Chairman's Blog
The psychology of Ecclesiastical Incompetence
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| Bishop Mark Jabale at the LMS Annual Requiem in Westminster Cathedral |
The reason I've been writing about Norman Dixon's theory of 'rigid' personalities and military incompetence, is that the Church has certain interesting parallels with the military. The Church is hierarchical and authoritarian; the Church's training institutions are places where people can enjoy the predictability of institutional life (particularly in religious communities) and the rewards of conformism. It is inevitable, therefore, that the Church, like the army, will attract conformists, and that good superiors in both cases must be on the look-out for those whose conformity to the necessary discipline of the institution hides a debilitating lack of self-confidence. Priests lacking in self-confidence will be useless in the field, so if they don't gain the necessary maturity they must be weeded out. Things will go very wrong if, on the other hand, the conformists gain the upper hand. In that scenario it is the self-confident ones who will be weeded out, and pastoral effectiveness will suffer across the board.
The tensions just described are built into the nature of things, and so the psychology of the use of authority in the Church, and especially in seminaries, could remain constant, in certain ways, through the Vatican II revolution. Institutions which had been taken over by conformists under the Old Regime could change their theology without, necessarily, changing their psychological dynamic, for the New Regime. Liberals might think that their 'let-it-all-hang-out' ideology had banished the authoritarianism/ conformism pattern of the past, but it didn't: it simply meant that instead of conformism meaning slavish adherence to late 19th century neo-scholasticism and the ruthless weeding out of liberals, it now meant slavish adherence to Hans Kung and his friends and the ruthless weeding out of conservatives. And indeed, since the products of such a system were priests who were conformists first, and conservatives or liberals second, a change of ideology would not even necessarily require a change of personnel.
I put forward these theoretical observations as a way to interpret certain historical patterns. Not all Catholic seminaries and communities were or are the same; nor were all the products of these institutions the same, with people bucking the trend in both good and bad ways. Nevertheless, I think few will dispute generalisations such as the following:
1. There was an exaggerated emphasis on conformism in many seminaries and communities before Vatican II.
2. This exaggerated conformism both fed the liberal critique of these institutions, and facilitated their flipping overnight from demanding conservative conformism to demanding liberal conformism.
3. The secular and religious clergy of the 1960s and 1970s were, let us say, more than one would wish, characterised by conformism, that is a lack of moral courage, than by rebellious, innovative, getting-the-job done, to-hell-with-others'-opinions, non-conformism.
Now what happens when weak-ego conformists are actually in charge of things? Can we find parallels in the behaviour of bishops for the patterns identified by Norman Dixon in his incompetent military commanders?
What we would expect to find, on Dixon's principles, are things like the following: bishops having regard for the opinions of each other, and of their superiors, at the expense of the wisdom or indeed the suffering of their priests and people; bishops seemingly incapable of absorbing or reacting to new and unwelcome information; bishops focusing on the appearance rather than the reality of success; bishops surrounding themselves with yes-men; bishops preferring easy or impossible tasks to difficult ones.
Readers with detailed knowledge of the history of the Church since 1960 will know well enough how widespread these tendencies have been. I will limit myself to two examples.
The Congregation for Divine Worship, in allowing bishops to permit altar girls, noted the importance of male altar serving in fostering vocations to the priesthood. This point has been vindicated by the experience of Lincoln, Nebraska, which is almost unique in the developed world in never permitting altar girls; by the isolated parishes which have maintained male-only altar serving; by the Traditional Institutes which recruit from chaplaincies with male-only servers; and by research on the influential experiences of seminarians.
It is theoretically possible for any bishop in the world to forbid altar females in his diocese. Almost all the diocese of the Western world are desperately short of vocations. Forbidding altar girls is a proven way to boost vocations, as shown by experience and affirmed by authority. A lack of vocations is posing an existential challenge to these dioceses. And yet they have not forbidden altar girls.
It is sometimes claimed that the reason for this is that these bishops - almost all the bishops of the developed world - don't actually want vocations. This is not so, however, as can be seen by the lengths they are going to in other ways to find priests: getting them in from overseas, for example, allowing in all kinds of new movements and religious institutes, and even giving parishes to traditionalist groups. No, nearly all of them want vocations, but they have lacked the moral courage to do the one thing proven to be effective in getting them, because there would have been a stink.
I'm not saying that this or that bishop should be accused of wrongdoing. Bishops are under all kinds of pressure and their circumstances are particular. What I'd say is that that fact that not a single one of the hundreds and hundreds of bishops who could copy Lincoln's example, has done so, suggests that as a group there is an unhealthy degree of conformism at work in the group as a whole. If a few did it, then many others, whom we could excuse now, would be able to follow.
Here's my second case. After Vatican II Cardinal Heenan set up a teacher-training institution in his diocese called Corpus Christi College, to re-educate Catholic school teachers in the new approach to Catechetics supposedly mandated by Vatican II. It was taken over by more or less open heretics who told the teachers not to teach the Faith at all. Daphne MacLeod and Michael Davies investigated it in detail and sent the necessary information to the Cardinal. Catholic teachers were being told, for example, not to affirm the Divinity of Christ or the Real Presence: pretty basic stuff.
Heenan, however, either refused to believe the reports, or refused to act on them. In the end, after years of pressure, the prospect of public scandal forced his hand and he closed the place down, but rather than distance himself from its teaching he claimed that the reason for the closure was financial. This allowed everyone involved to continue to claim that the content of the courses was officially approved.
