14
John XXIII
The papal conclave of 1958 elected Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the former nuncio to France, who had been serving as patriarch of Venice. John XXIII (1958-1963) was unusually old (seventy-seven) when elected, and conventional wisdom assumed that he had been chosen as a brief transitional pontiff. But to the contrary, his pontificate would turn out to be one of the most momentous in the entire history of the Church.
Style
In a sense, the “style” of the new Pope was more important than his specific policies. Apart from anything he decreed or authorized, John immediately effected a revolution in the public image of the papal office, an abrupt transition from the concept of the pope as ruler to the pope as kindly pastor. Whereas Pius XII was tall, thin, aloof, austere, and aristocratic, John was short, rotund, and informal, given to making jokes at his own expense, and he deliberately departed from papal protocol by the kinds of guests he received (the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, the atheist son-in-law of the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev [d. 1971]). John signaled that he would no longer be the “prisoner of the Vatican” when he left Rome to visit the Marian shrine of Loreto and other places in Italy. His first trip outside the Vatican was to a prison, an act meant to exemplify the ancient papal title of “servant of the servants of God”.
Myths
Because of John’s style, few popes have had so many myths woven about them. Thus he was often called the “peasant pope”, although in fact his family might be called lower middle class. Dubbed “pastoral”, he spent part of his career in administration and the rest as a Vatican diplomat, culminating in only five years as head of a diocese. Far from being simple, he was intellectually and politically sophisticated. John’s spiritual diary, The Journal of a Soul, revealed a man of deep traditional piety, and his “liberalism” was qualified by such acts as mandating the teaching of Latin in all seminaries, at a time when it was being phased out in many places, and mandating the inclusion of St. Joseph in the Canon of the Mass after the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council had shown no interest in the matter.
A Council
John’s pontificate was one of the most momentous in the history of the Church mainly because of the Council, which, to the surprise of everyone, he summoned less than a year after his election, at a time when most Catholics had probably never even heard of such a thing. (An “ecumenical council” is a gathering of the entire Church and does not refer to the ecumenical movement to which Vatican II would give its support.) Although Pius XII had considered the possibility, there had been no such gathering since the Vatican Council of 1870 (now called Vatican I), which had never been officially dissolved. Some of John’s advisors urged caution, but he brushed aside all misgivings.
“A New Pentecost”
Precisely why the Council was summoned remains somewhat uncertain. John announced its goals as “the renewal of the spirit of the Gospel in the hearts of people everywhere and the adjustment of Christian discipline to modern-day living”.1 He spoke of a “new Pentecost” and stated serenely that, since the teachings of the Church were firm and not in doubt, the Council would not concern itself with doctrine but would be primarily a “pastoral” council.
A Healthy Church
For the most part, the Church at the time seemed quite healthy. The rate of church attendance in many countries was remarkably high (over three quarters of Catholics attended Sunday Mass in the United States), religious vocations were abundant, and Catholics seemed very serious about their faith, although they were sometimes criticized as neglectful of social justice and overly formalistic or mechanical in their piety. Clerical scandals were rare, the level of priestly education and zeal was high, and not since the patristic period had the laity been so well instructed in their faith. Since World War I, the importance of the Holy See in international affairs had been recognized in the number of countries with which the Vatican had official diplomatic relations: up from only fifteen at the beginning of the century to seventy-eight by 1968.
Evangelization
It is likely that John thought that the “new Pentecost” would build on this foundation to bring Christ to the nations. He hoped for nothing less than the conversion of the world, something that required Catholics to put aside the defensiveness that had characterized the Church since the Counter-Reformation.
A “Pastoral” Gathering
In his opening address in 1962, John called on the Council to take account of the “errors, requirements, and opportunities” of the age and regretted that some people (“prophets of gloom”) seemed unable to see any good in the modern world. At the same time, he affirmed the infallibility of the Church and said that her dogmas were settled and “known to all”, so that the conciliar task was merely one of presenting those dogmas in new ways.
But the papal proclamation was ambiguous, in ways that would turn out to characterize the Council and its results even more. What was authentic renewal and how was it to be achieved? How should essential discipline be adjusted to modern culture? Even a “pastoral” council had to be clear about its beliefs. Contrary to what John apparently intended, Vatican II ended up giving much of its attention to the internal life of the Church, a scrutiny that resulted in a crisis of Catholic identity without historical parallel. John died after the first session of the Council and was succeeded by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini of Milan, who ruled as Paul VI (1963-1978).
Vatican II
Public Interest
Vatican II met in a glare of publicity greater even than Vatican I, including the press all over the world and the relatively new electronic media. The intense interest that even many non-Catholics took in the proceedings was an acknowledgment of the Church’s importance, albeit in some ways an ambiguous compliment. It was the best-attended council in history: composed of 2,500 bishops and 150 superiors of male religious orders, from all over the world, plus innumerable official “observers” and periti (specialists) who advised the voting delegates on matters of theology and canon law.
The Agenda
There was a crisis from the beginning, when many of the Council Fathers objected to the work of the various preparatory commissions—mainly members of the Roman Curia—that had been set up to formulate the schema (agenda) of the Council. The tension arose from the desire of many of the Fathers to open discussions as widely as possible, without restriction. John acquiesced in the demands for new schema, which were then formulated mainly by committees of the Council Fathers themselves.
Blocs
The Fathers were by no means of one mind—there were various blocs working to achieve diverse goals, often in opposition to one another—but the procedural squabble was in many ways the decisive event of the Council, representing a crucial victory for what was now being called the “liberal” party.
“Progressives”
The leadership of that party, and in many ways of the Council itself, came mainly from five Western European countries, the most influential prelates being Cardinals Bernard Alfrink (d. 1987) of the Netherlands; Leo Jozef Suenens (d. 1996) of Belgium; Achille Lienart (d. 1973) of France; Julius Doepfner (d. 1976) and Joseph Frings (d. 1978) of Germany; and Franz Koenig (d. 2004) of Austria. The majority of the Council Fathers tended to defer to the opinions of those prelates and a few others, such as Cardinal Giacamo Lercaro (d. 1976) of Bologna.
Theologians
Over the previous century, those five countries had nourished the most vigorous and sophisticated Catholic intellectual life, and as theological questions arose, bishops were influenced by the men recognized as the most accomplished theologians of the age: the Jesuits Henri de Lubac (d. 1991) and Jean Danielou (d. 1974), the Oratorian Louis Bouyer (d. 2004), and the Dominican Yves Congar (d. 1995) in France; the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx (d. 2009) in the Netherlands; the Jesuit Karl Rahner (d. 1984), the Redemptorist Bernard Haering (d. 1998), and the diocesan priest Joseph Ratzinger in Germany. These periti were influential both in shaping the thought of the prelates whom they advised and in working behind the scenes with other bishops and periti. The influence of this northern European group was due partly to their well-organized efforts to shape the discussions.
But despite its intellectual brilliance, in some ways the Church in Western Europe appeared less than vigorous, in terms such as church attendance and religious vocations. Some countries, France in particular, seemed top-heavy—rich in intellectual life but with an eroding popular base—so that their vigorous intellectuality was partly motivated by a certain sense of crisis, the urgent need to make the faith more credible to “modern man”. By contrast, the Church in the British Isles, southern Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States, to say nothing of the Third World, lacked great intellectual achievements but appeared to be in a relatively healthy pastoral state. Most of the bishops from those countries seemed to see little urgency in many of the questions that came before them, and some expressed bewilderment as to why change was necessary at all.
“Conservatives”
Open resistance to the prevailing conciliar spirit came from some diocesan bishops, notably Cardinal Giuseppi Siri (d. 1989) of Genoa, but especially from certain members of the Roman Curia, such as Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (d. 1979), prefect of the Holy Office, whose primary responsibility was to safeguard doctrinal orthodoxy. In the end, most of the conciliar decrees were consciously balanced, often by a very careful choice of words. This balance would later allow both “liberals” and “conservatives” to claim conciliar authority for their interpretations.2
Authority
Ironically, in view of the later claim that the Council democratized the Church, deference to authority was a major factor in determining the outcome. Papal leadership, and an unquestioned faith in the Church’s inerrancy, led most of the Fathers to support the final decrees that emerged from the debates. No decree received more than a small number of dissenting votes.
Theological Currents Preceding the Council
Although many of the actions of the Council took the world by surprise, all of them grew out of ideas that, perhaps little known to most Catholics, had been coming to fruition for a long time. Modernism, as condemned in 1907, had been only a marginal influence in the Church, and it did not survive in an organized way. However, the modernists raised questions to which later thinkers sometimes returned, usually without being conscious modernists. Those questions were fundamental: whether beliefs transcended the historical era in which they were formulated; whether it was necessary to adapt those beliefs to the spirit of each age; to what extent belief was the product of a human religious sense rather than of supernatural revelation; whether modern scholarship, especially biblical studies, had discredited certain beliefs; and whether the Catholic faith had to be understood only in terms of Thomistic theology and philosophy.
Ressourcement
The situation was complex. While most theologians were Thomists, some, especially in France and Germany, were moving in other directions. Their principal approach came to be called ressourcement (“recovery of the sources”). A return to the Church’s scriptural and patristic roots during the millennium before the advent of Scholasticism was being advocated by de Lubac, Danielou, Bouyer, Congar, Ratzinger, and the Swiss priest-theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (d. 1988).
There was often a strong Thomistic reaction against this theology based on ressourcement, and the dispute between the different approaches to faith resembled that between Scholastics and humanists at the time of the Renaissance. To proponents of the “New Theology”, Scholasticism, while true, was abstract and remote, whereas Thomists thought that the “New Theology” was dangerously imprecise, providing no objective basis for faith.
De Lubac
Following Augustine, de Lubac argued that the distinction between reason and faith did not take sufficient account of the inherent human yearning for God and thereby unwittingly helped prepare the way for secularization. This theory had aroused suspicion against both Rosmini and Blondel, on the grounds that it did not recognize the necessity of divine grace in order to know God, and de Lubac was accused of softening the distinction between the natural and the supernatural to the point of obliteration, making faith seem to be almost a natural human phenomenon.
Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis (The Human Race) was a check on the New Theology, seeming to criticize de Lubac without naming him, explicitly warning against assuming the theory of evolution to be true, and insisting that the doctrine of Original Sin required that the human race be descended from a single set of parents. Partly because of this papal warning, until the time of Vatican II, the New Theology was taught primarily in a few Jesuit and Dominican theologates in Europe, with Thomism continuing to dominate most seminaries and universities. But by the time of the Council, de Lubac’s orthodoxy was no longer in question, and the influence of ressourcement was obvious in all the conciliar decrees, especially their strong scriptural foundations.
Aggiornamento
A second new theological approach, which was later called aggiornamento (“updating”), moved in the direction of modernism3 by making the demands of contemporary culture its chief concern. Aggiornamento owed much to the Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan (d. 1984), who distinguished the “classical” from the “historical” mentality, arguing that the former—a belief in a stable and unchanging mental universe—was now discredited and that theology had to operate within the historical mode. This question of changing mentality Newman had tried to resolve by his theory of the development of doctrine.
Transcendental Thomism
Transcendental Thomism was an alternative to the mainstream Thomism of Gilson and Maritain. It originated at Louvain University and sought to take account of Kant’s claim that the mind cannot know things in themselves but only “phenomena” that present themselves through the mind’s own categories (time, space, causality, and other things). Transcendental Thomism was so called because it posited a fundamental affinity for God within the human soul that allowed men to transcend ordinary knowledge.
Rahner was a Transcendental Thomist and emphasized this inherent human ability to know God, even speaking of the “anonymous Christian” who in effect possessed the faith without being aware of it—a theory that went much further than de Lubac and marked a clear departure from the theology of ressourcement. Although Rahner shared some of the interests of ressourcement, he became the intellectual leader of aggiornamento. The related “incarnational theology”—so called because it claimed to take seriously the fact that God entered human history in Jesus—made “human experience” rather than classical dogma the center of theological speculation.
Phenomenology
Although most theologians of ressourcement were only secondarily interested in moral theology, Catholic moral teaching also underwent development prior to the Council, although more at the hands of philosophers than of theologians.
Phenomenology
The Jewish Edmund Husserl (d. 1938) was the founder of phenomenology, a philosophy that sought to understand reality as it was actually experienced by men. On the border between objectivity and subjectivity, it proved especially insightful into human relationships. Phenomenology appealed to some Catholics (Edith Stein was Husserl’s student) as a corrective to scientific materialism, in that even physical objects retained a spiritual significance that science could not understand—a house was not merely a material structure but had special meaning for those who inhabited it.
This philosophy had special relevance to marriage, beginning with the German layman Dietrich von Hildebrand (d. 1977), who was also a student of Husserl and who immigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis. Hildebrand spoke of marriage’s dual purpose—the procreation of children that was its objective reality and the spiritual unity of the spouses that was the experience at its heart. Sex without love, even between married persons, was therefore a moral disorder, and the union of the spouses was the highest good of marriage, reaching its ultimate fulfillment in the begetting of children.
Personalism
Influenced by Blondel in particular, the French layman Emmanuel Mounier (d. 1950) articulated what he called Personalism, a philosophy in which truth was known not abstractly but by an intuition into the inexhaustible mystery and inner freedom of the person. Personalism’s practical significance was uncertain, in that at different times Mounier was sympathetic to both Fascism and Communism. He became increasingly critical of the Catholic Church. Personalist moral theologians rejected traditional casuistry (see Chapter Ten above, p. 314) as a minimalist approach to morality, since God called His people to perfect love, not merely to the avoidance of sin.
On birth control and other issues, there were stirrings of dissatisfaction in Western Europe especially. There was a growing sense that the Church needed to try new ideas in order to stem the religious decline.
