The Catholic Revolution New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council. How, a mere generation after Vatican Council II initiated the biggest reform since the Reformation, can the Catholic Church be in such deep trouble? The question resonates through this new book by.
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Sewell's example of such a structure-shattering event is the storming of the Bastille in Paris in July Paris was on the edge that summer.
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The crown had run out of money. The Estates General had convened and constituted itself as a National Assembly, and King Louis dismissed the liberal minister Necker, surrounded Paris with troops, and seemed ready to suppress the National Assembly. Underlying the growing tensions between the king and his supporters and the Enlightenment-influenced National Assembly was a sharp division over the nature of sovereignty. Prospects for the harvest seemed poor.
Pamphlets and newspapers were flooding Paris with incendiary articles. Mobs ransacked the city. They seized more than thirty thousand muskets and then moved to the Bastille to find gunpowder. After a bitter fight in which more than a hundred of the attackers were killed, they captured the fort, released its seven prisoners forgers and madmen , and killed two government officials and paraded their heads around Paris on pikes.
There had been urban riots in Paris before and the battle for the Bastille was not a militarily important one, but within three days the king recalled Necker, removed the troops around Paris, and came to Paris to submit, in effect, to the wishes of the National Assembly.
Second Vatican Council | Roman Catholic history [–] | leondumoulin.nl
At first the Assembly condemned the violence at the Bastille and indeed all political violence. But within two weeks, Sewell writes, its members had changed their minds: In the excitement, terror, and elation that characterized the taking of the Bastille, orators, journalists and the crowd itself seized on the political theory of popular sovereignty to justify the popular violence.
This act of epoch-making cultural creativity occurred in a moment of ecstatic discovery: What happened at the Bastille became the establishing act of revolution in the modern sense. By their action at the Bastille, the people were understood to have risen up, destroyed tyranny, and established liberty. Within a month other structure-shattering events followed: The storming of the Bastille, now a culturally defined event, led to the utter transformation of the structures of French society in an outburst of exuberant creativity.
The Old Regime would linger on at least till in one fashion or another. But the New Regime had in fact replaced it. Would the political and social development of the then largest and most powerful country in Europe have been different if that event had not occurred? Did there have to be a revolution and then the bloody wars that lasted until and struggles in the twentieth century up to ? Was the development on balance good or bad?
Might a more peaceful evolutionary transformation of power have been less traumatic for France? There are many different answers to these questions, and indeed the politics of France for two centuries have been, in part, a battle between those who accept the Revolution and those who in some sense do not. But the important point in Sewell's analysis is that the storming of the Bastille, once interpreted as a revolutionary, momentous event, shattered and eventually replaced the social, political, and religious structures of France.
I now propose to apply Sewell's model to Vatican II, and to argue that while the Council's various documents, taken singly or together, were not, in and of themselves, the cause of the shattering of structures in the Catholic Church, the Council, as irrevocably interpreted, was, in addition to and beyond its decisions, a historical event of enormous importance for the Church. I will consider three structures of twentieth-century Catholicism that shaped the Catholic institution: Prior to Vatican II, it was assumed that decision making flowed downward, and that those who disagreed with the pope or any higher Church leaders were no longer Catholic.
It was further assumed that the primary goal of a good Catholic was the salvation of his or her soul, a goal that could be attained by avoiding sins and keeping all the rules which were de facto the same thing , or, once sins were committed, by confessing them in species and number. It was finally assumed that the Church could not change, had not changed, and would never change. These "schemas," reinforced by such "resources" as theories of the divine origin of the Church and papal infallibility, set the parameters of Catholicism inside the worldviews of the Counter-Reformation, the centralization of papal power at the First Vatican Council, and the condemnation of Modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century.
It might have been true that pluralistic decisions about power had been characteristic of the Church for many centuries for example, in the internal governance of some religious orders. It might have been true that in its long history the Catholic Church had often changed most recently on such issues as slavery and coeducation. It might have been true that one ceases to be a Catholic not when one disagrees with the pope but only when one joins another church or formally and explicitly renounces the faith. Finally, it might have been true that the central truth of Christianity was God's forgiving love, which Christians were to imitate.
Nonetheless, in the minds of most of the laity and the clergy and those who were not Catholic, Catholicism before Vatican II was in fact a centralized, immutable, and sin- and rule-driven heritage. Most of the bishops who attended the Council came to Rome fully accepting those assumptions. On the surface, the Catholic Church in was not nearly as edgy as the populace of Paris in He approved changes in the liturgy of Holy Week, the modern critical study of the Bible, and, in effect, birth control, by accepting the rhythm method.
A new emphasis on the Mystical Body of Christ, the teaching that the laity, as well as the pope and the bishops, was in some fashion the Church, suggested to small groups of laity that perhaps the Church ought to listen to them. Scholars, digging into the liturgical, theological, and organizational history of the Church, found a much more variegated Catholicism than the existing official structure of immutable centralization indicated.
