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. 

The Troubling Presuppositions of Neo-Traditionalism

In regard to my last post, I received this following comment that merits some attention. 

Mark 4:35-41

A noble attempt that will fall on deaf ears for the tired Catholics who would like to believe that there's something more to Catholicism than toeing an ever-changing Party Line. The Traditional Latin Mass is not the Mass of power-hungry reactionaries, but of defensive, bewildered Catholics who yearn for at least symbolic stability in a world of doctrinal ambiguity. Right or wrong as they may be, those "preconciliar teachings" are what generations of Catholics have been taught and have told their children to believe and take seriously. It's one hell of a reverse course that they are being asked to take lying down.

I think the commentator highlights two of the problems with the neo-traditionalists who favor the usus antiquior, or as it is popularly often called, “The Traditional Latin Mass,” or the Tridentine Mass. 

The first problem the commentator identifies is the problem of change and the fact that change is a very threatening concept for many people.  In a world in which so much is changing so fast—from the Supreme Court’s legal establishment of Same Sex Marriage to the shifting geo-political boundaries of Central and Eastern Europe; from the rise of militant Islam to the breakdown of gender identities; from issues of global climate change to electronic video-games and instantaneous communication, the world seems at times to be spinning out of control.  In such an environment of a perceived chaos, the image of a Church which offers a fixed and immovable standard of practice and belief provides a refuge for those suffering from a sociological vertigo set off by this spinning planet.  Entry into a darkened church with candles providing pin-points of light and air scented with beeswax, incense, and musty vestments provides us not only with a respite from the confusion of daily life but entrance into a magical world that offers escape from the realities of today’s world.  We are permitted to hide ourselves in a fixed past that lets us, at least for an hour or two, avoid facing the uncertainties of the future.  Expand this magical world now with the gentle tones of Gregorian chant, the aroma of the incense, the white-noised drone of Latin prayers from the altar, and mindless immersion into the sensual stimulation of it all and you have a Spiritual Spa Day that gives you the emotional strength to face a week of the madness of the world around us. 

Sounds wonderful but the problem is that is not a life of discipleship.  The disciple is called not into a passive endurance of the spiritual vicissitudes of the world in which we live, but a confrontation with that world.  As Blessed Titus Brandsma, a Carmelite Friar who died at Dachau for his resistance to Nazi policies in occupied Holland wrote: “If you want to win the world for Christ, you must have the courage to confront it.”  We cannot retreat into the past, no matter how comforting. We cannot take our Catholic Faith and make it a freeze-dried relic of the Eisenhower years to be our spiritual security blanket.  God did not incarnate himself into this world so that we can escape it; Christ did not preach a Gospel of hiding ourselves in the Temple instead of facing the realities of human suffering—and human sin; Jesus did not hang on the cross for us to find comfort and escape and he was not raised from the dead so we could bury our faces in piety and pretend that we are somehow close to him because we feel the thrills of religion. 

The Christian knows that he or she must put on the armor of God so that we may stand firm against the tactics of the evil one and having done everything possible to hold our ground.  We cannot flee in this conflict to places of refuge but we must stay on the field of battle.  Change is inevitable.  The struggle is to make the changes work for the better.  Blessed John Henry Newman wrote “To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” The strategies and tactics of our struggle to be faithful cannot be the strategies and tactics of our parents and grandparents.  The world has changed.  An insistence on unchanging dogmas and doctrines may have served well in the past to fend off the challenges of Ratramnus of Corbie or Abelard but today they fail to win the hearts and the minds of the potentially faithful.  The baroque architecture and glorious strains of Palestrina or Gabrielli may have drawn the faithful of the 17^th century to faith, but today their power is lost on all but the effete and the savant.  The Liturgy of the 1570 Missal was a powerful tool in combatting the Protestant Reformations but it is totally ineffective against either the inroads of the self-proclaimed “evangelicals” or the far more dangerous religious and spiritual indifferentism that infects contemporary western culture.  You must remember, I am a historian and I love a visit to colonial Williamsburg. However, I have no reason to want to live—or pray—in the eighteenth century.  If God had wanted me to live in Rome of the Counter-Reformation he would have had been born in Rome in the Counter-Reformation.  But God had me born for the dawn of the 21^st century—and you too—and he expects us to live in our time and place. 

