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Traditionalism and its Dangers part II
Read Part I: Hermeneutics of Rupture and the Extremes
Vatican II must be treated as a valid Council
The first great danger for traditionalism is to try to act as though Vatican II did not happen and to seek, in practice, simply to ignore the post-conciliar Magisterium. Rather, recognizing the different levels even of papal Magisterium, the traditionalist must learn to read the conciliar and post-conciliar Magisterium in light of the continuity of tradition (a principle that was proposed to and accepted by the SSPX in the failed talks before the 1988 episcopal consecrations); that means that the first primary attitude towards Magisterial texts should be acceptance, unless there is some clear reason for concern.[1]
Ironically, collegiality was one of the Vatican II developments that has been rejected by some traditionalists, but which, faced with the Francis papacy, Cardinal Müller has highlighted. In other words, Pope Francis has been acting against one of the central principles of Vatican II, one of its true developments, collegiality, even while talking ad nauseam about “synodality”.
Often traditionalists spend much time criticizing the way a statement has been formulated, or casting suspicion on the motivations behind the statement – and they may indeed have good reasons for doing so – while failing to insist on and promote a proper interpretation (which is usually possible).[2]
Dignitatis Humanae has been one of the Vatican II documents most criticized by traditionalists. The criticism focuses on the affirmation of a “natural right to religious freedom”: “the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature” (DH 2).
Little attention is paid to the power of the foundation of this right:
It is in accordance with their dignity as persons – that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility – that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth (Ibid.).
True, the Council will affirm that the right does not depend upon the fulfillment of the obligation, but more attention needs to be paid to the moral obligation to seek truth and adhere to it in practice. This is really the fundamental obligation of the human person.[3] This raises questions that could help understand the limitations inherent in the right and also raises questions critical of much of the pastoral practice inaugurated by the Council.
First, is there any reason to suppose that most men pay much attention to this obligation? Indeed, is it not rare to find someone seriously committed to seeking the truth and adhering to it in practice? Does it not seem that most men pretty much take uncritically what they have been taught, whether by parents, schools, or “culture”? Do they not then pretty much pursue their desires and plans, if they are “decent” folk, within the vague framework of “right” and “wrong”, as they have received it, in which the framework is secondary to their own plans?
That in turn throws light back on Lumen Gentium 14-17 and the Council’s seemingly rosy view about the prospect of salvation outside of the Church. A Catholic who simply follows what he has been taught, is living then within a framework of what is truly right and wrong and, in addition, has received the Sacraments and with the Sacraments grace; all that at least gets him in the vicinity of the way of salvation. He may not be pursuing the fundamental obligation with the sort of seriousness it calls for, but he is surrounded by so many things in the Church that God can use to bring him home. There is in his regard, at least, some basis for optimism.
But the non-Catholic, the non-Christian, the Atheist? They are groping in the dark, but generally not too concerned about it, while they are deprived of the means of grace. Yes, God’s grace can still reach them, but is there much reason for optimism in their regard if they show no particular signs of taking seriously their fundamental human obligation to seek the truth and adhere to it? Does that not have something to say to the Church’s missionary effort? Does it not even have something to say to the importance of bringing non-Catholic Christians into the Church, despite the efforts of ecumenism?
Second, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that divine revelation, proposed by the Catholic Church, is needed even for the truths within the reach of the human mind, because of the difficulty in attaining those truths, and absolutely for the essential truths required for salvation, the mysteries of the faith.[4] In other words, men cannot attain the truth they need to live by without help, natural and supernatural, and in particular without the help of the Church.[5]
The Council focuses on the right to seek the truth in community as the foundation for the right of religious freedom for groups. Nevertheless, does not the need for supernatural help to attain the goal of the right argue for special status for the Catholic Church that would put a limit on the rights of other religions? One might put it this way: do not persons have a right to assistance in the fulfilment of their obligation, assistance that calls for access specifically to the Catholic Church? Even the need for help in the natural order would seem to call for some form of protection against error.
