source: ctu.ed |
We spend so much time talking
about the “Conciliar Church” that we often forget what the “pre-Conciliar
Church” was. Indeed, the Catholic Church has been the “Conciliar Church” since
the Council of Jerusalem recounted in the Acts of the Apostles or, at least,
since the Nicene Council convoked by Emperor Constantine in 325. The Second
Vatican Council was the latest council in the long history of the Church, but
not the only. For all intents and purposes, it is the only Council that matters
to most modern Latin Churchmen. They, wrongly, see it as the birth of their own
incarnation of Catholicism. In this they are wrong. Their variation of
Catholicism was born long before the Second Vatican Council and only was brought
to full maturity during the 1950s and 1960s. The grapes had long been crushed,
the juice bottled, and the product fermented. The Council only opened the cork.
What was that process?
Such a question is too
intimidating to answer, but hopefully we can get a head start here. It all
began, of course, with the Reformation and, later, the French Revolution. We
often think of these twin revolts as revolts first against the Church and then against
God Himself. The Reformation and French Revolution were these things, but they
were also so much more. From the Edict of Milan until 1517, the Church built a distinctly Catholic culture in Europe on the ashes of the Roman legal
system and Greek philosophy, baptizing them into herself and allowing them to
flourish in a renewed set of political structures. The emergent Catholic Europe
was multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-governmental, but united by the faith,
a remarkable feature the Greek and various Oriental Churches did not enjoy.
After the Reformation, and
especially the French Revolution, there was no longer a Catholic Europe, only a
Europe in which the majority of inhabitants were Catholics. The faith was
undermined for political reasons. Few large blocks of territory signed onto the
Augsburg Confession for reasons of belief. In the various north German states
as in Henry VIII’s England, Protestantism offered a chance to break away from
the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Spanish politics. In the case of England,
the “stripping of the altars” was not so easy and required considerable
bloodshed to eventuate. Catholic culture died a heroic death, but it died
nonetheless.
A new Catholic culture emerged
which separated itself from secular society. This was a culture to which one
could belong if one was a Catholic, not necessarily if one were only European.
European intellectual thought, particularly in Germanic states and France,
began with anti-clerical cynicism, but Spinoza and Voltaire it radicalized
into open anti-clericalism, anti-popery, and anti-monarchism. Lockean concepts
about freedom, the blank slate man receives at birth, and economics insinuated
academia everywhere. America’s revolution encouraged the seeds of France’s
revolution. Everywhere the former conduits of Catholic education and
intellectual thought were undermined and replaced by the Enlightened. More and
more Catholics began to emphasize the Church as a “perfect society,” something
akin to St. Augustine’s City of God, which exists on earth, but is beyond
earthly criticism. The “perfect society” nearly received explicit expression in
the First Vatican Council in the documents Tametsi
Deus and Supremi Pastoris. This “perfect
society” was not celestial as was St. Augustine’s. It was a society parallel to
the secular one, running on even plane with it, never touching it. This perfect
society, bereft now of major universities and academic credibility, but still
enjoying a place in most royal courts, took the apologetics and theology of the
baroque doctors as well as the art of that period and called them its own. This
16th to early 20th century synthesis of the baroque
political establishment with the privatized Catholic faith would be the irreproachable
idea of the Catholic faith that survived until World War I. The perfect society
could never question itself, nor its head, the Pope. This escapism was fine
while popular, but when it declined, many lapsed. Novelist Umberto Eco lost his
faith during university when he discovered, to his shock, that the Church had
done wrong during the Spanish Inquisition—semantics about the true nature of
the Inquisition aside.
The French Revolution ended a few
years and untold thousands of deaths after it had begun, yet its spirit did not subside. Despite the ascendance of the diminutive despot Napoleon, the
Revolution would continue to spread. Napoleon himself spread it. He had no
interest in the “rights of man” or public use of the guillotine, but he did
promote liberation from ancient governments, demonstrated that one could oppose
the Church publicly, and inculcated French intellectual culture wherever he
held influence in Europe. The 1815 Peace of Paris nominally restored the
ancient order after Bonaparte’s defeat at Waterloo, but the damage had been
done over the preceding decades. The revolutionary spirit was there to stay.