Now it might be claimed, again, that Heenan acted this way because he agreed with the content of the teaching at Corpus Christi. This explanation does not fit the facts, however, for Heenan was quite clearly a theological conservative. The problem was the acute embarrassment and conflict which Heenan expected if he had acted against the College, which would no doubt have been supported by all the liberal intellectuals of the country and beyond. He lacked the moral courage to do it.
The history of the Church in the West in the first decades after Vatican II provides a vast number of parallels for these two cases. Collectively and individually, with exceptions notable for being exceptional, bishops failed to do what they knew could and should be done, even while priests and religious were leaving their vocations in droves, and the number of Catholics attending Mass dropped by as much as half in one decade. This was the Passchendaele of the Church in Europe and North America, and the bishops were the generals: stubborn in their weakness, refusing to see the problem, refusing to act, safe in the knowledge that they were following the policy of everyone else.
I write this happy in the knowledge that, outside certain institutional bubbles where denial is still maintained, everyone will agree with my analysis. Not because everyone will accept my diagnosis of the post-conciliar crisis, but because what I have been saying fits in, in a very obvious way, with something I've not yet mentioned, but which was reaching its fullest extent in this very time-period: the clerical sex-abuse crisis.
It is a truism to say that the clerical sex-abuse crisis was made possible by a culture of authoritarianism / conformism, and demonstrated a lack of moral courage on the part of many in the Church, but above all of bishops and religious superiors. It follows that, in these crucial decades, before and after 1970, the Church was characterised by this kind of culture. I'm afraid, dear reader, however much you may have been resistant to my argument so far, you will now have to admit that, even if my examples are wrong, my conclusion is correct.
Furthermore, as I noted in the last post, the liberal idea that breaking down the old rules would end this culture, is false. The authoritarian / conformist culture quite evidently did not end with Vatican II. The new rules were able to form the basis of authoritarianism and conformism too.
Finally, the liberal conflation of moral courage with self-indulgent rule-breaking finds its ultimate, painful, refutation, in the tragic cases of the abuse crisis. The stories of these cases precisely show how liberal norm-violation can coexist with authoritarianism.
May God forgive those whose moral courage failed when confronting these abusers.
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The Psychology of Military Incompetence
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| The last stand on the retreat from Kabul (Wikipedia) |
In my last post, I described part of the theory of the 'anal personality' widely used by psychologists of the 1960s and 1970s, and to an extent both before and after. Stripped of its Freudian explanatory basis (which is a lot of outdated and indeed laughable stuff about potty-training), the theory says that people with a 'weak ego' and a fear of failure will seek the approval of superiors and peers by conformism and playing it safe. This is not so much a theory, in fact, as a statement of the obvious.
I described how this observation has been applied in a one-sided way, by looking for conformism solely in terms of strict adherence to traditional rules. If attention is fixated upon this specific model of conformism, then it can seem inconceivable that a person opposed to traditional morality or social forms could be a conformist. This is the state of mind of seminary rectors, for example, who see theological or liturgical conservatism in seminarians as prima facie evidence of a weak ego, which would in turn indicate that the seminarians in question would be incapable of the flexibility of mind necessary for pastoral work.
This also seems to be the way that Pope Francis thinks. I don't want to pick him out, however: this is a very widespread attitude among senior clerics of his generation. The situation in seminaries and religious communities is beginning to change as a result of the retirement of this generation.
One of the ironies here is that so many practitioners of this psychological theory, and those influenced by it, exhibit the inflexibility of mind, and the rigid use of stereotypes, which they condemn in others.
In any case, things become more interesting once one notices that the core insight - that those who fear failure will play it safe - means that people with weak egos will comform with whatever are the dominant values of the environment in which they find themselves. In light of this rather obvious fact, the observations of Norman Dixon, in The Pyschology of Military Incompetence, are particularly helpful. Here is a summary of his conclusions.
Military establishments are, by necessity, hierarchical and authoritarian, and in their training environments, and in general in peace-time, they offer the predictability of institutional life and rewards for conformism. They are thus attractive for people with weak egos: people whose fear of failure makes them want to play things safe. In a well-run army, it will be a constant struggle to avoid promoting only the conformist goody-goodies, and conflict between them and risk-taking non-conformists, people who don't care too much about the opinions of their peers and superiors, but want to get the job done, will be a fact of life. In badly-run armies the conformists will take over completely and establish a culture of conformism which will lead to military ineffectiveness.
The next question is what happens to weak-ego conformists when they are promoted to positions of authority. When they have the freedom and authority to do their own thing, at least to an extent, what do they do? Here Dixon is at his most interesting, because it is here we can see the irrational and counter-productive aspects of the pathological fear of failure.
The incompetent generals Dixon considers have in common a concern for the respect of their fellow-officers and a disregard for the welfare of their troops. When it comes to conducting operations, they combine weakness and dithering, and a failure to give orders, with being closed-minded to unwelcome information, which can look like stubbornness.
On the first point, their self-image depends on the opinions of their peers (and superiors), rather than their inferiors. Thus General Elphinstone, during the retreat from Kabul of 1842, refused to allow his men, literally dying of cold, to improvise puttees from horse blankets. Elphinstone said it would look scruffy.
