Stellar Battles and Space Junk

 A note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they will often tell you not only what is wrong with them but also what is wrong with you.”

― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

I have just started reading a book by Tracey Rowland called Catholic Theology.      You can read a bit about the book here:   Tracey Rowland's Guide through the Catholic Academic "Zoo".   She is Australian and a former member of the International Theological Commission.  

The book is meant to be an introductory aerial view of the different branches of theology within the Catholic Church at this time, including a tracing of historical origins.   As she says in the interview: 

Certainly I am one of those who believe that our current woes began in the 14th century with the rise of Franciscan nominalism which fed into the theology of late scholasticism which in turn fuelled the crises of the sixteenth century. As the narrative goes, nominalism led to a decadent scholasticism, a decadent scholasticism led to the Reformation, the Reformation led to baroque scholasticism, baroque scholasticism fostered a rationalist current in Catholic theology, romanticism (of which post-modernism is a development) was a reaction against rationalism and could take either a Catholic or a nihilist direction. Prior to the Second Vatican Council we had a theology that was focused on a response to the Reformation and a response to the rationalism of the 18th century. It could not contend with the romantic interest in history which had been driving the non-Catholic theological world for at least a century.

I am hoping the book will help me to understand better the underpinnings and different premises and goals that seem to act as barriers in many Church discussions.  As Rowland says:

One of my favourite television programmes is the BBC’s “Great British Rail Journeys” hosted by Michael Portillo. Portillo travels on stretches of rail track and gives the viewer a cultural history tour along the way. My book is a bit like this. One cannot teach theology well by merely presenting students with a series of dogmatic statements and helping them to understand how the statements can be built into a system. They need to know the history behind the dogmas and there needs to be room left for the mystery which always exceeds any system. They also need to know something about the personal life histories of the theologians they are studying including who were their mentors, heroes and villains.

 A lot of the discussions, no matter where they start, end up as a kind of meta-discussion about who gets to say what, and in what tone and context, and with what degree of authority.    Any partly online Catholic is very used to this, but it is peculiarly a feature of our times.  Another book I recently read, The Desolate City by Anne Roche Muggeridge, traces this back to pre-Vatican-1 days, but describes how it heated up in the years following the Vatican II Council, especially with the promulgation of Humanae Vitae.    For her book, she uses the framework of "features of a revolution" and in this context, she considers the encyclical on contraception and the planned and organized resistance in the US and Canada to be the "triggering event".   From a thorough review of the book by John F McCarthy:  

The triggering incident came in the debate over contraception. Bernard Hãring and others persuaded the majority of the special study commission to drop the whole argument from natural law underpinning the Church's teaching about marital acts (79). The final vote of the commission was 64 to 4 in favor of removing the ban on artificial contraception (83). In spite of this crushing defeat of traditional morality in a commission appointed by the Popes themselves, Paul VI went ahead and published Humanae Vitae in July 1968, wherein he stated: "No believer will wish to deny that the teaching authority of the Church is competent to interpret even the natural moral law. It is, in fact, indisputable" (104). But by 1968 Paul VI's definition of 'believer' "no longer applied to many of those who still called themselves 'Catholics,'" and that massive loss of belief "was a direct consequence of the way the revolution used the issue of contraception to reintroduce the Protestant principle of authority into the Church" (105)......

....   Anne Muggeridge believes that the end of the moderate phase of the revolution coincided with the end of the Council in 1965 (114). From then on it became more and more the role of the radical theologians "to precede and prepare the opinions of the magisterium" (106, quoting Richard McCormick). Especially since the 'July Revolution' of 1968 a revolutionary ideology has the upper hand, "for although the magisterium continues to hold and repeat its moral teaching, it sees it everywhere repudiated, and lacks or feels it lacks the support necessary for a counteroffensive" (107). For instance, in the United States according to Andrew Greeley, by l979 only ten percent of those under the age of thirty agreed that the Pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals (108). As in other true revolutions, in 1968 the empowering symbols of the existing order of Catholic ecclesiastical authority were "dragged from their usual integrated subliminal existence into the raucous ideological public square" (110).

 Anne Roche Muggeridge's book was written in the 80's.  By now, forty years later, I think that most people in the pews who are still practicing the faith would uphold the doctrine of the primacy of the pope, and would express loyalty to him.   But it might well not even occur to many of them that this would affect their decisions with regard to their married life.    

Tracey Rowland writes:

By the early 1970s the academic theologians who attended the Council had divided into two quite definite camps, known in academic short-hand by the names of their flagship journals: Concilium and Communio. I agree with Philip Trower that these two groups have been engaged in a ‘theological star-wars’ over the heads of the faithful. The fall-out from the stellar battles lands in parishes but Catholics who have not studied theology are unable to identify the origins of the bits of “space-junk” they encounter. By writing about the intellectual DNA of the two groups it was my hope that readers would be helped to identify the intellectual pedigree of the ideas with which they are presented in homilies, lectures, retreat addresses, etc.

This is a good description of how I think many ordinary people experience the ongoing struggles and see their effects.