The Church’s tipping point

Pope John XXIII – Mass Opening Vatican II

Time magazine is carrying this article examining where the Roman Catholic Church stands today, in America, just after the hugely successful visit of Pope Benedict XVI. It makes some assumptions that Time and other big media have accepted for the past four decades or so. Namely, that liberal dissidents have carried impressive power and legitimacy in trying to re-make the Church since Vatican II. And that the Second Vatican Council actually did and said more – or other – than it actually did.

Here’s the open:

He may not have been thinking about it at the time, but Pope Benedict, in the course of his recent U.S. visit may have dealt a knockout blow to the liberal American Catholicism that has challenged Rome since the early 1960s.

There is a nuanced but big difference between regarding the Church here as ‘American Catholics’ or ‘Catholic Americans’. That’s key to understanding the framework of dissent against the Church that has never changed its teaching on faith and morals from the time of Christ.

“Vatican II,” which overhauled much of Catholic teaching and ritual, had a revolutionary impact on the Church as a whole. It enabled people to hear the Mass in their own languages; embraced the principle of religious freedom; rejected anti-semitism; and permitted Catholic scholars to grapple with modernity.

It did not overhaul Catholic teaching on matters of faith and morals, but on the structure of the Church and the place of the Church in the modern world, defining both with clear, positive, encouraging language. As for the vernacular Mass, it called for an ‘active participation’ by Catholics in the pews, while allowing Latin to remain an option (though I know people who think Vatican II rendered Latin “illegal“). That part has been straightened out in recent times, especially by Benedict.

But Vatican II meant even more to a generation of devout but restless young people in the U.S. rather than a course correction, Terrence Tilley, now head of the Fordham University’s theology department, wrote recently, his generation perceived “an interruption of history, a divine typhoon that left only the keel and structure of the church unchanged.” They discerned in the Council a call to greater church democracy, and an assertion of individual conscience that could stand up to the authority of even the Pope. So, they battled the Vatican’s birth-control ban, its rejection of female priests and insistence on celibacy, and its authoritarianism.

Not to resurrect a battle that now seems to be winding down…..dissidents perceived a hierarchical church turning into a democratic one in ways it did not. And they railed at what was really their misperceptions, because they weren’t true. The Church highly respects free will and individual conscience, but has never stopped teaching that it must be well-formed, and on matters of faith and morals formed under the teaching of the magisterium. Which never changed what can’t be changed….revealed truth about the nature of the Church and of the human person.

Remarks Tilley, “For a couple of generations, progressivism was an [important] way to be Catholic.”

Then he adds, “But I think the end of an era is here.”

Why? Why now? Because Pope Benedict has continued the work and the teachings of John Paul II on the truths of the faith and the human person, trusting in the power of truth and clarity. Because, as they say, Benedict “gets it.” His visit to America “changed the dynamic.”

And that’s a problem for progressives. Says Fr. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center whom Benedict famously removed from his previous job as editor of America, “Reform movements need an enemy to organize against. As most bishops have gotten their acts together on sex abuse, they have looked less like the enemy and more like part of the solution. Enthusiasm for reform declined. With the Pope’s forthright response, it will decline even more.”

Furthermore, the dissidents are not only being mollified by a great Shepherd, they are also aging and seeing a young generation with very different spiritual direction and desires.

And so, unless Benedict contradicts in Rome what he said in New York, the Church may have reached a tipping point. This is not to say that the (over-hyped) young Catholic Right

(why call them “over-hyped“?)

will swing into lay dominance. Nor will liberal single-issue groups simply evaporate. But if they cohere again, it will be around different defining issues. “It’s a new ball game,” admits Steinfels. As Tilley wrote recently in Commonweal regarding his fellow theologians, “A new generation has neither the baggage nor the ballast of mine. Theirs is the future. Let’s hope they remember the Council as the most important event in twentieth-century Catholicism.”

And let’s hope they learn the fullness of the Council’s fruits better than their parents and grandparents. This is an exploding information age, and they really know how to get information.