Interview by Christoph Schmidt for the KNA (“Catholic News Agency”).

The author Martin Mosebach is one of the best-known conservative Catholic intellectuals in the German-speaking world. He emphatically greeted the restoration in 2007 by Pope Benedict XVI of the old rite of the mass. The author, who currently is living in Rome under a grant, reveals in an interview with the Catholic News Agency (“KNA”) what he thinks about the new style of Pope Francis.

KNA: Mr. Mosebach, Pope Francis appears to be striving for changes in the structure and in the pastoral practice of the Church. What does a conservative Catholic think in the midst of so much euphoric rhetoric?

Mosebach: Up till now no one can say what Francis really wants precisely. Public opinion tries to insinuate that he has intentions that fit in with the spirit of our age. It is possible that he wants to accomplish great reforms. It is also possible that he is being misjudged, and that he not so very interested in change. The people cheer him, but I do not know if they know whom they are exactly cheering. As approachable and warm as Francis appears he is also just as reserved. He doesn’t give anyone a peek into his hand of cards.

KNA: Francis himself has stoked these expectations.

Mosebach: …and that even among people who have nothing to do with the Catholic Church. They assess him as a new president who is proposing a new legislative package. Traditionally a pope does not act in this way. His office consists in continuity not in change. He does not have the mission to reinvent the church. From the very first second, however, Francis has chosen a symbolic language that serves the media public and is supposed to convey this: I will do everything differently. That was not very loyal towards his predecessor. From his “buona sera” instead of the priestly greeting “Praised be Jesus Christ,” to his rejection of papal garments to his move into the Vatican guesthouse. My feeling is that these externals have acquired an inappropriate importance.

KNA: You lack sympathy for the papal humility?

Mosebach: Ultimately that to me is not humility but a dimming down to a style of life coinciding with today’s secular power. Today billionaires wear T-shirts and sit in comfortable sofas instead of on hard Baroque furniture. Heavy brocaded vestments that represent the glory of the Christ who is to come again are very uncomfortable. The Bergoglio style should not be confused with asceticism. And even if Francis were an ascetic, I would not like at all to hear about it from the mass media. Asceticism has value above all when it is hidden.

KNA: Many conservative Catholics fear an attack on the doctrines of the church under Francis. The initiatives of the synod on the family in October for a new method of dealing with remarried divorced people and homosexuals were after all far reaching.

Mosebach: If the intense management of the synod originated with Francis, he at least received pushback. The interim report could not be successfully pushed through. The tempo disturbed me in all this. The church was always slow but that was good. Endless discussions reflected the spiritual development until at some point the papal decision was taken. In the end always that which had been proven was successful. That is the meaning of the image of the pilgrim Church throughout history. This path should be, as much as possible, without losses in substance. But as I have said, up to now it is totally unclear what Francis really thinks. We only know that he places great value on a merciful Church that stands on the side of the poor – which from the very beginning has been always natural for the Church.

KNA: Do you hope for anything then from Francis?

Mosebach: I hope from every pope that he strengthens Catholics in their faith and that, through him, the Church gains spiritual force so that she can maintain her faith against the spirit of the times. But this takes time. Scenes of cheering around the popemobile are not a standard for that. Only in a couple of years will one be able to see if the seminaries and the religious orders once again have more candidates and conversions increase; if there is therefore anything to Francis beyond that he’s nice and is able to communicate with the masses.

KNA: At the end of November, for example, the pope appealed before the EU Parliament in Strasbourg to Europe’s Christian identity. Did that impress you?

Mosebach: On the one hand it was good to remind secular politicians of that which they absolutely do not want to hear. Namely that everything which calls itself European is attributable to Christianity. Even the anti-Christian tendencies since the Enlightenment could never sever themselves from the debate with religion.

KNA: But on the other hand?

Mosebach: Such appearances are for me in the end just pious utterances, which go in one ear of the politicians and out the other. Really, these papal appeals don’t interest me at all. I would rather have a pope who never gives any speeches. I would like a pope who imposes his hands on the people, who blesses them, who absolves them from their sins and says the mass for them. A priest-pope, not a politician-pope.

KNA: That sounds to be sure a little unworldly and would deprive the Catholic Church of much of her effectiveness. What do you have against charismatic leaders on the papal throne?

Mosebach: I have nothing against charisma in the Church – quite the opposite. But from the beginning, the Church separated institution and charisma. It wasn’t Paul the charismatic theologian who became the first pope but Peter the fisherman, a priestly, blessing figure. St. Francis also did not become pope even though he filled the people of his time with the greatest enthusiasm. He didn’t even want to be a priest. The Church breathes with two lungs – with the institutional offices culminating in the papacy and with the enthusiasm for the faith of her charismatic individuals. Both should be kept separated. I consider it to be an error to canonize popes. They should be above all the guardians of continuity and of the sacraments.

KNA: Which, since the new regulation of Benedict XVI can be celebrated once more according to the old missal. At that time you were among its greatest supporters. Pope Francis appears to have less interest in this.

Mosebach: I think that he probably has no great interest either in the old or in the new rite – or in liturgy at all – which I myself take to be the heart of the Church. In this he is completely a Jesuit. In 2007, however, as the first archbishop of the world, he put a church at the service of the celebration of the old rite of mass in Buenos Aires. Obviously he has nothing against it. The celebration of the old rite had expanded worldwide under Benedict. In almost every larger German city you can celebrate it. Its presence is even stronger in France and strongest of all in the USA. With this action Benedict XVI reacted to a widespread need. For me that was his greatest achievement as pope.

KNA: But the discussions with the FSSPX are still stalled. How do you judge the prospects for an agreement between the Church and the traditionalists?

Mosebach: I have no prognosis in this regard but such an agreement would be very desirable. In the first place, the crucial thing is that the discussions are continuing at all – and they are. After Benedict’s resignation many said that the door has been finally slammed shut for the Fraternity of Pius X. But Francis has had basically even fewer problems with them than had his predecessor because he is interested far less in detailed questions of theology.

KNA: Do you miss Benedict XVI?

Mosebach: I regretted his resignation very much. He felt that he could no longer physically meet the demands of the office and felt that his remaining time in office was too short to allow it to be followed by a long phase of agony like that of John Paul II. One has to accept that. The shape of the new institution of the “pope emeritus” is for me still insufficiently clear. I hope that a new age of popes that have resigned does not lie before us. In any case Benedict XVI was a great pope but no ruler. In contrast Francis is a ruler and an autocrat. Whether he is also a great pope still has to be seen.

(By kind permission of Martin Mosebach. Translator: Stuart Chessman)

 

 

Winter in Wien – or at least late autumn in Vienna – a somber time of gray skies, chill winds and frequent drizzle. The dismal weather and the falling leaves prompt thoughts of death, of the end of things – so different from the frequent brilliantly clear, joyous days of Fall in the Northeast United States leading up to Thanksgiving. Yet the lights that begin to appear in early November at the Christmas markets scattered all over Vienna make all the stronger impression contrasted with the increasing gloom. You can get a real sense  here why Christmas took on such extraordinary importance in the German lands.

 

Winter in Wien is the title of the last book written by Reinhold Schneider, a leader of the “Catholic Literary Renaissance “ in Germany. Written in 1957-58, it is a diary of a lengthy stay by the author in Vienna, at a time when the raw memories of the catastrophe of World War II and the fears of potential apocalypse of atomic war were very much alive. Winter in Wien is a dark, even despairing work, deeply pessimistic about the future of Man. Vienna, a place where the great course of European history seemed to have come to a final end, naturally lent itself to reflections on the last times. And Reinhold Schneider – like most authors of the Catholic literary Renaissance – was naturally a man fascinated by the extremes of human behavior– sacrificial resistance, heroic stances, dramatic conversions. He had written a memorable novella on Bishop Bartolome de las Casas; he had published underground essays of theological consolation during the National Socialist regime. In the bleak pages of Winter in Wien Schneider meditated on the end of civilizations and of history.

 

Yet, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the most profound insight of this book lay elsewhere. Schneider was visiting a shop when a ridiculous toy – something like a jack-in-the box – caught his attention. And this cheap object suddenly was an epiphany for him. Yes, Schneider now knew that he indeed was in apocalyptic times. But our author had been entirely mistaken about the nature of the threat to the West. It was not Nazi or communist persecution or annihilation in an atomic holocaust. Rather, it was  modern consumer culture with its the ludicrous products like that silly toy that were burying Western civilization. A burial ritual that reached its consummation in the “opening of the windows” to “modernity” by the Catholic Church only a few years afterwards. As another, perhaps more insightful author had written decades earlier:

 

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.”

 

Today, decades of EU prosperity have transformed Vienna into one of the minor outposts of the New World Order. The slovenly, casual dress of almost everyone is striking; you get the sense that 1970’s American fashion has been elevated into a uniform here. One evening, one of the main TV channels shows a film on the great poet Trakl, graphically depicting an improbable love affair with his sister; there followed a movie on the saga of an aging prostitute (a transvestite? – I didn’t watch long enough to find out.). A Volksoper production of Puccini’s Turandot has all the singers dressed as insects.

(Above) The baroque Mariahilf church reflected on one of the stores of Vienna’s main shopping street.

 

It’s all a strange contrast with ball dresses on display in the windows.  They testify to the continuance (for tourism’s sake?) of social rituals whose purpose disappeared ages ago. Indeed, almost everything of interest here belongs to the past; the magnificent Habsburg art collections, the oversized buildings on the Ringstrasse, the many magnificent baroque churches, the musical life in the opera houses, churches and concert halls. Western Europe as whole is living off the legacy of an earlier age but nowhere can this be sensed as strongly as in Vienna. The Austrian Republic and the European Union have created nothing here.

(Above) The University – and the Jesuits’ – church, with the new and old altars.

Neither has the Conciliar Church, whose ravages are nowhere greater than in Austria. 50 years ago 90% of the population of Vienna – even if never a hotbed of the faith in recent generations – still identified themselves as Catholic. Today it is 40%. Religious practice is far less than what that percentage implies. In a magnificent baroque church one encounters only one or two visitors at any one time – half of them tourists. Sunday masses of the churches of the center of town are frequented mainly for the music. Again, one encounters the trappings of the past –the magnificent architecture, the masses of Mozart, Haydn and Bruckner, the splendid vestments – in a new environment entirely foreign to the culture that created them.

 

(Above and Below) the Votivkirche.

Perhaps the grandiose “Votivkirche” (Votive Church) on the Ringstrasse is more illustrative of the current spiritual situation of Austria than the perfectly maintained baroque churches of the older part of town. This grand neo-Gothic church was built in the second half of the nineteenth century in thanksgiving for Franz Josef escaping an assassination attempt.  It had dedications from the Imperial family and from the nations that made up the Austrian Empire. Even at the time of its creation, however, there was criticism from “liberals” (in the original sense of the term) for whom the Votivkirche was a relic – if magnificent- of a faith that had vanished:

 

Already before me did a poet call you, the newest of cathedrals, “the Church without God.”