The perfect society proved
ill-equipped to deal with Bonaparte, the revolutionary culture he created, or
with shifts in 19th century academia. A revival in Biblical
scholarship in Germany fell early to protestants and disbelievers with
linguistic talents who taught that the Gospels were, at best, penned a century
or so after Christ. Educated people could no longer take the Scriptures
seriously despite complaints from clergy that the first century origin of the
Gospels was the Church’s teaching. The beliefs of the perfect society were
self-evidently true to believers and required no explanation, only instruction.
To those outside the Church, the teachings looked like circular logic.
Another shock to the system was
Charles Darwin’s publication of Origin of
Species, in which he, perhaps with borrowed material, sought to explain
variations in bird beaks in the Galapagos through evolution of creatures. "Mutability" replaced "cause" as the truth of the learned.
The perfect society, as with any
subgroup within a larger society, developed what Richard Hofstadter would call “paranoid
style” when describing American politics. “Paranoid style” happens when a large
minority, convinced of its own value, resorts to conspiracy theories and
accusations of wrong doing to explain its own futility. These theories
intermingle with the facts, but do not accurately reflect them. In the 19th
century, some Catholics became enamored with what later conspiracy theorists
would call the “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy,” which states that the Jews and
Freemasons of Europe had united to deceive and destroy the Catholic Church from
within; in some variations of this theory, the Freemasons are Satanists who
knowingly attempt to invalidate the Sacraments and change fundamental
teachings.
As with most examples of Hofstadter’s
“paranoid style,” there are facts mixed with fiction. The Jews of Europe did
support the various revolutions of 1848, including the revolt against the Pope
in Rome. In the next century, Jews would support socialist and communist
parties, too. Modern people looking through modern lenses lose sight of why.
Prior to Pius IX, Jews were forced to live in a walled ghetto within Rome, a
fetid place with limited access to infrastructure and a proclivity to disease.
Marriage laws forced more recessive genes which, ironically, raised both the
average IQ of European Jews and their susceptibility to certain sicknesses. Jews
could hold few good jobs. Among the few lucrative positions Jews could hold was
money lending, since Catholics were forbidden to lend money at interest. This
had the compounding consequence of making some Jewish families, like the
Rothschilds, very wealthy, while making Jewish stereotypes all the more prevalent;
no one likes his debt-holder. Jewish people grew tired of their inability to
participate in the now-secular society growing throughout Europe. Some
progressive politicians, like Pope Pius IX, tried granting rights in moderation
and removing the ghetto walls. Pius IX felt betrayed then when the Roman Jews
supported the failed revolution and erected a new wall around the Jewish
quarter.
Similarly, one faces difficulty
in separating Freemasonic facts from Freemasonic fiction. Blaming the
Freemasons for what happened in the 1960s, or 1860s, is humanly understandable.
How else could the perfect society have collapsed in the years after the Second
Vatican Council? A closer look reveals that, from what outsiders can
know about them, they may not be all some traditionalists believe them to have been.
The Masons are a cellular brotherhood, not a single organization. Fairly
independent lodge systems associate with one another, but do not necessarily
answer to one overarching figure. This means the Freemasons are united in their
vague pseudo-religious beliefs, although not in agenda or organization. The
Freemasons in France played a considerable role in the blood bath Revolution.
Their evil Italian twins, the Carbonari, aided the revolts of 1820 in Rome,
Naples, and Sicily. By contrast, their English and American brethren were quite
well behaved. This may have been because England and America were not Catholic
countries or because the communitarian character of those joining the lodges in
the Anglophonic world differed from the revolutionary character of those
joining Continental lodges.
The Freemasons were a force in 18th
and 19th century politics, organizing revolts and coups in a
grassroots fashion, achieving goals through networking and making the right
friends. Their goals could be vaguely characterized as progress, fraternity of
man, enlightened thought, and liberty. If understood loosely enough, some
progressive Churchmen could join the right lodge in good conscience despite condemnations
of the Craft by the Apostolic See. Several people over the years even
accused Pius IX himself of having joined a lodge during his liberal years as
Msgr. Mastai-Ferretti, delegate to Peru. Some lodges and Mason James Marples
support this claim, while others like Jesuit Fr. Herbert Thurston denounce it
in great detail. While the idea may seem outlandish—and it certainly is—it is
not impossible: Mastai-Ferretti was a liberal, the John Paul II of his day,
until the 1848 sent him into exile, an exile form which he returned an
archconservative. Regardless, the Freemasons’ goals were to spread their
secular-progressive ideas. The method of doing this was left to local
discretion. Some aimed at infiltrating the State and Church. Others organized
revolts. Others attended town hall meetings. And others yet did nothing
other than share ideas and operate fraternal functions. To assume a
concentrated effort reveals some ignorance of 19th century European
politics and of the Craft itself.
