Chairman's Blog

So, on the first question. The Pope can speak as Pope and as a private person. In the latter capacity what he says may be of interest as an indication of his thinking, but it wouldn’t bind the faithful to believe anything. Normally private letters wouldn’t be considered part of the magisterium. Putting something in the AAS is a way of making it part of the magisterium. It is a bit surprising to do this with a private letter but I think there are precedents. Certainly many things are in the AAS which were addressed in the first place to particular groups, such as Pius XII’s famous talk to midwives authorising NFP. Putting such things in the AAS is a way of directing them to the whole Faithful.

On the second question: There is, however, more to making something part of the magisterium, and therefore binding on the consciences of Catholics, than simply asserting that it is magisterial. The content of the document is also relevant. ‘Legal positivists’ claim that laws are valid just by virtue of a valid procedure approving them, but this is false and has never been accepted by the Church. Even in the case of human laws, a law will fail to bind in conscience if it is impossible to follow, for example if it is incomprehensible, retroactive, or totally unreasonable. In those cases it fails to be a binding law, or, really, a law at all. Law is by definition something which guides action, and such putative laws are incapable of doing that.

In a similar way, if we are to talk of a papal magisterial act binding Catholics to believe something, then it must be in accordance with the existing magisterium, and it must be possible to understand what it means. Pope Francis’ letter fails on both counts.

Let's consider the content of the letter in more detail. The letter makes it clear that Pope Francis approves of the guidelines produced by the Bishops of Buenos Aires, but it does not say that these are doctrinally precise and binding on everyone, as opposed to being a reasonable local adaptation of general principles. The attitude of Pope Francis expressed on other occasions, in fact, points more to the latter interpretation. Cf. Amoris laetitia 3:

Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas

I've waited to see if there if would be any reaction in the Letters page to Mgr Basil Loftus' latest outrage: an attack on Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, in which he described the Archbishop, and any anyone like him who was actively pro-life, as a terrorist. (Catholic Times, 24th November 2017.)

His column is, as usual, both bizarre and incoherent. Remember, as you read it, that the Catholic Times is sold in the backs of Catholic churches every weekend: this is a newspaper, in other words, with ecclesiastical approval. I transcribe the key section for the record, since the paper has no online presence, even for subscribers.

No-one is more supportive [than Pope Francis] of the rights and paramountcy of all marginalised people, including the unborn - but he is totally opposed to the purportednly pro-life antics of men such as Archbishop Naumann, the recently elected head of the American bishops' 'pro-life committee'.

Where Naumann would erect marquees in papal colours in front of every abortion clinic, and staff them with a 24-hour guard of what Francis calls "prune-faced" people reciting the rosary round the clock, Francis for his part would have smiling and empathetic women there, who khow what it feels like to lose a baby, ready to offer support to the mothers who come out of those clinics, to accompany them in the awful journey of their post-abortion realisation, and to help them to discern what this means. Francis' ideas are clearly articulated by Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, who recently lost the contest for chairmanship of that episcopal committee. He told his peers, and everyone else, that while strenuously defending the rights of the unborn child: "We should be no less appalled by the indifference towards the thousands of people who die daily for lack of decent medical care; who are denied rights by a broken immigration system and by racism; who suffer in hunger, joblessness and want; who pay the price of violence in gun-saturated neighbourhoods; or who are exectuted by the state in the name of justice." The US bishops preferred the argument advanced by Naumann, ...

Single-issue fanatics, whether they are exercised about sex and marriage, about maniples and Communion-on-the-tongue, about celibacy of the clergy, about contraception, or about the right to carry loaded firearms in America while attending Mass, are at heart essentially zealots. Sadly, too, it seems that those who insist on wearing birettas are often selfsame individuals who want to carry Berettas. All these fanatical partisans are by definition biased and prejudiced against any attempt to reason with them in a way that would seek to integrate their sometimes, but not always, rightful concerns within a wider context. Their extremist and sometimes violent propensities make them, in all but name, terrorists.

And sometimes worse. It is said, after all, that one can sometimes reason with a terrorist, but never with a liturgist! The priest who sweeps a child's teddy-bear off the tiny white coffin because it is forbidden by liturgical law, or who excludes females from the role of altar-servers, or refuses to wash their feet on Maundy Thursday, or who turns away from Communion a politician who voted not to criminalise abortion, or a bishop who refuses to back Pope Francis' plea for discernment in the matter of Communion for the divorced and remarried, and for those who live in non-conventional domestic situations, all of them are crypto-terrorists. They are numbered among those whom Paul condemns as ignoring the God's ways of righteousness in favour of their own ill-informed zeal (Romans, 10:3). ...

I hardly think it necessary to point out the contradictions and scandalous assertions in this article. But isn't it funny that he wants to bundle together so many positions he dislikes, in order to discredit them all, and then label people holding them as 'single issue zealots'?

The accusation of terrorism, though not larded with the casual racism which characterised his attack on Cardinal Ranjith ('the Sri Lankan cappa magna fetishist and Tridentine-rite devotee'), and not as theologically fundamental as his denial of the Bodily Resurrection of Our Lord or His Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, is in itself the most serious insult of a named prelate that I have read in his columns, and also perhaps the most insane. It seems Loftus, who was a canon lawyer, has forgotten the right of Archbishops, like lesser folk, to their good name (Canon 220).

I detect in this extract the instinctive anti-abortion sentiments common in Catholic liberals of his generation: the hand-wringing refusal to do anything to oppose what they think of as this dreadful, dreadful thing. It makes his attack on Archbishop Naumann all the more morally troubling.

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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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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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