Bishops, however conservative, did not like the heavy-handed behavior of the curial dicasteries. An increasingly well-educated Catholic laity was uneasy with the rigidity of the Church. Married people found the birth control teaching difficult, a teaching that became a matter of heavy emphasis only after Noonan Parish priests were increasingly uneasy with the apparent insensitivity of the Church to the problems of the laity, and the "Catholic Action" movements were producing cadres of well-informed, dedicated laypeople.
Finally, the disaster of World War II and the surprising rebirth of Europe following the war created an atmosphere in which many Catholics felt that some modifications in the Church's various stances might be appropriate. None of these events, separately or in combination, seemed then to have constituted a prerevolutionary situation. In retrospect, they can be seen as the raw material for drastic change; in Sewell's terms, the resources for new structures.
Nonetheless, there were signs of slippage. As I have noted, by , half of the Catholics in America did not think birth control was always wrong, and studies showed that most American Catholic women practiced some kind of contraception before the end of their fertility. Still, many, if not most, probably confessed to their use of birth control.
Moreover, the Catholic hierarchy in the United States was already bringing pressure on Rome to obtain some sort of relief for divorced and remarried Catholics, this despite the official posture that the Catholic Church could not change its teachings on marriage. Only in retrospect, however, do these issues suggest that there was serious ferment in Catholicism in the United States, or anywhere else, when Pope John convened the Council.
The Council's preparatory commissions, dominated by the Roman Curia, had prepared draft documents for the first session of the Council that would have turned it into a rubber stamp for the then existing ecclesiastical structures. Most bishops, it would seem, were prepared to vote for them and go home, still able to tell their people what they in the bishops' minds wanted to hear: The occurrence that played a role something like the storming of the Bastille was the sudden opposition of two leaders of the western European Church, Cardinals Joseph Frings of Cologne and Achille Lienart of Lille.
The voting procedure had been slanted by the Curia. Elderly men with enormous personal prestige who had suffered through the war, Lienart and Frings demanded at the first meeting of the Council on October 13, , that the Council fathers be given the opportunity to select the men who would serve on the various commissions. They requested that the voting be postponed for a single day, during which the names of men who were not on the list prepared by the Curia could be circulated.
That night the pope agreed. It was clear then to at least some of the bishops that it would be their Council, not the Roman Curia's. The bishops, it turned out, had power in practice as well as in theory. The Vatican bureaucracy could be defied. In the end, the elected commissions were far more diverse both ideologically and nationally than they would have been had the preparatory commission simply been re-elected.
Furthermore, not only did the postponement prevent the conservatives from gaining absolute control of the conciliar commissions and eventually the very unsatisfactory preparatory constitutions from being approved, but it seems to have started in a change in many of the less motivated bishops" Wilde On that October day, the Catholic revolution had begun. The initial battle over something so apparently minor as selecting drafting committees would change the Catholic Church forever.
That there could be pluralism of power in the Church was a very dangerous truth, as subsequent events would demonstrate. Very few Catholics, lay or clerical, realized at the time what had happened. As the Council went on, the bishops, by overwhelming votes, endorsed a broad range of changes. Joseph Komonchak has noted three overarching changes: The Council proposed a far more nuanced evaluation of the modern world; it introduced the necessity of updating and reform into the Church; and it called for greater responsibility in the local churches.
The press reported, with increasing fascination and exuberance, the alteration of the unalterable. I note five crucial changes that transformed the structures of the preconciliar Church. Here are the first three: On Septuagesima Sunday, , almost every altar in a Catholic church in the United States was turned around. For the first time in at least a thousand years, the priest said Mass facing the congregation, and he said it partially soon totally in English. If the Latin liturgy could be abandoned that easily after more than a millennium and seven-eighths of American Catholics approved of the change , the Catholic Church could certainly change.
The Council was now willing to admit that Protestant denominations were indeed churches and that Catholics should strive for mutual understanding with them in friendly dialogue. The heretics, schismatics, Jews, and infidels down the street were now suddenly separated brothers and sisters. Overnight, Catholicism was willing to change when it wanted to. This change resulted from a decision of the American bishops after the Council was over. It may have been the most unnecessary and the most devastating.
Fish on Friday had been a symbol that most visibly distinguished American Catholics from other Americans.
Bishops continued to insist that nothing had really changed. None of these reforms touched on the essence of Catholic doctrine. But such distinctions were lost on the laity and on many of the clergy, too. The immutable had mutated; what would change next? When one considers the rather moderate nature of these changes, one is puzzled by the insistence that the Council caused all the subsequent trouble the Church would experience.