In other words, the very foundation laid by the Council for the right to religious freedom contains within itself, though this has been neglected on all sides, a principle that would limit that same freedom.
This argument also shows how engaging the Council, rather than merely criticizing or rejecting it, can bring light.[6]
God allowed the Council and the Novus Ordo
Traditionalism, then, runs the danger of treating the Magisterium as though it has been in suspension since Vatican II. If the visible Church is indeed a continuous reality before and after the Council, as evidenced by the continuity of the hierarchy, then, the Magisterium continues as well, even if it has become in some way confused on account of the Council’s peculiar pastoral turn and the changes in language and expression, not to mention the sheer verbosity.
Further, whatever missteps involved in the Council and afterwards, however great they may or may not be, whatever the consequences, we need to recognize that God allowed this to happen. God allowed the Council; God allowed the Novus Ordo and the whole liturgical reform. For better or for worse, this is all now a part of the Church and part of the pastoral reality the Church has to work with.
Something should be said about the “hermeneutic of suspicion” regarding the Council and the Mass. Jean Madiran claimed that the whole liturgical reform is legitimately suspect and that we are being subject to deceit because the new Mass is an instrument with an ulterior motive. The same attitude is often displayed in regard to the Council. It is an attitude that can effectively avoid direct engagement with the Council or the Mass and prohibits the acknowledgement of anything good because the whole is “suspect.” Refined arguments will be made claiming that the Church is not indefectible or infallible in all disciplinary decisions, which poses no problem when it comes to particular decisions here and there, but which because of the scope with which the argument is applied, casts into doubt the solidity of the whole edifice of the visible Church. If Jean Madiran’s argument is valid, then we cannot trust the visible Church that has given us the new Mass. Then we have returned to embracing the hermeneutic of rupture.
All this means that the traditionalist Catholic who is going to criticize this turn of events must also ask, “Why has God allowed this?”
One possible answer is: “As a test of fidelity.” In other words, the content of the tradition after 2,000 years is fundamentally clear (indeed, John XXIII effectively affirmed this in his opening speech at the Council![7]), but God has allowed this confusion, obliging Catholics either to adhere faithfully to the inheritance of 2,000 years, or give way to novelty. The “divine trial” mentality can help foster a “holy remnant” mentality.[8] There is certainly an element of “trial” in all this, but is that a sufficient explanation?
A second answer would be: “It is a sort of divine punishment.” God has removed or lessened certain goods within the Church because they were neglected or taken for granted by Catholics. That could certainly apply to the loss of the traditional Mass. To put the matter simply: if at the time of the Council Catholics generally valued the received liturgy as presently traditionalist Catholics value the traditional liturgy, there would have been no urgent desire for liturgical reform at the time of the Council.
Yet, considering just the Mass, if God allowed an impoverishment of rite as a sort of punishment, what does that mean for us practically? Does it mean that, in some measure the impoverishment should be accepted and worked with the best we can? Does it preclude the possibility of learning something even from the impoverished rite? I will return to that when I consider the question of the consecration.
Of course, when a neglected treasure is lost or imperiled, its value is esteemed as it was not before; that is very much the experience of the new wave of traditionalists whose experience of the traditional liturgy is not in continuity with the pre-conciliar liturgy. Yet, the value they put on the newly discovered treasure can lead to putting an excessive value on it, as something absolutely necessary.
Another possibility is that God allowed all this as a lengthy and painful course correction to papal excess. Something similar has happened before in history. Popes are capable of making “pastoral” mistakes and their mistakes can have dire consequences.
The previous high point of the papacy was perhaps with Pope Innocent III (1198-1216). In any case, from the beginning of the Gregorian reform to the papacy of Innocent III, the papacy grew in prestige and increased its power in Christendom. In many ways, this was good and necessary for the circumstances, especially in combating the domination of Christian princes that tended to stifle the Church and subordinate her to secular concerns, depriving her of her true freedom.
