Papal Resignations! IX

Blessed John Henry Newman

As you notice, I very rarely post comments but I often try to respond to them in topics I choose for blogs.  Recently I had several inquiries as to how I view the magisterium if I think that certain Church teachings regarding contraception, same-sex relationships, divorce/’remarriage, in vitro fertilization along with other subjects such as sharing the Eucharist with non-Catholics, clerical celibacy, and women’s ordination need to be discussed openly and honestly at every level of the Church.  The implication of the questions is that once something is defined by the magisterium it cannot be changed.
Well, remember this is a historical blog.  I don’t deal with theology qua theology—only with the history of the Church, and at times the history of the development of theological teachings in the Church.  And—remember this too—my consideration of history is not only about the past but also about what light the past sheds on the present and what opportunities for the future the past reveals to us.  People who limit the study of history to the past and don’t consider the past as metaphor that permits us to speak of the present and the future are not historians, they are antiquarians.   The Church has far too many antiquarians, including whoever it is that has been dressing Pope Benedict up in the left-over glad rags of past centuries.  Nevertheless, I am not anxious to go there in this posting. 
The past shows us that the magisterium, including infallible statements, are not irreformable.  Pius XI condemned the Ecumenical Movement in his 1928 Encyclical Mortalium Animos which was completely overturned by the Decrees Unitatis Reintegratio, Nostrae Aetate, and Dignitatis Humanae at the Second Vatican Council.  Remember it was an encyclical that was overturned—the same medium through which Pius XI condemned contraception in Casti Connubi (1928) and Paul VI extended the condemnation to the use of “the Pill” in his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae.  This teaching is considered to be infallible; the condemnation of ecumenism was once so thought also. 
In the 1302 Bull, Unam Sanctam, Pope Boniface VIII wrote: Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.   
The Church has long moved away from such doctrine—long before Vatican II—but certainly Nostrae Aetate with its positive comments on non-Christian religions and the Divine truths they reflect is more than a repudiation of Boniface’s teaching, it is a contradiction. 
Mortalium Animos and Unam Santam reflect teachings once considered infallible.  On a lesser level, in the 1930’s Pius XI refused a petition from the bishops of France to declare Saint Thérèse of Lisieux a Doctor of the Church on the grounds sexus obstat: her sex (female) was a barrier to such a position.  Hmmm.  That argument is used today in a different context. Some forty years later Paul VI named the first two women as Doctors of the Church—Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena.  John Paul would name Thérèse to that honor in 1997.  Theologians can argue about the ability of the Church to alter doctrine but historians view it from a different perspective, unencumbered by an agenda of apologetics.
What I wrote is that the Church needs to have honest conversation on a wide variety of issues.  The faith of the Church is not solely the teaching of the magisterium—it is the deposit of doctrine and it is the faith held by the faithful, that is by the Church which is not limited to the hierarchy but comprises the community of the baptized.  The Deposit of Doctrine, or the corpus of Tradition, is the province of the theologians who have studied the doctrines along with their roots in Divine Revelation and their historical development through the centuries.  The consensus fidelium—the consensus of the faithful—is the living faith as held and understood (using that term as held intuitively rather than as intellectually fathomed) in the hearts of the baptized.  History shows us, as Blessed John Henry Newman explained so well in his essay On Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine, that magisterium, theologians, and faithful must work in tandem for doctrines to take hold.  The current dissensions among the hierarchy, the theologians, and the faithful indicate to the historian that this is not yet an opportune time to state the teaching of the Church on a wide variety of issues.  But we cannot afford to come to a standstill, thus conversations are necessary to reach that single voice proceeding from a single heart.
Such conversations will not be easy and such accord will not be quick.  We Americans and Western Europeans have a tradition of imperialistic arrogance that we know better than our “little brown brothers” of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Rim.  We are shocked that they do not see questions about the role of women or about human sexuality from the same perspectives that we do and we think that they are backward for viewing these issues differently.  We are, I suppose, as entitled to our prejudices regarding them as they are theirs regarding women and gays.  Or, maybe we are no more entitled to our prejudices than they are to theirs.  But in any case an honest and frank discussion in a universal Church will not come to easy resolutions, nor will all be pleased with the outcomes, but we need to undertake the process nevertheless.  We can see the chaos which has befallen the Anglican Communion when the Churches of the North have moved unilaterally in directions in which the Churches of the South are unprepared to go. But the alternative is not to stay stuck and go nowhere.  If we believe that the Holy Spirit is here to guide the Church, we need to trust that Spirit and begin the process.             