The Conciliar Decrees
Revelation
Biblical Studies
Although scholarly biblical studies had sometimes generated skepticism, Leo XIII affirmed in principle the legitimacy of archaeology, history, and linguistics, provided they were undertaken in the spirit of faith. He authorized the establishment of the Dominican École Biblique (“school of the Bible”) in Jerusalem, under Marie-Joseph Lagrange (d. 1938), and set up the Pontifical Biblical Commission to encourage and oversee such studies. Under Pius X, the Pontifical Biblical Institute was established in Rome under Jesuit auspices. Pius XII also gave qualified approval to biblical scholarship, reminding Catholics that, while the Bible was divinely inspired, it was written through human agencies, making scholarship crucial in such things as archaeological discoveries, the precise meaning of words, and the historical context in which biblical events occurred.
During the 1950s, scholars at the Ecole Biblique produced the Jerusalem Bible, a rendering of the Scripture in modern French that was soon translated into English and began to supplant the Douai-Rheims edition that had been in use for 350 years. Over the next several decades, there was a proliferation of new biblical translations in many languages, and Catholics even began using Protestant versions.
Vatican II strongly urged Catholics to make Scripture the center of their spiritual lives, reminding them that the truths of Scripture were salvific—those things God had revealed to man for the sake of his salvation. The Scriptures were both divine and human in their authorship, and human error could enter in on matters that were not salvific.
Tradition
There was, however, sharp debate over the nature of revelation, with some Fathers fearful that an emphasis on Scripture alone would undercut certain Catholic beliefs (the Assumption, for example) that had come down through Tradition. In the end, the Council reaffirmed the authority of Tradition, which had been a major point of contention between Catholics and Protestants since the Reformation, but returned to the patristic understanding of Tradition not as a source of authority separate from Scripture but precisely as the Church’s own understanding of Scripture: the Bible as received not by individuals but by the ecclesial community guided by the Holy Spirit.
The Church
The Mystical Body
The theology of the Church was a basic concern of the Council, the foundation on which everything else would be built. The recovery of the concept of the Mystical Body of Christ, expounded by St. Paul, was one of the achievements of nineteenth-century theology, confirmed by Pius XII in 1943. It moved beyond thinking of the Church primarily in juridical or institutional terms—as a formal organization with members and rules—and sought to recover a sense of her as a spiritual entity that transcended her institutional structure. Properly understood, this required a deeper kind of spirituality: not merely living piously and morally in order to receive grace but entering into mystical union with Christ Himself, in which a person embraces dying and rising with Christ in order to be completely transformed by Him.
Other Models
In its decree on the Church Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations), the Council invoked other images besides that of the Mystical Body: the Church as the People of God (“Laius”); the New Israel of Christ’s followers bound together by faith; and the “Pilgrim Church”, those pursuing their journey toward the heavenly Jerusalem, a reminder that men had no earthly dwelling.
Hierarchy
Hierarchy was integral to the doctrine of the Mystical Body, since, as St. Paul said, no part of a body could claim to act independent of the others and the whole body was governed by its head. But the relationship between hierarchical authority and shared authority (“collegiality”) was reopened at Vatican II, because Vatican I had defined only the authority of the papal office, not that of the bishops.
Collegiality
Lumen Gentium defined episcopal collegiality to mean that bishops were not simply agents of the Holy See but had apostolic authority in their own right. Historically, they had often acted in consort, especially in the ecumenical councils. But some Council Fathers were fearful that this might be understood as a revival of late-medieval Conciliarism. Paul VI personally intervened to ensure that in Lumen Gentium episcopal authority was limited by the dogma of papal infallibility, forthrightly asserting that, while it was appropriate that the Holy Father consult the bishops in the exercise of his Petrine office, his authority was valid without episcopal affirmation. (In fact, no pope has ever made a solemn doctrinal declaration without consulting the bishops; most such declarations have been made by councils.) Scarcely touched by the Council was the question of how the idea of collegiality applied at other levels of the Church.
Morality
Contraception
Organized promotion of birth control grew throughout the twentieth century, and in 1930, Pius XI issued the encyclical Casti Connubii (Chaste Marriage), the most complete exposition to date of the Catholic theology of marriage. The encyclical reaffirmed the Catholic teaching on contraception only a few months after the Church of England became the first Christian body to justify the practice officially, although the Anglican bishops warned that it could be used only for “grave reasons”.
“Rhythm”
Catholic Personalists were far from justifying contraception. However, their philosophy seemed to imply that, although procreation could never be deliberately thwarted—something that would constitute a violent disruption of the marital union—not every sex act had to be potentially procreative. (The marriage of sterile couples, or of couples too old to beget children, was always permitted by the Church.) Some traditional Catholic moralists questioned the legitimacy of what was then called the “rhythm method”—temporarily limiting sexual relations to the infertile periods that occur naturally in a woman’s menstrual cycle—but Pius XII in 1951 declared it to be licit if used for good reasons, including poverty or ill health.
“The Pill”
By the time of the Council, there was considerable agitation for the Church to accept at least some kinds of artificial birth control, especially the newly developed “Pill”, which produced in the woman an artificial infertility. In Belgium and the Netherlands, the Pill was even endorsed by several bishops. Paul VI intervened to take the issue off the floor of the Council, appointing a special commission to study it. In its decree Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), the Council explicitly recognized the dual purpose of marriage as both procreation and the loving union of spouses.
Priesthood and Religious Life
Worker Priests
During the Second World War, a number of priests were sent to concentration camps, where they ministered to other prisoners under extreme conditions, outside the normal structure of priestly life. In France, some priests were forced to work in factories during the war and, with direct experience of the falling away of so many industrial workers from the Church, voluntarily returned to such jobs after the war, living together in small communities and hoping to evangelize the workers.
This “worker-priest” experiment was cautiously approved by the hierarchy, but in a way it turned out to be symptomatic of the fallacy of much postwar liberal Catholicism—bold and imaginative but pastorally ineffective. Few workers were attracted back to the Church, some priests abandoned their vocations, and others embraced the Marxism that was deeply imbedded in the French working class. The Holy See first imposed restrictions and eventually suppressed the experiment. (Significant in terms of his liberal image, it was John XXIII who did so.)
Celibacy
Most priests of the time seem to have been living faithfully and zealously, and the Council’s decree on the priesthood affirmed traditional discipline. A few Council Fathers raised the issue of celibacy, but Paul VI forbade its discussion.
Religious Life
Noting the decline in European religious vocations after the war, Pius XII urged the “modernization” of religious life, albeit in accord with its traditional purposes. The Council prescribed both ressourcement and aggiornamento for the renewal of religious life, enjoining religious communities to return to the original vision of their founders but also to make prudent adjustments to modern life.
The Laity
Call to Holiness
The Council’s principal message to both the clergy and the laity was the “universal call to holiness” in whatever one’s state of life. The Council recalled Paul’s teaching about the priesthood of the laity—that they joined with the priest in offering the holy sacrifice, an idea that had been almost forgotten as a result of the Protestant insistence on the “priesthood of all believers”.
Lay Apostolate
Through Catholic Action and other movements, lay activity had been continually growing during the twentieth century. The Legion of Mary, founded by the layman Frank Duff (d. 1980) in Dublin in 1921, was a major apostolate in many parts of the world, its members working especially among the poor, with prostitutes, and with those who had lapsed from the faith. In England, two primarily lay groups—the Catholic Evidence Guild and the Catholic Truth Society—aggressively championed the Church in a somewhat hostile environment, with the former group witnessing to the faith while standing on actual soapboxes, taking on all comers. There were few lay theologians before the Council—Frank Sheed, an able popularizer, being one of the very few—but laymen were active in every other area of Catholic intellectual life.
Apostolic Mandate
In defining the role of the laity, Vatican II for the most part adapted the Catholic Action concept, focusing entirely on the apostolic mandate of the laity, who were enabled by their baptism to engage in evangelization, to renew the temporal world. It said nothing about the participation of the laity in the governance of the Church.
Liturgy
Of all the changes wrought by the Council, none were more dramatic and far-reaching than those in the liturgy.
Emperor Joseph II and other “reformers” of the Enlightenment period wanted to simplify the sacred rites, to make them in a sense more “efficient”, and they even discussed the use of the vernacular. But their program ended with the French Revolution and had no influence on what was later called the liturgical movement.
The Liturgical Movement
That movement began with Prosper Guéranger in the monastery of Solesmes in the nineteenth century. In attempting as far as possible to re-create monastic life as it was lived in the Middle Ages, he placed the liturgy once more at the center of Catholic life, his multivolume work The Liturgical Year being the first modern attempt to encourage a piety centered on the liturgy.
The liturgical movement continued to develop principally in Benedictine monasteries in Germany and Belgium and was brought to the United States mainly through St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. The movement was primarily monastic, because the celebration of the Mass and the Divine Office had always been the monks’ principal task, and they possessed both the education and the time to celebrate the liturgy in all its fullness.
Gregorian Chant
Part of Gueranger’s program was the revival of Gregorian chant, which had all but disappeared from Catholic worship. The music of the “High Mass” was often written by contemporary composers and performed by professional orchestras and choruses, while in ordinary parishes, the music consisted mainly of pious hymns.
Pius X
Pius X came to be considered the patron of the liturgical movement, because he both strongly endorsed the revival of chant and strongly encouraged frequent Communion. He allowed children to make their First Communions at an early age and thereby went against Jansenist prejudices that prevailed even among many people who were not Jansenists.
The Sacred Mysteries
Guéranger’s idea of authentic liturgy was a Romantic kind of medievalism, but later scholars sought to recover the worship of the early Church, concluding that over the centuries numerous accretions had developed that obscured its original meaning. The Italian-German priest Romano Guardini (d. 1968) was the most important theologian of the liturgical movement, relating liturgy to the most basic mysteries of the faith and showing it as the center of Catholic life. Based on the theology of the Mystical Body, the German Benedictine Odo Casel (d. 1940) explained the liturgy as not only the continuation of the sacrifice of Calvary, through which the faithful receive grace, but as a divine mystery into which the faithful fully enter, in order to die and rise with Christ.
The Liturgical Calender
To achieve this, liturgists emphasized the “seasonal cycle”—Christmas, Epiphany, Holy Week, Pentecost—over the “sanctoral cycle” that commemorated the saints, and they also sought to limit the frequency of Masses for the dead, which in many parishes made up most of the weekday liturgies. In each case, the proper celebration of the liturgy was in tension with popular devotion.
Pius XII seemed to give his blessing to the liturgical movement when in 1951 he authorized the restoration of the Easter Vigil to its proper place on Holy Saturday evening or early Easter morning, replacing the anomalous custom of celebrating it on Saturday morning. It was an especially significant reform that was intended to make the Paschal mystery the heart of the Christian life.
The Social Dimension
The liturgical movement also had a strong social dimension, teaching that in the liturgy both individuals and the community are transformed, so that they in turn can transform the world at the most profound level, elevating people to a higher level of being and meeting the most desperate of all human needs—salvation from the powers of darkness. In the United States, especially through the Benedictine Virgil Michel of Collegeville (d. 1938), interest in the liturgy was often linked with racial justice and other social issues.
“Active Participation”
Worshippers had always believed that something of eternal significance was taking place on the altar—that Christ Himself was present—and most people assisted at Mass in a spirit of deep reverence, even if they did not fully comprehend it. But the achievement of what Pius X called “active participation” in the liturgy by the laity was the chief purpose of the liturgical movement, with participation understood as being present in a prayerful spirit, attending closely to the rites, and understanding their meaning, although not necessarily singing and praying along with the priest.
Slowly, the liturgical movement moved beyond the monasteries, awakening in some priests and laity a new appreciation of the liturgy, at a time when many people probably found popular devotions more meaningful. Overall, however, the movement had only modest impact. A small minority of lay people used bilingual daily missals that enabled them to pray the Mass with the priest; a very few began to pray the daily Divine Office; and in advanced circles, the “dialogue Mass” allowed the congregation to make the Latin responses that were ordinarily rendered only by the acolytes. Some liturgists favored use of the vernacular, but it was not a central issue.
The Vernacular
The conciliar decree on liturgy embodied the rich theology that lay behind all this, speaking of liturgy in a mystical way, as a foretaste of the New Jerusalem, a glimpse of Heaven itself. Of all the things for which Vatican II is known, the movement from Latin to the vernacular is perhaps most famous, but in fact the Council did not mandate that move but merely conceded that under some circumstances the vernacular might be appropriate in some parts of the liturgy. Gueranger gave “pride of place” to Gregorian chant, which had been neglected, but newer styles of music were also encouraged.
Mary
Marian piety flourished in the twentieth century, and some bishops wanted the Council to issue a special decree on Mary, even to proclaim her as “Co-redemptrix” with Jesus. Instead, the Council included a statement about Mary in Lumen Gentium, defining her role within the total economy of salvation, in order to overcome any belief that Mary offered a way alternative to Christ’s own redemptive sacrifice.
Ecumenism
Next to liturgy, ecumenism was perhaps the Council’s most dramatic legacy. The ecumenical movement was a Protestant, and to a much lesser extent Eastern Orthodox, development of the early twentieth century. By the end of the century, however, the movement was being led by the Catholic Church.
The Ecumenical Movement
Pius IX had bluntly told the Protestants that Vatican I was yet another opportunity for them to repent their errors, and both Benedict XV and Pius XI warned against the danger of seeming to make religious belief the subject of negotiations. As a result of the Oxford Movement, there was some ecumenical rapprochement between Catholics and “High Church” Anglicans, although Leo XIII, after study, pronounced Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void”.4 During the 1920s, there were unofficial Catholic-Anglican discussions (“the Malines conversations”), tolerated by the Holy See, under the patronage of Cardinal Mercier.