During the latter part of the 19th
century and early part of the 20th century, the perfect society of
the Church found herself shaken by vitiating movements of liberalism and
liturgical reform. The liturgical reform movement, the Liturgical Movement,
sought to revitalize Catholic life through the liturgy in places ravaged by the
preceding century of revolutions and destruction of culture. It also offered an
alternative to the Romantic movement, which rejected the excesses of
rationalism, but still replaced Revelation with nature, as is evident in 19th
century artwork. This movement was also characterized by an indifference to the
clericalism—a reaction to the existing anti-clericalism—of Pius IX’s long reign.
The other movement was the
Modernist movement. Modernism was not, contrary to the teaching of Pascendi, the “synthesis of all heresies.”
“Modernism” is a term applied too broadly to too many people. Some supposed Modernists,
like Adrian Fortescue, were simply good Catholics who did not fit into the
perfect society’s mold. Others, like Loisy, were outright apostates. And many
others, like Tyrrell and Duchesne, fell somewhere in the murky middle. Pascendi and the anti-Modernist oath
given by Papa Sarto forced all non-conformists underground and, effectively,
synthesized the various dissidents and disgruntled clerics into one identity,
the Modernist. Pascendi was a self-fulfilling
prophecy. The Modernists stayed out of the spot-light until the coast was clear
after the Second World War, bidding their time by studying seemingly benign
subjects such as liturgy and coopting those subjects to their cause.
Msgr. Umberto Benigni assumed
that the Modernists were an organized clan intent on infiltrating the hierarchy.
Benigni organized the Sodalitium Pianium to
counter the Modernists. The Sodalitium
was a loose network of fifty to one hundred people, mostly laymen, who never
spoke to each other. They only answered to a single contact in Rome. The agents
would spy on potential Modernists by reading their articles or book, sometimes
by opening their mail, and even by looking up their receipts in bookstores.
Once a potential Modernist had been confirmed, Benigni would either use the
pope’s authority against the person or condemn said Modernist in the press. All
this kept the perfect society safe from those assaulting it from the outside.
The more liberal Benedict XV
succeeded the to-be-canonized Pius X in 1914 and, after the War to End All Wars,
dissolved the Sodalitium, an
organization which Pietro Gasparri—Pius XII’s mentor and Pius XI’s first
Secretary of State—called “occult.” The perfect society was gone. The Church
from Benedict XV onward would live in the world and work with the means
available to her.
The Church struggled working
within secular politics for the coming decades. The Integrist movement and Action Francaise was met with some measure of
success in advocating a Church-friendly right-wing agenda that would be the
first breath of fresh air for the French Church in nearly a century and a half.
The Cristero movement opposed Calles’ openly secular aims and desire to
suppress any public expression of religion. The Church, although effectively
disestablished, still possessed enough popularity and prestige to wield political
power that would ensure her longevity in Europe. “The faith is Europe and
Europe is the faith,” Hillaire Belloc wrote. It was not to be. While Pius XI
was writing about the “social reign of Christ the King,” his Secretary of State
and Under-Secretary were suppressing the Cristeros and the Action Francaise movements. This did not mean the Church was out of
politics, only that the Vatican and the “Rampolla clique” were out of
right-wing politics. Newspaper editor turned activist Giorgio Montini’s Popular
Party, a center-left Christian democrat faction, enjoyed the patronage of
Cardinal Gasparri and Eugenio Pacelli. The Vatican often supported or did not
obstruct worker organizations or other types of granges formerly associated
with working class collectivism. The Vatican was discreetly pandering to yesterday’s
liberal causes while the contemporary forces surged faster towards a new wave
of revolutions and political disruptions, namely the rise of Nazism, Fascism,
and Communism. The Second World War destroyed the first two of these, leaving
the third untouched until the joint efforts of Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul
II accelerated the Soviet Union’s internal decay. The Second World War not only
destroyed Germany, but also the remaining relics of the perfect society
incarnation of the Church. The emerging materialist and existentialist Europe
would have little use even for the vestiges of its Catholic heritage.
