Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis?

Henri de Lubac

 I have wanted for some weeks now to take a look at the famous interview with Pope Francis that has caused so much consternation and see why it has made voices on the right raise the alarm about the Holy Father.  For many of us who have read the interview conducted by Father Antonio Spadaro SJ and published in La Civiltá Cattolica and reprinted in America, the interview was a breath of fresh air, a sign of a new springtime in the Church in which we were beginning to feel a winter freeze that we feared heralded a return to the pre-conciliar ice age.  What is it exactly that has terrified the extreme right wing? 

An initial point that some have missed was that in the preliminary conversations, the Holy Father told Father Spadaro that the greatest influences on his own intellectual development were the works of Henri de Lubac and Michel Certeau.  Both de Lubac and Certeau were 20^th century Jesuit intellectuals and each signaled a departure from the faux-traditional Catholic methodology of neo-Thomism established by Leo XIII at the end of the nineteenth century as the “official” Catholic intellectual system. 

Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) came from an aristocratic French family but unlike many of the old French nobility did not identify with the Action Française  and French royalist movements that fashioned the views of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and others who would lead the rebellion against the Catholic Church and the Second Vatican Council.  de Lubac began studies in chemistry but suddenly switched and entered the Society of Jesus.  At the time the Jesuits and other religious communities were banned from France and so he entered a province in exile in England.  He left to fight in the French army in WWI but re-entered the Society after the War.  He was ordained in 1927 and appointed to the theological faculty at Lyon in 1929.  Up until WWII he spent his time in research, writing, and teaching.  He was identified with the nouvelle théologie. 

The nouvelle théologie was an intellectual movement primarily among French and German theologians in the first half of the twentieth century that rejected the neo-Thomism pushed by Leo XIII and Pius X in their reaction to “modernism,” in favor of returning to a use of the scriptural and patristic sources in doing theology.  Other proponents of the nouvelle théologie would be Yves Congar, Marie-Dominque Chenu, Jean Daniélou, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the (then) young Josef Ratzinger.  With Fascism, Nazism, and Marxism sweeping Europe in the ‘30’s, and then the War from 1939-45, the Holy See was preoccupied with political matters, but when the dust settled “orthodox” Curial commissars were appalled at the spread and influence of this “new theology” which they saw not so much heretical in its conclusions as rebellious to papal authority in its methodology.   After all, Popes had all but canonized the Neo-Scholasticism of such pseudo-Thomists as Gaetano Sanseverino, Josef Wilhelm Karl Kleutgen, and Giuseppe Pecci, the older brother of Leo XIII. 

In the 1950’a under the intellectual police state created by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Prefect of the Holy Office (today’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith), most of the Nouvelle theologians found themselves silenced, prohibited from teaching or publishing.  Much of this intellectual repression was carried out indirectly through the religious orders of the respective theologians rather than by the Holy Office itself.  (It would only elevate the status of a theologian to attract the negative attention of Ottaviani and his winged monkeys.)  The Jesuit General, Jean Baptiste Janssens ordered de Lubac’s works—Surnaturel, Corpus mysticum, and Connaissance de Dieu—removed from Jesuit libraries and, as far as possible, from circulation altogether.  De Lubac was removed from his editorship of Recherches de science religieuse and from teaching at the Catholic University of Lyons.   The Encyclical Letter of Pius XII, Humani Generis, was widely thought to be directed against the proponents of the nouvelle théologie though not against de Lubac personally. 

Though de Lubac was under a ban, he continued to research and even to write.  His work was subject to censorship, but he was able to publish quite a bit nonetheless.  He published a study of Origen, three works on Buddhism, and several works on ecclesiology that would help shape the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church at Vatican II.  He also wrote several commentaries on and defenses of the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a friend and fellow Jesuit.  This did him no favor in Ottaviani’s office in Rome as the aged Cardinal had a relentless pathological hatred for Teilhard de Chardin’s work.  Nevertheless, to Ottaviani’s extreme displeasure, John XXIII appointed de Lubac to the preparatory commission for the Second Vatican Council and also named him one of the theological periti (experts) for the Council, a move to break Ottaviani’s stranglehold on Catholic “orthodoxy” before it could subvert the Pope’s plans for the Council.  In the years after the Council Pope Paul VI offered de Lubac a Cardinal’s hat in recognition for his contribution to Catholic thought, but de Lubac declined.  John Paul II urged him to reconsider and in 1983 de Lubac accepted the Pope’s nomination to the Sacred College. 

