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Vatican Pressure on American Sisters

UPDATES The US bishops will spend church funds on this: http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2009/09/youve-got-to-be-kidding-me.html

 (July, 2009): http://paulsurlis.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/fr-karban-on-vatican-visitation-of-women-religious-in-the-usa/

http://thewildreed.blogspot.com/2009/07/vatican-and-us-women-religious.html

http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/07/vatican-scrutiny-puzzles-some-nuns.html

http://donfrancobarbero.blogspot.com/2009/07/tempeste-vaticane.html

One of the nastiest sports of fundamentalists is nun-baiting -- it is the successor of witch-hunts and Gothic tales of convent horrors. It is well represented today by the confused and immature columnist Damian Thompson. The comments in his combox are steeped in the most rabid misogyny. The Vatican should be ashamed to be fnding their supporters in such quarters. 

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/9084211/The_Sisters_of_Perpetual_Indignation_tell_the_Vatican_to_get_stuffed/

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While the Church in Ireland reels over revelation of mismanagement and abuse, the Vatican is investigating Sisters who seem to represent the best spirit of Vatican II, the very thing that has proved an antidote to abuse both in Ireland and throughout the Church. See http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/05/international-religious-superiors-back.html

1. THE APOSTOLIC VISITATION OF CONVENTS

‘The action was initiated by the Congregation’s prefect, Slovenian Cardinal Franc Rodé, C.M. The decree, issued Dec. 22, 2008, indicated the Visitation is being undertaken in order to look into the quality of the life of the members of these religious institutes.’

http://ncronline.org/news/women/vatican-begins-study-us-women-religious

http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2009/01/first-seminaries-now-convents.html

http://apostolicvisitation.org/en/materials/decree.pdf 

Joan Chittister commented:

‘From where I stand, if the church really wants to support women religious, it’s about time for a statement that says again, “These are great women living a great spiritual life and doing great things.” Let’s hear it: loud and clear. After all, if religious life for women disappears -- or, conceivably, begins to function outside the boundaries of the institutional church -- it will not only affect religious women -- it will also definitely affect the church in the modern world.’

http://ncronline.org/blogs/where-i-stand/if-they-really-mean-it-its-about-time

Sandra Schneiders commented:

‘But we can receive them, politely and kindly, for what they are, uninvited guests who should be received in the parlor, not given the run of the house. When people ask questions they shouldn’t ask, the questions should be answered accordingly.’

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/features/index.cfm?recnum=60296 

2. THE REIKI BAN

‘The six-page doctrinal committee statement was approved for publication by the administrative committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at a meeting in Washington in late March. It says that “a Catholic who puts his or her trust in Reiki would be operating in the realm of superstition, the no-man’s-land that is neither faith nor science.” ... While Christians believe in the efficacy of prayer for healing, they do so with a reliance on divine power, not with the expectation that the person engaged in invoking that power can cause the release of that power, it says. “For Christians, the access to divine healing is by prayer to Christ as Lord and Savior, while the essence of Reiki is not a prayer but a technique that is passed down from the ‘Reiki master’ to the pupil, a technique that once mastered will reliably produce the anticipated results,” it says.’

http://ncronline.org/news/spirituality/reiki-good-health-spirituality-or-only-superstition

http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2009/04/reiki-ban-and-lcwr-investigation-go.html

3. THEOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT OF LEADERSHIP

‘The Vatican congregation [CDF] informed the leadership conference officers of its new “doctrinal assessment” in a February 20 letter, which the officers received March 10. The letter came from Cardinal William Joseph Levada, the congregation’s prefect. In his letter, Levada explained the congregation is undertaking its “assessment” of the women’s leadership conference after initial Vatican doctrinal concerns were expressed in 2001.’

http://ncronline.org/news/women/vatican-investigates-us-women-religious-leadership

http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2009/04/under-assessment.html

http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2009/04/catholic-sojourner-and-lcwr.html

http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2009/04/vatican-men-enter-uppity-liberal.html

An ecstatic reaction from the neocath publication New Oxford Review (which has no connection with the University): http://pblosser.blogspot.com/2009/07/surprise-femi-nuns-find-themselves.html. Purge the Church of liberal nuns, it urges.

There is indeed a popular New Age theology that the CDF do well to worry about. They should highlight the values in the following address of Laurie Brink, OP, but point out how these values can be squared with orthodox Christology, as correctly interpreted in function of today’s frameworks if understanding:

The dynamic option for Religious Life, which I am calling, Sojourning, is much more difficult to discuss, since it involves moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus. A sojourning congregation is no longer ecclesiastical. It has grown beyond the bounds of institutional religion. Its search for the Holy may have begun rooted in Jesus as the Christ, but deep reflection, study and prayer have opened it up to the spirit of the Holy in all of creation. Religious titles, institutional limitations, ecclesiastical authorities no longer fit this congregation, which in most respects is Post-Christian.

When religious communities embraced the spirit of renewal in the 1970s, they took seriously that the world was no longer the enemy, that a sense of ecumenism required encountering the holy “other,” and that the God of Jesus might well be the God of Moses and the God of Mohammed. The works of Thomas Merton encouraged an exploration of the nexus between Eastern and Western religious practices. The emergence of the women’s movement with is concomitant critique of religion invited women everywhere to use a hermeneutical lens of suspicion when reading the androcentric Scriptures and the texts of the Tradition. With a new lens, women also began to see the divine within nature, the value and importance of the cosmos, and that the emerging new cosmology encouraged their spirituality and fed their souls.

As one sister described it, “I was rooted in the story of Jesus, and it remains at my core, but I’ve also moved beyond Jesus.” The Jesus narrative is not the only or the most important narrative for these women. They still hold up and reverence the values of the Gospel, but they also recognize that these same values are not solely the property of Christianity. Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Judaism, Islam and others hold similar tenets for right behavior within the community, right relationship with the earth and right relationship with the Divine. With these insights come a shattering or freeing realization—depending on where you stand. Jesus is not the only son of God. Salvation is not limited to Christians. Wisdom is found in the traditions of the Church as well as beyond it.

Sojourners have left the religious home of their fathers and mothers and are traveling in a foreign land, mapping their way as they go. They are courageous women among us. And very well may provide a glimpse into the new thing that God is bringing about in our midst. Who’s to say that the movement beyond Christ is not, in reality, a movement into the very heart of God? A movement the ecclesiastical system would not recognize. A wholly new way of being holy that is integrative, non-dominating, and inclusive.

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http://www.lcwr.org/lcwrannualassembly/2007assembly/Keynote.pdf

Philip Powell OP, underlines as objectionable the following: ‘women also began to see the divine within nature, the value and importance of the cosmos, and that the emerging new cosmology encouraged their spirituality and fed their souls’, and: ‘Salvation is not limited to Christians. Wisdom is found in the traditions of the Church as well as beyond it.’

I fail to see any theological problem with these assertions, but there are others that give me pause, which I italicize above.

http://hancaquam.blogspot.com/2009/04/feminismnew-cosmologyjesus-doesnt-save.html 

Fr Geoff Farrow argues that what Sr Brink is saying is not as radical as it sounds, and that John Paul II received the same critical reaction because of his Assisi initiative. http://fathergeofffarrow.blogspot.com/2009/04/beyond-jesus.html

For a fuller picture of US women religious leaders, see: http://www.lcwr.org/lcwrannualassembly/previousassemblies.htm#2005assembly.

Fr Powell seems totally imperceptive of these women's charisms in his dismissive account: http://hancaquam.blogspot.com/2009/04/lcwr-prophets-of-futility-new-age.html. The site has lots of splendid stuff, including an address by Mary Robinson, former President of my country, and some wit from Sr Chittister:

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‘A little girl camel trying to understand the facts of life asked her mother a question: “Momma, why do we have webbed toes?” The mother camel answered, “Darling, we have webbed toes so that we can walk in the desert without sinking into the sand.” “Oh, that sounds right,” said the little girl camel. “But, momma, why do we have long eyelashes?” Her mother answered, “Dear, so we don’t get sand in our eyes from desert storms.” “That makes sense,” said the little girl. “Momma, why do we camels have humps on our backs?” “Sweetheart,” said her mother, “we have humps on our backs so we’ll have water to drink in the desert.” The little girl camel thought for a minute and then said, “Momma, if we camels have webbed toes so we don’t sink in the desert, if we have long lashes so we can go through desert sand storms, and we have humps on our backs so we’ll have water to drink in the desert, then could you tell me what in God’s name we’re doing in the San Diego Zoo?”‘

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The spirit of Christian good humor that characterizes these prophetic women is also found in Elizabeth A. Johnson:

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‘Some years ago, my colleague at Catholic University, Charles Curran, was under investigation for his teaching that differed with the church’s position on birth control (Humanae Vitae). Summoned to appear in Rome for questioning by Cardinal Ratzinger, he came out of the meeting knowing that he had failed to convince. He would be condemned as a Catholic theologian and fired from his faculty position: a public humiliation, a personal disaster, and by implication also a rejection of the many theologians and bishops whose thinking was also critical of this noninfallible teaching on artificial contraception. The next day was Sunday. Bernard Häring, the influential moral theologian who taught in Rome and was Curran’s old professor and mentor, celebrated Mass in a chapel for Curran and his university advisors. The gospel happened to be the Prodigal Son. Looking at Charlie, Häring’s homily went something like this: at this time, the church is the prodigal son. It is taking your treasure -- your training, talent, reputation, contribution – and wasting it, feeding it to the pigs. The Spirit of Jesus calls you to be the father in this parable, not rejecting but welcoming back the prodigal. Do you forgive the church? Häring went from person to person and looked them in the eye with this question. The Mass could not continue until they wrestled with their anger and allowed the Spirit to move them to a different place. Forgiving does not mean condoning harmful actions, or ceasing to criticize and resist them. But it does mean tapping into a wellspring of compassion that encompasses the hurt and sucks the venom out, so we can go forward making a positive contribution, without hatred. This is the work of the Spirit, reconciling at the deepest level, so that community coheres and witnesses in a gracefilled way.’