Disappointed Dreams

John XXIII convoking the Second

Vatican Council, Basilica of Saint

Paul outside the Walls, January 25,

1959

55 years ago today Pope John XXIII made the surprise announcement that he was convoking the Second Vatican Council.  People had long presumed that with the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870’s, councils were redundant—there was no need for a Council when the pope “could do it all.”  But John had other things in mind—a veritable revolution in Catholicism that would throw off four centuries of fossilized and moribund stagnation that had locked Catholicism into an anachronistic curiosity that was no longer a credible witness of the Gospel with which its Master had entrusted it to proclaim. 
I wonder what Good Pope John would think today as he looks from heaven on the wreckage of his Council.  While John certainly had no idea—or intention—that the Council would make such radical changes as it did to the liturgy, he had great hopes for how it would alter its relationship to the world around it—and in particular how it would work to restore the unity of Christendom to that there might be one flock and one Shepherd.  (Notice the capital “S” in the word shepherd—denoting that Christ is that one shepherd.)   After such a good beginning at the Council and for sometime afterward, we have allowed the ecumenical movement to become a train wreck. 
Some are inclined to blame this fiasco on the decision of various Reformed and Evangelical Churches to ordain women.  (Notice, I am using the term “Churches,” something the Vatican eschews in favor of the insulting “ecclesial communities.”)   Others do not see how we can maintain an open dialogue with Christian Churches that do not share our views on abortion or on same-sex relationships.  But we Catholics have taken disagreement and chosen to make it disagreeable.  We have all but retrenched into the “unconditional surrender” approach to ecumenism of Pius XI and Mortalium Animos which the Council had so dramatically overturned.
On this feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul let us ask Christ to send the Holy Spirit to bend our stubborn hearts and will, to melt the frozen, and warm the chill that the work of this Council may revive and that the Church may be given shepherds who never lose sight that the flock is Christ’s and not theirs. 

Vatican II--A Radical Break With the Past

Plaque marking the 1986 interfaith

gathering in Assisi hosted by Pope

John Paul II

As we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Council, I want to make some comments on the Robert Blair Kaiser lecture I posted on October 19^th .  In particular I want to address the issue of whether the Council represents a “hermeneutic of continuity” as some claim; “a hermeneutic of rupture” as others claim, or the “hermeneutic of reform” as Benedict XVI has now picked up.  In other words—does the Council mark a sharp departure, even a reversal, with the past?  Are the teaching of the Council consistent with the teachings of the Church before the Council?  Or have the teachings of the Church been “reformed” (reformulated?) as part of the “development of doctrine” that is part of the evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) expansion of human understanding of Divine Truth?  Let’s look at one area that clearly was revolutionary, Ecumenism and Interfaith Religious Dialogue: 

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 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.

I recently gave a talk at an adult education program in a bustling suburban parish.  As I looked out at my audience before speaking I suddenly had a chilling awareness.  “How many of you were born after 1962, the year the Council opened?” I asked my audience.  Four-fifths of the audience raised their hands.  Today most Catholics have no idea of what life was like before Vatican II.  I am old enough to remember the world before the Council.  I can rattle off the old “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum” of the days when altar boys were altar boys and could rightfully swagger about the sanctuary, proud of the immense amount of nonsense syllabus they had committed to memory.  And I remember when to enter a Protestant Church was considered seriously sinful and when the Jews were annually called “perfidious” in the Liturgy.  (Oremus et pro perfidis Iudæis…. Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui etiam iudaicam perfidiam a tua misericordia non repellis…)  The Catholic Church had established a long policy condemning the ecumenical movement—or rather claiming that authentic ecumenism was that all schismatics (the Eastern Churches) and heretics (The Protestant Denominations) should “return” to the Papal Catholic fold.  Any prayer with such schismatics or heretics—so much as saying the Lord’s Prayer together—was forbidden as mortally sinful.  Rome had been horrified with American participation in the 1893 World Parliament of Religions held at Chicago’s Columbian Exhibition (see entry for March 30, 2011).  Pius XI had been outraged at Cardinal Mericer’s “Malines Conversations” with the Anglicans in the years after World War I even though Mercier—Archbishop of Brussels in Belgium had had the permission of Pius’s Predecessor, Benedict XV for the dialogues.  Pius XI issued an encyclical condemning ecumenism, Mortalium Animos, in 1928 and through the reign of Pius XII any ecumenical activity was strictly prohibited.  When John XXIII announced the Council in January 1959 and explicitly declared that one aim of the Council was heal the breach in Christianity represented by the East-West Schism of 1054 and the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was radical news.  For these religious bodies to be invited to send official delegations to the Council and the warmth with which these delegations were received would have been unimaginable only four years previous.   And when the Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Reintegratio) and the Decree on Non-Christian religions were published (1964 and 1965 respectively), the book had to be rewritten from beginning to end.  No, on ecumenism and interfaith dialogue the hermeneutic is certainly not “continuity” and not even “reform”—in fact not even “reform” but an entirely new beginning.