Pius XII’s papacy marked a
transition period between the perfect society and the “Conciliar Church.” The perfect society—entered by Baptism and juridically governed in a visible
way by the Roman Pontiff—replaced the temporal Catholicism of pre-Revolutionary
Europe. Now the Church of the “Mystical Body” would supplant the perfect
society. For several centuries now, Catholics in the Latin Church assumed the
Church was a self-contained society with its own intellectual and inerrant
theological systems, ruled by the Pope. Then, in 1943, Pius XII wrote that he
could find no description of the Church to be “more sublime” than “Mystical
Body.” The new paradigm of the Church as a mystical union with the person of
the Pope was certainly a shock to theologians and a departure from the spirit
of Vatican I—Vatican II was not the first Council with a spirit which departed
from the letter. The liturgical revolution was revived in 1948 and began in
earnest with the new Holy Saturday in 1951 and a new Holy Week as well as
radical changes to the calendar in 1955. Progressives looking to foster good
relations with other religions or seeking to create new interpretations of
older teachings thrived on the lecture circuit and in conferences. Many
conservatives were irate that when the Society of Jesus suppressed Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin’s works the Vatican seemed indifferent. Above all, the
Vatican seemed to share in the United States’s post-War optimism about the
future. The perfect society and the Europe of ideology were both dead. A
renewal was both necessary and inevitable.
At this point, the familiar story
begins. Religious forces long simmering under the lid blew the top off the pot
between 1962 and 1965. German theologians and ecumenists used their influence
in the schema committees and in parliamentary proceedings to interpolate
controversial statements at the choke points of several documents. The
justification for the long-planned new liturgy is finally given. While those following
the Vatican since Pius XI’s reign were hardly surprised, the faithful still
operating on the perfect society model were throw into paralysis and, often,
disbelief.
The point of this article is to
give readers an understanding of the political and social place of the Roman
Church and the forces pushing her in the years prior to the Second Vatican
Council, not to summarize the Vatican’s politics or the reform movement itself,
a loaded topic for another time. If context is key, we must know why so many
reform movements arose and why the Council played out the way it did.
Perhaps the mistakes of the Vatican in politics were a felix culpa? The perfect society was going to collapse eventually. Nothing could survive the Second World War intact, not even, as the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 proved, the planet itself. The traditionalist movement originates in the French countryside, a place which had enough Gallican common sense to ignore the problems in Rome and to continue what had been done for centuries. The French traditionalist movement was a strange mix of bedfellows: Ultramontane doctrine, Gallican action, and quasi-Jansenistic moral rigidity. This odd blend ensured some semblance of tradition survived for us today in the mainstream. Perhaps one day we will have them to thank within a smaller, more vibrant Church, one dissolved from concerns about the City of Man and focused narrowly on the City of God.
Polemically speaking, the term "Conciliar Church" originated with a delegate of Pope Paul VI (I can't recall the name) in the course of his demands to Archbishop Lefebvre. This is explained in ABL's official biography. Traditionalists have subsequently accepted this Pauline descriptive, but they didn't invent it.
ReplyDeleteFunny how, as with the term "Novus Ordo Mass," the term originates with the pope and then the established becomes embarrassed with its use because it exposes a degree of innovation.
Delete...it exposes a degree of innovation. To put it mildly.
DeleteThis puts me in mind of Pius XII, who was sometimes described (not entirely without justice) as "the chaplain of NATO." Paul VI was plainly sensitive to that concern. Unfortunately, in brushing aside the remnants of the societas perfectas in favor of a consciously new Conciliar Church, he ended up making making the Catholic Church (certainly in most of Western Europe!) in many ways the house chaplain to the new liberal secular order - an order which, he discovered too late, does not bide well any dissent from its orthodoxies, not even from its agreeable new chaplain.
