An Apologia Against The Apologies

The story varies—some ascribe it to the pontificate of Pius IX other to Pius X and a few to Leo XIII, but allegedly a delegation of British Anglicans were admitted to a papal audience and when they asked for the Holy Father’s blessing, the Pope uttered the following prayer which is used for the blessing of the incense at solemn Mass: “ab illo benedicaris in cuius honore cremaberis” (May you be blessed by him in whose honor you shall be burned).  Now those were the days when we knew how to treat heretics.  What happened?  How did we slide down the ladder from our exclusive perch in the heavenly heights of safeguarding the purity of the faith into the ecumenical boondoggle of inclusivity and relativism? 

I suspect the Pandora’s Box of decay and error was opened when Pope John XXIII addressed the world’s cabal of heretics and schismatics (AKA Protestants and Orthodox) as “separated brethren.”  Talk about putting lipstick on a pig, they’re nothing but rebels, murderers, and thieves.   They stole our cathedrals and ancient churches across Europe and the Near East, they cruelly martyred those who stuck to the old faith, they defaced sacred images and scattered the relic of the saints in the dirt of their streets.  Their leaders broke their vows of celibacy and let countless souls to the fires of hell and this Pope calls them “separated brethren?”  Enemies, not brothers, and it was they who chose separation.  And then that pernicious council of Vatican II speaks of “restoring unity.”  The only way back is unconditional surrender.  Truth does not compromise.  Error has no rights! 

But if that weren’t bad enough, the next Pope—even worse than John—Paul VI on December 16 (imagine, in Advent, barely a week before Christmas) 1975 fell on his knees and kissed the foot of the schismatic prelate Metropolitan Meliton of Chalcedon.  What was he thinking?  The Pope bows to no one save God alone.  He is the Vicar of Christ.  Would Christ bow to some schismatic bishop?  The same Pope had ten years earlier lifted the excommunication of the Greek claimant to the Patriarchate of Constantinople imposed over nine centuries before.  How do you undo almost a thousand years of excommunication?  Do the gates of hell open and let the prisoners out?  By what authority can a pope undo the divine judgment?  Divine Mercy only goes so far—once you are dead you have no more claim to it.  It’s too late to change your mind and say, like the Church Lady on the old Saturday Night Life, to God, “never mind.” Once God puts you in the devil’s frying pan you’re there to stay.  But what is even worse, this liberal Pope let the Greek claimant to the Patriarchal throne absolve him of the excommunication.  As if a schismatic had the authority to life an excommunication, much less impose one on a Pope.  I tell you, things were going to hell fast and have been ever since.  But it only get’s worse as time passes. 

It was John Paul II who really compromised the integrity of the papacy however.  He began by apologizing for Galileo.  Honestly, he should just have ignored that old canard—I mean over and done with centuries ago.  What is the point of bringing it up all over again.  And besides, maybe Galileo was right about the earth revolving around the sun, but he was defiant in the face of Church’s authority and refused to back down.  That alone should have been grounds for imprisonment by the Inquisition.  And it wasn’t that he was tortured or burned at the stake.  But that was only the beginning.  John Paul then went on to apologize for the Church’s involvement in the African salve trade.  Really?!?!?!  Like the Pope was selling slaves in Saint Peter’s square.  OK, so there were a few bad apples in the Catholic barrel—the Pope can’t apologize for every Catholic who has ever made a bad choice.  But then he went on to apologize for burning Protestant heretics at the stake and for the Religious Wars of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  I am sorry but we had an obligation to stop the spread of those pernicious heresies that were causing millions of souls to be lost.  I only think we should have gone at it harder.  In 1995 he apologized to women for the way the Church has treated them through the centuries.  What drugs was he on?  The Church has always been the protector of women.  And it just got worse and worse.  John Paul apologized for the Crusades, for the treatment of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance, for the behavior of European missionaries in China in the 19^th century, for the removal of Australian aboriginal children from their families to Church-run institutions in the late 19^th- and early 20^th centuries, for the 1204 Sack of Constantinople, and for the contempt shown towards the primitive “cultures” of the various savage peoples among whom the Church sent missionaries from the 16^th through the 20^th centuries.  I find this last one particularly hard to understand as we introduced these tribes to music and art and literature; we taught them to read and to write.  We gave them medicines and made scientific technology available to them.   We have been their salvation in the material as well as the spiritual realms.