Notably, however, St. Louis did not jump to the defense of Innocent IV in his conflict with Frederick II. That suggests that even though Frederick II was of doubtful integrity (to say the least) that Innocent IV was already engaged in a papal political overreach that exacerbated rather than healed the situation.
In any case, the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282-1302) clearly manifested papal overreach, when the papacy became involved in a war between Christian powers, employing its spiritual arsenal in favor of its favored parties, when the whole thing began because Aragon, in alliance with the Sicilians, undercut the papal plans in favor of Charles of Anjou (the not so holy younger brother of St. Louis).[9] It would be a long decline of the papacy from the Sicilian Vespers to the Council of Constance to Pope Leo X. Even after the Council of Trent, when the prestige of the papacy was somewhat restored, the Popes had to walk very carefully in relation to the Catholic powers. Long gone were the thundering excommunications of the 12th and 13th centuries.
Yet, the disaster of the French revolution gave the papacy a new boost, as Catholics began as never before to look beyond the mountains (ultramontanism) to Rome for guidance in a world that had become profoundly hostile to the Church. Then with the disappearance even of the Austrian Empire and Catholic Kingdom of Spain in the early 20th century, and with the establishment of the Vatican City State, the Papacy, unchecked by Catholic princes, enhanced also by modern means of communication, successfully navigating two world wars, attained a dominance and prestige in the Catholic world that it had never enjoyed in all of history. By the time Pope Pius XII declared the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, it would seem that the Catholic faith had become a matter of the Pope commanding and Catholics obeying.
One might say then that God allowed Vatican II because the Popes, and a large part of the Catholic world with them, had forgotten that they were beholden to Tradition as an inheritance received.
This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed (Dei Verbum, 10).
Paying little heed to their own teaching, the Council Fathers acted in many ways as though it was within their purview to tear down the entire Church and rebuild her better to serve (so they thought) her purpose, much as an old church building might be torn down and rebuilt in a more contemporary style. So, it might be a matter of God allowing the hierarchy (and the rank and file of Catholics) to learn their limits the hard way.
And yet, if God has allowed this demolition, He has not abandoned His Church. If there is much good that was destroyed or imperiled with all the iconoclastic violence witnessed in “wreckovated” churches, it must also be acknowledged that there was a great deal of dry rot and “accumulated junk” – some things that we are well to be rid of but wouldn’t have gone except by violence – that went out the door as well. Traditionalists benefit from the freedom for lay initiatives in the Church that would have hardly been possible in the 1950s, when control from “top down” was much more intensive.[10]
An example of “top down” control would be the index of forbidden books. In its time and place, I think that was probably a good thing. I am inclined also to think that it was a mistake to get rid of it, as that gave the impression that now it was alright to read whatever you wanted, that there were no “dangerous” books. At the same time, I am inclined to think it would probably not be opportune to restore it; publication, whether in print or on the internet has become so easy and published works so numerous and voluminous, that a Congregation of the Index could not in any adequate way keep up. Any list now would seem very arbitrary. The sort of guidance needed now, to protect from errors, is the simple condemnation of errors and judging of heretics.
Finally, the recognition that God has allowed this, that as a result a great deal of doctrinal error has entered the day to day life of the Church, as well as just plain confusion and ignorance, that, on the traditionalist argument, the Roman Church is saddled with an impoverished liturgy, often uprooted from or obscuring the fulness of the Church’s tradition, does not answer the practical question: what now?
Pope Benedict XVI saw the problem of simply countermanding the decisions of Vatican II. If confusion was caused by the sudden changing of changeable things, more confusion will be caused by the sudden changing back of changeable things that should not have been changed.
