The Spirit of Vatican II

Professor Colleen McDannell, who teaches History and Religious Studies at the University of Utah,  thinks that all of the changes in the Church since the Second Vatican Council have been good.  She implies that she liked guitar masses, liked the Novus Ordo Mass, and she definitely likes an increased role for women in the leadership of the Church.  She implies that she is in favor of women’s ordination and even more liberalization.  People like this seem to not have a real appreciation of what we have in the Catholic Church and want to make it a carbon copy of the Episcopal Church.  Seeing as how there are even more empty pews in Episcopal Churches than we have now in the Catholic Church, I don’t really understand why.

Having said that, Professor McDannell's book, The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America (Basic Books, 2011), is excellent.  In many ways, this book is the exact opposite of Russell Shaw’s American Church which pretty much viewed the changes in the Church as a disaster.   McDannell loves “Good Pope John,” dislikes Paul VI and really dislikes Humanae Vitae.  She also dislikes the efforts of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to “reform the reform.”

However, the book is well written and enjoyable. McDannell uses her own family as a case study of what life was like for the people in the pews before and after the changes in the Church which came about as a result of the Council.  The only place the book dragged and became boring wasi in the middle chapter describing the Council documents.  But mostly it weaves what was going on in the Church at large with what was going on in the parishes attended by her family.

Although the Bad Catholic doesn’t like the “Spirit of Vatican II” as much as Dr..McDannell does, The Spirit of Vatican II is recommended reading.

Briefly Noted: LITERARY CONVERTS

Joseph Pearce's Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (Ignatius Press: 2000), is one of those books which I intended to read but has wound up sitting around on the shelf unread for several years. During a brief vacation to the beach a couple of weeks ago, I finally sat down and read it.

My general reaction is that in comparison with the literary intellectuals of the early and mid twentieth century, we live in a world populated by intellectual pygmies.  Like I previously noted with respect to Pearce's book Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, all the usual suspects are here: Oscar Wilde and his death bed conversion, G.K. Chesterton, Robert Hugh Benson, Eric Gill, Siegfried Sassoon, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Roy Campbell, Malcolm Muggeridge and others. Pearce does not confine his book to converts to the Roman Catholic Church however, and also includes those atheists or agnostics who became High Church Anglicans like T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers.

The intellectual level of these folks was so high that I wonder if there is anybody today of this stature. It seems that although we live in "the information age" we are really dumber than ever. Some of it was the product of the early twentieth century education that these folks received in the British "public schools" (which are really what Americans would call exclusive private schools).   Back then students received instruction in Greek and Latin and read the classics in the original languages. This education laid the foundation for lives of intellectual inquiry.  These people did things which astound us today.  C.S. Lewis corresponded for years with a monk in Italy in Latin which was their only shared language. Mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers spent the last fifteen years of her life studying Dante and translating The Divine Comedy into English. Monsignor Ronald Knox translated the entire Latin Vulgate Bible into English.

Almost all of the literary converts who survived into the nineteen sixties and seventies were appalled at the changes in the Church following the Second Vatican Council. They were especially upset at what they felt was the banal translation of the sacred liturgy from Latin into the vernacular. Many, like Evelyn Waugh, also prophesied that the watering down of the liturgy would lead inexorably to the decay of the faith and moral life of the faithful. There are many who believe that this was a correct assessment.

Literary Converts is a great read and a great intellectual tour de force. The breadth and depth of Professor Pearce's knowledge of twentieth century literature and the history of the Church is truly impressive. Highly recommended.

Professor Joseph Pearce

Allen Tate and the Catholic Revival

At one time, the poet, critic, historian, and novelist Allen Tate (1899 - 1979) was a well known name in academic circles. With the advent of “post-modernism” and “deconstruction” as a technique of literary criticism, Tate has faded into oblivion as just another “dead white man.” A member of the so-called “Fugitive Poets” and “Southern Agrarians” at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s, Tate was critical of a modern world which was showing signs of abandoning belief in God and all tradition. Attracted to the Catholic Church as early as the 1920s, Tate finally converted to Catholicism in 1950, having been sponsored by the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and his wife Raissa.