You can see why the neo-traditionalists would be so unhappy with Pope Francis saying that Henri de Lubac was one of the two great influences on his thought.  de Lubac represents everything the neo-trads hate.  He was one of the key figures in dismantling the pseudo-orthodoxy of their neo-Thomist stranglehold on Catholic thought.  The nouvelle théologie which he represents is precisely what undermined the static world of pre-Conciliar Catholicism with its “unchanging” liturgy, its simplistic catechisms, its pyramidic hierarchy, its identification with monarchy, its confusion of doctrinal assent for faith, and its embalmed doctrines.  But if de Lubac is “bad,” just wait until you see Micheal de Certeau.

Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) was also a Jesuit, though never a cardinal.  He was not a theologian—he was something far more dangerous, a historian.  And, influenced by the dramatic and revolutionary French historiography of the inter-war period he brought history into dialogue with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences.  Psychoanalysis—now there is a word that strikes fear into the chilled hearts of the neo-trads.  And what is worse, Certeau was not only into psychoanalysis, he was a Freudian.  In fact he was one of the founders of the École Freudienne de Paris.  These Jesuits—when they go into freefall, they just soar with the eagles.  They never do anything in half-measures.  Certeau came to fame with his critique of the social revolution that swept France in May 1968 when over 11,ooo,ooo French—students and workers—threw the country into chaos as the Communists and Socialists joined together in an alliance to demand radical social change.  Certeau was interested in how history is written to justify power—the old “history is written by the victors” and how it has served as a tool of colonialism to destroy the culture and identity of indigenous peoples in order to subject them to colonial powers.  Great—we have a theological revolutionary in de Lubac and a political revolutionary in Certeau and the Pope is their disciple.  No wonder the right wing-nuts are just about ready to s***.  We have a Pope who is used to thinking outside the box.  Hold on to the hand-rails folks, this could be a wild ride, but then I have always loved roller-coasters.  Sure beats the glacial re-freezing that had been setting in before the Argentine Spring.  

Vatican II Lives! (In Spite of Some)

Here is a long entry, but one well worth reading.  A friend sent it along; it was originally printed in the London Tablet.  This being the 50^th anniversary of Vatican II, it is very appropriate and there is much here I would like to “unpack” over the several subsequent postings. 

Don't let anyone tell you the Council didn't change much

by Robert Blair Kaiser ( 2012 Tablet Lecture via CNUA)

These days, both wings in the Church are saying the Council was a failure. The left wing is saying the Council didn't go far enough. The right wing is saying it went too far. I do not believe the Council was a failure. It has already changed the way we live - and think - as Catholics. I believe the charter that was written at Vatican II is the only thing that will save the Church, the people-of-God Church, not the hierarchical Church.

I had a peculiar vantage point on Vatican II. I was Time magazine's man at the Council, sent there in part because I had spent 10 years in the Jesuits and because I was one of the few reporters on earth who could speak fluent Latin, the official language of the Council. So, here I am in mid-August 1962, chatting with Pope John XXIII's secretary, Loris Capovilla, at the papal summer residence, Castel Gondolfo. All of a sudden here comes John XXIII bouncing up the marble hallway. 'Why,' he says, arms outstretched, 'What a wonderful surprise!' Of course, it wasn't a surprise at all. It was all prearranged by Time magazine's friend in New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman, arranged that way so the Pope wouldn't be breaking tradition.

I thought I might have a few mostly chatty minutes with the Pope, and then make my move to leave. But no. The Pope grabbed my elbow and said he had some things he wanted to tell me. He was at last ready to tell the world (and he chose to do it through Time magazine) that he did not intend his Council to be a strictly churchy event, but a worldly event designed to bring people together, people of all faiths, even the so-called godless Communists.