Now it may be, as some traditionalists seem to think, that the whole “Novus Ordo Church” is simply going to collapse, which will enable a full “return to Tradition.” Yet considering, for example, the Church in the United States, in which a massive demographic collapse is humanly predictable (human foresight being notoriously fallible), it seems unlikely even then that a “full return to Tradition” would be feasible. The vitality of the “Novus Ordo Church” is not so completely lacking that, on the coming disaster scenario, there will be a complete collapse; besides traditionalists, there would survive pockets of priests and faithful, ignorant of Latin, and immersed in a spirituality built upon the Novus Ordo.
Further, one cannot plan on disaster. Once the present state of affairs, as allowed and permitted by God, is recognized, once the legitimacy of the vast “Novus Ordo Church” is accepted as being simply the present condition of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, pastoral decision making must be based on the good of the whole, realistically attainable.
In that light, traditionalism has a role to play, even an important role to play, but the traditionalist needs to recognize that traditionalism is not the whole but a part of the whole. The traditionalist tendency to consider traditionalism simply as “the solution”, sees traditionalism as either the “real Church” or at least the exclusive pars sanior. Those attitudes contain a centrifugal tendency away from the visible unity of the Church towards the peripheries of the SSPX and sedevacantism.
Pope Benedict XVI’s “Reform of the reform” and “Summorum Pontificum” addressed the whole with patience and foresight that might not satisfy many traditionalists. They argue that the traditional Latin liturgy is by right the liturgy of the Roman Rite, that the new liturgy is a new artificially fashioned rite, an example of a papal abuse of power, that because of its artificiality stands in contradiction to the traditional character of liturgy, and so can only be regarded as an illegitimate usurper. It is a strong argument but does not stand against the massive fact that it has been done, that this liturgy has become the liturgy of the Roman Church now for 60 years. Abuse of power or no, it has been to some extent legitimized by usage and acceptance. Denying that “de facto” legitimization is tantamount to declaring that the entire hierarchy of the visible Church (including the non-Roman rites who have accepted this state of affairs) from Pope down, has fallen into error for 60 years. We are moving back towards sedevacantism.
[1] Bishop Athanasius Schneider wrote, “The Council had many and beautiful texts.” (Christus Vincit, 123) And answering the charge that the whole should be rejected because of a little bit of poison, “We cannot accept it because the Second Vatican Council was an event of the entire Church. It is such an important phenomenon, even though there were negative points, we have to maintain an attitude of respect … back to the comparison – ‘it’s somewhat like a cake with a bit of poison in it’ – I would say this does not apply to the Second Vatican Council. For me, that betrays a lack of a supernatural perspective.” (Ibid., 129,130)
[2] Now, I will admit that with the current pontificate this becomes a wearying task, because the best statements even are couched in ambiguity, and there the whole presentation is so confused and even contradictory, that a person is tempted to just shrug and not pay any attention. For all that, Bishop Athanasius Schneider has often done a marvelous job of responding to major papal documents, with a respectful commentary highlighting the good and critiquing the bad. In regard to Amoris Laetitiae he wrote, “There are certainly points we need to criticize objectively and doctrinally. But there are some sections which are very helpful, really good for family life, e.g., about elderly people in the family: in se they are very good.” (Ibid., 130) We can also consider how the Magisterium continues to function in a document like Fiducia Supplicans. Though the document as a whole works to undermine Catholic teaching in practice, it actually begins with an authoritative affirmation of that teaching in FS 4, which belongs to the Church’s authentic Magisterium. Finally, unless, we are in the grips of the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” Pope Francis has recently given the Church the gift of a beautiful Encyclical Letter on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Dilexit Nos.
[3] This perhaps is one of the keys to the proper understanding of the Council. The Council wants to treat people and address them in a way that befits the personal responsibility expressed in this passage. For this reason, it wants to persuade, rather than command. For a Catholic, this sense of personal responsibility does not pertain first of all to seeking the truth as an unknown, but to receiving it and seeking to understand it. The Council wanted to treat Catholics as adults, but much of the post-conciliar chaos was a result of their acting like children or teenagers.
[4] ST Ia Q.1, a 1.
