The State of the Church

So an interesting spate of news in the past week on the shifts in the Church. From darkest America, we get this:

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, which might be called the golden age of Catholic dissidence, theologians who took positions challenging traditional church teachings—ranging from the authority of the pope to bans on birth control, premarital sex, and women's ordination—dominated Catholic intellectual life in America and Europe. They seemed to represent a tide that would overwhelm the old restrictions and their hidebound adherents.

Now, 45 years after Vatican II concluded in 1965, most of those bright lights of dissident Catholicism—from the theologian Hans Küng of the University of Tübingen to Charles Curran, the priest dismissed from the Catholic University of America's theology faculty in 1987 for his advocacy of contraception and acceptance of homosexual relationships—seem dimmed with advanced age, if not extinguished. They have left no coherent second generation of dissident Catholic intellectuals to follow them...

The piece concludes with an unwontedly complete dismissal of what Allen calls "conservative Catholicism."

Not that conservative Catholicism is in any better straits; it's a vibrant but niche branch of the religion, and its leading intellectuals—Robert George, Mary Ann Glendon—aren't theologians. But it is fair to note that when Prof. Daly died, she left behind no young Mary Dalys to continue waging her quixotic war against the faith that shaped her, whether she liked it or not.

Since she seems to intend "conservative Catholic" to include anyone and everyone on the opposite side of the fence from the dissenters listed in the article, she must contend with the massive forces in American Catholic culture known as EWTN, Ignatius Press (currently the main English-language source for many of the works of Pope Benedict), Scott and Kimberly Hahn, George Weigel (who deserves great credit for his biography of John Paul II among other fine works and less for his odd reaction to Caritas in Veritate), the Knights of Columbus (and especially their ever-more-published leader Carl Anderson), Catholic Answers, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and oceans and buckets more, many affiliated with the various people or groups already mentioned, a vast and growing tide of people who really are changing the face of American Catholicism. Indeed, they already have--there are a multitude of converts to the faith who can be traced back to the people and organizations listed. But Allen's article is interesting nonetheless for what it points out: the dissenting generation is beginning to die/retire/both. We are entering into new territory. The people bothering to attend church, work for the Church, enter the seminary, join religious life, or in fact be religious on an ongoing, committed basis, are people who believe what the Church teaches. There are a lot of cultural Catholics out there, true. But the ones who are shaping the current direction of the Church are people who follow the Pope. Why? There's nothing to hold the commitment of young dissenters. If push comes to shove, the people who are in it for the social justice but don't really believe the faith will quickly realize there's tons of places to do social justice work outside the Church where they can believe whatever they want, live however they want, and get the same yearly service opportunities as they could at the best Catholic colleges. If the dissenters are right, there's nothing to see here. The Church will quietly die and go away. If they are wrong, the Church will never go away, no matter how many people leave it. From across the pond, Damien Thompson on the liturgical wars over the English language translation of the Novus Ordo Mass:

Elderly liberals in the United States, horrified by the return of solemnity to Catholic worship, are mounting a campaign against the new English translation of the Mass, entitled What If We Just Said Wait. The campaign and petition have been endorsed by the supersmug National Catholic Reporter, which really tells you all you need to know. Here’s my suggestion. What If We Just Said Get Stuffed, You Finger-Wagging Liberals Who Wreck The Mass Every Sunday By Boring The Pants Off Us With Your Politicised Bidding Prayers, Dreary Folk Antiphons And Other Self-Aggrandising Stunts. Or, if you’d like to express yourself more temperately, sign this petition, entitled: “We’ve Waited Long Enough”.

While Thompson is about as diplomatic as a two-by-four to the forehead, he is a fair representative of a certain body of Catholic thought. And then there's people like me, who watch all this and wonder--why was it great to change the Mass in the 60s and 70s, and unthinkable for it to change today? If the earlier liturgical changes could go through at the behest of a Pope and his liturgical consilium, what's wrong with another Pope doing the same? But then they'll say, it's not the fact that they're changing it, it's the nature of the changes... To which the response will come: well, now that you mention it, these aren't actually changes to the Mass. Not the way the 60s and 70s stuff actually changed the Mass. No, these are alterations of the English translation of the Mass, since the English translation apparently was not very accurate. And the ceremony by which God comes to earth ought to be accurate. Will it be clunky? The language of the Mass has always struck me as clunky. We use words and phrases in ways that do not ever appear outside the Church. Will everybody understand it? I can vouch for the fact that a lot of Catholics have no idea of what's going on at Mass or why we do what we do as it is. A more accurate translation will not change that one bit. America magazine has an excellent defense of the new translation. Once again, on the American front, Evangelical revert to Catholicism Francis Beckwith blogs that

Norman Geisler's co-author of Is Rome the True Church? (Crossway Books, 2008), Joshua Betancourt, has converted to Catholicism!

They just keep coming...thank God! And on the continental front, John Allen reports:

...the liberal bloc in the European church had long been led by three towering cardinals: Carlo Maria Martini of Milan, Basil Hume of Westminster(...), and Godfried Danneels of Brussels.

More than ten years later, Hume is gone and Martini is retired, and in a matter of days it seems likely the third member of the trio will also be out of job. Rumors in Belgium suggest that sometime soon, Pope Benedict XVI intends to appoint Bishop André-Mutien Léonard of Namur to succeed Danneels in Brussels.

If so, the changing of the guard at the senior levels of the European church will be virtually complete.

By Catholic standards, the facelift has been remarkably swift. In Milan, Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi followed Martini in 2002; in Westminster, Archbishop Vincent Nichols took the reins from Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor last April, who had succeeded Hume in February 2000. Now it seems that Léonard, 69, is poised to arrive in Brussels. Sources in Belgium this morning said the announcement is expected soon.

This follows on the news that the episcopal face of the Church in Canada has been rather rapidly changed, the remarkable efforts of the USCCB to rally opposition to a health care bill which would cause the state to cover abortions, the raised voices of a plethora of bishops in response to Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden during the recent presidential election, and much more. Methinks the first phase of the post-conciliar Church is on its way out. We are having done with the hermeneutic of discontinuity decisively. The age of dissent is drawing to a contentious close. The next phase will be marked by the shift in the demographics of the Church, the issues facing Europe and Islam, the hidden Church of the Asian persecutions, the unsteady future of America as a nation, and the anticipation of whatever the Spirit and the Bride may bring in the next few decades.