And truly so:

Perhaps, since you could be seen in your much-praised beauty,

Has hardly one heart throbbed within you in true faith,

Has hardly one knee bent in true devotion.

And so you tower,

Even if filled each day with the sound of organ and with clouds of incense,

With your flying buttresses

And your openwork spires,

Like a stone anachronism

Upwards out of the faithless present…

 

(Ferdinand von Saar)

 

The Votivkirche also had important connections with the Austrian military. All around the church are commemorative plaques and monuments – the legacy of two terrible world wars. And after World War II, the republic of Austria smeared its partisan political messages on the windows and walls of this church.

(Above) This plaque commemorates not soldiers in one of the two world wars but militiamen fighting a leftist uprising in 1934 – and perhaps others who died fighting a National Socialist coup attempt.

(Above) In the Votivkirche. (Below) The magnificent old main altar.

(Above) The renaissance grave (moved from a destroyed church in Vienna) of Count Nicholas von Salm, the heroic commander during the first siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1529.

 

But the post-war years have not been kind to the Votivkirche. In contrast to the baroque churches of Austria, nineteenth century neo-gothic architecture was held in contempt. Signs of neglect are everywhere, and the scaffolding outside the church serves as a welcome billboard leased out by the Archdiocese of Vienna. The congregation of this church, still sizable in 1950, has also dwindled away.  Now it is the seat of an apostolate to foreigners in Vienna, led by “Father Joe” (naturally not an Austrian).

(above) An “evening for women” on “the question of offices in the Catholic Church” while the men discuss God and the world.

(above) “Father Joe”; (below) “The Cistercian monks of Heiligenkreuz monastery and Timna Brauer sing together to the One God.”

 

Truly, it seems that European culture has reached its end here! And yet, despite it all, there are still people kneeling and candles constantly lit before the images at the entrance to St. Stephen’s cathedral. The Christmas and Advent markets found everywhere are (still) called just that – not “holiday” or “seasonal” markets. One finds here and there signs of devotion to Blessed Karl of Austria. And in some less touristy, more out of the way cafes we find pictures of Emperor Franz Josef and Dr. Karl Lueger….

 

Finally, on our recent visit we experienced the wonderful solemn mass celebrated by Cardinal Burke. The magnificent Karlskirche of Fischer von Erlach was standing room only during the entire lengthy service. Several gentlemen stood about in uniforms reminiscent of the Empire. Families with sometimes noisy children attended without being greeted by angry glares or scolding (as is usual in the German-speaking world). Perhaps the Catholic culture of Austria is not totally a thing of the past, perhaps that which was confidently declared dead even in Franz Josef’s time can spring miraculously back to life. And the only place to start is a return to the fullness – in theology, morality and ritual – of the faith that made this culture possible in the first place

 

(Above)Solemn pontifical Mass with Cardinal Burke.

(Above) “Immaculate Virgin, intercede for Austria!” This shrine from 1936 in an ancient church is qualified as a relic of a prior time by a modern explanatory plaque.

It has been four years since the death of Joseph Sobran.  Scott P. Richert has written a moving tribute at the Chronicles magazine website.

“For many Catholics of a certain age, Joseph Sobran will forever be remembered as one of the greatest literary defenders of the Catholic Church’s teaching on life over the past 40 years. From contraception to abortion, from euthanasia to just-war doctrine, Joe was an eloquent voice in the popular press for the teachings of the Catholic Church, and, in fighting for the truth, he wore himself out a few decades too early, dying at 3 P.M. on Thursday, September 30, 2010, at the age of 64.”

“Much of Joe’s best writing on life issues appeared in Human Life Review. Indeed, one might say that, for almost two decades, Joe Sobran was Human Life Review. As J.P. McFadden, the founding editor of HLR, wrote in his Introduction to Single Issues, a 1983 collection of Joe’s best essays from the Review, “we never dreamed how much he would have to say, or that he would become our most faithful contributor: his sharply-honed essays would have appeared in every issue over the past eight years [from the Review’s founding in 1975 until 1982, when McFadden was writing], but for a few missed deadlines.”

Yet after Bill Buckley fired Joe Sobran from National Review in 1991 he was also dismissed from Human Life Review (both publcations emanated from the same offices). When HLR subsequently celebrated a major anniversary – I believe it was their 25th – Sobran’s name was not mentioned. Indeed, when Sobran came out in opposition to the Republican party and its Iraq war, Human Life Review ran a hit piece written by James Hitchcock directed primarily against him:

“Sobran’s way of dealing with the life issues can then be seen as the conservative counterpart to the liberals’ “seamless garment”—an attempt to persuade pro-lifers to transcend their “narrow” outlook and support a wider agenda. …
(F)or some on the Catholic part of “the Right,” the life issues are no longer paramount, if they ever were.”

Sobran’s prior role at HLR was of course not mentioned in this shameless screed. It had become clear that supporting the agenda of the Republican party and of the neocons – especially as it related to the Mideast – had taken precedence over all other concerns at the publication that Joe Sobran had put on the map. It was also a particularly outrageous insinuation, for, as Richert writes, regarding life issues “Joe, better than any other Catholic conservative, argued forcefully for a truly consistent ethic of life, regarding the Church quite properly as Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher).”

We must concede, however, that in this question of authority Bill Buckley may have been somewhat more perspicacious than Joe: Mater si, Magistra no! Death spared Sobran the spectacle of a Bishop of Rome lecturing Catholics not to “obsess” about abortion, gays and contraception; of a new archbishop of Chicago who had discouraged pro-life vigils at his former diocese – this action being touted as one of his key qualifications – and, just the other day, of a Spanish Opus Dei priest raging against “fundamentalists” because “the stubborn defense of the right to life is plain and simple ideology.”

Sobran had to bear an extraordinarily amount of suffering in his last years. But his writings witness a true Christian acceptance of the various personal and health trials the Lord had sent him. I hope a younger generation rediscovers the man and his work. Scott Richert’s article is a good place too start.

Dear Fellow Parishioners and Friends of Holy Innocents,

It’s the interrelationships between Patrick Charles Keely, his churches, and the Traditional Latin Mass that is significant in the story of Keely’s Church of the Holy Innocents in New York City, built in 1870.

Because the story is not only that Holy Innocents was built by America’s foremost Catholic architect of the 19th century. But also that Holy Innocents is Keely’s only remaining church anywhere that celebrates daily the Traditional Latin Mass, which was the spiritual and liturgical foundation of all of his churches.

In the parish-planning program, Making All Things New, the Archdiocese of New York will announce its decision in November whether or not The Church of the Holy Innocents will remain open and retain her Traditional Latin Mass.

One of the primary criteria set by the Archdiocese for determining which churches will remain open and which ones will be closed is that the church is an “active, vibrant community of faith.” That means that in addition to a church’s active liturgical, spiritual, and social outreach programs, it must sustain itself financially, and it must be structurally sound.

Holy Innocents is exemplary in all those areas, as well as in its attendance at the Traditional Latin Mass, which continues to grow, day by day, with worshippers of all ages.

It is also significant to remember that Holy Innocents is unique.

Of the estimated 600 churches in the United States and Canada, designed and built by Keely, it is the only one offering the Traditional Latin Mass daily, seven days a week, “its unique distinction,” according to Edward H. (Ted) Furey, Founder of the Keely Society and the foremost authority on Keely’s life and architecture.

When Keely built his churches, the Traditional Latin Mass was the only Mass celebrated–so it was celebrated in every single one of them. Since Vatican II, however, all that has changed. Ted Furey says, “That’s why Holy Innocents’ continuation is so important, especially due to the fact that it is in a city that is a model of resilience to the world–and a beacon of Hope!”

The remarkable fact, which invites reflection, is that Keely’s churches exist because of the Traditional Latin Mass.

As a devout Catholic, the foundation of Keely’s Faith was, as it is for all Catholics, the Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Mass. Every one of his churches is a shrine he built to that foundation of his Faith, which even affected the plan of his churches.

For example, the altar is the site of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, which is why all elements in a Keely church are oriented to its altar. The architectural lines, as well as the symbolism and decoration, lead the worshipper to the altar. It’s why Keely commissioned Constantino Brumidi, Americas leading 19th century muralist, to create the mural of the Crucifixion of Christ over Holy Innocents’ main altar, the site of the un-bloody Sacrifice of Calvary.

The fact that since Vatican II, many of the altars in Keely’s churches (as well as the altars in many other Catholic churches) have been replaced, disfigured, or destroyed in keeping with the novelty that has prevailed over the past 50 years, emphasizes the unique role of the altar in the Traditional Latin Mass, which continues to be celebrated daily at Holy Innocents.

Because Keely was best known for his churches in the Gothic Revival style, he was called “The American Pugin,” after A.W.N. Pugin, the foremost Gothic Revival architect of the 19th century, for whom “The beliefs and manners of all people are embedded in the edifices they raise.”

It is Nancy’s and my hope and prayer that those who guide the parish-planning program, Making All Things New, will preserve Holy Innocents, our unique edifice in which is “embedded” the Mass and the Sacred Liturgy that sustained Patrick Charles Keely and the parishioners of his time and that continues to sustain those who worship here now.

Sincerely,
Don
Donald M. Reynolds

September 28, 2014

cc: Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan
Archbishop of New York

Bishop John O’Hara
Making All Things New

Living on Fire: The Life of L. Brent Bozell Jr.
By Daniel Kelly,
ISI Books, Wilmington, 2014

I have already written on this blog some notes on the history of Traditional Catholicism in this country. In that saga, no individual is of greater significance than Brent Bozell, the founding editor of Triumph magazine. For, from 1966 till its demise in 1975, Triumph was the voice of Catholic conservative opposition to the leftward avalanche in the Church and the country. Now the late Daniel Kelly has provided us with a new biography of this critical figure of the post-conciliar Church in the United States.

This is a much-needed work. Kelly, for the first time, gives us a coherent narrative of Bozell’s life. It is an amazing story. He worked with Bill Buckley (his brother in law) to found National Review for which he wrote extensively. He was the ghostwriter for Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative – the single biggest success story in conservative publishing of that era -which helped launch Goldwater’s national political career. Later, he authored a respectable work on the Warren court.

Yet Brent Bozell was becoming disenchanted with the proto-“libertarian” doctrine of “mainstream” American Conservatism (although in that day the received opinion considered Buckley and his cohorts denizens of the far right). A period of residence in Spain in the early 1960’s had opened Bozell’s eyes to the still extant beauties of a Traditional Catholic society and culture. By 1966 he had split from the National Review circle, and had founded his own magazine – giving it a title deliberately calculated to enrage Catholic progressives, then and now: Triumph. After extraordinary vicissitudes the magazine collapsed in 1975 and Bozell descended into madness and alcoholism. Later, he partially recovered and ended his days in spiritual peace.