And now Francis thinks we owe gay people an apology.  Will this madness never stop?  What is to be gained by apologizing when we weren’t wrong to begin with?  No, the Church should never admit to be wrong.  We have the Truth and we should uphold it in the face of all these modern heresies that are corrupting our world.  Truth admits for no compromise.   All that this apology stuff does is to open the door to dialogue and reconciliation.  And surely God doesn’t want that, does he?  Stand firm in the Truth and when you pray for your non-Catholic friends and relatives, remember the old prayer ab illo benedicaris in cuius honore cremaberis.

For What Did Christ Die?

As many of my regular readers know, one neo-trad site that I find worthwhile is New Liturgical Movement.  While those contributors whose focus is on the philosophical merits of restoring the pre-conciliar rites are generally not worth the time, there are frequent articles on historical points that give interesting insights into the history and development of our Catholic, indeed our Christian, faith.  In our storehouse of Catholicism’s two millennia of treasures there are more than some old gilt chairs that broke under the weight of the fat arse of some doddering prelate.  We have Chartres and the In Paradisum and blue as a liturgical color.  (In fact we have yellow as a liturgical color which is really a bit outré.)  We have Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and the Canon of Addai and Mara, and the Easter Sepulcher and the hymns of the Roman Breviary.   Some, many, of the old things are probably best left in the storeroom, but some really need to be taken out a bit more often and polished-up and used.  But in doing so we always need to ask ourselves: What is the Church for which Jesus gave his life? 

There was a great video of the coronation of Pius XII (March 12, 1939) on the site.  It led me to a host of other old videos of the old days of prelates clad in silks and furs like Hollywood starlets or the San Francisco Gay Pride parade. (C’mon boys, even Cardinal Burke says that men should dress like men. Not that he practices what he preaches.) It is a reminder that to work on reinforcing our liturgy with elements both old and new is the work of wise stewards, but to build kingdoms other than the Kingdom of God is to make a mockery of the Cross.  

The Church That Francis Built

Pius XII--each pope in
his own papacy remakes
the Church 

There is no doubt that in two and a half years Pope Francis has effected a radical change in Catholicism—creating a very different Church than the one he inherited from his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.  The Franciscan Revolution has not yet been complete and its thoroughness will depend, to some extent, on how much longer Francis continues in the papal ministry, but once again the toothpaste is out of the tube and will not successfully be put back, at least in its entirety. 

The most notable change in this papacy is from an emphasis on objective moral norms to a much stronger personalist appreciation for the vagaries of human behavior, most particularly regarding human sexuality.  As practically every commentator has pointed out, Francis has not changed any Church teaching on sexual morality but his openness to encounter and willingness to dialogue with transgendered individuals, the divorced and remarried, people in same-sex relationships, has done far more than change a tone.  It has torn down the barriers that isolated non-conforming individuals from the larger Catholic community.  It has put sexual behavior in its proper context and not let it be any longer the overriding defining characteristic of a person’s moral quality.  Francis doesn’t claim that non-marital sexual relationships are not sins but he treats them like any other area of moral fracture and doesn’t impose some sort of Scarlet Letter on individuals who don’t measure up to our somewhat strict Catholic codes.  Consequently people once seemingly isolated from full participation in the life of the Christian community are finding the Church a comfortable spiritual home and learning to integrate themselves back into the community.  More and more are even taking responsibility for their spiritual integrity and deciding for themselves questions about whether their individual choices are indeed serious fractures in their relationship with God and how to handle their taking responsibility for their moral integrity vis a vis participating in the Eucharist and other sacraments.  There is nothing really new in this except for the scale on which it is proceeding.  Some individuals have long had that maturity and spiritual depth to plumb their own consciences and act accordingly, but it is now almost becoming normative.  This does drive some people of the old Scribe and Pharisee Club ‘round the bend however.  Always did.  Even back in the day when the disciples picked corn on the Sabbath.  But that is another story.