Unofficial Encounters
During World War II, some informal ecumenism developed between Protestants and Catholics engaged in the struggle against the Nazis in Germany, the Netherlands, and France, and in England there was a formal ecumenical organization—the Sword of the Spirit—that for a time enjoyed hierarchical approval. After the war, both Catholic and Protestant scholars began writing accounts of the Reformation that sought understanding rather than mere polemics. Bouyer, a convert from the very small French Lutheran church, was especially influential on the Catholic side. In 1949, a Boston priest, Leonard Feeney (d. 1978), was first expelled from the Jesuit order, then excommunicated, for persisting in his teaching that no one who is not a Catholic can be saved, starting a schismatic movement that was only reconciled to the Church decades later.
John XXIII
John XXIII began the Catholic ecumenical initiative even before the Council, largely by his personal openness to non-Catholics, whom he addressed as brothers. The Holy See had declined to join the World Council of Churches when it was formed in 1948, but in 1961, it began sending observers to its meetings. John established the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity under the German Jesuit Cardinal Agostino Bea (d. 1981), Pius XII’s former confessor. Protestants and Eastern Orthodox were invited to send observers to the Council,5 their presence making Vatican II unique among councils.
Religious Truths
The Council itself identified religious truth as present in what was in effect a series of overlapping circles, with all Christian faiths possessing some degree of truth but “the fullness of Christ’s truth” present only in the Catholic Church.
The new ecumenism appeared revolutionary to many, a complete reversal of what had previously been taught. It was, however, merely a change of perspective, in that the Catholic Church had always recognized the core of orthodoxy in Protestantism (the Trinity, the divinity of Christ) but had previously emphasized its errors. Now she chose to recognize its truths, as the basis of imperfect brotherly unity.
Eastern Orthodoxy
Ecumenical priority was inevitably given to the Eastern Orthodox, who were recognized as sharing most of the Catholic faith. Separation from the Orthodox was viewed by the Council Fathers as a lamentable historical misfortune, and the mutual excommunications of 1054 were formally rescinded after the Council.
Protestants
The Council warned against a false ecumenism based on an indifference to, or a misinterpretation of, doctrine. However, under Bea’s direction, official dialogues were initiated, especially with Lutherans and Anglicans. In practical terms, the immediate effect of ecumenism was to alter Catholics’ and Protestants’ attitudes toward one another, as for the first time they were allowed, even encouraged, to pray together both formally and informally, although they could not share the Eucharist.
The Jews
The conciliar decree on the Jews reaffirmed that the death of Jesus was the fault of the entire, sinful human race, not of the Jews specifically, and recalled the Jews’ status as God’s chosen people and the role of their faith in the economy of salvation. (Some Near Eastern bishops spoke against the decree because it would offend their people.) Pope John personally ordered the expunging of the term “perfidious Jews” from the liturgy of Good Friday.
Non-Christians
The Church’s approach to non-Christian religions required, not ecumenism, which applies only to Christians, but some kind of interreligious dialogue based on natural theology, which posits the ability of men to know the existence of their Creator. Thus Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions were said to possess a core of truth, although they remained in need of the Gospel.
Church and World
Sympathy
Gaudium et Spes—usually called “The Church in the Modern World”—was often identified as the heart of the Council’s message, the charter of aggiornamento. Its tone differed from many earlier Church documents in that it did not primarily warn or condemn but instead expressed sympathy and understanding for a world that possessed an unfulfilled longing for truth and justice.
Characteristic of this optimistic tone, Gaudium et Spes made only oblique reference to the fact that the twentieth century had already seen a persecution of Christians more severe than any in the entire history of the Church. Despite vigorous efforts by some Fathers, the Council did not condemn Communism by name.
A Loving Mother
In announcing Christ as the “Light of the Nations”, Lumen Gentium claimed for His Church a position superior to that of every other institution, and Gaudium et Spes, far from uncritically embracing the world, also boldly asserted the Church’s superiority over secular culture. The burden of the conciliar message was that, so long as men relied merely on their own resources to achieve good, they would always be disappointed, that only the saving Gospel of Christ could provide fulfillment. The Church was like a loving mother—sympathetic but always providing the world with firm guidance.
The Signs of the Times
The title of the decree Gaudium et Spes—taken from the first three Latin words of the text—was in a sense misleading, in that after “joy and hope” the very next words were “grief and anguish” (luctus et angor), the juxtaposition of the two phrases accurately expressing the balanced stance which the Council took toward the world. The Church, according to Gaudium et Spes, undertook to “read the signs of the times”, discerning in the movement of history how the world needed guidance, searching for what was positive in secular culture in order to build upon it. The Council even dispassionately analyzed various kinds of atheism, in order to understand their appeal.
A Wide Agenda
By far the longest of the conciliar decrees, Gaudium et Spes attempted to deal with all aspects of the modern world: the human sense of alienation, the economy, war and peace, the family, and many other things. It mandated economically developed nations to help poorer ones, condemned the arms race and all wars against civilians, made blunt reference to “the plague of divorce” and the “abominable crime” of abortion, judged deliberately childless marriages to be a tragedy, and reminded the faithful of the Church’s condemnation of artificial birth control.
Religious Liberty
Opposition
One of the actions of the Council that attracted the most notice was its decree on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae (Human Dignity), which was also one of the most controversial within the Church herself, drawing the largest number of negative votes of any conciliar document, albeit still only a small minority. The disapprobation of some Council Fathers reflected a long-standing Catholic view that religious liberty could only be justified for pragmatic reasons, in those cases where it was not expedient to prohibit the practice of other faiths.
Murray and Maritain
This outlook seemed to place an unbridgeable gulf between the Church and almost all modern Western societies, and it had been questioned especially by John Courtney Murray. After being under a cloud, Murray was brought to the Council through the efforts of Cardinal Spellman, and he was the only American theologian to have any significant influence there. Maritain perhaps had even more influence on Dignitatis Humanae than did Murray, since Maritain, after having for a time been politically reactionary (he supported Action Française), became an enthusiastic supporter of democracy as the best of all political systems, given the other possible choices.
Human Dignity
Properly understood, Dignitatis Humanae reaffirmed that “error has no rights” but also affirmed that men who may be in error do have rights. The decree’s title summed up its teaching: that the basis of toleration was not indifference to truth but respect even for those who might be in error. The Church foreswore coercion in matters of faith as a violation of the spirit of the Gospel, as most of the early Fathers had done.
Social Doctrine
Since Quadragesimo Anno, the popes had not addressed social and economic questions very directly. But beginning with John XXIII, there were a series of encyclicals identifying such questions as a crucial concern, applying Catholic principles to changing times.
John XXIII
The social message of Gaudium et Spes had been anticipated by John XXIII. His Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher, 1961) was a strong restatement of the principles of distributive justice, and Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth, 1963) called on the world to achieve lasting peace by transcending national and ideological differences. Both encyclicals were bids by the Church to play a formative role in resolving social problems, and they attracted a great deal of favorable response. John offered Catholic principles as the basis for a just society everywhere, because those principles were not merely Church doctrine but were based on natural law.
Papal Journeys
This claim to transcendent teaching authority was also symbolically manifest in the pope’s new role as a pubic figure. John XXIII had broken with custom by leaving Rome. Now, beginning with the Holy Land, Paul VI made nine world journeys, giving the papacy a new level of public recognition.
Modernization
In the conciliar environment, certain concrete changes had lasting significance. The papacy and the papal administration were given an updated look that was more accommodating to modern sensibilities.
Beginning with John’s easygoing informality, the monarchical trappings of the papacy, such as the triple tiara and the coronation ceremony, were phased out. Later, the pope would no longer be carried on his throne but would walk in processions or be transported by a “popemobile” (Pope John Paul II’s innovation).
The Curia
The Roman Curia was reorganized, and permanent secretariats (Pontifical Councils) were established for the Laity, the Family, Christian Unity, Non-Christians, and Dialogue with Unbelievers, among other things. There had been demands for the internationalization of the Italian-dominated Curia, and Paul VI quickly moved to achieve that. Partly in order to accommodate an increasing number of cardinals from outside Europe, the College of Cardinals was increased to 120 from the traditional number of 70.
Freedom
The Council seemed to encourage freer theological speculation. The Index was abolished, the Holy Office was renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Ottaviani soon retired), and those accused of unorthodox teaching were guaranteed a formal hearing.
In the Wake of the Council
A Time of Crisis
Paul VI greatly admired Maritain, was sympathetic to the New Theology, and thus seemed uniquely qualified to preside over the implementation of the Council. But tragically, his pontificate would prove to be in many ways a long series of crises at every level.
Even though John XXIII had said that the Council would not issue new dogmatic decrees, the fact that practically every aspect of Catholic belief had come under discussion inevitably raised both expectations and fears. Before the Council had even ended, there was widening disagreement as to its meaning.
The first phrase of Gaudium et Spes—“joy and hope”—seemed to validate optimism, proclaiming the Church’s openness to the world, while its second phrase—“grief and anguish”—was largely ignored. But reading the signs of the times proved to be far more difficult than Gaudium et Spes foresaw in its measured judgments.
“The Sixties”
Wholly unforeseen, just as the Council ended, the worldwide cultural revolution called “the Sixties” began. It was nothing less than a frontal assault on all forms of authority, and had the Council been held a decade earlier, during the more stable 1950s, it is likely that the post-conciliar upheaval would have been far less severe.
“Liberation”
Unrecognized at first, it soon became clear that attempting to counter secularism by moving closer to the secular culture produced largely negative results. “Modernization”, rather than satisfying the discontented, merely whetted the appetite for more of the same. As had been happening to liberal Protestantism for some time, rates of church attendance and religious vocations among Catholics began to fall, almost exactly in proportion to how “progressive” the Church became. For many Catholics, the meaning of their faith now consisted mainly in continuous efforts to free themselves from the past.
Dialogue
Along with every crisis came the newly popular idea of “dialogue”. While in principle engaging in dialogue did not require the participants to surrender their own beliefs but merely allowed them an opportunity to try to understand those of others, in practice it often had the effect of leaving all questions permanently open, as opposed to the exercise of teaching authority. Especially during the first twenty years after the Council, a variety of formal dialogues were undertaken—with various religions, with Marxists—but with relatively meager lasting results.
Traditionalists
The first crisis occurred shortly after the Council’s end, when a number of small groups calling themselves Traditionalists questioned the Council’s authority, especially its decrees on liturgy, ecumenism, and religious liberty. The most important of these was the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), founded by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (d. 1991), who had been a papal nuncio in Africa, general of the Holy Ghost Fathers, and a participant in the Council, where he signed his name to all its decrees. The movement proved to be of some importance in France but was marginal in most other places. To some extent, it had ties with those who advocated monarchy as the only legitimate form of government, and one of its bishops, an English convert, was fiercely anti-Jewish. The SSPX started a seminary in Switzerland, and Lefebvre was first suspended from the episcopal office for ordaining priests and sending them to set up schismatic parishes in various parts of the world, then excommunicated for consecrating bishops, both without canonical authority Although these “traditionalists” went into schism, a graver crisis was caused by some who claimed to accept the authority of the Council.
Media
Given the immense media interest in the Council’s proceedings, it was perhaps less important what the Council actually did than what people thought it did. Thus certain bishops and periti entered into a working alliance with certain journalists, with both becoming in effect “participant-observers” reporting the events and at the same time seeking to influence them, fixing in the popular mind a lasting impression of what the Council was doing.
The gist of such reporting was that at long last the Church was admitting her many errors and coming to terms with modern culture. The Council Fathers were divided into heroes and villains, “liberals” and “conservatives”, and the conciliar deliberations were presented as morality plays in which open-minded progressives repeatedly thwarted the plots of Machiavellian reactionaries. Consequently, people who understood almost nothing of the theological issues believed that the Council’s “real” purpose was simply that of repealing rules that had become burdensome.
Euphoria
Measuring the Council’s effects is difficult, because many of those effects were matters of mood or tone rather than of concrete actions. The conciliar process itself proved to be a transforming experience for many people who may have given little previous thought to the questions there discussed. A major psychological factor was the heady experience of swift and unexpected change. In 1960, almost no one predicted the virtual abandonment of the Latin liturgy, for example; but, when the Council Fathers seemed to support such a change, it became an irresistible temptation for some to continue pushing further and faster, as what had been thought of as stone walls of resistance turned out to be papier-mâché.
For many, the postconciliar period therefore proved to be a time of rudderless experimentation, with change itself apparently now the only new certitude. In that environment, the distinction between essentials and nonessentials was for many people no longer clear. If Catholics could now eat meat on Fridays, why could they not get divorced, especially if the purpose of the Council, and of “Good Pope John”, was to make the faith less burdensome?
But in another sense, at first not fully understood, the attention paid to “externals” was not disproportionate, because in a sacramental religion material things are doorways to the spirit. Thus an aversion to Friday abstinence or to nuns’ habits sometimes revealed something much deeper.
Uncertain Trumpets
Many of the Council Fathers, after they returned to their dioceses, seemed themselves uncertain as to what had been intended. Bishop Fulton Sheen, for example, while briefly serving as bishop of Rochester, supported the most liberal of his priests and stated on television that the Church might now permit contraception. Caught in the post-conciliar crossfire, he soon resigned his see. On the whole, the bishops themselves made little systematic effort to catechize the faithful (including priests and religious) on the Council’s meaning and relied instead on certified “experts” in every area of Church life. As at the Council itself, the traditional concept of obedience was used to persuade reluctant Catholics to conform to the new ways.
Collegiality
Although Lumen Gentium clearly stated that episcopal authority could not be exercised except in union with the Holy See, collegiality was often problematic in the postconciliar era. The chief way of exercising that collegiality was the newly established international synod of bishops held in Rome every three years to address particular questions, with some of its members elected by their fellow bishops in each country, others appointed by the Pope. These synods themselves sometimes became the occasion for bishops to challenge papal authority, as Archbishop John R. Quinn of San Francisco did on one occasion.
