Campanella and those others who could maintain the distinction between philosophy and theology: and thus the true upshot of the conflict was to restore to theology its properly theological character. Campanella indeed drew up proposals for a universal reform of the sciences and of life, based on new astronomical discoveries and anomalies (as he thought them), and on the discovery of new lands and new races, but he kept the renewal within the ambit not only of Catholicism but of the papal, Roman Church. To those who thought, like the contemporary playwright Berthold Brecht, that the revolution in astronomy would extend to the whole of life, Galileo addressed this warning: “To those who are disturbed at the prospect of having to change the whole of philosophy, it must be shown that such is not the case, and that the theory of the soul, of generation, of meteors and of animals remains the same.”54 Genuine reforms, whether in human knowledge or in religion, do not deny the fixity of human nature; they admit the existence of an unchanging element upon which man constructs the legitimate novelty of his own historical period. The theologians of the Centre des pastorales des sacrements, an institution controlled by the bishops of France, have said that: L’Eglise ne pent etre universellement signe de salut qua la condition de mourir en elle-meme...d'accepter de voir des institutions, qui ont fait leurs preuves, devenir caduques...de voir une formulation doctrinale remaniee and have decreed that lorsquil y a conflit entre les personnes et lafoi cest lafoi qui doit plier.55 Here the description of radical change has become a theory, and given the official status which the Centre enjoys, the Church's teaching authority is also involved, thus showing that the problem is not confined within the realm of the doctrinal perversions and aberrations of private individuals. It is thus unnecessary to introduce the analysis of the crisis in the Church made by persons outside it, who concur in maintaining that the Church has “made a decision about those aspects of its tradition to be put forward and those which are to be radically modified” thus coming to terms with the modern world.56 This coming to terms requires a movement in the direction of the immanent, which Vatican II is alleged to have begun involuntarily, and which tends to abolish law in favor of love, logic in favor of the spiritual, the individual in favor of the collective, authority in favor of independence, and the council itself in favor of the spirit of the council.57 49.
“From nothing you can make whatever you like.” 55. The denigration of the historical Church. The present denigration of the Church's past by clergy and laity is in lively contrast with the courage and pride with which Catholicism confronted its adversaries in centuries past. It used to be recognized that the Church had adversaries and indeed enemies, and Catholics simultaneously waged war on error while exercising charity towards their opponents. Where truth forbade the defense of human failings, reverence would cover the shame as Shem and Japeth covered their father Noah.58 In the wake of the radical innovation which has occurred in the Church, and the consequent rupture of historical continuity, respect and reverence have been replaced by the censure and repudiation of the past. Respect and reverence derive from a feeling of dependence on something, some principle on which we depend either for existence, as in the case of our parents or our country, or for some benefit, as in the case of our teachers. Those feelings involve an awareness of continuity between those who offer and receive respect, so that what we revere is something in ourselves, to which we in some respect owe our existence. But if the Church should die to itself and break with its past so as to rise as a new creature, the past is not something that should be appropriated and lived out, but something from which one should detach oneself and then repudiate; and reverence and respect for it will thus vanish. The very words respect and reverence include the idea of a looking backward, for which there is no room in a Church projected towards the future, a Church which sees the destruction of its past as a condition of its own rebirth. During the council itself there were already signs of a certain pusillanimity in defending the Church's past, a vice which is opposed to the pagan constantia and to Christian fortitude; and the syndrome subsequently developed rapidly. I will not go into what the innovators have said about Luther, the Inquisition, the Crusades and St. Francis. The great saints of Catholicism are treated either as forerunners of modernity or as being of no importance. I pass rather to the denigration of the Church and the exaltation of those outside it. This denigration of the Church is a commonplace with the clergy of the post-conciliar period. By a piece of mental confusion combined with an accommodation to the opinions of the world, they forget that one's duties towards the truth are not only binding when one's enemies are involved, but also apply in one's own case; one need not be unjust to oneself in order to be just to others. The French bishop, Mgr Ancel, blames the Church for the problems of the modern world because aux problemes reels nous ne fournissons que des reponses insuffisantes.59 Who, first of all, is meant by we: we Catholics? the Church? we pastors? Secondly, it is false in the Catholic view of things to say that errors are born from the lack of satisfactory solutions, since in fact errors always coexist both with the problems and with those true solutions which the Church permanently possesses and teaches, so far as the essentials of man's moral destiny are concerned. It is moreover ironical that those who say that error is necessary in the search for truth, should then say that the search for truth is impeded by error. Error has its own responsibilities, which should not be loaded