Chairman's Blog

I first published this in October 2015. Events seem to have upheld my pessimism.

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The Third Station: Jesus Falls the First Time. The Fourth Station: Jesus is met by His Blessed Mother

I wasn't around for the Second Vatican Council and its immediate aftermath, but on the basis of what I've read about those years, I feel as if I am watching an action-replay.

One thing to remember about it is that the terrible things which happened after the Council came after the promulgation of documents which had been much tweaked in a conservative direction, documents which the more conservative bishops felt they could, after all, support, since they were quite capable of being read in a way consistent with traditional views. For example, it was quite late in the proceedings that one famous sentence of the document on liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, assumed its final form:

'there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them'

with the addition of the phrase 'genuinly and certainly', 'vera et certa'. With this in the document, what more could anyone ask?

All sorts of qualifying footnotes and subclauses went into the documents of the Council to acheive the consensus votes which were thought to be appropriate - and rightly so. But the disasters which befell the Church afterwards still happened.

Before anyone says that it was all wonderful, wonderful, wonderful after the Council, and only curmugeonly traddies like me think differently, let me just quote our three post-Conciliar Popes on the subject (not counting JP I).

Bl. Pope Paul VI: This state of uncertainty even holds sway in the Church. There was the belief that after the Council there would be a day of sunshine for the history of the Church. Instead, it is the arrival of a day of clouds, of tempest, of darkness, of research, of uncertainty.  

Pope St John Paul II: I would like to ask forgiveness-in my own name and in the name of all of you, venerable and dear brothers in the episcopate-for everything which, for whatever reason, through whatever human weakness, impatience or negligence, and also through the at times partial, one-sided and erroneous application of the directives of the Second Vatican Council, may have caused scandal and disturbance concerning the interpretation of the doctrine and the veneration due to this great sacrament.

Pope Benedict XVI: in many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear. I am speaking from experience, since I too lived through that period with all its hopes and its confusion. And I have seen how arbitrary deformations of the liturgy caused deep pain to individuals totally rooted in the faith of the Church.

I would strongly suggest to all Catholics that, if the conservatives at the Synod declare victory, we should congratulate them heartily, and then start digging an air-raid shelter in the garden.

One thing we have to understand is the way liberals read documents. Their scriptural exegesis illustrates the point. They don't read a whole passage or letter or whatever and come to a balanced view of what points are being made there - that would be boring. Instead, they take a bit they like, and instead of reading it in the context of the rest, they use it as an 'interpretive key' of the rest: they read, or ignore, the rest of the document through that one passage. Usually it is an isolated sentence, or even a stray phrase. Thus, they see St Paul's words 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female', (Galatians 3:28), and instead of asking what, in context, he meant by that, they take it as meaning what they want it to mean, which today is something approaching gender theory, and proceed to interpret, or ignore, everything else St Paul wrote to fit their weird understanding of that one phrase. So despite everything St Paul says, at length and with great emphasis, about the differences between the sexes, liberals will quote this phrase to show that female ordination is demanded by Scripture. Nothing else St Paul wrote makes any difference, because it all needs to be understood through this 'key'.

The 'Spirit of Vatican II' works in a similar way. The argument here is that, again looking at an isolated passage in a particular document, the Council moved the Church from being in favour (for example) of traditional religious dress with all the trimmings, or a completely Latin liturgy, to the point at which we are asked to consider if all the trimmings are appropriate to modern conditions, or to consider the use of the vernacular for some parts of the Mass. What we need to take from the Council, the liberals claimed, is not the document's final, stated, position - habits and Latin should emphatically be retained - but the direction of movement. It is therefore a matter of 'obedience to the Council' to continue that movement: it is obedient to the Council, in fact, to violate the Council's clear words, and jettison habits, and Latin, altogether. To insist on what the Council actually said is to disobey the Council.