Kelly does a good job of “connecting the dots” of Bozell’s life, digging up a host of fascinating details and putting it all into a readable narrative. I could claim to be somewhat familiar with broad outline of this story yet I found many new and important facts. For example, I knew there had been a connection between some of the Triumph stalwarts and Christendom College, I didn’t know that that institution sprang directly from a Triumph summer program. Throughout the book, Kelly sets forth succinctly and clearly what Bozell, Buckley, etc. thought and wrote over the period covered by the biography – critical for what is primarily the history of an intellectual.

It is truly said de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Yet I have to report that, in my opinion, Living on Fire exhibits serious defects that prevent it from being more than a first essay on the subject. First, Kelly provides inadequate historical and intellectual context for the life and opinions of his protagonist. Living on Fire seems to presume familiarity with American history of the 1950’s through the 70’s as well as the details of the development American conservative movement. That can no longer be presumed of younger but interested readers. Moreover, failure to provide historical context tends to diminish the significance of Bozell’s Triumph years. For 1966-75 were years of the greatest social and intellectual change in America. It was a radical, public shift to the left in politics, culture and morality – opposed only in an incomplete way by the counterattack of Nixon and the “silent majority.” In the Church, there was the parallel conciliar revolution. Seen in this context, Bozell’s shift from the conservative focus on anti-communism and the defense of capitalism to the criticism and reform of culture looks remarkably prescient – even more so if historical developments since the 70s are also taken into account. The positions of Bozell, which in this book often appear as a series of strident ideological assertions, take on an entirely different and more favorable aspect in the historical setting of the craziness of the 1960’s in Church and society, .

Second, Kelly does not consistently provide critical evaluation of the positions of Bozell. Now Bozell was an intellectual – despite Kelly’s assertions, repeated several times in this book, that he could have attained high electoral office, Bozell’s vocation was that of a writer and editor in the fields of religion and politics. Essential to assessing such a man is judging whether the opinions he voiced were in fact correct. Kelly shares his opinions only here and there. Some are perceptive, others obtuse, such as his repeating uncritically contemporary descriptions of Bozell as “Anti-American.” However, from the author’s tone of detached irony – and his extremely favorable portrayal of William F. Buckley throughout this work – one gets the sense that, for Kelly, Triumph and all that it stands for was an aberration, a unfortunate departure from Bozell’s promising conservative career – perhaps motivated by rivalry with Buckley and even incipient mental problems.

Third, I am not totally persuaded by Kelly’s’ attempts to flesh out the personalities of Bozell (and of others covered in this book) and to provide psychological motivations for their opinions and actions. His narrative is too summary and disjointed to be totally convincing in this respect. For example, Bozell in 1962 suddenly moves his family to Spain. We are then informed for the first time that Trish, his wife, is an alcoholic – and that Bozell suffers from some kind of drinking problem as well. The book quotes letters written by Bozell on this tragic subject that are moving and eloquent in their language which stands out startlingly from Kelly’s surrounding gray prose. Then, upon the Bozell family’s return to America, the subject of alcoholism is dropped – only to be taken up again 14 years later when Brent Bozell succumbs to mental disorders. Was this something that afflicted both Brent and Trish only in moments of extreme stress? We do not know from this book. In another example, Thomas Molnar is depicted as a “voice of reason” in contrast of the “radicalism” of Bozell. That’s a very strange role for someone whose “anti-Americanism” exceeded anything Bozell put to paper. One longs to see the original interview notes of Kelly. (Molnar also is revealed to be a significant player at the foundation of Triumph yet then disappears – without explanation.)

What is to be said about Triumph? The apparently disdainful judgment of Kelly – and of American conservatism – is refuted by the very content and tenor of this book. Triumph offered the first critical reviews of the new mass and of the “liturgical renewal.” It forcefully advocated what were later called “pro-life “ positions years before Roe v. Wade. Above all it understood the unbridgeable and ever widening gap between the American establishment and the Catholic faith. It discerned very early on the processes that were gradually turning the United States in to a quasi-totalitarian progressive state. Bozell accomplished all this by gathering a team of gifted writers – a team that has never been duplicated since. And we should not underestimate the courage it took to criticize the Church establishment and the implementation of the Council. As one enraged reader wrote to the magazine:

“I hope your magazine will either never appear or very soon be forbidden to appear. How can grown-up intelligent Catholics be such an obstacle to the workings of the Holy Ghost?”

(The writer was Baroness Maria von Trapp of Sound of Music fame)

Yet the grand venture of Triumph failed. Living with Fire helps us identify some of the reasons. Especially after 1970, the editorial stance of the magazine became consistently more critical of the “American way of life.” That in my view was entirely appropriate. But at the same time Triumph increasingly opposed to American society a vision of Catholicism that verged on fantasy. The magazine that had been one of the most perceptive critics of the liturgical revolution became more and more an apologist of the papacy of Paul VI. The core of the Triumph staff had emerged from the conservative political movement; they would have needed need more liturgists, theologians and historians of the Church to understand what was going on. For the same destructive forces at work in the United States and that Triumph so eloquently denounced were also active in the Church. Bozell and his colleagues could never totally understand that. Instead, they engaged in an increasingly Quixotic effort to present the conflicted, crumbling Catholic Church of the 1970’s as the panacea for the social evils of the United States. Indeed, despite the talk of “Radicalism” and “Anti-Americanism” there was something eminently American in Triumph’s effort to make “the Catholic thing” a political program and to quickly create a ”Catholic culture” on these shores – something that had taken a thousand or more years in Europe.

Yet despite the limitations, Triumph was a great adventure and a great accomplishment. Kelly’s book – despite the reservations of its own author – makes that clear. For the issues that Buckley and Bozell addressed at National Review in the 1950’s and early 1960’s belong to another world and to an America that has ceased to exist. The issues addressed by Triumph are with us to this very day. Kelly’s book is good introduction to the subject – but I would refer all interested readers to the original texts of Triumph.

5. The Era of Pope Francis and an Epilogue; 2013 -?

One again the Traditionalist scene in the United States was rocked by an event from across the seas. Pope Benedict, who had done so much for the cause of Catholic Tradition – without fully embracing it himself – abdicated. It was clear from the start that his successor, Francis, would be a man of entirely different character – had he not been pushed as the main alternative to Benedict in 2005? But what few – aside from a key group of initiates – realized was that Francis was a genuine progressive in the line of cardinals Bernardin or Martini. What had been inconceivable in 1978 or 2005 had taken place: the left wing of the Church had captured its highest position.

If we consider the situation only in America, this development, while unexpected, was not at all totally surprising. For the Church’s progressive wing had not been idle in the years we have followed the twists and turns of Traditionalism. They remained in total control of most religious orders and Catholic institutions of higher education. The Catholic press and the Church bureaucracy were in their hand. And they retained vocal supporters among the hierarchy: Mahoney, Bernardin or Weakland.

Beyond maintaining their position in the ecclesiastical sphere, the Catholic left forged powerful links with the forces of civil society. They developed valuable ties with secular educational establishment. The liberal media (that is, almost all the media) turned to their agitators for “authoritative” commentary on things Catholic; the Catholic hierarchy (including the Vatican) also turned to the National Catholic Reporter as a preferred media outlet. And a new field of activity for the progressives was the overt alliance with the Democratic Party and specifically the Obama administration, counteracting “pro-life” initiatives in and outside of the Church. American Catholic progressivism was a movement that John Paul II and Benedict might attempt to restrain but could hardly discipline, let alone dislodge.

Pope Francis immediately launched a systematic campaign both of accommodation with Western secular civil society and of outreach to the Catholic left. Certainly in rhetoric it is a return to the 1960s, covered in the first installment of this essay. Instead of increasingly respectful treatment Traditionalists now heard themselves denounced by Pope Francis in coarse and contemptuous language. More concretely, at Francis’s direction, the Vatican launched a campaign of annihilation against the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate – a bi-ritual order with a growing Traditionalist commitment. One of the main initial penalties imposed was the de facto abolition of Summorum Pontifcium for these friars. But these actions had little resonance in the United States, given the friars’ limited presence here.

The forces of the American “Conservative Catholics” had very little time to rejoice, however. For Francis and his acolytes immediately moved, in word and deed, even more forcefully against the holiest principles of the conservatives. Francis and his team denounced capitalist economic principles. They called into question or mocked pro-life activity of all kinds. And as one of his most significant new ecclesiastical initiatives, Pope Francis launched a “discussion” clearly aiming at changing the rules of the Church regarding divorce. This last move struck the weakest link in the conservatives’ stance on life issues. For divorce is an unambiguous conflict between the teaching of the Church and one of the nonnegotiable principles of American civil society.

What was the impact of these dramatic developments? We have seen that in the 1960’s the reforms of the Council had been virtually unopposed. The reaction to the current attempted restoration of the 1960’s has been far more complex. True, among the clergy open rebellion is nonexistent. Yet by 2014 a lively Catholic samizdat – the Internet – had arisen. News was rapidly disseminated and critical commentary offered. The Traditionalist Catholic of 2014 had an infinitely better idea of what was going on in the Church – both in and outside of the United States – than his predecessor of fifty years ago. And his experience of 50 years of working around the structures of the “official Church” had immunized him against the progressive revival.

There is above all this remarkable fact: in the first year of Francis the Traditionalist cause in America has actually strengthened. True, certain masses sponsored by “fair-weather friends” have been canceled. But other masses and apostolates have taken their places. Certain prelates have taken the opportunity to settle scores with a movement they always disdained. But others have maintained and even expanded the Traditionalist presence. Traditional masses are still spreading to new locations with full official support. The successful modus vivendi of traditional Catholicism with the Church establishment, inaugurated by Summorum Pontificum, has largely continued. For Traditionalists. the loss of papal support has not produced an existential crisis or a rush to “preemptive obedience” (as the Germans call it).

The situation of the conservative Catholics is much more critical. For Pope Francis has radically challenged their core beliefs on the nature of the papacy, on “life issues” and on the economy. Only a minority (of which George Weigel is representative) attempts to uphold the ultramontane cause in its purity, seeking to prove that Francis is no different than Benedict, John Paul II or Paul VI. Other leading spokesmen have lapsed into silence or have vehemently criticized the utterances of the pope’s inner circle (but not those of Francis himself). Predictably, those who have most directly criticized Francis himself have done so for his statements on capitalism and Israel. We do observe, however, that the pro-life movement is continuing in its accustomed course unconcerned about whether they are “obsessing” or not.