Allen Tate and the Catholic Revival: Trace of the Fugitive Gods (Paulist Press: 1996) was the Ph.D dissertation of Professor Peter A. Huff who currently teaches Religious Studies at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. Huff’s thesis is that Tate and other intellectuals were attracted to the Catholic Church by their rejection of the values of the modern world and modernism.  However, by the time Tate joined the Church in the 1950s, the Church was on its way to making peace with the modern world and rejecting its earlier uncompromising stand.

Allen Tate (1899 - 1979)

As early as the 1929 Tate wrote a letter to a friend that he was feeling drawn to the Catholic Church.

"Feeling an attraction to the Catholic Church in the Roman Jubilee year 1929 meant appreciating a religious tradition unapologetically dogmatic and avowedly illiberal. The Lateran Treaty of that year, for instance, rejected the notion of the exclusively spiritual nature of papal authority and reaffirmed the pope’s claim to temporal power over the Vatican territory. Only recently free from association with Action Francaise, the monarchist movement led by French traditionalist crusader Charles Maurras, the church on the eve of the Great Depression also found itself newly entangled with Opus Dei, the controversial movement of Spanish origin promoting aggressive lay involvement in right-wing political ventures. It was a church which proscribed involvement in the fledgling ecumenical movement, obliged its clergy to forswear modernist thoughts, denounced the liberal “hypothesis” of church-state separation, prohibited the use of artificial birth-control methods among its laity, legislated precise norms of proper dress for female communicants, and censored new motion pictures along with an already long Index of Forbidden Books."

Pope Pius IX

"In the United States, rudely reminded of its tenuous status by presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith’s political defeat, the church remained discredited in intellectual quarters by Pius IX’s earlier Syllabus of Errors and Leo XIII’s 1899 condemnation of “Americanism,” controversial papal pronouncements that seemed to reinforce Rome’s age-old reputation for authoritarianism and obscurantism. The perception of American Catholic opposition to the republican Popular Front battling General Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War a few years later only served to validate that conclusion for non-Catholic American progressives. Drawing from a venerable tradition of anti-Catholic polemic reaching back to the eschatological musings of seventeenth-century Puritan divines, critics now ranked “Romanism” in the same category as the fundamentalist rabble that put Dayton, Tennessee on the cultural map. In the heyday of American progressivism, no better example of hidebound resistance to modern civilization could be found than the Roman Catholic Church.”

Pope Leo XIII

The “Catholic Literary Revival” had begun in England in the nineteenth century with the work of John Henry Newman. It had continued in the twentieth century with the work of authors like G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. In France, the Catholic Revival had produced thinkers like the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain and novelists like Francois Mauriac and George Bernanos. In the mid-twentieth century, the Catholic Revival finally reached America where a number of intellectuals became notable converts:

“Born between 1890 and the close of the First World War, two generations of American writers felt deeply the attraction of the Catholic faith. They found their spiritual home in the church, believing entrance into the Catholic community to be an integral part of their literary careers. Including Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, Clare Boothe Luce, Robert Lowell, Tennessee Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Walker Percy, the American literary converts were drawn to Catholicism for intellectual and aesthetic reasons, motives mixing undefined spiritual aspirations with romantic countercultural protests.” 

Jacques Maritain and Thomas Merton

Many of these converts had rejected the values of the modern world. They rejected the notion that life was about the mere acquisition of material wealth and prosperity and yearned for spiritual completion. In the ancient liturgy of the Catholic Church they found beauty which appealed to their artistic tastes as well as a weighty theology and world view which rejected the modern world in favor of higher values.

“Many of the converts, enticed by the exotic features of Catholic doctrine or the high drama of Roman liturgy and devotion, shared the imaginative “nostalgia for Catholic order” that Harold Bloom has found in Hemingway’s literary consciousness.”

