No member of the Ordo Verbi Soluti—the Order of the Word Unfettered—was invited to participate in the lead up to the Synod on Synodality. In the Parrhesian Fathers, as we are commonly known in our little patch of ecclesiastical periphery, we have taken it on the chin. Life’s too short, after all. Armageddon cannot be far off, metaphorically that is, though it’s a bit of a trip geographically. Luckily you can see it on the internet, though it is called Tel Megiddo now, so as not to scare the horses: Tel Megiddo.
Isn’t technology great?
One mixed blessing of technological progress is the ability to see so much more of history on our screens. Online archives for newspapers and magazines, Facebook history pages, Twitter-X history feeds, and the like allow us to see and hear the past with relative ease. One notable feature is the difference in the Catholic media. Not the obvious differences in doctrinal and ecclesiastical assumptions; I mean the mood.
In the 1950s and early 1960s the mood was one of confidence. The Church was growing, Catholics were increasingly gaining leadership roles in society, and Catholic culture—especially its literary aspect—was buoyant. Contrary to what you might gather from activists today, mid-century there was already a well-established lay-voice choir: Chesterton, Belloc, Carol Robinson, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and the inimitable Frank and Maisie Ward, and Catholic novelists such as Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Grahame Green, Muriel Spark, JF Powers, to name a few. While not wholly uncritical, the prevailing Catholic mood was one of an unabashed profession of Catholic faith which assumed that Catholicism in its undiminished integrity had a rightful and natural place in wider society.
Moreover, the ecclesiastical temper was optimistic. The 1960s, shaped by the global traumas of the 1940s and the remarkable recovery of the 1950s, was one of change, change that was breath-taking in its pace, scope, and ambition. Even those who felt alarm at some of the changes in the air were nevertheless fundamentally open to the inevitability of change, if not always attracted to it. The pace was so dizzying that no one seemed to have much time to think about it. It was groovy, the sun was shining in, the age of Aquarius was dawning. Yet few could see, and fewer articulate it in time, that a world in frenetic flux was shaping the Church, rather than the Church guiding the world along a safer, surer path to the future, and to the End.
Read the Catholic media of today and the mood is strikingly different. The Church is in headlong demographic decline in the West. The pendulum of development has swung so far towards so-called progress that it has slipped over into regress, as the great heresies of the early Church re-emerge in modern, secularly-approved garb. Catholic self-criticism has been debased into Maoist self-accusation which verges on fetishist self-flagellation. There is no Catholic teaching that cannot be publicly impugned with impunity, to be met only with episcopal and papal silence, and even approval. To profess the coherent Catholic moral code is labelled as rigidity, as is any attachment, however discerning and nuanced, to the organic liturgical heritage of Western Catholicism over two millennia. Journals are filled with articles and letters that express complaint, recrimination, denigration, bitterness, and often—to be honest—despair. The last is my category.
Both “progressives” and “conservatives” tend to locate the cause of our modern malaise in Vatican II, surely the worst-timed council in Church history. For progressives, “the Council” was not a finished product, but the merely the catalyst for an ongoing project of root-and-branch change that is given the all too apt label “reform.” Re-forming the Church has become the goal, not renewing it; deconstructing it to reconstruct it according to a secular ideological agenda that has undermined Catholic self-confidence and driven Catholics to a cravenly apologetic attitude towards her most beautiful attributes and truths, even faith itself. Dealing with a few—real enough—faults has become the justification for open-ended, untempered, ungrounded reform. The few among them who still bother to make token reference to “the Council” do so to lament that it has not been implemented, that its alleged programme of permanent change is being stymied, and so the Church is suffering, because it is not keeping up with the times. Conforming to liberal secular society has become the focus of their energy, not evangelisation in the name of Christ, which is now caricatured, even at the highest levels, as proselytism.
For the “conservatives,” “the Council” has barely been implemented at all, but rather hijacked. The more moderate ones try to make the best of what remains after reform, revealing an innocent naïveté in interpreting “the Council” conventionally, by its concrete decrees rather than its novel and nebulous “spirit.” The more radical, who prefer to be called “traditionalists,” blame “the Council,” rejecting most if not all changes made in its name, looking back to the halcyon days before “the Council.” But which days in particular? The 1950s are out, as its liturgy was already infected by change, which though relatively minor in scale were nevertheless shaped by the arch-fiend and liturgical bête-noire, the ironically-named Annibale Bugnini. Indeed, many now look to pre-Pius X days for a “pure” liturgy used by a Church still unscarred by the cancer of Modernism. For them tradition is too often reduced, sometimes unwittingly, to the period between Trent and Pius IX. This ahistorical conservatism is all grist to the progressive moaning-mill.