We do not know what the future will bring. We do not know what will happen if Francis extends in some way the actions he has taken against the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate to the whole Church. We also have to consider the long-term effect of the endless stream of statements from the Vatican and of potential episcopal appointments as well. My personal view is that Francis’s actions on other fronts (such as on divorce) are likely to precipitate such a crisis in the Church that the relationship with Traditionalists will remain in the background. It would be just as plausible, however, that a Vatican that suffers a reverse on these other issues would respond by retaliating against ”enemies” – of which Traditionalists would be the easiest and safest targets.

Epilogue

So a movement that first arose out of the religious chaos of the post-conciliar years finds itself established as a fixed, if mostly marginal part of the United States Catholic scene. In a way, Pope Francis should be happy with the Traditionalists; their only method of survival and of evangelization has been by means of example. Without the institutional support of the hierarchy, the Catholic educational system or the religious orders, the Traditionalists built a network for themselves. It is growing not receding. In many, if not most places, a working relationship has been established with the institutional Church. And leadership has been handed over to a new generation of clergy, religious and laity. It is a success envied by Traditionalists in most other parts of the world.

Yet there is also a palpable feeling of dissatisfaction. Traditionalists remain the one group of the Roman Catholic Church that can be officially persecuted. The Vatican has assumed once again a position of open hostility. It seems after so many years and so much effort Traditionalists remain on the outside.

Part of the discontent is the pain of honestly facing the reality of the “Conciliar Church”; the dire predictions of the Traditionalists have only been proved so terribly true. This is a Church where the knowledge of religion among the mass of Catholics borders on the nonexistent; where the practice of the overwhelming majority in key areas of morality is hardly distinct from that of the surrounding population. A Church whose hierarchy seems “obsessed” only with material, secular issues and with arranging their comfortable accommodation with the world. A Church where the pope, the Vatican and the bulk of the hierarchy are able to isolate themselves in a fantasy world free both from the obligation of dealing with reality and from accountability for their actions. A Church that expressly rejects the rational and the beautiful, patronizing instead cretinous “movements.” A Church that is on the path to extinction in the developed world.

The unavoidable issue is that, in view of such facts and given its principles, Traditionalism cannot remain the province of a nostalgic few, of a “remnant” or of an elite following a “counsel of perfection.” Traditionalism can be nothing else than how it was described in the subtitle of Latin Mass magazine: a “movement for Catholic reform.” Not a call back to some past which never existed but a rediscovery and reliving, in all its neglected richness and completeness, of the Tradition of the Church. Living completely the liturgical life of the church is necessarily inseparable from adhering to Christian morality and accepting Christian theology.

There is more than enough to do in rebuilding the Church, but isn’t it also clear that Catholic Traditionalism also has important consequences for the life of the Catholic in the world and in this country? Certainly our secular adversaries think so – that is why Pope Benedict faced opposition not just from within the Church but from sovereign states and from Western civil society in general. It is very important to powerful secular forces in the Western world that the progress of the Traditionalist cause be stopped – the Latin mass is a political issue!

What is the next step for the Traditionalists confronted by both the great promise of their movement and the catastrophic situation of the Church today? There have been many heroic laymen and priests in the American Traditionalist movement; there have been many intrepid writers, journalists and, today, bloggers. And there has been an ever-increasing focus on the liturgy in all its perfection. But I believe to get to the next step, to move to being a genuine reform for the whole Church, the Traditionalist movement needs to acquire what ancient Ireland is reputed to have had when it set out to re-evangelize the West: saints and scholars. Let us take that in reverse order.

Scholars are easiest to develop and train. They need to acquire the tools of scholarship in their various fields without becoming a part of the secular academic establishment, which is lethal. Scholars can preserve and present to clergy and laity the riches of Catholic history, philosophy and theology. They can deal squarely with the unpleasant truths of the past and the present, which Catholics make a habit of ignoring. They will counter the normal Catholic response when confronted by difficulties of all kinds: the flight to the irrational, the blind submission to the world or ecclesiastical authorities.

Saints – that is another matter. The crisis of the Church and 16th-century was result in large part through a new generation of Saints. When, in the 1520s, things were at their bleakest, a soldier, Ignatius Loyola, was reading a book of saints while recovering from a war wound. A little while later John Fisher and Thomas More stood virtually alone against the conformism of the hierarchy of an entire kingdom. Later there were many more: like the mystics Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, the great Archbishop of Milan, Charles Borromeo or the apostle of Rome Saint Philip Neri. But saints cannot be “produced” – they can only be given to us.

Is my vision – scholarship and sanctity added to liturgical perfection – not unlike the Benedictine reform of the 6th century onwards? Does not American Traditionalism need more focus on contemplation as opposed to action? I do believe so! But I would also expect that the Traditionalist movement, which has overcome so many difficulties and challenges to reach where it stands today, will enjoy the necessary divine support to continue and perfect its mission – if we only ask and pray for it.

The rose window of Holy Innocents is very likely the original from 1870 mentioned by John Gilmary Shea.

Yes, there is a unique quality, difficult to capture, that the sensitive visitor experiences in the silent old churches of New York or Brooklyn. A feeling of remoteness from the surrounding city, a somewhat musty atmosphere of a past that here somehow has not disappeared and a mysterious sense of solidarity with the tens, even hundreds, of thousands who have passed through these doors. This is especially so in the old Victorian churches of New York. The few neoclassical buildings, like St. Peter’s, are stark witnesses to us of an earlier age that has vanished. The later magnificent structures of the golden age of the Archdiocese, like Blessed Sacrament or St. Vincent Ferrer, are too artistically complete, too carefully thought out. I find myself constantly returning the structures of the earlier High Victorian age – St Stephen’s especially, but also Holy Innocents, Most Holy Redeemer or the former St. Ann’s. These churches, once grand centers of Catholicism and even of the city itself, now lie off the beaten track, sustained by small devoted congregations. They show all too clearly the ravages of time: water damage, indifferent paint and plaster work, shrines and altars that have been abandoned. Their decor ranges from magnificent windows and altars to kitschy devotions – with every age feeling entitled to add its own new devotion or shrine. Some, like St. Stephen’s are splendid architectural achievements, other like Holy Innocents represent the average parish church of the time. Best of all, by reason of their poverty, they mostly – not entirely – escaped the full ravages of the liturgical renewal.

(Above) Candles (real) are always burning at Holy Innocents, here before an image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. (Below) A Lourdes grotto is furnished with a fountain that has gone dry long ago.

(Above) St. Lucy is of course among the seemingly innumerable statues of Holy Innocents. (Below) Joyce Kilmer also stood before this crucifix many times before his conversion.

What does the threatened loss of a church like Holy Innocents mean to us? First,of course, the loss of a place of secluded refuge, of prayerful spirituality and even, here and there, of real beauty – all set in the midst of one of the most arid wastelands created by a barbarous capitalism.

This window is one of set of 20 from Munich installed as part of a grand refurbishing of the church starting in 1894 which included the new high altar. Other elements of that once magnificent decoration, like the side altars and communion rail, have disappeared.

Then, there is the loss of the devotions that made up so much of the life of old Catholic piety. Our Lady, the Infant of Prague, Christ the King, the great crucifix for an indulgenced prayer before leaving the church – all these and many others are found here. In recent years Holy Innocents also acquired a special new devotional role: as a shrine to its own patron saints in the face of a new massacre – that of abortion. Presumably this devotion is no longer seen as necessary or urgent.

There is also the loss of solidarity with the many who come here daily to pray, to light candles, to attend the masses and devotions. They are generally workers, the poor, even the eccentric and annoying. Those who frequent parishes in the suburbs or off Park Avenue do not come here. It is these ones with little means who are most adversely impacted by the looming changes. But so are they who are deprived of their example of sacrifice.

Above all, of course, Holy Innocents has served since 2007 as a center of the daily celebration of the Traditional mass. How many magnicent liturgies have taken place here in recent years! Moreover, this mass has added significance now that that the Traditional mass at Our Saviour’s across town has been suppressed. All this liturgical progress is the result of grass root initiatives – just like the hundreds of thousands of dollars this parish recently raised to refurbish the grand Brumidi fresco. I would have thought that the Church would want to encourage such initiatives from below. That is, if I didn’t know already through long experience how unlikely that would be! But the cessation of the celebration of the Traditional Mass would be the gravest loss of all. Let us pray – through the intercession of the Holy Innocents – that this fate can somehow be averted.

(Above and below) Mass for Ascension Thursday celebrated by Fr. George Rutler.

5. The Era of Summorum Pontificum 2007-2013

On July 7, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. For traditionalists it was a vindication and emancipation that would have been scarcely imaginable a few short years before. For now the Traditional liturgy was acknowledged to be a constituent element of the Catholic faith that had not and could not be abrogated. The Traditional liturgy was declared a right of the faithful. They, not the hierarchy and the clergy, were empowered to request and obtain its celebration. Finally, an avenue of appeal to Rome was provided in the (all too likely) case of conflicts with the local hierarchy.

Less obviously revolutionary but perhaps even more significant in the long term was Pope Benedict’s December 22, 2005 discourse on the “hermeneutic of reform in continuity.” By emphasizing the need to understand the “Council” (there seems to be only one in the Church of today) in the light of the entreaty of the tradition and doctrine of the Church Pope Benedict was (undoubtedly unwittingly) calling the whole Conciliar project into question. For isn’t the driving concept of “Vatican II” the imposition on a suppossedly moribund and retrograde Church of the new truths and vitality proceeding from the modern world?

What was the impact of these momentous developments in the United States? Compared to the spirit and even the letter of the new law it was of course limited. If traditionalists expected the hierarchy to take the initiative to make the traditional liturgy broadly available they would be sorely disappointed. In most cases the bishop no longer “got in the way” of local traditionalist initiatives. In the New York area, for example, it was only a few parishes that immediately and fully “implemented” Summorum Pontificum (“SP”). In most cases episcopal monitoring and authorization continued. As one wag put it, under SP the hierarchy finally discovered the Indult. So Charles Chaput, the newly installed archbishop of Philadelphia, made a parish available to traditionalists – while describing SP in exactly the language of the Indult.

Yet even this minimum was of course a dramatic transformation. The traditional mass now reappeared all over the Catholic landscape, resurfacing in locations previously unimaginable: Jesuit universities, any number of cathedrals, campus chapels, churches of religious orders and even in the parishes of the well-to-do. The mainstream Catholic press now actually began to report traditionalist liturgies and events now and did so in a neutral, even respectful tone. Even the institutions of “conservative Catholicism” which only yesterday had been conducting a war of words with traditionalists now opened their doors – at least partially – to the old mass: e.g., Thomas Aquinas College, Ave Maria university.