His predecessors, Pius XI and Pius XII had mounted crusades against communism. As an historian, Papa Roncalli knew what a disaster the Crusades had been. Now, he said that, in a world that was armed with megaton nuclear warheads, the time had come to say, 'No more crusades.' In fact, he didn't want the Council to launch condemnations of any anything or anyone.

Time magazine's foreign editor Henry Grunwald didn't want to believe my report, but what could he do? This Rome correspondent had talked with the Pope and he hadn't. So Time ran with my reporting, on this NO MORE CRUSADES story, and on a good many other initiatives the Pope was starting to make.

Grunwald had to admit: 'We've got to watch this Roncalli pope. What's this word aggiornamento? What is that all about?' I had to admit: aggiornamento was a pretty bold word for the pope to use, in Roma aeterna, where nothing ever changed. How do you bring a Church that never changes 'up to date'? The top cardinal in Rome, Alfredo Ottaviani, the pro-prefect of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, could not conceive of any of the changes that the word aggiornamento implied, and I soon found out from theologians like Yves Congar, Jean Danielou, Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx (all of whom had been silenced before Vatican II for their 'radical thinking') that Ottaviani was doing almost everything he could to put roadblocks in the way of Council's major change-projects. And why wouldn't he? His coat of arms said it all: Semper Idem. Always the same.

How would the Council bring things up to date? Early on, this wasn't too clear to anyone, not even perhaps to the Pope himself. He was a modest man who used to end jokes with his secretary with the punch line, 'I'm not infallible, you know!' But he had an intuition: that 2,500 bishops encouraged to speak freely in a kind of parliament of bishops would figure it out.

They did this very quickly. After a month-long debate on whether the Church should scrap its traditional Latin Mass for the vernacular, the Council Fathers voted 2200 to 200 in favour of the language of the people. It was our first clue: that Vatican II was trying to re-create a people's Church.

Up to now, the bishops had been part of the ecclesia docens, the teaching Church, while the rest of us were the ecclesia discens, the learning Church. Here at the Council, the bishops all became part of the learning Church. Hobnobbing with theologians like Congar, Danielou, Chenu, Schillebeckx, they began to start speaking of the Church in new ways, promising to create a new kind of Church, a people's Church, not a Church that was making itself less and less relevant with its excessive clericalism, juridicism and triumphalism. Some of the best Council speeches were now calling for a Church that believed God was at work in all men and women, in individuals as well as in humankind as a whole, a Church that wanted us to be all that we could be - in this life as well as in the next.

As the Council opened, I sought out America's most famed Catholic preacher, Bishop Fulton Sheen (he was staying at the Excelsior, the most pricey hotel on the Via Veneto), to ask him about his hopes for the Council. He turned down my request by denying the very humanity of the Council itself. 'It will be all about the Holy Spirit,' he said. 'He will tell us what to say and do.' Bishop Sheen didn't tell me how I should go about interviewing the Holy Spirit.

I went on to interview everyone else I could find, often in 18-hour-days, and, much to my surprise, I was getting stories about the Council into the magazine almost every week. And then at the end of the Council's first session, the Macmillan Publishing Company in the U.S. and Tom Burns of Burns, Oates and Washburn asked me to do a book on that first session of the Council. Time's editors gave me six weeks off to do it. I went off to the Rome headquarters of the Society of the Divine Word and wrote pretty much around the clock (with a couple of hours home for lunch every day). The Observer serialised the book, installments on page one every Sunday for four Sundays in a row in August 1963. And when the book came out, first in London and Dublin, it shot to number one on the bestseller list.

In the book, I used an extended metaphor, imagining the Church as the barque of Peter, a boat that had been in port for too many centuries, its bottom so encrusted with barnacles that it couldn't even sail. Now, by calling a Council, I said that Pope John had figuratively launched that vessel out on to the seas of the world.

Pope Paul VI liked the image so much that he got one of his American monsignor friends who lived in Rome to ask me for permission to have my book translated into Italian and published for the benefit of the Italian bishops who didn't quite understand the Council was trying to create a new kind of Church, one less concerned with its own power, one more at the service of humankind.

My barque-of-Peter image underlined what was different about Vatican II. For all the other councils of history (20 of them) the Church turned inward on itself. This council was turned out to the world.