“For all of the converts of the Catholic Revival, the church represented the realm of mystery sadly absent from modern experience. More than just a religion, Catholicism was for them, as Anne Roche Muggeridge has described it, “a country of the heart and of the mind.” Disgusted by the banal dimensions of what Merton called a “society of salesmen,” they found an oasis of beauty in the divine drama of the church’s worship. Critical of the reductionism of modern thought and the shallowness of liberal Protestantism, they found the integrity of Neo-Thomism and classical Christian orthodoxy intellectually stimulation. Witnessing the contemporary menace of totalitarian politics, they sought the remedy to secular society’s ills in the sacred tradition of the church. Even the pre-conciliar church’s requirement of personal sacrifice appeared as an attractive component of Catholic life. Though the converts were often drawn to the faith precisely because of orthodox Catholicism’s antimodernist stance, they nevertheless expressed impatience with the Catholic ghetto’s naive rejection of modern art and literature. What the American literary converts advocated was aggressive interaction with the modern world, not retreat into separatist folkways. They sought a religious tradition that would directly address the authoritative wisdom of the past to the fragmented world of the present.

Intellectual converts like Tate, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day had “read themselves into the Church.” Huff notes that the conversion of intellectuals also stimulated an intellectual Renaissance among cradle Catholics:

"As a rule, the American literary converts, like their European counterparts, followed an intellectual path into the faith. Ever since Augustine heard the child in the garden singing, “Tolle lege, tolle lege,” people have been reading their way into the Catholic Church. But Thomas Merton’s conversion, triggered by a chance encounter with Gilson’s The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy in a Fifth Avenue bookstore, became nearly paradigmatic of the intellectual American’s conversion before and after his time. Others, born into the church, experienced an analogous rebirth of faith and religious identity after immersing themselves in the literature of the Revival.”

Why did all of these intellectuals, most of whom were self-proclaimed atheists or agnostics but who came from predominately Protestant backgrounds, become Catholic? The Catholic Church was generally considered to be backwards and stagnant. It has been said that intellectual converts of the 1930s who left Communism for Catholicism merely exchanged one authoritarian world view for another. This was an age in which the Church still set forth The Index of Forbidden Books and demanded unconditional assent by the faithful to all areas of teaching and dogma. The Church seemed an unlikely venue for all of these artists and intellectuals. Why did these people become Catholic rather than, say, Episcopalian?

“Rejecting the strategy of liberal Protestantism designed to attract Christianity’s “cultured despisers” by minimizing claims to infallible truth and reliance upon a supernatural world view, the intellectual converts to Catholicism overcame long-standing cultural barriers to accept the Catholic religion precisely because of its claim to possess a body of supernaturally revealed dogma. They were not inspired by a demythologized Christianity, nor were they convinced of the apologetic potential of the modernist project. As Ronald Knox put it, “the latitudinarian appeal, as a matter of experience, does not attract.” Rather, like Chesterton, the Revival converts found the church’s insistence upon doctrinal accuracy curiously “romantic.” Regularly, they described submission of the intellect to the mind of the church as an act of “mental emancipation.” Thomas Merton, for instance, thought it a liberating thing “to breathe the clean atmosphere of orthodox tradition.” Seeing themselves as spiritual heirs to Newman’s opposition to nineteenth-century liberalism, the intellectuals of the twentieth century Catholic Revival were stimulated, not stifled, by the church’s critique of modernity.”

Tate had a romantic admiration for the Middle Ages as a time in which Western Europe was bound together by a common Christian culture:

“Though he repeatedly denied that his admiration for the Middle Ages entailed reversion to an ideal past, he shared the Catholic Revival’s affection for the period and used it as the reference point for discussion of a restored Christian civilization. The organic unity of the culture, the agrarian pattern of its economy, and the common mythic structure shaping its vision were stock features of the Revival’s interpretation of the Middle Ages, but they appealed to the same instincts in Tate that drove him to reject much of what he found mediocre and destabilizing in modern culture. For most of his career, Dante figured as the icon of the fully developed artist in Christian society, and the medieval university served as his model for the understanding of genuine religious humanism.”

