Friday Passages

The Council Fathers had voted for greater use of sacred Scripture, homilies rather than sermons, removal of liturgical duplications, the prayers of the faithful, training the faithful to say and sign all the Mass parts in Latin, and, under certain circumstances, openness to concelebration and Communion under both species. 

They did not call for changing the direction of the altar, removing tabernacles from sanctuaries, Communion in the hands, the iconoclastic “wreckovation” of churches, jackhammering high altars and Communion rails, whitewashing of sanctuaries, the substitution of sacred music with saccharine and occasionally heretical hymns, hideous banners, “clown” Masses and liturgical free-for-alls, all seemingly justified by the undefined spirit of the Council. - Father Roger Landry, appointed by the U.S. bishops a National Eucharistic Preacher

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Sanctifying the world — “Christifying” the world, if you will — was thus John XXIII’s original intention for Vatican II. The Council was not summoned to reinvent Catholicism, for the Church had a “constitution,” a body of truths and a structure, given it by Christ. Nor was the Council summoned to embrace the modern world uncritically: the Council was summoned so that the Church might more effectively engage the modern world, in order to convert the modern world. - George Weigel, John XXIII’s original intention for Vatican II, CWR

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What limits the force of evil, the power, in brief, which overcomes it - this is how he (Pope St. John Paul II) says it - is God's suffering, the suffering of the Son of God on the Cross: "The suffering of the Crucified God is not just one form of suffering alongside others.... In sacrificing himself for us all, Christ gave a new meaning to suffering, opening up a new dimension, a new order:  the order of love.... The passion of Christ on the Cross gave a radically new meaning to suffering, transforming it from within... . It is this suffering which burns and consumes evil with the flame of love... . All human suffering, all pain, all infirmity contains within itself a promise of salvation;... evil is present in the world partly so as to awaken our love, our self-gift in generous and disinterested service to those visited by suffering... . Christ has redeemed the world: "By his wounds we are healed' (Is 53: 5)" (p. 189, ff.). - Pope Benedict XVI, Thursday, 22 December 2005

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As the diocesan phase of the Synod on Synodality closed, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops collated the data by region. Many commentators have observed that the less than 1 percent response rate to the survey has no statistical value. Having administered schools, parishes and other institutions for four decades, I too am leery of such results because processes like this all too often only attract the cranks and malcontents.

But desirous of doing penance for my sins, I actually read through the fifteen regional reports; barely a handful had the ring of normalcy to them. What really struck me, however, was that only nine of the fifteen even mentioned Catholic schools – and those mentions were little more than a passing wave. - Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas

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(J)ust because a moment calls for reinvention doesn’t mean that a specific set of reinventions will succeed, and we now have decades of data to justify a second encapsulating statement: The council was a failure.

This isn’t a truculent or reactionary analysis. The Second Vatican Council failed on the terms its own supporters set. It was supposed to make the church more dynamic, more attractive to modern people, more evangelistic, less closed off and stale and self-referential. It did none of these things. The church declined everywhere in the developed world after Vatican II, under conservative and liberal popes alike — but the decline was swiftest where the council’s influence was strongest.

The new liturgy was supposed to make the faithful more engaged with the Mass; instead, the faithful began sleeping in on Sunday and giving up Catholicism for Lent. The church lost much of Europe to secularism and much of Latin America to Pentecostalism — very different contexts and challengers, yet strikingly similar results.

And if anything post-1960s Catholicism became more inward-looking than before, more consumed with its endless right-versus-left battles, and to the extent it engaged with the secular world it was in paltry imitation — via middling guitar music, or political theories that were just dressed up versions of left-wing or right-wing partisanship, or ugly modern churches that were outdated 10 years after they were built and empty soon thereafter.

There is no clever rationalization, no intellectual schematic, no sententious Vatican propaganda — a typical recent document references “the life-giving sustenance provided by the council,” as though it were the eucharist itself — that can evade this cold reality.

But neither can anyone evade the third reality: The council cannot be undone.

By this I don’t mean that the Mass can never return to Latin, nor that various manifestations of post-conciliar Catholicism are inevitable and eternal, nor that cardinals in the 23rd century will still be issuing Soviet-style praise for the council and its works.

I just mean that there is no simple path back. Not back to the style of papal authority that both John Paul II and Francis have tried to exercise — the former to restore tradition, the latter to suppress it — only to find themselves frustrated by the ungovernability of the modern church. Not to the kind of thick inherited Catholic cultures that still existed down to the middle of the 20th century, and whose subsequent unraveling, while inevitable to some extent, was clearly accelerated by the church’s own internal iconoclasm. Not to the moral and doctrinal synthesis, stamped with the promise of infallibility and consistency, that the church’s conservatives have spent the last two generations insisting still exists, but that in the Francis era has proved so unstable that those same conservatives have ended up feuding with the pope himself.

The work of the French historian Guillaume Cuchet, who has studied Vatican II’s impact on his once deeply Catholic nation, suggests that it was the scale and speed of the council’s reforms, as much as any particular substance, that shattered Catholic loyalty and hastened the church’s decline. Even if the council’s changes did not officially alter doctrine, to rewrite and renovate so many prayers and practices inevitably made ordinary Catholics wonder why an authority that suddenly declared itself to have been misguided across so many different fronts could still be trusted to speak on behalf of Jesus Christ himself.

After such a shock, what kind of synthesis or restoration is possible? Today all Catholics find themselves living with this question, because every one of the church’s factions is in tension with some version of church authority. - Ross Douthat, NYT (paywall)