Not everyone understood that right away. Pope John's Curia didn't get it--they may have never gotten it. The most curious among you might want to read Yves Congar's Journal of the Council, a daily diary of his exhaustive and exhausting work behind the scenes, battling with Cardinal Ottaviani and his chief aide, the Dutch Jesuit Sebastian. To get ready for the Council, they were crafting a compendium of the faith as enunciated by all the papal encyclicals written since Pius the Ninth, doing everything they could to make Vatican II into another Council of Trent.

'This is all wrong,' Congar wrote. 'This is papalist nonsense. It is making the Council into a textbook manual that will not help bring about the aggiornamento Pope John XXIII is calling for--a recreation of what the faith was in its primitive beginnings. To rediscover the beauty of that faith, we have to take a deeper look at Sacred Scripture, and study the Fathers of the Church. And only then will the Council speak to the world in language it can understand.'

Reading Congar's accounts now, I realise my reports in Time and my book on the first session reflected only dimly what a fierce battle was going on. The Observer had a poster for my series that appeared in all the tube stations of London. It screamed out the headline THE PLOT TO THWART POPE JOHN. Read Congar and you will see that headline was an understatement.

Why am I telling you these stories? Because I want you to be aware during the coming year of efforts to dumb the Council down, of efforts to convince you that the Council didn't change the Church very much. I think it did, and after you recall what kind of Church we lived in before Vatican II, I think you will agree with me, and rejoice with me and be glad for what the Council did do, irreversibly, I hope.

The Council changed the way we thought about God, about ourselves, about our spouses, our Protestant cousins, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Jews, even the way we thought about the Russians. When a handful of bishops kept pushing for conciliar condemnation of Communism, John XXIII kept insisting that that kind of talk would only blow up the world. Pope John and his Council made some preliminary moves that helped end the Cold War. For this, the editors of Time made John XXIII the Man of the Year.

The Jews? The Council reversed the Church's long-standing anti-Semitism. Until the Council, Catholics believed that, if Jews didn't convert to Catholicism, there was something wrong with them. The Council Fathers took another look at that idea and decided that Jews were still living their ancient covenant with God. We decided there was nothing wrong with the Jews; they became our brothers and sisters.

Before the Council, we thought we were miserable sinners when we were being nothing but human. After the Council, we had a new view of ourselves. We learned to put a greater importance on finding and following Jesus as 'the way' (as opposed to what we said in the Creed. It didn't matter so much what we said. What mattered was what we did: helping to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and find shelter for the homeless. That's what made us followers of Jesus.

Before the Council, we were told we were excommunicated if we set foot in a Protestant Church. After the Council (where Protestant observers were welcomed, given seats of honor, and spoken of no longer as Protestants, but as 'separated brethren'), we stopped fighting the Methodists and the Presbyterians and conspired with them in the fight for justice and peace and marched with them to Selma.

Before the Council, we thought only Protestants read the Bible. After the Council, we've seen a new Catholic appreciation of the Scriptures; they've been given a more prominent place at Mass; and in many parishes, we have groups gathering every week for Bible study.

Before the Council, we took pride in knowing that we were the only people on earth who could expect salvation, according to the centuries-long mantra, 'There is no salvation outside the Church.'

After the Council, we began to see there was something good and something great in all religions. And we didn't think we had all the answers. After Vatican II, we started thinking of ourselves not as 'the one, true Church'. We were 'a pilgrim people'. It was a phrase that summoned up an image of a band of humble travellers on a journey who, though we are subject to rain and snow and high wind and hurricane, to thirst and starvation and pestilence and disease and attack by leopards and locusts, keep on plodding ahead with a hope and a prayer that we will someone reach our destination. The image was calculated to counter an old self-concept that hadn't stood up to scrutiny - of a triumphal Church that had all the answers, lording it over humankind.

Before the Council, we identified 'salvation' as 'getting to heaven.' After the Council, we knew that we had a duty to bring justice and peace to the world in our own contemporary society, understanding in a new way the words that Jesus gave us when he taught us to pray, 'thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' By the end, among the most influential figures at the Council, we encountered two humble souls, one a woman, Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who wasn't allowed to speak to the assembled bishops at Vatican II (no woman was), and a bird-like figure, Dom Helder Camara, the archbishop of Recife, in Brazil. Both of them went around Rome telling individual bishops and those who were putting together the Council's crowning document, Gaudium et Spes: please don't forget the poor.