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Particularly deplorable is the CDF’s bullying complaint that the sisters are not doing enough to promote the CDF’s own controverted teachings on homosexuality:

http://fathergeofffarrow.blogspot.com/2009/04/thank-you-sister.html

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-12026.html

I may have jumped the gun in speaking initially of a witch hunt, but given the personnel it is hard not to opt for that paradigm:  

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/04/romes-witch-hunt-against-american-nuns.html 

Evagrius remarks: ‘It’s another attempt to stifle, not dissent, but exploration or, as the nuns state, sojourning.’

Who are these men, to judge these women?

A Church Historian's Judgment on the Williamson Affair

UPDATE: An editorial in the Jesuit review Stimmen der Zeit says that the reacceptance of a group whose sole raison d'etre is to oppose Vatican II is a scandal, even apart from the Holocaust denial. See also: http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20090316_1.htm. Meanwhile Bp Williamson, who has become the poster boy of negationists worldwide, speaks up undaunted: http://dinoscopus.blogspot.com/2009/04/eleison-comments-xciii-difficult.html

 

Here is what Massimo Faggioli wrote in The Tablet, April 11:

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The anti-Semitic remarks of the Lefebvrist bishop Richard Williamson, which came as no surprise to anybody familiar with the political and ideological orientation of the sect, has sparked, most notably in Europe and North America, a huge outcry. Not only did bishops’ conferences and individual bishops speak out, and, understandably, representatives of Jewish communities around the world, but also political leaders have done so, albeit sometimes discreetly. Their reactions forced the Holy See to acknowledge the central point at issue: the meaning of Vatican II. For the followers of Lefebvre from the beginning proclaimed their refusal to accept the Council, and particularly to accept certain elements of its corpus. Their only reason of existence is their rejection of the Council.

Benedict’s attempt to reabsorb this schism has revealed that the Second Vatican Council represents for today’s Catholic Church more than a “compass” for its future path, which is what John Paul II had hoped for in Novo Millennio Ineunte, his 2001 apostolic  letter to the bishops, in which he outlined his priorities for the twenty-first century… There are two facts revealed by what we might term this international theological case. The first is that, in the contemporary Church, contemporary politics and international public opinion, the Second Vatican Council has shown itself to be a “guarantee of citizenship” for the Catholic Church in today’s world. The second is that this “guarantee” has been identified in public opinion with the definitive rejection of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism as elements of a pre-modern and antidemocratic political culture. This guarantee has also been identified with other specific ways that the Council broke with the Catholic Church of the nineteenth century…

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To reflect now on the reception of Vatican II one must take into account not only theology but the Council’s “political” reception and its “constitutional core”. As a result of Benedict’s decision, it has become even clearer that the “political problem” with the four Lefebvrist bishops was not only Williamson’s anti-Semitic remarks but their overall rejection of the Council. This focused particularly on the documents that put the Council most clearly in discontinuity with previous church pronouncements… When, some weeks ago, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, reminded the Church that the rejection of anti-Semitism is a fundamental feature of post-war Germany, she also reminded Catholic leaders of the Church’s political and cultural responsibilities in the international arena. She thus underscored Vatican II’s discontinuities with the preconciliar Church…

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The Second Vatican Council took place after the Second World War. The relationship of the Church to democratic culture, in the appreciation of the modern liberties rejected by Pius IX’s Syllabus in 1864, in collegiality and co-responsibilities, in the commitment to ecumenism and to inter-religious dialogue, and so forth – have had a political impact… Documents of the Second Vatican Council contain a core of belief that world leaders, opinion-makers, religious communities and others take for granted today when they interact with the Catholic Church. These nontheological actors thus provide an assessment of the Council and help resolve the debate swirling around its interpretation. They do so because they are sensitive to the “constitutional” core of the Council rejected by the followers of Lefebvre…

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If the Regensburg address in 2006 showed the dire need for a different approach to Nostra Aetate and the relationship with Islam, the year 2009 represents the need for a new awareness as to how important Vatican II was in the history of the Church. This means doing away with the simplistic “continuist” view of the relationship between the Council and earlier pronouncements of the papal Magisterium. In this moment of political reception, it has become clear that those who reject the Council’s positions automatically put themselves outside the “constitutional” boundaries of modern Catholicism..

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The efforts to analyse Vatican II in strict continuity with the past are often tied to ideological positions that advocate a reactionary Catholicism as the only hope for the survival of western civilisation… In his book The Third Wave: Democratization in the late twentieth century, published in 1991, less than 20 years ago, Samuel Huntington argued that the process of democratisation might have more to do with the Second Vatican Council than with the spread of free markets.

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An extended version of this article has appeared in Rassegna di teologia; see http://www.rassegnaditeologia.it

Marcion Lives!

John R. Donahue raises a troubling question in the current issue of Commonweal: To what extent is the restoration of pre-Vatican II liturgy and ideology a dismantling of the Church's relation to Judaism (painfully recovered at Vatican II)? Also, one wonders to what extent the neuralgic reaction to Liberation Theology was due to an aversion to its Jewish roots in the Old Testament.

'Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy states clearly, “The treasures of the Bible are to be opened up more lavishly, so that richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God’s word. In this way a more representative portion of the Holy Scriptures will be read to the people in the course of a prescribed number of years.” The postconciliar General Instruction on the Roman Missal implemented this directive by prescribing three readings, one from the Old Testament, followed by a responsorial psalm, a reading from Paul or other apostolic writings, and a Gospel reading-all arranged in a three-year cycle. This cycle of readings has been followed by many other Christian groups and has been hailed as a significant ecumenical achievement. Groups such as the SSPX, which claim to be guardians of “Tradition,” might be surprised to know that prior to the Council of Trent various rites such as the Ambrosian, the Gallican, and the Mozarabic, contained three readings, including one from “prophecy,” that is, the Old Testament, as did the older Roman rite for special feasts. Any widespread restoration of the Tridentine liturgy means that the great narratives of Exodus, the struggles for the land, the outcries of the prophets against injustice, along with the joyous praise of God and pleas for help in the Psalms, will no longer be “opened up” for parishioners in many Catholic churches. The specter of Marcion, the second-century heretic who wanted to excise the Old Testament from Christian faith, seems to hover over the restored Tridentine rite. With the granting of widespread permission to use the Tridentine rite and the possible reinstatement of over five hundred SSPX priests celebrating public liturgies, an increasing number of Catholics will be deprived of the rich treasury of the inspired texts that Jews and Christians together cherish as God’s Word. That shared biblical language is indispensible for any serious dialogue with our Jewish brothers and sisters.'

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2471

 

Society of Pius X or Society of Jesus?

How conservative is the Pope? This conservative: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/resource.php?n=497

Golias magazine notes that while the Vatican bends over backwards to accommodate the Society of Pius X it has been full of suspicion and mistrust of another Society, historically its most loyal and competent collaborator, namely the Society of Jesus.

Golias lists (I don't know how accurately) the following Jesuit theologians as under doctrinal high surveillance: Jose Ignacio Gonzales Faus, Mateos, Freïjo, Juan Antonio Estrada, Alegria, Jose Maria Castillo, Jose Ramon Busto, Aloysius Pieris, Moreno de Souza (d. 2007), Samuel Rayan, Francis X. D’sa, Sye-Kongseok, Cheong Yang, Bernard Sesboue, Joseph Moingt, Christophe Theobald, Aguirre, Thomas Reese. Roger Haight and Cardinal Martini are also mentioned, as well as the deceased Dupuis, and de Mello. This is nothing less than a war on intelligence and scholarship, and it has already caused a tragic brain drain in the ranks of Catholic theology.

Anti-intellectualism and paranoia about open discussion also lie behind the fix the Church has got itself in about abortion, as evidenced in the cruel actions of Archbishop Sobrinho, whose appointment caused his predecessor Helder Câmara to weep.

A good comment can be found here: http://thewildreed.blogspot.com/2009/03/rome-falling.html.

For a documented chronicle of some of John Paul II's repressive actions, see http://www.terrelibere.it/index.php?x=completa&riga=207#_Toc110484523 (Italian); www.adistaonline.it/speciali/76spagnolo.pdf (Spanish).

Adista notes that on succeeding to Helder Câmara in 1985, MsgJosé Cardoso Sobrinho immediately set about dismantling the work of his predecessor, through closing his seminaries and expelling many teachers, religious and priests close to Liberation Theology (see Adista n. 57/95), a fine pastoral and evangelical movement which the then Cardinal Ratzinger described as "heretical," "atheistic," "un-Christian" and separated from orthodoxy by "a gaping abyss."

The embarrassment suffered today by the Vatican is the direct result of their promotion of this man, one of the many abusers who have attained power in the Church under John Paul II. And the embarrassments are bound to go on and on and on...

How to Empty the Church

1. What a fine priest Franco Barbero is, though disgracefully treated by the Vatican. Here he is giving excellent counsel to a troubled gay Catholic:

http://donfrancobarbero.blogspot.com/2009/03/la-lettera-di-luigi.html

http://donfrancobarbero.blogspot.com/2009/03/la-mia-risposta.html

I hope that the counselee finds some life partner whose love can heal the wounds of self-hatred inflicted on him by a homophobic society and a doctrinaire cabal within the Church.

 

2. There is a striking contrast between the warm charity of Don Franco Barbero and the icy fundamentalism and reactionary longing for former times expressed by his compatriot Cardinal Biffi, who writes:

“Regarding today’s emerging problem of homosexuality, according to the Christian conception there must be a distinction between the respect that is always due to persons, which involves the rejection of any social and political marginalization (with the exception of the unalterable nature of marriage and the family), and the necessary repudiation of any exalted ideology of homosexuality. The word of God – as we know it in a page of the letter to the Romans by the apostle Paul – even offers us a theological interpretation of the phenomenon of the rampant ideological and cultural aberration in this area: this aberration, it is affirmed, is at the same time the proof and the result of the exclusion of God from collective attention and social life, and of the refusal to give him due praise… It is a page of the inspired book that no human authority can force us to censor… The exclusion of the Creator… has had the consequence, almost as an inevitable punishment, of the spread of an aberrant sexual ideology, with an arrogance unknown to previous times.”

