The Roots of the Conflict

Saint Ambrose

Back in the day Conservative Blog Rorate Caeli often had some postings worth the time to read.  That was before they brought on Richard Cippola and Peter Kwasniewski and Benedict Constable as “contributors” and level of rational analysis and critical thinking nose-dived. I like to read things that make me think and re-think my positions—especially if they contain new information I had not previously considered.  Rare to find that, however, these days on Rorate Cael which is usually as insightful as yesterday’s toast. However, I did see a posting last week entitled “The Condemnation of Action Française and the Birth of Vatican II” and was excited to read it.  The title held some possibility that it might be a significant article, or at least give me some more background on the current ever-widening schism between those of us who embrace the Council and those who reject it.  Unfortunately, I ear-marked it for later and by the time I got back to it, it had been taken down. 

Action Française was a Catholic right-wing political movement in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century France.  It was monarchist and it was deeply anti-Semitic, playing a significant role in the infamous Dreyfus affair. (The family of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre were tied to Action Française.)    The Third French Republic, The French government from the end of the Franco-Prussian War until France’s collapse in the face of Nazi expansion in 1940, was plagued by a lack of social cohesion that polarized French society and Action Française offered an agenda of national unity rooted in France’s historical Catholic culture.  This was opposed—and successfully—by the secularists on the Government’s political left but the rightists were able to offer an effective resistance to the much of the more extreme program of the left, or at least to block some of their proposed anti-clerical legislation. However not all in the Church were willing to sell their Catholicity to Action Française. In 1927 Action Française members were officially denied the sacraments and two years later Pope Pius XI condemned the movement in an effort for rapprochement with the secularist government. The Pope felt that certain right-wing politicians were using the Church for their own political ends rather than acting in good faith.  (The condemnation was lifted by Pius XII at the beginning of the Second World War.) 

The nouvelle théolgie was a movement among theologians—mostly French but also Belgian, Dutch, and Germans—that began about the same time as Action Française fell into disrepute with the Church. The liturgical renewal (some would call it a “revolution”) being born in the Abbeys of Maria Laach, Chevetogne, and Beuron was developing simultaneously as scholars began to study the ancient liturgical texts and better understand the relationship between Patristic theology and pre-13^th century rites. The nouvelle théolgie movement was a reaction against the neo-Thomism promoted by Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris that was so foreign to the ways the Church of the first millennium expressed its faith. Advocates of the nouvelle théolgie looked not to Saint Thomas Aquinas for their theological models but to the older Tradition, to the Fathers of the Church. 

Let me back up for a moment.  From the sub-Apostolic age (approximately 100AD until “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance” the theological foundations of our Catholic faith were set out by a series of bishops and theologians collectively referred to as “The Fathers of the Church.”  The earliest of these is probably Ignatius of Antioch, the final father is Saint Bernard of Claivaux.  The list includes Iranaeus of Lyons, Ambrose, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory  Nazianzus,  and several dozen other early writers of the Eastern and Western Churches.  These “Fathers” all expressed their teachings in neo-Platonic philosophical terms because in both the Eastern and the Western Christian worlds the dominant way of thinking was neo-Platonism. Neo-Platonism was a “take” on Plato as he was understood and interpreted by Plotinus, a third century philosopher from Greek Egypt.  His philosophy shaped the way people in the Mediterranean world thought and expressed themselves for almost a thousand years.

In the 12^th century, mostly through contact with the world of Arab Philosophy, the West rediscovered Aristotle.  Aristotle had been a disciple of Plato in ancient Athens, but developed his own philosophical methods which depended on logical syllogisms.  Aristotle’s works had been lost in the Western world for centuries but were rediscovered by Arab philosophers in the tenth and eleventh century.  Most prominent among these philosophers was Ibn Sīnā  (or, as we in the West call him, Avicenna).   The cultural exchanges between Islam and the West in the 11^th and 12^th century led to Catholic philosophers becoming very excited about this new way of thinking.  Early Aristotelian thinkers like Peter Abelard were condemned by the Church, but Saint Thomas Aquinas successfully reinterpreted the teachings of the Fathers in this new Aristotelian method and it eventually won the favor of the hierarchy.   Gradually from the thirteenth through the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church abandoned the old neo-Platonic thought and replaced it with Aristotelian, or more commonly called today, Scholastic thought.  In the process, however, Catholic theologians depended less and less on the Fathers of the Church, replacing them with Saint Thomas and his disciples. It proved to be a serious disruption in Catholic intellectual life as the Fathers retreated (or were shoved) off to the sidelines of Catholic thought.