But it was the change in the quality of the liturgies that was even more significant than the growth in their number. The traditionalists of 2007 did not aim at recreating some past they had never known but wanted to restore the rites of the Catholic Church in all their splendor. The solemn high mass – prior to the Council a rarity and in the Indult era almost nonexistent – now was celebrated often – in a few places even every Sunday. Solemn pontifical masses became al least in the greater New York area almost an annual event. Vespers, which had disappeared from the American scene – at least on the parish level – even before the Council, here and there now sprang back to life. There was, in all these liturgical efforts, a new insistence on perfection and completeness of the ceremonial, the music, the vestments and the very furnishing and arrangeements of the churches.

There was a significant shift in leadership as well. Spearheading the era of SP was a generation of young priests – in contrast with the predominantly lay leadership of all previous phases of the American traditionalist movement and despite the emphasis of SP on the imitative of lay communities. These priests, born years after the Vatican Council, had no knowledge of pre-conciliar times. In many cases they lacked extensive experience of even the Indult era. They were joined by older priests “young at heart” – ordained well after the Council but unacquainted with anything prior to it. Together, it was a generation that had observed for itself what was going on (mostly wrongly) withe Church and had rediscovered tradition through the example of others, through reading or through – let us acknowledge it- the workings of Divine Providence. They now joyfully responded to Pope Benedict’s invitation. An ever-growing number of seminarians also became interested in the traditional mass. Finally, even the mainstream religious orders – a territory which, except for isolated individuals, had remained off limits to conservatism, let alone traditionalism – now participated at least to some extent in the traditionalist revival. Certain of these orders (like the Dominicans) had their own rites which were now celebrated for the first time in decades.

Not that the “traditionalist tradition” of lay leadership had entirely come to an end. On the contrary: SP saw a new generation of Catholic lay organizations arise. Moreover, the stability of these groupings was far greater than that of their “conservative Catholic” counterparts (and traditionalist predecessors) because of their devotion to the objective liturgical tradition of the Church and their strong links with the existing structures of the Church.

The result was a much greater integration of the traditionalist movement in to the day-to-day life of the “American Catholic church.” There was a new willingness to compromise and to work out a modus vivendi of the various liturgical directions within the church. More and more parishes became in effect “bi-ritual” without awakening the divisive ideological debates of the past. Despite much nonsense written at the beginning, it soon became clear that the old and new rites, the old and new calendars could very well coexist. Recourse to Ecclesia Dei was – in number of respects fortunately – not a constant feature of post-SP life in the United States.

The “fruits of Summorum Pontificum” were not long in coming. For example, Saint Mary’s parish in Norwalk, Connecticut offered both the ordinary and the extraordinary forms. But it was the traditional mass around which the life of the parish soon oriented. Terhe soon followed greater involvement of the laity in the life of the parish, its music, its devotions and its liturgies; more frequent reception of the sacrament of confession; and that ultimate criterion of Catholic success, increased amounts in the collection basket. Vocations of course also appeared. The traditional liturgy, far from being a source of division, became a source of unification of a parish otherwise divided into number of isolated communities: Hispanics, Indians, old-time Italian and Irish parishioners etc. A unique and moving measure of success with two recent deathbed testimonies in favor of the traditional liturgy – including the request for a requiem mass – by two prominent parishioners who had had no previous connection with traditionalism until the era of SP. But perhaps the greatest testimony to the success of St. Mary’s under SP is that of all those most directly involved with the work of the parish – the clergy, the ministers, the musicians, the lay volunteers. – only two or so had any experience with the pre-conciliar Church or even any long – term experience of the Indult.

A further benefit of the new regime was the cooling off in the cold war waged by conservative Catholics against the traditionalist movement. Indeed, some prominent publicists of ”Conservative Catholicism” and “Reform of the Reform” increasingly became supporters of the new course. Others, who could not disguise their disagreement with SP, retreated into silence: in keeping with their principles how could they dispute any action taken by the pope?

It will be noted that the era of SP was once more primarily liturgical: the invitation of Pope Benedict to reflect upon the relationship the council to the whole course of Catholic Tradition was not immediately taken up in the United States. Since the fall of Triumph there was no publication or organization exercising intellectual leadership on these shores. The intellectual component of Traditionalism was still overwhelmingly provided by foreign sources – German, French, English and increasingly Italian. But one positive development in all this was the blossoming of the traditionalist Internet scene. Through sites and blogs traditionalists obtained unprecedented access to news of the Church and the intellectual developments abroad. Moreover, in the post SP “era of good feeling” certain key players of the “conservative catholic “ Internet now joined in publicizing traditionalist developments.

Yet all was not sweetness and light. There were disturbing shadows of the past, and, in hindsight, somber forebodings of the future. The implementation of SP was very uneven – the attitude towards the traditional liturgy in many dioceses remained resolutely hostile. Seminarians and members of religious orders regularly faced sanctions for participating in traditional liturgies. It still remained common for such clerics and aspiring clerics to request anonymity if they showed up in the sanctuary. In 2010, a magnificent pontifical liturgy was scheduled at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. The Archbishop of Washington prevented the participation by the scheduled celebrant, Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos. The next year, Archbishop Wuerl forced the cancellation of the scheduled Pontifical liturgy altogether at the last minute. It has not reappeared since. Moreover, towards the end of this period, ti seems that underground the forces opposed to SP were regrouping. For example, the current worldwide crisis in the Franciscan Friars of the immaculate was launched with the key participation of certain US members with the encouragement of certain “conservative Catholic” elements.

That there were also issues with the traditionalist movement itself cannot be denied. A certain lassitude seems to have overtaken many of the traditionalists. Instead of redoubling their efforts and eagerly seizing the incredible opportunities now made available to them to both celebrate the Traditional liturgy and evangelize others, many sat back and let the clergy take over the running of the traditionalist show. This spread of this passive, inwardly focused attitude so typical of mainstream American Catholicism, could only be disastrous for a still marginalized movement like traditionalism. For as subsequent events would show official favor can be a very fleeting thing. It is a sad fact that many promising traditionalist liturgical initiatives had to be abandoned because of lack of participation.

Do we also need to mention that some of the negative organizational features of the Indult era continued? That no publication of a high level existed that would serve to focus traditional Catholics and inform them of developments? That traditionalists continued to be divided into many different groupings under dominating leaders – either lay or clerical? That it was nearly impossible to get these groups to even inform each other of what they’re doing, let alone collaborate and cooperate? These long-standing difficulties remained – yet it was reasonable to hope that they would be worked out in the course of time.

In summary, Traditionalists had indeed accomplished something tremendous. A cause that had been written off as dead and been subjected to the almost universal opposition of the church establishment had been resurrected. And, most importantly, 50 years after the close of the Vatican Council, the traditionalist movement had been handed over to a new generation – one untainted by the complexes and compromises of the past.

The following manuscript was sent to me by a friend. He said it was found recently in the cellar of what was once a monastery and now is a Walmart. Its authenticity is certainly open to question. As experts have already pointed out, the terza rima scheme has been abandoned and it is in the wrong vernacular. But there has been no authoritative judgment as yet on its provenance or authenticity. Its authorship remains a mystery.

 

Canto XXXV

 

The heat was now unbearable and yet
My guide seemed cool and unperturbed.
I asked him as politely as I could:

 

“Will we see the one I asked about,
The one who should not be here but
I have heard he is but know not how?”

 

“Do not assume you know such things,
For that knowledge and its reasons
Lie hidden to us but known to One.”

 

He gestured with his hand and pointed
To one who walked over and over
Through two doors whose entrances

 

Were marked by the words YES and NO,
And each time he walked through NO
A devil struck him in his rear portion.

 

“Can he stop”, I asked, “so I can ask him
If he is indeed the one I seek”?
My guide nodded and held his hands

 

Towards the devils who snorted and farted
But stopped their role in this contrapasso
To allow me to approach the one whom

 

I now noticed was wearing a miter upside
Down. “Are you he, then,” I asked him,
“Who made what is called the Gran Rifiuto “?

 

He panted, for he was out of breath with
His running YES and NO and back again.
He struggled to speak and blurted out:

 

 

“I heard you were looking for me and
I think I know why, but thinking in
This place can be torture for us.”

 

“ Can you tell me,” I began,”how it is possible
That you are here when you are celebrated
In the world above as a Saint of Holy Church?”

 

“Aime! Contradictions are the meat of this
Place of woe and fire and filth and mire, where
YES means NO means YES means NO.

 

But I am here because I thought I could lay aside
The burden I had been given by Him above
Out of fear and fatigue and selfishness.

 

The cry of Malabranca was my doom,
My downfall the plotting of Caetani,
My place of hellish pain the Kingdom of Naples.

 

What you call me above in the place of the Living
Has nothing to do with who I am in this place
Where I endlessly am punished with SIC et NON.”

 

“But I am confused”, I answered, “for were you not
Declared a Saint by the Church in some decree
Somewhere by some Pope who judged you well?”

 

“ I see your problem but it could not exist when
I was declared a Saint as a part of political vengeance,
For this was before the thunderstorm in Rome

 

That began the march to papa monarchus absolutus
When the Pope became the Church and
The Church became the Pope and all authority

 

In heaven and earth and hell passed to him who sits
On the throne of Peter whose power and authority
Will reign forever and ever and ever Amen.

 

That is why I do not have the hope that I will
Leave this place of stench and torture and pain
Anytime soon but there is a small hope, there is”.

 

“What is this?” I exclaimed so forcefully that
My guide motioned me to calm down and
To remember where we were and why we came.

 

“ Did not I read that terrible notice when I
Entered this place of abomination and pain:
Abandon hope all ye who enter here?

 

Can there be hope in hell? Is this not the
Greatest of all contradictions making free will
A joke played on us all by the One who made us?

 

Still panting, he replied: “Look at that man
Over there who is dressed as if he is saying
Mass and whose eyes are locked in awful gaze.”

 

I looked and saw this man whose vestments
Were melting from the heat and burning his
Flesh whose head was held by demons so that

 

He could not stop staring at his reflection in
A warped mirror where his reflection was twisted
Into faces laughing at him and taunting him.

 

One demon was assigned to torture him
In a special way by striking him on his face
With what looked like a small stole with thorns.

 

The words on his missal jumped around and kept
Changing so that what came out of his mouth
Was a garbled cry of frustration and pain.

 

“Why does he have hope”, I asked, “where does
It come from?” Between pants the mitered one responded:
“Now that papa monarchus has extended his

 

Authority even to these places of ignis and dolor
His friends can play the get out of hell card
And he will be welcomed into the Empyrean Heav’n.

 

And even I, even I in my piteous state of terrible
Ambiguity of SIC et Non et CUR et QUOMODO,
You who see me here where I should not be

 

According to the nineteenth of May, even I
Have hope in what I have heard from those
Just come down to this place from above.”

 

I looked at my guide and he was looking down
And would not look at me, silent, hard, dark,
Turned away, would not speak, pained, dark.