We should not get fixated on the subject of Elphinstone's obsession: the smart appearance of the British soldier. What is critical is that a scruffy army was a way in which he might lose face with his fellow officers. For him, that was more important than the welfare of his men.
On the second point, the generals' stubborn weakness, the crucial issue is the desire, manifested in a irrational, self-defeating, form, first to avoid blame (by not giving orders), and second, to hide from the possibility or the reality of failure by refusing to face up to disturbing information. Lord Raglan, famously, failed to give any orders at all during the battle of Alma, during the Crimean War, after his first one ('Advance to the river'). The most extreme example of the failure to look information in the face must be General Percival, who was warned repeatedly, not only by inferiors but even by his superior, that the Japanese attack on Singapore could come from the north, the land-ward side. He refused to build defences or move guns into the area, as he could easily have done.
When asked why, Percival revealingly replied that it would be 'bad for civilian morale' if the possibility of a Japanese attack from the north was acknowledged. But it wasn't civilians' morale which was really at issue: it was his own. He couldn't bear to face the possibility that the Japanese could invade from the undefended, land side of Singapore. It would have crushed his fragile self-confidence.
Another characteristic of incompetent conformists is taking on (when there is a choice) only tasks which are either easy or impossible. This might seem surprising, but fragile egos like these tasks because either they will succeed, or they will avoid blame for failure. They also like to assign blame, if possible, either to inferiors, or to forces outside their control.
Dixon's explanations make sense. The competent general is prepared to take responsibility, not by backside-covering conformity to conventional procedures, nor by burying his head in the sand, nor by diverting his energy to impossible tasks, but by facing squarely the difficult and necessary job at hand in an open-minded way. Since force conservation is a military necessity, the welfare and morale of his troops occupies an important place in his priorities, and he will not hide from the ordinary soldiers in headquarters. He will take responsibility for failure as well as for success, and he will be able to learn from his own, and others', mistakes.
Dixon makes the point that, tempting as it is, it is a mistake to attribute the military failures he considers to stupidity. Many of the generals he considers were highly intelligent. Nor were they cowards under fire: in many cases physical courage was among the factors which led to their promotion. Nor, again, did they necessarily lack compassion. Field Marshall Haig was physically ill when he saw the dressing stations, and resolved to preserve his health by not visiting them.
No: the thing they lacked was moral courage: the strength of character to do the right thing at the risk of failure, rejection, disgrace, and ridicule. Moral courage is the quality which led great commanders to break the rules, on those occasions on which they did so: Nelson's blind eye to the command to retreat at the battle of Copenhagen, for example, or the young officer James Wolf, later the great General Wolf, who refused the order to kill the wounded and prostrate Macleod of Glenelg in the aftermath of Culloden. He said to the appalling 'Butcher' Duke of Cumberland:
My commission is at the disposal of your Royal Highness, but I decline to become a butcher.
And here's something which nails the liberal narrative which is developed out of the general theory Dixon is applying, and with which Dixon himself agrees: viz. that taking rules seriously indicates a weak-ego, 'anal', conformist, character, whether the rules are military orders, moral obligations, or social norms. It should be obvious that there is a very important difference between breaking rules (such as orders) which are of only subordinate importance, because one has the moral courage to realise that they conflict, in the circumstances, with the right thing to do, and, on the other hand, breaking fundamental moral rules out of self indulgence. The self-indulgent breaking of sexual norms, for example, is not an example of moral courage, even if a some famous commanders combined moral courage in military matters with sexual self-indulgence.
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The psychology of the 'rigid' personality
I've been reading Norman Dixon's 1975 classic, The Psychology of Military Incompetence. It has many insights, and also many flaws; one point of interest in reading it today is to see how psychology was done in the 1970s.
I was stopped in my tracks by one passage, a quotation (p254). It is from Peter Kelvin, The Bases of Social Behaviour, 1970. He is talking about the 'authoritarian' personality. (Elipses are Dixon's.)
These tendencies reflect on a type of individual who needs to feel that his environment is highly predictable ... he needs to know where he stands; and so he fastens on to norms: he does not 'let himself go', for fear of where this might lead; he looks to authority as a guide ... [He also] relies very heavily on stereotypes in [his] perception of the social environment. Moreover, the stereotypes used by an authoritarian personality tend to be very clear-cut, and the characteristic infelixibility of this personality leads to relative inability to modify the stereotype once it has been formed.
This is a concise characterisation of what progressives, in the Church and outside it, in the 1960s and 1970s, thought was wrong with their opponents. It also seems to match what Pope Francis has in mind when he talks about 'rigid' people. We don't have to imagine that he ever read Kelvin: these ideas which were widespread when the Holy Father was at an impressionable age.
It establishes a theoretical basis for the connections which seem to exist in Pope Francis' thinking between (1) a concern for rules / authority-figures; (2) self-restraint / lack of authenticity; (3) an inability to make nuanced judgements about persons and situations, instead attempting to force everything into one of a set of pre-determined stereotypes.
I'm not a psychologist, or a historian of the discipline, but it is apparent that this theory is dated, to put it mildly. Underlying it is a Freudian account of how character is moulded by over-bearing mothers and potty-training, and indeed there is so much emphasis on the latter that it is hard to avoid concluding that it is the author, and not the subjects, who has an anal-fixation. (Perhaps it is exposure at an impressionable age to theories such as this which explains Pope Francis' puzzling interest in coprophilia and coprophagia.)
