"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.". The Hobbit
Communio is a Catholic journal for present-day ressourcement thinkers. If you follow the link you can see a bit about its history and focus. Some though not all of its articles are available for reading free in pdf form. I had read about ressourcement theology in books about Vatican II but hadn't known it was still a thing until I started reading Larry Chapp's blog. That link takes you to one of his posts about his personal background in theology.
All this is a rather indirect road to what I was going to say, that yesterday I read a Communio article by Ian Ker called Newman, the Councils, and Vatican II The article made the point that studying the history of the councils put Newman on the road to conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. In this journey, he traced out some of the features of doctrinal development before, during and after various ecumenical councils (particularly Nicea and Trent). Eventually Newman would go on to develop a theory of doctrinal development which has been much discussed since then. Ker makes the point that some of the confusion and conflict which has followed on Vatican II has to do with differing views on what doctrinal development is and can do. (Interestingly, he also discusses the tendency of pivotal councils to rouse controversy as well as end it, but that would be for a different post).
The most recent discussion I have read on doctrinal development is a useful one by Thomas Weinandy, OFM. There is also of course, some reference to notions of doctrinal development in the DDF's recent declaration, Fiducia Supplicans.
Sorry about that very long yet still very abbreviated lead-in. By the way, this demonstrates some of the problems a poor Catholic or halfling runs into when talking about Church things. If you weren't already familiar with ecumenical councils, and JH Newman, and current Church controversies -- for example, if one of my non-Catholic or Catholic but not too interested in theology type friends was reading this -- you would probably have already swiped left.
In writing this blog, just to lengthen the introductory throat-clearing even more, I am going to have to find a way to discuss things that seem important without making the footnotes longer than the original topic. Bilbo wrote stories and songs about his adventures, which might be a good approach. Frodo went silent, and eventually sailed west. Samwise returned to his gardening, I believe, and probably told many tales to his wife and 13 children. None of them turned to blogging.
But anyway, moving on....
One of the other things Fr Ker discussed in the article linked above was how the main teaching of Vatican I -- the infallibility of popes under certain restricted conditions -- was hotly disputed before and after the Council. Even well after. In fact, you can read Vatican I as an origin story or canon event for Vatican II. It has been done.
Now I am finally zeroing in on my original topic. Ker was writing in 2001, and spoke of how the Vatican II council in certain ways tried to balance out the teaching of Vatican I, by speaking of the teaching and pastoral charism of all bishops, specific to their office, not simply an executive authority delegated by the pope when he selects them. Vatican II also spoke famously of the role of the laity. ... it didn't envision special interest lobbies of the identity elite, or some kind of representative democracy, or even necessarily laypeople teaching in seminaries, running diocesan offices, or acting as lectors and Eucharistic ministers, but it did tie together clergy and laity in a sort of unified "People of God" -- pointing out an ancient truth sometimes neglected in the modern world, that we are all laity before we are religious, priests, or popes, and that our parents are all laity, so the laity isn't just a faceless collective.
While reading his 2 decade old article (and Fr Ker died 2 years ago) I remembered the days when we were all worried about the tendency of bishops' conferences to think of themselves as checks and balances to the papacy. And how strange that seems now, because now the tendency is to think that the papacy is even more centralized than it was before the Council.
However, according to Ker and Newman (and it seems to be well documented historically) this kind of turmoil is not atypical at all for ecumenical councils. In zeroing in on incomplete truths and errors, sometimes the council brings out unresolved lines of doctrinal development, new difficulties that were inadequately seen before. That's why sometimes there is a chain of councils, as with the Arian heresy, Ker notes that Newman recognized that the Monophysite controversies followed Nicea and were easily seen as an overreaction to Arianism in the opposite direction. It took at least a couple more councils, some of them very colorful, to get to a place of orthodoxy in the official doctrine.
Truly it seems that orthodox doctrine is a pearl of great price whose possession often entails a lot of hard work and controversy, and not rarely, martyrdom.
Anyway, what I started to talk about is that for what I think are complicated reasons and not dependent on one pope or one strain of theology, the papacy has become even more centralized in some ways than it was before the council.
Part of this is because the Council envisioned the Church speaking to the world. The papacy lost temporal power a long time ago, in fact right around the time of Vatican I. But it correspondingly took on a more prophetic or didactic role, and the art of the encyclical really flourished in consequence.
Directly before, during and after the Vatican II Council, Popes were increasingly conscious of the ecumenical project, and often addressed their encyclicals to "people of good will" rather than to the Church or to bishops.
At the same time, the media found the Church's new look and attitude very newsworthy, and part of being newsworthy means being able to be manipulated for political effect. So there was a tendency to seize on every micro-detail of every proceedings, often with enthusiasm untrammeled by theological sophistication or even journalistic restraint.
And the media increasingly became the way people were educated in their faith after early childhood. One set of people mostly ignores Church issues altogether, because every time you look you find something new, in the media's mind if not in reality, and it starts to become destabilizing. They are tired, and done with that, or they are caught up in what the Popes used to call "temporal cares". Another set of people becomes obsessed with the ephemerea of every nuance, every speech and expression of the pope's activities; or perhaps just what their favorite commentator says about those things. Most of us, meaning those who want to continue to be formed by the Church but don't want to run this way and that, try to sort through, to find the bits of wheat in the chaff, the lost coins on the cottage floor, the eternal Bride.
Finally, the Church is large in its constituency and fairly significant globally. Perhaps because of this and because of the global connections -- everyone knows everything at every moment, at least everything that is transmitted and received -- there is a kind of Sun King effect. It's not that the Vatican has become Versailles, or the Pope thinks of himself as an absolute despot: "L'eglise c'est moi."
The Sun King effect I am talking about is a media driven one, and it burst into bloom after Vatican II, though no doubt it was rising toward the surface before then.
Louis XIV, in order to nerf the power of the aristocrats who had rebelled in his early childhood, brought them closer by making them involved in every detail of his toilette, his morning and evening routines, etc. This kept them under his eye and also by definition subordinate.
The media have elected themselves courtiers in this style. They keep an eye on every detail -- who the pope smiles at, frowns at, talks about in the most casual conversations. They report it, because we are supposed to be interested in every detail. And generally we are; it is with some good reason that the media is so fascinated and that we are too, by proxy. By a series of accidental events the papacy has come to seem like the center of everything.
Some of the media are sycophantic, more are at least potentially skeptical in one way or another, but they are not there as believers. They are there to pay attention. And they do. Sometimes they are writing to influence the narrative. They do that, too.
I don't think post-Vatican II popes aspire to be Sun Kings. In my view, they've all intended to use the Sun King effect, which they didn't choose to acquire, for good. As mentioned earlier, they know that John XXIII intended to open the doors for the Church to dialogue with the world, and they are the most visible and newsworthy icon of the Church in its visible, institutional form. They are trying to evangelize, to be the face of the Church.
But the resultant brew seems volatile. I wonder if Aragorn had political problems once he was crowned. I would guess he would try to restore the agency of the peoples he governed, so that the Shire could be the Shire, the Rohirrim the Rohirrim, etc. I look at other historical times where leaders involuntarily acquired a patina of absolutism along with their formal job description, and usually it ends up with a bit of a crash.
The Church uniquely can be born again and again from some spectacular crashes. Hope is an element of eucatastrophe -- not knowing HOW it can possibly work out, but knowing that it WILL. I think it's reasonable to be very hopeful, just like Cecilia and Sebastian and Lawrence and Perpetua, and still be quite persuaded we are in for some interesting times.
This post is far longer than I intended it to be. I may have to revise it a bit.
Comments
Post a Comment