The Council did not forget the poor, and the statement out of Rome in October 2011 allying the Church with the world's have-nots only proves that even the current powers-that-be in the Church (still so unaccountable in so many other ways) get it. I will quote Gaudium et Spes: The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ .

Before the Council, we were sin-obsessed. It was even a sin to eat a hamburger on Friday night after the game. After the Council, we had a new sense of sin. We didn't hurt God when we sinned. We sinned when we hurt somebody else. Or ourselves. After the Council, we had a new holy hopeful view of ourselves, redefining holiness as the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton did: to be holy is to be human.

Before the Council, we were told we were condemned to hell if we made love to our spouses without at the same time making babies. After the Council, we knew we had a duty (and the God- approved pleasure) to make love even if we could not afford to have another baby.

Before the Council, we thought God spoke directly to the Pope and that he passed the word down the ecclesiastical pyramid to the bishops, then to the priests, then the nuns, and, properly filtered, to us. After the Council, we learned a new geometry. The Church wasn't a pyramid. It was more like a circle, where we are all encouraged to have a voice. We are the Church. We have a right and a duty to speak out about the kind of Church we want.

Please note that most of these changes did not come about because the Fathers of Vatican II revamped what we had already professed believing in the Apostles Creed. They didn't change our faith, they didn't come up with a new understanding of God. Still one God, two natures, three persons. Only in this sense can I agree with Pope Benedict XVI when he keeps insisting on something he calls 'the hermeneutic of continuity.'

I have to agree with him when he says the Council didn't come up with anything new. No, no new dogmas. (And thank God for that. The last thing modern, thinking Catholics want are dogmas of any kind. 'Dogma' and 'dogmatic' are words that we do not much resonate with. When I think of dogma, I think of the hundreds of anathemas laid down by the Council of Trent: 'believe these dogmatic propositions or be damned.')

When Jesus addressed the multitude on that hillside overlooking the lake, he did not enlighten their minds by reading them the Ten Commondments. He enkindled their hearts by telling what would make them happy.

The Council Fathers did not follow the example of Trent. They followed the example of Jesus. They did not anathematise anyone or anything. They set a new style of thinking about ourselves as followers of the guy who told us how we could have life and have it more abundantly.

We make a mistake if we comb through the sixteen documents of Vatican II and hope to find explicit warrants for the Church we want to see take shape in the future. We can only capture the real, revolutionary meaning of the Council by looking at the new kind of language that permeated all those documents. It was not the kind of legalistic language Cardinal Ottaviani loved. The American Jesuit John W. O'Malley, author of the most authoritative work on the Council, What Happened at Vatican II, says the Council's message was hidden in plain sight. Fr O'Malley describes it by contrasting the old language with the old: ...at stake were almost two different visions of Catholicism: from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to service, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to ongoing, from passive acceptance to active engagement, from fault finding to appreciation, from prescriptive to principled, from behaviour modification to inner appropriation .

Mere words? I do not think so. They underline my thesis - that the Council helped us all be more real, more human and more loving. The Council helped us realise that the world was a good place. It was good because God made it, and he made it because he loved us and loved the world, too. As should we .

- http://www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/381/18

Freedom from Religion and Freedom of Religion III

The Tomb of Pope Leo XIII in the
Basilica of Saint John Lateran

The United States, including its Catholic citizens, was very committed to the principle of the Separation of Church and State.  The papacy was very committed to the idea that the Catholic Faith should be established by law in every nation and that other religions—and especially heretical “cults” (aka Protestants) should be proscribed.  Two trains running down tracks ultimately destined to collide.  