[5] Cf. CIC 213
[6] In a certain way engaging the Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Magisterium takes more mental effort; it is not a task for lazy minds. Lack of precision of language, verbosity, framing doctrine in terms adjusted to practical purposes, some of which are questionable, mixture of speculation into doctrinal teaching, and the complexity of the different levels of Magisterium, which is still a matter that has yet to achieve a full articulation, make for some hard work. Pre-Conciliar Magisterium and “approved” theology and catechetics, however, can be a bit deceptive in its apparent clarity. While there are “disputed questions” there is also a large degree of unity of language, caution, and precision in expression that can give a wrong illusion of some things being established, when they are not, and others being stated in a perfect and adequate manner when they are not. A comparison of two catechisms will illustrate what I mean. On the Trinity, the Roman Catechism is succinct and to the point, does not indulge in any speculation, and indeed warns the faithful against trying to dig too deeply into what is beyond the capacity of the mind. No one will be led into error by this, but the approach of “shut up and believe” while hoping you might one day behold the reality in heaven, leaves one wondering why God revealed the doctrine of the Trinity in the first place. The Catechism of the Catholic Church has a more expansive treatment of the Trinity, containing the solid and accurate doctrine, but introducing rich citations from the patristic tradition, and trying to show in some way how the mystery sheds light on our lives and the whole of reality. The treatment is less cautious and does not shut down speculation and contains passages that can and do give rise to stupidity. CCC 221, if taken as what is primary in the doctrine of the Trinity, can give rise to some strange and confusing ideas. On another matter, the Roman Catechism scarcely treats of original sin (and indeed one could miss the whole deifying character of sanctifying grace – more caution?) while the Catechism of the Catholic Church gives an excellent and extensive treatment of original sin (and makes the deifying character of sanctifying grace quite clear) but in setting forth the contrast between Adam and Christ could give the impression, taken out of context, that redemption is automatic. CCC 404: “By this ‘unity of the human race’ all men are implicated in Adam’s sin, as all are implicated in Christ’s justice.”
[7] Gaudet Mater Ecclesiae 6
[8] God knows his “holy remnant”, but it is seductive, intoxicating, and dangerous to think that my particular group, large or small, is that remnant.
[9] It is worth noting that the rivalry between Pope and Emperor lies at root of the dissolution of Christendom and the rise of secular modernity. By 1300 the Papacy had become accustomed to employing worldly weapons (political maneuvers and wars, subordinating spiritual resources to these purposes, opposing “enemies” with excommunications and supporting friends by “indulgences.”) Dante clearly saw how this had ruined Italy, turning the peninsula into a viper’s nest of rival factions. This more than anything else led to the Avignon papacy (a safer place) and the great schism that resulted upon the return of the papacy to Rome. After the resolution of the Investiture Controversy in 1122 it seems the main point of contention between the Pope and the Emperor was really the control of Italy. The Emperor, precisely as Emperor of Rome, instinctively thought it his right to rule in Italy. The Pope, fearful of Imperial power, and not without reason, wanted to keep that power far away. That, I think, lies at the root of papal overreach. If somehow the 12th century Popes could have come to terms with a strong Empire, ruling even in Italy, while somehow preserving the rights and independence of the papacy, what might have been the result? Strong support for the Crusader kingdoms, which would have checked Muslims power, and also maybe even reunion with the Greeks. Now, ironically, while the medieval Popes fought the Catholic Empire, our present Pope seems to have become a craven servant of the secular empire of the “New World Order.” Then, papal overreach was in the name of the liberty of the Church; now, papal overreach seems to have been placed as the service of the secular agenda. Rejection of the papal service of the modern secular world (how do you theologically explain that fact?) lies at the heart of sedevacantism and the sedevacantist tendencies of traditionalism.
[10] In some ways, it seems that Pope Francis is trying to restore that suffocating top-down control, but he is limited in his ability to do so and his very agenda, at the same time, works against it.