That sort of turmoil was not entirely new to the Catholic world. In the history of the Church, major councils have frequently been followed by periods of confusion until the new teachings have been absorbed. But Vatican II was the first ecumenical council in the age of modern communications, when every new theological argument was instantaneously disseminated throughout the world. Ordinary Catholics, as well as interested observers outside the Church, could develop their own views about the conciliar debates. Those views, however, were strongly influenced by the secular media, which were nearly unanimous in decreeing that the liberal or “progressive” wing of the Church had the better of the debates.
In Turmoil and Truth, the British Catholic author Philip Trower explains the public perception of the post-conciliar Church with this vivid image:
Six men are pushing a heavily loaded car which has run out of fuel. Three of them, who have been riding in the car, want to push it 20 yards to get it into a lay-by. The other three, who have offered to help, mean to push the car 50 yards and shove it over a cliff followed by the car owner and his two friends. Once the pushing begins and the car starts moving it is probable the car is going to come to rest more than 20 yards from the starting point even if it does not end up at the cliff’s foot.
Now let us imagine what a group of people watching from a nearby hilltop will make of the incident. They will start by assuming that all six men have the same intentions. The car is moving steadily forward. Then they see three of the men detach themselves from the back of the car, run around to the front and try to stop it. Which are the troublemakers? Those surely who are now opposing the process that has been started.
Needless to say, this analogy is imperfect. The Catholic Faith was not “out of gas” before Vatican II, and it would be unfair to imply that everyone calling for radical change was motivated by a desire to destroy the Church. But Trower makes the important point that, like the three men in the car, the Church was on a journey before the battle began, and to understand the battle one must understand that journey.
John Paul II and the Restoration
During the long pontificate of St. John Paul II, the turmoil within the Church slowly subsided. No one could accuse the Polish pontiff of opposing the council’s teachings. He had been an active and influential participant at Vatican II, and his pastoral leadership of the archdiocese of Krakow was widely regarded as a model for the proper implementation of the council’s teachings. Nevertheless, he rejected the excesses that had been promoted by some of the overzealous champions of reform. Thanks also to his enormous popularity and his deserved reputation for personal holiness, he held the confidence of the faithful and was able to steer the universal Church back toward normalcy.
John Paul II faced resistance, to be sure, and a good deal of it came from within the Society of Jesus. In their eye-opening book Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits, Peter McDonough and Eugene Bianchi take a sympathetic look at the progressive Jesuits who were appalled by the Polish pope’s refusal to change Church doctrine, particularly on issues of sexuality. “He’s not one of the worst popes; he’s the worst,” one Jesuit told the authors. “I am appalled by the direction of the present papacy,” said another. “I am scandalized by Rome’s intransigent refusal to re-examine its doctrines regarding gender and sex,” said another. One Jesuit made a shocking statement of disloyalty: “The Church as we know it is dying. I hope and pray that the Society [of Jesus] will help to facilitate this death and resurrection.” Another, in more measured tones, boasted: “The society has not sold its soul to the ‘restoration’ of John Paul II.”
That restoration continued under Benedict XVI, who had been John Paul’s right-hand man. Helping to settle the lingering confusion about the proper interpretation of Vatican II, he explained that Catholic doctrine and discipline should always be seen in continuity with the centuries of the Church’s tradition. The Faith does not change, though over time the Church refines her understanding of truths that have been known from the days of the apostles. Vatican II, Benedict explained, did not, and could not, constitute a break with Catholic tradition. Proposing a “hermeneutic of continuity,” by which the teachings of Vatican II were to be read in the light of the teachings of previous councils and magisterial statements, he rejected the extremism of both the radicals and the traditionalists, who agreed that Vatican II had repudiated previous Church teachings—the former welcoming the rupture and the latter loathing it.
John Paul II and Benedict XVI did not repair all the fissures in the structure of the Church that appeared after Vatican II. Far from it. For ordinary Catholics, the problems persisted at the parish level, where liturgical abuses continued and religious education was shallow. Catholics seeking a reverent liturgy had to shop for a congenial parish, often far from their homes, and parents determined to educate their children in the Faith hunted out the few rigorous parish programs or, more and more often, taught their children at home. Still, these struggling Catholics knew that in parochial conflicts, they could cite recent papal documents, confident that they had the support of the Vatican.
“Irreversible” Change
No longer. Francis has reopened the debate about the continuity of Catholic teaching. His supporters see him as the liberator of the spirit of Vatican II, bringing permanent change to the Church, while his critics protest that the Church cannot alter its fundamental doctrine. So the intramural disputes that split dioceses and parishes and families a generation ago are flaring up once again. Orthodox Catholics who thought they could finally foresee the restoration of reverence and beauty in the liturgy and of serious substance in catechesis see their hard-won gains slipping away. That conflict in itself would be cause for alarm. But there is more.
As the pope’s closest advisers have stated on several occasions, Francis intends not only to change the Church but to lock in the changes. Archbishop Victor Fernández, a fellow Argentine who helped the pontiff draft his first encyclical, remarked in 2015, “You have to realize that he is aiming at reform that is irreversible.”