Conservatives were at a huge disadvantage in debating the meaning of such texts with liberals, because they wanted to adopt a balanced and docile position which drew from the documents whatever might be of value in them. They felt obliged to go along with a huge amount of very disruptive and damaging changes in the hope that they would have good results - which of course they might have had, at least in many cases, if they had stopped there - which merely conceded to the liberals a good half of what they wanted. It was then far harder to resist the further changes which the liberals undertook under cover of the confusion and controversy. The conservatives did the liberals' work for them by overcoming the inertia inherant in any stable institution, getting the ball rolling, by an often ham-fisted authoritarianism.

With hindsight, it would have been better to say that, since the Council's comments on these and many other matters were nothing more than recommendations on matters of prudential judgement, the vast can of worms they offered to open should remain closed until a more auspicious moment presented itself.

With the Synod on the Family, that won't be an option in the same way, but the liberals' ability to snatch victory from the jaws of stalemate is undiminished. The very fact that the issues are being debated is a huge gain for the liberal side of the argument. The very fact that certain frankly disedifying statements from the bishops' interventions are being quoted in the press - accurately or not - moves the debate immeasurably in their favour.

I read today that one bishop thought the 'language of indissolubility' needs to be changed. Words fail me. That this should be said at a Synod in Rome undermines the certainty of doctrine which has, on this topic, survived in the public perception of the Church. That certainty, in public perception, is of immense value. Take that away, and all hell breaks loose.

If the good guys win at the Synod, the liberals will still win. If the good guys clearly and publicly lose, then the results will immediate and catastrophic. I expect, however, that some formula will be found to maintain a consensus, a formula which could be seen as a victory for the conservatives, at least by comparison with the demands of some of the liberals. The point is, this will still be a victory for the liberals. They will take the concessions made to them, they will act as if they won twice as much, and they will be back for more.

I don't believe in an inevitable victory for the liberal side of the debate in the long term - quite the contrary - but the Synod, like Vatican II, has brought together a balance of forces which is clearly not going to conclude with a triumphant reassertion of the traditional view. Things are going to get worse, a lot worse, before they get better.

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La Nativité - Lorenzo Costa

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I can't say I'm very impressed by their choice of photo, but that's life.

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Cardinal Burke in St James', Spanish Place, for the Latin Mass Society

It is interesting to see EWTN giving Cardinal Burke the interview I posted yesterday, and the general pro-dubia stance they have taken. A similar editorial line is being taken by Church Militant. Less surprising is the support for the dubia coming from LifeSiteNews, which has long had a robust editorial line.

From a Traditional Catholic point of view, each of these organisations has come in for criticism over the years. Christopher Ferrara wrote a book, EWTN: A Network Gone Wrong with some stinging criticisms of their TV broadcasts, which showed a marked tendency to tone down their attachment to the Church's traditional teaching and spirituality after the retirement of Mother Angelica. I myself criticised Michael Voris's absurd and inconsistent vow never to criticise the Holy Father; in fact his 'Vortex' videos have continued studiously to avoid the subject of the dubia, which has been covered for them, as far as I can see, by Christine Niles. Even LifeSiteNews failed, in the end, to back up Hillary White when she was attacked some time ago by Ultramontanist fanatics for reporting something about the Pope which they simply wished hadn't happened.

Reporting on the dubia in an even-handed way, giving the dubia the oxygen of publicity, is precisely what the Pope's self-described supporters do not want, and doing so pushes these organisations away, or further away, from the institution mainstream of the Church. That means things like the degree to which bishops' press people would return their calls or help them arrange interviews, the degree to which people in the Curia in Rome would regard them as a respectable Catholic news service, and things like that.

The same process can be seen with what we might call the intellectual heavyweight conservative Catholic blogs and journals, such as Crisis, Catholic Culture, and First Things. These have never been 'traddie', on matters liturgical and spiritual, and often writers on these platforms have gone to a lot of trouble to give Pope Francis the benefit of the doubt, to promote his initiatives, explain his ideas and so on (as, in fact, have I on this blog). But with the crisis over the dubia they have been carrying some very hard-hitting stuff in support of the Cardinals.