Episcopal Conferences
The concept of collegiality also led the hierarchy in the various countries to form themselves into national or regional conferences, and some national conferences appeared not to support certain official teachings, such as that on birth control. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops (later, the “United States Conference of Catholic Bishops”) issued numerous public statements—on national defense, on economic justice, on the pastoral care of homosexuals—that were presented as the collective opinions of the hierarchy but that some bishops found seriously deficient.
A Crisis of Faith
Theological Divisions
The theologies of ressourcement and aggiornamento began to move in opposite directions very soon after the Council, opening an increasingly unbridgeable chasm. Along with Schillebeeckx, Haering, and to a lesser extent Rahner, the German-Swiss priest-theologian Hans Küng was the increasingly bold and abrasive chief spokesman for aggiornamento, demanding that the Church accommodate herself to a changing culture, while de Lubac, Danielou, Maritain, Balthasar, Bouyer, Ratzinger, and others protested what they considered distortions of the Council.
The Conciliar “Spirit” and the Theology of Aggiornamento
Where the conciliar decrees did not explicitly support their agenda, some advocates of aggiornamento began to appeal to the Council’s “spirit”, which was said to transcend its actual decrees and in some cases might even contradict them. Thus, ironically, the authority of the Council was itself relativized.
The ultimate question, which was reaffirmed virtually without discussion by the Council itself, was whether the Church teaches with divine authority or whether her doctrines merely represent human striving for some kind of transcendence. Some now understood the Council in Hegelian and modernist terms, as merely an episode in the history of the Church’s unfolding self-understanding, its function not to make authoritative pronouncements but merely to facilitate the movement of the Church into the next stage of historical development.
A “Second Magisterium”
The existence of an authoritative Magisterium that decides matters of doctrine was increasingly denied, either openly or implicitly, a denial that was especially aimed at papal authority. Theologians of aggiornamento sometimes spoke of a “second magisterium” of theologians themselves, parallel to that of the hierarchy and ultimately having more authority than the hierarchy, on the grounds that theologians alone fully understood the faith.
Biblical Studies
In many ways, the ultimate source of the crisis lay in biblical studies. While successive popes had encouraged such studies, Pius XII warned of the danger of an approach to the Bible entirely dependent on scholarly opinion and requiring the reader to prescind from the divine character of the Scriptures. Prior to the Council, Catholic scholars had done their work in accord with such papal injunctions, but afterward, some of them speedily adopted precisely the methods against which Pius had warned.
Largely as a result of the Council, Catholics were encouraged to study the Bible as never before but, ironically, they were also often told that it was not an altogether reliable guide to knowledge of Jesus. Liberal Protestant exegetes had long been wedded to the historical-critical method, and in the decades following the Council, numerous new Catholic commentaries were published that employed that method.
The Historical-Critical Method
In principle, the method itself could lead the reader to see the Old Testament not as prophetic—foreshadowing and preparing for the New—but to understand it solely as a collection of documents about the Jews. The Gospels were said to have been composed long after Jesus’ death, by various local communities seeking to validate their own distinctive beliefs by claiming particular Evangelists as the authors of their sacred books and emphasizing certain stories about Jesus at the expense of certain others.
At first, it was suggested that only the “infancy narratives” might not be historical, whereas belief in Jesus’ bodily Resurrection was essential to the faith. Soon, however, it became increasingly difficult to draw such lines, and the Resurrection itself was redefined in symbolic or psychological terms, such as the Apostles’ witnessing to the deep and lasting impression Jesus had made on them.
The Gnostic Gospels
By the end of the twentieth century, liberal scholars had ceased to treat the New Testament even as a uniquely authoritative book for Christians, as the rediscovered texts of the ancient Gnostic “gospels” of Thomas, Philip, Judas, and others were given equal authority.
This “demythologizing” especially occurred with respect to distinctively Catholic teachings, such as the claim that Jesus founded the Church and gave Peter primacy over her or that “This is My Body” was to be understood literally. Logically, given their assumption of the Bible’s errancy, some theologians of aggiornamento claimed that classic Catholic dogmas, as found in the creeds and in the decrees of Nicaea and Chalcedon, had ceased to be meaningful.
The Theology of Aggiornamento
Christology from Below
Schillebeeckx expounded a “Christology from below” that, while not explicitly denying the ancient creeds, prescinded from them in order to focus on modern people’s “experience” of Jesus—“who Jesus is for me”. Schillebeeckx’ approach would not allow for a clear affirmation of Jesus’ divinity and in practice led to a new kind of Arianism that spoke of Him in terms like “someone in whom God was present in a special way”.
The “Anonymous Christian”
Rahner was committed to aggiornamento in that his principal concern was to reconcile the faith with modern German philosophy. His precise meaning was often unclear, but he was increasingly unwilling to affirm classical Catholic doctrine and increasingly hostile to the exercise of magisterial authority His idea of the “anonymous Christian”, who embraced Gospel values without perhaps realizing it, made the need for the Church seem problematic. Some theologians now distinguished the Kingdom from the Church, claiming that Christ’s intention had been to establish not the latter but the former—the reign of truth and justice on earth.
Teilhard
Although he was not a theologian, the French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (d. 1955) became for a time the most influential figure of aggiornamento, formulating a theology based on what he considered to be the ultimate truth of modern science, a cosmic theology derived not only from human history but from the evolution of the entire universe. Teilhard, who died seven years before the Council began, had been ordered by his superiors not to publish his theories. After his death, his books began to appear, but they had no direct influence on the Council’s deliberations.
In man, according to Teilhard, the universe had evolved to a new level and now moved toward an “omega point” at which all differences would converge, a “Christogenesis” (“birth of Christ”) that was the ultimate fulfillment of creation. Teilhard’s theories bore some resemblance to the patristic doctrine of cosmic redemption, but he seemed to understand this transformation as a wholly natural process in which sin, and therefore the need for redemption, was transcended and the universe underwent a kind of pantheistic divinization.
Although his influence gradually waned, Teilhard enjoyed a significant vogue in the two decades following the Council, not least because he seemed to provide both a scientific and a theological foundation for the spirit of optimistic euphoria. He was rhapsodic over the atomic bomb as a dramatic manifestation of the new powers being unleashed, and he subscribed to theories of racial superiority. In private, he was scathing in his condemnation of much of the Catholic theological tradition.
Morality
The theology of aggiornamento had its greatest impact in morals, where the spirit of dissent took hold because of its immediate practical implications, especially for sexuality. The old casuistry was a system of rules and laws that provided people with concrete direction; and, once those rules had been deemphasized, many people became morally confused.
Self-Fulfillment
Reversing traditional spirituality, emphasis was now placed on the idea of “self-fulfillment” as a necessary condition for psychological health, in effect a revival of Pelagianism, with its wholly optimistic view of human nature. In many places, the practice of confession all but disappeared.
Conscience
Haering, the American priest-theologian Charles Curran, and others now began to cite people’s “lived experience” to justify behavior (primarily sexual) that had previously been considered sinful. The individual conscience was turned into an absolute, and the traditional teaching that conscience must be formed in accord with objective morality was largely ignored.
Moral Relativism
“Situation ethics”, as developed by liberal Protestants and adopted by some Catholics, denied absolute moral laws and evaluated the morality of acts primarily on the basis of circumstances: the motives of the people involved, their particular problems, even such things as their gender and social class. “Consequentialism”—essentially the principle that “the end justifies the means”—judged the morality of actions primarily on the basis of their likely results.
Contraception
Birth control was the crucial issue that required Catholics to decide whether they recognized the Church as an authoritative moral teacher. The fact that Paul VI set up a special commission to study the question led many people to assume that Church authorities themselves were uncertain and that the teaching was therefore about to change. Although their work was supposed to be confidential, in 1966, some members of the commission revealed to the media that a majority recommended acceptance of contraception, thereby heightening the expectation of change.
At first, some Catholics thought that, if the Church acknowledged error in her teaching about birth control, her credibility on other moral issues would be preserved, or that contraception could be permitted only to married couples and then only to postpone pregnancy, not to prevent it altogether. These positions soon proved to be untenable, however, as the “sexual revolution” burst on the Western world as nothing less than a denial of traditional sexual morality in all its aspects. The “contraceptive culture”, for the first time in history, completely severed the connection between sex and procreation and defined sex as existing primarily for the sake of pleasure.
Catholics as a whole had begun to engage in sexual behavior not measurably different from that of nonbelievers. The Catholic divorce rate rose to the level of the general population, and the number of ecclesiastical annulments increased geometrically.
When Paul finally issued Humanae Vitae in 1968, reaffirming the traditional teaching, there was an explosive rebellion, orchestrated in the United States by prominent theologians led by Curran.
Education
Based on new theological currents, religious education at all levels underwent a postconciliar revolution. The Thomistic establishment swiftly collapsed, and many Catholic institutions of higher education became centers of eclectic philosophy and dissenting theology. Shortly after the Council, a group of Catholic university presidents in the United States declared their independence from Church authority. Some Catholic institutions went out of existence, and some became officially secular, while most continued to claim a Catholic identity that was vague and undefined. Seminaries were not unaffected, and a generation of priests was trained in an environment in which theological dissent enjoyed as much authority as official teaching.
Catechetics
The nature of catechetics had been under revision for some time, especially promoted by the Lumen Vitae (“light of life”) Center in Brussels. Instead of the traditional approach, in which students learned doctrines, the new catechetics promised to inculcate in them a lively personal faith, through Bible study, liturgy, and many other things, paying close attention to the psychology of the students and the pedagogical methods appropriate to their ages.
On the assumption that all education has to resonate with the student’s own experience, the new catechetics tended to minimize distinctive Catholic beliefs, even to the point of treating formal doctrine as an obstacle to living faith. The result was several generations of young Catholics who had never been taught the essentials of their faith and tended to understand it primarily as a vague kind of humanitarianism.
Liturgy
Nowhere was the postconciliar tension between aggiornamento and ressourcement more pronounced than with regard to the liturgy. The liturgical movement had struggled for decades to make Catholics appreciate the Eucharist as the center of their lives, but, once liturgical “reform” had been enacted, participation in the Eucharist fell off sharply almost everywhere.
Responsibility for implementing liturgical reform was given to the Concilium, a committee whose work received at least the passive acquiescence of the Holy See. The key figure was the Italian Vincentian archbishop Annibale Bugnini (d. 1982).
The Demise of Latin
The normative text of the Novus Ordo (“new order”) Mass was in Latin, and it was celebrated in Latin at papal ceremonies, but most Catholics were unaware that a Latin liturgy of any kind was still permitted. Both Latin and Gregorian chant all but disappeared. The “new Mass” constituted the most sweeping liturgical changes ever implemented in so brief a time.
Versus Populum
Next to the vernacular, perhaps the most significant innovation was Mass celebrated versus populum (“facing the people”), something which, like the vernacular, was not mandated by the Council but soon became all but universal. To make this possible, permanent altars were often removed from churches and replaced by freestanding wooden tables.
Dramatic Changes
Other dramatic changes to the Mass included placing the sacred vessels on a side table at the beginning of Mass rather than having them veiled on the altar, allowing laymen to handle those vessels, offering the chalice to the laity in Communion, the abolition of the prayers at the foot of the altar at the beginning of Mass and of the Last Gospel at the end, the Liturgy of the Word no longer conducted by the priest at the altar, and the abolition of the “solemn High Mass” in which the celebrant was assisted by deacon, subdeacon, and other ministers. (The Council restored the office of permanent deacon but abolished the subdiaconate.)
Pruning
The Concilium suppressed large parts of the “Tridentine Rite”; “purified” the Mass of what were deemed excessive genuflections, signs of the cross, and repetitive prayers; and authorized vernacular translations that were not literally faithful to the official Latin texts but sought instead for “dynamic equivalency”. Old churches were often ruthlessly stripped of their side altars, statues, stations of the cross, and other things, in order to minimize their Romanesque, Gothic, or Baroque styles that were deemed no longer to speak to “modern man”.
“Active Participation”
“Active participation” was now taken to mean that the congregation must join vocally in all prayers not exclusive to the priest and most hymns. Liturgists emphasized the communal nature of the Mass to the point of strongly discouraging, if not actually forbidding, priests from celebrating Mass in private, and concelebration by more than one priest was restored for the first time since the early centuries. The Divine Office was also translated into the vernacular and substantially revised, including a wider variety of readings, some of them from modern sources.
The discouragement of private Masses raised questions about the meaning of the Mass itself. Traditionally, it was a communal act in the sense that it was celebrated for the benefit of people who were not physically present, especially for the dead. Now, however, it seemed to be the celebration only of those who were actually present.
Funerals
The Requiem Mass was suppressed in favor of the funeral liturgy as the joyful celebration of resurrection. There were, however, theological difficulties: exclusive emphasis on resurrection seemed to imply that the deceased was already in Paradise, so that the funeral homily often functioned as a eulogy of the deceased and the practice of praying for the dead seemed unnecessary.
Devotions
Liturgists judged that for most Catholics the heart of the faith lay in pious devotions rather than the Mass, and the Council warned against an overemphasis on such devotions, while also calling for their preservation. But, as with Latin and chant, many of those devotions disappeared completely, their suppression creating a subjective spiritual hunger that the liturgy itself did not entirely satisfy.
A Modern Style
Changes were initially justified as a return to the practices of the early Church, thus to a presumably more authentic manner of celebration. Soon, however, liturgists began the systematic introduction of modern modes of celebration—in language, music, symbolism, and other things—seeking to make liturgy “relevant” by deemphasizing its mystical elements and assimilating it to contemporary culture. “Active participation” came to be measured by the subjective effects the liturgy had on its participants through the use of contemporary language, new ritual practices like balloons and dancing, and “folk” music in commercially popular styles.