For Catholics who have weathered two generations of confusion and conflict, clinging to beliefs they hold precious, the prospect of “irreversible change” along the lines suggested by Fernández is horrifying. The unsettling “Francis effect” has left thousands of Catholics constantly anxious, easily rattled by the latest rumors from Rome.
In the spring of 2017, for example, a report circulated that the pope had authorized a Vatican commission to reconsider the teaching of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical of Paul VI reaffirming the Church’s age-old condemnation of contraception that had touched off the bitterest theological disputes of recent decades. The report was not quite accurate, but the reality was unsettling enough. It was not the pope himself who was reopening the question—at least not directly. The Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family (named after the most eloquent defender of Humanae Vitae) was sponsoring a “study group,” working under the auspices of the recently remodeled Pontifical Academy for Life, to examine the history of the preparation of the encyclical. A pontifical institute would not undertake a reevaluation of a papal encyclical unless the sponsors were confident that the pope would approve. Since the members of the study group were known for their lack of enthusiasm for the Church’s teaching on contraception, veterans of the battles over Humanae Vitae were hardly paranoid in fearing that the ugly controversy could erupt again—this time with the Vatican supporting the critics of constant Catholic teaching.
Far from employing the “hermeneutic of continuity,” Francis has often displayed a dismissive, almost sneering, attitude toward Church leaders of the past. In an address to Jesuit officials in October 2016, he said that the missionary work of the early Jesuits was marred by “a hegemonic conception of Roman centralism.” A Catholic historian, Bronwen Catherine McShea, takes exception to that phrase, which seems to “dismiss, and gratuitously to tarnish the memory of, Church leaders of the distant past for the sa
ke of advancing a current agenda for inculturated forms of Christianity among the world’s indigenous cultures.”
McShea is also dismayed by the pope’s remark to a Lutheran delegation from Finland: “The intention of Martin Luther five hundred years ago was to renew the Church, not divide her.” On the contrary, McShea writes, “from early on, Luther’s Reformation was centrally about separating, promptly—with the help of powerful territorial princes and city magistrates with local influence and armies at the ready—the hidden, faith-filled wheat from the papistic chaff, so to speak.”
New Fuel for Liturgy Wars
Francis himself used the word “irreversible” in August 2017 when he spoke on the most controversial of all the changes that Catholics experienced in the years following Vatican II: the dramatic alterations in the language and rubrics of the Mass. Speaking to a conference in Italy, the pope stressed that the changes wrought by the council could not be undone.
The pope—who, unlike his predecessor Benedict XVI, had rarely spoken about liturgical matters—argued that the post-conciliar changes were not sudden. They were part of a long history of reform, he said, that dated back to the early years of the twentieth century. Those changes, he continued, responded “to real needs and to the concrete hopes of a renewal.” Therefore, he concluded, “we can assert with certainty and magisterial authority that the liturgy reform is irreversible.”
Francis has been reluctant to invoke his magisterial authority on doctrinal questions, but here he invoked it in connection with liturgical reform. Once again his words were profoundly confusing. The pope said in the same address that liturgical renewal is a continuing process. What does it mean to speak with “magisterial authority” about a process?
Virtually every Catholic, from the crustiest traditionalist to the most iconoclastic radical, would agree that something should be done to the liturgy. Hardly anyone is satisfied with the current state of liturgical affairs. The only questions are whether, how, and in which direction the process should continue.
Insofar as he was saying that the Church is committed to the process that began with Vatican II, Francis was only reinforcing what John Paul II and Benedict XVI had said. But many analysts who read the pope’s speech—including, notably, those who applauded it most enthusiastically—interpreted his words as a distinct break from the statements of his immediate predecessors. Father Anthony Ruff, an influential American liturgist, remarked, “It is obvious just what, and who, is omitted.” Ruff did not spell it out, but he clearly meant that Francis never mentioned his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who had written and spoken so frequently about the liturgy. The implication was that with this major address the current pope had thrust aside the ideas of the former pope, who had always emphasized the need for continuity in the Church’s teaching and worship.
But if Pope Francis is free to discard the ideas of Pope Benedict, then a future pope should be free to discard the ideas of Pope Francis. And if Francis was indeed reversing the policies of his immediate predecessor, he was, in the process, undermining the supposed irreversibility of his own policies.
Three weeks later Francis took another bold step forward on the liturgical battlefield with a motu proprio giving national bishops’ conferences the authority—previously reserved to the Holy See—to prepare and approve vernacular translations of liturgical texts. On paper, Magnum Principium involves only a minor shift in jurisdiction. But the pope’s move is likely to have far-reaching effects in practice, possibly reigniting the battles over translations that were fought with particular vigor in the English-speaking world in the 1990s.