 

“And on what is your hope based, what hope
do you have in this place created by God
for those whose NO to his love is eternal?”

 

“All I can tell you is what I have heard:
That the fires of this place are about to be
Extinguished by a great wet blanket that bears
A name emblazoned on it: MISERICORDIA”

By John Lamont

 

To understand how the Jesuit conception of obedience departed from earlier conceptions, it is helpful to compare it with the teaching of St. Thomas on obedience. The fundamental difference between the two is that St. Thomas considers the proper object of obedience to be the precept of the superior (2a2ae q. 104 a. 2 co., ad 3). Obedience that seeks to forestall the expressed will of the superior does not bear on what the superior wants or thinks in general, but only on what the superior intends to command. St. Ignatius’s lowest degree of obedience, which he does not consider to be virtuous, is thus what St. Thomas considers to be the only form of obedience. St. Thomas holds that St. Ignatius’s alleged higher forms of obedience do not fall under the virtue of obedience at all:

For Seneca says (De Beneficiis iii): “It is wrong to suppose that slavery falls upon the whole man: for the better part of him is excepted.” His body is subjected and assigned to his master but his soul is his own. Consequently in matters touching the internal movement of the will man is not bound to obey his fellow-man, but God alone. (2a2ae q. 104 a. 5 co.)

St. Thomas ‘s point here is that the limitation of the duty of obedience that is admitted by a pagan philosopher to belong to slaves a fortiori applies to the limitation of the duty of obedience in general. The contrast between Seneca and St. Ignatius on this point is striking. St. Thomas does not hold that his limitation on obedience applies only to obedience in natural matters, with religious obedience being excepted.

Religious profess obedience as to the regular mode of life, in respect of which they are subject to their superiors: wherefore they are bound to obey in those matters only which may belong to the regular mode of life, and this obedience suffices for salvation. If they be willing to obey even in other matters, this will belong to the superabundance of perfection; provided, however, such things be not contrary to God or to the rule they profess, for obedience in this case would be unlawful. (2a2ae q. 104 a. 5 ad 3.)

It is thus the case, as noted above, that St. Thomas does not consider obedience to involve the sacrifice of one’s will as such. It can only involve the sacrifice of one’s self-will, which is defined by its adherence to goods that are attractive in themselves but that do not conduce to our ultimate happiness. Nor does he think of obedience as a virtuous form of personal asceticism. He does not hold that obeying a command we dislike is necessarily better than obeying a command we are happy to fulfil. Indeed, since a rightly directed will seeks the common good, a good person will be glad to carry out any suitable command, since such commands and obedience to them both exist for the sake of the common good.
Obedience does not for St. Thomas occupy the central moral role that it does for Counter-Reformation theologians. He does not consider that all good acts are motivated by obedience to God, because he considers that there are virtues the exercise of which is prior to obedience – such as faith, upon which obedience depends. Nor does he consider that the essence of sin consists in disobedience to God, or even that all sin involves the sin of disobedience. All sin does indeed involve a disobedience to God’s commands, but this disobedience is not willed by the sinner unless the sin involves contempt of a divine command – i.e., involves a will to disobey the command in addition to a will to do the forbidden act. He asserts that ‘when a thing is done contrary to a precept, not in contempt of the precept, but with some other purpose, it is not a sin of disobedience except materially, and belongs formally to another species of sin’ (2a2ae q. 104 a. 7 ad 3). Obedience is simply an act of the virtue of justice, which is motivated by love of God in the case of divine commands and love of neighbour in the case of commands of a human superior. These loves are both more fundamental and broader than obedience.
In addition to his transformation of the traditional conception of religious obedience, St. Ignatius was responsible for another innovation that revolutionised the relation of superior to inferior in the religious life. This was his introduction of a new conception of the manifestation of conscience. Opening one’s heart to one’s spiritual father, and revealing one’s sins, trials, and tribulations, was an ancient practice in the monastic life: it was recommended by St. Anthony himself.10 This practice originally had three characteristics; it was a voluntary act on the part of the person manifesting their conscience, it was directed at a spiritual father who was chosen purely for his wisdom in guiding souls, and its purpose was the growth in holiness of the person making the manifestation.
St. Ignatius rejected these characteristics. He not only encouraged but required the manifestation of conscience, and he required that the manifestation be made to the religious superior – he made no mention of manifestation to a spiritual father other than the superior. He required that such a manifestation be made every six months, and he directed that all superiors and even their delegates were qualified to receive these manifestations – in contrast to St. Benedict, who limited the recipients of the manifestation of conscience to the abbot and a few selected spiritual fathers in the monastery. Finally, instead of restricting the purpose of the manifestation of conscience to the spiritual well-being of the manifestee, the superior was not only permitted but required to use the knowledge of his subordinates gained through the manifestation of conscience for the purposes of government. The manifestation of conscience was much broader and more intrusive than the chapter of faults in monastic communities, which limited itself to external actions that contravened the rule, or even than the necessary extent of self-revelation in the confessional. It included ‘the dispositions and desires for the performance of good, the obstacles and difficulties encountered, the passions and temptation which move or harass the soul, the faults, that are more frequently committed … the usual pattern of conduct, affections, inclinations, propensities, temptations, and weaknesses.’11 It should be underlined that the making of a full manifestation of conscience of this kind was impressed upon the inferior as a grave religious duty.
The overweening power that this practice gives to the superior needs no underlining. The ancient religious orders (such as the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites) resisted the introduction of an obligatory manifestation of conscience on St. Ignatius’s model, but many modern religious institutes adopted it. The abuses of the practice were so severe that the Holy See eventually had to forbid it. Leo XIII’s decree Quemadmodum banned the practice for lay institutes of men and all religious congregations of women in 1890, and it was banned for all religious by canon 530 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law (the Jesuits, however, were permitted to preserve it by a special decree of Pope Pius XI).12 By this time, however, the practice had had several centuries to leave its mark on the understanding of authority and the psychology of superiors and subordinates within the Church.
There is probably a connection between liturgical practice and the Jesuit conception of obedience as well. The liturgical prayer of the Church is principally composed of the Psalms. Any reader of the Psalms will notice that they are full of what by Counter-Reformation standards is insubordinate language towards God; complaints, demands, criticisms, unsolicited advice, and reproaches. They are not compatible with a spirituality in which the Jesuit conception of obedience plays a central role. Accordingly the Counter-Reformation came to treat the recital of the Divine Office as important largely because it was a task that must be completed under pain of mortal sin. The spiritual life of laity and religious came to be focused instead on devotions, which did not pose this problem. It would be interesting to pursue the question of how far a tyrannical conception of authority influenced post-Counter-Reformation devotion and religious art. One may speculate that the feminised chinless portrayal of Christ, and the sickly sentimentality, that characterised this period, were an attempt to balance the fear and aversion produced by the perception of Christ as a tyrant that would inevitably follow from belief in his supreme authority.
The Counter-Reformation Church thus wholeheartedly adopted the Jesuit understanding of obedience, and extensively practiced the Jesuit method of manifestation of conscience. The effect of this scarcely needs explaining. The Jesuit understanding of authority was a tyrannical one, since it located authority in the will of the superior rather than in the law. Of course, the expositions of this understanding of authority always insisted that it did not extend to commanding sin, but this limitation did not have much practical import. The relevant understanding of a sinful command was more or less limited to grave and clear violations of the Decalogue, and the unjust commands of authority are rarely ones that insist on crimes of this sort; such crimes are not the sort of thing that unjust authorities usually have an interest in commanding. Some expositions of the Ignatian conception of obedience, indeed, described obedience to an order than one suspects but is not certain to be illicit as an especially high and praiseworthy form of obedience.13
To a tyrannical understanding of authority necessarily corresponds a servile understanding of obedience, where the object of obedience is not the law as understood by the reason, but the pure will of the superior untrammelled by the will or intelligence of the subject. Ignatian thought and practice not only upheld a servile understanding of obedience, but provided a uniquely effective method of producing such obedience. The follower’s independent will and intellect are deliberately annihilated as far as is humanly possible, and this is done not only by external pressure, but also by a far more effective means – that of enlisting the follower’ own will in the process, through getting the follower to believe that this annihilation is a religious duty, and indeed is the highest form of holiness. The Ignatian form of manifestation of conscience provided the perfect means of implementing this process. By leaving the the subordinate with no thoughts or desires independent of the superior’s will, it provided a means of thought control that surpassed anything described by George Orwell. It was no accident that totalitarian leaders such as Lenin and Heinrich Himmler admired and emulated the Jesuits.
A number of objections are liable to be raised against this indictment of the Jesuit theory of obedience. Has not Jesuit spirituality in general, and the Constutions of the Society of Jesus in particular, been given the authoritative approbation of the Church? Have the Jesuits not produced many saints and done great work for the Church, something that could hardly have been produced by a tyrannical and thus morally objectionable method of formation? Was St. Ignatius himself not great saint, and an outstanding leader whose methods were not in fact tyrannical ones? Have not Jesuits in the past shown a high level of ability and initiative, something that is incompatible with a method of formation that is a form of brainwashing and breaks the mind and will?
As far as the approbation of the Church goes, it can be pointed out that the essence of the spirituality of St. Ignatius is contained in his Spiritual Exercises. These are distinct from the Constitutions of the Society and his other writings on obedience, and are the spiritual work of St. Ignatius that has been singled out for approbation by the Church. They do not however contain the teachings of St. Ignatius on obedience that are criticised here, and in fact lay stress on reflection and conscious action. The Constitutions of the Society have been approved by the Church as the basic regulations governing the structure and functioning of the Society. This approval thus bears on the Constitutions as a regulatory structure for the Society; the reflections on obedience in the Constitutions do not form part of this regulatory structure, and hence are not the objects of the approbation of the Constitutions by the Church.
When it comes to the achievements of the Society of Jesus, it should be remembered that notwithstanding the heroic witness of a number of Jesuit martyrs, the principal achievement of the Jesuits – the thing they were really good at, and that enabled them to make a decisive contribution to the Counter-Reformation – was running secondary schools. It was the Jesuit schools that enabled them to turn the tide in favour of the Church in a number of European countries. A defective understanding of authority and obedience did not have too much scope for action in these schools. For one thing, they were run according to a detailed and uniform program that did not leave much scope for tyrannical initiatives on the part of the superior. For another, they had the essential test of direct, immediate success or failure at their stated object, which is a main curb in practice on tyranny and servility. Educational success was immediately apparent, and meant the schools would flourish; educational failure was equally apparent, and meant that they would lose their pupils. Finally, the difficult and humbling side intrinsic to all successful teaching was not propitious for the characteristics that mark those who enjoy and practice tyranny or servility. Neither the servile nor the tyrannical have the authority needed to teach large numbers of adolescent boys. When it came to the main apostolic activity of the Jesuits, a literal understanding of St. Ignatius’s teachings on obedience was thus destined to largely remain a dead letter. Unfortunately this was not the case with other orders and other apostolic pursuits in the Church of the Counter-Reformation.
There are more considerations that need to be kept in mind when considering the successes of the Society of Jesus in general. The Society does seem to have ended up by attempting to train its recruits according to a servile conception of obedience, at least initially, but the calibre of Jesuit recruits led to this formation producing a result that was different from its ostensible purpose. The Society was very selective in the men it admitted, insisting on ability and intelligence that were far above average, and the men admitted were generally given substantial tasks to do. Servile obedience is inculcated by subjecting the inferior to humiliating, pointless and unpleasant tasks, to a degree intended to break their will and self-respect. With individuals of strong will and high intelligence, however, this process can fail of its purpose. In such a case, what it produces is great toughness and endurance, together with rigorous self-control and the capacity to disguise one’s thoughts and emotions. Such a process is often used in the initial stages of military training, in order to produce just these qualities. When this toughness and self-control has been elicited, however, the character of military training is changed to foster the qualities of initiative and intelligence that are required for successful performance.The demand for success in important tasks virtually requires subordinates to show initiative, and superiors to exercise actual leadership. Jesuits who lived up to the servile theory on obedience would thus tend to fail at the tasks required of them, and to suffer as a result. The need for success in the important tasks undertaken by the Society demanded a mitigation in practice of the tyrannical theory of authority.
It seems that the Jesuits in fact took this approach to obedience, appropriately so given St. Ignatius’s military background. Their training came to be valued not simply for its capacity to produce obedience, but even more for the traits of endurance, self-control, and dissimulation of the emotions that it inculcated – the Jesuits came to be recognised as distinguished above all others for their capacity to master anger. These traits are extremely useful in worldly activities, and explain much of the success of the Jesuits in worldly affairs, although their usefulness in producing holiness is open to question.
These mitigating factors depended however on the character of the Jesuits as a carefully selected elite. They could not obtain for the Church as a whole, and they did not do so. For the great majority of Catholic priests and religious, the Jesuit conception of obedience and the Jesuit method of manifestation of conscience tended to produce what they were intended: subordinates who believed that they owed servile obedience to their superiors, that they should surrender their will and intelligence to the people above them, and that in so doing they were doing God’s will and growing in holiness: and superiors who believed that their commands were the will of God, and that any resistance to these commands by their subordinates was rebellion against God himself.
As for the wisdom, sanctity, and achievements of St. Ignatius, we should distinguish between the meaning of St. Ignatius’s writings on obedience when considered in abstraction from their original context, and the meaning that St. Ignatius can be judged to have ascribed to them when we look at the context of his own purposes and actions. In the light of this context, it seems that what St. Ignatius had in mind in his writings on obedience was the idea that the subordinate should not simply carry out explicit commands, but should grasp the plan of the superior that the commands were intended to implement, and should accept and enthusiastically carry out that plan. Such an approach to the superior’s purposes was necessary for the tasks that he intended the Jesuits to carry out, because these tasks generally required independent action where regular recourse to the superior’s instructions could not be available. It is in general the approach that subordinates must take to carry out any substantial task properly. However, in expressing this idea St. Ignatius was handicapped by the deficient understanding of law that was accepted in his time. As we have seen, this understanding was not St. Thomas’s conception of a law as a rational plan to achieve some good. Law was instead conceived of by the philosophers and theologians with whom St. Ignatius was familiar as simply a set of commands. In his writings on obedience St. Ignatius was trying to get across the idea that obedience to the law in this sense – obedience simply to the content of the explicit orders of the superior – was not sufficient, and that an understanding of and identification with the superior’s purposes was necessary. He did not however have at his command an idea of a law that could exist in the superior’s mind, be distinct from the superior’s beliefs and purposes generally, and be rationally appropriated by the subordinate. He was therefore induced to convey his meaning by calling for an identification with the superior’s personal intentions and beliefs, without making a satisfactory distinction between the superior’s plan and general objectives as directed to the common good, and his other beliefs and goals. We can draw a comparison here with St. John of the Cross; just as St. John would not have accepted the unreasonable conclusions that followed from his ascetical teaching, and did not put these conclusions into practice, so St. Ignatius did not intend the unreasonable applications of his writings on obedience. He was simply betrayed into unreasonable positions, as was St. John of the Cross, by the philosophical assumptions of his age, from which he was not able to emancipate himself. We might also see his personal struggles as an influence on his doctrine of obedience; originally vainglorious and ambitious, and always attracted to ruling and taking the initiative, he would have found the attempt at a total surrender of mind and will to another a useful tool for combating his dominant faults.
The problem was that the meaning of St. Ignatius’s writings on obedience taken in the context of his actions and purposes, and the meaning of these writings when considered on their own, were not identical; and it was the latter meaning, not the former, that was generally accessible to, and generally accepted by, the Church of the Counter-Reformation. It is true that intelligent spiritual writers could interpret the Jesuit theory of obedience in an acceptable way. For example, Dom Paul Delatte, in commenting on the Rule of St. Benedict, writes of the Rule’s demand for obedience that