But this brings me to the second element of the above response to my previous post: it is not only a matter of change, even more basic is the understanding of what is faith.  The response presumes “faith” to be an acceptance by intellect and will of certain doctrines and practices or disciplines of the Church.  This has been a common misconception of “faith” by many Catholics at least since Leo XIII’s establishment of Neo-Thomism as the Church’s official theological framework.  Faith empowers the will and intellect to accept certain doctrines and practices but it should not be confused with the assent of the intellect and will.  Faith is a dynamic of the individual’s relationship with God, not with the Church or doctrine or even morals.  It is the relationship in which the believer is graced to put his or her trust in God.  An individual can have faith and yet not pass theological or even moral muster.  A person can have faith and be mistaken as to faith and morals.  This is not to imply that faith is a feeling—like charity and hope, the other theological virtues—faith is an act of the will in which the individual, empowered by God’s loving action (grace) yields to God’s will as the individual perceives it.  Abraham had faith—this yielding to God’s will—and it was counted to him as justice.  Faith is in many ways the antidote to the sin of Adam who trusted not in God but in his own will.  This sort of faith in which we put our trust in God enables us to ride the waves of change undisturbed knowing that while he may seem to be asleep, Christ is indeed in the barque of Peter and while the winds of the world and the waves of change may buffet the boat and even blow it this way and that, God will bring the barque to port.  Faith empowers us to face change without panic knowing that, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Or, as Teresa of Avila writes: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things are passing away: God never changes.  Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.”

Of course, faith—to be authentic—must not be some abstract surrender of the will to God but one that bears fruit in concrete action of “hearing the Word of God and putting it into practice” as Jesus himself says in the Gospels.  But that Will of God is not something frozen or even stable.  The Law of Moses forbade certain work on the Sabbath but Jesus permitted his disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath: Jesus did not perceive the Law to be a frozen ideology, immutable and unbending, as did the Pharisees.  Jesus stopped the crowd from stoning an adulteress, even though that was the punishment prescribed by the Law.  Jesus did not mandate his disciples to keep the traditional Jewish fasts.  He was not concerned with the ritual purity that mandated the washing of various household items when they had been “contaminated” by something or someone that rendered them unclean.  He himself broke the Law by sitting at table and sharing a meal—a sacred action in Judaism—with sinners and the most gross sort of sinners.  Jesus warned the religious of his day that he would see the tax collectors and prostitutes enter the kingdom of God before them.  My impression is that the stability for which some are looking for when they turn to pre-Conciliar Catholicism is in fact a lack of faith, an empty piety.  I think it is dangerous pastoral practice for the Church to offer what is essentially an unsafe harbor.  To sum it up, a quote I recently heard and found thought provoking: “the opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty.” Should this be true how sinful it is of us to look for those islands of certainty in the name of faith.  

Pope Francis, Two Churches, A Bridge Too Far--Some Further Thought

I have written in several recent postings that we have seen over the past 35 years that a Church has grown within the Church, a counter-Church as it were or even an anti-Church, that is becoming increasingly hostile to its host body and a threat to its welfare and mission.  During the pontificates of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI this counter-Church had reason to think that it would absorb its host body and become the predominant form of Roman Catholicism in a post-Vatican II (read: a forgotten and abandoned Council) world, but the papacy of Pope Francis has checked its progress and questioned its legitimacy.  As Francis moves forward with his agenda for the Church in his pontificate, some in the counter-Church fear that a bridge too far will force them to take a stand against Francis and those Catholics who adhere to his vision for the Church in the third millennium.  I had written in an earlier posting that the earmarks of this counter-Church and its adherents include: 

1. Refusal under any or most circumstances to participate in the Mass, Sacraments, and Rites of the Church in the “Ordinary Form.” 

2.     Rejection of the Post-Conciliar Rites and not only the Mass but especially an insistence that Baptism, Confirmation, Penance, Matrimony, and funerals be performed according to the pre-conciliar ritual.  Some extremists would also insist that Holy Orders be administered according to the pre-conciliar rites. 

3.     An insistence that children be catechized according to the pre-conciliar catechism (in the United States, the Baltimore Catechism).

4.     A conviction that the (traditional) Catholic Church is the One True Church founded by Jesus Christ and is the exclusive channel of Christ’s grace outside of which salvation is impossible or, at the very least, unlikely. 

5.     A conviction that the Church and “the world” are at enmity and that the Catholic minimize contact with the larger culture; collaboration of the Church for some supposed “common good” with those outside of the Church, either secular or believing but non-Catholic being against the mission of the Church.

