Troubled Seas Ahead For The Barque of Peter?

I love it, but not everybody's happy 

I have been concerned about the probability of a schism in the American Church for over thirty-five years.  While the first ten years or so after the Council seemed to shine favorably on a unified Church moving to implement the conciliar decrees, cracks started appearing somewhat late in the pontificate of Paul VI.  There certainly was tremendous disappointment on the left with Humanae Vitae, but that didn’t show any fissures in the fabric of the Church.  Yes there were people—including many priests—who voiced their dissent to the Pope’s conclusions and it did turn out to be the first warning shot across the progressive bow that all might not go as the liberals had hoped for in John XXIII’s aggiornamento. There were priests suspended for refusing to support the encyclical and there were many angry married Catholics who had been looking for an acceptable solution to the challenges of family planning,  but no one was talking about leaving the Church for some alternative Catholicism. But then the revised liturgy of the 1970 Missal—the Novus Ordo Missae—became as significant an issue for conservatives as Humanae Vitae had been for the left, but again no one, at least in a serious and credible position, was talking about leaving the Church or creating a parallel Catholicism.  In 1970, the year that Paul VI promulgated the new rites,  a French bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, who had also served as the General Superior of the Spiritans (Holy Ghosts Fathers), organized a “pious union” of priests and seminarians to maintain the traditional doctrines and liturgy which Lefebvre saw as under attack by the very sort of “modernist” theologians and clergy that Pius X had condemned in the 1907 decree Lamentabili Sane Exitu, and Encyclical of the same year, Pascendi Domini Gregis.  Nevertheless, Lefebvre had confidence in the Church that it would regain its even keel and not abandon its historic orthodoxy.

Lefebvre had had several reservations about the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, in particular Nostra Aetate (on non-Christian religions), Unitatis Reintegratio (Christian Ecumenism), and Dignitatis Humanae (the right of religious freedom).  While he voted against these decrees, he did sign them once they had passed.  He seems to have later regretted this choice but he also seems honestly to have believed that the Holy Spirit was guiding the Church and would right the course as time went on.  This was not an unreasonable hope as Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI did significantly change the ways in which several of the Conciliar decrees have been interpreted at the time of the Council and by the Council Fathers, though not to the extent that Archbishop Lefebvre would have had it. 

Let me say—in the interest of full disclosure—that my own opinion is that despite all the talk about a “hermeneutic of continuity” several of the Conciliar decrees—including the three above named—represent a break with the previous magisterium.  I personally don’t think that is a bad thing, but I do believe to claim some sort of magisterial continuity on the questions of religious freedom, ecumenism, and inter-religious dialogue is nothing less than just downright duplicitous. 

There were some who from the beginning saw this break in continuity. A seminary dropout from Seattle, Francis Schuckhardt, who was very active in the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima—a very conservative association of people in the Catholic Church, though one safely within the bounds of Catholic magisterial authority—was convinced that the Council was heretical and went around the United States warning Catholics of what he perceived to be the "heresies" found in the Conciliar documents.  Schuckhardt built a following and founded a religious community of priest, brothers, and sisters called the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen.  He had the canonical permission of the Bishop of Boise—in whose diocese he lived at the time—to establish this new community. (Ironically this permission was the sort of freedom given to Bishops after the Second Vatican Council to establish such communities ad experimentum.) Remember that at this point, Schuckhardt was a layman. About the same time he established his new religious order,  Francis Schuckhardt  became convinced that Paul VI was a heretic and that Vatican II was a “false Council.”  He claimed that a heretic could not hold the papal office and that when a pope went into heresy, he was automatically deprived of his office.  This stance separated him from the Catholic Church.  Schuckhardt would go on to get himself ordained priest and then consecrated a bishop by Daniel Q. Brown who himself was a layman and had been ordained and consecrated by Hubert Rogers, an “Old Catholic” bishop whose orders trace back to the Union of Utrecht and through them to the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands that went into schism with the 1723 illicit episcopal consecration of Cornelius van Steenoven.  (I don’t want to go too far down this path or we will get sidetracked from our main focus—but I do promise to return at some future point about the Old Catholic Successions and Schisms.  It is sort of an ecclesiastical version of a Chinese Fire Drill.)  Suffice it now to say that Schuckhardt stood in a historic apostolic succession.  I personally won’t say “valid” though most Catholics would.  My reservations are twofold.  First I am not sure what “valid” means when we talk about sacraments; I think that it implies our imposing some degree of objectivity that permits us to tie God’s hands.  Remember, I am a historian and not a theologian, but I think the “valid” thing has somewhat expired as an effective argument and we need a new category to understand the sacraments and the way they work.  Just saying; again I am not a theologian.  Secondly, while matter and form may have been there in these ordinations—and intention to pass on the apostolic succession in the office of priest or bishop (depending on to which office the candidate is being ordained)—when a “sacrament” is celebrated with the intention of fracturing the unity of the Church…. Well, I just wonder.  Again, not a theologian but I think the theologians need to do some remodeling of the arguments here.  Just saying.  