Dixon wants to apply this theory to military organisations, and immediately runs into the problem that effective commanders are, in a popular sense, authoritarian, whereas he wants to argue that bad ones are bad precisely because they are authoritarian in the way just described. He deals with this by distinguishing the 'authoritarian personality' with the 'autocratic' one, which can include being a disciplinarian. He never sets out the distinction in detail, and it looks ad hoc. Dixon appears to put everything he personally doesn't like into his notion of the 'authoritarian' (including such disparate things as being religious and taking an interest in one's personal appearance), and everything he does like into his notion of the 'autocratic' (his is the only book where I have ever read the word 'womaniser' used as a term of praise). Dixon describes how the theory was developed with Nazism in mind, with the result that it is problematic, if not self-contradictory, to apply it to the megalomaniacs and mass-murderers of the political left. Crafting a psychological theory to further one's personal political preferences is, well, less than entirely satisfactory.
Dixon does have a lot of interesting things to say, and I will discuss them in a later post, but the significance for the Church of the problems I have identified with this theory has been incalculable.
It was psychologists with attitudes along these lines who advised religious orders and seminary directors in the 1960s and 1970s. An insider's account of this process is given by Dr William Coulson. (You can see a summary of Dr Coulson's ideas here; better still download an MP3 talk by him here. It is an eye-opener.)
On this kind of thinking, Catholic teaching is inescapably unhealthy, 'anal', because it imposes constraints on sexual behaviour. On the theory, people are well-adjusted just insofar as they are letting it all 'hang out', without guilt. Any concern with 'norms' is ipso facto a bad sign. Ritual is just the kind of thing an 'anal' person would care about, so if you don't want to be chucked out of seminary for being mentally ill you'd better not take any notice of rubrics. Political, social, or theological conservatism are all indications of a 'weak ego', a pathological need to conform and seek approval. As Pope Francis expresses it:
And I ask myself: Why so much rigidity? Dig, dig, this rigidity always hides something, insecurity or even something else. Rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid.
Pope Francis and others of his generation can say this without any direct knowledge of the people he is talking about. Why? Because for them it is obvious. It just follows from a universal psychological theory.
The irony here is overwhelming. Didn't it occur to the religious superiors of the 1970s and later that, under their new regime, people seeking approval from their superiors out of a lack of self-confidence would be rigidly conforming to the anti-rules of liberalism? That is, not wearing a cassock, not following the rubrics, not being faithful to the office. That they would find new ways of showing off how much they were teachers' pet, not by an immaculate appearance and a pious demeanor, nor yet by vying with each other in exaggerated reactionary remarks, but instead by leaving pornography lying around and visiting gay bars. But no, liberal superiors never noticed this, because the theory was not conceived of as applying equally to any set of rules, but only to the rules of the past. The real insight behind it, that goody-goodies could be motivated by an exaggerated horror of failure with which their fragile personalities could not cope, was distorted by the social and, in the case of the Church, the theological goals of the people who applied the theory: like the drunk's lamppost, it was ultimately valued as support, not for illumination. Or, to vary the metaphor, it was just used as a battering-ram against the Faith.
Just ask yourself this. Who is the conformist, in the Church of today, in a Catholic university, seminary, or religious community: the eccentric conservative, or the one whose liberal ideas are safely within the comfort-zone of 90% or his peers and teachers? If you have a weak ego, if you are scared of being ostracised, being thought a failure, or not fitting in, will it be more attractive to you to be a conservative or a liberal?
The great value of Dixon's book, for me, was his account of what happens to the conformist when he himself becomes a superior. Dixon may have thought of his principles as only applying to conservative conformists, but there is a genuine insight here which applies to liberal conformists as well.
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Loftus on sacrality
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| A glimpse of something a bit different from the everyday world. |
In my last post on the egregious Catholic Times columnist Mgr Basil Loftus, I noted his hatred of the Reform of the Reform and of the Traditional Mass. This hatred extends to the Ordinariate liturgy as well, to which he referred on 7 July 2013:
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| Loftus on 8th April 2016 |
For an expression of the liberal attitude, the extract in the photo will serve as a good example. There are various psychological explanations for the illiberal liberal, but as far as rational arguments go, it is simply a reiteration of the arguments made about the need for reform in the 1950s and '60s. It was said then that the Church was failing to make the impact she should make because the form of her liturgical and indeed cultural life was 'out dated'. Just as we need the latest cars and trains and computers (with lots of valves) in order to be efficient, so we need up-to-date liturgy, reflecting up-to-date ideas about liturgical history, scriptural scholarship, and also about effective communication, psychology, and the needs of 'modern man'.
Obviously, what in the liturgy was (in Loftus' words) 'culturally at odds' with the 'modern world', in the 1950s and today, was 'at odds' with it in the 1850s, and to a large extent the 1150s, because even then the Roman liturgy was famous for being ancient. Come to that, the language of the liturgy and the Bible was a cultural oddity in the 450s: it was evidently and strangely different from the language of ordinary speech. How often did people in the streets of Rome say to each other 'Quaesumus, Domine' or 'Amen, amen, dico vobis'? One might indeed ask, Is that even Latin?