Note that this is the thinking of a man very close to John Paul II and Benedict XVI:

“At table, the Holy Father said to me at one point: ‘Did you see that we have changed that statement in Tertio millennio adveniente?’ The draft, which had been sent to the cardinals before publication, contained this expression: ‘The Church acknowledges as her own the sins of her children’; an expression that – as I had stated with respectful frankness – could not be set forward. In the definitive text, the idea had been changed as follows: ‘The Church always acknowledges as her own her sinful children.’ At that moment, the pope took care to remind me of this, knowing that it must have pleased me.  I replied by expressing my gratitude and manifesting my complete satisfaction with the theological formulation. But I also felt prompted to add a reservation of a pastoral nature: the unheard-of initiative of asking pardon for the errors and inconsistencies of past centuries would, in my view, scandalize the ‘little ones,’ those most favored by Jesus (cf. Matthew 11:25): because the faithful, who do not know how to make many theological distinctions, would see these self-accusations as a threat against their serene adhesion to the ecclesial mystery, which (as all the professions of faith tell us) is essentially a mystery of sanctity. And these were the very words of the pope’s reply: ‘Yes, that is true. That will require some thought.’ Unfortunately, he did not reflect on it sufficiently.”

Here is what Cardinal Biffi said at the 2005 Conclave:

 

“A few days ago, I saw on television an elderly, devout religious sister who responded to the interviewer this way: ‘This pope, who has died, was great above all because he taught us that all religions are equal’. I don’t know whether John Paul II would have been very pleased by this sort of elegy… I would like to point out to the new pope the incredible phenomenon of Dominus Iesus: a document explicitly endorsed and publicly approved by John Paul II; a document for which I am pleased to express my vibrant gratitude to Cardinal Ratzinger. That Jesus is the only necessary Savior of all is a truth that for over twenty centuries – beginning with Peter’s discourse after Pentecost – it was never felt necessity to restate. This truth is, so to speak, the minimum threshold of the faith; it is the primordial certitude, it is among believers the simple and most essential fact. In two thousand years this has never been brought into doubt, not even during the crisis of Arianism, and not even during the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. The fact of needing to issue a reminder of this in our time tells us the extent of the gravity of the current situation. And yet this document, which recalls the most basic, most simple, most essential certitude, has been called into question. It has been contested at all levels: at all levels of pastoral action, of theological instruction, of the hierarchy. A good Catholic told me about asking his pastor to let him make a presentation of Dominus Iesus to the parish community. The pastor (an otherwise excellent and well-intentioned priest) replied to him: ‘Let it go. That’s a document that divides.’ What a discovery! Jesus himself said: ‘I have come to bring division’ (Luke 12:51). But too many of Jesus’ words are today censured among Christians; or at least among the most vocal of them.”

Cardinal Biffi, along with his successor in Bologna, Cardinal Carlo Caffarra (speechwriter for John Paul II, famous for urging that a married woman could not refuse her marital duty to an AIDS-infected husband, and could not use prophylactics either), Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, who despairs of 'curing' gays, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos and Cardinal George Pell, who like to undulate in cappa magnas, as well as Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, or Fr Gerhard Wagner, the withdrawn nominee for auxiliary bishop of Linz, are only the most visible of a host of extreme reactionaries who have been given power over the Church due to the appointment policy of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Their specialty is misreading the signs of the times, and leading the People of God down the cul de sac of a stubborn revolt against modernity. 

For Fellini-esque cappa magnas, see:

http://dappledphotos.blogspot.com/2005/09/cappa-magna.html

http://the-hermeneutic-of-continuity.blogspot.com/2008/12/little-ratzinger-is-new-prefect-for-cdw.html

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2008/12/more-about-card-canizares-llovera/

 

 

For Biffi’s views, see:

http://ihmhermitage.stblogs.com/2008/12/07/cardinal-biffi-versus-’a-mysterious-cabal-of-maniacs’/

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/173182?eng=y

 

 

For Grocholewski see:

http://cnsblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/homosexuality-and-the-priesthood-revisited/

 

For rage from the lunatic fringe over Wagner's withdrawal see:

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=19978542&postID=6732668364583925704

 

3. Meanwhile the Catholic implosion continues, and the folly of John Paul II in thinking that the post-babyboom generations would find Biffi-style theology sustaining is coming to light. John Paul II and his appointees have signally failed to read the signs of the times, not surprisingly, given their refusal of consultation, dialogue and listening:

 

“For thirty years I've sat back and watched the Vatican hierarchy attempt to stop the forward movement of the Church and return it to the Church of their youth. In this process it became evident that the Vatican had decided that the future of their Church did not lie in the Western generations which embraced Vat II. They not only wrote off those generations, they worked diligently to stop their voices from being heard. Why anyone ever thought that the children of those parents would ever embrace a regressive form of Catholicism boggles my mind.”

 

http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2009/03/us-roman-catholicism-on-decline.html

http://thewildreed.blogspot.com/2009/03/time-to-re-think-basis-and-repair.html

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/03/exodus-from-church-and-abandonment-of.html

4. In the USA the Church sometimes looks like the Republican Party at prayer:

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/03/right-wing-catholicism-right-wing.html

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/03/watchdog-activities-of-cardinal-newman.html

Of course it is obvious that Neocaths are on the Republican side in the culture wars. But this is more than a harmless meeting of minds. The Catholic Right have political teeth, and are good at bilking their adepts of money to support their causes.  Tracing these movements to their source, one must ask if Cardinal Ratzinger’s crusade against Liberation Theology was not itself a political aggression masked under a veneer of theological scruple; or at least one must ask whether the theologically scrupulous Cardinal was not a puppet of right-wing political forces.

 

 

5. Meanwhile, the Vatican bends over backwards to accommodate the worst enemies of Vatican II:

 

FRATERNITÉ SACERDOTALE SAINT-PIE X

A Sa Sainteté le pape Benoît XVI

Très Saint-Père,

C’est dans l’action de grâces que nous désirons exprimer à Votre Sainteté notre profonde reconnaissance pour l’acte de Sa paternelle bonté et de Son courage apostolique par lequel Elle a rendu inopérante la mesure qui nous a frappés il y a vingt ans à la suite de notre sacre épiscopal. Son décret du 21 janvier 2009 réhabilite de quelque façon le vénéré fondateur de notre Fraternité sacerdotale, S. Exc. Monseigneur Marcel Lefebvre. (THE PAPAL DECREE REHABILITATES OUR GLORIOUS FOUNDER MARCEL LEFEBVRE!) Il procure aussi un grand bien à l’Église, nous semble t’il, en faisant justice aux prêtres et aux fidèles du monde entier qui, attachés à la Tradition de l’Église, ne seront plus injustement stigmatisés pour avoir maintenu la foi de leurs pères. (OUR EXCOMMUNICATION WAS UNJUST! OUR ONLY OFFENCE WAS TO MAINTAIN THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS, MENACED BY THE MODERNIST HERESIES OF VATICAN II!)

C’est en raison de ce combat de la foi que nous assurons votre Sainteté, comme Elle le souhaite, de "n’épargner aucun effort pour approfondir dans de nécessaires entretiens avec l’Autorité du Saint-Siège les questions encore ouvertes". Nous désirons en effet commencer dès que possible avec les représentants de Votre Sainteté des échanges concernant des doctrines en opposition avec le Magistère de toujours. (WE SHALL CONTINUE TO DISCUSS WITH YOU THE OPEN QUESTIONS, INCLUDING THOSE DOCTRINES IN OPPOSITION TO THE MAGISTERIUM OF ALWAYS -- THE DOCTRINES OF VATICAN II!)

Par ce chemin encore nécessaire qu’évoque Votre Sainteté, nous espérons aider le Saint-Siège à porter le remède approprié à la perte de la foi à l’intérieur de l’Église.  (WE WILL HELP YOU REMEDY THE LOSS OF FAITH WITHIN THE CHURCH!)

La Vierge Marie Immaculée a visiblement guidé les pas de Votre Sainteté à notre rencontre, elle Lui maintiendra sa gracieuse intercession. C’est avec cette assurance que nous demandons filialement au Pasteur universel de bénir quatre de ses fils les plus attachés au Successeur de Pierre et à sa charge de paître les agneaux et les brebis du Seigneur. (THE BVM LED YOU TO US, NOW BLESS US -- INCLUDING OUR HOLOCAUST-DENYING BROTHER.)

Menzingen, le 29 janvier 2009, en la fête de saint François de Sales
La lettre est signée par Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson et Alfonso de Galarreta.

One commentator writes:

" La porte est maintenant grande ouverte par le pape Benoît XVI à ceux qui nient la démocratie, qui sont antisémites, qui valident les thèses négationnistes, qui refusent l’ouverture du Concile Vatican II et toutes évolutions, qui rejettent l’œcuménisme avec les protestants et les orthodoxes, qui refusent le dialogue interreligieux avec le Judaïsme et l’Islam, allant même jusqu’à dire qu'il est impensable que le pape ou des responsables de l’Église entrent dans une synagogue ou une mosquée et bien sûr qui sont homophobes.
"Terrifiant!
"Pour ma part, je ne peux plus faire partie d’une telle Église.
"Seigneur, ils t’ont trahi."

http://dieunousaimechretiensetgay.blogspirit.com/archive/2009/03/04/eglise-integriste.html

Though the Vatican made strong statements against negationism a few days later and called on Williamson to recant, etc., it does seem as if the SSPX are going to become a Trojan horse of antisemitism in the City of God.