Over the decades since Schuckardt’s renouncing the papacy as sede vacante, that is there being no (valid) sitting pope, sede vacantism has spread among the ultra-kooks in the katholic korral.  Some groups like Schuckhardt’s Congregation of Mary Immaculate or a particularly peculiar group (of 2 monks with a handful of followers) known as Holy Family Monastery in Fillmore NY, or Bishop Daniel Dolan (a Lefebvrist run-away) claim that because Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and now Francis were "heretics," there is no true pope and the see is empty (sede vacante).  Some sede-vacantists push the claim of heresy/invalidity back to include John XXIII.  There are also small groups known as “conclavists” who have decided to fill this supposedly vacant papal office by having conclaves to elect a new pope. A Kansas whack-job named David Bawden, aka “Pope Michael” who was elected “Pope” in 1990 by a conclave of six people (including his mother and father) to fill the chair of Peter left vacant by the aforementioned heretical popes, has a few dozen followers.  Bawden is not the only person who claimed a conclave to elect him pope to fill the empty seat.  The late Lucien Pulvermacher, a former Capuchin Franciscan friar disgruntled with Vatican II, was elected in the ballroom of a rural Montana hotel in 1998 and took the name Pius XIII.  (Some votes were phoned in, a progressive move way beyond the official Catholic Church.)  There are several other conclavist claimants in Europe and South America.  I had a maiden grandaunt who thought she was Empress of Austria. This sort of thing happens even in good families. 

All these various groups—the Congregation of Mary Immaculate People, the Holy Family Monastery folk, the Pope-in-Kansas crowd don’t add up to much over a thousand people.  Even the Lefebvrist faction, the Society of Saint Pius X, are really not a force to be contended with seriously, having perhaps 20,000 followers in the United States and perhaps another 30,000 worldwide. With Pope Francis in the Chair of Peter, the left seems mollified.  Actually they seem delighted as many felt they were being edged out of the Church in the previous two papacies. (Indeed there were a small number of people who went into groups that formally rejected Church authority such as Spiritus Christi Church or Holy Wisdom Monastery or the Catholic Church of the Beatitudes in Santa Barbara, and a much larger number—in the hundreds of thousands who joined Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist and other congregations because they had grown disillusioned with a Catholicism they perceived as having backed away from the Second Vatican Council.)  But after the pax benedictina there are grumblings on the right again as there were in the days of Paul VI.  Will it come to schism?  I would think probably not in the formal sense of a mass movement to an alternative Catholicism, but marginal groups like the Society of Saint Pius X and the more moderate schismatic networks that maintain the old rite and the old catechism will probably draw several thousand of the more neo-traditionalist crowd that find Francis’s directions increasingly troubling.  If Pope Francis makes any move limiting the pre-conciliar rites, or permits local bishops to suppress the TLM, that number would be considerably higher though there are probably less that 200,000 American Catholics who regularly attend the Tridentine Mass.  A more serious threat would be any significant change on the status of the divorced and remarried.  That would be a huge opportunity for the sede vacante groups which I would not be surprised to see triple in size—or even more. 

