For the first time in many years, I am beginning to feel optimistic about the future of Catholic leadership.
Fifty years ago tomorrow (September 29, 1963) the newly-elected Pope Paul VI opened the second session of Vatican Council II by repeating Pope John XXIII’s call for “a second Pentecost” and giving it four priorities: A better understanding of the Catholic Church; Church reforms; Advancing the unity of Christianity; and Dialogue with the world.
This brought a sigh of relief to millions who had held their breath after John died in June 1963, fearing that his vision for the Church’s future might have died with him.
For it was only five years after Paul VI re-opened Vatican II that he issued “Humanae Vitae,” his encyclical reaffirming the most recent official teaching on contraception while rejecting any further revisions. And five years after that, in January 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its infamous “Roe v Wade” decision.
No matter how we view these actions, their combined effect since 1973 has been gravely damaging for American Catholicism. Taken together, they have divided Catholics and caused a generation of American bishops to encourage the public impression that the American hierarchy is composed chiefly of sex-obsessed celibate men, bent on the self-righteous insistence that only they understand human goodness.
During the 40 years since Roe v Wade, in fact, two more things made matters worse. First, Catholics who took issue with the official positions on sex-related questions were increasingly labeled “not good Catholics” or “not real Catholics” or even “not Catholic at all.” Second, the outbreak of the sex-abuse scandal beginning in Boston in 2002 sharpened the image of a hierarchy simultaneously obsessed with sex and incompetent to deal with sex. This undermined their moral authority on virtually all other issues and left them impotent to seed public affairs and policymaking with the wisdom from Catholic tradition.
When progressive Catholics lamented the lost focus on the core of Catholic tradition and invoked the legacy of Vatican II, conservatives derided them for falsifying the Council by citing its “spirit” rather than its “texts,” and claimed Popes John-Paul II and Benedict XVI as champions of a “definitive” or “authoritative” interpretation of Vatican II that promoted “continuity” rather than “rupture.”
The net result of all this polarization has been an official leadership dominated, in the U.S. at least, by three flawed tendencies.
First: Fetishism. Any fetish obsesses over one small part of something rather than the whole (e.g., desiring someone’s big toe rather than their whole body). Too often in recent years, U.S. Catholicism’s official leadership has been obsessed with sex-related “culture war” issues like contraception, gay marriage, sex in the media, and abortion, as if they represent the core of Catholic tradition. Whether intentionally or unwittingly, they have revived the distorted Catholic identity of the pre-Conciliar era, in which Catholics saw their tradition mainly as a moral system, saw morality mainly as a set of rules, and saw rules on sex as the most important ones. In the extreme, this made Catholicism a fetish-religion for the sex-obsessed.
Second: Puritanism. As Catholic numbers declined across America, many conservative Catholics seemed satisfied rather than alarmed. To them, the loss of “cafeteria Catholics” or secularized Catholics simply meant that the Church was purging itself of its impurities. Once everyone contaminated by contemporary values (rather than “traditional” values) drifted away, the Church would be a smaller, purer, more authentic vessel of God’s will.
Third: Proof-texting. There is a long practice of Catholic teachers quoting whatever Bible passages can be located to “prove” their point. This means using Gospel texts out of context and without any historical or literary analysis to gauge the writer’s true message. This clashes directly with modern Biblical scholarship, which has shown that isolating Biblical texts to prove a point often distorts their real meaning and thus violates the Word of God.
Some Catholic leaders have taken the same approach to the documents of Vatican II. They will find passages supporting their view and rip them out of their literary and historical context. Anyone who objects is accused of promoting a mythical, even fictional “spirit” of the Council.
What is lost by such proof-texting is (1) the appreciation of Vatican II as an historical event guided by the Holy Spirit, (2) the recognition that John XXIII proclaimed it to be a rebirth of the Church, (3) the acknowledgement that the Council’s driving themes, named by both John and Paul VI, were mercy and hopeful dialogue with the outside world, and (4) the recognition that the Council texts are imperfect, political documents, often worded to appeal to as broad a base of bishops as possible, and thus often containing contradictory statements.
In short, proof-testing pretends that it is the documents alone, rather than the Council itself, which was divinely inspired. The documents become self-defining, rather than being defined by the actual history of the Council.
Thus proof-texting the Council allows conservative leaders to portray the Council as they wish it had been: as an event that restated rather than transformed Catholic tradition. Often this also allows them to portray John-Paul II and Benedict XVI as historical giants whose groundbreaking work rightly overshadows (or at least defines) the Council.
With all this in mind, it is no mystery why Pope Francis’ interview sparked such rapid and widespread commentary. For in one fell swoop, he took direct aim at all three of these flawed tendencies. The result was a “triple play” against any distortion of Catholic tradition or the legacy of Vatican II.
Let’s see how.
Against Fetishism. Pope Francis clearly rejects the idea that the Church’s mission can be advanced by focusing narrowly on a small piece of Catholic tradition. But he knows that this has happened:
The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.
Specifically, he rejects a strategy that plunges the Church into the “culture wars” by ripping some “traditional values” out of their real traditional context:
We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.
Francis makes it clear that a focus must remain on the core of Catholic tradition, which means keeping our priorities straight:
The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.
The point here is that too much official leadership has conveyed an unbalanced view of Catholicism by stressing moral principles over the whole message of the gospel:
The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing…The message of the Gospel, therefore, is not to be reduced to some aspects that, although relevant, on their own do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ.
The new pope could not be clearer: the fetishism that reduces Catholicism must give way to a focus on “the heart” of our faith.
NEXT: Francis takes aim at Catholic Puritanism and Proof-texting of the Council.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013
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