Tate predicted cultural disaster if the West abandoned its Christian heritage:

“. . . he predicted the rise of “a complete Gnostic society,” should the West abandon its fundamentally religious insights into the human condition. . . . Along with Maritain and Dawson, Tate maintained that any hope for an authentically democratic future in national or international affairs necessitated the acceptance of a genuinely Christian humanism. Like Chesterton, who identified the dogma of the incarnate Logos as the idea ‘central in our civilization,” he placed the Christological mystery at the heart of his analysis of culture. Without that controlling idea, he said, every quest for the perfect society yields only another “perishable god” for the scrap heap of the world’s worthless idols: “I have come to the view that no society is worth ‘saving’ as such: what we must save is the truth of God and Man, and the right society follows.”

Tate and his first wife, the Catholic convert and author Caroline Gordon, to whom he was married and divorced twice.

Throughout his life Tate struggled with his own personal demons including alcoholism and divorce. Due to his multiple divorces and remarriages, Tate became estranged from the Church he loved. (Tate was married and divorced twice to the novelist Caroline Gordon, also a Catholic convert). However, during his last marriage to former nun Helen Heinz, Tate was able to be restored to full communion before his death.

Huff details how the changes to the Church after the Second Vatican Council distressed Tate who thought that the Church had gone too far in compromising with the modern world. Tate was particularly critical of modern theology, like that of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and was opposed to the Ecumenical movement.

“ . . . Tate shared Maritain’s misgivings regarding the apparent trajectory of postconciliar Catholicism. The “neo-modernist” theological fads of the age concerned him and irritated him and confirmed his suspicions of an emerging Catholic gnosticism. Especially exasperated by the cult of popularity surrounding Teilhard (described by an exasperated Gilson as “the most Christian of the gnostics”), Tate once blasted a lay enthusiast of the Jesuit mystic, telling him in no uncertain terms to “shut up about Chardin.” At the same time, he chafed under the liturgical experimentation of the period and worried about the destructive effort of ecumenical ferment on Catholic devotion. As one who “got into the Church only through the Virgin,” he was distressed by the tendency of the Vatican Council to “play down” Marian devotion in obvious overtures of friendship toward separated Protestant brethren. “If the Ecumenical movement is merely a levelling process towards 20th century rationalism,” he prophesied during the second session of the Council, “it will fail.”

“Attempting to describe the anxieties of that age of Catholic transition, James Fisher has recently produced a provocative portrait of convert Dorothy Day making her way into the old-fashioned Catholic subculture of personal piety and sacrificial obedience, precisely at the moment when her birthright Catholic followers, seeking to rid themselves of alien citizenship, were fleeing from the immigrant ghetto into the pluralism of America’s secular city. In a sense, Allen Tate was engaged in a similarly ill-timed pilgrimage. Walker Percy, fellow apologist for the forlorn values of the Catholic Revival, saw the plight of the modern Catholic writer as that of “a man who has found a treasure hidden in the attic of an old house, but (who) is writing for people who have moved out to the suburbs and who are bloody sick of the old house and everything in it.” To his dismay, Tate discovered the attic’s treasures just as the house was going on the market. In his career, he witnessed not only the disappearance of the South’s regional tradition in the wake of America’s unrestrained march toward standardization but also the dissolution of what he perceived to be the best of the Catholic tradition as well. To borrow a phrase from historian Mark Noll, Tate - as southerner and Catholic - joined the ranks of the twentieth century’s “alienated losers twice over.”

Allen Tate and the Catholic Revival is out of print but is still worth a look for those, like this Bad Catholic, who are interested in seeing a new Catholic Revival.

What Happened to the Music?

Along the same lines as the question "What happened to Church Architecture?" is the question "What happened to Church Music?" in the decades following the Second Vatican Council. Here's a review of a new book on the subject.

David Lodge's How Far Can You Go?

For my recreational reading this Easter season, I took up David Lodge's tour de force satirical novel How Far Can You Go?

Lodge, born in 1935, is Emeritus Professor of English Liturature at the University of Birmingham, England, where he taught from 1960 until his retirement in 1987. Lodge is the author of numerous novels. Lodge was reared as a Catholic and many of his novels deal with Catholic characters. Lodge has described himself as an "agnostic Catholic."