The essential problem is that both the radical progressive and the radical traditionalist are failing to engage properly with the now, and seek affirmation in what is not.The progressive looks to a Church that has not yet come to be because of the intransigence of those who will not allow the spirit of “the Council” to do its work of building a new, world-friendly, de-capitalised, de-articled “church” under the influence of a similarly de-articled “Spirit.” The traditionalist looks back to a time, often chosen according to personal taste, when the Church was untainted by post-Modernist change, the good old days long before “the Council” was even a twinkle in the papal eye, a Church stolen from them by “the Council.” Neither can live contentedly in the present.
As one of those caught in the ecclesiastical no non-gender-specific person’s land, I am not particularly happy either! My label is hard to define, but most likely many in the muddled middle would find they would share it if I could articulate it. In this middle ground are those who can see that “the Council” was called not for nothing, but to address a slowly emerging crisis in the Church, a crisis beginning to be identified not just by theologians but, more significantly, by pastors. Practice of the faith post-war was high, but proportionally it was falling, especially seen in relation to a fast-growing nominal Catholic population. This was clear by the 1950s to those who were paying attention, but the will to address it was slow in forming, and by the time “the Council” was called and then, three years later, convened it was too late. Inevitably, within the council of the fathers there was little recognition of, let alone ability to cope with, what Benedict XVI termed the “council of the media,” and the few who did recognise it used it skillfully to serve their own ends.
Fundamentally, “the Council” is the problem. For the progressive, invoking it trumps any other source of teaching authority in the Church. In practical terms, for them the Church began in 1962-1965; nothing before it matters unless it can be employed somehow to justify their cause. For the traditionalist conservative, nothing after “the Council” is legitimate unless it suits their taste. Like all caricatures, these of the two ecclesiastical extremes are not wholly fair but expose a truth that is real enough. “The Council” itself is now a caricature, though its shape changes according to the mind of those who employ it. Thus one must speak of “the Council” rather than the council.
We like to blame people these days. If something goes wrong, for whatever reason, someone’s head must roll, someone must resign, someone must be cancelled. Purging another absolves us from having to do anything ourselves. Of course, sometimes there is a legitimate target for blame, at least partial blame. Dare I say it, blame could be laid with the college of bishops. The mitred ones failed to take control of implementing the council they themselves comprised. They failed to make use of the now officially-approved novelty of episcopal collegiality, despite the constant profession of it ever since. Bishops’ conferences have subverted the authority of the individual bishop in his diocese, because the committee is now more marketable than individual authority and responsibility. It also provides better cover. Moreover, collegiality has become truly Orwellian for, even as collegiality is invoked officially, a centralising papacy more than ever dictates what a bishop may do in his own diocese. Collegiality was usually set in relief against the papal curia rather than the pope himself. Indeed, the curia has been tamed, even subverted, and is now barely more than a cipher that offers some administrative utility. (In much the same way, lay involvement in the running of the Church has been degraded into the rise of a burgeoning and self-justifying ecclesiocracy, whose members must be paid market salaries to do work of often questionable value…but I digress.)
However, collegiality was meant to be about the relationship between the papacy itself and the other bishops. Now that individual diocesan bishops have lost what effective independence they ever had by being gathered into a college—the members of which are not really bishops but bishops’ conferences—so the easier it has been for an autocratic papacy to centralise power in itself and exercise more control over the collegially-corralled episcopacy than it ever has before.
The poor bishops. There are exceptions, of course, but not many. Their mitres have become dunces’ caps, their croziers cattle prods. Desperate to keep up with a world and a Church in increasingly rapid flux, they fall ever further behind the times. Shielded from the faithful by diocesan bureaucracies, on which they have made themselves dependent, they have lost touch with what few faithful remain in their churches. Desperate to be relevant in society, they are now barely noticed by society. Is there a sadder, vainer thing than a bishop’s statement on a social or political issue? They have become ecclesiocrats par excellence, not pastors of a flock. They serve institutions rather than the congregation of the faithful, let alone their faith.
Now they are seeing the slow death of episcopal collegiality as it is supplanted by another novelty, universal synodality, open even to those who reject the Catholic faith. How they bend the knee to the very idol that seeks to kill them off! Desperate to keep their jobs, they are fostering that which seeks to get rid of their “job” itself. They could find real relevance again if they would only preach the Gospel rather than peddle the neutered ecclesiastical dialect of corporate-speak. But, as Sir Humphrey Appleby would say, that would be courageous, and courage tends to be detrimental to career security.
If you want to hear the gospel preached, somewhat simplistically at times but with real vigour and verve, and unapologetically, try TikTok. It is astounding the number of young Christians there, and increasingly Catholics among them, who offer an encouraging word from scripture to their followers, Bible in hand, fresh in face and spirit, and without any air of the geeky or freaky, addressing the concerns of their peers which they know first-hand. It is a strange day when I find my faltering faith bolstered more by a youth with his or her raw but earnest faith, than a successor to the apostles, who now offers more sophistry than Christianity. Mind you, no bishop has been here for years…
Time for a cuppa…
Father Enda Matether OVS
Pastor, St Nusquam’s
Black Stump, Woop Woop