As with the news services, there is a price to be paid for not taking the party line on something as contentious and important as this. There are many Catholic institutions, for example, which would allow their members to have associations with some kinds of Catholic publication, but not others, and the quickest way to become persona non grata in lots of places where lots of resources are controlled is to allow oneself to seem to be not 'with the Pope', when the pope was going in a liberal direction. So the writers on these platforms may end up losing certain opportunities, and the editors may for the same reason find it harder to recruit writers.

But we can see individual Catholic figures, with their own personal careers and reputations and influence to consider, coming out in support of the Cardinals, in the various joint letters, and notably with Professors Finnis and Grisez. These two of course don't need to worry about getting promotion, but they are still taking a risk with the considerable influence they have had over the years with Bishops' Conferences and over younger scholars, if they cease to appear to be balanced, mainstream, people who basically 'support the Pope'.

So, first, on a personal note I would like to express my admiration and gratitude for and to the people involved in all of these ways, nearly all of whom have more to lose than I have in speaking out. What they are doing is their duty: and I should emphasise that this is so even if they (and I) are mistaken. Perhaps there is a perfectly sensible explanation of the meaning of Amoris laetitia in combination with other statements and hints. We are still right to ask what that explanation is.

The wider point is that the move of Catholic intellectuals in support of the dubia is so marked that Austen Ivereigh was obliged to acknowledge it, suggesting that the reason all these academics and writers were supporting the dubia is that they are too intellectual, attached to reason, and not sufficiently pastoral: indeed, he tells us that Amoris can only be understood by Pastors. A weak argument, of course, as many supporters of the dubia are indeed pastors (unlike the Holy Father, Cardinal Burke has been a Parish Priest), but a very significant admission. What happened to the Church's liberal intellectual leadership?

Modernism at the turn of the 19/20th centuries, and neo-modernism from the 1950s to the 1970s, was not led by pastors, or indeed by a popular upswell from below. It was led by theologians. It is amusing to read so many arguments about liberal 'pastoral' strategies on contraception, and about 'pastoral' liturgy, being made, in the mid 20th century, by the high-brow denizens of universities and monasteries respectively.

That school of thought has gone now, leaving only vestigial traces, particularly in the English-speaking world. They lost the argument in the end, and fashions changed. A few of them labour on in great old age; a few others have adopted liberal positions as the path of least resistance, but neither are capable of producing new and interesting ideas. And now push has come to shove, the conservative Catholic intellectuals of the Pope John Paul II generation have been forced into open opposition to what is presented as a Papal initiative.

This is clearly not what was supposed to happen. I can only imagine that the architects of 'liberal Amoris' (for want of a better term) imagined that the instinctive loyalty to the Pope of Catholic conservatives would triumph over their attachment to a sane view of marriage and sexual morality, but the opposite has happened. It is the conservatives who've stuck with the view of Cardinal Kaspar on the basis of various Papal hints who look isolated and weak, and not very 'conservative' after all, and it is the intellectually weakest of them who have taken this line, people like Mark Shea and Rebecca Hamilton (who?) on Patheos, while a number of others have lapsed into embarrassed silence. (Jimmy Akin? Fr Longenecker? Are you there?)

This is a very interesting situation. What it means is that a very large proportion of our conservative Catholic voices have been forced to reconsider the narrative, which has been a favourite of their school of thought, that everything which has gone wrong has gone wrong because of people misunderstanding or mis-implementing Vatican II or the post-Conciliar popes. When a pope has made it clear that his personal view is something nor really consistent with the Tradition--Paul VI on the liturgy, John Paul II on the death penalty or the authority of the husband over the family--they have tended to side with the Pope against Tradition, despite the fact that the Papal statements on the subject tended to lack magisterial weight.

From now on, that strategy isn't going to be attractive to these conservatives. They've been asked to do it once too often, they have refused to do it, and things are not going to be the same again. What happens to ultra-montanist Catholic conservatives who finally realise that some at least of the Church's problems go right to the top--who take, as the metaphor of the hour has it, the red pill?

Ask a Traditionalist. Almost all us have gone through this process personally: I certainly have. Once the dust has settled, and people think through the implications of what they have realised, we will be entering a new phase of the history of the post-Conciliar Church. I don't think the liberals will enjoy it.

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