“Creativity”
Primary emphasis was now placed on the Eucharist as a community meal, so that for some people the greeting of peace, which had not been part of the Tridentine Mass, became the high point of the celebration. The inevitable logic of the drive to make liturgy “relevant” was the idea that each congregation should create its own liturgy. Although the Council expressly forbade priests to make changes in the rites, Bugnini himself urged toleration of unauthorized experimentation. Thus some congregations composed their own prayers, chose their own readings, and dispensed with vestments and other signs of the sacred.
Religious Life
In some ways, the severest crisis in the postconciliar period was in priestly and religious life, a crisis that went to the very identity of those states, as in the practice of referring to the celebrant of the Mass as the “presider”, thereby minimizing his sacerdotal status and making him primarily a representative of the community. The vocation of priests and religious was now defined primarily as that of “service”, which made renunciation for the sake of the Kingdom—celibacy especially—seem merely burdensome.
The Decline of Discipline
Priests and religious gave up their vocations in large numbers, and even many of those who remained were troubled. Religious discipline, which had been at a high level on the eve of the Council, declined sharply, as heterosexual relationships were not uncommon and homosexuality among priests came to be a serious problem. Bishops showed a certain reluctance to deal with it, even when the Holy See ordered that known homosexuals not be admitted to seminaries, and several bishops were themselves implicated.
Sisters
Before the Council, women religious were probably more devout, and lived more austerely, than priests. But on the whole, they also had less education, so that at first they depended heavily on male leadership to guide them through postconciliar change. Cardinal Suenens wrote an influential book urging sisters to come out of their cloisters.
Renewal
“Renewalists” at first promised a phenomenal revitalization of religious orders, including dramatic numerical growth, if sisters modified or discarded their traditional habits, liberalized their strict discipline, and ventured into new apostolates. The Council’s injunction to religious to rediscover their original charisms was largely disregarded, a prime example of aggiornamento overcoming ressourcement. Communities of women who for centuries had run schools and hospitals now abandoned those ministries, thereby causing a major crisis in Catholic education and health care.
Democracy
The idea of “self-fulfillment” as a necessary condition for psychological health was a novelty in religious life and rendered the very concept of obedience unacceptable, so that some religious communities no longer spoke of “superiors” but of “presidents” or “leaders”. The modification, then the abandonment, of traditional religious habits marked the beginning of the end of religious life as it had existed for centuries. Instead of growth, the number of sisters in the United States declined by over 65 percent in the period from 1965 to 2010, with comparable declines in all other Western countries. In many communities, vocations all but ceased.
A Noted Failure
The most celebrated “renewal” story in the United States was that of the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Los Angeles, whose program of aggiornamento was guided by the prestigious psychologist Carl Rogers (d. 1987), a one-time student for the Protestant ministry who had developed a negative attitude toward religion. The Immaculate Heart “renewal” was a paradigm for many others that followed: favorable publicity, optimistic expectations, the use of fashionable techniques of “behavior modification”, and a personified villain (Cardinal James F. McIntyre [d. 1979]). The community soon fell apart. Many sisters left; those who remained split into opposing factions; there were few new members; and most apostolates were abandoned. In time, the community virtually ceased to exist.
A Vacuum
Many religious, having abandoned both traditional spiritualities and traditional ministries, created vacuums waiting to be filled by new absolutes—left-wing politics, environmentalism, and above all feminism. Catholic feminism included lay women, but its most aggressive leadership came from women religious. The new feminist faith required sisters to see themselves as having been exploited laborers in their traditional apostolates and to pursue new careers, often living outside any community structure. At the farthest point, Catholic feminists invoked mythical goddesses and other female spirits and practiced neopagan rituals.
Male Communities
The crisis of religious life deeply affected most male communities as well, although they tended to be less openly rebellious than female groups and less likely to abandon community life and traditional apostolates like education.
For example, at the end of the Council, the Society of Jesus, the largest male community in the Church, had thirty-six thousand members throughout the world, but by 2010 that number had fallen well below twenty thousand. The leadership of the Society announced that a “fundamental option for the poor” was the very reason for its existence, a priority that had not been previously recognized and that made it difficult to justify much of the Society’s traditional educational and pastoral work.
Ecumenism
For forty years after the Council, various ecumenical commissions (Catholic-Anglican, Catholic-Lutheran) periodically announced agreements among their members, which did not, however, officially bind the participating churches. But, despite promising beginnings, ecumenical dialogue with “mainline” Protestant groups faltered over time, because the major thrust of liberal Protestantism was precisely against authoritative creedal statements, so that the search for official agreement on doctrine proved to be of decreasing relevance. Even the most daring Catholic theology came to seem timid in the postconciliar environment, when leading Protestant theologians began to speak of “religionless Christianity” and even of “the death of God”. In addition, liberal mainline groups eventually ordained women as clergy and tended to accept the sexual revolution, including abortion and homosexuality.
The Missions
By the time of the Council, most people understood that Catholicism could no longer be treated solely as a Western religion, but European prelates still made up 39 percent of the Council, almost three times the number of any other regional group. Yet missionary activity was then at its highest point in the history of the Church, and “Third World” bishops were also numerous at the Council, although their participation was relatively slight.
Cultural Relativism
Integral to the revolution of “the Sixties”, however, was cultural relativism: the claim that every belief was merely an expression of the culture that gave rise to it and none could lay claim to transcendent truth. Thus Christianity, which from its very foundation was an aggressively missionary religion, was dismissed by many as merely a form of Western “cultural imperialism”. In this context, the theological emphasis on “lived experience”, Rahner’s “anonymous Christian”, and the Council’s favorable view of non-Christian religions combined to provoke a severe crisis of missionary identity.
There were demands for yet further inculturation, such as accepting polygamy in Africa, but even heavily “inculturated” forms of Christianity were now seen as unwarranted intrusions on cultures that had their own religions. Thus missionaries, like every other category of priests and religious, began to give up their vocations in large numbers. Of those who remained, many pulled back from the very idea of making converts, even to the point of defining their task in terms such as “helping people to be better Hindus”.
Some missionaries turned to political action as their justification—helping to overthrow the vestiges of colonialism and creating a better world in economic and social terms. The Kingdom itself was seen as the earthly reign of justice, achievable by human effort, from which thoughts of eternity were a distraction. The Church was merely a means by which the Kingdom could be achieved, and the “anonymous Christian” worked for social change, possibly without interest in religion at all.
Liberation Theology
Some Catholics in Latin America were attracted to Liberation Theology, an entirely new development of Catholic social doctrine that began in Germany but whose principal proponents included the Jesuits Jon Sobrino and Juan Luis Segundo (d. 1996) in Chile, the Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff, and the Peruvian secular priest Gustavo Gutierrez. (Boff left the Franciscans after being ordered to moderate his commitment to Liberationism.) At Medellin (Colombia) in 1968, the Latin American bishops’ conference endorsed the “preferential option for the poor” and gave cautious encouragement to Liberationism, of which some bishops, notably Archbishop Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil (d. 1999), were enthusiastic supporters.
‘Ortho-Praxis’
For Liberation Theology a certain concept of social justice was the core meaning of the Gospel, requiring from Christians an unqualified commitment to the transformation of society—“ortho-praxis” (“right action”) rather than orthodoxy. While not explicitly denying classical doctrines concerning sin, redemption, and eternal life, Liberation Theology deemphasized them almost to the vanishing point, lest they divert people from the social struggle. A religion that preached such doctrines was dismissed as a “bourgeois” distortion of the Gospel, motivated by the desire to protect social privilege.
Marxism
Liberation theologians were Marxists in seeing society as fundamentally a conflict between rich and poor and demanding commitment to the social struggle as an act of faith, without reserve. Some priests and religious actively participated in would-be revolutionary movements, in order to demonstrate “solidarity with the oppressed”, and leftist Catholics everywhere enthusiastically praised such movements as the only hope for the future.
Ostpolitik
In some communist countries, notably Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Catholics were encouraged by their bishops to cooperate with the regimes as much as possible, a policy (Ostpolitik—“Eastern policy”) that was also followed by a Vatican that apparently assumed that Communism could not be defeated. A group of Jesuits teaching in Rome even identified the Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong as the hope of the world, the most authentic contemporary representative of the Gospel.
Base Communities
As an alternative to the “institutional Church”, Liberation Theology extolled “base communities” that supposedly arose from the people’s own awakening sense of injustice, their spontaneous discovery of the principles of liberation. But most such communities seem to have depended on an elite educated leadership, who were always few in number and had short life spans.
Protestant Gains
Meanwhile, however, many Hispanics, including many who immigrated to the United States, converted to Evangelical Protestantism, partly because of what amounted almost to the evacuation of their traditional faith after the Council. Told that their ancient pious practices were superstitious, and urged to adopt a this-worldly theology instead, many concluded that true Christianity had been kept from them by the Church.
A Democratic Church
Every disputed issue in the postconciliar Church unavoidably involved the concept of the Church herself. The term “Pilgrim Church” changed from that of a humble and devout traveler following a marked path toward the heavenly Kingdom to that of a spiritual explorer following his own lights. For some, the concept of the “People of God” gave rise to the expectation that the Church would now be governed democratically.
Call to Action
In connection with the Bicentennial of the United States in 1976, Cardinal John F. Dearden of Detroit (d. 1988) presided over the Call to Action Conference in his see city. Although made up primarily of clergy, religious, and lay employees of the Church, the conference aggressively advocated, among other things, an end to mandatory priestly celibacy, the ordination of women to the priesthood, and changes in Catholic sexual morality. The failure of the Church to embrace that agenda left a legacy of resentment that still festered decades later.
Feminism
Feminists, many of them male, were usually the angriest. After initial hesitation, Church authorities admitted women to the ranks of lectors (readers), ministers of Communion, and acolytes (servers) at Mass, which gave rise to the expectation that they would soon be ordained to the priesthood as well. Church authorities pointed out that, except among the early Gnostics, there was no precedent for this in the entire history of the Church, but the feminist demand for ordination became increasingly strident, denouncing the hierarchy as “patriarchal”. In a few cases, women were “ordained” as priests or bishops in ceremonies the Church did not recognize as valid. There was a partially successful demand for “inclusive language” in Scripture and liturgy, primarily on the grounds that words like man and mankind excluded women and should not be used. Some feminists went so far as to refuse to speak of God as “He” or as “Father”.
Secularization
The influence of religion in the West, which seemed to be substantial for two decades after World War II, declined very sharply in the decades after the Council, making the region that had guided the Council the most secular in the world. The gravest crises occurred in precisely those countries that had previously been thought of as mostly Catholic.
Netherlands
Catholics in the Netherlands were a very large minority who, because of centuries of treatment as second-class citizens, had become highly conscious of their identity, to the point of developing their own subculture of labor unions, communication networks, and educational institutions. (They were also, proportionate to their population, the greatest Catholic missionary country.)
For a period during and after the Council, the Netherlands made a bid to provide the universal Church with a model of renewal. An official national synod boldly called for change in almost every area of Church life, and priests and people, often cautiously encouraged by their bishops, undertook almost unlimited experimentation. For a brief time, the new “Dutch Catechism” for adults was extolled as the purest expression of the Council, but soon Netherlanders themselves were dismissing it as too conservative.
The Catholic subculture quickly collapsed, and Netherlandish Catholicism became the most liberal in the world, even as the Netherlands overall became one of the most secular and morally permissive nations in the world. Forty years after the Council, the quality of religious belief and practice was such that one of its bishops declared sadly that the country had become mission territory.
Spain
After World War II, Francisco Franco pursued a successful program of economic modernization in Spain, but, inevitably, this new found economic prosperity led to social and cultural unrest. Although Franco sometimes clashed with the Catholic hierarchy over his refusal to extend political freedoms, his authoritarian regime was closely identified with the Church and with traditional morality, so that after his death in 1975 there was a popular reaction against religion and toward an easy hedonism.
Ireland
Until the 1990s, Ireland was still regarded as a very Catholic society, but there also sudden prosperity led to a hedonistic reaction against the Church, fueled by revelations of clerical pedophilia that the bishops had ignored. Ireland, however, remained one of the very few Western nations that did not permit abortion.
Italy
In Italy, a substantial majority of citizens, in defiance of their hierarchy, voted to legalize divorce, and in time, the Italian birth rate dropped, becoming the lowest in Europe.
Malta
The tiny island republic of Malta could be considered the most Catholic European country, officially proclaimed as such in its constitution and forbidding divorce and abortion. However, even there, weekly Mass attendance fell from 82 percent in 1967 to barely half by 2010.
Poland
In Poland, freedom from Communism proved to be a mixed blessing, as a hedonistic “consumer society” spread from the West, and by 2010, the rate of Mass attendance had fallen to 60 percent.
Integralism
If the experience of liberal Protestantism exposed the essential fallacy of an uncritical accommodation with secularity, the experience of the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Quebec (see Chapter Thirteen above, pp. 431-32), and some other places also exposed the essential fallacy of Integralism, the demand that political, social, and economic life be intimately bound up with religion, an ideal of medieval Christendom that was shattered by the Reformation and the French Revolution.
The essential fallacy of Integralism was that, in such a closed system, change of any kind, even beneficial change, necessarily caused instability and thereby undermined religion. The conditions of modern life are such that no society can remain permanently protected from the forces of the modern world, and people who have been inoculated against those forces can often withstand them better than those who have been protected. In the terms of Dignitatis Humanae, the authentic Christian life must be lived in freedom.