Obedience so described is a far different thing from the obedience that reproduces the passivity and inertia of a corpse, or the unthinking docility of a stick that we brandish in our hands. It is said that a good commander ought to have his forces well in hand, so as to get from them with spirit and unity the maximum efficiency at the exact moment it is needed. So it is with the obedient soul … When the masters of the spiritual life use these comparisons they merely wish to express the perfect pliancy of the obedient soul, dead to its own will.14

Dom Delatte was however writing from within the Benedictine tradition, which had its own well-articulated understanding of obedience that could be and was used to interpret St. Ignatius’s writings in a positive sense. But the usual practice was to take St. Ignatius’s words literally, in a sense that commended a tyrannical understanding of authority.
We find this, for instance, in Alphonsus Rodriguez S.J.’s Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues. This work, the most widely read manual of ascetic theology of the Counter-Reformation, was published in Spanish in 1609, and went through many editions in many translations – over sixty in French, twenty in Italian, at least ten in German, several in English. It was required reading for Jesuit novices up to the Second Vatican Council. In his proposed examination of conscience, Fr. Rodriguez (who is not to be confused with St. Alphonsus Rodriguez) requires the penitent

II. To obey in will and heart, having one and the same wish and will as the Superior.
III. To obey also with the understanding and judgment, adopting the same view and sentiment as the Superior, not giving place to any judgments or reasonings to the contrary.
IV. To take the voice of the Superior … as the voice of God, and obey the Superior, whoever he may be, as Christ our Lord, and the same for subordinate officials.
V. To follow blind obedience, that is obedience without enquiry or examination, or any seeking of reasons for the why and wherefore, it being reason enough for me that it is obedience and the command of the Superior.15

Rodriguez praises obedience – as he understands it – in illuminating terms.

One of the greatest comforts and consolations that we have in Religion is this, that we are safe in doing what obedience commands. The Superior it is that may be wrong in commanding this or that, but you are certain that you are not wrong in doing what is commanded, for the only account that God will ask of you is if you have done what they commanded you, and with that your account will be sufficiently discharged before God. It is not for you to render account whether the thing commanded was a good thing, or whether something else would not have been better; that does not belong to you, but to the account of the Superior. When you act under obedience, God takes it off your books, and puts it on the books of the Superior. … so the Religious, living under obedience, composes himself to sleep – that is to say, he has no trouble or care about what he is to do, but goes his way to heaven and perfection. Superiors see to that, they are the captains and masters of the ship. … this is the blessing which God has given to the Religious who lives under obedience, that all his burden is thrown on the shoulders of his Superior, and he lives at ease and without care whether this be better or that. This is one of the things that greatly move virtuous folk to live under obedience and enter Religion, – to be rid of the endless perplexities and anxieties that they have there in the world, and be sure or serving and pleasing God. … If I were there in the world and desired to serve God, I should be troubled and in doubt whether I eat too little or too much, sleep too much or too little, do too little or too much penance … but here in Religion all these doubts are cleared away, for I eat what they give me, I sleep at the time appointed, I do the penance they assign me. 16