But there is room for optimism. In putting himself into the wily hands of Fellay and Williamson, Benedict has exposed the incoherence of his own reactionary project. Everyone knows how devious and manipulative Fellay is, and Benedict should have foreseen that he would exploit any concession to the hilt. Benedict is now saddled with the taint of association with antisemitic, antidemocratic, negators of Vatican II, religious freedom, and ecumenism. He may not feel totally ill at ease with these unsavory bedfellows, but the People of God are for the first time enraged. Benedict has taken a revelatory step that has discredited the reactionary policy in place since 1978, and given new heart to those who remember Vatican II, as they realize that the ball is in their court again.

 

Church or Sect?

1. ‘Benedict XVI... has always remained shut up in the Vatican – which is rather similar to the Kremlin of one time -, where he is sheltered from criticisms... The Secretary of State, Tarcisio Bertone, who could be a counter-weight, was a subordinate of his at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; he is a man of doctrine, completely submissive to Benedict XVI. We are facing a structural problem. There is no democratic element in this system, no corrective. The Pope was elected by the conservatives and today it is he who nominates the conservatives...

'He is faithful to the Council, in his way. Like John Paul II, he always insists on continuity with “tradition”. For him, this tradition goes back to the medieval and hellenistic perios. Above all he does not want to admit that Vatican II has brought about a rupture, for example as regards the recognition of religious freedom, opposed by all the Popes before the Council... Basically Benedict XVI has an ambigious position on the texts of the Council, because he is not at ease with modernity and reform... 

'I think that he defends the idea of the “little flock”. It is a little the line of the integrists, who think that even if the Church loses a lot of its members, there will remain in the end an elitist Church, made up of “real” Catholics. It is an illusion to think that one can go on like this, without priests or vocations. This evolution is clearly a restoration, which is manifested in the liturgy, but also in acts and gestures, such as telling the Protestants that the Catholic Church is the only true Church... The Church risks becoming a sect. Many Catholics no longer expect anything of this Pope.

'When he received me in 2005, it was a courageous act and I really believed he would find the path to reform, even if slowly. But in four years he has proved the contrary. Today I wonder if he is capable of doing anything courageous. For a start he would have to recognize that the Catholic Church is traversing a deep crisis.'

 Hans Kung (Le Monde, 24 February, 2009; La Stampa, 25 February)

Cardinal Sodano replies:

The dean of the College of Cardinals… said that regarding the lifting of the excommunication of the Lefebvrites, the Pope “who has been placed by the Holy Spirit to govern the Holy Church of God, is working a lot for unity in this important hour of history.” The cardinal said he was “hurt” by reading the interview, and contended that the accusations were “unproven, generic affirmations.” The prelate declared: “Fraternal critique is always possible in the Church, since the times of St. Peter and St. Paul. A bitter critique, on the other hand, and more if it is so generic, does not contribute to the good of the Church.” “Personally,” he added, “I am a witness of the determination of the Holy Father to make the Church a family, the family of the children of God.” And the cardinal reflected, “I don't understand how an Italian newspaper, well up to date on the work of the Pope, has wanted to offer so much publicity to this interview.” http://www.zenit.org/article-25209?1=english

Cardinal Poletto and the bishops of Piedmont have reprimanded the Turin newspaper for publishing Kung’s interview. La Stampa’s reply: ‘noi siamo laici.’ It does not seem that the human rights of freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press  are highly valued by the Catholic hierarchy in Italy ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’ (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, par. 19)

Of course what really hurts in Kung’s words is their truth.

There is an excited discussion at http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/hans-kung-papal-criticism-draws-vatican-ire

Anonymous says: “The Pope is not only a religious figure - he is also an international political figure; his words and actions can produce potentially dangerous ramifications on a global scale - and that possibility frightens me, with so many unstable fanatical sects in the world. Benedict's actions reflect extreme irresponsibility. His apologies mean nothing - the damage has already been done. He should have made himself aware of the issues before opening his mouth. I have no sympathy for Pope Benedict's feelings or for Cardinal Sodano's being hurt by Hans' words. Our bishops have made the lives of so many Catholics miserable through their abuse of power - and in feeling hurt, they are experiencing a little of what they have inflicted on so many. It is really difficult to be empathetic toward others, until you have first experienced what they have…

“Lay people have a right and a responsibility to play significant roles in helping the Holy Spirit in the renewal of and shaping the direction of the Church. The Second Vatican Council ratified this point. Yet, in this respect, Benedict and our other bishops play only lip service to the Council; they pick and choose what suits their need to retain control… This abuse of power could not happen without lay people handing over their own authority and power over to our clergy. For those of you who defend doing this, I will say to you, that you possess an immature faith.”

Matthew Sheprow, PhD, says: “Cardinal Ratzinger has been urging for a smaller, holier church for decades and continues toward that goal today as pope. The sad part is Vatican II was never fully realized and, being stopped midstream, the struggle has paralyzed the church; it won't move forward and can't move backward. Fr. Kung has always challenged the absolute authority of the Vatican, and has done so respectfully. The church belongs to the community, it is our church, and our responsibility. To not speak up is shunning our responsibility, and that challenge is what differs us from a nothing more than a cult.”

2. Those who frequent the comboxes of newspapers will know the Bishop Williamson is now a hero and martyr in the eyes of thousands of Holocaust deniers worldwide. He has given new heart to the cause of Holocaust denial. [An ironic proof of this: I just received an email from a negationist who is thinking of joining the Lefebvrites, thanking me for my defense of Bp Williamson! If my attacks on this dangerous eccentric are taken as encouraging negationists, how much more so the weasel words of the Vatican, at the very same moment as they are stamping on liberal and progressive Jesuits worldwide.]

It is rather scary to see neocaths buying into Holocaust denial. I think the reactionary policies of Benedict XVI may now have let a genie out of the bottle. 

Far from being a passing embarrassment, the stink of the Williamson affair may be with us for a long time. Not only will Williamson in all likelihood stick to his guns, but he will have a throng of supporters, for what position of traditionalist Catholicism was so popular as its antisemitism? The Argentine Government does well to worry about the Argentine youth brainwashed in the seminary of the crackpot Archbishop.

A sample of what some Catholics now think is honorable discourse: ‘Let the Jewish nation produce the verifiable names to justify the official figure of those who died in the camps, so that those who wonder can assess the facts and will be in a better position to do so.’

http://stephenhand2.blogspot.com/2009/02/title-legal-charges-leveled-against.html

[Mr Hand has replied to this, accusing me of being an enemy of free speech. For the record, I prefer the USA approach to our European criminalization of Holocaust denial, which not only savors of Orwell's thought-crime but makes martyrs out of eccentrics like Williamson. Hand then says I give no proof of the "official" (his scare quotes) numbers of those directly killed in the Nazi camps, and suggests I am indifferent to the agony endured by the people of Gaza and to other, more numerous victims of World War II. This "whataboutery" is on the same level of insensitivity as his doggedly obtuse and insulting demand for proof of the Holocaust, and merits no response; it reminds me oddly of a famous antisemitic caricature, of Shylock demanding his pound of flesh. http://stephenhand2.blogspot.com/2009/02/worry-of-neo-modernists-over-bishop.html. I take Hand's state of mind as a sad reflection of how neocath reactionaries have degenerated, following the logical momentum of their refusal of modernity, rationality and dialogue, eerily paralleled in the implosion of the Republican party under Limbaugh-Palin.]

Does Benedict XVI yet realize the gravity of what he has done? Is he still scolding Chancellor Merkel (along with his brother) for her cheek in speaking out of turn? Does he think it is all just a problem in PR and not an issue that calls for deeper soul-searching? Robert Fisk has written an intemperate rant about this, which makes Hans Kung's much-resented criticisms look bland in the extreme:

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/robert-fisk/robert-fisk-pope-will-demean-other-religions-to-prove-christianityrsquos-lsquosuperiorityrsquo-14208500.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-examine-the-popes-words-and-theres-only-one-thing-to-conclude-1634266.html

Meanwhile church leaders are laboring mightily to restore the Church's credibility: 

 http://the-tidings.com/2009/030609/statement.htm

http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c36_a14990/News/New_York.html

3. Benedict has the reputation of being a great intellectual; yet who more than he has shut down the intellectual life of the Catholic Church, turning it into a sect for the brain-dead? See: http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/collusion-of-catholic-and-political.html

The stereotype of Benedict now is that he lives in an icy solitude, totally out of touch, sheltered from criticism by his solicitous secretary: http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2009/02/solitary-life-in-ivory-tower.html

But in a sense this is a coherent part of a strategy of  mummifying the Church or turning it into a fossilized sect. Indeed this may be the historical destiny of Catholicism. The momentum in that direction is certainly terrific.

Mummification is not such a peaceful process as one might imagine. It is a little bit like being buried alive. The distraught Cardinals complaining about the surreal atmosphere in the Vatican and the huge multitudes of Catholics in all developed countries quitting the Church both formally and informally, along with the rise of nasty, zany, vocal antisemites, homophobes, Rush Limbaugh types, Holocaust deniers, are all symptoms of what mummification really means: not preservation or continuity but death and decomposition!

4. But wait! Perhaps I hear the rumble of marching feet... Perhaps there is some prospect of resurrection... Perhaps the Church will have its Obama turn-around just as the USA has...

"One of the things which have been happening since the rescinding of the excommunications of the SSPX bishops is that liberal Catholic blogs have seen a large upsurge in hits. This blog is no exception as readership has doubled and is not decreasing as time has passed. Other liberal bloggers have noted the same phenomenon. It's like something burst in liberal lala land with the SSPX announcement. Progressives are finding their voice, so much so, that finally a bishop has spoken out about his own harassment by the 'temple police' and their Vatican enablers.

 

'It's almost like Benedict kept poking and poking at progressive Catholicism and has finally managed to wake the dog. He's going to find out it's a very large dog. A far bigger dog than the yappy little terriers he's used to dealing with and he's not going to like it. He's also going to find out that the muzzle he has worked to keep on that dog for the last twenty five years finally came off because he couldn't resist poking that dog one too many times...