So maybe the Church in her wisdom had some idea other than that of conforming the world, when it came to liturgy, just as she did when it came to doctrine. Certainly Loftus is correct to link the two. The doctrine which was a scandal to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles was able to save people from the errors of the ancient world, of the medieval era, and of the modern world alike, precisely because it did not conform too closely to changing preferences.
What is most amazing of all, however, is the idea that any alternative to the suicidally counter-productive policies of the last half-century and more would make things worse. Loftus is not alone in insisting on that. We can't, of course, know with any certainty what would have happened without the post-Consiliar 'auto-demolition' bewailed by Pope Pius VI, but we do know what is happening right now to ecclesial bodies which took the process even further. What Loftus would like to see is the Church's adoption of the model displayed by liberal Anglicanism, and if you want to know what difference this would make to the Church's fortunes, just look what it has done for Anglicans. The decade from 2005 to 2015 saw a 12% drop in their church attendance.
Just as Pyrrus realised he couldn't survive many more victories over the Romans, I don't think the Anglicans can survive much more of this kind of revival.
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Update on Mgr Loftus
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| Eat your heart out, Basil. That's Archishop Malcolm McMahon of Liverpool with the FSSP in Warrington, about to ordain two of their men priests. |
I've not been blogging about Mgr Loftus recently; he is terribly repetetive and I've said pretty well everything which can usefully be said, while other issues have arisen. However, since the big push I made about him in March 2015 a few observations may be of interest to my readers.
Long-term readers may recall that at that time I prepared a dossier of his jems, and I didn't keep this document to myself. Reviewing my ever-growing paper archive of his columns since then, it is clear that this had some effect. Mgr Loftus must have been given some kind of warning by person or persons of authority, whether it be bishops or the Editor of the Catholic Times in which his screeds are published. So my project was not a waste of time.
The most obvious indication is the number of times he has been attacking English, Welsh, and Scottish bishops by name, or by clear implication. In the years up to 2015, this habit was completely out of control. He attacked Bishop Hopes for pointing out the negative side of people going up to Holy Communion without thinking about it. He attacked Archbishop Mennini, the Apostolic Nuncio, for getting the Nunciature's central-heating system mended. (No, I'm not making that up.) He attacked Cardinal Nichols for versions of both crimes. He attacked Bishop (now Archbishop) Roach, then of Leeds, for getting a coat of arms. He attacked Bishop Doyle of Northampton for telling his priests not to allow teddy bears on coffins in funerals. He attacked Bishop Hugh Gilbert of Aberdeen because someone had defaced a notice on a noticeboard. On serveral occasions he attacked Bishop Davies of Shrewsbury and Bishop Egan of Portsmouth.
Not content with these targets, in the most appalling terms he attacked cardinals outside the UK, notably Ranjith, Müller, Bertone, and Burke.
Since then, the only negative references to British bishops that I found on my trawl through his columns (I may have missed some) have been to Bishop Keenan of Paisley on the funeral teddy bear issue, and 'Dr Egan, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth', for saying that Amoris laetitia has not changed the Church's discipline.
It is scandalous (or ought to be) for a retired Monsignor to attack by name bishops of his former and current countries of residence, in a Catholic newspaper sold in their dioceses, for the crime of maintaining the Catholic Faith. However, in the context of his earlier columns this is astonishingly restrained.
On foreign bishops and cardinals he clearly feels less need to hold himself back, and there are ferocious assults on American bishops Morlino, Cordileone, and Chaput; on Léonard, the retired Archbishop of Brussels; on Archbishop Gänswein; on the Polish bishops; and (lots of times) on Cardinals Burke and Sarah.
Since 2015 he has become bolder in his attacks on Humanae vitae and the Church's teaching on contraception. The unlawfullness of contraception was denied in his columns on 4th Sept 2015, 10th June 2016, and again on 9th Sept 2016.
He has become bolder about the ordination of women as well, making his position unmistakable on 17th March 2017.
The issue which seems to get his goat the most (if the expression may be excused), however, is the celebration of Mass ad orientem. He can't stand the 'Reform of the Reform' and detests the Extraordinary Form, but it is ad orientem which is most consistently mentioned as a specific problem, beating even the hieratic language of the 2011 English translation of the Missal (and that's saying something). Readers were privileged to peruse the great man's rants on the subject on 27th March 2015, 8th April 2016, 28th October 2016, and this year so far on 28th July, 1st Sept, and 22nd Sept.
My conclusions from this are several.
First, it is a mistake to imagine that Loftus is immune to pressure: he has obviously felt it and responded to it.
Second, it is a great pity that the pressure didn't extend to ending his column altogether, because even from the perspective of a bishop at the liberal end of the spectrum of opinion, his columns are embarassing, and undermining of the respect due to ecclesiastical office. For example, the bishops have decided not to reopen the Missal translation issue, and would like everyone to stop attacking it and just let it bed in, but Loftus will not shut up about it.
Third, Pope Francis has been well recieved by the Loftus column, but although many inches have been devoted to ramblings about 'mercy', Loftus' agenda remains his own. It is not possible to defend Loftus' remarks on women priests or contraception on the basis of Pope Francis' words, and as for celebrating Mass ad orientem, if this is a crime then Pope Francis is a criminal too.
Fourth, Loftus continues to demonstrate that mainstream liberals in the Church are far more embittered, and far ruder about bishops, than equivalently mainstream conservatives or traditional Catholics.