A Troubled Pope
Cardinal Montini participated in the first session of the Council and, although he said relatively little from the floor, was considered preeminently a man of the Council. His election as pope was completely expected—many had thought him worthy of the office already in 1958—and he was given the responsibility of bringing the Council to a conclusion and overseeing its implementation.
Career
Prior to his nine-year episcopacy, the future Paul VI had spent his entire career in the service of the Holy See and, although not even a bishop, was recognized as one of the most important men in the Vatican under Pius XII. He also did pastoral work, especially as chaplain to university students in Milan. He was strongly anti-fascist, and his students were sometimes physically assaulted by Black Shirt gangs.
But by neglecting to make him a cardinal, Pius effectively excluded Montini from achieving the papal office in 1958, a neglect that John XXIII immediately remedied. (The reasons for Pius’ sending Montini away from Rome, then failing to make him a cardinal, are uncertain, but in some sense Pius probably considered him too liberal.)
Ressourcement
It was Paul VI’s cross to preside over the Church during this great crisis. A disciple of Maritain, he saw the growing split between aggiornamento and ressourcement and, although he was inclined by nature to be open to new ideas, his sympathies ultimately lay with the ressourcement school, who were now deemed “conservative”. He conferred the cardinalate on de Lubac, Danielou, and Congar and offered it to Maritain, who declined.
Social Teaching
Paul continued the modern papal tradition of addressing the social issues in an authoritative way, directed to the entire world. Populorum Progressio (The Progress of Peoples, 1967) seemed to accept the modern economic theory that poverty is best overcome not by redistributing wealth but by the economic development of the entire society, which improves the lot of everyone. But the Pope identified the poverty of the “Third World” as to a great extent the fault of the developed nations and called for an equitable sharing of resources, including technology to facilitate development, not as charity but as an obligation of justice.
Firm Action
Prior to Humanae Vitae, Paul showed himself as capable of action. He intervened to ensure that Lumen Gentium would adequately respect papal infallibility, declared on his own authority that Mary is the Mother of the Church, instructed the Council Fathers not to discuss clerical celibacy, vetoed an attempt by the Jesuits to weaken their vow of special obedience to the pope, and suddenly replaced Bugnini as the overseer of liturgical change.
Indecision
Paul sometimes anguished publicly over the many crises of the Church, even lamenting that “the smoke of Satan has entered the Church”, but he often seemed indecisive. Although he made a special effort to encourage the use of Latin in the liturgy, he did nothing to alter the direction of liturgical change and took no decisive action against the rising tide of often militant theological dissent. Having touched off a firestorm with Humanae Vitae, the Pope seemed reluctant to mandate its acceptance. Several national bishops’ conferences appeared to dissociate themselves from the encyclical, and when Cardinal Patrick A. O’Boyle (d. 1987) of Washington suspended a number of priests who had rejected it, he was required by the Holy See to reinstate them.
The exodus of men from the priesthood became a flood in part because under Paul it was the policy of the Holy See to release priests from their obligations almost for the asking. The laxity seemed to correspond with the number of annulments granted to married couples, which as already noted, also increased geometrically.
Ultimately, it was left to Paul’s successors to begin the process of authentic renewal. Although in a sense the Council had seemed to modify papal authority through collegiality, a strong papacy proved to be the only means of maintaining the unity of the Church in the face of the centrifugal forces unleashed by the Council.
John Paul II
An Exceptional Pope
Paul’s immediate successor, John Paul I, survived for barely a month, and the next conclave had a wholly unanticipated and electrifying effect, when it chose as pope the intellectual leader of Polish Catholicism, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow. Authentic renewal occurred during the pontificate of Paul VI, but it was often obscured by more negative events. Under John Paul II (1978-2005), the fruits of renewal began to be seen.
John Paul II was the only Polish pope in history and the first non-Italian in 455 years. He studied for the priesthood during the Nazi occupation of Poland, for a time hiding in the basement of the archbishop’s palace, and for the rest of his life remembered with anguish that the notorious Nazi death camp of Auschwitz was located in his native country. After the fall of Nazism, he spent his entire priestly career amidst the communist government’s unceasing attempts to undermine the Church.
Progressively Conservative
Like some of the major figures of the Counter-Reformation, he was innovative in the service of orthodoxy. A philosopher, poet, and playwright, he was perhaps the most intellectually formidable man ever to ascend the papal throne, and perhaps no one was better qualified to integrate ressourcement with whatever was valid in aggiornamento. The maturation of the seminal ideas of the Council, after fifteen years of confusion, was to a great extent due to the work of the Pope himself.
A Council Father
As a former participant, he fully understood the Council, and during his pontificate—the third longest in history after St. Peter and St. Pius IX—the Council’s purposes at last began to be fulfilled, perhaps more often than not in ways—both good and bad—the Council Fathers did not fully foresee. One by one the issues began to be addressed.
World Traveler
World journeys were the distinguishing mark of John Paul’s pontificate, as he traveled almost continuously, visiting every inhabited continent—many places more than once—to be greeted everywhere by huge crowds jubilantly shouting their devotion. People who did not necessarily accept his teachings, nor even understand them, nonetheless often had a strong personal admiration for him.
An International Curia
Because of their experience at the Council, many liberals considered the Italians to be an obstructive conservative bloc and urged that membership in the Roman Curia be broadened. But this internationalization, which began under Paul VI, proved to be one of the more ironic outcomes of the Council. Under a non-Italian pope, the Curia was indeed internationalized, but some of the Italians now turned out to be liberals, while some non-Italians were among the leading conservatives. For example, Cardinals Jorge Medina Estevez of Colombia and Francis Arinze of Nigeria—successive heads of the Congregation for Divine Worship—acted to correct liturgical abuse.
The Synods
Almost immediately upon taking office, John Paul acted to stem the flood of departures from the priesthood, only rarely granting requests for laicization. He used the triennial episcopal synods to resolve the uncertainties of collegiality, allowing free discussion, then himself synthesizing the various opinions into a final document that embodied the consensus of the Magisterium.
Kung
John Paul manifested his concern for orthodoxy almost immediately upon his election, when he declared officially that Hans Kung, who had become the most conspicuous spokesman for dissent and was by now in effect a liberal Protestant, was no longer to be considered a Catholic theologian.
Social Teaching
John Paul continued to expound Catholic social teachings to the world.
The Family
Familiaris Consortio (On the Christian Family, 1981) once again affirmed the family as the indispensable basis of the social order, identifying its nature as the primacy of self-giving love, modeled on the internal love of the three Persons of the Trinity.
Labor
In Laborem Exercens (On Human Work, 1981), the Pope reiterated the traditional Catholic respect for the dignity of labor, affirming the workers’ right to employment and urging the developed countries to be generous in receiving immigrants.
Globalization
In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (The Church and Social Order, 1987), John Paul II raised moral questions about “globalization”—the international free market in which poorer nations continued to fall behind richer ones—which he characterized as a kind of neo-colonialism. He urged both the developed nations and international organizations to reduce or cancel the debts of the developing countries that helped keep those countries in poverty.
The Market
Centesimus Annus (Hundredth Year, 1991), which commemorated the issuance of Rerum Novarum, cautiously endorsed the free market as the most efficient means of organizing the economy, while again warning against unfettered economic competition.Centesimus Annus was the first social encyclical following the fall of Communism, and John Paul praised the West’s respect for freedom and human dignity while warning against “consumerism”—the perversion of freedom into the pursuit of superficial material goals, a kind of practical atheism.
Theology of the Body
Personalism
Perhaps John Paul’s most important achievement was his theology of human sexuality, which was made possible by his assimilation of both classical and modern philosophies. He was strongly influenced by personalism and by the phenomenology of the German Max Scheler (d. 1928), who had twice been converted to Catholicism and twice apostatized. The future pope’s doctoral dissertation on the mystical theology of St. John of the Cross integrated the latter’s Thomism with his phenomenological descriptions of the mystical state.
The Mystery of Sexuality
As cardinal, John Paul had influenced Paul VI in the writing of Humanae Vitae, which, despite its being largely regarded as merely a reaffirmation of traditional prohibitions, in reality set forth a positive theology of human sexuality in which sexual disorders were shown to dishonor the true dignity of sexuality. As pope, John Paul developed that positive vision into the “theology of the body”, the most profound and comprehensive theory of human sexuality ever conceived, affirming in almost mystical terms the flesh as part of God’s good creation. In the act of love, husband and wife give themselves unreservedly to one another, culminating in the act of procreation in which they share in God’s own creative act, genuine love freeing eros from mere lust. John Paul reaffirmed celibacy, not as a denial of sexuality but as the willingness to give oneself to everyone in love, as a witness to the Kingdom where, as Jesus said, men neither marry nor are given in marriage.
The Culture of Death
The Pope identified “the culture of death”—epitomized by abortion, euthanasia, and other direct assaults on human life—as in opposition to this affirmation of the body. He also included capital punishment, which, in contrast to earlier popes, he came close to condemning as inherently immoral. At its root, according to the Pope, the culture of death was nothing less than a refusal to accept the divine invitation to participate in the work of creation. At the heart of modern secular culture was a kind of nihilism, a rebellious rejection of every ultimate truth.
The New Feminism
In the face of often angry demands for the ordination of women to the priesthood and the feminist claim that motherhood restricts women’s freedom, John Paul expounded what was sometimes called “the new feminism”, in which woman’s highest dignity lies precisely in her free response to the divine invitation to participate in creation, her openness to the divine call in imitation of Mary. Moving beyond the mere invocation of tradition as the justification of the male priesthood, John Paul based it on St. Paul’s comparison of marriage to the union of Christ and His Church, with the priest representing Christ and the Church His Bride.
Ecumenism
Eastern Orthodoxy
John Paul II made relations with the Eastern Orthodox a high priority of his pontificate but, while ancient doctrinal and liturgical issues to some extent faded into the background, the Orthodox in general were resistant, partly because of historic grievances like the Fourth Crusade. Ironically, the fall of Communism complicated the matter, as some Russian Orthodox leaders opposed the presence of other Christian groups in the former Soviet Union, and many Orthodox regarded the Uniate (Eastern-Rite Catholic) churches as a kind of provocation.
Evangelicalism
During John Paul’s pontificate, ecumenism took an unexpected turn in the United States, in the encounter between Catholics and the kind of Protestants variously called Evangelical or Fundamentalist, who tended historically to be anti-Catholic. Scarcely noticed at first, Evangelicals had replaced liberals as the dominant element within American Protestantism, and some Catholics were surprised to discover that they had more in common with Evangelicals than with liberal fellow Catholics.
The new ecumenism usually began with cooperation on practical moral issues like abortion but soon led to the realization that those moral principles were themselves based on traditional Christian beliefs, including the divine authority of the Scripture and the unchanging truth of the faith. Ecumenical prayer and Bible-study groups followed.
Protestants of this kind were almost invisible in Europe, so that the Holy See had not engaged in formal dialogue with them. But in America, there began to be significant ecumenical activity at the “grass roots” level, without anticipating formal reunion. As with the Eastern Orthodox, such activity revealed the paradox that, to the degree that people held strongly to their own beliefs and were unwilling to compromise, they might also respect others who held equally strong beliefs.
Christ Alone
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)—now under Joseph Ratzinger—was praised by Evangelicals and severely criticized by liberals for issuing Dominus Jesus (Lord Jesus). This document is a restatement of the classic Christian teaching that the world is saved solely through Christ and reproves theologians who hold that Jesus was perhaps only one of a number of equally authentic revelations of God to mankind.
“New Age”
Ironically, the relationship between Christianity and pagan beliefs became an issue even in nominally Christian lands, including the United States, because of the neo-pagan renaissance broadly called the New Age, a kind of neo-Romanticism that criticized Catholicism not as superstitious but as overly rational. The movement was essentially a search for personal spiritual “fulfillment”. “Spirituality” was distinguished from “religion” and orthodox Christianity condemned for confining spirituality within doctrinal boundaries.
The New Age movement, which attracted many feminists, including religious sisters, proved to be even more inimical to genuine religion than was rational skepticism, because it set itself up as the true religion that transcended all others, exploiting the natural human religious sense in order to undermine Christianity. The movement revived belief in ancient pagan deities, reincarnation, magic, astrology, the occult, and even witchcraft. Supposedly outmoded ritual elements like candles, incense, vestments, and chanting were resuscitated.
The Collapse of Communism
Perhaps the most significant event of John Paul’s pontificate was the sudden collapse of Communism in the later 1980s, something that Paul VI’s Ostpolitik had assumed was not possible but that John Paul played a major role in bringing about.
The Church in Poland
Only in Poland, under the bold leadership of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński (d. 1981), did the Church as an institution offer significant resistance to the communist regime. The Church in Poland had long been the soul of resistance to the regime, the Catholic faith so deeply ingrained in the people that the government, while making occasional martyrs, could not suppress it. (An outspoken priest, Bl. Jerzy Popieluszko [d. 1984], was brutally murdered and, although several government officials were later convicted of his killing, none were ever punished.)
Solidarity
The Solidarity movement combined religion, nationalism, and labor militancy to organize strikes, massive rallies, and other acts of antigovernment resistance so effectively that only military intervention by the Soviet Union could have crushed it. John Paul clearly stood behind Solidarity, to the point where it was thought that he would actually go to Poland in the event of a Soviet invasion. In the end, the Soviets allowed the regime to collapse, thereby beginning of the process by which the other communist dominoes, including the Soviet Union itself, fell one by one. (In 1981, John Paul was shot and seriously wounded by a mentally disturbed Turk who may have been acting for the Soviet government.)