 

'I suspect in the coming months we will see more initiatives coming from both the laity and clergy calling for real and sustainable change in how Catholicism conducts it's business. It will be coming from people who also really love this Church, even the ones who have left in frustration. It's way past time for these voices to be heard. The conservative wing of this Church has had their say for the last forty years. The results have been disastrous in the West and placing the blame for these results on those who have left is rather self serving.'

http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2009/02/finally-bishop-speaks-out.html

5. Benedict is of course unfazed by the bad impression made by his crusade against the proposed UN declaration on gay rights:

‘African countries, Islamic countries and the Holy See formed a bloc on February 18 against the recognition of homosexuality, categorically opposing the mention of the concept of sexual orientation in the project of an international declaration... The western countries, including the USA, and the Latin American countries mounted the battlements to defend the mention of sexual orientation in the text... Egypt and Nigeria argued that the conference could not “internationalize a concept not agreed on by the UN instances concerned, whether the General Assembly or the Human Rights Council.” The Netherlands replied that the “growing challenges” created by discrimination based on sexual orientation “had not received sufficient international recognition.” In the absence of an agreement the discussions have been adjourned to a later date.’

It is encouraging to see that the USA, under President Obama, has reversed the obstructionist position it took on December 19, 2008. (Ah, 'if Obama were Pope!')

‘On the advice notably of a Tony Anatrella... and of an ultraconservative American priest of the Congregation for Bishops, Mgr Andrew Baker, the Vatican has also chosen to close the doors of the priesthood to boys presenting a homosexual tendency that is present and deep-rooted. This discrimination is odious, apart from the fact that to follow it would result in emptying some seminaries. As if to further harden the tone, Rome envisages calling on psychologists to sound the sexual orientation of candidates for the priesthood. How far will they go?... The Vatican seems to be relinking with its strategy at the 1994 Cairo conference on women, of building a front against social advances even if it means allying themselves with disreputable partners such as Islamicist regimes. The discredit that this attitude is causing, already far advanced, will not be slight in Europe and America.’

http://www.golias-editions.fr/spip.php?article2683#Forums

(Golias is an interesting publication, but I do hope that they will correct a stridency of tone that leads to exaggerations and inaccuracies.)

It turns out that the Vatican have something in common with hip-hop rappers:

http://thewildreed.blogspot.com/2009/02/homophobia-its-so-gay.html

For an antidote to the confused Fr Anatrella, whose writings had a devastating effect on a friend of mine when he was a vulnerable adolescent, see http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng23.html.

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Alison read the 2005 instruction literally: 'The instruction is clear, straightforward and logical and I don't think any service is done by anyone attempting to represent it as saying other than what it does. If they are tempted, then Cardinal Grocholewski’s elucidations on Vatican radio and Msgr Anatrella’s commentary in L’Osservatore Romano should give them pause for thought.'  However the anagogic reading of Timothy Radcliffe OP, taken up by a host of bishops, has won the day, and the reference to the instruction in the recent document on seminaries is distinctly muted. Cardinal Grocholewski is left growling from the sidelines. Alison is a man of extreme honesty, who has taken hard knocks as a result. The delicate card-castle of pretence that he could not abide is now toppling around our ears.

What Happened at Vatican II?

Nicholas Lash

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1. REMEMBRANCE

“Do this in remembrance of me.”[i]  All things are born and die in time, but only in the case of human beings is an awareness of temporality constitutive of their identity. Without remembrance, we know not who we are, can make no plans and have no hope. We learn, or fail to learn, to live and speak the truth - and truthfulness takes time..

           Bernard Lonergan’s first words to my uncle Sebastian Moore (who had gone to work with him in Rome) were: “Concepts have dates”. Battered by Enlightenment, Catholic Christianity pulled up the drawbridge and withdrew into a citadel of illusory timelessness, a simulacrum of eternity in which nothing ever happened and, most importantly, nothing ever changed. If, in the 1960s, “aggiornamento” was required, when had Catholic thought begun to fall behind the times? Lonergan’s answer was: around 1680: “When modern science began, when the Enlightenment began, then the theologians began to reassure one another about their certainties”.[ii]

           From this point of view, Vatican II may be considered - notwithstanding the unsurprising imperfections and incompleteness of so vast an undertaking - as the high point of the Church’s re-engagement with its temporality, renewed remembrance (in acknowledgement of its contingency) of the richness of its history (“ressourcement”); a re-engagement which thereby also brought it into fresh, constructive but by no means uncritical, relationship with the forces shaping the modern world in which it lived (“aggiornamento”).

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2.  TELLING TRUE STORIES

Major historical events are not susceptible of any one, uniquely “correct” interpretation (not for nothing do we have four gospels!). Any account of what happened at Vatican II will be told from some particular point or points of view, will select some themes and features, rather than others, for particular consideration. What we ask of historians is not that they say everything that could possibly be said, but that they be wholeheartedly committed to truthfulness and accuracy in their handling of evidence, and that the points of view from which they write be honestly and clearly indicated. Polemics makes bad history.

           By these criteria, the Church has been well served by the international team of scholars, brought together by Giuseppe Alberigo of Bologna, who laboured for over ten years to produce a five-volume History of Vatican II.[iii] With different chapters written by over two dozen different authors, an editorial board ranging from Roger Aubert and Henry Chadwick to Cardinals Dulles and Tucci, and weighing in at some 3,000 pages, this is a work of daunting erudition, an invaluable aid to our remembering.

           An Italian commentator has complained, in the online magazine L’Espresso, that “rarely do we find critiques of this history”, a judgement that I find surprising.[iv]  The first three volumes were reviewed, appreciatively but by no means uncritically, by John Paul II’s friend and biographer, George Weigel.[v] From the first volume, he picks out Komonchak’s 189-page chapter on “The Struggle for the Council during the Preparation” as a “masterpiece of research and exposition”, and concludes that “the dramatic ‘form’ of the Council, which Professor Alberigo and his colleagues are eager to recapture, is itself the best testimony to the futility of trying to tell the history of Vatican II as a tale of political intrigue”. Weigel remarks that “the great challenge to any history of Vatican II is to avoid what might be called the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ interpretation of the Council ... Professor Alberigo’s team is not altogether successful in avoiding this temptation in Volumes II and III. But the wealth of detail assembled in each of these books ... is such that the careful reader can make his own interpretive judgements, and can do so in a much more informed way”. “Pope John Paul II”, notes Weigel, “who was one of the youngest Council fathers during the first period, has insisted for almost four decades that the Council can be grasped in its essence only if we think of it as an epic spiritual event, at which the Holy Spirit led the Catholic Church into a new encounter with modernity precisely for the sake of evangelizing the modern world”.

           With that observation in mind, I turn next to three themes that are indispensable to our understanding of what happened at Vatican II: the relationship between events and documents, the extent to which the Council marked some kind of new beginning in the Church’s life, and the different relationships to the Council of John XXIII and Paul VI.

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3. EVENTS AND DOCUMENTS

Towards the end of the first session of the Council, Yves Congar wrote in his journal: “The episcopate has discovered itself. It has become aware of itself. Given that, the formulas will emerge”.[vi] Already, in that first session, says Alberigo, “the bishops and their ‘experts’ with them, gained an almost totally new awareness of their concrete and common general responsibilities for the universal Church”. It is this, he says, which warrants “the methodological choice that inspired the concept and realization of this History of Vatican II ... That choice rested upon the view that to equate Vatican II with the corpus of its texts not only impoverishes the hermeneutics of those texts themselves but is also fatal to the image of the Council”.[vii]

           The soundness of that judgement is borne out by my own memories of conversations with bishops at the time, and by everything that I have since read of their assessment of the conciliar experience. Notwithstanding the longueurs and exhaustion, the confusions and the tensions, of four years of debate, the Council was, for those who took part in it, the most profound and transformative spiritual and educational experience of their lives. It was, said Archbishop Denis Hurley, forty years later, “the greatest adult education program ever”.[viii]

           Before the Council opened, John XXIII expressed the hope that it would be a “new Pentecost”[ix] and, after it ended, the very English voice of Christopher Butler observed: “I am less doubtful than I once was that [the Council] was gathered for a second Pentecost”.[x]

.

4. CONTINUITY AND REVOLUTION

Between the third and fourth sessions of the Council, E. E. Y. Hales published Pope John and his Revolution. Insisting that the conciliar project was appropriately described as “revolutionary”, he nevertheless warned: “We are told that the movement now started is irreversible; but it is hard to see why ... Moreover, an able and experienced civil service, such as the Curia, could circumvent it”.[xi]

           But may not the epithet “revolutionary” exaggerate the difference between the Church as it was before Vatican II, and the Church as the Council fathers strove to have it be? At one level, the answer is, undoubtedly: “No”. It is difficult for those who have grown up since the Council to appreciate how profoundly different, for better and for worse, is the sensibility of Catholicism today from that of the preconciliar Church.

           Before the Council, for example, even to suggest that the Church needed to be reformed made one suspect of heresy, as Yves Congar discovered when, in 1954, four years after the publication of Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Eglise, he was banished for a year into the wilderness - to Cambridge.[xii]

           In a lecture delivered in 1965, Bernard Lonergan argued that “Classical culture has given way to a modern culture, and, I would submit, the crisis of our age is in no small measure the fact that modern culture has not yet reached its maturity”.[xiii] So far as the Church’s participation in that crisis is concerned, he insisted that “The crisis ... that I have been attempting to depict is a crisis not of faith but of culture. There has been no new revelation from on high to replace the revelation given through Jesus Christ. There has been written no new Bible and there has been founded no new church to link us with him. But Catholic philosophy and Catholic theology are matters, not merely of revelation and faith, but also of culture. Both have been fully and deeply involved in classical culture”,[xiv] and that culture has now, irretrievably, broken down.

           The Church after Vatican II is, indeed, the same Church as the Church before, but it is required and called to be that same Church very differently.