6.     A conviction that the Church, as the Kingdom of Christ, “is not of this world” and therefore has no business in politics, economics, or other social spheres.   

Despite the first two earmarks I list being concerned with the “old” versus the “new” liturgy, I do not think that the major issue is the pre-conciliar liturgy versus the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council.  There are many Catholics who for reasons ranging from an aesthetic preference to a pretentious taste for the arcane attend the usus antiquior.  (My own pretentious taste for the arcane leads me to prefer this designation for the pre-conciliar Rites.)   I think the tension between the two forms of worship mask the real issue: two very different theologies, cosmologies, and anthropologies and these, in turn, are rooted in the differing philosophical foundations of 19^th century Catholicism (neo-Scholastic) and Conciliar Catholicism (neo-Patristic) as described in those recent postings. 

Different cosmologies.  There are those who see the world ordered hierarchically with power at the top and subservience in the lower ranks.  In a well ordered universe each person is in his or her proper place in the Great Chain of Being and, save some minor adjustments in the social order, one stays in one’s place.  People who subscribe to this sort of cosmology like hierarchy (and are therefore often fascinated by monarchy in the socio-political order).  Obedience and conformity are paramount to them; change is anathema because it undermines the eternally fixed hierarchical order of things.  Law and retributive justice keep everything in balance.   On the other end of the spectrum—and it is most often a spectrum, not two sharply divided camps—there are those who see the universe as an organic reality, a body as it were.  Positions are not fixed but, like the stars revolve and circulate with some rising and some falling through the course of their existence.  Different members of the body in their various functions may have greater or lesser dignity but are not of greater or lesser worth.  Power, such as it is, is distributed throughout the body with each member taking responsibility for his or her own contribution to the good of the whole.  In this fluid order of things, change is taken for granted and seen to be a healthy sign of development of the body.  The political ideal for such people is not democracy as one might expect, but more a corporatism in which all are involved in working for and establishing the common good but sometimes in different ways or with different roles.  (I think this is a lovely ideal, but am myself a proponent of democratic government because, while it is less faithful than corporatism to the organic vision of society, it is its most practical political manifestation.)

Theologies.  Those who espouse a hierarchically ordered universe will see God at the top of the pyramid.  As God is at the top, access to him is granted more easily to those at the top.  (I love the line in Anne of a Thousand Days when King Henry says: “I am the King of England; when I pray, God listens!)  Popes and bishops—good popes and good bishops, that is, not these soft-on-divorce-soft-on-queers false shepherds of today—are of course closer to God than those further down the ladder.  God is and remains totally "other."  When I pray to him I need to face away from the world and face him.  I need to approach him with the courtesy and ritual of the royal court as he is the supreme King and I am but a servant.   On the other hand—and end of the spectrum—are those who see God as the Origin of all creation and the Destiny of all creation.  Avoiding pantheism—the idea that creation or the material universe is somehow God’s “skin” or that he is a universal Spirit who inhabits his own creation—there are those who see that God resides in the depths of his creation, and most particularly in the depths of the human heart.  This leads to a very different approach to prayer in general and liturgical prayer in particular.  The one mentality sees liturgy as court ceremonial for the Great King who rules the universe; the other mentality is drawn to the communal nature of the liturgy that has a more incarnational dimension and even a mystical impression. 

Anthropologies.  The one way of looking at things, the hierarchical, stresses the un-crossable divide between the Divine and the human.  God is Divine and we, for our part, bear the burden of our fallen human nature.   We stand as sinners before the Judge, hoping for mercy but aware of the demands of Divine Justice.  Our sins demand atonement by the sacrifice of God’s Divine Son, the only victim whose innocence can balance our wickedness, but even so retributive justice demands that punishment awaits us for our sins—if not in the sufferings of this life, then in purgatory.  The other perspective, emphasizing the idea of theosis or divinization, is to see the human person to remain clearly, beneath the veneer of sin, the image and likeness of God.  This anthropology sees the human person to be and remain essentially good, despite sin and failings, and through the redemption won by Christ and the sanctification accomplished by the Holy Spirit restored in the sight of God by grace to an original integrity.  These two different anthropologies  will created two very different approaches to the spiritual life.  The Sacrament of Reconciliation, in particular, will have entirely different meanings for those in each group.