I plan to continue this question of the growing tension between the Catholic Right and the Catholic Left in a few more postings and in particular to look at how Pope Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI laid the groundwork—unwittingly—for the divide

Is Vatican II in Danger?-- III a closer look behind the scenes

Yesterday we spoke of how the ecumenical and inter-faith agenda of Vatican II has fared in the years since the Council. It might be important to clarify our terms. “Ecumenical” refers to relationships among Christian groups. “Inter-faith” refers to relationships among religious groups that do not share faith in Christ, or relationships between Christians and non-Christian religions. Thus Catholic-Presbyterian dialogues over worship, for example, would be Ecumenical. Catholic-Buddhist or Catholic-Jewish (or Muslim , Hindu etc.) dialogues or collaborative charities, or other efforts would be “Inter-faith.” We obviously have much more in common with other groups that profess faith in Jesus Christ as Son of God and Savior than we do with groups that may recognize him as a Prophet (Islam) or a Holy Man (Hinduism) or who see him as simply a historical or mythological figure. There is therefore a sort of hierarchy of relationships. We have more in common with Jews, for example, than other non-Christian religions as we see that we share with them the Revelation of the Law and the Prophets given to the People of Israel. We share with Jews—and Muslims—the Abrahamic faith in the One God which gives us a closer tie with Islam than with the non-Abrahamic faiths. But while we do not share the faith in the One God revealed to Abraham with Buddhists or Hindus or others there is much truth in the wide spectrum of Asian religions—and indeed many of the indigenous religions of the world and at Vatican II the Catholic Church explicitly acknowledges this truth and affirms that we Catholics do not reject any element of this truth. The Council Fathers declared
The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. (NA para2)
This statement is a bone of contention for many who reject—in whole or in part—the Second Vatican Council. In fact there are three decrees of the Council which are extremely contentious—and I am not counting the decree on the Liturgy among them. That is an entirely separate issue and not nearly as divisive—though it has been divisive enough—as the three I will mention. They are the Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Reintegratio), the Decree on Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate), and the Decree on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae). Opponents of the Council claim that these decrees represent a total reversal of the Church’s doctrine from before Council. And they are correct. The second Vatican Council did a 180 degree about-face on what the Catholic Church had taught on Ecumenism, Non-Christian Religions, and Religious Liberty. Some of the opponents of the Council have gone so far as to claim that this reversal, as a rejection of previously defined magisterial teaching, is heresy and therefore the “popes” who have supported it (John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and now Benedict XVI) are—as heretics—barred from the papal office and that the Chair of Peter is and has been since the Council began—empty. They are called “sede-vacantists” which comes from the Latin for “empty chair” (sede vacante). They reject all and everything about the Second Vatican Council.
A slightly less extremist position are the followers of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. While they are known mostly for their rejection of the new Liturgy, the Archbishop’s major complaint about the Council was the same complaint of the sede-vacantists, namely that the those three conciliar documents represent a repudiation of doctrines taught by the Popes and Councils and held by the faithful before the Second Vatican Council. Particularly troubling to Archbishop Lefebvre was the Document on Religious Liberty. Lefebvre came from a family whose political (and religious) ties were to a faction in French politics that are dedicated to restoring the Monarchy and reversing the French Revolution. Ever since the nineteenth century there has been a small but dedicated ultra-Catholic faction in France that seeks to establish the ancien regime with its alliance of Throne and Altar. Americans are generally not aware of this but the Catholic Church taught—up until the Second Vatican Council—that the Union of (the Catholic) Church and State was the political ideal and that Catholics had a duty towards political action that would establish the Catholic Church as the official State Religion—with restrictions on and even prohibition of other religious groups—in whatever nation they lived. This doctrine was generally overlooked in the United States as it was on conflict with our Constitution but there are some extreme