 In the mid-twentieth century advocates of the nouvelle théolgie urged a return to the Fathers as the basis of theological reflection.  An entire generation of theologians: Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Louis Bouyer, and Jean Daniélou embraced the new methodology.  Several of them suffered at the hands of the Holy Office (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and previously known as the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition) under the indomitable Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani because of their abandonment of neo-Scholasticism but the new way of thinking was to prevail.  These were the men who shaped the thought of the Second Vatican Council.

A challenge has arisen in as much as the Councils of Trent and Vatican I drew on the neo-Scholastic way of thinking whereas Vatican II is shaped by the Patristic heritage.  The ideas of each sound strange, even heretical, to the other.  The neatly packaged syllogisms of Scholastic Theology are clear and precise but lack the mystical depth of the Patristic Tradition.  The theology of the nouvelle théolgie writers is not nearly as sharply delineated and narrowly defined as the work of the Neo-Scholastics but have the antiquity of Tradition to their defense.  As a result the Church has lost the intellectual cohesion of the pre-Conciliar days.  Some of us can live with that ambiguity; others struggle.  Much of the conflict in the Church today is rooted in this theological diversity. 

By George 3

George Weigel

Let me come back to George Weigel’s book Evangelical Catholicism.  I had begun to discuss this in a number of earlier entries (November 19, 20, and 22^nd 2013). To recap, Weigel credits contemporary Catholicism as finding its roots in the vision of Pope Leo XIII, a pope who very much—in his day—engaged the (then) modern world and its questions and issues.  And, appropriate to his ministry, Leo brought the rich theological heritage of our Catholic faith into the dialogue.  Leo is probably best remembered for his startling encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which for its day was every bit as “radical” as the recent papal letter, Evangelii Gaudium.  I think Weigel fudges his history a bit—or rather paints the picture with strokes so broad as to be inaccurate in some details—but I think he is on to something in his thesis.  (My objections would center mostly in that I don’t see Pius X and his pontificate as standing in continuity with Leo (his predecessor) or with Benedict XV and Pius XI, his successors.  But I am willing to let the point pass.)   I am very much taken, however, by Weigel’s vision of an Evangelical Catholicism that anchors Catholic life in taking the Word of God to bear in our daily lives and nourishing ourselves by fully participating in the sacramental life of the Church.  Indeed, I think it was this immersion in Word and Sacrament that gave us the Second Vatican Council and especially its Liturgy.  The spiritual energy of places like Maria Laach and Beuron Abbey, Saint Séverin in Paris and Combermere in Ontario, the witness of people like Edith Stein and Dorothy Day and the Dominican friar Jacques Loew, and the scholarship of Josef Jungmann, Augustin Bea, and Marie-Dominique Chenu all reflect this spirituality of Word and Sacrament and all provided the resources from which the Council Fathers were able to imagine a new and renewed Church  that could project in our day and in our world the enthusiasm with which the Apostles propagated the Gospel in theirs. 
At the same time that this tremendous energy was flooding the Church, the world around the Church—or at least the European and American worlds—were falling into a post-Christian culture that would present the Church with an incredible challenge but one which we could meet strengthened by these resources of revived engagement with the Word of God and Sacramental Life.  The problems that prompted Leo to write Rerum Novarum—the sordid view of the Robber Baron Capitalists that the human person is no more than a tool to be used to make money—threated industrial societies with the grossest dehumanization.  Nihilism, the cynical philosophical system that swept away any idea of a moral compass by which the industrialists, the wealthy classes, and the State should be governed in their relationship with the masses, devoured whatever soul remained in Western society after the rise of secularism consequent to the “Enlightenment” and the Revolution it spawned.  The emergence of Leninism/Stalinism in Russia and its devaluation of the human individual in favor of the State as well as the rise of National Socialism with its dehumanization of the individual and its repugnant racial ideology were the results of this collapse of humanistic thought. 