No doubt some will tell me Loftus is not 'mainstream', but all I mean is that he has a huge weekly column in the Catholic Times, sold in Catholic churches up and down the land, his name appearing fortnightly on the mast-head to advertise the fact. It is further adorned, and its prestige underlined, by a photograph often so vast as to leave little room for anything else on this broadsheet page. He is allowed apparently infinite space to reply to his critics in the Letters Page, and the Editor publishes the most pathetic imaginable letters of support for the old booby, suggesting he does not have many to choose from. This is supposed to be the 'serious' Catholic newspaper, read by serious people, in contrast to the more low-brow Universe. And for all this, it remains acceptable for this column to decribe two Cardinals of the Roman Church, Sarah and Burke, as 'rigid reactionaries' (9th December 2016), as if it were the record of school play-ground.
But as a wise man once said: 'Being censorious of others is often a defence-mechanism to justify our narrow-mindedness.' (Mgr Basil Loftus, 12th September 2014).
Tu dicis, Basil: tu dicis.
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Prayers for Advent and Christmas: Booklet
If you want to mark Christmas as a spiritual, and not merely bodily, feast, then buy this booklet of traditional prayers for the season, compiled mainly from the Raccolta, the old manual of indulgenced prayers.
My particular favourite is a Novena from the 16th to the 24th 'of any month', in honour of the nativity. It obviously has special appropriateness in December, and maintains the spiritual character of the busiest part of Advent.
The LMS on-line shop has a big range of Catholic items for Christmas: cards, advent calendars, nativity scenes, books and gifts. Go and have a look!
And if you are a member, don't forget to log in to get your 5% discount.
From the booklet's contents page:
CONTENTS
A Note on Indulgences
Pious Exercises
Prayers in Honour of the Nativity of Our Lord
Novena
Sequence of Prayers
Prayers for the Feast of Christmastide
The Nativity of Our Lord
The Circumcision & The Holy Name
The Epiphany
The Holy Name of Jesus
Litany
Other Prayers
Prayers From Other Sources
Blessing of the Advent Wreath
Alma Redemptoris Mater
Prayers Before the Crib
The Holy Innocents
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Disappearing 'Catholic Guilt' or disappearing Catholics?
Reposted from March 2013. This reflects the ecclesial situation before Pope Francis, but the observations about the nature of the 'Catholic population' identified in surveys is still relevant.
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| Venerating Our Lady of Walsingham at the conclusion of the LMS Pilgrimage |
The Sensible Bond draws attention to a little-reported survey of attitudes which claims that Catholics feel little or no more compunction about immoral behaviour than the general population. He links that to the recent scandal about Cardinal O'Brien - which is very interesting, but here I'm just going to focus on the survey.
The Religion and Society Programme of the University of Lancaster has a helpful page with details of a long list of 'research findings'. The stuff about Catholic guilt is not to be found there, however, but in a press release. It is based, not on a study by sociologists, but an opinion poll by YouGov. The sample size of more than 4,400 sounds impressive, but it was conducted over the internet, and they only reached 391 self-described Catholics. This self-description, translated, in the Press Release, into the term 'practicing Catholic', comes down to whether they 'currently engage in religious or spiritual practices with other people, for example attending services in a place of worship or elsewhere, or taking part in a more informal group', where the 'group' etc. is Catholic for 'Catholics', or Anglican for 'Anglicans'. There is no reference to frequency of this vague spiritual interaction, so it would presumably include non-baptised people who go to their late work-colleagues' Catholic funerals once a decade. And if readers don't know a lot of serious-minded Catholics who'd never find themselves filling in an on-line poll, they need to get out more.
So I'd assume the survey would come out with results typical of the vast number of more-or-less lapsed Catholics, the sort of people who turn up at Midnight Mass and the occasional funeral. What does it say about them? This is the nub of it.
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Would feel guilty if
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All
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All non-religious
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All religious
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CofE
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RC
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Baptists
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Pente-costals
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Muslims
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Jewish
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Used pornography for sexual stimulation
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26%
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15%
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33%
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30%
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30%
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69%
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89%
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54%
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31%
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Used contraception
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5%
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3%
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6%
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3%
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9%
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7%
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9%
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23%
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3%
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Had pre-marital sex
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13%
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5%
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20%
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12%
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19%
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50%
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76%
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62%
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12%
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Had extra-marital sex
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56%
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48%
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64%
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60%
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57%
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88%
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89%
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69%
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72%
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It is clearly not the case that a (probably tenuous) connection with the Catholic Church makes no difference to attitudes. Catholics are twice as likely as non-religious people to see the moral seriousness of pornography, and nearly four times more likely to feel guilty about pre-marital sex. Fornication is not just accepted by secular society, it is pretty well required: to hold out against it is to make an extraordinarily strong statement, with huge implications for one's personal life. And yet a fifth of these 'Catholics' would feel guilty about it. Ok, so the Pentecostalists, Baptists and Muslims do better, but these groups are sociologically incomparable with the Catholic population, let alone the 'Catholic' population, and the sample sizes for those groups are scarcely statistically usable. The reported views of Pentecostalists, for example, are based on the mouse-clicks of only 25 people.
So to some extent we have a re-run here of the infamous survey in the USA which said that 98% of Catholic women were using contraception. (It turned out that NFP was taken as a form of contraception, and everyone wanting to conceive, unlikely to conceive, or not sexually active, was excluded.) However I don't entirely disagree with the Telegraph headline writer: 'Catholic Guilt is a Myth'. The reality is that we have two or even three 'Catholic Churches' to consider.