I hereby nominate The Rad Trad for the 2015 Nobel Prize for Blog Writing.
ReplyDeleteThis is a stupendous, monumental, exhilarating exposition of a weighty subject.
Thank You, The Rad Trad.
in Domino
Señor Rad Trad, me quito el cráneo ante Vuestra Merced, a causa de la grandeza de vuestra sapiencia y elocuencia. This is the best description I've ever read about the "golden days" of the "Old Church", a church-style I hope will never come back! And I agree with you that we may thank the Traddies in the future for what they have done; the problem is that they themselves do not seem to notice it!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, thank you for this wonderful writing!
K. e.
Justiniane, tu consideración me arrolla. Te doy gracias por la alabanza. ¡Si a ti te gustaría el artículo, compartelo!
DeleteZephyrine, thank you for the compliment. Now, if only I could get one of those $500,000 MacArthur genius grants....
This is a thoughtful (and somewhat idiosyncratic) historiography, Rad Trad. I will have to reflect further on this. Thanks for sharing it.
ReplyDeleteThe other movement was the Modernist movement. Modernism was not, contrary to the teaching of Pascendi, the “synthesis of all heresies.”
Like any good traditionalist, I find a lot to admire about Pascendi and its author, though perhaps more for its verve than its detail. It struck me from the first, reading the early modernist writings, that Pius X imputed more systematic organization to modernism than it itself possessed, or indeed, possesses today - it certainly embraces a number of clear heresies within it, but it's a motley collection, driven by different, sometimes not entirely compatible, modern ideas. This may be why of all the modern (meaning post-1870) Popes, I find the best exemplar in Leo XIII rather than his successor. Leo indulged in a certain degree of innovation, including a problematic natural rights synthesis, but generally of a restrained and thoughtful variety, one which at least had the effect of making the Church more appealing to Western working classes without sacrificing too much of its essence (and involved no codification of canon law or newly engineered breviaries).
The collapse of the old Christendom, begun in 1517, broken decisively in 1789, and finished off in the cataclysm of 1914-18, posed a real challenge to a Church which struggled to adapt to some unprecedented social realities, and while we better perceive the difficulties of the societas perfectas we oughtn't be too critical of a Church struggling to make the best of an increasingly bad situation. The concern now must be for what I tend to agree is one of the new temptations: a smaller, more vibrant Church, one dissolved from concerns about the City of Man and focused narrowly on the City of God. The result could be a quietism with limited evangelical power. In saying this, however, I do not offer an alternative: the Church is going to be smaller and more vibrant for the foreseeable future if it is survive in any recognizable form at all.
I hope I did not come across as critical of those who tried their best to deal with the governments of the time. I find it difficult to criticize those who got on board with the Vichy French regime or Mussolini after 150 years of bloodshed and maltreatment.
DeleteThe focus on the City of God is quite evangelical in my opinion. The creation of Catholic Europe was not, like in Byzantium, primarily a political coup to centralize power (although that did happen to an extent), but a recognition of an existing reality. I think once the faith becomes the white elephant in the room, society adjusts.
Honestly, this should be picked up by some larger Catholic publication and resyndicated there. It would be a welcome break from all the papal politics and ultramontine trad hand-wringing.
ReplyDeleteDear Rad Trad; Damn this is good, really good. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteIf MJ can be permitted a quibble; he was learnt that by a perfect society it was meant that existing entity which had all the means available to accomplish its end and, thus, even the state is a perfect society.
In any event, there are many many joys to be derived from reading you.
May God Bless and keep you writing for a very long time
This post has one horrible flaw: the snide use of the term "perfect society". This is a distortion of what that term meant. It didn't mean that every member of the Church was perfect, it meant that the Church was a perfect society because its end (the eternal happiness of men) is an end in itself. Similarly, the STATE was called a perfect society, every bit as much as the Church was, because its end (the temporal happiness of men) is an end in itself. In contrast, a simple business has the profit of its shareholders as its end, making it an imperfect society, as its end is not an end in itself. Do you think that the theologians who wrote about the "perfect society" thought that the State was literally perfect in a Statist, authoritarian way? No. So the use of "perfect society" as a snide way to criticize the pre-Conciliar understanding of the Church is just pathetic.
ReplyDelete