The second way in which the change is becoming effective is a move away from the triumphant style of recent years.  Towards the end of the reign of John Paul II there was a very notable shift in sartorial style in Vatican circles.  Cappae Magnae had not been seen in years but were suddenly popping up at all these “traditional” Pontifical Masses in the “Extraordinary Form.”  Silver buckles and violet and scarlet stockings began appearing on prelatial feet.  JPII kept his ox-blood loafers for everyday, but began wearing some vestments, especially copes, that were exceptionally beautiful but also quite different from the more simple style set by Paul VI and used by JPII himself in the first two thirds of his reign.  Then Benedict hit the scene with a fury that can only be compared to a confused six-year old allowed to raid his Gramma’s attic for dress-up.   I mean he was giving Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Grantham a run for her money in period costume.  I don’t mean to be unkind or demeaning but frankly, it was embarrassing.  It was certainly hard to explain to people who live in the everyday world.  And it was threatening to turn the Church into a bizarre fantasyland as the enthusiasm for vintage costuming trickled down through Bishops Burke and Finn and Slattery and Morlino et al to local clergy.  Francis’ return to the more simple style of vesture as well as his Ford Focus and apartment in the Vatican Guest House has set a standard of normalcy. 

I suppose there are other ways in which Francis has changed the Church.  One would certainly be the reduction of bureaucracy and the levels of transparency, especially in financial matters.  There is still a long way to go in these areas, but more progress has been made in these areas in the last two years than in the previous thirty-five.  Another is the move away from a juridical mentality where every canon and each liturgical rubric was noted and enforced.  Francis is not one for allowing his agenda to be snared by minor points.  Francis’ willingness to speak off the cuff is a huge difference from his predecessors and witnesses to his concern for the broad picture rather than sweating the small stuff.  His permitting free and open discussion at the Synod of Bishops witnesses to this same point.  And of course his willingness to take on the issues of the day—Climate Change, Income Inequality, Migrants—is notable.  His predecessors brought up these issues as well but always heavily veiled with abstractions.  Francis is very specific and concrete in his approach. 

We must remember however that the Church Francis inherited was not the Church as it came down from the Apostles.   John Paul II, along with Cardinal Ratzinger—later Pope Benedict XVI—had done much to create the Church as it stood on March 13, 2013.  It was not the Church John XXIII and Paul VI had left.  Francis’ predecessors re-centralized authority in the Roman Curia at the expense of the local bishops whom Christus Dominus at Vatican II recognized as heads of the local Churches.  Ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue had largely gone into a stall.  Liturgical development had taken an ugly turn with “The Reform of the Reform” and even worse with Ecclesia Dei and Summorum Pontificum.  There was a serious attempt to re-interpret the Second Vatican Council in a minimalist fashion.  In fact, much of what Francis has done, has been to restore the Church to the track envisioned at the Council. 

And John XXIII and Paul VI themselves had radically reshaped the Church that Pius XII had left at his death on October 9, 1958.  Few popes have had the opportunity to shape the Church in their papacy as had Pius XII.  His years as a diplomat gave him the skills to exploit the WWII period and the post-war period to extend papal control at the expense of local bishops and cathedral chapters as well as traditionally autonomous religious communities.  Resistance to Communism required the surrender of local independence to centralized Papal authority.  With henchmen like the American Francis Spellman, the French Maurice Feltin, British Bernard Griffin, and Spaniard Enrique Pla y Deniel Pius was able to control the Church throughout Western Europe and the Americas.  He was uncompromising with the Communist Regimes of Eastern Europe and Asia even though it meant the imprisonment and death of numerous bishops, priests, religious and faithful.   He created a political alliance with the United States government to check the spread of Communism, especially in Latin America and placed the resources of the Church at the disposal of the CIA in their joint efforts.  He was the most powerful pope since the 13^th century apex of papal power and, at least until is health problems began in 1954 was able to concentrate all power, curial and diplomatic, in his own hands.  His failing health and loss of ability to manage the Curia is in great part responsible for creating that behemoth that has plagued every pope since. 

We could go back further and see how Church has morphed to fit the vision of each Pope, some simplifying and others aggrandizing the Church and their own office.  But for this posting suffice it to say that while Pope Francis has done remarkable work, substantially he has done nothing other than what each of his predecessors has done in his reign. 

WHAT IF THERE HAD NEVER BEEN A VATICAN II?

What if Vatican II had never happened?  If there had been no Pope John XXIII?  If Cardinal Siri had been elected instead of Cardinal Roncalli?  Or Cardinal Agagianian?  Or Cardinal Lercaro?