One is the hard core: the people who go to Mass every Sunday, and take it seriously. Yes, the do exist. I don't mean only people committed to the Traditional Mass, though they are certainly included in this. There are large bodies of very committed 'conservative' Catholics who can be found in selected 'conservative' parishes up and down the country. I've no idea how many there are - that's the frustrating thing. But they can be found among readers of the Catholic blogs and the Catholic Herald, they show up at Latin Mass Society, Evangelium, and Faith Movement events, they staff and support the pro-life groups, and they buy the books produced by Baronius Press, Ignatius Press, and Gracewing, sometimes from St Anthony Communications. We'd certainly notice if they disappeared. From what it is possible to tell, this constituency is growing, not declining.
Then there are the 'Catholics' who have some family connection with the Church, very often reinforced, rediscovered, or just invented for the sake of attending Catholic schools, or for the purpose of having a wedding in a Catholic church. There might be a religious image in the home because it was granny's. They are aware that the Church teaches that fornication and contraception is wrong, and they would describe people who follow this teaching as 'good' (perhaps as 'good-goody'), but despite being baptised and (often) confirmed, they take no notice of that at all. Perhaps a moral theologian could generalise about the likelihood of such people dying without a mortal sin on their souls. The existence of the Catholic school system maintains the numbers of this group, as a sort of penumbra around the visible Church.
More problematic is the third group. I am thinking of more or less 'churchy' people who go to Mass and perhaps get involved in their parishes, but, when asked, turn out not to believe in biblical inerrancy, transubstantiation, the Immaculate Conception, or the Virgin Birth. Their moral attitudes are those of their secular neighbours, but being more self-conscious about their faith than the second group, they don't just ignore the teaching of the Church, but positively reject it. Their understanding of their relationship with the Church, and the Church's teaching authority, is essentially Anglican. You find these people everywhere, but the age-profile of this group is very tilted towards the 'Vatican II generation', and the Grim Reaper is cutting them down in rows. In twenty years time they will have all but vanished. The letters pages of the Catholic press will be unrecognisable.
The Sensible Bond is correct in saying that Catholic schools and parishes, and the Church in general, have failed to inculcate into most of the 391 people taking this survey the truths of the Faith. But once we break it down, it is easy to see why. For the second of my three groups, there hasn't been any real interest in the Faith since granny passed away, and catechising them at a Catholic school must be like preaching to the heathen. For the third, they postively rejected the teachings of the Church, or most of them, forty years ago (maybe when Humanae Vitae came out), and linger in the pews solely in the expectation that the Church will come round to their own way of thinking. Teaching them, from the pulpit of a Catholic church, must be like appearing on the podium at a Humanist Association meeting.
I'm not saying that catechism in schools and the teaching coming from bishops and others has been as clear and forceful as it should be - certainly not. But there is a reason for this lack of clarity and forcefulness. It is designed, quite deliberately, to keep the second and third groups on board.
What happened in the 1970s was an unprecedented collapse of church-going by adult Catholics. But that was, in fact, only the visible half of an even bigger apostasy. A whole lot more people ceased to believe the Faith in and around that decade, but carried on with some nominal affiliation to the Church; thanks to the allure of Catholic schools, this nominal affiliation can even be passed on to the next generation. In order to maintain the fiction that the Church is far bigger than my first group alone, bishops and catechists have gone to a lot of trouble not to frighten them off, even if they are not members of the second or third groups themselves (as most 'Catholic' school teachers today probably are).
Of course this has made the situation much worse, over time, and has delayed and minimised the revival which is today, finally, beginning to be visible. But rather than say that more than three quarters of Catholics think fornication is morally fine, let us recognise that more than three quarters of the people ticking 'Catholic' on on-line surveys are nothing of the kind, and (with their parents) in most cases haven't been for forty years.
It is a very open question whether the second and third groups will stick around as the great pincer-movement we see beginning really starts to bite: I mean the pincer-movement composed of state persecution, from one side, and newly appointed, orthodox bishops and priests, on the other. I would guess they will find things too hot for them, and their nominal affiliation to the Church will be withdrawn. When that happens, we should recognise that this is to a large extent the after-shock of the apostasy of forty years ago.
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us. (1 John 2:19)
The Traditional Movement and orthodoxy: Chairman's message
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| The Latin Mass Society pilgrimage to Walsingham, at the site of the Holy House |
For those who've not seen the latest Mass of Ages, the magazine of the Latin Mass Society, here is part of my 'Chairman's Message'.
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Photos of St Benet's Requiem
The annual Traditional Requiem, sponsored by the Latin Mass Society, took place yesterday; here are some photographs.
Celebrated by Fr Edward van den Burgh of the London Oratory, assisted by Fr Nicholas Edmunds-Smith of the Oxford Oratory and Br Albert Robertson OP.
Mass was accompanied by the Schola Abelis of Oxford under Dominic Bevan.
I am very grateful to Fr John Saward of SS Gregory & Augustine's for the loan of the candlesticks and other items used in the Requiem.
'Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,
Shall shine the holy glimmer of goodbyes.' (Wilfrid Owen.)
No candles at the Gospel: the acolytes stand by the deacon singing the Gospel, but without their candles.
