Douthats’ criticism of the Pope’s restriction of the Latin Mass is fascinating; It is also ahistoric and it has been used before

[ad_1]

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, fellow Catholic Ross Douthat criticized one of Pope Francis’ most important decisions: order.

Douthat is the most critical American public intellectual of Francis’ pontificate, but he is certainly not the only one to criticize the new restrictions. Yet Douthats’ argument deserves an answer because it reveals a particular cultural myopia unique to American Catholic conservatism.

Douthat argues that Catholicism has become ungovernable due to the swing of the pendulum between popes of markedly different political convictions since Vatican II. Douthat offers an interesting comparison between modern political history in the Western Hemisphere and the last sixty years of the Catholic Church. He redefined the modern papacy as the political leadership after the end of the Ancien Régime: John Paul II as Napoleon, Benedict XVI as the Restoration and Francis as the 1848 revolution of the Catholic Church. It’s a fascinating narrative, which also happens to be deeply inadequate, false, and historically unfounded, in at least two ways.

The first is the interpretation of the changes from Vatican II to the post-Vatican II period. Douthat does not declare the deep roots and the consequences of his way of representing contemporary post-Vatican II Catholicism. Douthat’s key hypothesis, stated at the very beginning of the article, is that the Church since the 1960s has been reliving the experience of France after 1789, with the arc of revolution and counter-revolution embodied in each pope. successive. This kind of comparison is very telling, because it takes up almost verbatim the interpretation of Vatican II by Marcel Lefebvre.

Lefebvre was a French archbishop who had served in colonial West Africa. During Vatican II, he was one of the leaders of a minority deeply opposed to reform. After Vatican II, he founded a schismatic group, the Society of Saint Pius X (sometimes called FSSPX). His group’s illegal ordination of bishops earned him excommunication in 1988, and even today the Society of Saint Pius X is the most relevant anti-Vatican II group.

In his Open Letter to Confused Catholics (1986), Lefebvre describes a chain of events from the Enlightenment to Vatican II: The parallel I have drawn between the crisis of the Church and the French Revolution is not simply metaphorical. The influence of the eighteenth century philosophers, and the upheaval they produced in the world, has continued to the present day. Those who injected this poison admit it themselves.

In the 21st century, American Catholicism replaced French Catholicism as the focus of theological traditionalism. It is therefore perfectly logical that Douthat model his interpretation of the Catholic Church on the history of France, from the Revolution of 1789 to Napoleon and so on. But this is not the only parallel between the interpretation of Lefebvre and Douthats of Vatican II and the liturgical reform recently championed by Pope Francis.

The rejection of the new liturgy and the defense of the Mass of all times against the Mass of our time is the most well-known point of dissent between Lefebvre and his group and the supporters of Vatican II. Lefebvre took seriously the strong relationship between liturgical constitutions, ie. the regulations concerning the Latin Mass and Vatican II as a whole, considering it as the first irrevocable step towards the full implementation of the reforms of Vatican II. But liturgical reform was only one element in Lefebvres, a much larger challenge to the theology of Vatican II.

The exact same can be said about Douthat and that kind of neo-traditional Catholic culture in America. The rejection of the liturgical reform of Vatican II is a means if not the means of rejecting the reforms of Vatican II on a wide range of understanding of tradition and including the rejection of ecumenism, religious freedom (also for non- Catholics and non-Christians) and interreligious dialogue.

The second problem with Douthats’ narrative is that he tries to compress the complex reality of the Catholic Church into a pre-established white, US-centric, and politically conservative narrative. Douthat writes:

In the divisions of the church, the pressure towards the traditionalist and progressive extremes, both the Latin Massgoers and the German Protestants recognize the fact of the Catholic decline. Both believe that the sight of the other would shatter the church in order to save it. The two have very different weaknesses and strengths. The result of their struggle is, as good Catholics know, somehow predestined.

Doubt may be right about the conflicting accounts of the fact of American Catholic decline. This Catholic world is in grave decline, despite the pathetic efforts of the Restorationists to pretend they were still in the 1950s, and despite the wishful thinking of the old-guard American Catholic liberals who have yet to understand why their children and students do not share their concern for the church. .

But reducing the dialectic of cultural and theological forces in contemporary Catholicism to Latin masseurs and German Protestants is a caricature that was not true even in the days of Vatican II. A conservative thinker like Douthat should know that the movement that prepared the theology of liturgical reform at Vatican II in the 1920s and 1930s had clear characteristics of conservative, anti-liberal, and even nationalist Catholicism, especially in Germany. The movement which led to the reform of the Mass at Vatican II proceeds from a rediscovery of the Church Fathers of the first centuries, but also from an anti-modern Catholic theology (for example Romano Guardini, one of the most important thinkers of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, alias Pope Francis). Who could have predicted that genuinely conservative liturgical ideas could have sparked the anti-Baroque, minimalist liturgical style that finally took hold in the 1970s in many places?

But leaving aside these historical-theological minutiae for a moment, Douthat shockingly overlooks the most massive development of Catholicism today; that is, its globalization. The long game for the future of Catholicism is not in the hands of the Latin Massgoers and German Protestants, but of the Catholics of Latin America, Asia and especially Africa. But you should also know that the globalization of Catholicism is also happening in the West: American Catholicism is no longer dominated by the concerns of white Catholics, and the same will soon have to be said of European Catholicism.

These are massive historical forces that no pope, not even some sort of Napoleonic papecan, can stop. This is a development that greatly complicates some account of the liberal interpretation of Vatican II as naturally shaping the future of the Church. But it should also say something to the vengeful sentiment against Vatican II which has recently found a new source of ammunition in right-wing American politics.

[ad_2]