We have two different liturgies because the usus antiquior is totally incomprehensible to those whose anthropology, theology, and cosmology follows the one model and the Reformed Rites of Vatican II undermine the entire belief system of those who hold to the other.  And now, with Pope Francis having picked up the themes of the Council and moving the Church forward in that direction, we see that those who hold to the neo-Scholastic world view are increasingly threatened that the foundation is being pulled out from beneath them.  Anger towards the Holy Father is mounting.  Cardinal Burke’s vague promise to “resist” Pope Francis should he cross the bridge too far—in this case to provide some pastoral solution that would grant those in irregular unions access to the sacraments—has been a call to the barricades for many who had falsely read the ambiguities of John Paul and Benedict to be the promise of a restoration of the pre-conciliar world and whose hopes are now being dashed.  It is in fact putting Cardinal Burke in a very uncomfortable position as he knows the limits his “resistance” can take and those limits will render the “resistance” of little effect.  At the same time, the disappointment of those who are putting their trust in the Cardinal to restore the Humpty Dumpty of a well-regulated hierarchical Church in a well-regulated hierarchical world will turn vicious.  

More Thoughts on Pope Francis and A Bridge Too Far

Empty Pews: the Challenge 

of a Post-Christian world 

I mentioned in my last posting that the failure of the Church to introduce and insist on a single theological model, the neo-Patristic model that underlies the Decrees of the Second Vatican Council, has led to the development of a Church within the Church, each Body having a distinct and unique—though not contradictory—understanding of our Catholic identity and heritage as it is found in the doctrines and praxis of the faith.  While the vast majority of the Church has accepted—though very often passively—the neo-Patristic model, there is a significant number of Catholics who, rooted in the neo-Scholastic model that predominated in Catholic seminaries in the four centuries before Vatican II—and in the century immediately before the Council was given an official status—are distrustful of the orthodoxy of those Catholics who do accept the Conciliar vision of the Church.  The two models provide some very different—though not incompatible—understandings of the key mysteria of our faith including the nature and mission of the Church, the nature of the Mass, the Sacramental nature of the Holy Eucharist, the nature of the priesthood, the nature of Divine Revelation, and other key dogmatic questions.

A reader brought up a very interesting factor that complicates the tension significantly and to which I need to give serious consideration.  According to this reader the Council attempted to consolidate its theological positions and move beyond the modernist crisis that had challenged it in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.  You may recall that I had written that Leo XIII endorsed the Neo-Scholastic philosophical and theological systems because they seemed at the time to provide the best answers to the challenges of “modernism.”  Modernist thinkers took a rational and scientific critique of religious doctrines and even of the Bible itself, often looking at the Biblical texts and the historic dogmas of the Christian faith in the context of their historical development and not considering any supernatural influence of “Revelation.”   This method was responsible for the emergence of liberal Protestantism which Catholics usually looked on as vulnerable to a certain theological softness on the key issues of our faith.  In fact it was the proponents of the Nouvelle Theologie who believed and demonstrated that a return to the Biblical and Patristic fundamentals, rooted in a rigorous scholarly and historical analysis, provided the best defense against modernism.  Neo-Scholastic thought proved to be too much an intellectual closed circuit to answer credibly the modernist objections to historic Christianity and it was for this reason that the Church began under Pius XII to move away from Neo-Scholasticism and embrace the theological insights of the Patristic and Biblical Scholars.  By the time the bishops gathered under John XXIII for the Second Vatican Council, the Neo-Scholastic faction would lose out to the Neo-Patristic figures such as Congar, Daniélou, von Balthasar, de Lubac and others. (It should be noted that the young Josef Ratzinger was a junior member of this set.)  Let me say at this time that there were brilliant Neo-Scholastics, or more precisely neo-Thomists, who had influence at the Council especially Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain and the Council was not a rout of the Neo-Scholastics but rather a retreat from Neo-Scholasticism into a more historical use of the Ancient Christian Fathers to reshape the doctrines of the faith in a way consistent with the Church before the Schism of 1054 which divided Eastern and Western Christianity. The Eastern half of the Church had always retained the Fathers as the basis of theological discussion and this conciliar turn of methodologies opened up the common language for dialogue. 