This isn't the first time I've managed to organise a High Mass for this occasion, though most of these, since I started them in 2013, have been Sung Masses without deacon and subdeacon. With the catafalque, there is not an abundance of space, but it is possible.
I organise Masses in a number of rather small churches and chapels, and the small catafalque (which is a console table the rest of the time), with the pall which covers it exactly, has been in many of them. The rather small thurible I also aquired with such chapels in view, which tend to be the ones without thuribles of their own.
In St Benet's there is an additional difficulty of celebrating ad orientem with the altar close to the edge of the step. The footpace used yesterday is a wooden platform made specially for this purpose.
The capacity of the chapel is extremely limited, but a decent crowd came along.
May the deceaed alumni, staff, and benefactors of the Hall rest in peace.
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The New Age and the Old Mass
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| Milton Manor House, Oxfordshire |
Today I am publishing a new Position Paper from the FIUV on the New Age. Go over to Rorate Caeli to read it. Here I present some background and further reflections.
A few years ago on the LMS Walking Pilgrimage to Walsingham I noticed that four of my fellow pilgrims were converts to the Catholic faith from Buddhism. Buddhism is not a major religion in the UK, so the coincidence was rather remarkable. Indeed, in a number of obvious ways Buddhism presents a very marked contrast to Catholicism, and traffic between Buddhism and Catholicism tends to flow the other way. In fact, three out of these four pilgrims had been Western converts to Buddhism, before they came to the Catholic Church.
Buddhism in the West is part of a wider phenomenon, of the attraction posed by eastern spirituality to post-Christin or nominally Christian westerners. This eastern spirituality is often somewhat re-packaged for western tastes, and only the most serious-minded go the whole hog and become Buddhists. Far more popular are the (apparently) nice bits of eastern spirituality, such as reincarnation and the idea of self-realisation, without the asceticism and the infinitessimal prospects of success. Add these to a bit of Tarot-reading, Astrology, the 'all-religions-are-one' dogma of Freemasonry, and other bits of Western-inspired clap-trap, and you have the New Age Movement. This soup of influences is united by the idea that we can free ourselves from soul-cramping restrictions imposed by bad upbring, traditions, and habits, by spiritual techniques, such as meditation, perhaps aided by Yoga, or maybe even drugs.
It is easy to make it sound silly, but it is ubiquitous. We no longer live in a Christian society, but that does not mean there is no spiritual narrative guiding people's lives. Instead of seeking salvation and transformation by Christ, a high proportion of the other people on you local bus would probably agree that they are ultimately concerned with gaining self-realisation through techniques: as the New Agers say, by 'working on themselves'. It may be positive thinking, it may be the gym, it may be a new diet. But it is spiritual, in the sense that it concerns what is most central to them, and what, if anything, has transcendent value. Of course they may not use these terms, but we can determine that we are not simply dealing with material ambition, whether healthy or pathological, because it is about making themselves not just better off, but better people. In this sense, it has replaced religion in their lives - even if some of them still pop in to church occasionally.
Not all of the people on the bus who think about the kind of person they want to be can, in the end, work up the energy to give up red meat, take up Yoga, lose two stone, or whatever it is they think might help. It remains true, however, that, instead of seeking salvation from Christ, they are seeking, well or badly, self-realisation through techniques. If they are to convert to Catholicism, they will need to give up the idea that their ultimately important destiny is some vision of self-perfection. They will have got to accept, what they or their parents or grandparents rejected, the Christian narrative of sin, grace, and redemption, an external and personal God, and an eternal heaven and hell.
The New Age spiritual narrative, as I have described it, has replaced the Christan one for most of the population of the English-speaking world since the 1960s. Even if the hard-core, self-identified, tofu-eating, sandal-wearing, New Agers are relatively few, in this more general sense their ideas have won.
It is a matter of no small interest, then, why they have won, and how this victory can be reversed. I was able to consult a good number of Traditional Catholics who had spent time in the the New Age and Occult milieu, to help with the development of this Position Paper. Thus is not just armchair theorising: it is informed by first-hand experience.
So here in a nutshell is the argument of the paper. If the New Age spiritual narrative won, it must have been more attractive than the alternatives apparently available. The New Age is, among other things, a revolt against rationalism and moralism, and a search for the mysterious and transformative. The major alternative in the English-speaking world in the 1970s was a Protestantism which has ceased to believe in itself, and had never been very good at offering its adherents transformative mystery, in liturgy and spirituality. Catholicism, which had been good at doing that, quite suddenly stopped doing it, just at the moment the New Age was gaining momentum.
Here's the pitch. You're not being offered anything impressive or exciting by conventional religion? You are feeling a bit depressed and a bit uptight? Use these techniques to unlock your inner potential because, yes, you are a wonderful person, if only you knew it, and you just have to free yourself.
Those who do try the techniques can feel a bit buzzy and euphoric, and when that wears off there are more, stronger, techniques to try. Some of them contain perfectly genuine benefits, to health for example. Some are very dangerous. But you'll be dead long before you've tried them all.
The Church can't combat this by offering some watered-down New Ageism. It can offer the profound in place of the superficial, the objective in place of the subjective, and the real in place of the fake. It can offer a transcending mystery which really can heal and transform. It can open the door the New Ager is knocking on. The traditional liturgy is the ideal means to do this.
Click on the label 'New Age' to see other things I written here about it.
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