In 2001, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments released the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam providing guidelines for liturgical translations. That instruction—which called upon translators to adhere as closely as possible to the language of original Latin texts—remains in effect. Magnum Principium, however, was hailed by critics of Liturgiam Authenticam as grounds for a reconsideration of the fundamental principles of translation and an effort to produce new English-language versions of the liturgy.
Actually, Francis does not suggest new approaches to translation. Quite on the contrary, in his motu proprio he states that the existing Vatican instructions “were and remain at the level of general guidelines and, as far as possible, must be followed by liturgical commissions … .” Still the overall effect of the new papal document was to reopen a painful debate within the Catholic community.
An Odd Affinity for Traditionalists?
Francis seems to be working directly against the goal of “irreversible change” with one important policy initiative: his drive to regularize the status of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a traditionalist group that broke with Rome in 1988 when its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, defied the Holy See in consecrating four bishops. All the bishops involved in that ceremony incurred the penalty of excommunication, and the SSPX priests they ordained were never accorded canonical status. Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications in 2009, but the status of SSPX clerics remained irregular; they did not have official permission to administer the Sacraments.
During most of Benedict’s pontificate the Vatican engaged in negotiations with the SSPX, hoping to bring its followers back into the fold. The talks stalled, however, when the leaders of the group balked at acknowledging the validity of the teachings of Vatican II. Francis surprised many observers by continuing the talks, going even further to achieve a reconciliation. In 2015 he granted SSPX priests the authority to hear sacramental confessions, and in 2017 he announced that the Catholic Church would accept the validity of marriages at which an SSPX priest presided.
As I write, informed sources in Rome say that it is only a matter of time before the Vatican fully recognizes the SSPX, making it a personal prelature. The prelature would exercise authority over SSPX priests, ensuring that they were not subject to disciplinary control by diocesan bishops unsympathetic to the traditionalist movement. By all accounts, the Vatican has already offered the SSPX this status. The sticking point seems to be a requirement that the SSPX acknowledge the authority of Vatican II, but Francis has reportedly made concessions far beyond those offered by Benedict, including an acknowledgement that there can be legitimate differences of opinion as to the authority and the interpretation of the council documents.
Why would a pontiff bent on radical change within the Church make this extraordinary effort to reconcile with recalcitrant traditionalists? Suspicious members of the SSPX are asking exactly that question. Is the proposed reconciliation a tactic to bring the traditionalists to heel, to regain the disciplinary leverage that the Vatican lost when the SSPX leaders were excommunicated? Or is an SSPX prelature seen as a sort of ecclesiastical safety valve, a way for “rigid” Catholics to segregate themselves, leaving dioceses and parishes to the ministrations of the new liberal hegemony?
There is a simple explanation, really, which has three parts. First, Francis has always said that the Church should reach out to those on the “peripheries,” and the SSPX is undeniably on the periphery of Catholicism today. Second, traditionalism has demonstrated an enduring appeal. Once thought to be the last gasp of a resistance that would die out as its members aged, the movement has attracted thousands of young Catholics. In France today, traditionalist chapels draw more worshippers than ordinary parishes. Third, and most important, the sticking point in negotiations with the SSPX has always been the group’s hesitance about Vatican II, and Francis has never been overly worried about the details of doctrine, discipline, and “the law.”
The Lessons of China and Venezuela
The willingness to overlook difficulties in doctrine has also been an important factor in negotiations between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China. On that front too, rumors suggest that an imminent accord will end a longstanding impasse over the appointment of new Catholic bishops in China. But if the rumors are true, the price of that agreement could be a crucial concession to Beijing, a co
ncession that Benedict XVI had firmly ruled out.
For decades, the Holy See has wrangled with the communist regime over control of the Church in China. The government insists that the Church must be under the guidance of the Communist Party through the government-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association. Benedict maintained that a role for the Patriotic Association cannot be reconciled with the freedom of the Church. There matters stood, apparently at a stalemate, during Benedict’s reign. The Patriotic Association appointed several bishops, whose consecrations the Holy See regarded as illicit. The Chinese government, for its part, refused to recognize the “underground” Catholic bishops, whose appointments had not been authorized by the regime. Many if not most Chinese bishops have managed to win approval from both the government and the Holy See, but the process for doing so is murky, the situation unstable. “Underground” Catholics are subject to police harassment, and bishops are under heavy pressure to bow to the Patriotic Association.
Under Francis, there have been signs that the stalemate could be broken, and the Vatican is reportedly ready to offer a new compromise: the Holy See would appoint new bishops, but it would select them from a list of candidates prepared by Chinese authorities. Thus the Holy See would protect its claim to ultimate authority over appointments, while Beijing could exclude clerics who were deemed unfriendly to the government.
Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired bishop of Hong Kong, who for years has been the leading Catholic critic of the mainland government, fears the Vatican is “going to make a very bad agreement with China.” The rumored agreement, he says, would “give too much decision-making power to the government.” Loyal Catholics could easily be excluded from consideration for appointment as bishops, and it is “really naïve,” he warns, to think that the Communist Party would hesitate to use that leverage.
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