But to the point that my Anonymous reader made, the battles that empowered the Church to move beyond the modernist crisis were too little and too late.  Modernism is long past and we are confronted with the Postmodern.  I look around in Church on Sunday morning, and the millenials are conspicuous by their absence.  Five hundred people at Mass and probably less than a dozen between the ages of 20 and 30.  Yeah, yeah, I know—previous generations were light on Mass attendance at this age but came back when they had kids.  But this has a different feel to it.  The parish I go to: a thousand families.  One wedding on the books for 2015.  35 baptisms in 2014 as opposed to 64 funerals.  This is not an aging community; the public schools are filled to overflowing and the names are Italian and Irish and Polish.  Where are they???  And speaking of Irish and Polish and Italian: I read the Death Notices in the local paper religiously.  Why is there a “celebration of her life” for Deirdre O’Connell at the Harp and Bard and not as Mass at Saint Mary’s?  And the corresponding question goes too for Rafaela Esposito  and Stan Mikulski.   Hey, these folks were Mass goers.  Their spouses who pre-deceased them had a Church funeral.  But their kids—they are in this new generation that is suspicious of organized religion or, at least, indifferent to it.  So indifferent to it that they can’t even face a funeral Mass for a parent who was a practicing Catholic.  What is the problem that we need to address?

When Pope John Paul died I was living in Rome and was hired by several news outlets as a technical advisor, and in some cases as a commentator.  Four million people came to Rome for the funeral. 85% of them were under 35.  I went up and down the Via della Conciliazione with a microphone and a cameraman. “Why did you come to Rome?”  Person after Person: “he was my Pope.”  “I loved him.”  “He made me proud to be a Catholic.”  “Looking at him was like seeing God.”  Ok.  “Do you agree with him about birth control?”  “No, of course not.”    “Do you agree with him about homosexuality?” “No, of course not.”  “Do you agree with him about sex outside of marriage?”  “He said something about sex outside of marriage?”  .  “Do you agree with him about in vitro fertilization?” “No.”   “Do you agree that women cannot be priests?” “Of course not.”

The only area where there was large agreement—though not total consensus, was abortion.  To be very frank, I think if most Catholics, at least Catholics in the developed world, understood Francis’ entire outlook, he would not be nearly as popular as he is.  Like it or not, we live in an age in which people are not interested in theological points and in which they want to make their own decisions based on their own—and I dread to say it—feelings.  We are in a time of great subjectivity where people make all sorts of decisions with a minimum amount of research or thinking things through.  And in this world, despite the charm and popularity of a Pope Francis, people are not going to find the experience of Church, of regular worship in a normal parish community, in any way significant. 

I need more input and I need more reflection before I can say much more about this situation but I think my reader is dead right on to something.  I like the Neo-Patristic approach to Church that is written in the Decrees of Vatican II, but then I am of considerable years and see the world differently than most of the people among whom I live and work.  This much though I think I do know.  Pope Francis has not changed much in terms of rules or doctrines but that is not the interest of the 20 and 30 somethings.  He has made some remarkable progress in changing the perception of the Church from a rigid and doctrinaire institution to a bunch of people who are open, inquisitive, and respectful of differences. That may not be the long-term answer, and it is not bringing people back into the pews, but in the short term it is staunching the growing alienation many people had been feeling from the Church of their youth.  I don’t  know that Pope Francis can turn things around, but the course we were on was only headed for greater disasters. 

The Neo-Scholastic Church is predicated on the predominance of a Christian culture to which there is a universal, or all but universal, consensus.  It has a certain number of unchallenged first principles which must be accepted if it is to serve as the foundation for the theological constructs of a Christian world.  There was a predominant Christian culture at the time of Saint Thomas.  Though its unity was shaken by the Reformations of the 16^th century there was still a Christian culture that defined Western Civilization until the Enlightenment.  In fact, this Christian culture remained—or at least its illusion remained—right up through Dwight Eisenhower and Leave It To Beaver.  In the last fifty years we have seen our Christian society become a post-Christian society.  In this post-modern age in which we live there are a plethora of answers to every question; an excess of values for every decision.  Somehow Christendom vanished.  We are back at step one.  The challenge is a New Evangelization.  I think our Catholic heritage, both in its Neo-Scholastic and Neo-Patristic expressions, has much to contribute to the discussions of today’s world.  I think that the Christian Gospel has the Truth and has it more completely than any other system of belief including the non-belief of atheism. But like Paul on the Areopagus, we will have to argue the Message convincingly to our contemporary world.  And we will have to do it in contemporary language and with contemporary argument.