Quickening

  "One of the great purposes of Vatican II was to vivify the religious life of the faithful, to permeate their lives with the Christian revelation."

Chapter V:  Vivification of Religon 

 The term Dietrich von Hildebrand uses in opposition to vivification is "ossification".   Vivification is an odd Latinate word.   In the Divine Office we pray Vivifica, meaning we asked that we be enlivened or "quickened".   Quicken is the term we still use for the flutter of new life a mother feels when an unborn baby is early in the second trimester.   Ossification means turning into stone or something else hard and insentient.  

Ossification is a danger for any institution insofar as it is human.  The distinction between the Church and other organizations is that the tendency has always been overcome by continual renewal.

Here are some examples of a "legalistic and formalistic" approach which Hildebrand gives.  These problems, he points out, are ultimately naturalistic, because they occur when the Church is not thought of as divine and supernaturally directed.

This is an important point -- when things in the Church go wrong, it is because it has become too worldly, not too religious.    Extreme religiosity is one more permutation of worldliness.  

• Catechesis by rote (taught like history and spelling, by rationalistic methods).   Real religious teaching strives to "awaken and develop a sense of mystery and reverence in his pupil."   Neutralization of religion "renders it dull and inert and incapable of penetrating our entire life."
• Mere loyalty to the Church (as an institution) rather than true faith.  This would involve people going to Mass merely as a duty, or people being indifferent to suffering and injustice because it does not involve Catholics.   DVH remembers people who didn't concern themselves with Hitler because he was attacking Jews, not Catholics.
• "Employeeism" or bureaucracy in the Church.    He talks about the priests who say Mass as if they were going to the office, who are unconcerned about "transformation in Christ."   He goes on to talk about "ritualization" of faith makes laity unable to discourse with atheists or any kind of non-Catholics.  The faith is "ghettoized."
• Overestimation of organization.   He uses the example of what followed Pope Pius XI calling for "Catholic Action."  (in his encyclical Pax Christi in Regno Christi).   "The Pope called for penetration of the entire life of the layman by the spirit of Christ and for a new participation of laymen in the apostolate."  Many took this as a call to "mere organizational activity".  In contrast, DVH brings up a slum in Paris where a priest went to live.  He attracted several other priests and some Catholic students who came there one day a week to help.  After twenty years, a third of the city's vocations came from this once-degraded and anti-religious area.
• Approaching supernatural truth through naturalistic categories.   When religion does not permeate life, one's approach to truth and practice remains secular and this dries out and ossifies religion.

This is the context by which to see the main agenda of Vatican II.    This chapter is a partner with the preceding one, which spoke about progressivism as a reaction to ossification and sterility in the faith.  

You can see the solutions implicit in his statement of the problems.  Religion must permeate life, individuals and clergy must be transformed in Christ.    Hildebrand states that the progressive solution of increasing secularism only exacerbates the problem, it does not solve it.  

Here is a vexing problem -- the only solution to the crisis is a wholesale change, but organization of change is even worse than organization of sameness, as we've seen in many iterations.    Humanly speaking, we are at an impasse.   If we look at history, real conversion is usually seeded by the lives of a few saints and martyrs, and a vaster silent body of the ordinary people, the peasants.   The Holy Spirit, the giver of Life, tends to work with the small, the unknown, the hobbit-folk.   Here is Chesterton on that:  

Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular tradition, had everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt most directly, with least check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt cults of civilisation, the need we have already considered; the images that were adventures of the imagination; the mythology that was a sort of search; the tempting and tantalising hints of something half-human in nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places. They had best understood that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story is a personality. But rationalism had already begun to rot away these really irrational though imaginative treasures of the peasant; even as systematic slavery had eaten the peasant out of house and home. Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was descending a dusk and twilight of disappointment, in the hour when these few men discovered what they sought. Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the forest. Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep. And though no man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfil all things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The shepherds had found their Shepherd.