In the face of this implosion of civilization, Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular had the resources to provide an alternative view in which the human person retained his or her worth as a being and not dependent on the usefulness of the individual  to society or to the state.  Catholic philosophers such as Paul Claudel, Etienne Gilson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,  and Gabriel Marcel presented philosophies in which the human person, far from being a tool of the State or having no intrinsic value, is the raison d’etre of being, the very center of existence for whose sake and good interest society exists. 
The philosophic debate is not over.  In the post-World War II period, secularism has espoused and advanced a philosophy in which there is no concept of the common good but in which ethics are guided by self-interest of the individual.  The impact of Ayn Rand, the doyenne of this school of radical self-interest, has transformed American society (and not, to my mind, for the better.)   American society today would seem to recognize no good that trumps the self-interest of the individual.  We are left with a “trickle-down economics” that sees the gap between a rich minority and an ever-poorer and growing majority increasing by the year. In 2009, the average salary of a CEO was 263 times that of the average American worker, a situation every bit as evil as that against which Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum.  Americans are obsessed with alleged personal rights whether it is the right to possess firearms or the right to have an abortion.  We find our chief form of entertainment in the vicarious disposal of human life through media ranging from movies through television to video games for youth and consider this to be our “right.”  We perceive pornography—whether sexual or violence—to be a “victimless crime.”  The family is in shreds because “I don’t want to be married anymore” is sufficient cause—again the triumph of the selfish individual—to overturn commitments of marriage and parenthood.  Both “the left” and “the right” have bought into this heresy of “it’s all about me and my happiness.”
The antidote to this moral chaos is Weigel’s Evangelical Catholicism.  It is a revived commitment to a scriptural spirituality in which, as one medieval spiritual text explains:  Let the Sword of the Spirit, that is the Word of God, dwell in your minds and in your hearts that all that you do may be done in the Word of the Lord. What has been the genius of evangelical voices throughout the history of Christianity has been this call to “hear the Word of God and put it into practice.” (cf Luke 11:28).  
The error that I see Weigel making is not in his vision of Evangelical Christianity but in his understanding of how it is to be presented.  He sees it as a bastion against the philosophical/moral chaos of post-modern society.  He wants Christians to use their clout to contain and suppress this modern heresy of an “ethics” of self-interest.  He falls into the same error our bishops have fallen into these past thirty some years since Roe vs. Wade: change laws and everything will be alright.    But if Weigel knew the scriptures himself he would know that the mission God gave to the prophets and Jesus gave to his disciples is to change hearts.  It is a far more challenging mission to change hearts than to change laws, but it is the only path that will bring success.  I am all in favor of Evangelical Catholicism but it must be, well, evangelical—you know—evangelizing. 
I remember thirty years ago I was part of a committee a young priest was trying for form in our parish.  It was an evangelism committee—an attempt to evangelize our neighborhood in which many had fallen away from the faith and even more had never had it.  At the end of the organizational meeting a wise old nun (yes, an LCWR nun) who had served as novice mistress in her community observed: “ok, fine, but who will evangelize us so that we can go and evangelize the neighborhood?”  Yes, who will evangelize us?  I think Weigel makes an important contribution to this task but he needs to go back and re-read those scriptures. 