Liberationism
John Paul faced Liberationism directly in Nicaragua, where the hierarchy at first opposed a right-wing dictatorship, then became equally critical of the new Marxist “Sandinista” government (named after an early Nicaraguan radical). Cardinal Miguel Obando served as the leader and symbol of the many Nicaraguans who opposed the Sandinistas’ curtailment of liberties, including their harassment of the Church. But the government included four left-wing priests, who defied the Holy See when told to relinquish their government posts and whom, during an official visit, John Paul publicly rebuked. (The Sandinistas eventually fell from power but later returned.)
Marxism
John Paul’s confrontation with the Sandinistas was partly due to his experiences in Poland, where Marxism had shown itself to be an instrument of tyranny rather than of liberation. Marxism held that violent revolution alone would bring about the “classless society”, and the Catholic left in Latin America was often ambivalent about the violent tactics of guerilla groups. Meeting with John Paul at Puebla, Mexico, in 1979, the Latin American bishops in effect rescinded their endorsement of Liberationism at Medellin.
The Fruits of the Council
Dogma
Ratzinger
Ultimately, no one contributed more to the process of postconciliar renewal than Ratzinger, who was by far the most important of the non-Italians named to the Curia. First as a professor, then briefly as archbishop of Munich, finally as prefect of the CDF, he did more than any other single person to clarify and deepen the meaning of the Council, bringing the theology of ressourcement to fruition in ways that were rooted in the New Testament and the early Church Fathers but also spoke to modernity.
Balthasar
Both John Paul and Ratzinger were strongly influenced by Balthasar, who came to be recognized as the most important Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. (John Paul named him a cardinal, but Balthasar died before he could be invested.) Balthasar was a man of immense learning who incorporated much of the Western cultural tradition—philosophical, literary, artistic—into his theology. But unlike the proponents of aggiornamento, he looked primarily inward, to the deepest mysteries of the faith.
His theology was an extended meditation on those mysteries, culminating during the climactic days of Holy Week, when the redemption of mankind was accomplished. To Balthasar, theology was a “theo-dramatic”: a story of overwhelming power and beauty that summoned mankind to respond in awe and reverence to God’s communication of Himself to His people.
Condemnations
Under Ratzinger, the CDF began to act vigorously to correct questionable teachings, issuing official warnings against several theologians and in some cases ordering them to cease teaching and publishing. Although theologians sometimes complained that they were condemned without being understood, they were in fact being judged by a man whose intelligence and theological attainments were superior to their own.
Continuity
Ratzinger insisted on the essential continuity between the “preconciliar” and “postconciliar” Church. There was no “spirit of Vatican II”, in the sense of a meaning that was dependent on changing human culture, because the Council derived its very authority from God. Somewhat daringly, he suggested that Gaudium et Spes had been excessively optimistic about the state of the world.
Scripture
In Scripture, Ratzinger acknowledged the achievements of the historical-critical method but proposed that it had reached the limits of its usefulness, to the point where it now actually obscured the full meaning of Scripture, which was accessible only through faith. Christians could not approach the Bible as outsiders studying a historical book. Based on Vatican II’s understanding of Tradition, Ratzinger insisted that Scripture disclosed its full meaning only within the community of the Church, in the act of worship, since the biblical canon was defined by the Church as precisely those works appropriate to be read in the liturgy. Ratzinger advocated a recovery of the exegesis of the Fathers, who read both the Old and New Testaments as the revelation of the mystery of Christ.
Liturgy
Although he had strongly supported the liturgical movement, Ratzinger after the Council became one of the most trenchant critics of liturgical change, arguing that the process ignored the way in which the ritual life of the Church was deeply rooted in the mystical community and therefore could not be changed by sudden fiat, which made the liturgy seem merely a human project rather than divinely ordained. Instead of attempting to harmonize the “old” and “new” liturgies, he lamented, bureaucrats maximized their disjunction, so that there now needed to be a “reform of the reform”.
Ad Orientem
Even prior to the Council, the principal historian of the liturgy, the German Jesuit Josef Jungmann (d. 1975), argued that the versus populum position was inappropriate if the Mass was “an immolation and homage to God”. Now Ratzinger and others pointed out that, contrary to some liturgists’ claim, versus populum was not the original practice. In the early Church, the celebrant usually faced eastward (ad orientem), at the head of the congregation, looking in the direction from which Christ will come again.
Episcopal Conferences
Ratzinger contended that national episcopal conferences illegitimately restricted the authority of individual bishops, who in their individual dioceses possessed an apostolic authority not given to them collectively except in general councils in communion with the pope.
Liberationism
Liberation theology was severely criticized by the CDF under Ratzinger. Both he and John Paul defined the Christian meaning of liberation as including the reform of social structures but above all as liberation from the bondage of sin, which was rooted in human nature and was therefore the ultimate cause of social injustice. Social change would always fail, and even result in greater injustices, if the necessary spiritual reform did not occur. The distinction between Kingdom and Church was invalid, Ratzinger insisted, because the Kingdom that Christ promised was in fact Himself, sacramentally present in the Church.
The Catechism
A major instrument for clarifying doctrinal confusion is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was promulgated by John Paul II. Developed under Ratzinger’s overall supervision, the new universal Catechism, the first since the Council of Trent, made authentic Catholic teaching, on every subject, readily accessible to non-theologians.
Ex Corde Ecclesiae
In 1990, John Paul wrote Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church), summoning Catholic universities to recover their religious identity, reminding them that the university itself was a creation of the medieval Church. But in the United States, where most such universities were located, only a few institutions responded to that call.
Religious Life
Despite the overall decline of vocations, some dioceses and religious orders continued to attract a significant number. Following an investigation by the Holy See, the quality of some diocesan seminaries in the United States improved notably by 2000, and seminarians almost everywhere were described as more traditional than clergy of an older generation.
The Jesuits
When John Paul asked the Society of Jesus to combat atheism, the leadership replied that this could be done best by promoting social change, not by confronting atheism on the intellectual level. The Pope later made an effort toward the reform of religious life by taking the extraordinary step of appointing a Jesuit to be his “personal delegate” in governing the Society, an action that caused bitterness on the part of some Jesuits, because it was seen as a papal repudiation of the leadership of their general, Pedro Arrupe (d. 1991). After a time, the Society’s self-government was restored, and it appeared that little had changed.
New Communities
Repeating a pattern that has recurred throughout the history of the Church, as older religious orders declined, new ones flourished, although some smaller communities, especially of female contemplatives, remained largely unaffected by the postconciliar confusion.
Missionaries of Charity
The most notable new female community was the Missionaries of Charity, originally founded by an Albanian nun, Bl. Teresa of Calcutta (d. 1997), to work especially with the poorest of the poor in India—the abandoned and homeless taken off the streets to be cared for in their last hours. Partly because of the fame of Teresa herself, the new community grew rapidly and soon extended its apostolate to many parts of the world, including the United States. The Missionaries serve as a living example of the continued “relevance” of traditional religious life, in that they have responded to the most desperate needs of the age but nonetheless live in convents, wear religious habits, and have adoration of the Blessed Sacrament as the heart of their spirituality
Mother Angelica
Contemplative religious life took a wholly unexpected turn in the story of a Poor Clare abbess, Mother Angelica Rizzo, head of a monastery in the heavily Evangelical Protestant state of Alabama, who managed to put together by far the most successful Catholic communications network in history, making her one of the best known and most influential Catholics in the United States. Her Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) produced television programs that were beamed all over the world and for many people served as the pole star of Catholic piety and belief during a time of confusion. Among other things, it was a means of rekindling both Marian and eucharistic piety.
Legionaries of Christ
Ostensibly the most successful of the new male religious communities were the Legionaries of Christ, founded in Mexico in 1940 by a diocesan priest, Marcial Maciel (d. 2008), but not well known until the 1980s, when it was noticed that they were experiencing phenomenal growth.
The Laity
After the Council, lay people began to play important roles in almost every aspect of church life, including the liturgy, the social apostolate, and the intellectual life. Through diocesan and parish councils of various kinds, they exercised new responsibilities. But although some liberals saw the new “age of laity” primarily as emancipation from hierarchical authority, the lay apostolate developed quite differently from what they expected.
“The Movements”
John Paul strongly encouraged what he called “the movements”. These predominantly lay organizations that in a sense existed parallel to the hierarchical structure of the Church, developed from below and promised spiritual and apostolic renewal.
Opus Dei
Opus Dei (“the work of God”) was founded in Spain in 1928 by a diocesan priest, St. Josemaría Escrivà (d. 1975). Although directed by priests, it was in some ways the most significant lay movement of modern times, embracing over eighty thousand members worldwide, a majority of whom were married but lived under the spiritual direction of priests and under the disciplinary authority of their own bishop.
Part of Opus Dei’s original significance was the fact that, whereas traditional European Catholicism had always been cool, even hostile, to industrialization, Opus Dei enthusiastically embraced technological modernity and successfully combined it with traditional piety. (Franco modernized Spain partly by using the skills of “technocrats” affiliated with the movement.) Opus Dei members were especially active in journalism, business, technology, and education, including a major new Catholic university at Navarre in Spain. In some countries (but not the United States), they were also active in politics.
Other Groups
In the postconciliar period, other important new lay groups included the Cursillo (“little course”) of intense spiritual exercises undertaken within a very brief period of time; Focolari (“hearth”), founded by the laywoman Chiara Lubich (d. 2008); Communione e Liberazione (“Communion and Liberation”); Regnum Christi, also founded by Maciel; the Neocatechumenate; and the Community of St. Egidio, the latter two being lay groups devoted to prayer and works of charity
The Charismatic Movement
The most influential expression of popular piety in the postconciliar period—once again wholly unanticipated—was the charismatic movement, which began at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and spread rapidly, first throughout the United States, then to other countries.
Recalling that all baptized Christians receive the Spirit, the movement sought to respond to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, including the recovery of the charisms described in Acts: discernment, spontaneous prayer (including speaking in tongues), prophesying, and physical and spiritual healing.
At first, it was a wholly unauthorized lay movement, and it remained predominantly lay even after it gained ecclesiastical approval. Since being a charismatic was largely a matter of personal inspiration, the movement had no universally recognized central authority, hence it harbored considerable variety In a sense, it existed alongside the hierarchical Church, sometimes with the support of bishops and parish priests, never in overt opposition to them. At its peak, around 1990, the movement affected millions of people in virtually every place where Catholics were found, some living in tightly knit communities, others participating in mass rallies or small prayer groups.
Communities
The desire to replicate the pattern of the early Christians led many charismatics to live in communities governed by strict discipline and adhering closely to traditional moral teachings at a time when many Catholics were rejecting them. Although the movement had multiple centers, the most important was the Word of God Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, composed of several thousand members who provided spiritual and intellectual guidance to charismatics all over the world.
Decline
Many people testified that charismatic piety rekindled their dying faith, and it provided many with a way of leading a Christian life during a troubled time, perhaps often filling the void left by the near disappearance of traditional devotions. But the reliance on personal inspiration meant that fervor inevitably cooled over time, and splits developed within communities. By the end of the twentieth century, the organized charismatic movement was a shadow of its former self, but its influence was lasting, a wholly unanticipated fruit of Vatican II.
Marian Piety
Marian piety underwent a major revival beginning in the 1970s, partly through reports of Marian apparitions in various parts of the world. By far the most influential of these was at Medjugorje in Yugoslavia (later Bosnia-Herzegovina), where three young people reported numerous visions of Mary over a period of several years. For the next three decades, millions of pilgrims came to the town, and many people reported miraculous occurrences and a lasting revival of their personal faith and piety.
The cult of Medjugorje was promoted primarily by Croatian Franciscans, but almost from the beginning the local bishops officially expressed reservations about its authenticity, in time condemned it, and even publicly criticized a cardinal for endorsing it as a “place of prayer and repentance”. The Medjugorje cult differed from the classical Marian pattern in that some of the “seers” continued to report apparitions years after the original event, even in distant places far away from Medjugorje itself.
Conservative Laity
One of the great ironies of postconciliar Catholicism is the fact that, despite the “emancipation of the laity”, priests and religious were always the backbone of liberal movements, whereas conservative lay people not only often lacked clerical support, they might even find themselves in direct opposition to their priests and bishops.
After the Council, especially in the United States, conservative lay people organized aggressively, publishing polemical books and journals and founding schools at every level, all independent of ecclesiastical control, a kind of lay activism that would have been impossible before the Council. (Mother Angelica’s apostolate—a cloistered nun at the head of a huge communications network—would also have been impossible before the Council.)
Education
The Council’s affirmation that the parents were the primary educators of their children became the basis for considerable lay resistance to the new catechetics and also to the growing practice of “home schooling”—parents teaching their own children rather than enrolling them in schools.
Lay people also founded high schools and colleges independent of hierarchical control, with minimal clerical presence. Unlike the Society of St. Pius X, which was a priestly organization, most lay conservatives did not question the Council itself but its interpretation. They affirmed their loyalty to the pope, to whose authority they appealed, if necessary, against that of the bishops.
The Pro-Life Movement
In the United States, no postconciliar event so galvanized Catholic energy as the transformation of abortion into a constitutional right by the Supreme Court in 1973. The pro-life movement emerged as the single most effective lay apostolate of the post-Vatican II period, working with the bishops but independent of their authority, officially ecumenical and even nonsectarian.
The New Millennium
Benedict XVI
Ratzinger’s election as Benedict XVI in 2005 was a surprise to many, in that, as the official guardian of orthodoxy, he was often the target of liberal attack as a “divisive” figure. His quick election was therefore an unambiguous decision by the cardinals to continue the path of renewal laid out by John Paul II.
Ratzinger had been an adolescent in Germany in the waning years of World War II and, like other German young men of the time, was forced to join the Hitler Youth and the German Army, from which he deserted at his first opportunity. A diocesan priest, he became one of the leaders of the New Theology, although he was a generation younger than most of its noted practitioners.