upon those who are not in error. Pierre Pierrard repudiates the whole polemic waged against anticlericalism by the Catholics of the nineteenth century, and even writes that the slogan Le clericalisme, voila Vennemi, previously regarded as wicked, is now appropriated by priests themselves, since the Church's past has been a negation of the Gospel.60 The Franciscan, Nazzareno Fabretti, writing with a great many loose theological expressions in the Gazzetta del popolo of 23 January 1970 on the subject of ecclesiastical celibacy, accuses the Church of committing crime throughout its history when he writes that virginity, celibacy and the denial of the flesh “having been imposed by sheer authority, without a corresponding conviction or objective possibility of choice, on millions of seminarians and priests, represent one of the greatest abuses which history records.” Mgr G. Martinoli, the Bishop of Lugano, maintains that religion is responsible for Marxism and that if Catholics had behaved differently, atheistic socialism would not have arisen.61 The same Mgr Martinoli says: “The Christian religion is now presenting itself with a new face: it is no longer made up of little practices, exteriority, great feast days and much noise: the Christian religion consists essentially in a relationship with Jesus Christ.”62 Mgr G. Leclercq would have it that the people responsible for the defection of the masses are the priests who baptized them.63 Cardinal Garrone states that: “If the modern world is dechristianized, it is not because it rejects Christ, but because we have not given Him to it.”64 At the Italian church assembly of 1976, the conclusions of the principal relator, Professor Bolgiani, on the recent history of the Church in Italy were entirely negative: the bishops had been nonentities, there had been compromises with political power, and a lack of openness to any renewal.65 Cardinal Léger, the Archbishop of Montreal, went so far as to say that “if religious practice is decreasing, it is not a sign that people are losing the faith because, in my humble opinion, they never had it, I mean a personal faith.”66 According to the Cardinal, the Christian people in the past cannot have had true faith. The false notion of faith underlying these statements will be explained further on. Finally, S. Barreau, author of the book La reconnaissance, ou qu’est-ce que la foi writes: Pour ma part je crois que depuis le XIII siècle il y a peu d’evangelisation dans l’Eglise.67 58.
Genesis, 9:23. 56. Critique of the denigration of the Church. This line of accusation, which has taken the place of Catholic apologetics and even of an exposition of Catholic tradition, is first and foremost superficial, because it assumes that the efficient and determining cause of one mans error is to be found in the errors of others. The thesis contains a veiled denial of personal freedom and responsibility. It is also erroneous, because it implies that those who are to blame for others' errors are themselves the only real agents, the others being simply secondary characters or even mere matter acted upon by the first group or by history. The thesis is also irreligious and generates an idea which is at odds with theological and teleological truths. Consistently applying this accusatory line of thought would lead to belaboring Christ Himself with responsibility for the opposition He met with from men, blaming Him for not having revealed Himself appropriately or sufficiently, for not having entirely dissipated doubts about His divinity, in short, for not having done His duty as savior of the world. The accusation rebounds from the Church to Christ; from the social individual of the Church to the personal individual of its founder. The truth is that the attainment of the Church's end is not a fact of history, but of religion and of faith, and consequently one cannot consider the Church's activity as if it were a purely human enterprise, since that activity is essentially spiritual and other-worldly, even though it occurs in time. The accusatory line of thought savors of that theological superficiality characteristic of the innovators who, having entirely set aside the doctrine of predestination, are no longer able to grasp either the depths of human freedom, which they contradictorily claim depends on the freedom of other people, or the depths of the mystery of redemption. In his Christmas message for 1981, John Paul II expounded the theological depth of the Christian mystery very well.68 The birth of the God-Man, come into this world, is certainly the heart of it, but it is equally mysterious that from the moment of His birth onward the world has not received Him and continues to refuse to receive Him. This mysterious non-reception of the Word pertains to the very depths of our religion, and the attempt to find its causes in the failings of the Church is a sign of spiritual aridity. As prefigured in Isaiah 5:4, and re-echoed in the marvelous liturgy of Good Friday, Christ asks the human race: Quid est, quod debui ultra facere, et non feci?69To which the moderns seem to reply: Ultra, ultra debuistifacere et non fecisti.70Their reply to Christ's lament is: Appensus es in statera et inventus es minus habens.71 Christ's preahing and miracle working left the majority in their unbelief, many in their sins, and all with a tendency to sin. Was the redemption therefore a failure? Those who accuse the Church are ignorant not only of the psychology of freedom, with its attendant mystery, and of the theology of predestination, with its hidden depths, but of the first law of God's dealings with creation, by which the pattern of God's manifestation ad extra is directed back towards the glory of God ad intra. The grammatical distinction between suasion and persuasion is itself sufficient to explain the history of the Church: Ecclesia veritatem suadet, non autem persuadet, 72 since history is the theater of both divine predestination and human freedom. 68.