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5. A TALE OF TWO POPES

Two men of strikingly contrasting character. There is little doubt that John XXIII’s warmth and spontaneity won him a place in people’s hearts more swiftly than the great respect in which Paul VI eventually was held.

           During the first, “somewhat chaotic” session of the Council, John XXIII tended to stand back and “let things ride”. He “wanted the bishops to find their way by themselves”.[xv] Paul VI, largely “excluded from the official preparation for the Council” by “the Roman Curia, which was mainly in control of the preparatory phase”, took a little time to find his feet, and the first few months of his pontificate, the summer of 1963, “were marked by indecision and compromise”.[xvi] During the final sessions, he came increasingly “to emphasize his role as moderator and mediator between the component parts of the assembly”, his overriding concern being “to ensure the greatest possible consensus” in the Council’s decisions.[xvii] In this he succeeded, to an astonishing extent, and if there was a price paid - in concessions to the handful of bishops who, from start to finish, resisted the entire programme of reform - it was, almost certainly, a price worth paying.

           If only someone like John XXIII would have had the inspired courage to convene the Council, probably only someone like Paul VI could have seen the venture through.

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6. ONSLAUGHT FROM THE VATICAN

On June 17, 2005, there was a book launch in Rome: Il Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II. Contrappunto per la sua storia,[xviii] mostly reviews of studies of the Council, purporting (according to one news agency represented at the launch) to give “the Holy See’s point of view on that milestone event”.[xix] The author: Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, an official of the Secretariat of State who seems never to have been bishop of anywhere, but is a beneficiary of the custom of ordaining senior curial officials to the episcopate as if the sacrament of holy orders were a kind of life peerage.

           The focus of the launch, and the main target of the book (the account to which it seeks to supply a “counterpoint”) was Alberigo’s History which, in Osservatore Romano, Marchetto had “repeatedly ripped ... to pieces after the release of each volume, criticizing every page”.[xx]

           Taking part in the launch was Cardinal Ruini, Vicar General of Rome, president of the Italian bishops’ conference and Grand Chancellor of the Lateran University. Comparing the History with the “highly inflammatory and partisan” history of Trent by Paolo Sarpi, he challenged the “central thesis of Alberigo and his ‘Bologna School’, founded by Fr Giuseppe Dossetti in the 1960s ... that the documents produced by Vatican Council II are not its primary elements. The main thing is the event itself. The real council is the ‘spirit’ of the Council”. According to Ruini, the History of Vatican II portrays “The gap between John XXIII and Paul VI” as “unbridgeable. It is almost as if the ‘letter’ of pope Giovanni Battista Montini had suffocated and betrayed the ‘spirit’ of pope Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli”. Another central thesis of the History is “that Vatican II marked a fundamental rupture between the preceding, preconciliar period and the postconciliar period that followed. Cardinal Ruini challenged this vision at its core”.[xxi]

           A few weeks later, Marchetto, interviewed by Catholic Online, claimed that the History’s “unbalanced” and “ideological” analysis of Vatican II “betrays the event”: the Council “does not constitute a break, a sort of birth of a new Church”. Moreover, “The opposition between John XXIII and Paul VI, which would separate ‘John’s Council’ from Paul VI’s ... is groundless”. Asked about two other issues - collegiality and Paul VI’s reservation of the question of birth regulation to himself - Marchetto said: collegiality was “an ecclesial characteristic of the first millenium, which was rediscovered, so to speak, by Vatican II. It was placed, without contradiction, next to papal primacy, exercised personally, which developed especially in the second millenium”. As to birth regulation, Alberigo is wrong “to speak, as he does, of a ‘trauma caused throughout the Christian world by the encyclical Humanae Vitae’”. Finally: “from the beginning I have defined as ‘ideological’ the interpretation made by the Bologna Group. And where ideology exists there is a lack of balance, extremism, blurred vision” (weaknesses from which, presumably, “the Holy See’s point of view” is immune).[xxii]

           It is alarming that there should still be people in the Vatican who are unable to come to terms with the fact that the Council happened as it did, and deplorable that two such senior curial officials should distort the account given in the History in so misleading and unscholarly a manner.

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7.    SACRAMENTS AND POWER STATIONS

“By her relationship with Christ, the Church is a kind of sacrament or sign of intimate union with God, and of the unity of the whole human race”. Commenting on this first article of Lumen Gentium, Christopher Butler said: “The Council has helped me to see that this notion of the sacramentality of the Church is basic to our understanding of her”.[xxiii]

           According to Congar, the greatest shift that Catholic ecclesiology has ever undergone occurred in the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-1085). In the context of developments in canon law, Church and episcopacy, previously understood in symbolic, sacramental terms - as signs and images of God’s transforming presence - came to be understood juridically in terms of the possession and the exercise of power.[xxiv]

           From this point of view, the debates through which the text of Lumen Gentium emerged - with the structuring institutions of episcopate and primacy being considered (in Chapter 3) in the light of a larger picture of a pilgrim people drawn through history towards God’s kingdom (Chapter 2) which, in turn, needs to be understood in the light of our meditation on the mystery of God’s redemptive gathering of humankind (Chapter 1) - may be considered as announcing the recovery, in Catholic Christianity, of a rich and ancient vision of the Church which had been largely overlaid, obscured from view, by the juridicism of intervening centuries.

           Whatever the detailed working out of the theory and practice of episcopal collegiality, we might surely have expected, therefore, in the years after the Council, not only a diminution of the unprecedented centralised control which the Roman Congregations had acquired during the twentieth century, but a renewed attentiveness to the concerns and needs of local churches.

           But this, of course, is not how things worked out. During the long pontificate of John Paul II, striding the world stage like a colossus, and largely uninterested in details of structure and administration, the Curia tightened its grip. Consider two issues: episcopal appointments and vocations to the priesthood.

           Episcopal appointments. The 1917 Code of Canon Law enshrined a quite new claim: that the Pope had the right to appoint all bishops in the Catholic Church. As recently as the early nineteenth century, “the last thing the Holy See wanted was to get involved in selecting bishops for the Universal Church”.[xxv] Today, far from the equivalent canon having been repealed, Rome unilaterally draws ever more narrowly its criteria for “suitable” appointments and, again and again, rides contemptuously roughshod over nominations made by bishops’ conferences.

           Vocations. It is through the community of the Church that the Holy Spirit calls people to its ministries. There cannot be a “shortage of vocations”, only a failure, on our part, to invite sufficient people to bear the burden of such service. It is intolerably paradoxical that, in 2005, the Holy See should, on the one hand, have invited us to celebrate a “Year of the Eucharist” while, on the other, drawing the criteria of those who may be ordained so narrowly as to ensure that, in large parts of the world, the eucharistic community that is the Catholic Church is being, quite literally, starved to death.

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8. CONCLUSION

What happened at Vatican II? According to some people, it would seem, the answer goes: “Not much, really. Things looked threatening for a time but, once the bishops went away from Rome, we soon got things back on track”. Before the ice freezes on the Council’s vision and programme of reform, we can be grateful for the History of Vatican II for keeping alive another memory of how things might yet be made to be.

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[i]             Luke 22.19

[ii]               Bernard Lonergan, “Theology in its New Context”, A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), p. 55. Cf. Nicholas Lash, “Modernism, Aggiornamento and the Night Battle”, Bishops and Writers. Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism, ed. Adrian Hastings (Wheathampstead; Anthony Clarke, 1977), pp. 51-79.

[iii]           Edited by Alberigo, the first four volumes of the English edition, edited by Joseph Komonchak, and published by Peeters of Leeuven, appeared in 1995, 1997, 2000 and 2003. The final volume (published in Italian in 2001) is due in 2006.

[iv]               Sandro Magister, “Vatican Council II: A Non-Neutral History” [www.chiesa.espressonline.it/english], a column issued on the publication of History of Vatican II, Vol V.

[v]            See First Things 67 (1996) and 114 (2001).

[vi]               History of Vatican II, Vol. I, p. 575.

[vii]               History, Vol. II., p. 583; cf. Vol.I, p. xii; Vol. IV, p. 327.

[viii]          Cited by John Allen, National Catholic Reporter, 18 October 2002, reporting on a congress in Rome held to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Council’s opening.

[ix]               History, Vol. I., p. 42.

[x]            B. C. Butler, Searchings (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1974), p. 265.

[xi]           E. E. Y. Hales, Pope John and his Revolution (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 205.

[xii]               Having narrowly avoided censure simply for using the word “reform”, it seems that it was an article sympathetic to the “priest-worker” movement which was the last straw. A decade later, Paul VI drew on Vraie et fausse réforme when writing his encyclical Ecclesiam Suam (see History, Vol.II., p. 452).

[xiii]         B. J. F. Lonergan, Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1967), p. 259. Though the terminology was not in use at the time, Lonergan’s position would now, I think, be best described as “postmodern”, for the meaning of “modernity” has changed.

[xiv]         Op. cit., p. 266.

[xv]               History, Vol. II, p. 495.

[xvi]         Ibid., pp. 504, 506.

[xvii]               History, Vol. IV, p. 633; cf. Vol. II, p. 579; Vo.III, p. 443..

[xviii]               Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005.

[xix]               ZENIT, 20 June 2005.

[xx]               Magister, “Vatican Council II. A Non-Neutral History”.

[xxi]               Sandro Magister, “Vatican II: The Real Untold Story” (22 June, 2005). On Dossetti, adviser to Cardinal Lercaro and, for part of the second session, secretary to the Cardinal Moderators of the Council, see Joseph A. Komonchak, “Augustine, Aquinas or the Gospel sine glossa? Divisions over Gaudium et Spes”, Unfinished Journey. The Church 40 years after Vatican II, ed. Austen Ivereigh (London, Continuum: 2003), pp. 102-118.

[xxii]               Catholic Online, “Clearing the Record on Vatican II: Interview with Archbishop Agostino Marchetto”, 14 July, 2005.

[xxiii]        B. C. Butler, A Time to Speak (Southend: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1972), p. 147.