Rodriguez adds that ‘not only in spiritual matters, but also in temporal, this is a life very restful and void of care. Like a passenger in a well-victualled ship, a Religious has no need to attend to his own necessities.’17
One could not give a plainer exposition of a servile notion of obedience. Rodriguez’s position draws the logical conclusion from a literal understanding of St. Ignatius’s writings on obedience. If a subordinate entirely abandons the activity of his own mind and will when presented with the order of a superior, it is indeed the case that he surrenders all moral responsibility for the execution of the order, and the responsibility is transferred entirely to the superior who gives the order. That is because moral responsibility requires the functioning of one’s intellect and will; if this functioning is legitimately abolished in the case of a superior’s order, responsibility for the execution of the order is abolished as well. The fact that the abandonment of this functioning is presented as legitimate and indeed as obligatory is the key to this logical implication. If the functioning of one’s mind and will is abandoned illegitimately, one does not lose all moral responsibility for the acts that one performs as a result of their abandonment. But if this abandonment is legitimate, as Rodriguez claims it is, moral responsibility is indeed necessarily suspended.
In drawing this conclusion, Rodriguez goes farther than St. Ignatius. The absence of this conclusion in the writings of St. Ignatius is what makes it possible to give a pious interpretation to his views on obedience, and to assert that his writings need not be read as an endorsement of a tyrannical understanding of authority and a servile understanding of obedience. With Rodriguez such an interpretation is ruled out, and these understandings of authority and obedience take undoubted possession.
Like other writers, Rodriguez makes the usual exception for obedience to commands that are manifestly contrary to the divine law. But this exception is not something that has much practical reality. Internalising and practicing the Jesuit notion of obedience is difficult, and requires time, motivation, and effort. When it has been done successfully, it has a lasting effect. Once one has destroyed one’s capacity to criticise the actions of one’s superiors, one cannot revive this capacity and its exercise at will. Following the directive to refuse obedience to one’s superiors when their commands are manifestly sinful then becomes psychologically difficult or even impossible – except perhaps in the most extreme cases, such as commands to murder someone, which are not the sort of sinful commands that religious superiors often have an interest in giving in any case.
There is an explicit appeal to the wisdom and goodness of superiors in this doctrine of obedience. This appeal however ignores the characteristic effects of the exercise of tyrannical authority, which are no less deep – perhaps deeper – than those of the practice of servile obedience. Such authority has an intoxicating effect, producing overweening pride and megalomania. Superiors in the grip of these vices become both prone to giving unjust orders, and incapable of conceiving of themselves as sinful or mistaken.
Rodriguez is especially interesting in his description of the principal appeal of a servile conception of obedience to the subordinate (its appeal to a superior needs no explaining). He states in the plainest terms that this appeal lies in the abdication of all adult responsibility, along with the worries that inevitably accompany it. The ruinous effects of attracting to the clerical state people who seek avoidance of adult responsibility, and the material security of passengers in a well-victualled ship, extend much farther than the overthrow of the rule of law in the Church.
This servile conception of obedience remained the standard one into the twentieth century. Adolphe Tanquerey, in his widely read and translated (and in many way excellent) work Précis de théologie ascétique et mystique,18 could write that perfect souls who have reached the highest degree of obedience submit their judgment to that of their superior, without even examining the reasons for which he commands them.19 The Jesuit conception of obedience did not remain a peculiarity of the Society, but came to be adopted by the Counter-Reformation Church as a whole. This was due to the prestige of the Society and the attractiveness to religious superiors of the nature of the obedience held up as a model, and also to the plausibility of the conception given the philosophical assumptions noted above. This conception of obedience was completely dominant in the many foundations of the Counter-Reformation, which, unlike the Benedictines, lacked traditions of their own to counteract a literal reading of St. Ignatius. It was also prevalent in the new institution of the Counter-Reformation seminary. We can see an manifestation of this prevalence in the Treatise on Obedience of the Sulpician Louis Tronson, which gave St. Ignatius’s teaching and writings as the summit of Catholic teaching on obedience. The Sulpician adoption of the Jesuit conception was particularly important because of their central role in the training of priests in seminaries from the 17th century onwards. The seven years of seminary training meant that the tyrannical understanding of authority and servile understanding of obedience conveyed by this training was deeply ingrained in those who went through it.20
As a result, this was the understanding conveyed to the laity. Its effect on the laity was different from its effect on the clergy. The laity could never hope to acquire authority, so the traits needed to rise in a tyrannical system were not produced in them. What happened instead was that the laity were infantilised in the religious sphere of their lives. This infantilisation can be observed in religious art and devotion, especially from the 19th century onwards, and in the willingness to give blind obedience to the clergy. It had of course a certain attraction; there is a comfort in relapsing into childhood in some sphere of one’s life, and handing over deliberation, decisions, and adult responsibility to one’s superiors. This attraction is the basis of the appeal of religious cults and totalitarian states. The Catholic laity did not have to endure tyrannical authority in every sphere of their lives, so this comfort was all the more appealing to them; it did not have the accompanying cost of total servility that the clergy had to pay.
It was thus the literal, tyrannical understanding of St. Ignatius’s writings on obedience that had come to be accepted by the Counter-Reformation Church. The enormous chaos that followed the Second Vatican Council is an indication of this acceptance. It revealed a widespread alienation from Catholic teaching and tradition among priests and religious, the majority of whom either gladly rejected what they had been taught to consider true and holy or left the religious life altogether. This was a consequence of identifying this teaching and tradition with the tyrannical regime under which they had been formed. The resulting hatred and alienation was greatly aggravated by the fact that this regime was largely incapable of communicating a real understanding of Catholic tradition in the first place, because such an understanding requires a mature exercise of intellect and will – precisely the things that religious formation was designed to extirpate. As a result there was little or no real grasp of the tradition to counteract the reaction against the generally accepted conception of it. Indeed such a real grasp often made a priest or religious suspect in the eyes of ecclesiastical authority, since it required this mature and independent exercise of thought and insight – as is the case with all substantial traditions. The tragicomic history of John Henry Newman’s career in the Catholic Church is a good illustration of this suspicion. Newman’s actual thought was ferociously reactionary in nature, but because he had arrived at his positions by himself, he came under the suspicion of ecclesiastical authorities (who were in fact often more liberal than himself in their ideas), and was held up as a hero by modernists whose whole lives were condemned by his writings.
As for the laity, their indoctrination in blind obedience made them willing and even proud to follow disaffected clergy when ordered to reject the liturgy and teachings that they had previously been told were sacred and inviolable. The lack of Catholic initiative by the laity in the preconciliar period is also to be explained by this infantilising formation. It has long been noted that converts to the faith, at least in the English-speaking world, made a disproportionately large contribution to Catholic thought and culture. This was inevitable given the formation that cradle Catholics had received.
Formation in tyrannical authority and servile obedience inevitably fostered undesirable characteristics in the priests who exercised authority over the laity, and thus produced hostility to the clergy. It is significant that the term that came to be used for opposition to the Catholic Church in Europe was ‘anticlericalism’. In its literal meaning, the word ‘anticlericalism’ is quite distinct from opposition to Catholicism, since it simply means antipathy to the Catholic clergy. Such an antipathy does not imply rejection of the Catholic faith, and in some circumstances may be quite justified, or even required by fidelity to the Church. Its identification with anti-Catholicism as such was the result of an opportunistic exploitation by unbelievers of the widespread loathing of the clergy, a loathing caused by their practice of a tyrannical conception of authority, together with a genuine identification of the faith with the clergy – an identification fostered by the infantilisation of the laity, which produced the impression that the faith was the property of the clergy as such.
There were of course many factors in the Church that counteracted the effects of the philosophical and practical forces described above; her intellectual traditions with their insistence on learning and philosophy, healthier traditions of spiritual teaching and practice, and the demands of reality itself in the form of the challenges and responsibilities faced by clergy and religious. In the 20th century, however, the forces within the Church promoting a tyrannical understanding of authority and a servile understanding of obedience received decisive reinforcement from two factors.
The first was the promulgation of the Code of Canon Law in 1917. The basic idea of this codification – that of streamlining the canon law of the Latin Church, and making it easier to use – was well-meaning and indeed correct, but the way in which this idea was implemented was fundamentally flawed. The problem with the 1917 Code was that it was a Napoleonic Code, rather than a Justinian Code. When the Emperor Justinian decided to codify Roman law for purposes similar to the ones that inspired St. Pius X, the whole mass of previous Roman legal rulings and decrees were collected together, organised, and purged of obsolete and contradictory elements. They were not however ruled void of authority and replaced by an entirely new body of edicts. The great body of Roman legal tradition was preserved in Justinian’s codification. In the Napoleonic code, in contrast, the previous legal tradition was abolished and entirely replaced by the new and much smaller collection of decrees that made up the code devised by Napoleon and his jurists. The Latin Code of Canon law of 1917 was deliberately designed on the Napoleonic rather than the Justinian model. The massive body of the Latin legal tradition, collected in the Corpus Iuris Canonici, was declared to be of no force. From this point onwards the Latin Church had to operate largely without the benefit of its own legal tradition, on the basis of a legal system modelled on the legislation of a military dictator implementing Jansenist and Enlightenment ideas of law and authority. In addition to the crippling of Catholic legal practice that this involved, the alleged abrogation of the entire Corpus Iuris Canonici was itself of dubious legality, since the canonical tradition of the Church has always been considered to contain substantial elements of sacred tradition. This is recognised by the Oriental Code of Canon Law, which states at its outset that ‘the canons of the Code, in which for the most part the ancient law of the Eastern Churches is received or adapted, are to be assessed mainly according to that law’ (canon 2). It is paradoxical that the Oriental Code should recognise the authority of the Eastern canonical tradition, while the the Latin Code should overthrow the Latin tradition – despite the fact that the Latin tradition is the one that contains most of the rulings of the pope, the highest legal authority in the Church. The 1917 Latin Code thus struck a severe blow at the rule of law in the Church.
The second factor in promoting a tyrannical understanding of authority was the abandonment of the Church’s practical activities in the postconciliar period. The enormous involvement of clergy and religious in education and health was largely shut down along with the religious orders that carried out this involvement. The institutions that had carried out this involvement were handed over to governments or lay organisations, and became Catholic in name only. The direct activity of the Church in preaching and administering the sacraments was also greatly reduced, as congregations shrunk after the Council and continue to decline. The expectation that priests and religious would succeed in carrying out serious work, and the accompanying need for competence and leadership, declined along with the decline in serious work to carry out. The scope for tyrannical exercise of authority was correspondingly widened.
This last factor may seem to contradict the thesis about the dominance of a tyrannical conception of authority in the Church. Do not tyrants seek something to tyrannise over? If the importance and influence of Catholic activities declines steeply, does not their scope for tyranny decline with it?
To answer these questions, we need to understand the dynamics of an organisation that has been dominated for a long time by a tyrannical conception of authority and a servile conception of obedience. The key point is that in a clerical system dominated by these conceptions, the leaders all start off as followers themselves. In this capacity, they learn the skills of the slave for survival and advancement; flattery, duplicity, bullying and humiliation of those beneath them, and concealment. Their promotion from subordinate to superior does not depend primarily on their competence at the tasks they are supposed to perform, but on their capacity to ingratiate themselves with their superiors. The leadership in such a system is thus not selected for its capacity to get things done, and is not generally motivated by a desire to get things done. The dominant motivation is desire to escape the servile position and enjoy the tyrannical position. A collapse of the real activities of the institution does not get in the way of the fulfilment of this desire – if anything it makes it easier, by dispensing with the need for determination and intelligence in the personnel of the institution; these characteristics compete with the skills of the courtier as qualifications for promotion, and make the task of tyrannical leadership a lot more difficult. The deliberate destruction of these activities of the Church was to a great extent motivated by the desire of religious leaders in the Church to free themselves of the encumbrance of real responsibilities, the better to have free range for the arbitrary exercise of their wills.
We have now seen how the members of the Church have been formed to accept a tyrannical understanding of authority and a servile understanding of obedience in religious affairs. This in turn explains why the rule of law does not obtain in the Catholic Church; its leaders do not consider themselves to be subject to the law, and their followers do not see the law as the source of their leader’s authority or as a constraint upon their actions.
There are connections between these causes and the particular form of violation of the law mentioned at the outset of this paper. Scandalous sexual activity on the part of priests is not new in Catholic history; it has occurred during every period in the past when zeal and fidelity in the Church has diminished. What is new, however, is the character of this activity. Previous scandal largely involved concubinage and casual fornication by priests. The scandals of the past sixty years, however, have been of a different character; involvement with adolescent boys has been much more significant than in any previous period of corruption on the part of the clergy. It is not of course that such involvement was absent in the past; it is that it was not the characteristic form that clerical sexual misbehaviour took. This new development is a result of the fact that these forms of sexual abuse are closely connected with narcissistic personality types, and a social structure based on tyranny and humiliation both forms and selects for this type of personality.
The abandonment of the rule of law in the Church is only one of the manifold consequences of the Jesuit conceptions of authority and obedience. It is impossible to even attempt a description of all of these consequences. I believe however that these consequences put together are one of the most serious problems that the Church suffers from today; if we restrict our consideration to internal problems, it is likely that they are the most serious one. The single effect of the overthrow of the rule of law in the Church indicates that this is the case, and demonstrates the urgency of rejecting these conceptions of authority and obedience, and replacing them by the traditional ones that enlist, rather than destroy, the free cooperation of mind and will.