     The collision was to be a long time in coming however.  In a world without modern communications the American Republic was no more than a vague idea to the Papal Court.  Until the final decades of the nineteenth century, basically until people began to accustom themselves to the transatlantic cable, the American Church in its day to day operations was all but independent from Rome.  John Carroll had deliberately held communications with the Holy See to a minimum and his successors in the American episcopacy followed suite.  It was pointless to involve Rome in local decisions—before steamships for a letter to go to Rome, be considered by a congregation, and come back was at least a six month process and could easily take twice that long.  Whatever decision was needed was long past its time before the Holy See could respond.  And frankly, European bishops were no more inclined to surrender decision making to the Roman Curia were jealous of their own authority in their own dioceses.  That only began to change with the collapse of the Papal States in 1870 when the popes needed to consolidate their religious authority to compensate the diminution of prestige at the loss of the Papal States.  It was after Vatican I—and the fall of Rome to the Italian Monarchy that same year—that Rome really began to take note of the American Church and it was startled to see how “American” (i.e. non-Roman) it was.  This came to a bit of a head with Leo XIII’s 1895 Encyclical Latter, Longinqua Oceani, in which the pope declared  that the Church “ would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  Such favor and patronage, of course, is in direct contradiction to the United States Constitution which declares in its first amendment that “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion…”   Leo further admonished the American Church that while it might have to live with the idea of separation of Church and State at least until a Catholic majority could correct the situation, it “would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.”  In other words, the American situation of the separation of Church and State is not an ideal but an anomaly.

     It could have been worse.  Leo was, unlike his predecessors, not opposed to Republics per se.  To the rage of conservatives he encouraged French Catholics to give their support to the Third Republic which replaced the Second Empire after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.  Conservative Catholics in France wanted to restore the Bourbon monarchy and while Leo wold have preferred that, he conceded that the Republic was acceptable.  Catholicism had always seen monarchy as the ideal, the thought being that civil government should be along the lines of Divine Government and so just as God governs the world, a monarch should govern the people.  Forget this Vox Dei Vox Populi idea—it is dangerous to Church and State alike. (Vox Dei Vox Populi is Latin for The Voice of God [is found in] the voice of the people.  You can see why Popes who consider themselves the Vox Dei don’t like that idea.) 

     Fortunately it took a long time to bring this pot to a boil, but to a boil it was to come.  An American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, was teaching at the Catholic University in Washington DC.  The experience of Christians of various faiths cooperating against the Third Reich in the years before and during World War II convinced Father Murray that the traditional anti-ecumenical policies of Catholicism and the resultant Catholic isolationism was an obsolete and a dangerous policy in a world haunted by totalitarianism.  He further came to believe that, despite the admonition of Leo XIII in Longinqua Oceani,  religious freedom as outlined in the First Amendment to the American Constitution was an ideal that should be embraced in the twentieth century.  In these ideas he was far ahead of his time—too far ahead of his time for many of his fellow Catholics who saw the ethnic and religious ghettos into which the Catholics of the early twentieth century had retreated as essential to preserve the faith.  Teaching with Father Murray at Catholic University was Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, one of the most arrogant and acrimonious junior grade prelates the Church has known in its long history of arrogant and acrimonious prelates.  Monsignor Fenton was editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review.  Fenton despised Religious.  Fenton despised anyone who he considered beneath him and his monsignoral dignity him which more or less included the human race as a collective.  He was probably also a bit jealous of Murray and his popularity.  Fenton reported Murray to the appropriate Roman dicasteries and the redoubtable Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, who silenced Murray and prohibited him from speaking or writing on the topic of Church/State relations.  These were the final years of the papacy of Pius XII who that year had suffered from a hiatal hernia requiring surgery and whose health went into a steady decline during which more and more of the papal prerogatives were assumed by curial officials such as Ottaviani.  Pius’s successor, John XXIII convoked an Ecumenical Council with the express purpose of opening the Catholic Church up to the ecumenical movement which had long been prohibited it by Popes such as Pius XI whose encyclical Mortalium Animos condemned ecumenism as undermining Catholic doctrinal hegemony.  Ottaviani insured that Fenton would be on the various commissions that were preparing the Conciliar agenda and it was planned by Ottaviani that no serious doctrinal shift, especially as regards ecumenism or freedom of conscience would be submitted to the bishops.  When the bishops assembled in the autumn of 1962 for the first session of the Council, however, they would not accept the conservative agenda, however and demanded that the schemata for the council prepared by Fenton and others be abandoned and a new agenda drawn up.  It was at this point that Francis Spellman, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, rescued John Courtney Murray from the obscurity to which Fenton’s accusations had reduced him and brought him to the Council as Spellman’s personal theologian.  Here Murray had his revenge on his reactionary foes as the Council in its decree on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, enshrined the basic principles of freedom of conscience and the very doctrine that Leo XIII had said should not be spread from America to the rest of the world became a universally recognized principle in Catholic teaching.  Eternal Rest to Joseph Fenton, Alfredo Ottaviani, and Leo XIII.  One of those three, despite his fear of freedom of conscience, is probably a saint.  It wouldn’t be Fenton or Ottaviani.  