How Far Can You Go?, first published in 1980, tracks the lives of a group of young English Catholics from the early 1950s until the mid 1970s. The novel deals with the changes in the Church and society at large, especially with regard to sexual morality. The biggest problems of the characters deal with sex. In fact, you might say that Lodge's characters are obsessed with sex, just like contemporary Western society. The novel has a lot of graphic descriptions of sex which border on the pornographic. However, How Far Can You Go? is also a very, very funny book.

The title, How Far Can You Go?, has a double meaning. It has the obvious sexual connotation, but it also refers to how far can you go in throwing out theological and moral teachings and still claim to be Catholic or Christian. One of the group of young people, Miles, becomes a Cambridge Don and "comes out" as a homosexual. Another, Ruth, becomes a nun, has a crisis of faith, but then becomes involved with the "Charismatic Renewal." The rest of the group of 10 characters or so marry and have children. A large part of the story surrounds the Church's position on birth control.

Although all of Lodge's married characters eventually decide to ignore the teachings of the Church and use birth control, part of Lodge's message in the novel is that the abandonment of sexual morality by the laity is the primary cause of the unraveling of morals across the board. This is the point which Professor Ralph McInerny makes in his excellent book What Went Wrong With Vatican II? which I read before starting How Far Can You Go? As soon as the faithful feel that they can with impunity pick and choose which doctrines they believe and which ones they don't believe, there is no reason to hold to any of them.

The fault for this lies at the feet of theologians, clergy and religious who decided that they knew better than Pope Paul VI did what sexual morality should be. In the novel, Father Austin Brierly starts off in the early fifties as a dedicated young priest, one who is over scrupulous and is shocked by a young women hitching up her skirt and bearing her leg. By the late sixties, after Father Brierly has been sent to study modern Biblical criticism, he is disciplined by his bishop for publicly preaching against the Church's teaching on birth control. Father Brierly ultimately leaves the priesthood and marries a young woman who he counseled after she had an affair with a married man.

Here's one of my favorite passages:

At some point in the nineteen-sixties, Hell disappeared. No one could say for certain when this happened. First it was there, then it wasn't. Different people became aware of the disappearance of Hell at different times. Some realized that they had been living for years as though Hell did not exist, without having consciously registered its disapperance. Others realized that they had been behaving, out of habit, as though Hell were still there, though in fact they had ceased to believe in its existence long ago. By Hell we mean, of course, the traditional Hell of Roman Catholics, a place where you would burn for all eternity if you were unlucky enough to die in a state of mortal sin.

On the whole, the disapperance of Hell was a great relief, though it brought new problems.

Throughout the book, there is a lot of poking fun at novel liturgical practices. The mass which is described at the end of the book with dancing nuns and a South American priest-liberation theologian dressed like Che Guevara, reminded me of the recent controversy over the closing mass at the religious education conference in Los Angeles.

Lodge ends his novel on this interesting note:

While I was writing this last chapter, Pope Paul VI died and Pope John Paul I was elected. Before I could type it up, Pope John Paul I had died and been succeeded by John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope for four hundred and fifty years: a Pole, a poet, a philosopher, a linguist, an athlete, a man of destiny, dramatically chosen, instantly popular - but theologically conservative. A changing Church acclaims a Pope who evidently thinks that change has gone far enough. What will happen now? All bets are void, the future is uncertain, but it will be interesting to watch. Reader, farewell!

I Alone Have Escaped To Tell You

I just finished reading the memoirs of the late Professor Ralph McInerny (1929-2010). From the mid-1950s to his retirement in the 21st century, Professor McInerny taught philosophy at Notre Dame. He also found time to write an incredible number of novels. This book, published in 2006 by the University of Notre Dame Press, is called I ALONE HAVE ESCAPED TO TELL YOU: MY LIFE AND PASTIMES.

The Bad Catholic found this to be a very enjoyable read, as well as a profound one. Professor McInerny surveyed the highlights of his life, which include the death of his first born child at age three to the writing of the highly popular Father Dowling mysteries.

Professor McInerny also spoke at great length about the Church and Catholic education and the poor state that both have fallen into. He talks about his early years in the junior and senior seminaries and his higher education after he left the seminary. Even going to graduate school in the late 40's and early 50's, McInerny felt that there was much that was wrong with "modern philosophy." McInerny says "To doubt everything is impossible. . . . No wonder philosophy over the last century has seemed to real from one form of self-assertive subjectivity to another, with its last state being skepticism that there is anything beyond our construals to know anyway. Truth along with objectivity goes out the window."