[xxiv]        “Le plus grand tournant que l’ecclésiologie catholique ait connu” (Yves Congar, L”Eglise de Saint Augustin a l’époque moderne [Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1970], p. 103).

[xxv]               Garrett Sweeney, “The ‘wound in the right foot’: unhealed?”, Bishops and Writers, p. 217.

Alberto Melloni, Defensor Concilii

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Does Vatican II need to be defended? Reading the following remarks of Benedict XVI, as reported by Sandro Magister, certainly gives one the impression that a full-scale campaign against the spirit of Vatican II, in the name of its letter, is in progress:

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"After the great Council of Nicaea – which is, for us, truly the foundation of our faith, in fact we confess the faith as formulated at Nicaea – there was not the birth of a situation of reconciliation and unity, as hoped by Constantine, the promoter of the great Council, but a genuinely chaotic situation of a battle of all against all.

"In his book on the Holy Spirit, saint Basil compares the Church’s situation after the Council of Nicaea to a nighttime naval battle, in which no one recognizes another, but everyone is pitted against everyone else. It really was a situation of total chaos: this is how saint Basil paints in vivid colors the drama of the period following the Council of Nicaea."

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Liberation Theology and the other theological movements repressed by the Vatican were "total chaos" only to those who could not or would not understand them. It is the paralysis imposed by the Vatican that creates the impression of darkness. The vision of the Vatican II years as a time of darkness is one the Pope shares with liturgical restorationist Klaus Gamber, as quoted in http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1977: "Great is the confusion! Who can still see clearly in this darkness? Where in our church are the leaders who can show us the right path? Where are the bishops courageous enough to cut out the cancerous growth of modernist theology that has implanted itself and is festering within the celebration of even the most sacred mysteries before the cancer spreads and causes even greater damage?...We can only hope and pray that the Roman Church will return to Tradition and allow once more that liturgy of the Mass which is well over 1,000 years old." The world's bishops strongly resisted the first liberation of the Tridentine Mass in 1984; they were not consulted for the second in 1988; their objections to the third, 2007, have been overruled and their authority undercut. Some of the Cardinal electors must be tearing their hair as they wonder if they have put an unwitting tool of Msgr Lebebve on the Throne of Peter.

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"how difficult it was at first for all of us to digest the Council, this great message. To imbue this into the life of the Church, to receive it, such that it becomes the Church’s life, to assimilate it into the various realities of the Church is a form of suffering, and it is only in suffering that growth is realized."

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Vatican II presented a lovable and credible Church, recalling the biblical vision of the People of God (Lumen Gentium 2). This has been disparaged and ridiculed by the Vatican as its bureaucrats have got to work on dismantling the Council. This is the deep source of the anomie now so prevalent in the Church, and of which the shriekings of traditionalists is merely the most lurid symptom.

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"And we must note that there were two great historic upheavals in the concrete context of the postconciliar period. The first is the convulsion of 1968, the beginning – or explosion, I dare say – of the great cultural crisis of the West."

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Students of Ratzinger, in an anthology of his writings assembled in his honor, claim that the student revolts of 1968 have issued in the worldwide terrorism of today. Such views betray a fundamental lack of insight into contemporary society.

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" The postwar generation had ended, a generation that, after seeing all the destruction and horror of war, of combat, and witnessing the drama of the great ideologies that had actually led people toward the precipice of war, had discovered the Christian roots of Europe and had begun to rebuild Europe with these great inspirations. But with the end of this generation there were also seen all of the failures, the gaps in this reconstruction, the great misery in the world, and so began the explosion of the crisis of Western culture, what I would call a cultural revolution that wants to change everything radically. It says: In two thousand years of Christianity, we have not created a better world; we must begin again from nothing, in an absolutely new way. Marxism seems to be the scientific formula for creating, at last, the new world."
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Still fighting the ghosts of Marx?

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"One side was of the opinion that this cultural revolution was what the Council had wanted. It identified this new Marxist cultural revolution with the will of the Council. It said: This is the Council; in the letter the texts are still a bit antiquated, but behind the written words is this “spirit,” this is the will of the Council, this is what we must do. And on the other side, naturally, was the reaction: you are destroying the Church. The – let us say – absolute reaction against the Council, anticonciliarity, and – let us say – the timid, humble search to realize the true spirit of the Council. And as a proverb says: “If a tree falls it makes a lot of noise, but if a forest grows no one hears a thing,” during these great noises of mistaken progressivism and absolute anticonciliarism, there grew very quietly, with much suffering and with many losses in its construction, a new cultural passageway, the way of the Church."

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Conveniently, all the theologians fired or aborted by Ratzinger are classed under the massive straw man category of "Marxist cultural revolution" while the counter-growth activities of the Curia are given le beau role.
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"And then came the second upheaval in 1989, the fall of the communist regimes. But the response was not a return to the faith, as one perhaps might have expected; it was not the rediscovery that the Church, with the authentic Council, had provided the response. The response was, instead, total skepticism, so-called post-modernity. Nothing is true; everyone must decide on his own how to live. There was the affirmation of materialism, of a blind pseudo-rationalistic skepticism that ends in drugs, that ends in all these problems that we know, and the pathways to faith are again closed, because the faith is so simple, so evident: no, nothing is true; truth is intolerant, we cannot take that road."

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Again, this shows total lack of insight into contemporary society. There are plenty of truths that laity, clergy, and theologians are blue in the face shouting at a deaf Vatican. There are also plenty of truths that secular society is establishing and defending along the pathways of democratic debate and consultation, which seems to be anathema to the present Pope.

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"The Council had said that triumphalism must be renounced – thinking of the Baroque, of all these great cultures of the Church. It was said: Let’s begin in a new, modern way. But another triumphalism had grown, that of thinking: We will do things now, we have found the way, and on it we find the new world."

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Was the Council thinking of the Baroque, and not rather of one-sided ultramontanism? And the new departures after the Council were inspired above all by a reading of Scripture. The efforts to restore the Tridentine rite are in part an effort to silence Scripture again.

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"It seems very important to me that we can now see with open eyes how much that was positive also grew following the Council: in the renewal of the liturgy, in the synods – Roman synods, universal synods, diocesan synods – in the parish structures, in collaboration, in the new responsibility of laypeople, in intercultural and intercontinental shared responsibility, in a new experience of the Church’s catholicity, of the unanimity that grows in humility, and nonetheless is the true hope of the world."  Something oddly pallid about this list.
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"And thus it seems to me that we must rediscover the great heritage of the Council, which is not a “spirit” reconstructed behind the texts, but the great conciliar texts themselves, reread today with the experiences that we have had and that have born fruit in so many movements, in so many new religious communities."

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So the new religious communities are the interpretant of the Council! Forget about the cry of the poor, the liberated voice of the world's bishops, it is Communio e liberazione, the Focolare, the New Catechumenate, and Opus Dei, who will tell us what the Council means.

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Turning from the miasma of this Vaticanist recuperation of Vatican II, I find the desired clarity and serenity in the writings of Alberto Melloni, a Catholic layman, Professor of Church History at the Universities of Bologna and Modena, editor of the writings of John XXIII, and co-author with the late Giuseppe Alberigo of the standard History of Vatican II. Melloni does not just fret and fume like most of us who have seen the Council despised and betrayed. He speaks with the authority of his great erudition and especially of his deep knowledge of Vatican II and of the History of the Councils. He is probably the foremost voice in Italy today defending the heritage of Vatican II against the reactionary currents that threaten to dilute or destroy it. I first came across his name as the author of a stirring piece in Recherches de Science Religieuse 93/2 (2005), translated in The Japan Mission Journal 59:4 (Winter 2005) as “Questions from History for Tomorrow’s Council”. Here is a florilegium of his utterances, culled from the internet:

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1. Corriere della Sera, July 5 (full text in Italian at http://www.aclibergamo.it/articolo.php?id=700):

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“The Motu Proprio concerns not the faithful, tradition, or Latin, but something more crucial: the ministry of the bishop… No one can understand what pastoral demand the document is replying to, unless it be that anti-conciliar relativism that is felt, rightly or wrongly, to be protected by Benedict XVI. The French bishops have remarked this in a statement harsher than any in the entire twentieth century. It is clear that with this gesture Pope Ratzinger will not “turn back” a Church that speaks hundreds of languages and uses dozens of alphabets; nonetheless it breaks a custom, if not a tradition, according to which the Pope should be very careful not to negate, unless for special questions and in special modes, the things his predecessors have decided: to resolve an issue with unilateral kindness is a good thing, but given that on this issue Paul VI was subjected to very violent contestation and John Paul II suffered a schism, the suspicion remains that Benedict’s gesture is at the expense of the prestige of those two predecessors, whom the traditionalists have often presented as the Antichrist... Paul VI himself, when he “imposed” (as they say now) the liturgical reform, drew on the virtually unanimous consensus of the bishops (even Msgr. Lefebvre voted for the Constitution on the Liturgy!) in favor of this reform that purified the celebration from devotional incrustations and freed it from the linguistic corset that allowed the faithful only an esthetic degustation of the rite, so as to give them back their role. To say, as the Motu Proprio does, that thirty laypeople can announce the use of a rite without regard to the bishop, is a blow to the teaching of Vatican II on the bishop and on the authority of the bishop. If the bishop is reduced to a notary de gustibus, it is obvious what will happen: the present episcopate will be subjected to humiliation, without reacting, or perhaps with the occasional excess of careerist zeal. Having reduced the authority of the bishop on the theological plane, by making him the passive registrar of ideological agendas, by what means can he be restored to his function, his munus, his power?”

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2. From an interview on his book, Chiesa madre, chiesa matrigna (“Mother Church, Stepmother Church,” Einaudi 2004), http://www.aclibergamo.it/articolo.php?id=269. The book deals with the collapse of religious practice, the continual exodus of believers who feel they are strangers in the Church, the ever-greater disorientation of bishops and priests, amid the mediatic noise generated by the papacy.