O.R., 26-27 December 1981. 57. False view of the early Church. One paradoxical result of the denigration of the historical Church by the new fashion in historiography73 has been the unmeasured lauding of the early Church and the claim that its spirit and customs are being restored. The early Church is presented as a community of the perfect, inspired by charity and following the commands of the Gospel to the letter. The truth is rather that the Church has always been a mixed multitude, a field of wheat and tares, a mixture of good men and bad. The evidence begins with St. Paul. One need only remember the abuses at the agape, the factions among the faithful, the moral lapses, the apostasy in persecution. In St. Cyprian's experience, in the third century, the mass of Christians apostatized at the first news of persecution, before the real danger had even begun. Ad prima statim verba minantis inimici maximus fratrum numerus fidem suam prodidit....Non expectaverunt saltern ut ascenderent apprehensi, ut interrogati negarent...ultro ad forum currere etc.74 And was it not in the early Christian centuries that there was a great sprouting of heresies and schisms, of which St. Augustine numbers fully eighty-seven kinds in his De haeresibus ad Quodvultdeum, ranging from the most deep and widespread, such as Arianism, Pelagianism and Manichaeism, to local and extraordinary kinds like Gaianism and Ophitism?75 This retrospective lauding of preconstantinian Christianity, on which the schemes for renewal of the Church are based, is thus historically groundless, as Christianity is at all periods the mixed thing portrayed in the parable of the tares. Wolbero, the Abbot of St. Pantaleon, even writes that the Church contains the city of God and the city of the devil,76 I think mistakenly, because, as St. Augustine teaches, it is the world, not the Church, which contains the two cities. We do not therefore imply that it is impossible to distinguish between one era and another: as well as the injunction not to judge: Nolite iudicare77we also read: Nolite iudicare secundum faciem, sed iustum iudicium iudicate.78 The actions of both individuals and generations are matter for this difficult operation. The criterion of judgment is the unchanging reality of religion, to which human changes are in different degrees conformed. Historical judgments about religious matters are in this regard no different from, for example, judgments about aesthetics. Just as any beautiful work is measured against the type towards which it tends (a fact attested to by the labor of an artist, who knows when the ideal is being approximated to and when it is not), and is comparable with other works so measured, so too the various historical periods of Christianity can be measured against the inspiring principle of the Christian religion itself, and then compared one with another. Hence it is that a period of crisis can be defined as one when the Church distances itself so much from its inspiring principle as to put itself in danger. Let it be noted, however, that we will not arbitrarily privilege one historical period as the yardstick by which to measure another, judging the present state of the Church by comparing it with, for example, the mediaeval period; all are to be measured against a suprahistorical and unchanging standard, which depends on the divine unchangeability, and is thus the genuine measure of them all. 73.
There have been refutations of this
denigration of the historical Church. One notable one was made by
Mgr Vincent, the Bishop of Bayonne, read on Vatican Radio on 7 March
1981, and published subsequently in his diocesan bulletin. He refutes
the articles of accusation one by one: that the Church was merely
ritual, that the Bible was unknown, that there was no appreciation
of the liturgy, that there was an obsession with matters of sex.
The bishop remarks that: “This opposing of the past to the present
has about it something infantile, caricaturistic and unhealthy.”
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