right-wing Catholics—mostly in the Sede Vacantist group—who do still teach it today. Solange Hertz would be one; Atila Sinke Guimarães is another. This school not only represents a renunciation of the Second Vatican Council, but of Western culture since the Enlightenment with its positive values (I for one do not think all the values of the Enlightenment are positive) of equality of persons under law, freedom of conscience, republican government and other elements that provided the founders of our nation with the foundational principles of the American Revolution and Constitution. We will touch on this topic in future blogs when we treat some of the reasons for Anti-Catholicism in American history. Those voices who, especially in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, claimed that Catholics could not be good Americans actually knew Church teaching better than most American Catholics who did not see a conflict between their Church and their loyalty to the United States—but all that is for the future.
While the Holy See does not take the Sede-Vacantists seriously—and for the most part they, like Mrs. Hertz and her friends—are people who have constructed a bit of psychotic bubble, a universe of alternative realities, both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have made serious overtures to the Lefebvrist camp. Indeed Pope Benedict has lifted the excommunication and received them back into the Church without clearing up the Lefebvrist dissent from the Council. This is problematic for a variety of reasons. First it legitimizes dissent from official Church teaching. Secondly it may require revisiting the Council and its decrees to try to find ways to accommodate the Lefebvrists. This may explain one of the reasons for a reinterpretation—usually claimed to be an “authentic interpretation” of the Conciliar Documents. If this is so it will open yet more issues for while the Lefebvrists are willing to tolerate the existence of the “new liturgy” as long as they don’t have to use it, they are quite firm on rejecting the doctrinal changes that have permitted Ecumenical and Inter-faith relationships to develop on any official level.
When one recalls the heady enthusiasm of the Coinciliar years, Ecumenism has been for the most part hugely disappointing. I don’t think that any of us expected that Inter-religious dialogue would progress beyond the point of mutual respect and collaboration in projects that better the lives of people both locally and around the globe. It still has the promise to do that and in the process we have learned about some common ground that has been mutually beneficial. This has not been without controversy, however, particularly in the area of the influence of Buddhist and Hindu meditation techniques. But we had great hopes for Ecumenism during and after the Council. Forty years ago many of us thought that by this time we would have come to the point of, if not corporate reunion, at least sacramental sharing. There are reasons why this has not happened and not all the blame goes on the Catholic side. As I had written previously, the decision by most Protestant and Anglican Churches in the favor of the ordination of women has been a huge stumbling block . Underneath the surface is also a very different theology of human sexuality, manifest not only in divergent views of homosexuality but in the role of sex in marriage. There is also a different anthropology that gives a different level of urgency to the abortion issue as well as questions of embryonic stem-cells, in-vitro fertilization, genetic engineering and other topics very pertinent to today’s world. But our mistake, I believe, in not making greater progress while there was still much consensus on these other issues, was that we did not talk frankly and openly about our different ecclesiologies and theologies of the Sacrament of Orders. We avoided the tough questions where feelings are sensitive. Now we have several more tough and sensitive questions and it will be all the more difficult to resolve them. Far from backing off from Ecumenical dialogues we need to sit down, indeed chain ourselves to the table, and examine all the neuralgic points in full detail, ready on both sides (or all sides) to listen and open to being convinced (note, I said open, not predetermined). We still need the polite gestures and cordial ceremonial gatherings but we also need “to talk turkey.” Reconciliation will never come about without honest, truthful, frank, conversation, indeed argument. Somewhere here I have passed from history-in-the-making to theological turf where I have sworn not to go, so better to end this here. Next installment of Vatican II—in Danger? will be on the liturgy but probably not for a few days. I want to cover the issues of the nuns on the battlefields of the Civil War first.

The image today is a Buddhist monk with some Catholic Sisters at the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 2003