“What if’s” are a tricky field.  But it would not have made much difference who succeeded to the papacy after Pius XII’s death in 1958.  In the 56 and one half years since Pius’ reign ended, there have been six popes on the throne of Saint Peter.  The extraordinarily long reign of John Paul II is balanced by the extraordinarily short reign of John Paul I and the moderately short reigns of John XXIII and Benedict XVI.  In any scenario there probably would have been between five and seven popes for those decades.  While the terms “liberal” or “progressive” would probably be defined somewhat more narrowly, the right end of the spectrum would be, I would think, somewhat the same as it is now and, without the unexpected developments in liturgy, ecumenism, the role of the laity, and other “fruits” of Vatican II, I don’t think there would be the rancor we experience today between the extremes on either end of the spectrum. 

There would have been change.  Not the degree of change that we experienced; but there would have been change.  As for the Liturgy I think we only need to look at the work that was being done in several of the German Abbeys such as Beuron and Maria Laach in the 1940’s and 50’s as well as the scholarship of men like Josef Jungmann and Louis Bouyer.  Changes began even before the Council.  Pius XII had shortened the communion fast and introduced restored rites for the Sacred Triduum at the end of Holy Week.  The Mass of Pius V would still be the foundation for the Roman Rite but I suspect that a certain amount of vernacular would have replaced the Latin, especially in the Liturgy of the Word.  I think too that vernacular chants such as were developed by musicians like Lucien Deiss and Joseph Gelineau would have been introduced.  Even dramatic Mass settings like the Congolese Missa Luba would probably have emerged and been used in culturally appropriate settings.  Laity would have been introduced to do the readings.  On the other hand, I don’t think the chalice would have been restored to the faithful, at least on any sort of ordinary basis and I doubt that Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist would have been introduced.  As I think the “vocation crisis” would still have happened, there may have been a restoration to laymen of the minor order of acolyte with permission for them to administer Holy Communion. 

While the majority of altars would still be turned so that the priest faces the apse of the Church during the celebration of Mass, the practice of positioning the altar so that the priest faces the congregation had already begun in Europe before the Council.  The practice of versus populum altars was particularly strong in Rome where Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X, in their restoration of countless Roman Churches to their ancient forms, had so situated altars in what in pre-baroque Rome was the typical position. At the Council when bishops from America and other outreaches of the Catholic world saw this they brought the practice home, but altars that “faced the people” were not only common in Rome but not unknown in Germany and France with the Liturgical Renewal of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. 

There would be no outreach to those of other Christian denominations or to those of non-Christian religions.  We would be instructed to be courteous to all, but any sort of collaboration in either mission or worship would be totally out of the question except perhaps charitable work in times of critical need. 

The distinctiveness of our Liturgy, the peculiarities of our practices (such as no meat on Fridays and other days of fast), the prohibition of social contact with our non-Catholic neighbors (where we could not be in their weddings nor they in ours, or even our being forbidden to attend weddings and funerals involving a non-Catholic service) and the strong barriers against mixed marriages would have led to a great deal of isolation for Catholics that in America and would have created considerable social difficulties.  I suspect that there would have been considerable defections to liberal Protestant groups, especially those with a liturgy similar to ours such as Episcopalians and Lutherans, and that even more Catholics would simply not practice their faith.  John Kennedy could probably not have been elected president in 1960 and there would be few Catholics in public office.  The secularization of the culture might initially have been slowed down a bit if the Church had itself resisted inculturalization, but it would have happened none the less and probably over the decades picked up even more speed than it has.   Those families and individuals who remained practicing Catholics would have a stronger sense of Catholic identity simply because they would be so clearly differentiated from mainstream American families. While I think we would still have our automobiles and even our televisions (for select programming) Catholics would be a lot like the Amish in terms of a closed community.  Such Catholic families would still be happy to see a son or a daughter give themselves to the Church in a vocation and the number might be there to serve those remaining active in the practice of the faith but as the community of the active faithful would be so much smaller, I think too the number of priests and sisters would never reach the numbers of the early 1960’s. 

Without the Council and its program of adapting the liturgy and the catechesis of the faith to local cultures the missionary activity of Asia and especially of Africa would probably not have been nearly as successful as it is. The revitalization of the Church in Latin America would probably not have happened either.  Remaining a European Church culturally would mean that the majority of Catholics would still be in the Northern hemisphere.  It would be a much smaller Church but a more distinct and even, perhaps, a more energetic church internally.  It influence on the world outside its own isolation, however, would be negligible.  The Pope would probably be a sort of Christian Dalai Lama, admired for his compassion and piety—even, perhaps with a good pope, for his wisdom—but with little or no impact on the world and its challenges.