Professor McInerny felt that the Zeitgeist of the 20th century was very destructive and that the smoke of Satan had definitely entered the Church through "the Spirit of Vatican II." In his chapter on his various extended stays in Europe, McInerny says this: "Of course Europe has changed since our first visit, and not for the better. It is not simply that lovely national currencies have given way to the euro. There is something post-Christian about the continent, England seems neo-pagan to me, and even holy Ireland is taking on the worst traits of modernity. Cardinal Schonborn has said that our cathedrals have become museums and our museums have become churches. That does not begin to capture the change that has occurred."

Professor McInerny attacks the idea that in order to be a first class university, that a school must be totally secular and abandon its religious affiliations in the classroom. "I have portrayed the conflict as one between believer and nonbeliever . . . In Catholic departments of philosophy, one now has tenured colleagues whose training disposes them to take seriously positions which, however implicitly, are in conflict with the faith. And of course, students in our colleges and universities are likely to be taught by professors, whose views, if true, would undermine the student's faith. That is why those of us who have spent long careers in traditional Catholic institutions are involved in a long twilight struggle within the walls. Positions dubiously compatible with the faith are maintained and taught all around us. A young colleague of mine announced in a departmental meeting that, since he regarded Catholicism as false, he had a moral obligation to disabuse his students of their faith. That is where we have come." This is underscored by the recent commencement address controversy at Notre Dame. Professor McInerny loved Notre Dame passionately and was deeply saddened by the forces of secularism and evil at Our Lady's University.

In discussing the decline of the Church, Professor McInerny says that the post-conciliar problem was primarily Catholic intellectuals and left-leaning bishops who fostered changes on the Church which were not intended by the Council. The hot button issue was sexual ethics. According to McInerny, this one issue is the primary fire bringing Pope Paul's "smoke of Satan" into the windows of the Church. Professor McInerny opines that the open rebellion against the teachings of the Church in this one area has opened the door and led to the collapse of moral theology.

This quote is worth reproducing in full:

". . . many of the priests who are currently costing the Church millions upon millions of dollars in court-ordered payments were already priests before the collapse of moral theology. Their training surely would have enabled them to see that adulterous and homosexual activities were morally wrong. How can one explain this? I will provide an anecdote.

Priests of that age, though not only they, were regularly sent to programs allegedly designed to familiarize them with the brave new post-conciliar world. There was such a program at Notre Dame. A St. Paul priest I had known years before, who had been engaged in dedicated and effective pastoral work, came to Notre Dame to be renewed. We had lunch one day in the University Club. After pleasant reminiscing, it became clear that he wanted to talk about what he was undergoing. He leaned across the table and said to me in a whisper, "They told us to forget everything we had been taught in the seminary." Perhaps the one speaking to those priests was indulging in hyperbole, a little rhetorical excess to gain attention. Perhaps. The effect on my old friend was obvious. He was not, I can say, a fast-ball pitcher in the seminary, but he was a good priest. He had walked in the vocation to which he had been called. Now he was being told to forget everything that had defined his life. How could he not feel vertigo? He finished the course and went home and a few years later left the priesthood, under a cloud of accusations of sexual irregularity."

It is no doubt that Ralph McInerny was a remarkable man and led a very rewarding life as a husband, father, teacher, and author. The chapter in the book on writing fiction and detailing how McInerny broke into the publishing business and came to write mystery novels is worth the price of the book by itself.

Professor McInerny does not close his memoirs on a sour note. "Have I become a Cassandra, in despair of the Church and the modern world? Not at all. With William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize address, I am confident that man will prevail, and as for the Church, the gates of hell will not prevail against her. But one would have to be a mindless Pollyanna not to admit that we live in strange and antinomian times."

I ALONE HAVE ESCAPED TO TELL YOU is highly recommended. I have previously reviewed Professor McInerny's book SOME CATHOLIC WRITERS and his novel THE PRIEST.