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“I find it symptomatic that precisely around the figure of the ordained minister, within Roman Catholicism, at the end of the nineteenth century, was born for the first time a rhetoric of revendication. The idea, that is to say, that modernity was robbing vocations. Then the cause was identified as the lay State, then as the sexual revolution, or the determination of sexuality… We have grown up with the idea that there is something that comes from outside that attacks the quality of the clerics and ministers of the Church. To me, however, the problem seems far greater. The priest as we know him is an extraordinary, very important, and, in my own personal experience, stupendous invention of the Council of Trent. Before that, the priest was a different thing. The Tridentine priesthood lasted a remarkably long time, but it is evident to anyone today who looks at the life of a real community that the figure of the priest is no longer that designated by the Council of Trent. In much of the world, the function of the “sacrament man” has been left behind by reality. The Tridentine model is in irreversible crisis, and we are seeing forms of ministry already being practiced in the Church which indicated an attempt to reconstruct pastoral care. Although no one in the Church talks about it, competent observers know that in this development the figure of tomorrow’s priest is being redesigned. As these still undefined figures grow in number and importance, the ordained priest remains a prisoner of many bureaucratic incumbencies: manager of a pastoral team, social assistant, functionary, one responsible for formation. In none of these roles is there adequate space for the cura animarum, on which Trent had based the reform and the identity of the clergy. The price is paid by the cleric himself, often a figure without stable identity.”

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“We rightly fear being limited to being a small spiritual congregation that has nothing to say, and that speaks to no-one except perhaps to itself. To be sure, some have the illusion that one can instrumentalize religious experience to carry it outside the sacristies. But the Church is asked what is the meaning of its experience. Can it make social life more practicable? Is it called to a proclamation that is not limited to the moral plane?” Only Vatican III can answer these questions: “Every so often the Church needs to take stock of its own complexity in a communal act. Then things come out that never occurred to one before, things that seemed impossible. That is what happened at Vatican II.

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3. From an interview with Il Riformista (see http://www.radioradicale.it/files/active/0/Il%20Riformista%20Melloni.pdf).

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“As I see it, the Pope is acting like one of those high school teachers who faced with ‘desperate’ cases give them a diplomatic passing mark even though they don’t deserve it, to ensure that they move up to the next grade. He has given the Lefebvrites a passing mark in liturgy – they can move up in spite of everything… As to Vatican II, I think Ratzinger is contradicting the reading of it that he offered in a famous speech of December 2005. There he spoke of the need to interpret Vatican II in continuity with tradition, without a rupture; yet the ones who have betrayed the Church and created a fracture are precisely the Lefebvrite schismatics, no one else… It is thanks to Vatican II that the faith has been able to be transmitted… What have the Lefebvrite schismatics done for the faith of the Church? Little or nothing.”

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4. From his more recent book L’inizio di papa Ratzinger (see: http://www.ilfoglio.it/articolo.php?idoggetto=27654), probably the most scholarly account of the conclave and the initial period of the Ratzinger papacy:

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“Ratzinger thinks that the encounter between biblical faith and Greek culture has constituted a sort of reciprocal immanence between the two: for him there is no longer any true rationality (in the sense defined by Greek philosophy) except in the light of faith; and a faith that cannot give an account of itself in that form of thought is exposed to inevitable risks of perversion.” “Despite the great efforts of the Magisterium from Pacem in Terris on, Ratzinger does not see the human yearning for a more human life as bearing a value to which the Church gives a name and from which it learns: to the contrary he thinks that only by being assumed into the possibility of the act of faith can the social norm remain outside the perimeter of self-destruction.”

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In short, Melloni notes the Eurocentric character of Ratzinger’s mind, based on a massive fusion of Greek philosophy with biblical revelation, and he sees him as disparaging of the longings for justice and peace to which Vatican II responded.

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5. From http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=20037&eng=y

Alberto Melloni is a noted Church historian, one of the leading experts on the Second Vatican Council, about which he edited a monumental history published in several languages. But Alberto Melloni defines himself as a Catholic “in the back row of church.” And in that distant spot he does not hide the disappointment with which he views the Catholic Church of today. He has just sent to the bookshelves, published by Einaudi, a little volume with an eloquent title: “Mother Church, Stepmother Church,” which has been pilloried by the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, “Avvenire,” but reviewed very favorably by the prior of Bose, Enzo Bianchi, the guru of the progressivist Catholic intelligentsia. In it, Melloni censures the Church for abandoning Jesus and making itself instead the chaplain of another religion, not his, completely and solely civic, at the service of the potentates of the world.

Q: Professor Melloni, is there or is there not anti-Christian aggression taking place?

A: “Of course there is. But it is not the secularist kind that people in Italy and the rest of Europe chatter about. A real, harsh, bloody persecution, of which many Christians are victim, exists in various regions beyond Europe: these are the real persecuted people almost no one talks about. It’s completely different in Europe. The persecution that so many Catholics complain about here doesn’t deserve the name. It is only their problem of incomprehension, lack of communication, and difficulties in coming to terms with modern man. Calling all of this persecution is an offense for the Christians in Africa or Asia who are persecuted, and really killed.”

Q: But what do these Catholics think they will obtain by playing the victim when they’re not, as you put it?

A: “They’re dreaming of a return to a lost form of Christianity, a political-religious symbiosis that would put the Church back at the center. And they quickly find political forces interested in this operation. There’s nothing new in all this. The alliance between the reactionaries and the papists has made its fortunes before, in the 1800’s, just as did the encounter between Catholicism and democracy which the moderate Catholics tried many decades ago. Today this dream is being reintroduced in a big way, on a European scale. The new Europe includes the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury, the patriarch of Romania, and the archbishop of Athens, and this is enough to feed the pretext of a new Christian Europe, forgetting that there are also the Muslims and the Jews, and thus causing great harm to the Church itself.”

Q: What kind of harm?

A: “That of reducing it to Europe. It is incredible that so many Catholics and ecclesiastics are not annoyed at seeing persons outside the Church determine for them what the place of the Church within Europe should be. Christianity is not European or Western, but worldwide. We can have good Europeans and Westerners without inconveniencing the papacy and the Church. They know this in the Vatican, and in fact they are more prudent. Cardinal Angelo Sodano kept his distance from the campaign in defense of Rocco Buttiglione. He was careful not to bring the weight of the Church to bear on petty domestic quarrels.”

Q: Sociologist of religion Danièle Hervieu-Léger maintains that Catholicism is now outside of contemporary culture. Do you agree?

A: “It is outside because it excludes itself. If the Church does nothing but churn out photocopies of the catechism and ban reflection on sensitive topics within itself, it won’t go far. Let’s take homosexual rights. Very different positions on this exist within the Christian world. But while the Anglicans, who are also Christians, discuss it openly and at the highest levels, within the Catholic Church discussion is not admitted. No item of news here goes by without an immediate declaration from the magisterium by way of condemnation. It’s the same with sexual morality, the interruption of pregnancy, embryos, and also in the case of Islam. These are all, not external, but internal questions for the Church. But the Church does not permit the faithful to debate openly about how to apply the message of Jesus to these realities.”

Q: John Paul II, in his speech to the Italian parliament, said that democracy becomes totalitarianism if it does not have an “ultimate truth” to guide it. What do you think?

A: “If the Church wants to speak to a disoriented society, it can offer only one ‘ultimate truth’: peace. Peace as the capacity for people who are different to coexist. The Church came to discover this truth after centuries, passing through intolerance and wars of religion. Now that pluralism has been affirmed in Europe, the Church should not look upon this as a threat, but as an enhancement that makes the faith even more beautiful.”

Q: But the Church continues to say ‘no’ to a democracy that transforms into truth and law every desire of the majority.

A: “Democracy has its weaknesses; it doesn’t work like a Jesuit seminary. The important thing is encounter and mediation. Just as it is wrong to reject every episcopal declaration as if it were an attack against secularism, so it is wrong to see everywhere an attack against the Church. Ideas evolve. Today, the Church no longer thinks about freedom of the press the way Gregory XVI, who demonized it, did, nor does it think about democracy the way Pius XII did. The Church is called to learn from the voice of the Spirit, which resonates within the heart of human existence.”

Q: Does it also resonate within the heart of staunchly secularist non-believers, like Pera or Ferrara, who recently came to the defense of the Church?

A: “The Church should protect itself from them. They make it look like they’re defending the Church, but in reality they’re exploiting it for political purposes, without any respect for the content of the faith. Theirs is an old maneuver that has never been good for society or the Church. It wins the enthusiasm of the clerics, with consequences for which all Christians must pay, in terms of the loss of credibility: and when this happens, the so-called ‘devout atheists’ will already have abandoned them. The Christian faith does not need such apologists. It can defend itself by its own means, which are firmness and meekness.”

Q: Does a philosopher like Jürgen Habermas, an atheist but a great admirer of Christian theology, also exploit the faith?

A: “It’s different in Germany. German theology is not carried out only in the seminaries, as it is in Italy. It is taught in the state universities, and is a branch of learning in open dialogue with society, even though the Church hierarchy often disowns it and condemns its positions.”

Q: The new charter of Europe does not mention “Christian roots.” Was this a defeat for the Church?

A: “I don’t believe that the pope, the curia, and the bishops were so very eager after all for that mention, which would have been more symbolic than anything else. At least in this the Holy See showed exemplary neutrality. In a Europe that no longer has Catholic political parties, the Church is more interested in keeping the citizens united than in dividing them into ranks by religious membership.”

Q: And the surprise of the American elections?

A: “Thomas Friedman wrote in the ‘New York Times’ on November 4: ‘We are not divided on what America does, but on what America is.’ Woe to Europe if we also divide ourselves one from the other for reasons of religious identity. There are those within the Church who wish to do so. But fortunately the Church is too complex to move uniformly in this direction. A great Church of the people will not accept its own reduction to a political fringe movement; it will not accept throwing God onto the market to see how many votes he gets.”