Backpedaling from Vatican II?

I noticed this petition at morning prayer today and it made me very sad. 

Make us eager to work with you in building a better world so that it may listen to your Church and its gospel of peace--Jesus, you feed and heal our souls; come to strengthen us. 

It made me sad because I am not sure that the Church’s Gospel is the Gospel of Peace.  I think sometimes—and, to be frank,  more than sometimes—we talk out of both sides of our mouth.  I enjoy working on this blog but I think you can see as clearly as I do that, not the Church, but the Institution of the Church (and they have to  be distinguished because on several levels they are different realities) has as its primary agenda, not the Gospel, but its own self-preservation.  In fact, I do believe that in the years during and immediately after the Second Vatican Council the Church—and here I mean the whole Church, Institution and popular reality, was enthused by the Gospel.  John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris gave us a new and energetic vision, a holistic vision, an integrated approach to faith and life-in-this-world.  O sure there were voices that decried it, did not understand it, were terrified of it—voices that even saw how it would undo their own positions of power.  It totally overturned the cosmology of Alfredo Ottaviani and other traditionalists such as Giuseppe Siri, Marcel Lefebvre, the American Francis McIntyre, and others, but in the papacy of Paul VI they were not able to seize the upper hand and there was a strong hope for a true evangelical renewal of our Catholic Church.   There was a period in which the Church—Institution and faithful together—became the cry of peace and the voice of justice.  Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio, echoed by voices such as Dom Helder Camara and Oscar Romero had not only credibility but a power that led men and women to give their lives—literally—for the Gospel to the poor.  With leaders in the Church like Basil Hume and Paul Hallinan, Paulo Arns, Joseph Bernardin, Denis Hurley, the Institutional dimension of the Church had a credibility among those people of good will who were anxious to see the human family brought together in solidarity with one another.  I am intrigued to figure out what happened to reverse that dynamic over the last thirty years but it does seem that we have reverted to an emphasis on the Institution rather than the Mission.   There are prophetic voices in the Church today but at least in the developed world they seem more on the periphery, without the weight of the Institution behind them.   Why didn’t the American bishops pass on papal objections to the Gulf Wars?  Why are we not hearing about the plight of our Catholic and Christian brothers and sisters in Palestine and in the Arab World?   Where is a Catholic critique of the economic injustices that led to the financial collapse of 2008?  Granted there were problems with the Obamacare proposals, especially in regard to the sanctity of life, but where were the hierarchical voices giving leadership for a Catholic approach to universal health care?  Where is Church leadership on the moral issues of how we are dealing with the current budget crunch?  Maybe the Church has lost its moral credibility due to the clerical sex scandals—or, more likely, to the way the hierarchy has handled the sexual misconduct issues—but the way to rebuild that moral credibility is not to remain silent on controversial issues but to develop a consistent social ethic and not only teach it and preach it, but live it.  Maybe the Institution needs to shed some of its own blood and surrender some of its own power and even alienate some of its own supporters, but we need leadership—sound leadership—that can inspire us with the gospel and we are not getting it.   Cardinal Burke (seen blog for April 4, 2011) thinks that the reason the Church is bleeding members is “poor” celebrations of the liturgy—by which he means we lack in pomp and circumstance—but His Eminence’s galero is too tight and is choking blood supply to an already enfeebled cerebellum.  The reason that we are bleeding members is that the gospel fire is going out in the hearts of those who have been called to lead.