"Nouvelle Théologie" The Bogeyman of the Catholic Religious Right

Pope St Pius X: his fear of

modernism stifled intellectual

life in the Church for three

quarters of the twentieth

century. 

At the end of a lecture last evening, I was reminded that I had been working on a series of entries about the Church of England before Pope Benedict turned the Catholic historical world upside down by his resignation and all the questions it engendered.  I will get back to that topic, hopefully by Monday next.  But let me do a few more entries on the chaos with which the new Pope has been tormenting some and delighting others.   
One of the more intellectually oriented blogs—but crazy none the less—that expressed anxiety over Pope Francis was by Marielana Montesino de Stuart, an unsuccessful senatorial candidate from the Great State of Denial, I mean Florida.  I say Denial because Ms Montesino de Stuart is from that wigged out group of neo-trads including Matt Abbot.  I am fascinated by the lady’s name because while the Stuart lineage died out with Henry, Cardinal Duke of York, there are all sorts of mini-pretenders to the royal Scots heritage and there are many connections between the anti-Vatican II integrists and those who embrace monarchist fantasies.   Anyway, the lady expressed her apprehensions about Pope Francis because he was formed in the "Nouvelle Théologie."
So what is the "Nouvelle Théologie"?  There was a movement in post World War II Europe to move away from the neo-Scholastic Theology of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries with its “manuals” (theological handbooks, sort of a “Doctrine for Dummies”), pat formulas, and lack of historical context to a recovery of the patristic and biblical heritage that formed Catholic thought for the Church’s first twelve centuries.  It was an entirely different model of theological thinking and teaching, but  not a new model—far from it, it marked the recovery of the Tradition that had provided the foundation for Thomas but was somewhat amorphously absorbed into the manuals of the post- and pseudo-Thomists.  Nouvelle Théologie actually called itself ressourcement: a return to the sources (of the faith).  This neo-Thomism, or better pseudo-Thomism, to which the Nouvelle Théologie found itself opposed, had been endorsed by Popes Leo XIII and Pius X in their efforts to provide a bulwark against modernism.  Modernism, described by Pius X as “the synthesis of all heresies,” involved a historical-critical approach to biblical and theological studies that deconstructed the biblical texts and theological doctrines to discover their original meanings and purposes in the context of their historical origins.  Such an attempt to intellectually understand the articles of religion was perceived by many, and not without reason, as undermining faith.  Indeed for some it did as for those of undeveloped affect and spiritual imagination who found themselves with their Christianity deconstructed into a myriad of pieces of cold historical and textual data with nothing to breathe life into them.  For others, however, the recovery of the original experience of the scriptural authors and the Fathers of the Church led them to their own participation in the Mysterium of a personal encounter with the God of the Scriptures and the Risen Lord of the Church.  One cannot look at these scholars of the Nouvelle Théologie such as Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (perhaps especially Pierre Teilhard de Chardin), Edward Schillebeeckx, Louis Bouyer, Etienne Gilson, and Yves Congar among others but to see the light of the Risen Christ reflected back from their own faces. 
These proponents of the Nouvelle Théologie divided into two camps after Vatican II.  Rahner, Chenu, Schillebeeckx, and Congar were the more “liberal’ group.  deLubac and von Balthasar were the more “conservative.”  Nevertheless, in the days before that divide—and it was a division in the same camp, not an opposition—they had suffered much together.  Pius XII, a Pope for whom there was no room in the Church for any theologian but himself—had condemned many of the ideas of the Nouvelle Théologie in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis.  Teilhard de Chardin suffered notably and died while under the ban against publishing any of his works.  Pius’ Grand Inquisitor, the unbendable Cardinal Ottaviani, was zealous in his work of persecuting all who deviated from the pseudo-Thomist line.  In the end,  however, several of the surviving Nouvelle Théologie thinkers—Congar, Danielou, de Lubac, von Balthasar—would get red hats in recognition for their theological contributions.  Today Nouvelle Théologie rather than neo-Scholasticism or pseudo-Thomism provides the basis of Catholic Teaching.  
What Ms. Montesino de Stuart fears in the Nouvelle Théologie background of Pope Francis, and she is very clear about this, is that the Nouvelle Théologie opens the door to “socialism.”  You see in the pseudo-Thomist manuals of the sort of “theology” that she and other Catholic neo-cons want restore, theology can be manipulated to say whatever one wants it to say.  Because in the neo-Scholasticism of early 20^th century Catholicism one’s methodology is governed only by the canons of Aristotelian logic and one can pick the flowers of biblical and patristic texts to arrange one’s own bouquet to taste, theology can say whatever you want it to.  But serious biblical and patristic scholarship leads one back to the stark doctrines of the early Church which would make short shrift of our capitalistic consumerism as incompatible with Christian faith.  It would be grossly anachronistic to claim that the Biblical authors or the Church Fathers were socialists but  neither the prophets nor the evangelists nor Saint Paul nor the Fathers of the Church would have anything good to say about the economic disparity of today’s American society, much less the global economic structures.  There is much to fear in authentic Catholicism for those whose comfort lies in Free Market capitalism and not only Ms. Montesino de Stuart knows it but the whole Catholic right-wing knows it and consequently is trembling at the thought of a pope whose method is the ressourcement to Biblical and Patristic foundations. 

What Ms. Montesino de Stuart fails to mention, if not to notice, is that one of the leading Nouvelle Théologie theologians whom I had not named to this point is Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI.  Ratzinger is profoundly Augustinian in his theology (as opposed to Thomist or pseudo-Thomist) and while he was one of the theologians who followed de Lubac and von Balthasar in the Communio School (as opposed to the Concilium faction of Rahner, Chenu, Congar et al) he is Nouvelle Théologie to the very core of this thought.  But then I have always found that the neo-trads were much like the “cafeteria Catholics” of the left whom they have been so strong in criticizing—they pick and choose from Papal teaching what they like.  As for me, I respected Ratzinger/Benedict as a theologian, but I love Francis’ style.  If this is the gift of the Nouvelle Théologie I can only say Merci beaucoup.