As a peritus at Vatican II, Ratzinger was considered a liberal, but as the paths of ressourcement and aggiornamento diverged after the Council, he decisively followed the former, partly because the cultural revolution of the later 1960s, which was strongly felt in Germany, underlay so many of the demands for change.
The Sexual Abuse Scandal
As pope it fell to Benedict to preside over the Church at a time of great scandal. The gravest stain on the Church during John Paul II’s pontificate was the revelation of sexual abuse—primarily of boys and male adolescents—perpetrated by priests, a devastating scandal not because a tiny percentage of priests perverted their calling, but because in many cases bishops knew of the abuses and took no decisive action. Incalculable damage was done to the Church’s credibility, and the blot on her reputation is likely to survive for many years.
U.S. and Ireland
At first, the abuses seemed to be largely a problem in the United States, where the Church had to pay many millions of dollars in damages to an ever-lengthening list of victims. Eventually, however, the revelation of even worse cases erupted in Ireland. Benedict publicly rebuked the Irish hierarchy and appointed a commission of investigation, and several bishops resigned, including John Magee of Cloyne, who had been secretary to three popes. By 2010, new allegations of sexual abuse were coming to light in other places and the harm to the reputation of the Church seemed likely to get worse. Benedict repeatedly expressed sorrow and anguish over the sufferings of the innocent victims, some of whom he met personally.
Legionaries of Christ
The story of the Legionaries of Christ proved to be an especially severe scandal. The Legion was for years criticized for excessive rigidity and for fostering a cult of personality around Maciel, whom some former Legionaries accused of serious sexual misconduct. The charges were categorically denied by Legion officials, and during John Paul’s pontificate attempts by Ratzinger to initiate an investigation were blocked by others in the Papal Curia. But after Ratzinger became pope, the Holy See finally verified the charges of sexual abuse of seminarians, bigamy, and systematic financial irregularities. Maciel was stripped of all authority and soon died, and an official investigation of the Legion left its future in doubt.
Papal Theology
As the greatest theologian ever to serve as pope, following the greatest philosopher ever to do so, Benedict has devoted much of his pontificate to teaching, continuing the work of ressourcement in public talks—later published—on the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church. He has traveled widely, although less so than John Paul, with a series of “world youth days”, inspiring intensely enthusiastic responses by huge crowds.
Social Teaching
Benedict’s first encyclical was Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), which, after decades of papal emphasis on justice, reminded the world of the primacy of charity, not in a paternalistic or condescending way but as something that goes beyond what is strictly due. In the same encyclical, as a kind of corollary to John Paul’s theology of the body, Benedict in a sense reclaimed for Christianity the concept of love as eros, something natural to the human person, to be sanctified by agape. Like his predecessors, Benedict lamented the specter of war that hung over the world and urged that resources used for military purposes be devoted instead to peace.
Reform of the Reform
It was perhaps in liturgy that Benedict hoped to have his greatest effect, a “reform of the reform” to recover the sense of liturgy as a divine action in which men are privileged to participate. Elements of this reform included greater use of Latin as a vehicle of tradition and a unifying liturgical language; translations that were both more beautiful and more faithful to the original; communicants kneeling to receive Communion on the tongue; and the renewed use of sacred gestures like genuflections and striking the breast. The Pope gave blanket permission for all priests to celebrate the Tridentine rite, a permission that seemed to be utilized disproportionately by younger priests. Significantly, he expressed belief that the priest at Mass should face ad orientem, as head of the congregation facing East toward God, rather than versus populum (toward the people). The ad orientem position, he believed, was more appropriate to the Mass as primarily an act of worship rather than a community celebration. Though he continued to celebrate most public Masses versus populum, a crucifix is placed on the altar in front of him, the celebrant, providing the “Eastward” focus.
Traditionalists
Benedict once characterized groups like the Society of St. Pius X as infected by an un-Catholic “sectarian zealotry”, but he lifted the excommunication of their bishops, although they were still forbidden to exercise their offices. The Pope initiated discussions aimed at reconciliation, but the Society’s official spokesmen insisted that such reconciliation could not take place unless the Church explicitly repudiated the “errors” of Vatican II.
Devotions
Popular devotions, especially eucharistic adoration and the rosary, revived under John Paul and Benedict, and for several decades there was immense interest in the Holy Shroud, a cloth kept at Turin, Italy, that bears the image of a man with wounds like those of the crucified Jesus and that many believe was His burial cloth.
Ecumenism
Benedict continued to seek better relations with the Eastern Orthodox, with more apparent success than John Paul had experienced. The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church, which had been cool to ecumenical overtures, proposed to cooperate with the Catholic Church in opposing militant secularism in Europe.
Anglican Conversions
But although official dialogue with Anglicans continued, in time it became obvious that it was unlikely to bear significant fruit, as Anglicanism moved in an increasingly liberal direction.
Prior to the Council an occasional married convert clergyman had been allowed to become a Catholic priest, and afterward such permissions were given fairly freely, primarily to clergy from the Anglican Communion (under the 1980 Pastoral Provision of Pope John Paul II). During Benedict’s pontificate, the Holy See announced, in response to formal requests, that it was willing to receive into the Church entire organized groups of Anglicans from various countries. These groups had broken with the Anglican Communion primarily because of women clergy and the acceptance of homosexuality. The Anglican groups would be under the authority of their own “ordinaries” (who might be priests or bishops) and could retain elements of their liturgy. Married clergy could be ordained as priests but, as with the Eastern Orthodox, only celibates could be bishops. Both liberal Catholics and some Anglicans denounced the conversions as a violation of ecumenism.
The Jews
Relations with the Jews after 2000 were severely marred by a sudden and fierce campaign of slander against Pius XII, who was condemned as a Nazi sympathizer complicit in the Holocaust. But by no means was all the slander by Jews, and some Jews defended the Pope.
A Resurgent Islam
Until almost the year 2000, Islam, despite its huge numbers, was regarded as almost a marginal influence in the world. Then it suddenly underwent a dramatic resurgence, politically as well as religiously, in conscious rivalry to the West and to Christianity, a rival potentially as formidable as Communism had once been. (A major and undeveloped theological issue was Vatican II’s statement that Muslims, like Christians and Jews, “adore the one merciful God”.)
Besides government persecution in various officially Muslim countries, especially the Sudan, Christians were subjected to frequent mob violence in Pakistan and other Muslim states where they were legally tolerated. Turkey, an officially secular country, classified Christian missionaries with Muslim terrorists, and an Italian archbishop serving in that country was murdered by his Muslim driver, who shouted, “I have killed the Great Satan!”
But Islam’s greatest challenge to the West was massive Muslim immigration to Europe, where, combined with a very low birth rate among nominal Christians, it seemed likely in time to become the majority religion in what was once called Christendom.
Europe
Just as it had supported the United Nations, the Holy See supported the formation of the European Union (E.U.) in the early twenty-first century. But in its constitution, the Union refused to acknowledge Christianity as even a historical influence in Western civilization. Benedict, who perhaps chose his papal name in homage to the founder of Western monasticism, who is also the patron saint of Europe, was especially concerned to remind his fellow Europeans of the religious basis of their civilization. (Among European states in 2010, Catholicism was the official religion only in Lichtenstein, Malta, Monaco, and Vatican City.)
The Worldwide Church
Growth and Decline
Benedict presided over a Church that had doubled in size since the Council. By 2010, there were well over a billion Catholics in the world—about 17 percent of the total population—the second largest religion after Islam. Brazil was the largest Catholic country in the world, followed by Mexico. Europe still accounted for a quarter of all Catholics, but the growth of the Church there fell well short of the overall population growth, while in Latin America it barely kept pace.
Latin America
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the governments of most Latin American countries, despite the fact that their people were overwhelmingly Catholic, were pursuing a secular agenda like that of Western Europe, as the Church struggled, often unsuccessfully, against legalized abortion, homosexual “marriage”, and other issues. The bishops of Venezuela repeatedly clashed with the socialist President Hugo Chavez, whom they accused of attempting to establish a dictatorship.
Asia and Africa
The Church was growing fastest, and appeared to have more spiritual vitality, in parts of Asia and Africa than in the West, especially as measured by religious vocations. While Catholics were only 17 percent of the population of Africa, their number had multiplied fifteen times since Vatican II, and, while they were only 3 percent of the population of Asia, their number there had tripled during the same time. At the same time, Africa, along with the Middle East, was the site of greatest aggression by radical Muslims against Christians.
India
Although India by no means had the largest Catholic population in the world—Catholics were barely 1 percent of its huge population—it had the largest number of seminarians and female religious in the world. India had far more Catholic schools and hospitals than all of North America put together; there were many converts, and the rate of religious observance was high. Despite the popular image of Hinduism as virtually a pacifist religion, Christians were subjected to violence, including murder, in various parts of the country, often with the connivance of the local government. Catholic leaders protested but also reminded their flocks that the blood of martyrs was the seed of Christians.
The Crisis of Civilization
Dechristianization
The gravest threat to the Church was secularization. Various U.N. and E.U. agencies defined abortion as a fundamental “right”, to be protected by all governments, and, claiming authority over the internal affairs of its member countries, the E.U. ruled that crucifixes in Italian schools were a violation of religious freedom. Reflecting the dechristianization of Europe, Italy’s ultimately successful appeal of the ruling was not supported by a single major Western country, although—also reflecting the changing cultural and political scene—it was supported by formerly communist Bulgaria, Romania, and the Russian Federation, and by Muslim Morocco. The existence of the International Criminal Court and similar agencies seemed to threaten the Church’s freedom, in that atheists and some others demanded that Church leaders, including the pope, be prosecuted for the “crime” of condemning abortion and homosexual activity.
Religious Freedom
The threats, however empty, showed how the meaning of religious liberty in a pluralistic society had changed in the decades since Dignitatis Humanae, as some liberals now argued that the Church’s stand on such moral issues constituted unwarranted “interference” in what should be an entirely secular society, that religious believers as such had no legitimate voice in pubic affairs. In some democratic countries (for example, France and Canada), Protestant clergy were convicted of the “crime” of speaking against homosexuality from the pulpit, while in the United States, some Catholic agencies ceased placing children for adoption after various state governments ruled that the agencies had to facilitate adoption by homosexual couples. The epidemic of “AIDS” (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), often spread through homosexual sexual activity, stimulated new attacks on the Church for not endorsing contraception as a means to thwart the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
But Benedict strongly reaffirmed the principles of Dignitatis Humanae, even citing the American Revolution as marking a new stage in the development of religious liberty—a government that favored no religion but was not hostile to any. Ironically, Dignitatis Humanae, which was originally seen as a belated effort by the Church to accept the principle of liberal tolerance, by 2010 placed the Church in the forefront of the defenders of freedom.
Enviromentalism
The protection of nature—“environmentalism”—was by 2010 perhaps the principal social and political issue facing the world. Extreme environmentalists tended to be overtly anti-Christian, not least because they identified men as the chief threat to nature and therefore favored draconian measures to control population and condemned the Church for her position on contraception and abortion. Some environmentalists, including some Catholics, went so far as to deify nature as a living being—Gaia—and practiced nature worship.
Benedict urged the protection of the environment on the basis of a theology of creation, a divine act from which the goodness and dignity of the world derived. Nature evolved not by blind chance but according to the divine plan, and it was precisely man’s divinely given stewardship that required nature, including human life at all its stages, to be conserved and cherished.
Christian Humanism
In 2010, the frontiers of morality stood at a point that had been mere science fiction at the time of Vatican II. Besides abortion, euthanasia, and suicide, the issues included surgically induced sex changes, artificial insemination, cloning, and the “creation” of life in laboratories, often to be destroyed for embryonic stem-cell research.
The crisis was metaphysical even more than moral, in that the very identity of humanity was being called into question by a seemingly irresistible, all-devouring technology and by men determined to deny both higher moral truth and any concept of inherent human significance.
Since the Enlightenment, secularists had accused the Church of being anti-humanist, because she subordinated man to God. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century, it had become apparent that without God the dignity of man could no longer be affirmed, that many secularists had come to reject humanism precisely because it placed man at the summit of nature. Thus, ironically, the Catholic Church, as she had since the time of her birth, claimed to be both the representative of God and the chief witness to true Humanism.
Conclusion
Faith allows believers to approach the past with a certain serenity, as shocked and appalled as any nonbeliever at “man’s inhumanity to man” but nonetheless ultimately hopeful. History is indeed the war of good against evil, but the progress of that war is hidden from human eyes.
The fundamental barrier to any full understanding of history is the simple fact of human fallibility. Genuine understanding would require omniscience—the pattern of history could be fully seen only by someone above history But the search for such a supra-historical vantage point is obviously futile. The end of history is beyond history, and history cannot reveal its own inner meaning.
A related fallacy stems from man’s limited temporal horizons. If, as some early Christians believed, the Roman Empire came into being in order to prepare the way for the birth of the Savior, this was not at all evident to pious Jews longing for the Messiah. They experienced the Roman incursion as merely another of those periodic mysterious catastrophes that fell upon them. But hindsight also does not suffice. An argument can be made for the providential role of the Empire in preparing the way for Christ, but in other respects the Empire was a formidable obstacle to the spread of the Gospel. Providence was indeed at work, but it is presumptuous to think that men know exactly how.
If Christianity is by far the most historical of all religions, from another point of view it is problematic why Christians should respect history at all, since the Gospel foretells its termination. “All this will pass away” (see Mt 24:35). All will be gathered into eternity.
Thus, for Christians, there can be no final understanding of history in this life. No one knows when history will reach its end, and the believer is enjoined by Christ to refrain from all such speculation. If mankind survives another million years, its view of history will change profoundly, as all the carefully delineated eras that are now part of the historical record will recede into a very remote past, to be disposed of by future historians in the twinkling of an eye.