The centralization of authority was not yet in jeopardy, however. Change in itself did not mean that ordinary priests or laypersons could make their own decisions about the conditions under which they would be Catholic. Yet implicit in the newly discovered mutability of the Church and in the bishops' revolt against the Curia was the notion that if something ought to be changed and would be changed eventually, it was all right to anticipate the decision and change on one's own authority. The gradual drift in this direction in the late s put the centralized authority structure of the Church in grave jeopardy.
Could the bishops have been more cautious in implementing the Council? Was the prelate I quoted above correct about the bishops' mistakes?
They might have left Friday abstinence alone, but liturgical reform and ecumenism by themselves would have created a heady atmosphere in which the expectation often eager of more change would have swept the Church. Two subsequent developments, however, called the authority structure of the Church further into question. An attempt to preserve the authority structure of the Church in fact weakened and eventually came close to destroying it. There was strong sentiment among the bishops at the Council to address birth control, but Pope Paul VI, not trusting his fellow bishops with the issue, removed it from conciliar debate.
Instead he appointed a special commission, which included married laypeople, to report to him on the subject. The existence of the commission became common knowledge. Laity and clergy alike assumed that if change were possible, it would occur, especially after learning that the commission had recommended change almost unanimously. As I explained in the previous chapter, by the time the pope turned down the recommendations, the "lower orders" of the Church had already made up their minds.
In terms of protecting the authority structure of the Church, it would have been better if the pope had never established the commission, or if, once it was established, he had followed its recommendation, or if he had left the matter alone. In the confusion, disappointment, and anger that followed Paul VI's Humanae vitae , laity and clergy embraced the principle of following one's own conscience.
It was this development, more than any other, that shattered the authority structure. It is often argued that priests and laypeople cannot make such decisions for themselves. Perhaps they should not, but in fact they did and do. It is further argued that they cannot be good Catholics if they make such decisions, but in fact they think they can.
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This is what happens when a historical event shatters a behavior pattern and the resources that support it. The dialogue goes something like this: You have tried to force them for three decades now and it has not worked. You need another approach.
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In the late s and early s, every age segment in Catholic America changed its convictions about the legitimacy of birth control, and, more ominously, about the right of the Church to lay down rules for sexual behavior. Authority was no longer centralized; it had become pluralistic. Similarly, acceptance of papal infallibility fell to 22 percent of Catholics in the United States. Catholic laity, with the support of the lower clergy, had decided that it was not wrong to be Catholic on one's own terms. Such was the fruit of the Second Vatican Council—not a series of documents, but a phenomenon that transformed the behavior patterns of Catholics with regard to their Church.
Catholics who decided that contraception was not wrong justified that decision by appealing not to a pope who did not understand but to a God who did. The point is not whether such a justification was proper, but that it helped to erode the mortal sin structure of preconciliar Catholicism. A fifth critical change in the structures of the preconciliar Church was the dispensation of priests to leave the priesthood and enter ecclesiastically valid marriages, often with former nuns. This development confirmed not only the possibility of change, but the willingness of Church authorities to back down in the face of pressure.
How the second Vatican council responded to the modern world
In effect, the lower orders asked the following questions: If the Church could permit men who had left the priesthood to marry, why could it not permit them to marry while still active in the priesthood? If it could change the playing field on liturgy, ecumenism, and Friday abstinence, why not on birth control and the role of women in the Church? If so many "mortal" sins were no longer sinful, was it necessary to worry so much about sin? There are complex theological replies to these questions, but they didn't seem credible to many Catholics, who concluded, unfairly perhaps, that the Church could change whatever it wanted, if only it wanted to.
Currently, a large majority of both priests and laypeople reject the Church's official teachings on the ordination of women, birth control, premarital sex, in utero and in vitro fertilization, oral sex, and the legality of abortion under some circumstances. There is also strong movement in the direction of tolerance for homosexuality. We're supposed to be actively participating. The changes didn't stop when Mass ended. As time went by, many nuns shucked their voluminous habits in favor of clothes similar to those worn by the people they served.
And men and women in religious orders started taking on causes, even risking arrest, when they spoke out in favor of civil rights and workers' rights and against the war in Vietnam. Such changes represented an about-face from the church's defensive approach to the world before Vatican II, said Christopher Baglow, a theology professor at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. The council documents say there must be a conversation between the church and the world, Aymond said. At the same time, the world is saying something to the church.
This shift included the Catholic Church's attitude toward other religions. Before Vatican II, Catholics weren't supposed to visit other denominations' houses of worship. But one document from the council acknowledged that these disparate faiths had a common belief in God, said Ryan, who described it as nothing less than "a revolutionary approach. Perhaps the biggest of these changes came in the church's approach to Judaism. That changed with the council, when the Catholic Church acknowledged its Jewish roots and Jews' covenant with God, Ryan said.
It provided an entirely new day.